Little did I know that all the hours of playing Peek-a-Boo with my children actually produced necessary neuronal growth in their brains so they can feel secure in this world!  Peek-a-Boo teaches our child that we are a secure object.  I thought we were just having fun!?  That’s the cool thing about putting psychology research into practice, it can be fun.  Research now shows that many time-honored traditions in parenting help create the trust and courage in kids necessary to conquer many of life’s challenges. 

Our family game was actually called, “Peek-a-Boo, I Love You.”  As soon as I would reappear, I would reassure my child that I really was back with a big smile, open arms, eye-to-eye contact, say “I see you” and, what would eventually become one of their first phrases, “I love you!”  I made sure to give the same verbal and non-verbal cues every time I would go away and come back once I started having other caregivers help in caring for my children.  Consistency being an important key to unlocking the treasure trove of trust between parents and children!

Schore, A. (2001). Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain

When my first child was born, a nurse handed me a form to complete which had two empty spaces, one for “Mother’s Name” and the other for “Father’s Name.”  I completed the form with my own mother and father’s names filled into the blanks.  The nurse reviewed the form and promptly asked me “Who are these folks?  Sweetheart, YOU are the mother. This form needs YOUR name.”   Everything went a little woozy as I was overcome by the seismic internal shift from daughter to mother.  All I knew was that I wanted to be good enough to warrant this immense responsibility and privilege to now be the guide, not the follower, on this next adventure in life.  I hoped I would have the kind of internal strength and courage to weather all the changes to come.  As I’ve written about previously, my first tasks would involve ensuring secure attachment and cultivating attunement between myself and my children. 

As parents, we need to become confident in our responsiveness and attunement to our own and our child’s needs.  And when we aren’t, our child’s separation distress acts as a kind of corrective mechanism to restore healthy attachment behaviors quickly and bring comfort.  In those cases, we need to recover quickly! Then, ensure that the majority of the time we are the kind of loving, available, reliable, approachable, and sensitive parents necessary to create the secure base and safe haven associated with healthy attachment between ourselves and our children.   We need to keep creating the neurological in-roads to lay the foundation necessary to ensure secure attachment through:  loving touch, eye-to-eye contact, responding to our children’s cries as responsively and sensitively as possible, being attuned to their needs, being a calm and reassuring presence.  At least the majority of the time!

Our temperament may not be the easiest, or our baby the calmest.  We may experience periods of post-partum depression and struggle to bond initially, or our baby cries for months with colic testing our true mettle and patience.  Our children may push buttons in us—buttons that may have been wired during our own childhood experience which can trigger urges to withdraw, be anxious and hover, become angry, and/or grieve our own childhood in moments.  We need not continue to blame our parents for what we may or may not have received in terms of how we were parented (afterall we are the parents now).  We can, however, choose to parent our amazing children with the kind of compassion, love, patience, generosity, and courage which we ourselves may or may not have received, as a way to not only ensure their psychological health but also our own! 

Winnicott (1993) urged us as parents to be authentically ourselves.  It is our authenticity, most of all, that children are looking for and that provides the kind of consistency they crave.  Parenting isn’t a profession we can perfect, as much as it is a practice in accepting our imperfections and having the courage to consistently move forward in the direction of love.  As my aunt said to me one day, after I called her in tears worried about a spectacularly imperfect parenting moment after my son bit his newborn sister’s hand, “If your biggest fear is that your kids are going to grow up and want you to come to therapy with them to discuss how imperfect you were, be grateful ’cause it means they still want to talk to you!”

Here’s a good link for more information on attachment from a group of mental health therapists committed to community education and wellness: http://healingresources.info/children_attachment.htm

I remember feeling instantly protective of my son E. when he was born.  We were a symbiotic unit during those early days.  I was reticent to hand him over and he was reticent to be put down.  I will, however, be forever grateful for every time his father offered me a much-needed reprieve and walked those endless blocks in the middle of the night to help E. fall asleep. 

During the first three months of his life, like most other mother-infant (or primary caregiver-infant) pairs, we were tuning ourselves into each other’s verbal and non-verbal cues and especially our feelings.  Best known in attachment theory literature as attunement.  E.’s signals of distress, crying, grimacing, stiffening of his muscles, clenching his fists, or arching of his back, were often associated with tiredness, hunger, and especially with E., proximity-seeking.  By six or nine months an infant’s primary attachment(s) are well-established and secure—as was ours. 

During the course of our first three years together, we began the first of our most important courage challenges:  to learn how to say goodbye whilst ensuring psychoneurobiological homeostasis (which is fancy talk for “not melting down during every little separation!”)

