56. Modeling Good Attachment

Knowing that our kids are influenced by our behavior and the examples we set can be a lot of pressure. Parents can feel like they have to be perfect all the time, especially with emotional issues like attachment and apologies, in case they negatively affect their child’s development. In today’s episode, I talk about how perfection isn’t the goal and offer some advice on how to stop worrying and learn to maintain your connection with your kids. The Finer Details of This Episode: A mother wrote to me about attachment styles, wondering if her child could have a different style to hers and her husband’s. Attachment styles are a concept used in psychology to describe how you relate to the people in your life, and relationships between people with different styles can go really wonky (I had a situation like this with a friend that I talked about in some podcast eps back in 2020). There are lots of different attachment styles, including: secure—you can trust fairly easily, are attuned to emotions, can communicate upsets directly, and lead with cooperative and flexible behavior; anxious—you struggle to communicate needs directly and act out when triggered; avoidant-dismissive—you downplay the importance of relationships and can become more vulnerable when triggered; and avoidant-fearful—you have low self-esteem and high anxiety and strongly fear rejection. We may all exhibit symptoms of all these styles, and most people need to work to get to a secure attachment style. What may go wrong in couples is when one person has done that work, and the other hasn’t, which means they still present with symptoms of the other styles. With kids, parents may overcompensate for their attachment issues in hopes of creating a child who feels secure in their attachments, often especially in parents who did their own work to get to a secure attachment style and want to make sure their kid has that from the start. The important thing when trying to cultivate a secure attachment for your toddler is to find a balance of freedom and support. This becomes tricky because we have a sincere desire to let our kids know that we’re there for them, but it can manifest as hovering and rescuing, creating dependence and entitlement instead of secure attachment. The biggest thing you can do to ensure that your child grows up with a secure attachment style is to do your work. If you don’t, you’ll either model one of the other styles or overcompensate, and then you’ll be trying to layer a secure attachment into an existing paradigm, which is just going to fuck up the kid. Even in secure relationships, fights will happen—connection ruptures happen all the time, so the idea isn’t to have a steady connection with your child that is never ruptured. Instead, what has to be second nature is how you repair the connection—which is easy because kids, in general, are so forgiving. Using the terms “connected” and “disconnected” is really valuable for families and all relationships. It’s a healthy way to express your needs and repair connection ruptures instead of slipping into passive-aggressiveness. I hear from a lot of clients whose kids just endlessly want to play with their parents because they’re not getting enough connection. It’s really important to hit those connection points with your kids when they know they’ve got your full attention at some point during the day (especially with COVID when we’re not getting a lot of physical contact with other people). Links: Jamie’s Homepage - www.jamieglowacki.com Oh Crap! Potty Training – https://www.amazon.com/Crap-Potty-Training-Everything-Parenting-ebook/dp/B00V3L8YSU Oh Crap! I Have A Toddler - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Oh-Crap!-I-Have-a-Toddler/Jamie-Glowacki/Oh-Crap-Parenting/9781982109738 Jamie’s Patreon Page: www.patreon.com/join/jamieglowacki? Jamie’s Instagram Page: @jamie.glowacki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices