Parenting Right From the Start. Vanessa Lapointe

this question may bring you to your knees. A child instinctually knows that without connection they are doomed, so most children will fall into line to secure the connection they desperately need to grow as nature intended.

      The understanding of the importance of connection between children and their primary caregivers comes to us primarily via British psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s work. When Bowlby was doing research in a hospital during the 1940s, he noticed that young children dropped off at the hospital to receive care appeared to become more ill rather than improving in health. He also noticed that when their parents came for visiting hours the children would appear much improved. Experimenting with these discoveries, Bowlby established that parental presence led to faster improvements in health and far less distress for the child. Not only did this revolutionize hospital practices in terms of parental rooming-in and increased visitation, but it was also seminal in terms of how we understand the inner workings of the parent-child relationship. Bowlby’s observations resulted in a lifelong course of research for him and his then student, Mary Ainsworth.

      In the late 1960s, Ainsworth designed the paradigm called the “strange situation,” used to study attachment theory in the parent-child relationship. Ainsworth placed young children in a series of variously stressful and structured physical separations and reunions with their parents to observe the children’s reactions. Through Bowlby and Ainsworth’s work it became clear that the nature of the parent-child relationship is significant for positive developmental outcomes. In the 1970s, it was developmental psychologist Dr. Edward Tronick who studied the parent-child relationship using emotional separations and reunions. To do this, Tronick devised the still-face paradigm. Tronick asked parents in a controlled situation to interact with their babies face to face as they normally would at home. The parent was then instructed to turn away, wipe her face of all emotion, and then turn back to her baby with a completely “still” face. The still face is devoid of all emotion and connection and appears robotic.

      This dynamic was played out with children of different ages, and Tronick observed that, regardless of age, the children noticed immediately the presence of the still face and would become unsettled by it, even very young babies. After keeping the still face for two minutes, the parent was instructed to re-engage with the child in a way that was typical to their relationship. A child used to a responsive caregiver (that is, one who experienced secure attachment) was more likely to settle relatively quickly. The child who was used to a non-responsive caregiver might continue to be unsettled for a long period of time or might not even notice the parent’s re-engagement.

      You can see how this paradigm works in one disturbing video of a still-faced parent interacting with a three-month-old baby. As the parent continues with the still face, the child becomes increasingly dysregulated and upset. After only two minutes of emotional separation from his parent, the baby turns his head to the side and vomits from distress. What would it be like, then, for a child who experiences this type of emotional separation in an enduring way, as part of the relationship in which they are raised? What parents can learn from these studies is that while simple physical proximity is essential to the provision of care for young children, emotional closeness is also vital if the child is to grow and develop as nature intended.

      Secure attachment is the natural state of the parent-child relationship, and what we are wired up to engage in without instruction. But our modern lives feature numerous distractions, some of which can have us unintentionally exposing our babies to a robotic still face. Think of all the moments of opportunity for connection that existed before the invasion of screens and phones. Dr. Kristy Goodwin addresses this in her book Raising Your Child in a Digital World, in which she notes that feeding time is incredibly important for the cognitive and visual opportunities it grants babies around facial mapping—an important part of social development. “Brexting,” or feeding while texting, interrupts that process. Without a phone and social media and text messages to pull you away, you fall naturally into eye-gazing and gentle murmurs while feeding your baby. Public health campaigns have recently been developed to let parents know that being emotionally attentive to your feeding baby is key to their healthy development.² There is no app for your lap!

      This provision of physical and emotional contact and closeness for our children is particularly important in the formative early years of their lives. Psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld has woven together a large amount of research in the field of child development to map out exactly how the attachment relationship plays out in these early years.³ He tells us that a baby’s first year is characterized by attachment through the senses; that is, a baby makes sense of the connection that is forming primarily through being with the parent. The child needs to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear you to know that you are his best bet, that you’ve got him, and that you can be counted on.

      Clearly, the attachment relationship is a foundational piece of growing up our children in the best possible way. This marks a huge shift from the days of behaviourism, the parenting strategies which are, at heart, all about using the deprivation of connection to control a child’s behaviour. Attachment theory approaches the growing up of children as developmentally rooted in the creation and nourishment of connection. It also allows parents and other adults to see that each baby and child is exactly perfect in their imperfection. Challenging behaviour and the chaos of childhood are indications that everything is unfolding in exactly the right way. Don’t fret about the mess or the noise your baby is making—your biggest focus must be on you and your ability to protect that parent-child connection.

      Children must be able to trust the “dance” of reciprocity in the relationship with their parents. Psychologists refer to this dance of trust as “serve and return.” A child puts out a bid (usually a cry or some form of behaviour), and the parent responds over and over again. If a baby is left to cry, they will eventually fall asleep because they are exhausted from the stress. Though the baby may reflect the behaviours the parents desire, the internal experience is one of continual angst that ultimately thwarts development. Alternatively, if a parent responds consistently, the baby learns to trust in the certainty of that parent’s response. And, if handled as needed, also learns to trust in the goodness of the parent’s response.

      First, the child truly gets the message that they matter. When the dance of trust and reciprocity between parent and child is consistent, the child develops the belief that they are worthy of love and that they can simply lean into a parent’s enduring embrace—physically and emotionally—to receive that love. Over the years, this consistent provision of love from the parent morphs into a consistent provision of self-love from within the child. And the greatest gift a parent can give a child is to help them grow into an adult full of self-love.

      Second, as well as learning they can trust their parents to respond repeatedly in a caring way, the child begins to develop the capacity for self-regulation. This is a simple and simultaneously complex manifestation of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s openness to external influence—that is, the experiences a baby has in the child-raising environment will shape how their brain is growing. A baby’s brain gets fired up out of a need for food, for a diaper change, for comfort, for anything. When a parent responds and settles the baby, they are in turn settling the baby’s brain. As this happens again and again, a baby’s brain learns to hang onto the neural pathways that are repeatedly reinforced and fired up through their parents’ ongoing caregiving. Brain fires up. Brain gets settled. Over and over. Those pathways are precisely the ones that will allow a child to become capable of self-regulation, self-soothing, and self-control—eventually. It will take years of the connection dance playing out with consistency for this to unfold. And what predicts how well a child learns to regulate? That depends on how well the parent uses their “own arousal level to counterbalance and/or complement that of the child.”⁴

      Children will be and do exactly as they are meant to be and do for their own growth trajectory. Our role as parents is to promote our child’s development rather than create circumstances or conditions that get in the way of it. When children don’t get the connection they need they cannot be released fully to their developmental pathway. The child who must hang on, claw or grasp at, seek frenetically, or pursue connect with panic is the child who struggles. This is the child who redirects all of their developmental energy to securing the connection rather than striding forward with zest and confidence.