He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.
Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, 1922.2
This part of the book is about you rather than your child. For me, this information has been more powerful than anything else I’ve found in the research literature on parenting.
If it is the relationship our babies have with us that contributes most to their self-regulation skills and creates that ‘best possible’ self — and we know that it is — then what do we bring to that relationship? How do our lives, thoughts and emotions shape the relationship between us and our children?
These are the questions that attachment theory asks and seeks to answer.
Researchers of attachment theory study all the different patterns that exist in intimate relationships and how those patterns, in turn, shape us. They study romantic relationships, parent-child relationships and other very close relationships and describe these powerful and intimate reciprocal relationships as ‘attachments’, or ‘attachment relationships’. After studying millions of attachment relationships the researchers are able to see patterns into which these relationships fall.
They begin with looking at very little babies. All the things babies do — cry, smile, nestle, gaze — are designed to communicate to their parents their deep need to be kept as close as possible in order to feel safe and loved.
When a baby cries, that is an ‘attachment behaviour’. When a parent has a pattern of responding to that cry, the baby knows that he is safe. But when a parent has a pattern of responding differently, such as not coming, or coming inconsistently, then the baby knows that his survival may be on the line. It is at this point that a baby knows he must either increase or change the signal to get help.
You can see that the way in which the parent responds to their baby will create the pattern that the child must match in order to ensure his survival.
If you are a new parent of a little baby you may hear the advice, ‘That’s no way to stop him crying, you’re just rewarding him by picking him up’. And the advice sounds convincing, but not if you are using the attachment perspective and empathising with your baby.
What you can say is, ‘Let’s look at this from the baby’s perspective. He can’t meet his own needs and needs me to do things for him. Even if I don’t pick him up, he is still going to be needing me. So to get my attention he’s going to have to get more and more upset, and eventually I will pick him up.
‘So if I don’t pick him up I’m training him to get very upset immediately because nothing else works to get my attention. If he can’t trust me to fulfil his needs, then he’ll stick close to me because he won’t trust me when I’m out of his sight. That means he’ll explore less and won’t develop so many skills. And my baby will turn into a whingeing, clingy preschooler.
‘Or perhaps I could follow your advice and not pick him up at all when he cries. How would that turn out? Looking at it from my baby’s perspective, he still needs me but obviously, his cries disturb me so much that I can’t respond. To make me feel safe he’ll have to pretend that he has no emotional needs. He’ll learn to switch them off. And then he won’t be able to recognise them in other people either. My baby will turn into a preschooler who won’t have the empathic skills needed to make friends.
‘But if I do pick him up, he learns that empathy is seeing how someone feels and valuing that in your actions. He’ll know that I’m always going to be there to meet his needs and he will soon discover that it isn’t necessary to get upset and cry to get his needs met. So, eventually, when he wants me, he’ll just call out once and wait. Because he trusts me he’ll turn into a happy little explorer because he knows Mum will be there watching and protecting. He will develop lots of the skills needed for independence. And my baby will grow into an independent, sociable and cheerful preschooler.’
(You will notice that I haven’t suggested a snappy rejoinder. I am simply no good at these.)
Parents also often hear statements like ‘there is no such thing as a naughty child’ and ‘just ignore undesirable behaviours’. Again, attachment theory provides a child’s perspective on this kind of parenting practice — because the other great finding of attachment theory is that children need to feel safe, and that part of making them feel safe is having clear, enforced rules for behaviour. The great flaw in the parenting strategy of ‘only noticing positive behaviours’ — the one I describe in ‘About this book’ — is that it makes children feel less safe.
Attachment theory makes explicit something that we intuitively know: our children respond to our emotional patterns. Rather than offering ‘strategies’ for parenting, it offers us the chance to look at our emotions, how those emotions affect the way we respond to our children, and how that in turn shapes our children’s characters.
This is contrary to what I was taught while studying at university. At that time researchers believed that the active, the magic, ingredient for child development was ‘stimulation’.
‘Is your baby getting enough stimulation?’ was the question you were likely to be asked by the health professionals. But it was the wrong question.
We were doing all the right things with our babies by playing, touching, kissing, holding, singing to, talking to and cuddling them, but the most important thing in doing all this was not stimulation. It was the fact that this playful interaction built the knowledge that mother and child had of each other and strengthened the emotional connection — the attachment — between them.
The most powerful forces in a child’s development are his emotional states. These states are so powerful because emotion is the language the brain/body speaks to itself. The message is carried in chemicals — neurotransmitters, hormones — but the messages carried are emotional ones: fear, longing, discomfort, pain, sadness, despair, excitement, curiosity, exhilaration, confusion … All of these different emotions drive or hinder brain/body growth throughout our lives. Will your child’s main emotion be a feeling of love? Then it is oxytocin, the love and learning hormone that causes brain cells to grow and interconnect, that will prevail. Or will his main emotion be fear? Then it is cortisol and the catecholamines, the stress hormones that, in sufficient quantities, destroy neural connections, that will dominate.
