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This is a book which I found at first curiously difficult to read, hence the writing of this review has spanned a considerable time. On reflection I think this had something to do with the author's powerful evocation of living with, and being in touch with, the children who are often our patients.
Divided into two parts, the first -‘Making love’ - describes the author and her family's experience of fostering twelve young people, over a period of twenty-five years. It is, as she says, ‘an experience of family life with children who have lived through overwhelming stress’. Sometimes inspiring, at times despairing, it is a raw, impressive and touching account. What she describes is a family - with a difference - living in the community. All of their foster children have stayed in touch through the years. As Cairns says, this is not a ‘how to do it’ book, but a story; she tells the story in an accessible way which cannot fail to be painful to hear, but manages to convey hopefulness too.
In this first section, Cairns begins to address the issues which will form the substantive part of the second section. These are attachment, trauma and resilience. Drawing on particular experiences with individual children, she has formed ‘composites’ of her twelve fostered children. From these she talks about ordinary, good-enough emotional development in relation to attachment, trauma and resilience, and about what it means for development when such ordinary experiences are absent. She describes how the absence of good early infantile experiences can mean the lack of the relational skills we ordinarily take for granted; how trust, fun and playfulness, curiosity and interest in the world may then be missing, further depriving the child of new developmental opportunities.
Her theoretical thinking about children in this predicament, and their responses to the demands and possibilities of new relationships proceeds from this emotional understanding and experience of unmet and disrupted attach