Fix my child: The importance of including siblings in clinical assessments.

Aims: This study examined concordance in the attachment strategies of school-aged siblings with reference to environmental risk in terms of poverty and maltreatment. It also investigated the effect of child maltreatment and maternal mental illness on children's psychosocial functioning in terms of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM) including unresolved trauma and the DMM Depressed modifier.

Methods: The attachment strategies of 30 sibling pairs, aged 5-14 years, were assessed using the School-age Assessment of Attachment (SAA).

The Meaning of the Child Interview: A new procedure for assessing and understanding parent-child relationships of 'at-risk' families.

Reder and Duncan's well-known studies of the 1990s on fatal child abuse drew attention to how parental scripts regarding their children could dangerously distort relationships in ways that were sometimes fatal to children. This article reports on a new system for assessing the 'meaning of the child to the parent', called the Meaning of the Child Interview (MotC). Parents are interviewed using the established Parent Development Interview, or equivalent, and the transcript of the interview is then analysed according to parental sensitivity and likely risk to the child.

Assessing attachment in the school years: the application of the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment to the coding of a child attachment interview with community and looked-after children.

Background: This article reports on the analysis of a Child Attachment Interview using the Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) of attachment coding system developed by Crittenden for use with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). The aim of the study was to see if the two coders could classify the child interviews using the DMM-AAI approach and produce the range of DMM attachment strategies to be expected from previous research and the literature.

Methods: Two coders independently classified interviews with 41 children aged between 6 and 13 years with an average age of 9.

DMM assessments of attachment and adaptation: Procedures, validity and utility.

This article gives a brief over view of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of attachment and adaptation (DMM; Crittenden, 2008) together with the various DMM assessments of attachment that have been developed for specific stages of development. Each assessment is discussed in terms of procedure, outcomes, validity, advantages and limitations, comparable procedures and areas for further research and validation. The aims are twofold: to provide an introduction to DMM theory and its application that underlie the articles in this issue of CCPP; and to provide researchers and clinicians with a guide to DMM assessments.