And what creates these emotional states in a child? A child’s emotional states are mostly (but not totally, because temperament is a factor) created by the quality of his relationship with you. It is the way you respond, the pattern of your response to him, that creates the feelings he has.
If a distressed baby is immediately comforted, he will spend less time in that distressed state. If he turns to share something with you, and you respond with delight straightaway, his happy feeling is going to be strengthened. The phrase in the literature on attachment theory and the interlinked neuroscience is, ‘states become traits’ — in other words, the feelings a baby has more of now are going to shape his character down the track. The skills of self-regulation start in infancy but there is no aspect of development untouched by this. Not even movement or thinking or language skills, even though they seem so far removed from the ambit of emotion.
You will perhaps be wondering why I haven’t written ‘love’ here — why, in fact, love is not the magic ingredient. It would be a much nicer sentiment!
All parents love their babies and children. But it is how we respond to them that is the way our love is expressed, and there are ways of responding that are not going to help a child to that best possible self. No matter how much we love our children, it is how that love is expressed that counts.
To give a personal example, when my children have been distressed I have always responded immediately. My babies and toddlers and even preschoolers have all been the sort who ‘didn’t need to cry’, so rapidly do I respond. Except for this: once my children were five years old or older I no longer could bear it when they ‘gave way to despair’. My behaviour when faced with a despairing child could not have been less supportive. While I was comfortable with them expressing every other negative emotion — extreme anger, great sorrow — I found it deeply bothersome and did about all I could to outlaw ‘despairing crying’.
By trying to outlaw ‘despair’ I was still expressing my love and concern for them but not in a way that was going to help them. Working through just why I did this has been, as the Velveteen Rabbit suggests of becoming Real, uncomfortable and a bit sad. Nonetheless, it has been a very important part of ‘becoming’ a parent for me, and you might like to keep my ‘out-of-character’ behaviour in mind as you read through this part of the book. The other thing that I would like you to bear in mind is that a relationship can be repaired at any time, with changes in brain and body to match.
There have been a number of studies where pregnant women were asked about their own childhoods. Interestingly, each study showed the same thing. Researchers have found that by listening to the story of a woman’s childhood, her relationship with her parents and other attachment relationships, they can predict how securely her child will attach to her.3, 4
Many of my friends have freaked out when they read this. People immediately jump to the conclusion that I’m saying the research suggests that if they had a difficult childhood then they will struggle to parent. That’s not it at all. Some of the very best parents I know had very unpleasant childhoods themselves, childhoods on which they have reflected and come to terms with and used to build a very different kind of childhood for their own children.
The key word is ‘reflection’: the ability to find meaning and use for past experiences, whether for good or bad. If we can tell the story of our own relationships and childhood in a way that hangs together and pulls meaning from all that has happened to us, then we are going to be able to parent well. This has been known for many years, but, until recently, no-one was able to explain why. In the last few years, however, researchers think they have worked it out.5, 6
Being able to tell a coherent life story shows that you have moved on from your past. You are not trapped by circular thoughts of ‘if only’ and ‘what if’. You haven’t avoided thinking about the parts that hurt you, you’ve reflected on it all and come to terms with it and moved on. This lets you become a parent who is free to be in the here-and-now with your babies and children.3, 9, 10
But being able to ‘live in the present’ with your child is only one-half of the story. The other significant factor is that telling your life story, complete with ups and downs, shows that you are comfortable with a range of emotions.
The parent who has not turned away from experiencing life’s pain is a parent who can cope with an unhappy child. This is important as a parent, and never more so than when you are dealing with a newborn. If we imagine an ‘emotional compass’, babies initially tend to have that needle in the sad end of the spectrum. They don’t know how to get their needs met, they are helpless to meet those needs themselves, it’s a strange new world out of the womb — and so they often feel sad and needy and fearful to begin with. But a baby who is lonely or frightened or sad is a baby you can relate to. You’ve had those emotions and you came out the other side, so you know that, with your help, your child will too.9, 10
A parent who is mostly living in the present moment and mostly coping with the full spectrum of emotions in themselves and their children fits into an attachment pattern called ‘free’ or ‘autonomous’.
At the generational crossroads
This is a fictional story that someone who has worked through their childhood issues might tell.
