What Do Children Need?

Many thanks to The Santa Fe New Mexican for allowing us to share our column here!

One of the challenges in being a parent is desiring to give our children what they need, our children wanting us to give them what they need, and us not knowing what that is!  There is a lot floating around about parenting out there in our culture, and how do we discern what is the most valuable, true, and loving approach?  

Knowing about secure attachment can be a clarifying guide.  Secure attachment allows for your children to experience trust, to have a flexible nervous system, to feel safe, to be open and transparent with those around them, and to regulate their emotions.  Here are a few ways to create a relationship with your children and a vibe in your home that promote secure attachment.  

Be open, predictable, and consistent in your responses.  Consistency doesn't mean that you say, “Yes” to every request that they make.  Living from your values and having routines and rituals provide consistency.  Being willing to share what is happening with you and within you provides openness.  Being “knowable” and emotionally regulated provide predictability.  

Set clear boundaries and honor and respect their boundaries.  Setting boundaries can be a growth area for many of us.  Learning to set them clearly is a gift from your children and for your children.  Respecting their boundaries can mean not forcing them to hug people when they don’t want to or eat foods they dislike.  

Create safety for them to express themselves and their feelings.  Be open to listening without fixing.  Cherish the uniqueness of each of your children and their ways of self-expression.  Make your home an “all feelings welcome” space, not necessarily an “all behaviors welcome” zone!  

Model working through conflict and using clear communication.  All that your children know about resolving difficulties, they learn from watching you.  What did you learn from watching your parents?  If working through conflict peacefully with clear communication is something you would like to learn more about, consider coaching, reading books, attending workshops, or finding a good therapist.  Few people leave childhood knowing how to do this! 

Be emotionally resilient.  Your growth into greater resilience is one of the most valuable opportunities being a parent offers you. 

Stay connected with them during conflict.  Isolating, punishing, and shaming result in disconnection.  There are powerful and loving ways to guide your children that maintain connection.  Power struggling is a very common conflict that results in disconnect. 

Please know that you need not follow these guidelines 100% of the time for your child to experience secure attachment.  You can exhale.  We all blow it.  We all blow up.  We all get blown apart.  What your children need is for you to be imperfectly human, not perfectly superhuman.   

If you would like to learn more about staying connected during conflict and resolving it peacefully, consider attending Power Struggles: Stepping into Your Own Authority, our live virtual workshop happening on October 1, 2022. Details and registration are online here. If you are reading this after October 1, 2022, please check out our online workshop on power struggles and many other topics here.