Has learning about attachment changed or impacted YOUR parenting? Does it help people you work with? Do you know of any programs that teach about attachment? Please share any info., stories or links Learning about attachment has helped ALL of my relationships.
Learning about attachment, mostly from adoption parenting books and Daniel Siegel's Parenting from the Inside Out, help me understand why I've always got one eye on the door, how I think everyone has at least a double life (if not more) and why I get anxious when things are going well. I understand why I have some of my less than stellar relationship patterns with others and even my own self.
Plus, it's changed my parenting. Attachment theory helps me see what I am aiming for in terms of what I should be providing for my daughter. It helps me know what to celebrate when I see it in her.
For eample, had I not read about attachment, I would have thought her reaching out to me or up for me, even as a toddler, was not safe or wise. I would have worried (and did at times) that it would make her vulnerable. Had she been indifferent to me as a toddler had I not read about attachment I would have thought it meant she was strong and lucky not to need me. Indeed, I would have seen displays of needing and wanting me as clingy, emotionally weak or unstable and worried that she'd get crushed like a bug by life.
Thanks to attachment theory I know that the ones who trust other humans, expect to be cared about and responded to are actually strong. They are the ones who can be real, risk vulnerability and achieve intimacy. I'm working on this for myself, as an adult. But I'm glad I learned to update, change and challenge my own views because it's made a huge difference in my parenting even though much of attachment parenting still feels counter intuitive or "entitled" at times.
However, now, when my kids expects me to meet her needs, expresses feelings and wants, I know it's actually a sign of health. It does not mean she's entitled. It means she's feeling secure. It's hard to admit but I am quite sure I would have been a "harsh for your own good" kind of parent if I wasn't an adoptive parent in my mid thirties who had a decade of healing. I'm still learning how to be a less harsh person with myself and other adults even with all the healing, recoery and work I've done.
It's so uplifting to know that attachment can be "earned" or as I think of it - learned. And that this work we do might be slow when it comes to seeing change in our personal lives. But, in our parenting, it has transformative impact for our kids and our future family history. O.k., to the article....
By the end of our first year, we have stamped on our baby brains a pretty indelible template of how we think relationships work, based on how our parents or other primary caregivers treat us. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense, because we need to figure out early on how to survive in our immediate environment.
“If you’re securely attached, that’s great, because you have the expectation that if you are distressed you will be able to turn to someone for help and feel you can be there for others,” said Miriam Steele, the co-director of the Center for Attachment Research at the New School for Social Research in New York.
It’s not so great if you are one of the 40 percent to 50 percent of babies who, a meta-analysis of research indicates, are insecurely attached because their early experiences were suboptimal (their caregivers were distracted, overbearing, dismissive, unreliable, absent or perhaps threatening). “Then you have to earn your security,” Dr. Steele said, by later forming secure attachments that help you override your flawed internal working model.
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