As a new mom and trained child/family therapist, I was aware how adaptive E.’s startle response and protests against separation were for his survival.  As a student of psychology, I remembered that most child development research shows that it isn’t until seven to ten months that infants begin to show fear and stranger anxiety.  It takes that many months for this more complex defensive or inhibitive behavior to develop in the autonomic nervous system due to the maturational time-line of the brain’s cingulate cortex (the area of the brain which is primarily involved via the limbic system with emotion formation and processing, learning and memory). 

I was careful to listen to E.’s need for mama-time.  I also continually, gently, encouraged his time to bond, during those first seven months, in the arms of other loved ones—those aunties, uncles, siblings, grandparents, close friends, and eventual babysitters who would become the important secondary attachments in his life.  In those instances, I handed over E. with confidence and trust in his other caregivers whilst also paying close attention to his reactions.  We taught each other a great deal about interpersonal trust and emotional and social courage during those early days of building family connections. 

Though exhausted new parents, we continually held E., and walked, sang to, read to, fed on demand not always on schedule, and didn’t let him cry himself to sleep (though we tried a few times with heart-breaking results instead of the success and sleep other friends enjoyed).  We practiced the 7 Baby B’s of Bonding. We weren’t coddling or spoiling him, we were teaching him to feel safe in the world.  We were calming his nervous system so his neurons could wire and fire in the direction of survival and maintain or restore homeostatic and emotional balance—whatever the case may be.  

Despite what some of the baby books said about letting him ‘cry it out’, I paid close attention to what his cries conveyed to me and made sure he knew I was both sensitive and responsive to those specific cries.  In that sense, I was teaching him that his voice mattered, that he was safe, that I was his secure base, and with those assurances he could learn to separate and be well in another’s arms. 

We were privileged to be able to have this time with our infant son, and careful to live simply so that we could afford to support this critical period of his development.  We also got some good advice early:  it’s not stuff that your child needs, it’s YOU! 

We often said to one another, my husband and I, “These early years with our kids are not our money-saving years.”  We didn’t have fancy new strollers or cars, we sacrificed some career-advancing opportunities in favor of time at home with our kids, and our savings account dwindled.  But, it turns out we were wrong: they were our money-saving years!  The investment of time, patience, love, and attuned attention for our children turns out to be priceless in terms of ensuring their physical, cognitive, social, and emotional well-being.  The costs are astronomical when we don’t ensure our children’s well-being and thus their capacity for courage.

These days when economics require that most of us are dual-income families (my family included), taking the time to support a new caregiver’s relationship with your young child, pacing their introduction, tag-teaming with trust, is vital to the attachment process a child needs to transfer attention and then affection from parent to a new caregiver.  Here’s some helpful advice about introducing a new caregiver.

Little did I know then, that those first three years together lay the foundation for how my son and I now adapt and listen to one another, let go of one another, and relax trusting in our return to the safety and security available in our relationship.   Bigger separations were to come:  my return to work, starting preschool and then kindergarten.  

E’s separation protests were strong at times.  The first day of preschool, he screamed at the top of his lungs to make sure that his new teacher, all the other new parents and myself knew all about his separation anxiety, “If you leave me here, I’m going to be not okay and someone is going to have to call Dr. X (our family doctor)!”   It took everything I had to leave him.  Before I did, I leaned down to meet his eyes and hold his precious little hands in mine (removing them from around my neck), and said reassuringly “I know it is a big change to come here.  That’s why we’ve practiced a few times and now I know you are ready.  You need to know I would never leave you with anyone or in any place that I didn’t think was safe and good for you.”  Then, I walked away with tears in my eyes remembering how much courage it took me to leave my own mom on my first day of school.  I was filled with compassion for my son.  Somehow I knew, though, that I had to be the strong one in that moment and bid my good-bye.  I had to believe in him first, before he experienced the confidence boost that is associated with being brave enough to try something new, something scary, something that you have to do all on your own!

I now live with a confident, funny, loving thirteen year-old who has no trouble forming friendships, reaching out to his relatives, trying new things which require getting outside his comfort zone, completing his homework and guitar practice without being reminded, letting me know when he’s not feeling well or just needs some space, even changing schools and countries.   E. is not prone to fear or anxiety—instead he is the prototypical surfer dude who rides life’s waves with joy and ease.  This adolescent is the same infant who hardly ever wanted to be put down during the first nine months of his life, until he stood up one day in his ninth month and walked, then ran, across the living room collapsing into our laps.  And these days, without fail, every morning he leaves the house to catch the school bus, the last words I hear him confidently call out are “Bye, Mom!”  He waits for my response, “Bye, Love!” Then, he closes the front door and he’s off on his own journey. In that moment, I sigh with the subtle heart pangs of another good-bye, trusting in his strength and mustering the courage to love and let go. 

Here’s a quick review of what secure attachment looks like:
 

Warren, S., Huston, L., Egeland, B., & Sroufe, A. (1997). Child and adolescent anxiety