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Parents are advised to maintain control over a child with “firm and continuous pressure,” i.e., strict discipline, as if the child was hemorrhaging to death. When a child isn’t enduring more holding therapy at home, many additional “parenting” techniques are used to show the child that his mother is in complete control:

Isolation. An objective is to have a child’s only contact be his mother until he has sufficiently formed a primary attachment with her. Commonly, a child is kept away from siblings and friends, and out of school for “long vacations.” (Education, by the way, is considered a privilege that must be earned and not a right.) He may also be kept away from extended family members.

Excessive exercising. If a child does something the wrong way — e.g., answers a question with an “I don’t know” — he will be assigned push-ups or jumping-jack exercises, supposedly to get adequate levels of oxygen in his brain.

Pointless chores. Tasks are assigned for their maximum unpleasantness, repetitiveness, and uselessness. Shoveling manure is often mentioned. Adult survivors describe having to wash every dish in a kitchen if a spot is found on a single glass. Several report having to move a woodpile from one place to another and back; one had to pick up dog feces and leaves with her fingers.

Inadequate diet/starvation. Many children are maintained on peanut butter sandwiches or cold oatmeal for weeks or months at a time. One AT/P “parenting specialist” recommended “soup kitchen” food — something the child should be told he’ll need to get accustomed to. Ingestion of sugar, considered a “bonding food,” is strictly controlled, dispensed not as a reward but as a control mechanism.

Restricted environment. A child’s bedroom is kept mostly bare, with locks or alarms on the door and windows. One survivor claims several AT/P establishments in Colorado have “scream rooms” in their basements — locked, windowless rooms with no toilet — where children may spend days or weeks locked away in isolation.

“AT/P Paradoxical Techniques.” Parents are supposed to act unpredictably and irrationally with a child in order to keep him “off balance,” i.e., unable to “manipulate” situations. Another AT paradoxical practice is making a child gorge on any food he may have been caught sneaking.

Demonizing. Children are belittled and taunted outside of therapy. Since much, if not all, of a child’s behavior is suspected of stemming from evil motives or being cunningly manipulative, even good behavior by a child is frequently dismissed. Complaints of ill health are deliberately ignored as mere attention-getting. Indeed, some children have gone without needed medical attention for serious conditions until they become emancipated at age 18. Children treated this way are believed to be insensate to pain, while super-sentitive to light touch. They supposedly injure themselves so that abuse charges might come against their caregivers. A leading AT parenting specialist claims that she doesn’t allow Attachment-Disordered children to pray, because she can’t be sure who they are praying to, implying Satanic affiliation on the part of the child.

Compliance training. Children are expected to comply with all adult request with alacrity: “fast and snappy, and right the first time [just the way mom wants it]” is the refrain. Orders are to be obeyed unquestioningly. For example, should a child fail to close an upstairs door, he may be ordered to do it — fast and snappy — hundreds of times. As a gauge of a child’s unquestioning obedience, he may be frequently asked to repetitively flush an unused toilet. One session with a child was observed on videotape, where she was put through what the “Therapeutic Foster Parent” (TFP) called “your basic German Shepherd” — repeated, rapid commands of come, go back, sit, stand.

“Strong sitting.” Resembling the old standby of “standing in the corner,” strong (or power) sitting, is not used for just punishment. At frequent times during a day, a child is required to sit, tailor-fashion, utterly motionless for 10-30 minutes at a time. A required length of time is set at the beginning (usually 3 minutes, plus one minute for each year of age), but the time does not start to run until the child has gone completely motionless and is staring straight ahead, so the actual sitting can run into hours.