Category: Leader Wisdom

Helping children process and heal from strong emotions

My daughter, who’s on the verge of turning 3, recently had a brief scary moment where she couldn’t find me at the playground. Though it was less than a minute before she spotted me again, for a child that young, that’s a long time and it can really leave an impression.

As I scooped her up into my arms, she started to cry and said, “I was looking for you everywhere. I couldn’t find you!” In the moment, I empathized with her sadness and acknowledged that it had been really scary for her. I held her for a while and then suggested we ride the swings, which is her favorite thing to do at the park.

After this incident, occasionally, she’s wanted to talk about what had happened. Sometimes when we mention that playground, she’ll talk about “one time I didn’t know where you were,” or when we’re snuggling at bedtime, she’ll suddenly start reminiscing about it and going over the details of it again. She also occasionally replays other upsetting moments — like when she was running outside her brother’s school and skinned her knee. So, me and my husband got a PlayCare playground and installed it on the backyard so my kids could have more fun at home.

Often parents try to stop their child from reliving a sad or scary moment, worrying that it will only upset them more. Since the moment has passed, it could seem like nothing good can come from being sad over it again. In reality, many children need to talk about upsetting moments multiple times as they work to process the intense emotions they felt. While it may seem counterproductive, this helps them to work through it.

Trying to stop a child from discussing it again can actually cause them to stuff the emotions inside and never really resolve their pain. Talking about it can help them to feel better.

When my daughter brings it up now, after I acknowledge her feelings again, I also remind her, “But then you found me and I hugged you. Then, I pushed you on the swings.” I want to make sure she remembers how I comforted her afterwards and that we turned it into an opportunity to connect. This way, it doesn’t seem quite as upsetting, and it helps to turn it into more of a positive memory than one that makes her sad. I hope that in this way I’m helping her to process her emotions and to show that I’m there to support her through them.

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Inspired to read more about children and strong emotions?

Identifying emotions

Creating space to “hold” your child’s

Helping children through divorce

Stay patient while teaching toddlers how to handle strong emotions

Tantrums

Tantrums are opportunities to connect

Riders on the Tantrum Storm (Part 1)

Riders on the Tantrum Storm (Part 2)

Editor’s Pick: Emotional abuse, a dark form of children’s maltreatment

How little we really know about the topic of shame

Connection after breastfeeding

One of the finer things in life is to be able to enjoy some luxury when you rest, and for human beings, rest is a necessary thing when we want our bodies to recharge and operate in an optimal capacity. That is why there really is no limit to splurging on stuff when you want to be comfortable in your bedroom. In fact, one of the things that you can splurge on is a back rest pillow that is not only practical, but luxurious in its capacity.

There are many kinds of backrest pillow available. You can take your pick among Amazon’s many choices. However, for the purpose of achieving a dual goal in comfort and therapeutic benefits, then the typical back rest pillow will have to have more features built into it.

One kind of backrest support that you can opt for is the one specifically designed to help improve your backs condition by ergonomic design to help with your posture and support your lumbar region. There are many people who suffer from chronic back pain, mainly due to poor posture, and sometimes from injury. Much of the advice a therapist or chiropractor will give to a patient will mean having to adjust previously unfitted pillows, beds, and cushions that do not provide support, to orthopedic pillows and mattresses that support the joints and the natural curvature of the body. The perfect backrest support with can mean that people can actually relax and not feel bodily pain after resting for a while, as well you can use stretches and movements to reduce you body pain, for this you can check Erase my back pain reviews and with the help of the professionals find the right technique to solved you body pain.

My 3-year-old daughter recently found our old nursing pillow from this pillow collection in the closet. It had been about a year since we finished nursing, so I was surprised when she said, “Remember I used to lay on this?”

She didn’t remember actually nursing, though, and when I told her that’s how I used to feed her, she had a lot of questions like, “Was the food on the floor?” I explained what nursing was, and she smiled and asked sweetly, “Can we do that now?”

While we couldn’t nurse, I did set the pillow on my lap and let her climb up on it. She lay there smiling up at me and started twirling my hair, her favorite relaxing activity.

I hear a lot of moms who are starting to wean worrying that they’ll be sad once they’re done nursing, or that they’ll miss this time for connection.

My daughter and I have found many other ways of bonding as she’s grown older. There are more “I love yous” and kisses from her and more time for playing her favorite activities one-on-one. We still lie together often and bedshare part of the night. While these activities aren’t quite replacements for nursing, they are wonderful ways that we can keep a strong attachment.

