Today, I’m walking you through 3 things that kids need in order to feel secure in their attachment with you. Consider this your crash course in attachment basics, a how-to guide.

You’ll Learn:

• How focusing on attachment in childhood with help you kid in adulthood
• My experience as an adoptive mom working to repair my kids’ attachments after life in an orphanage
• The 4 S’s of attachment and how to use them in your parenting
• What to do if you’re still healing from your own childhood

I’m willing to bet that you're doing a lot of things right already. But if you want to improve your attachment and make it stronger, these steps will help you do it.

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One thing I want you to keep in mind is that attachment is a robust system. It’s not easily broken, and it’s never too late to focus on strengthening your attachment with your child.

Your kid wants to connect with you. They want to feel safe and secure with you. 

And the truth is that most parents do create secure attachment with their children. We’re hardwired to protect our kids, to take care of them and to make sure that they get what they need. 

Why Secure Attachment Matters

When a child has a secure attachment to their parent, it means that they feel pretty safe in the world. They’re not living in a hyper vigilant, stressed, reactive headspace. Their mental health is pretty good. 

Kids who are securely attached typically grow up to be self-reliant, independent, have a strong self esteem, and experience less anxiety and depression. 

They launch into the world…

• Feeling safe and seen
• Knowing how to take care of themselves
• Able to soothe themselves without drugs, alcohol, sex, and other addictions

The amazing thing about these 4 S’s is that when your child has this modeled for them - when they feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure with you, no matter what - they can create this inside of themselves. 

It’s that feeling of being okay. And who doesn’t want that?

The 4 S’s of Attachment

Each of these 4 S’s leads to the next. When your child feels safe, when they feel seen, when they feel soothed…that results in security (aka a secure attachment with you). 

SAFE 

Safety means that your child is physically and emotionally secure in their environment. They feel protected from harm, and they don't experience fear or threat from you.

Essentially, you need to be the safe person for your child - not the thing that scares them. This is really the crux of connected parenting. We’re not using fear or threats in order to get compliance. 

Spanking is one example of this. Your child’s fear activates their nervous system (which is not going to improve their behavior) and confuses them. You’re supposed to be the source of safety, but yet you’re the source of fear in that moment. They might be uncertain of whether they can fully trust you. 

Of course, we all have times when we are a source of fear. You might yell, rage, or get physical. That is why repair is so important. Instead of your child seeing you as dangerous, unpredictable, or unreliable, you take responsibility for your actions and use it as an opportunity to strengthen the attachment. 

SEEN 

To be seen is to have a caregiver who perceives and understands a child's emotional experience. 

It means that you see your child as an individual. You become curious about them, you think about what they want, who they are, and what they need. You view them as a fully whole individual that is revealing themself to you.

But sometimes, we don’t really want our kids to be themselves. You want them to be a mini-you or meet certain standards. Those expectations put you into a place of judgment rather than curiosity.

Instead, observe them and delight in who they are. Create space for conversations to understand them better.

Kids need to believe that they are good in order to develop a positive self esteem and self reliance. Being seen fulfills your kid’s need for authenticity. It allows them to express themselves and know that your attachment is unconditional. 

SOOTHED/SUPPORTED 

Your child looks to you for comfort and support when they are distressed. When they have complex feelings and situations happening, they want to know that you can help them sort through their big feelings. 

Soothing is not solving. You don’t need to solve all of your kid’s problems (and you shouldn’t). Discomfort and obstacles give kids the opportunity to become resilient. 

What they do need is someone who can be present with them, offer empathy, and problem solve with them, if they're interested in that. 

For example, maybe your child is doing their homework, and they're starting to get mad. They're slamming the table or ripping up their paper. You can come alongside them and say, “Listen, you're safe right now. I'm not angry with you. You're not in trouble. I'm looking at you struggling with this homework, and I wonder if you feel really overwhelmed by it…That makes sense. So how about we break it into a couple of questions at a time?” or, “How about we work on it for five more minutes and then we take a break?”

SECURE (The end result we’re going for) 

When your child feels safe, seen, and soothed by you, the result is a secure attachment. 

They know that no matter how they act, no matter how they show up in the world, no matter what they say or do, the attachment to you is never at risk. You have unconditional love and acceptance for them, and it cannot be broken.

It makes sense that kids who have that type of attachment in their lives grow up feeling confident and secure. 

Breaking the Cycle

Unfortunately, we weren’t all raised with secure attachment. We didn’t all get our physical and emotional needs met. 

