The Emotional Roots of Anxiety: Healing through Connection
From waves of panic to uneasy feelings that rise up from the gut, anxiety is a universal human experience. It comes as no surprise then,…
Portfolio Categories: Bridging
Healing Broken Attachments with our Kids
They are few stressors greater in life than having a challenging relationship with one’s child. It can be heart breaking to look at the chasm…
How to Repair a Relationship with a Child When You Blow It
Sometimes all the good intentions in the world are not enough to stop a parent from losing their temper with a child. One can wake…
Morning Mayhem: Getting Out the Door with Kids
If there was one common experience in parenting it would be the morning dance of the frazzled parent and the child moving at a snail’s…
Softening the Hardened Heart
Hearts can grow cold and become hardened, something poets, artists, and musicians have always claimed. From children to adults, emotional numbing is part of the…
Helping the Anxious Child or Teen Find Rest
As a parent it is challenging when you feel helpless to effect change for a child who is suffering or anxious. Parents often ask their…
Bedtime Battles: When Saying Goodnight is Hard
At the age of 4 my daughter looked at me and said, “Mama, we have a problem – I don’t like to sleep.” Shocked, I…
Starting School: Four Strategies for Helping with Separation Anxiety and Settling In
First day at school pictures seem to fill family photo albums. These images capture the significance of the ‘going-back-to-school’ ritual, a celebration of a key…
Parents in the Workplace and the Village that Supports Them
Returning to work after having a child is a necessity for some women, a choice for others, a heartache for many. Economists argue it helps…
Based on developmental science the evidence is clear in terms of the needs of young children. For their best bet in life they need at least one strong caring emotionally attuned adult with whom they are deeply attached. It is in the context of this relationship that developmental biases will unfold naturally and propel them towards maturation, e.g., to explore, to play, to create, to question, to adapt, to come to know oneself. The more immature one is the more one is rendered a creature of attachment actively pursuing contact and closeness in order to feel safe and get one’s bearings.
Children can attach to many people and even things but what is missed for the kids 6 and under is how they are not built for separation. They typically need 6 years to develop deep attachments with key people (e.g., parents) that will allow them to transcend physical separation through a sense of psychological connection and intimacy (1). We cannot hurry or force this development along – this is mother nature’s plan for helping them grow into separate beings capable of standing apart while being able to function with others. Does this mean we must never separate from our young children? No. One of the biggest futilities a young child faces is that they cannot hold onto a parent 24/7 and we really should stop holding it against them for trying. Our aim with young children is to ensure they have primary relationships in place and to help them to feel at home with other people in their attachment village that participate in raising them.
While we readily agree it takes a village to raise a child we also need to consider how we will deliver the child to this village and/or how to build it. We put our young children under great stress when they are not attached to the adults who are in charge of them. Research with young children in child-care centers has found cortisol levels via mouth swabs high enough to impair brain development (2). The cortisol levels are only decreased when the children have working attachments in the centers that help mitigate the stress of separation from their primary attachments.
Separation anxiety is one of the biggest issues young children face and reflects their irreducible need for attachment. They need enough consistency, contact and closeness to satiate attachment needs through the senses (e.g., touch, taste, smell, hearing, seeing) from ages 0 to 1. They continue to deepen their attachment with a strong invitation to exist in their parent’s presence from ages 1 to 6. By age 2 you hope to see signs of attaching by being the same as their parent (talking, preferences etc). By age 3 they enter belonging and loyalty as evident by their fierce possessiveness for people and things they are attached to. By age 4, a child will hopefully start to attach through significance, wanting to be special or matter to their parental figures and by age 5 to fall deeply in love with them. By age 6 it should hopefully occur to them that being close to someone means they share their secrets with them. When these forms of attachment unfold over the first 6 years of life they indicate a deepening of the relationship and increasing capacity to hang on when apart. We can continue to deepen our relationships over a lifetime, with some of us coming to the more vulnerable levels of attaching later on in life. Our job is to release our young children from clinging to us by taking care of their relational needs and giving them someone to cling to in our absence.
It begs the question as to what a parent can do to ensure the irreducible needs of children are met when they are working outside the home? What will help satiate a young child’s profound need for attachment and soothe subsequent alarm over separation? There are three attachment rituals that are helpful: collecting, matchmaking, and bridging.
1. Collecting
The collecting dance is an attachment ritual that has existed for centuries where relationships are built through the genuine expression of warmth, delight and enjoyment. If you think of the courting ritual between lovers this collecting dance becomes self-evident. There is a need for a strong invitation to be with the other person and perhaps a twinkle in one’s eye. Our role as parents is to deepen our relationship and satiate their attachment needs through collecting them often. In other words, we need to woo our children but this does preclude our need to also say no sometimes or set limits. Getting in their space in a friendly way, feeling that warmth between us seems so simple yet activates powerful chemicals in our body such as oxytocin. In fact, there is scientific evidence that having your boos boos kissed by someone you are attached to actually does make it feel better because of the release of oxytocin (3). When we continue to cultivate our relationship it promotes the development of a deeper attachment that will help them hang onto us when apart. They don’t need to practice at separation, they just need to get more deeply attached.
The collecting dance also pertains to other figures in the child’s village of care. Does the child care provider, teacher, grandparent, auntie, uncle, see themselves as also having to woo the child in order to cultivate a caretaking relationship? Do they get in their face in a friendly way and collect their eyes, work to get a smile, and some warmth back from the child? One of the challenges we face is in viewing child-care as a service. From a child’s perspective they care very little about services and more about whether their attachments will nurture and comfort them. The people who are part of a child’s attachment network need to win their heart as this will empower them to take care in our absence. When I went back to paid work and left my young child in the care of another person I squarely judged her on her capacity to fill my shoes and build a strong relationship with my child.