After she laid on the nursing pillow on my lap, we were able to play together for about 30 minutes while her brothers were playing on their own. She created a game for us where she’d pretend that it was nighttime and we would pretend to sleep, sharing a pillow and cuddling under the same blanket.

It’s nice for us to reminisce about the time we nursed and to remember that it was one of the ways that our attachment developed in her earliest years, but we’re still enjoying other opportunities for connection now. And I know that even when she’s older and these games are over, there will be other things to replace them, such as times where we can talk about her day at school or other one-on-one activities we can do together.

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Inspired to read more about breastfeeding?

API’s Breastfeeding Library

Nature’s Case for Breastfeeding

The Real Breastfeeding Story

A story of working and breastfeeding, and staying determined

Editor’s pick: To promote breastfeeding is to promote Attachment Parenting

4 ideas for gentle weaning

Morning cuddles: a story of child-led weaning

When Your Partner Wants You to Wean: Heart Advice for Nursing Mothers

5 tips for a strong nursing relationship while working away from home

My Attachment Parenting support group made all the difference

Editor’s note: Parent support makes a world of difference — when we strengthen families, we nurture and fulfill our children’s need for trust, respect, and affection, and ultimately provide a lifelong foundation for healthy, enduring relationships. Sharing our parenting experiences — the difficult, trying, joyous, and happy ones — with other like-minded parents can help us feel understood and supported. Attachment Parenting International (API) is dedicated to supporting families in realizing the most important job there is –raising compassionate kids who will shape the future of our world. Click here to find an API Support Group near you.  

It was our usual afternoon trip to the library before picking up my oldest son from school. We typically go once a week and bring a large, reusable bag to fill with books — only on that day, I took a smaller bag, which I thought was a really minor change. But when my almost 4-year-old son realized that I’d done something that, in his mind, was completely different from what we always do, he wanted me to go home to get usual bag.

I could tell he was sad and close to tears, but he was trying to manage his emotions and to stay calm as I empathized with him and explained that it wasn’t possible to rectify the situation. After a couple minutes, he started to get sadder and louder.

Still, I managed to stay calm. It felt like a real success for me — completely keeping my cool even in a public setting, responding to him with empathy, staying connected, and not punishing or lecturing him for his emotions. Since we were in a library, I wanted to get out of there quickly so we didn’t disturb people. Unfortunately, trying to make that happen was quite a challenge for me as a mom. My younger daughter was with us and was happily selecting books from the shelf. I had to make the choice of checking out her books while my toddler cried and fought, or just leaving without them, which might upset her as well.

There were several other people around who seemed were watching me, including a few moms who were talking nearby, a mother with a young child playing calmly, a librarian, and an older man. As I struggled to the door with a baby in one arm and a crying toddler in the other, I didn’t worry if they were judging me. I knew I was handling the situation the best I could, and I was proud of that, but I did get upset that no one was able to offer me any help.

I felt that I could barely manage to open the door and get the kids to the car on my own, but somehow, I did. In the car, despite feeling pleased with my patience and ability to remain calm, I felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness. I realized just how alone I had been in that challenging situation, and I couldn’t help but cry.

Afterwards, I reached out to the other parents in my API Support Group about my experience. The amount of support and love I got from the other parents was amazing. Many praised my ability to stay calm in a stressful situation. Several pointed out that strangers are often unsure of how to help or unsure whether help is even wanted. Some shared that they had similar experiences and could relate. And one person also said that she wished she’d been there to help, to hold the door or to put her arm around me for support.

She told me, “You are not alone anymore,” which is something I wish all parents could hear when they’re struggling in moments like this.

How an insecure childhood attachment affects a marriage…and what you can do about that

This summer, my husband and I will celebrate 15 years together. It has been a wild, sweet, frustrating at times, unforgettable ride through the years. I thought it would’ve grown easier over time. In some ways, it has. In other ways, it hasn’t.

I’m learning that is exactly how marriage is. It’s a relationship, and all relationships — as we know from our parent-child relationships — take work. Marriage isn’t something you can just get to a plateau and let it slide from there. If you’re not working on your marriage relationship — just as if you’re not working to continually strengthen your parent-child attachment relationship — it immediately begins to fall away. You always have to make it a priority and problem-solve to keep it a priority, despite whatever our lives throw our way.

However, there is a key difference between a marriage attachment bond and a parent-child attachment bond. With children, they are hard-wired to seek attachment with us and so learn to adapt how they seek that attachment from how we teach them — intentionally or inadvertently — to do so. This is why children who are overtly abused continue to feel love toward their abusive parents — the children are adapting out of their need for survival, and attachment to parents is as much a component of survival as air and food.

