An excellent fostering and adoption blog post series discusses attachment issues and makes them easier to understand.
In Adoption STAR’s never-ending quest to provide quality resources to our adoption community (and the adoption community at large), we offer up this link to a great blog post on attachment:
Attachment Made Simple: Avoidant Attachments
To paraphrase the blog post itself, a child can develop a positive, secure attachment cycle with the help of quality, supportive parents/parenting. However, if a child doesn’t have consistent, reliable support from a parent there is the potential for the child to develop an avoidant-insecure attachment.
This blog post is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to attachment issues, but the blog authors do a wonderful job of presenting information in a factual, easy-to-understand manner.
For those more intensely interested in this subject, the blog authors recommend some “pre-reading” before diving into the aforementioned blog post: