“Separation anxiety” means something different depending on who’s using the term. To a child clinician, it’s a specific, treatable disorder with its own assessment scales and protocol. To an attachment theorist, it’s a universal developmental responsel the fear and anger built into every young child’s bond with a caregiver, disorder or not.
These two books answer different questions rather than the same one twice: one treats the diagnosis, the other explains why the response exists in the first place. Read together, they cover both the how and the why.
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Separation Anxiety in Children and Adolescents: An Individualized Approach to Assessment and Treatment
Andrew R. Eisen and Charles E. Schaefer, foreword by David H. Barlow, The Guilford Press, 2005
This guide was written for clinicians without a CBT background as much as for specialists. Eisen and Schaefer walk through the entire clinical process – intake, assessment, coping-skills training, cognitive-behavioral intervention, relapse prevention – for ages 3 to 17, across home, school, camp, and extracurricular settings. They cover how to build a fear hierarchy, when to bring parents into a session versus work with the child alone, and how to handle an overprotective parent’s response as much as the child’s own resistance.The book also includes the Separation Anxiety Assessment Scales as reproducible tools.
Use this for the child you’re actually treating. Read Bowlby below for the theory underneath the protocol.
Separation: Anxiety and Anger
John Bowlby, Basic Books, 1973 (Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2)
This is the second volume of Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss trilogy, and unlike the book above, it isn’t describing a disorder.It treats separation anxiety and anger as a normal, universal response built into the attachment system itself – present in every child, not only the ones who end up in a clinician’s office. The book draws on real-world observation of children separated from their mothers to build the case for why separation provokes anger as well as fear. Bowlby’s argument: psychopathology comes from how that response is handled over time, not from having it at all.
This is background theory, not treatment guidance. Read it to understand why separation provokes the response Eisen and Schaefer’s book above is built to treat.