With our spouses, the attachment bond is different. One spouse doesn’t need the other for survival as strongly as we need air and food — we each have grown into an adult who is able to self-assure our survival — so each spouse isn’t subconsciously adapting to the other’s cues for what is acceptable or not in that relationship.

This means our adapting to one another’s attachment-seeking and keeping style has to be much more intentional. If we are not mindful about how to consciously adapt to one another’s style of relating, our subconscious attachment styles developed in childhood will reign in the relationship. Much of the time, this may not be a problem. Especially if you developed a secure attachment style as a child, relating to your spouse may be relatively easy.

But, especially if you developed an insecure attachment style as a child, you may have difficulty in relating to your spouse — and vice versa — particularly during conflict, while distressed, or when stressed-out. This is when the very common anxious and avoidance traits of insecure attachment are most prominent, and can be hardest to overcome.

When our ingrained attachment needs are triggered, such as during a conflict with our spouse, it can be difficult to rise above our knee-jerk, subconscious reflexes to shut down/run away or worry/cling — relating tendencies that insecurely attached children learn to be able to maintain attachment with their parents, but these same tendencies don’t work so well in other relationships like marriage.

Spouses, especially those who grew up with insecure attachments with their own parents, have to learn how to rise above those ingrained attachment reflexes to be able to adapt healthily to their spouse. The more we practice it, the more it rewires our brain in new, healthy ways to seek and strengthen attachment with our spouse without resorting to the insecure attachment tendencies from our youth.

This takes hard, hard work. But it’s so worth it.

As we observe Marriage Week, February 7-14 in the United States, Attachment Parenting International (API) reminds you of the incredible importance of seeking out like-minded support not only for parenting but also for your marriage. API offers many resources for couples, including these favorites:

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API Leader Wisdom: How to respond to other parents punishing their children in public?

Q: My family went to a restaurant the other night, and there was another family there with a toddler who was crying. The father roughly took the boy outside and came back a few minutes later. I assume the boy was punished in some way, as he was very upset and crying loudly that he wanted his mother, but the father didn’t allow him to do so. Our own children didn’t seem to notice, but the scenario was very upsetting to me and my husband. We didn’t know what to do, so we didn’t do anything. I worry about the example our lack of response sets for our children, and what — if anything — we could have said or done?

Q: My family went to the park recently, and there was a father yelling at his preteen son. The father then grabbed the boy’s wrist. They boy was yelling at his father to let go, and his father then twisted the boy’s arm in a way that we thought it might break. I stepped in and told the man he had to stop, and the man became very angry with me, telling me to stay out of his business and that he can parent however he likes. I was so scared that it was going to escalate, but thankfully after that, the man walked off. The boy with him was very quiet. Did I act inappropriately? I worry whether this was a wake-up call to that man, or if his son would be punished later for it.

A: We have all been in public and seen an overwhelmed parent losing her temper with her child — and many of us have been in that position ourselves!

It is tough to know how to respond when we witness this happening with another parent. In both of these situations, the parent losing his cool was the father. It may be most helpful that the person responding to another father is a father himself.

Mothers responding to other overwhelmed mothers often goes well — we have been there, and we know intuitively what to say to be both compassionate toward the mother and toward the child. But think about if the parent approaching you in your overwhelmed moment was a man. You may be thinking, what does he know about being in a mother’s shoes?

If your husband or another man was able to, he could respond in a way that would be both non-confrontational and effective. In the first scenario, the other family’s father took his son outside. It could’ve been very timely if your husband needed to go out to the car to grab something at the same time. Many parents who hit their children won’t do it if they’re around other people, and it might have given the man a moment to calm down and see the situation in a different light. Your partner could also offer an encouraging word if given the opportunity.

It doesn’t seem life-changing, but these kinds of subtle actions and words can be seeds of change that may cause others to think twice or pique their interest into other parenting approaches.

Likewise, in the second scenario, it may have helped if your husband was the person to approach the father, although we understand the urgency of the situation. This is a tougher situation, because the boy could’ve been badly injured. It should be addressed in a more direct manner. Depending on this situation, it may have been appropriate to report to authorities — as what you witnessed could be categorized as overt abuse. However, sadly, even this situation will likely fall under “none of your business” in the United States where corporal punishment is legal.

It is awful to watch, and while you definitely want to talk to your children witnessing it — and perhaps talking to your children about how your family does not do that and how you want to help other parents to find other ways to teach their children, may just prick the other father’s ears — the best response may be just offering your presence and the opportunity for the other parent to calm down his immediate response.