‘My mother was very young. There was a lot she missed out on, having me. So it was a resentful relationship: she resented having me and I resented her having me when she hadn’t really been ready But I got over it as a teenager. I always had my head in a book, and I encountered someone just like her in one of those sprawling family sagas. You met the controlling grandmother and then her children and then their children in turn, and you could just see it all, travelling down the generations. That was what the book was about. So I was able to see the situation from the outside, and that actually helped a bit because I stopped asking for what she couldn’t give and so she resented me less.
‘But before that, I remember coming home with my first school award and she just wasn’t interested. She just said, “Oh yes”. And at this point the next-door neighbour came in and Mum immediately began to play the proud parent. It was something she did and it obviously made her feel better about her life, but it always made me feel worse. I wasn’t worth the bother, but other people were. But she just wasn’t ready for a child — she hadn’t been herself first. The role of mother was something that she played on the outside for society, but often she would confide in me or friends she trusted that she still always dreamed about what she’d have done if she hadn’t got pregnant so young.
‘But after meeting her in that book I was able to think, “You poor sausage, you never got over it,” and “Well, that won’t be me, I’m going to get over it, I’m not going to stay stuck in the past.” And there were other people who were interested in me and took the trouble to get to know me and I learned a lot from them.
‘Mrs Simon, one of my high school teachers, was the main person. She was a very warm person, and back in those days teachers could give hugs, and although I was a very reserved girl she would always hug me. She was a big squashy lady, and she always smelt like oranges and wore bright friendly colours. She always joked about “keeping the books up to me”, and spent time talking to me about them. I came to terms with my Mum with her help. If Mum was late picking me up she would take me home with her own children who were all younger, and I would sit in her untidy small kitchen and we’d have cheese on toast and warm chocolate and then play cards. And I deliberately set about learning to be a parent from her, even though I was only thirteen. And she knew that, because she really knew me. My eldest son is named Simon after her.
‘Mum hasn’t changed. She loves me, but she is too caught up in her own life to be interested in mine. And I accept that because I’m not one of those people who keep trying to go back and change someone. I’m one of those people who seek out and celebrate the good relationships I can have instead.’
This woman, with her strong emphasis on the value of attachment relationships, would have children who were securely attached to her. The message from the attachment literature is that having had a ‘good childhood’ or ‘good parents’ isn’t a prerequisite. What is required is that you’ve worked it all through.
But not everyone is free to parent. Some people are emotionally preoccupied, still working through the wounds left by their own childhoods. Some people seem to have blanked out their memories of their own childhoods, refusing to look too closely at the painful emotions. In both cases, they are not responsive to some emotions in either themselves or other people and so they do not recognise those emotions in their child. Nor do they find it easy to cope with a child’s quest to stay very close to a parent and to be treated tenderly.
When this is the case, it will lead to a child having more of the negative emotions — fear and sadness. This in turn impacts on body and brain development, and these children are the ones who most struggle with self-regulation skills and are least likely to grow into resilient, happy and wise adults.
In the next chapters the different attachment patterns are described. You will probably find something of yourself in a couple of them, because most of us dip in and out of them.11, 13 Every mother can be too preoccupied with something to listen to a child to the degree they would wish, or not quite in a place to bring the same degree of warm comfort to a sad child as they would like. And there are patches of ‘psychological sunshine’ in the lives of parents who still have bleeding wounds left from their childhood, during which they are able to parent far more responsively.5
But what you should be looking for is an overall pattern into which your parenting fits. If you do feel very stressed a lot of the time, and during these times you find that you stay in one of the insecure or disorganised parenting patterns, then it is time to see what you can do to prevent an insecure and/or disorganised attachment pattern being passed down to your children and their children’s children and so on, down the generations.3, 4
You might be wondering what the various terms mean: secure, insecure, organised, disorganised? What does a secure and organised attachment look like? How does it feel? How do you know if you have one with your baby, or if you haven’t? Can an insecure attachment become secure? Can a secure attachment become insecure? Does your own attachment to your parents play a role? If you have a bad relationship with your parents, does that mean the attachment you experienced as a baby wasn’t secure or organised? What things support secure, organised attachment and what things hinder it?
In thinking about this for myself I found three different sets of literature very helpful. First of all were the descriptions of the different attachment types: secure versus insecure, organised versus disorganised. I came to believe that learning to see the different attachment patterns was something all parents could benefit from. Then came the ‘ghost-busting’ approach, which is all about identifying exactly what in your children’s behaviours causes you to stop being a ‘warm and responsive’ parent. Finally, I also came across the writings of Haim Ginott.
Although Ginott’s work fits in the ‘managing behaviour’ part of child development literature, it also provides the nuts and bolts of creating a secure attachment in your children. So I have included his theory in this part of the book also, and the bonus is that in following his approach you will also spot any gaps in your own emotional compass. His work resonated most powerfully with me and guided me through managing myself when I found myself uncomfortable with my children’s despair.