Dr. Gordon Neufeld has woven together a large amount of research in the field of child development to map out exactly how the attachment relationship plays out in these early years.3 He tells us that a baby’s first year is characterized by attachment through the senses; that is, a baby makes sense of the connection that is forming primarily through being with the parent. The child needs to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear you to know that you are his best bet, that you’ve got him, and that you can be counted on.
Clearly, the attachment relationship is a foundational piece of growing up our children in the best possible way. This marks a huge shift from the days of behaviourism, the parenting strategies which are, at heart, all about using the deprivation of connection to control a child’s behaviour. Attachment theory approaches the growing up of children as developmentally rooted in the creation and nourishment of connection. It also allows parents and other adults to see that each baby and child is exactly perfect in their imperfection. Challenging behaviour and the chaos of childhood are indications that everything is unfolding in exactly the right way. Don’t fret about the mess or the noise your baby is making—your biggest focus must be on you and your ability to protect that parent-child connection.
Children must be able to trust the “dance” of reciprocity in the relationship with their parents. Psychologists refer to this dance of trust as “serve and return.” A child puts out a bid (usually a cry or some form of behaviour), and the parent responds over and over again. If a baby is left to cry, they will eventually fall asleep because they are exhausted from the stress. Though the baby may reflect the behaviours the parents desire, the internal experience is one of continual angst that ultimately thwarts development. Alternatively, if a parent responds consistently, the baby learns to trust in the certainty of that parent’s response. And, if handled as needed, also learns to trust in the goodness of the parent’s response.
First, the child truly gets the message that they matter. When the dance of trust and reciprocity between parent and child is consistent, the child develops the belief that they are worthy of love and that they can simply lean into a parent’s enduring embrace—physically and emotionally—to receive that love. Over the years, this consistent provision of love from the parent morphs into a consistent provision of self-love from within the child. And the greatest gift a parent can give a child is to help them grow into an adult full of self-love.
Second, as well as learning they can trust their parents to respond repeatedly in a caring way, the child begins to develop the capacity for self-regulation. This is a simple and simultaneously complex manifestation of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s openness to external influence—that is, the experiences a baby has in the child-raising environment will shape how their brain is growing. A baby’s brain gets fired up out of a need for food, for a diaper change, for comfort, for anything. When a parent responds and settles the baby, they are in turn settling the baby’s brain. As this happens again and again, a baby’s brain learns to hang onto the neural pathways that are repeatedly reinforced and fired up through their parents’ ongoing caregiving. Brain fires up. Brain gets settled. Over and over. Those pathways are precisely the ones that will allow a child to become capable of self-regulation, self-soothing, and self-control—eventually. It will take years of the connection dance playing out with consistency for this to unfold. And what predicts how well a child learns to regulate? That depends on how well the parent uses their “own arousal level to counterbalance and/or complement that of the child.”4
Children will be and do exactly as they are meant to be and do for their own growth trajectory. Our role as parents is to promote our child’s development rather than create circumstances or conditions that get in the way of it. When children don’t get the connection they need they cannot be released fully to their developmental pathway. The child who must hang on, claw or grasp at, seek frenetically, or pursue connect with panic is the child who struggles. This is the child who redirects all of their developmental energy to securing the connection rather than striding forward with zest and confidence.
Relief comes for the child who is invited to lean on and rest in the care of their big people, and this is completely within our realm of control as parents to manage. Though we can occasionally get in the way of healthy development by imposing our own programming on our child’s growth, we can absolutely right ourselves in the face of challenges that might otherwise thwart our well-intentioned journey.
Nature Does Not Demand Perfection
Knowing how essential connection is for a child’s development, I can understand how new parents might feel overwhelmed or uneasy. This kind of commitment is not to be taken lightly. But guess what? Nature does not demand perfection. Parents do not have to keep up the connection dance constantly and flawlessly. Nature is far savvier. Child development experts coined the term “the good enough parent”5 to describe a parent who has engaged in the dance of connection well enough that the child has received what is needed, even if it wasn’t perfectly delivered all the time.
In his work, Dr. Tronick showed that parents are perfectly in sync emotionally with their children only about 30 percent of the time. The rest of the time, parents are either falling out of sync or finding their way back to being in sync. He calls this falling in and out “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” The good is when a parent is on top of the reciprocity of the serve-and-return dance. The bad is when a parent has dropped the ball but is working their way back to being in sync. Tronick believes that this falling out of sync is not the worst thing that can happen because the child does learn that reparation and resolution are possible and real. The ugly is when the parent connection is entirely absent and there is no move toward repair. In this scenario, the child is stuck in a horrible place of disconnectedness.
Bear in mind that when a child has a relationship connection with more than one key caregiver—a mom and a dad, for example—the flavour of each connection is specific to the individual relationship. This means that a child will have a specific connection relationship with mom, a different one with dad, and additional connection relationships with any other caregivers. No one relationship will be quite like the other. However, though the other relationships certainly matter, the one that is most intense and most frequent will be the front-row influencer in terms of the child’s development.
And here’s another thing to keep in mind: it really does only take one! Many parents come to me full of angst about an absent, uninvolved, or perhaps incapable co-parent, concerned about how this might affect their children. Yes, there will be an emotional impact of some kind. But if a child has at least one adult who is full of invitation for that child to exist, who is delighted to see them when they walk into a room, who has a twinkle in their eye and love in their heart for them, who will absolutely have their back through thick and thin, this is a child who will be okay. Resilience will abound and that child will thrive exactly as they were intended to.
Eventually other caregivers will be invited into your child’s inner circle—here is the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for all exhausted parents out there! Sometime around the age of two years, your child will start to develop meaningful relationships with others with whom she has ongoing connection experiences. As these other caregivers are invited into your child’s inner circle, parents continue to be the most important influence in terms of the child’s sense of self and her brain’s networks to facilitate self-regulation.
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