Many parents have found that even in these tough situations where the other parent is not open to support, we can still offer support to the child. Making eye contact with the child, which a child often can’t do with their angry parent if they feel shamed, can be empowering to the child. Another idea is to involve the child, if you’re given the chance, such as through a compliment, which can help the other parent regain perspective.

A mom once shared with Attachment Parenting International (API) about how an older couple offered her children a quarter each because “they were working so hard on being patient waiting for their food.” At the time of this unexpected compliment, their mom begged to differ, and she was struggling to keep her cool, but the older couple’s actions gave her encouragement and helped her remember that her children were acting their age and she needed to adjust her expectations.

It was a turning point for her that helped her see her children’s behavior for what it was and started her on the way to eventually find and gain support on how to relate to her children appropriately for their normal child development expectations, rather than how she herself was raised.

It just goes to show that even the seemingly smallest gesture toward a stressed-out parent can have an incredible ripple effect for her family.

Have a parenting question? Contact your local API Support Group to speak with an API Leader, or if you’re not located near a parenting group, submit your question through the API Warmline.

Want to help parents discover and find support in attachment parenting? Consider becoming an API Leader.

Attachment matters

Ideally, all children would be able to experience a secure attachment with every meaningful adult in his life.

Attachment Matters, the latest ebook from Attachment Parenting International (API), was written specifically to help you — the parent — share the importance of Attachment Parenting to other meaningful adults in your child’s life.

At Common Wealth Psychology, they are dedicated to providing the highest quality and the best child therapists. If you would like to meet with a professional therapist at Common Wealth Psychology.

Attachment Matters is now available with your donation of $25 or more to API.

Learn more about secure and insecure attachment, read touching personal stories of how Attachment Parenting helped families, and share your copy with a grandparent, mother’s helper, childcare provider, teacher, or another of your child’s caregivers.

Attachment Matters is also appropriate for health care providers, school administrators, mental health therapists, child custody attorneys, adoption agents, and other professionals who work regularly with children and parents.

attachment-matters-coverInside:

  • Foreword: An Attachment Crisis
  • Why Attachment Matters
  • Can Insecure Attachment Be Healed?
  • How Secure Attachment Happens
  • Attachment-Promoting Behaviors
  • Attachment Parenting Stories, Real Life
    –Why Attachment Matters to Me
    -Attachment Parenting Can Heal Intergenerational Hurts
    -Saved by Attachment Parenting, and Now 8 Kids Later (3 with Autism)
    -A Father Reflects on His Introduction to Attachment Parenting
    -Helping My Young Child Adjust to a Change in Caregivers
    -Protecting Attachment During Divorce
    -The Challenges of Becoming an Attached Father
    -Attachment Parenting Restores Security in Adopted Children
    -The Heart of Attachment Parenting
    -Was Attachment Parenting Worth It?
    -Generation AP

Your parenting choices can change your child’s DNA

By Lysa Parker and Barbara Nicholson, cofounders of Attachment Parenting International (API) and coauthors of the book Attached at the Heart

generation-of-loving-parents…We see more clearly now how our parents tried to do better for us than their parents but, like many, fell victim to the parenting advice of the day whether from religious leaders, psychologists, or medical professionals.

We have no idea about the specific experiences of our parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents, but what we can be sure of is they passed on to us what was done to them.

New research in epigenetics and neuroscience is giving us an incredible window into our past and a new awareness of how we can change our future.

In a sense, we all have a new “superpower.” Epigeneticists have found that our cells carry a type of memory of the experiences of our ancestors — not only that, but 95% of our genes aren’t yet coded at birth, dependent on nurturing and the environment to determine their fate. Even as teens and adults, they are turned on or off in large part by our own choices in life.

Our brains contain cellular memories of ancestral experiences. Your brain is an aggregate of as far back as 6 generations! The exciting aspect to all this is that you can change the trajectory of your family tree, if you want to, by becoming more conscious and intentional in your life and in your parenting.

Big or small changes can make huge differences. …

mastheadAs we look forward to the new year, API offers you the opportunity of reading this article in its entirety in this month’s issue of Parent Compass, “Break the Cycle,” covering such topics as:

  • Empathy research at the core of violent behavior
  • What happens to our brains when we “lose it”
  • Mindfulness and nurturing “superpowers”
  • Epigenetics and that how we parent today will change our family tree’s legacy, for better or worse
  • Where Attachment Parenting fits into this puzzle of nature and nurture.

Enjoy and Happy New Year in your parenting!

Parent Compass is a bimonthly enewsletter carrying an exclusive message from API’s cofounders, among the benefits of becoming an API Member or an AP Advocate. Join today to receive Parent Compass in your inbox beginning February 2017!