Editorial

Making a home in a new family is no small matter. The unconscious ease with which a content mother and her own lively two year old meld bodies and minds as she mediates his world to feed him or limit danger or to extend his horizons, may appear fluid and natural. But as all of us who have observed babies at close quarters know, such a beautiful relationship is hard won. It requires a carer sufficiently free of his or her own survival needs, one whose own psychological development has proceeded in a ‘good enough’ way, and intact healthy brains on both sides. The disposition of carer and infant and the match or ‘fit’ between these two will play a part. The inborn capacity of each to tolerate frustration will be important, and may influence their capacity to repair ‘ruptures’ in a felt sense of attunement. A legion moment-by-moment steps in their psycho-bio-social dance will have to accrue to construct the living dynamic of a secure base. Put in this way every well-attached child is not far short of a wonder. Fostered and adopted children, together with those who have had multiple family losses through violence and conflict, have so often not had the chance to achieve this, and certainly not at the very start when it mattered most. They do not arrive in new families with the happy freight of security, but instead with the vexed baggage of relational trauma.

And so in this special issue we are pleased to present seven papers which investigate and theorise precisely this matter of the struggle to make a home in a new family from multiple perspectives: the internal dynamics of finding or making a home, the powerful emotional effects of caring for emotionally ‘unhomed’ children, our therapeutic technique and our involvement and interventions as a professional group in the UK today. How can we best understand the complex internal landscapes of these unhomed children and how can we best help them become firmly settled within their new families?

Our title for this special issue