Childhood Attachment Styles and Parenting
When you skinned your knee as a child, you probably turned to your parents or caregivers for comfort. That simple act and their response became part of the childhood attachment model that shaped your expectations for all your future relationships. That’s kind of a big deal.
Parents love their kids and work hard to foster good relationships with their children. Maybe they really admire the way their parents raised them, and their parents’ skills provide them with a built-in roadmap. But what if they choose to bring their kids up differently than the way they were brought up? A wide array of parenting books is available, many with helpful tips. What the books sometimes miss, though, is the fact that we all bring our own unconscious patterns, rules, and customs to parenting that we learned in childhood. Let’s face it, our own childhoods have a pretty big impact on how we parent our kids.
One of the patterns worth considering is the attachment style you developed during your childhood. Research shows that unacknowledged family patterns of communication tend to repeat themselves, and the attachment style we had with our parents is the biggest indicator of the attachment style we will have with our own children.
Attachment is the deep emotional bond we have with another person, and it is crucial for long term emotional health. It is the solid base that lets children feel safe to explore the world. The attachments each of us formed in early childhood can have a large effect on our feelings of emotional security throughout our lives. So, let’s look at some different childhood attachment styles and see if they resonate.
Secure Attachment Style
The secure childhood attachment style is created when children see their parents or caretakers as a secure base from which to venture out into the world. Secure attachments are formed when a home is created where children feel safe, seen, heard, and secure and where parents are able to regulate their own emotions. In this environment, parents tune in to their children’s needs and empathize with their children’s experience.
Does this mean parents have to be perfect? Absolutely not! Nobody is perfectly attuned to their child 24/7, and we know that good parents attune to their children only about 50% of the time. When conflict occurs, as is bound to happen, being able to emotionally repair is what maintains a secure attachment. Children with secure attachments grow up emotionally healthy and believing that people are reliably there for them. They are good at maintaining their own identities while making connections with others.
Insecure Attachment Styles
Three different insecure attachment styles have been identified. They are anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and disorganized attachment. Developing an insecure attachment style, as a child, is not ideal, but it doesn’t mean that we are doomed to repeat history. Research shows that it is not so much what happened to us when we were children but how much we’ve processed and made sense of the challenges of our childhoods that predicts what kind of parent we will be. When we are willing to work to gain clarity with our story, we can begin to be intentional in our parenting and start to create different relationships with our children than we had with our own parents.
Anxious Attachment Style
When parents are frequently distracted or inconsistently available, it can leave children confused and frustrated. Children may feel clingy, anxious, or desperate with the parent who isn’t meeting their needs. Parents, without realizing it, leave children unsettled, and set up a pattern of children continually pursuing emotional connection to reassure themselves. Developing an anxious childhood attachment style can lead to children believing they have to be vigilant in future relationships to get their emotional needs met, and they grow up not trusting that others will be there for them.
Avoidant Attachment Style
Avoidant attachment grows out of having parents who are aloof, rejecting, or emotionally distant. A child’s basic needs may be met, but they feel starved of emotional connection or affection. Children adapt to this condition by acting as though they don’t have any emotional needs, and they develop a self-reliant attitude. They tend to avoid getting close to others because it does not feel safe, and they develop the belief that it is close to impossible to get their emotional needs met by another person. As adults, they may struggle to build intimate relationships with others, because it feels too vulnerable, and they may view dependence on others as a form of weakness.
Disorganized Attachment Style
Disorganized attachment develops when a parent is erratic in their parenting. Parents, whose emotions or behaviors change erratically from moment to moment can leave children confused and frightened. For example, one minute a parent is laughing and having fun; the next minute they explode in anger. Because their parents’ behavior is unpredictable, children don’t know how to make sense of it. The consistency they need from their parents to feel safe is missing, and children are faced with seeking comfort from a parent that frightens them. Children long for close relationships while simultaneously believing that relationships are inherently dangerous. They can develop into adults who struggle to create emotionally safe relationships.
While we may lean toward one childhood attachment style, we usually fall somewhere on a spectrum. That is, we might be mostly securely attached with a little bit of anxious attachment mixed in. And there is little to be gained by blaming parents for insecure attachments. They may have experienced parenting themselves that did not set them up to create secure attachments with their children. The advantage we have now, is that we know how important building a strong attachment can be.
Exploring our own childhoods and attachment styles gives us valuable insight into ourselves and our parenting. This clarity can help us foster healthy adult relationships and develop secure attachments with our children. Next time your child scrapes their knee, providing a band aid and a reassuring hug can be more powerful than we ever realized. Your children's expectations for future relationships are being crafted right now. If you’re interested in scheduling a parent-child relationship therapy session to discuss more about childhood attachment styles, get in touch.
