Attachment Security in Three-Year-Olds who Entered Substitute Care in Infancy.

This study assessed relations among number of out-of-home placement changes, time in caregivers' care, caregiver type (i.e., foster parent, adoptive parent, kinship relation, and biological parent), child gender, and caregiver-child Emotional Availability (EA) as predictive of child attachment security when children were 3 years old in a sample of 104 caregivers and children. Children entered court-ordered care by six months of age. On average, children at the age of three spent 30 months with their caregivers, and nearly half of them were adopted by that time. Child attachment was assessed using the Attachment Q-set (Waters & Deane, 1985), and caregiver-child EA was assessed using the EA Scales, 4th edition (Biringen, 2008). Sixty-six percent of children at age 3 showed secure attachments with caregivers, and EA subscale scores were also relatively high on average. The study predictor variables of EA Caregiver Sensitivity, Child Responsiveness, and Child Involvement predicted attachment security, with girls more likely to be securely attached to their substitute caregivers at age three than boys. Study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.