If this is you, you might need to do some healing and re-parenting if you don’t want to transfer your own insecurity and hypervigilance to your kids. 

As someone who was raised with insecure attachment and had a lot of childhood trauma, I had to double down on healing myself so that I could create a secure attachment with my kids. I didn’t want to create trauma for them. 

As I healed my own insecure attachment, I created what is called earned secure attachment. I had to fight for it. I had to earn it. And now, I can just give it to my kids as an inheritance. That’s what it means to be a cycle breaker, to heal from your trauma instead of passing it on. 

It’s all about awareness - noticing when you’re using a negative strategy like lashing out or checking out. When you see those behaviors, recognize that you don't feel safe. Then, you can go back and reteach yourself how to be safe. To realize that the world is not out to get you. That you’re good enough exactly as you are. 

You get to be the parent that you always wanted and needed - for yourself and for your kids. 

I see you, Mama. I know that you’re already doing the work. My wish for you today is that you feel safe, seen, and soothed - exactly as you are. 

Resources:

• Episode 193: Securely Attached with Dr. Sarah Bren
• Episode 158: Guilt & Self-Forgiveness (Repair pt. 1)
• Episode 159: Saying “I’m Sorry” (Repair pt. 2)
• Episode 102: 5 Emotional Needs of Kids
• Parenting from the Inside Out by Daniel J. Siegel M.D. and Mary Hartzell

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Connect With Darlynn: 

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• Follow me on Instagram @darlynnchildress for daily tips 
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Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlin

Childress. I'm a life and parenting coach. And on today's

episode, I want to go through the attachment basics. I want to walk you

through the four things that we do to create

a secure attachment for our kids. And I

wanted to piggyback on last week's conversation with Dr. Sarah

Brennan, because we talked about attachment and

I really loved our conversation. We talked about repair, we talked about how

attachment is hardwired in us,

and that really secure attachment is sort of

inevitable unless we do actively do things to mess it up.

But I still felt like maybe you

might have listened to that episode and kind of been like, okay, but

how do I make sure that I create secure attachment with

my kids? What do I need to do? So I wanted

to walk you through the different, you know, the

three things essentially that kids need in order to feel

secure and security is the fourth like result.

A lot of the things that I know about attachment come from Dr.

Dan Siegel's work. One of the books that I read early

on in my parenting journey that made a huge impact on me,

particularly in this topic around attachment

is called Parenting from the Inside Out. And it is a book

that Dr. Siegel wrote with Dr. With Mary

Hartzell. And they talk in the book

a lot about John Bowlby's work, which is

a lot about where all the things that you learn about attachment all

centered around Mary Main and John Bowlby and their research

around attachment in parent child

caregiving environments. So I wanted to kind of

simplify all of that and give you sort of the

four S's, which we did talk about in last week's episode. But I

wanted to give more air time to kind of break them

down. And so when you want to have a

child who has a secure attachment with their parent,

and the reason why we want to do this is because when

you have a secure attachment to your parent,

that means that you feel pretty safe in the world.

You're not living in a hyper vigilant, heightened

cortisol impulse reactivity

headspace. Your mental health is

pretty good, right? So the more securely attached a kid is,

typically it predicts that they'll have a strong self esteem,

they'll have self reliance, they'll be independent, they'll feel less

anxious and less depressed. So obviously we all want

our kids to create this secure attachment.

And some of us just feel a little bit like maybe we weren't

parented this way. Maybe we did not get our

emotional and physical needs met. As kids. And we're

in that re parenting process. We're in that

insecurity in ourselves where we kind of have that hyper

vigilance and we're like, we don't want to transfer that to our kids. So how

do we avoid doing that? This is the

episode for you to break that down and

make sure you're kind of hitting the high marks. Now, remember,

Dr. Bren said, it's a robust system. It's not easily

broken. So I don't want you to go into this episode being

really nervous because you probably

have secure attachment with your kids. Now, I

want to share something that I've not really shared before on the

podcast. This specifically, but when I

I'm an adoptive parent, which I don't really talk about that often,

but my kids were both in Russian orphanages

and we adopted them from Russia around the

age of 11 months. So for their first 11 months

of life, 12 months of life, they did not

receive a reliable

caregiver that met their emotional and

physical needs in a predictable, reliable

fashion. They had different caregivers. Those caregivers

were pretty ambivalent towards their needs, and their

needs were not met in an attuned way. So if they were

hungry and crying, they weren't necessarily fed

at that time because the caregivers

were on a schedule or whatever. And so they might

cry because they're hungry or wet or

uncomfortable for whatever reason. And there isn't an

attuned caregiver coming to either meet that need or

soothe them if they aren't going to get that need

met. Like, for example, if you're putting your infant on a

schedule for nursing or for feeding them right,

or sleeping schedule, something like that.

