Good news, creating healthy attachment is easier than current “parenting experts” lead you to believe. In fact, the truth will ease your mind and simplify your world, so let’s get straight to it.
A quick review of the why and the how?
The brain’s number one job is survival. As humans, our best means of survival has always been our intelligence. As a result, the brain’s is designed to learn. Specifically, to learn how the world works.
Because of this, the brain is always seeking patterns, assessing threats, and attempting to predict the future (Circling back to expectations in motherhood).
How does this apply to your baby?
With survival in mind, when humans are born, we are born extremely vulnerable and dependent on our caregivers. Accordingly, the brain quickly attaches to us (caregivers) and uses us as their references for understanding how the world works (identifying patterns).
As a result, healthy attachment provides a positive sense of self, others and their world…. Thus, giving them a foundation upon which they can thrive.
The Simple Two-Part Solution to Creating Healthy Attachment:
Part 1: Fostering Connection
Good News!! It is as simple as participating in positive interactions with your baby. No fancy tricks, special instructions, or professional magic about it. However and whatever connection looks like for you and your little.
Every day connection builders:
- A) Playing – Starting off as eye gazing, transitioning into smiles and laughter, and escalating into full-blown tickle fights and imaginative worlds. If it’s positive attention from you + they’re into it, it counts as play.
- B) Talking – A dance in which talking to him communicates he’s important, and you listening + responding to him communicate he is seen. In the beginning, it’ll be a lot of one-sided conversations, but don’t let that stop you. Narrate your day, sign them songs, ask for their advice on life… there is literally no wrong way to do this.
- C) Touch – Skin sensitivity is one the earliest and most completely developed senses. Gentle, positive touch communicates, love, acceptance, worthiness, and safety. So, cuddle, rock, and hold to your heart’s content.
Part 2: Be Attentive + Responsive + Accepting… Be a Safe Base.
Essential in fostering the connection and trust associated with a healthy attachment is being responsive to their needs.
Does this mean you have to be constantly available + reacting to your little?
No. Healthy attachment is not about responding to their every want, it’s about being overall consistent and reliable in acknowledging their needs. Being their “safe base” and establishing a sense of unconditional love (i.e., they are seen, accepted, and loved).
Didn’t we already talk about being a safe base when it comes to parenting their lower brains?
Yep!! In addition to the benefits mentioned last week (i.e. teaching self-regulation + calming big emotions), when you respond as a safe base, you are creating a positive sense of:
- A) Self – By regularly acknowledging them, they develop the sense that they are loved and accepted. That they matter and how they feel matters. They have a sense of security in that they are enough and worthy.
- This results in high self-esteem, confidence, curiosity, respect, etc.
- B) Others – By being consistent and reliable, they develop a sense that others are trustworthy and dependable.
- This results in positive social and romantic relationships, relationship resiliency, etc.
- C) The World – By being supportive, they develop the sense that they’re safe, that they can survive the unknown.
- This results in independence, a sense of competence, fulfillment and overall satisfaction.
IMPORTANT PARENTING TAKE AWAY:
You are enough.
In the end, what it all comes down to is they (their brains) are wired to need love from you. To play with you. To be seen by you. To be accepted by you. To be protected by you. To learn from you. To be like you. The key word is you.
And the best news…. there is no one way to do this. Your way is the right way.
That’s why there is truly no one way to parent.
Still a little overwhelmed?
Totally understandable.
If you’re like most mamas, you’re now rewinding your brains and focusing on all the instants in which you were less ‘Mother Teresa’ and more ‘Mother I’m-going-to-loss-my-mind.’ Or maybe you’re calculating the times you were sidetracked, disengaged, or busy.
Whatever moments are causing you to question yourself, don’t.
Perfect is impossible. Remember, mothers are humans. Super-humans, but humans nonetheless.
The BIG, most important attachment takeaway –
The brain is designed for normal, healthy development. Your little was born open to receiving love and connection. Parents don’t need to tirelessly worry about providing excessive experiences and sensory stimulation, or about getting every moment right.
What matters is consistency and the general impression of love and acceptance your little receives from you. Or as Maya Angelou put it,
“At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did,
they will remember how you made them feel.”
In fact, Pediatrician and child- psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott, coined the term “good enough mother” in which she encourages not focusing on a single, defining moment or obsessing about being perfect, but to read and respond to your child’s cues often enough to make him feel safe (and exhale… you are totally doing that).
To take this a step further, I can make the argument that ‘enough’ is actually BETTER than ‘perfect.’ Read more about that HERE.