Around the time of my son E.’s first birthday he took charge of managing his separation anxiety, conquering fear, and developing a capacity for courage.  How exactly did he do that, you ask?  Well, we’d been reading lots of books together about animals, and making the requisite oink-oink here, baa-baa there, and moo-moo everywhere to help him learn to communicate in sounds and words.  I noticed that he jumped every time I made the rather dramatic ROAR! for the lion.  He loved my lion, and he feared my lion at the same time. 

Firstly, “Happy Father’s Day!” to all our readers who are dads. Here’s a great quote to start your day:

“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.” ~ Jim Valvano
Now for today’s post:

Further to the research in previous posts that I’ve shared about the importance of baby bonding, creating healthy attachment between parent and child, separation anxiety, and the development of object permanence—these games help build trust and playfulness into your everyday life with young children. 

Play Peek-a-Boo and other Trust-Building Games!

The goal:  Reassuring your child that you are reliable, consistent, and that you always come back. 

Peek-a-Boo: You can play this game with infants to toddlers, and watch in amazement as their cognitive capacity for object permanence develops.  You can start with an object, a teddy, a ball, or something else familiar.  At around six months of age, begin to hide your own face, and quickly reappear after asking “Where’s Mommy?/Where’s Daddy?” Then say, “Here’s Mommy./Here’s Daddy!”  As your child approaches eight months, start using the moniker “Peek-a-Boo” as you reappear, “I see you!” and/or “I love you!” to reconnect.  Separation distress is normal for securely attached infants, your goal is to allow time-limited experience of separation anxiety, followed by the comfort and nervous system soothing provided by the return of a loving primary attachment figure—YOU!

Hide-and-Seek:  Once your child is mobile and more confident to be left alone for a moment, introduce “Let’s play Hide and Seek.” Hide yourself in an easily accessible place and call your child to come find you, delight in their ability to find you and the pleasure that comes from being reunited.  Then, teach your child to find a safe place to hide nearby and allowing for a few moments of suspense by counting to 10, go find them in their hiding place.  Again, celebrating their cleverness to hide, to disappear for a short time, to be found again, and delight in your reunion.  We have played a myriad array of hide-and-seek games in our family over the years including flashlights, secret nooks and crannies in the house, hidden-from-view places in tall grasses or high in the trees, favorite books to while away the waiting in secret hiding places for Mommy or Daddy to find them. They loved watching me look for them, bewildered, lost, calling out for hints about whether I was “hot” or “cold”—closer or father—from finding them.  They were reassured to see me on a loving quest to reunite myself with them. 

The Tickle Game: It’s impossible not to tickle a two year-old.  They are so full of wonderful reactions, giggles, and sensory pleasure.  As important as loving touch, teaching our children to say “No” or “Stop” and how to establish their own healthy boundaries is vital.  I started the tickle game based on the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song, where the spider eventually lands as a tickly five-finger spider climbing down my child’s arm as the water spout.  They also got to be the spider starting on my head, working its way down to my most tickly bits of all, my toes.  You can have a great deal of fun playing with the physical sensations of tickling. But, make sure that your child learns to both say and honor the word “No”, “Stop”, or “Enough” when the tickle game is done.  Over time, as kids grow up, teaching them that their bodies are their own and that no one is allowed to tickle them without their and/or a parent’s permission is essential for their safety and security.  Eventually, our tickle game resulted in years of my super-mobile spidery fingers chasing my kids around the house, them screaming in both delight and fear at being chased, and all of us tumbling into a tickle pile when I managed to catch them.  My 10 year-old daughter surprised me during a sleep over with all her pals recently, to do the same with all of them!  Once again, as soon as anyone says “Stop”, the game was over, often to start again with kids’ pleas to “Chase us again!” 

I’ll Catch You When You Fall: Once the tumbling and living room gymnastics stage starts, variations of this trust game can be lots of fun with the proper pillows in place.  Obviously, falling and hoping your child will catch you is not how this game is played.  But siblings can join in together, if they are equally matched and capable.  Start with your child on his/her knees with a pillow behind.  Have your arms cradled under their arm pits and ask them to trust their body in your arms as they lean back to lie on the pillow with your arms as support.  Then, as they develop confidence and agility, eventually they can stand “as tall as a tree”, and you can give a gentle chop to their side, ask them to count to three, “1, 2, 3”, and call out “Timber” which is, obviously, your cue to show your amazing lumberjack skills and catch your falling child, a.k.a. “Little Tree”. 

See Jennifer’s post about going on trust walks in “Blindfold“.

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

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