Privation of attachment means failure to form an attachment. Privation usually occurs when children have been kept in extreme isolation and therefoe have never had the opppurtunity to form an attachment.

There are 3 main types of evidence regarding privation and those are longitudinal studies of children in instituational care; case studies of children raised in extreme isolation; and studies of reactive attachment disorder which is a category of mental disorder attributed to a lack of early attachments.

A longiudinal study of ex-institutional children was done by Hodges and Tizard in 1989, to investigate the effects of privation by following the same children over a long period of time to collect reliable information linking early experiences to later outcomes for the same individual. The participants were 65 children who had been placed in an instituation when they were less than 4 months old. There was an explicit policy in the institution against caregivers forming attachments with the children. This would suggest the children experienced early privation. By the age of 4, 24 of the institutionalized children had been adopted, 15 had returned to their natural homes and the rest remained in the institution. Assessment at the age of 8 and 16 years old involved interviewing those children who were adopted and those who had returned to their original homes. Their parents, their teachers and their peers were also interviewed. Data was also collected from a control group of ‘nomal’ peers. The findings show there were some differences between the adopted and the ‘restored’ children. The adopted children generally had close attachments to their parents and good family relationships, whereas this was much less true for the restored children. However, there was similarities in the behaviour of the adopted and restored children outside the family. For example, both