What You Can Do Today to Impact Your Child's Sense of Self
While the question posed by the title of this post may seem too ambitious to respond to with one post, and the answer too simplistic, there is a concept in parenting that captures many far-reaching concepts and sets itself high atop the hierarchy of parenting tasks.
Secure attachment: How we hold our child in our mind.
What is it? Secure attachment is a response from a parent or caregiver where the child feels safe, welcome, and celebrated just as they are. Secure attachments are largely without parental anxiety. The parent is able to take in the feelings and behaviors of the child, metabolize them, and reflect back to the child a sense of the child’s OK-ness. The parent is calm and patient in their response and can provide a mirror or more accurately an experience for the child that they are OK. The child’s needs are responded to adequately, consistently, and in a timely manner.
While this description may begin to ring of perfection, the securely attached child has an imperfect parent who is able to apologize and own their shortcomings. And when the parent’s fallibility rears its head, they are able to carry their own inadequacies, so the child doesn't have to bear them.
In my new book, The Audacity to Be You: Learning to Love Your Horrible, Rotten Self, I provide a list of responses consistent with parents of securely attached children.
Safe
Thank you for telling me.
Tell me more.
I appreciate knowing—glad you told me.
Thanks.
That sounds hard.
I am sorry.
I am here/listening.
You are not alone.
That makes sense.
Is there anything I can do?
I can relate.
I am sorry.
When parents are unable to own their anxiety or inadequacies, the following responses displace those feelings into the child, leaving the child with the sense that something is wrong with them.
Unsafe
That is silly, irrational, unreasonable, stupid, ridiculous.
You are over-reacting.
You are too sensitive.
You are scaring me.
You are being selfish.
You should …
Get over it.
Look on the bright side.
Why did you do that? (As in, you “shouldn't.”)
That is your depression, insecurity, defense, justification, anxiety talking.”
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And when we make a mistake, which is inevitable, rather than defending it, we learn to say we are sorry and we were wrong without qualifications. This a deep strength. The ability to apologize and own one’s mistake and limitation is evidence of being an adult, healed, and whole self. It also models being human for the child and how it is okay to “not always know” and that we all get it wrong sometimes.
It is important to note here, the above is much more than a list of dos and don’ts. They are more than tools. They are what it sounds like when parent (or person) shows up in life like a healthy adult.
More than what we say to our children, it is how we think and feel about them that makes the biggest impact. How we hold the child in our minds is how the child will come to think and feel about themselves.
And the outcome of being raised by someone who responds more often with the safe rather than the unsafe list is that the child grows up with a healthy sense of what it means to be a self. They are less anxious. They are more confident. They know themselves and are less apt to stay in relationships where there is pressure to do or be something they are not. They will recognize mental illness and gaslighting more easily and avoid relationships where those issues and behaviors are present.
Perhaps most importantly, they will be less inclined to self-medicate because they have been taught, been shown, how to sit with themselves in discomfort and pain. They can self soothe because they carry around a copy of the nurturing parent inside of them—this is a reassuring and calming inner-voice.
It is also critical to point out that this compassionate and capable way of responding needn’t be paired with permissive or laissez-faire parenting, deficient of boundaries. The difference is that boundaries will be present and attuned to the needs of the child and based in the parent’s sense of self—what they feel comfortable with. For example, "I understand that you have been looking forward to this, but I am not comfortable with you going." Children in these homes will not be overindulged because these parents have a healthy sense of self and the child will be required to adjust to living with an Other.
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In my new release, I explain:
It is common to conflate love or “loving too much” with anxious attachment. “Loving too much” is a euphemism for the unhealed attachment wound and its expression in an anxious parent. The problem is not “loving too much,” but rather not enough self.
How do we do this? The greatest predictor of a parent’s ability to provide a secure attachment is not determined by the quality of their childhood. Whether a parent is able to provide a secure attachment experience and respond in the ways outlined above is a function of how much work they have done to understand their own lives. Siegel and Hartzell (2016) lay it out simply. “Research in the field of child development has demonstrated that a child’s security of attachment to parents is very strongly connected to the parents’ understanding of their own early-life experiences.”
So, this is what we know. Making sense out of the unique, emotional history of your own childhood is the foundation of your ability to provide your children with what they need to develop into healthy, happy adults. The conclusion, then, is that parents need to do their emotional work. Attend classes, support groups, therapy. Read self-help books and listen to experts encouraging parents to achieve greater consciousness in their lives.
References
Siegel, D. and Hartzell, M. (2016). Parenting From the Inside-Out: How a deeper self-understanding can help you raise children who thrive. 10th anniversary edition. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group.
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