When Saying Goodbye Is Hard

John Bowlby was a British psychologist and psychiatrist, and he founded attachment theory.

This emphasized the importance of our early relational experiences.

The need for attachment is a deeply rooted survival instinct.

So our children's early attachment experiences, how they form their attachment with their primary caregivers, really gives them a kind of a working model for how they perceive themselves, how they perceive others, and their relationships throughout life.

Now we know these early attachment experiences can be disrupted for many reasons and often for reasons outside of our control.

When you stop and think about how important those early attachment experiences are for your child, then it becomes even, to me, sort of more significant to really pay attention to this and to spend some time thinking and exploring and wondering about how your child's early attachment relationships were formed and how that might be influencing some of the day-to-day parenting challenges you might be having.

Now let's talk a little bit about how attachment develops.

In the first six weeks of life our infants they cry and they gaze at us and those are developmental nature's way of getting them to attract their caregiver's attention and connection.

They need that because they cry, because they're hungry, because they need comfort, because they need to be changed.

And there's also those wonderful moments of back and forth gazing, often during feeding or times of getting changed or falling off to a sleep.

And that's really how we begin to fall in love.

From about six weeks to six months, they become a little bit more alert and engaged in the world, less sleepy.

They begin to recognize and show preference for their primary caregivers.

They connect through their senses and physical proximity in those early weeks and months of life.

Around the ages from about six months to two years, infants and toddlers show a clear preference for their primary caregiver and separation anxiety is common.

If I think about the term anxiety, I like to reframe it because to me, anxiety, I guess in this modern world is very much a term we associate with mental health, with pathology, that there's something wrong, that it's not typical, that it's not okay.

But Our children being upset and crying when we leave, there's nothing wrong with that.

We don't need to pathologize that.

We don't need to label it as anxiety or something that's bad.

A term that I really like to use is a term coined by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, and he talks about it as alarm and separation alarm.

And I find alarm to be a much more helpful term than anxiety.

Why do I find it more helpful? Well, alarm just gives me a cue that there's something going on that I need to pay attention to.

Around two years of age, our children start to become more independent and they develop more capacity to hold on when apart.

There's that real dance between your two-year-old going, I want to do it by myself but then if we lead them to do too much by themselves they still they come back really quickly and want that support from us.

I've talked in earlier episodes about circle of security parenting and that's that framework where we see our children going out to explore and then coming back to us as their safe haven.