Building a Secure Attachment With Your Child

Building a secure attachment with your child in my view is paramount to healthy parenting. Having a secure attachment means that you have an emotional relationship with your child. This means the individual child feels safe and secure that you as their parent will protect them, love them, nurture them and take care of their basic physical needs. Physical needs include things like clothes that are appropriate for the weather, nutritious food and water and shelter.

Meeting the emotional needs of your child is not easy because we as parents are human beings. We have had our own life experiences and we respond to life's difficulties, challenges and grief according to these experiences. We get stressed, over loaded and at times we want to bury our head and make it all go away. However, as parents our emotional well-being directly affects our child's emotional well-being.

For me, building a secure attachment with your child is the platform in which your child learns about life. Most of all they learn about trust. They also learn to be confident in their choices, develop the self-esteem in knowing that they are worthy of love and to be in relationship with others. Your child's attachment to you as a parent will define the person they will become.

Trust is probably the most important facet of developing a secure attachment. This means that your child trusts that you as their parent will provide for their needs. Helene Goldnadel gives you an example of how the trust cycle evolves.

• The child has a need (eg hungry, fallen over and hurt themselves)
• The child has an emotional response (eg they are fussing or crying)
• They need a sense of gratification (eg the parent provides food or comfort)
• They develop trust (eg the child learns that their parent will help during a time of need)

So as parents to build a secure attachment you need to learn your child's emotional and physical cues and respond appropriately. if your child cries, comfort him or her. If your child is angry, find out why, validate their emotion and talk about healthy ways of expressing anger. If your child is happy, join in on the fun. When your child is playing, play with them and enter their imaginary world. This will in turn affect how well your child can trust others in the world to meet these needs.