Just as pain tells us that we are in danger of damaging our bodies:
1 Sadness tells us that we have lost something important
2 Worry tells us that danger is near
3 Anger tells us that someone has disappointed us
4 And all three are associated with the experience of insecurity.
ATTACHMENT BEHAVIOURS
So far I have tried to explain how our children feel when they are insecure. I want to turn now to what they do when they believe they are ‘not on our minds’.
As we saw earlier, in the first months of infancy your baby’s response to discomfort was to cry – one of the few ways she had to communicate. This resulted in you responding and your child feeling soothed. A cry can also be a complaint about not being soothed and being allowed to become upset in the first place – ‘How could you let this happen to me?’ And finally a cry can be demanding, in that your child only considers their own distress, and wants it solved immediately without any thought to others’ needs.
It is very hard to ignore a crying baby. It is a piercing sound that elicits various mixed emotions. While you can decide not to do anything in response to a cry, you cannot stop the feelings you have when you hear one. Sometimes we may feel angry with ourselves for not being able to soothe our child. At other times we may feel angry with our child for demanding so much from us: ‘What more do you want? Leave me alone!’ The recent popularity of the tongue-in-cheek book for adults, Go the F**k to Sleep about a child who won’t fall asleep is a case in point. It shows how we can become angry when our best efforts to help our child don’t work – angry at them and angry at ourselves. The book also highlights the value of humour when trying to deal with these difficult and intense emotions.
At about six weeks, your child develops another important attachment and communication behaviour: smiling. Its purpose is to get you to interact with her. When your child smiles at you, you respond by smiling, laughing and talking to her, picking her up or playing with her. Like crying, smiling is also an effective attachment behaviour, but it has the added bonus of getting your child’s attachment needs met without the corresponding negative emotions that crying and complaining can elicit. In fact, a child’s smile is more like a request. She is not demanding your attention, but asking for it – asking you to interact with her so that you both have a lovely time together.
Crying and smiling can be considered the two archetypal attachment behaviour styles, and your child will use a mixture of both to get her attachment needs met. Most of us would prefer ‘requesting smiles’, but ‘complaining cries’ are always used to some extent as they are so much more effective. A child who is laughing, smiling or giggling is much easier to ignore than one who is crying or screaming, and when your child is feeling particularly insecure (unthought-of and disconnected), she is likely to use whatever works best.
‘The smile’ attachment behaviours
As your child develops, she gradually discovers more subtle and sophisticated ways to feel secure. Like the smile in infancy, these positive attachment behaviours are healthy and adaptive ways to feel connected. They include touching, talking, being helpful, humour (making people laugh) and sharing experiences.
Touching
Requesting a hug, a cuddle or a kiss; holding your hand; sitting on your lap and playing with your hair are all experiences that help your child feel secure. Whether initiated by your child or yourself, these experiences promote a strong sense of safety and connection. Though not literally touching, eye contact is considered to be a particularly powerful and intimate ‘touch’ attachment behaviour between parents and children.
When a child is feeling insecure, she can overdo ‘touch’ and come across as smothering, needy or clingy. This may lead the parent to push her away to get space, which unfortunately reinforces the child’s insecurity and further increases her attempts to reattach with touch. This sets up a pattern that, instead of leading to loving connection, leads to disappointment and dread with the child feeling she never gets enough and the parent feeling the child’s needs are insatiable.
Talking
When a child talks to us, and we truly listen to her, she knows she is on our mind. Yet as with touch, children who feel insecure can overdo talking to the point that we end up only ‘half-listening’, which leaves them feeling insecure again, and so the cycle continues. (See ‘The Attachment Battery’ on page 22 for ideas on helping your child to feel more secure.)
Being helpful
We all want to be thought of. We all want to be considered. We all want our needs to be recognised. If we are sitting alone crying and no one notices or responds, we feel disconnected and alone. If we are anxious about a coming event and someone notices and responds to our distress, we feel connected and comforted. It is why we intuitively understand that remembering birthdays and other events is important, and why when you meet another’s need in an appropriate way it builds the relationship. Our actions are saying, ‘I have noticed and responded to your need; you are on my mind.’ In contrast, this need explains why being taken for granted is so toxic to relationships: ‘You and your needs are not on my mind.’
Sharing humour and play
In my experience, families who get the most from family counselling are the ones for whom humour and playfulness are important. Shared play with your children is a deeply connecting experience. As a parent, sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow, and sometimes you are so in sync with your child that you seem to play together with the one mind.
A shared joke is one of the most potent experiences of attachment we can have, and is often a time we feel most connected to others. Stand-up comedians describe their success as euphoric and their failure as ‘I’m dying out here.’ Humour is usually subtle and people can only share your joke if they are thinking of you; if their mind is elsewhere they won’t get the joke.
Of course, not all humour is positive. Sarcastic humour or putdowns, where people share a joke at the expense of another, are some of the most powerfully disconnecting experiences we can have. Telling ‘in-jokes’ can be a cruel way of defining membership of a group – determining who is in and who is out. Our adolescent children are particularly good at using in-jokes to help define group membership. If you cast your mind back to school days, you will remember times when you were ‘in’ and when you were ‘out’ of particular groups. Being the only one to not get the joke can be a painfully excluding experience. It is not hard to see that if you put your child down and shame them, whether in jest or not, you are setting up an unhelpful dynamic in which trust is replaced with anger (and with it, often the desire for revenge).
Sharing experiences
This may sound obvious, but as adults, the people you are most connected to are usually the people you have shared significant experiences with, such as studying, training, working or travelling. In the same way, the experiences we have with our children are crucial in building our connection with them. We need to share their triumphs and tragedies – watching them play sport, playing games with them, walking with them, holidaying with them – as well as the more ordinary daily tasks such as eating meals and doing chores. Each shared experience becomes an invisible thread connecting you and your child. And those memories of you can be taken with them, giving them a secure emotional connection to you even when you aren’t within their reach.
‘The cry’ attachment behaviours
If the more subtle positive attachment behaviours fail to get their attachment needs met (them being on your mind), children will eventually move on to the more negative