Attachment

A great deal of literature and research exists on attachment. This is primarily a western concept but given my colonial background, that’s what I’ll focus on today. Attachment theory (Bowlby) says that a child needs a bond with a primary carer (usually a mother), to develop and make sense of the world. They learn about expressing needs and wants, love and how they can impact on their environment through this relationship. There’s the wars around this – controlled crying Vs co-sleeping Vs carrying baby with you all the time Vs routine Vs demand feeding. The list goes on.

At the core, it’s about relationship. This looks very different for each parent as the list above tells us. In lots of ways, it doesn’t actually matter how you do it. The questions we want to say yes to are:

Does my child feel love and receive love when we look at each other?

Does my baby know it’s basics needs for food, shelter, care and love are met?

Does my baby see joy in my face the majority of the time when I look at them?

The yes to these questions is the path of secure attachment. There’s so much loss to work through when we consider attachment. Often, there’s experiences of care, or lack of, from our own families to work through, consider, ignore. As humans, we tend to not do the work to understand our own attachment patterns, but rather move into parenthood with a view that we’ll do it mostly the same. Or mostly differently. Our own experiences often inform what we will and won’t do from gut instinct rather than insight.

By taking some time to understand our own attachment history, we can take a small short-cut through the rugged forest of understanding our attachment to our own children.

3 ways to begin this work – top tips:

1. Start a journal and write about what you remember from childhood – what were the rules about parenting, what were the gold nuggets you cherish and the dead wood you want to send down the river?
2. Therapy – undertake your own therapy to further understand your attachment history and experience.
3. Pay attention to co-regulation with you baby/child – the moments when it feels easy, joyful or painless. Hold onto these moments and honour their existence.