How Do You Promote Healthy Attachment?

Awww….look…tiny fingers…tiny toes…now what?

Perhaps you have heard the term gentle parenting or secure attachment parenting but why would you want to do this?

The fact that you are even looking at this page already tells me that you are an amazing parent who is looking for better ways to help your little grow into a healthy and happy child. Looking around at the adults that have grown from the children of yesterday and our difficulty with emotional regulation and you know that something needed to change. This is especially true for me. I have a REALLY hard time with emotional regulation and I have seen it destroy good healthy relationships around me. This has prompted good conversations with my husband about how we can better parent our children. There is so much out there and we went through different types of parenting before we found what works for our family that will better prepare our children to have deep and meaningful relationships not only with us as parents but also with a spouse, friends and in the work place. Our goal is to give them the confidence and ability to navigate life with as little mental health problems as we can from our side. Mental health is an epidemic in this country. I absolutely believe that if we all started our children from a place of unconditional love, acceptance and security, our world would look different. We hope we are raising that difference here.

So why Gentle Parenting?

Gentle parenting is a peaceful and very positive approach to parenting that looks very different from how we were parented. This parenting relies on relationship and respect to teach about life and discipline rather than fear and punishment. When we work together with our child to understand behaviour and correcting, it brings respect and so much more peace. We try to approach our parenting situations with patience and empathy. Gentle parenting’s goal is to create a peaceful and healthy relationship with children that helps them grow into emotionally healthy adults. We are not “permissive parents” in the sense that we are passive and allow our children to do or say anything but rather we help to create healthy boundaries; a helpful skill to learn for life.

So what do we do?

There are four parts to gentle parenting. Using these four parts will help to correct children while maintaining and growing a close loving relationship with them.

Empathy – Empathy is very important with us. We are constantly assessing our children’s feelings and needs. I have bad days, you have bad days, our littles also have bad days. It happens! Think about the background to whats going on when they are having that tantrum. Often they are tired or hungry. By addressing the underlying issue and getting to the root cause of the tantrum, we can avoid it in the future. Take a deep breathe and try to understand where the child is coming from with this behaviour, are they anxious? scared? sad? once we can address the underlaying feeling then we can look at action that this feeling is being channeled through such as yelling, shouting, throwing toys etc.

Respect- One of my favourite quotes of all time regarding children is by John Holt “ If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult whose good opinion and affection you value” One of the common misconceptions that I have noticed when it comes to children is that children just become people when they grow up but we forget that children are people now. They have the same feelings that we do as adults of wanting to be protected, loved and valued. When we treat our children with respect, we not only encourage them to respect us back but also teach them what it looks like to be respected so that when disrespect happens in life they know deeply that its not right.

Understanding- I used to be a nurse and part of my classes towards becoming a nurse was lifespan development. So very very fascinating! Did you know that asking a 2 year old why they coloured on the wall will mean almost nothing to them because of the stage of development that they are in? Their brains are quite simply not developed enough to process why they might not allow their hand to draw. They just do whatever their brains tell them to. As they grow, reason begins to develop in their brains. Yelling at a child who doesn’t understand what it is that they have just done is only going to put a gap in your relationship. We have also noticed that understanding also includes an understanding of our own selves and where this aggressive yelling behaviour comes from. Our children follow our example far more than our words. If we respond to their chaos with calm, gentle, and loving expressions, they will also eventually learn to express themselves in this manner. So much easier said than done!!

Boundaries- As I said before, just because we choose gentle parenting does not mean that we just allow our children to run wild and be disrespectful. We set family rules to keep everyone in peaceful coexistence. We doesn’t have an exhaustive list but try to phrase our rules in such a way that inclusive of life situations. These boundaries focus on teaching children a better way of doing something or responding than an list of rules and regulations

Our Experience:

I’m not here to tell you exactly what you should and should not do with your own family or children but I am here to tell you what our experience has taught us. Gentle parenting is a lot of hard work! Responding with a lengthy conversation instead of simply yelling a child to stop crying takes both time and patience. Its never an overnight situation.
The rewards though? The other day I was feeling like I was getting nowhere with this but then something magical happened. Asher started to explode over having a toy taken from him by the baby when his older brother put his hand on Asher’s shoulder and said “its very frustrating when Berkley takes our toys but we have to remember that she is just a baby and doesn’t know what she is doing. Want to take a deep breathe together?” I could barely believe my ears…they listen. They watch. They feel. And now, they empathize, respect and regulate.