I'm not suggesting that if you don't meet their need, they're going to

become insecurely attached. It's not just about meeting needs.

It's also about getting soothed when those needs can't get

met because of a boundary or a limit. So

for my kids, they came to me

in an insecure attachment. They did not

have had an experience of being securely attached,

so we had to work at repairing their attachment.

So I feel like I can really offer to you a lot of

hope that attachment is

hardwired in our kids. They want to

connect with us and they want to feel safe and

secure with their caregiver. And for the most part,

most parents, unless there's really mental illness

or some kind of, you know, tragic thing that happens, most

of us do create secure attachment in infancy

because we're hardwired also to, you

know, protect our kids, to take care of them and to make sure

that they get fed and get changed and are the right temperature and all of

those things, and sleep well and all those things. So for the most

part, you're doing it right. That's what I want to say. And if you

have, for whatever reason, not been doing these

things or you feel like you could improve

your attachment with your children, you want to make it stronger or

change the quality of it, then going back and doing these three

things will help you create a secure attachment. So

let's get into what those are. Are. So it's

kind of the four S's. A lot of people will talk about the four

S's in attachment, and those are

feeling safe, seen,

soothed, creates secure. So when

your child feels safe, when they feel seen, when they

feel soothed, that results in security.

So that is really what we're talking about when we talk about a secure

attachment is we're talking about a person who has an

overall feeling that their caregiver

is safe for them will see

when they have issues or needs or problems, and that

caregiver will soothe them so their caregiver is

present, available, and meets their needs.

Meeting your needs does not mean meeting your

whims. Like I said, sometimes your

little kid doesn't really understand their needs. Like, they need

to sleep, right? But they might think they need to play.

And so we have to meet their actual need and

soothe them when they are feeling

overwhelmed or frustrated or whatever, even with our own

boundary. So let me break the S's down. So what

does safety mean? It means that your child

is physically and emotionally secure

in their environment. They feel protected from harm,

and they don't experience fear or threat from

you. So we need to recognize

that our job is to be the safe person for

our children and not the thing that scares them.

Right? We are committed to not being

the source of fear. Now, this is

really the crux of

connected parenting and parenting through connection

that you've been learning on this podcast and all the other parent educators that

you follow is that we're not using fear and

threat to manipulate our children in order to get them to behave.

We're not manipulating

their sense of safety, emotional connectedness with us,

or physical safety. We're not manipulating them

by triggering fear in order to get compliance.

So if you think about spanking a kid to get them to do what

you want them to do, you are the source of fear,

you are the threat, and then you are

using spanking to Hurt your children and

to manipulate them to listen to you. So

unfortunately, what that does is it activates the nervous system and makes

the child feel pretty confused, right, because you're supposed to

be the source of safety, but yet you're the source of fear.

That can create an insecurity within the child or at

least some confusion like how can I

trust this caregiver if this caregiver also flicks

my leg when I'm crying?

So for safety, the first thing we want to do is commit to

just not hurting our children, helping

our kids feel safe in our home, creating that safety and

that well being. Now, obviously there are going to be times when we

are a source of fear, when we do rage at our kids, when we get

angry, when we get upset. Maybe we are physical.

That is why repair is so important, because of

course it's nice. But it also helps establish

secure attachment. So the child's not thinking, oh my God,

I'm so. It's so dangerous around here. My

parent is unpredictable and unreliable. We want them

to know, no, no, no, no. What happened there,

that was on my watch. That was my fault. I did not

control myself, I did not take good care of myself and I ended up

hurting you. And that was not okay. You did not deserve

that. That's not okay. And I'm going to keep working on it.

So we talked a lot about repair in last week's episode and I have quite

a few episodes on repair that you can go back and listen to.

So repair is great because it helps emotional

connectedness, but really it's important because it makes our children

feel okay. The second S is

seen to be seen is to have a caregiver

who, who perceives and understands a

child's emotional experience, that you see

your child as an individual, right? You become

curious about them, you think of them as a fully whole

individual from birth that is revealing

themselves to you. What they want, who they are, what they need.

All of us, we have the need for safety, for security.

We want to feel safe, we don't want to feel attacked. And we also have

the need for authenticity. So I've talked about this before on

like the basic needs of kids, right? They need to be attached to

us, feeling safe, but they also need to be able to express themselves

and sometimes in attachment. What we do is we kind

of make our attachment or our connection to

our kids conditional because based on how they behave

or how we perceive them. So we don't

really sometimes want them to be themselves. We want them to be mini

uses or just like these other kids or whatever it is.

