Non-organic failure-to-thrive: Deprivation or distortion?

Abstract

Infants diagnosed non‐organic failure‐to‐thrive (NOFT) show arrested physical development. The cause of the growth delay and of the accompanying behavioral anomalies is not known, but generally is attributed to maternal deprivation. This study investigated the hypothesis that family hostility was also a contributing factor. NOFT families were compared with maltreating and adequate families and found to be larger and more intact, but characterized by extremely distressed interpersonal relationships and family violence. This result was interpreted as suggesting that NOFT resulted from the stress of both insufficient and inappropriate treatment of the infant. The source of the stress was observed to include the entire family, the members of which were displaying other psychosomatic manifestations of stress.

Eating disorders and attachment: the effects of hidden family processes on eating disorders

“…A study of parental stress in families with a nonorganic failure-to-thrive infant (Crittenden, 1987) and scattered findings in the studies above suggest that mothers of women with eating disorders had unresolved losses to which their daughters responded with compulsive caregiving (Ward et al, 2000). Therefore, we hypothesised that parents' history and hidden problems in the spousal relationship might be crucial to daughters' development of an eating disorder.…”

Physical and emotional development, appetite and body image in adolescents who failed to thrive as infants

“…Whether it is associated with any other psychological characteristics in the child is harder to say. There is a considerable body of evidence suggesting that failure to thrive identified in clinical samples is associated with insecure attachment, as classified by means of the ‘strange situation’ or related procedures (Chatoor, Ganiban, Colin, Plummer, & Harmon, 1998; Crittenden, 1987; Gordon & Corcoran Jameson, 1979; Ward, Kessler, & Altman, 1993; Ward, Lee, & Lipper, 2000), so one might expect differences in later emotional development. Cheung, Khoo, Karlberg, and Machin (2002) found that psychological distress scores as assessed at 23, 33 and 42 years of age using the Malaise inventory (Rutter, Tizard, & Whitmore, 1970) were higher in people with a lower weight gain from birth to seven years after adjustment for a range of social and economic variables.…”

Maternal language input and child maltreatment

“…In all cases, this videotaping was conducted before the child was 2 years of age. The 3-minute videotape period was selected because previous research had demonstrated the usefulness of such brief tapes in assessing maternal sensitivity (Crittenden, 1985(Crittenden, , 1987. This research also showed that dyadic behavior in such brief tapes was significantly related to infants' quality of attachment to their mothers.…”