And when we are able to be curious about who our

actual child is and observing

them and taking delight in them and looking at who

they are and how they're revealing themselves to us.

That is a very important part about attachment

is that our children feel seen.

So this is a lit a lot when you work with me or you study

from me, we talk a lot about connection, right?

And really being able to understand who

our children are and being really curious about

who they are. So this is

a. It's like you have your kid who needs to feel safe,

right? That their physical and emotional, their physical needs are going to get met, their

diapers are going to get changed, their bellies are going to get filled and then

they also have this other kind of emotional need

that you will see them for who they are and love and

accept them. So it's like I'm safe as

I am, I'm safe in who I am. I am seen as.

And I'm still okay. So getting to know

your kids, creating space for those conversations,

you know, being interested in them, learning about what they're

interested in. And when they offer ideas to you not to

immediately say, don't say that, don't think that that's not okay. What are you talking

about? That's not how we act in this family. Instead of snap judgments

like that, getting a little bit curious like huh, tell me more. Why do you

think that's true? What's that about for you? So these

seeing strategies help our children develop

their social ability,

their self esteem, their belief about themselves.

When we talk about wanting to have a kid who grows up

and has a positive self esteem and is self reliant,

they need to believe that they're good, right? That they are

interesting, that they have something to offer the world.

We do that by giving them that ability

to see them, that we see who they are. The

third S is soothed. So

your children are going to have times when they

are distressed, right? When they have complex

feelings, complex situations. And what a child is

looking for is comfort and support. They

want to know that you can help them with their

big feelings. That you can help them understand the

world and soothe them when things are hard.

Now soothing is not solving. I don't need

to solve every problem for my kid and pave the way for

them to not have discomfort. When you

create a non discomfort

would be a too comfortable life for your children. They don't get the

opportunity to be resilient, to actually overcome

obstacles. But what our kids look for is

when they are experiencing obstacles, they kind of need someone who can

be present with them, who can offer some empathy,

who can problem solve with them if they're interested in that.

By coming alongside and working with your

child to develop some strategies to calm themselves if

they're dysregulated, to problem solve a friendship

to work through, you know, overwhelm. When they're doing their homework and they're

starting to get mad and perfectionism takes over and they're slamming their paper

and ripping up their paper and all of that, when

we come to our kid and we say, listen, you're safe right

now, I'm not angry with you, you're not in trouble.

I'm looking at you struggling with this homework and I wonder if

you feel really overwhelmed by it. That makes

sense. So how about we break it into a couple little,

you know, a couple of questions

at a time or how about we work on it for five more minutes and

then we take a break? So you're soothing them,

you're seeing their strategies, their struggle, you're offering them

some support and you're not getting angry and trying

to shame them into being a better student.

That is kind of continuously reinforcing that security

within themselves. If you think about

the strategies that I'm teaching you with Connect limit set, correct, that's

what these all are supposed to do, is to create that

secure attachment, to have boundaries that your kids

butt up against, to have consequences that are

uncomfortable and all along the way way.

They are receiving your compassion, they are receiving

your ability to see them, your curiosity.

You're narrating their struggles, you're narrating what's happening for them.

You're helping them identify their feelings, you're helping them problem

solve those emotions. You are

securely attached to them no matter

how they act, no matter how they show up in the

world, no matter what they say or do.

The attachment to you, the unconditional love and

acceptance that you have for them is never

at risk. It cannot be broken.

So when you have that approach, your kids are also going to have that

approach for themselves. When you are communicating, hey,

you're safe here, I see you and I'm here to

help. Your child will then have that

secure base. And you want to do this

obviously when they're infant, you do this right?

And you create that secure attachment pretty easily because

those needs, you kind of know how to meet those. And you

know they're a baby, right? So you have like a lot of grace for a

baby, but. But then like 3, 4 5, 6 year olds, you're

like, enough. Get over it. Come on, kid. I already told

you. We can start to erode

that connection because of our own irritation.

So doubling down on these values of I will

do no harm, I'm going to create safety in this family, emotionally and

physically safe. I'm going to see my kids as

individuals going through an emotional experience

and I'm going to come alongside. Then I'm a soothe and support

and help them. All of that creates that

secure base, that secure

attachment that you so are longing for. Now, if

it becomes where you've been not being

able to be safe with your kids, either emotionally or

physically, maybe you aren't hurting them, but you sometimes

insult them, you blame them, you're critical. I'm not

judging, I've heard it all. You are also normal if you

show up that way sometimes. Do not hurt yourself

by being mean to yourself. Just own you

were dysregulated, you were overwhelmed, you were struggling in that moment.

Go back and create repair. You always have the

chance in every parenting relationship to, to repair and

to start over and to go back and re

establish that safe relationship. Because

what is amazing is that

when you have this modeled for you, when you feel safe,

no matter what, when you feel seen no matter

what, and you feel soothed. I like the word support.

When you feel supported, no matter what,

you will be emotionally healthy.

Like you create inside of you that feeling of,

I'm okay, it's okay, we're gonna be okay.

That feeling of being okay, that's what security is.

It's funny, a couple years ago, every year I make up a theme

for my year. And a couple years ago my theme

was internalized security. And it

really was me learning to re parent myself.

Because along the way in my life, I

wasn't always safe, I wasn't always seen,

and I wasn't always soothed. And so I had

an insecure attachment to

the world, really. I began to have, like

Dr. Bren said, like a blueprint. I had this perspective on the

world that wasn't. The world wasn't

safe, that people were out to get me, that I was being judged, that I

was always in danger of being rejected or hurt

or, you know, emotionally

abandoned or physically hurt or in pain in some way.

And so my insecure attachments kind of

bled into my adult life. And over

the course of the last 15 years, longer,

like ever since I was like 20, I have been working

on healing all of my childhood wounds.

And it has been very difficult to be honest,

but having My children and seeing that

sometimes I was showing up unsafe for them,

I was not validating their feelings and I was not soothing them,

right? So I wasn't being safe, I wasn't showing, I wasn't

letting them be seen and I wasn't soothing and that

I really was scared that I was going to create trauma for them.

And so I had to double down on healing myself.

And in many ways what that has looked like

is doing this work that we're talking about today, these

four S's or these three S's to create the final S,

which is security. I, I've had to go through and

teach myself that I am safe, that

the world is not out to get me, that

I've had to become that safe base.

When I talked about internal family systems and that concept of

the self, that that self energy

within me is the thing that I go to rely on now.

That self energy that's within you is what your children

go to and rely on as they get older.

You can model that internalized security

for your kids and they can leave launch

into the world feeling safe and seen and knowing how to take care of

themselves, knowing how to soothe themselves without drugs and alcohol

and sex and shopping and gambling addictions and scrolling on

Instagram and all the stupid stuff that we all do to soothe

ourselves. It's like I wanna

raise kids and I did raise kids who do know that they're

safe and do know what it means to be seen and

do know how to soothe themselves in healthy ways.

Do they always choose those ways? No, but they have a

toolkit because of all the work I do. So it's

kinda like as I've re parented myself and

healed my own insecure attachment,

I have created what is called in psychology,

earned secure attachment. Like I've had

to fight for it, I have earned it. I have

it now and now I can just give that to my children

as an inheritance. That's what it means to be a cycle

breaker or heal from trauma and not pass that trauma on

is you're in real time healing yourself and

working through your own insecure attachments and

recognizing it's all about awareness. Like recognizing when you

are in a negative strategy where you're emotionally

checking out or you're lashing out, or you're defensive

or you're blaming or you're taking on too much or your

perfectionism's getting out of control. When you see those

behaviors, recognize you don't feel

safe and you can go back and

reteach yourself how to be Safe. You can be

safe in the school environment, that wherever your kids are, you can be

safe in your marriage. You can be safe in your job, that

maybe, just maybe, the world is not out to get you.

Just maybe you're good enough exactly as you are.

Just maybe you can get soothed

by the people who love you and you can love yourself.

So this episode is all about secure attachment

and the attachment basics so that your kids can get that

secure attachment. But ultimately, Mama, it is

also for you that you get to find

that secure internalized security, that secure

attachment within yourself. You get to be

the parent that you always wanted or wished for or needed.

You get to be that for yourself now. And I know you're doing the

work. I see you. I. If I work with you, I

see you mamas on the calls that we do and on the sessions,

and I know you're working on it. And for those of you who just listened

to this podcast, I know by listening to this, you're doing it.

And you can maybe relax a little bit and be like, maybe I've

done a lot. And I can kind of relax just a little bit

and enjoy the secure attachment that I have with my kids.

So that's my wish for you this week. That's what I'm thinking about

as you reparent yourself and you parent your kids, that

you feel so safe,

seen and soothed exactly as

you are today. All right, Mama, I

will talk to you next time.