Secure attachment is one of the most powerful tools a parent has when a child is overwhelmed or frightened. In moments of distress, the parent child attachment becomes the child’s safest place to land, helping them make sense of what happened.
Through emotional validation, parents teach children that their feelings are real, seen, and understood. And when you understand how to comfort a traumatized child, you don’t just soothe the moment, you strengthen their ability to cope for life.
KEY POINTS
- Secure attachments are a primary source of coping with distress.
- Children benefit from the emotional validation of a primary caregiver, especially after experiencing an adverse event.
- Parents are uniquely equipped to help children heal from traumatic experiences by responding with compassion, care, and empathy.
One spring morning my husband decided to take our 18-month-old daughter for a ride in a new red wagon she had just received as a gift. He was pulling her behind him, running across the yard in his old shoes with worn-out treads, and he slipped and fell.
The wagon tipped over, and our toddler careened out of her ride and onto the grass, bumping her head. She cried out for Mama. I ran to her.
But instead of reaching out to me for a kiss or hug, she urgently pointed to the grass, dropped to all fours, gently tapped her head against the ground, and gazed back at me. My preverbal sweetheart was trying to show me exactly what had happened.
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She did this a few more times, deeply wanting me to understand her scary experience. After I gave her some comfort and verbalized her experience, she settled down and let out a big sigh.
Secure Attachment In Parent-Child Relationships
Jon Allen, a psychologist and mentor of mine, once shared this straightforward summary of what we know about coping: “The single best way we know to deal with emotional pain is to connect to others to whom we feel securely attached.”
For children, the most powerful attachment relationship is often with a primary caregiver: That means you. As a primary caregiver you are uniquely positioned to help your child heal from a traumatic experience.
You don’t have to be exceptionally empathic or have any special skills as a therapist. You just have to foster a secure attachment relationship between yourself and your child.
At its core, attachment is the emotional bond we share with another person. We all have many attachments in our lives–to our spouses, close friends, even colleagues.
We never outgrow the need for attachment relationships; whenever we are in a painful place, the best medicine we have is connection to these relationships.
One study that illustrates the power of the attachment relationship measured how simply having your hand held by an attachment figure could help protect your brain against distress.
In 2006, neuroscientist James Coan and his colleagues identified happily married couples, brought them into his lab, and, after a visit in which the couples were fully informed that the experiment would include minor electric shocks, proceeded to deliver mild electric shocks to the wife.
The wives were assigned to one of three experimental conditions: In one group the wives were allowed to hold their husbands’ hands throughout the shocks; the wives in another group could hold the hand of an anonymous male experimenter; and the wives in the third group were not offered any hand to hold.
The results were straightforward: As you might have guessed, the women holding their husbands’ hands fared the best, and their brains showed the least threat-activated response to impending shocks. The women without a hand to hold had the highest neural threat response.
But it wasn’t just about holding hands. Among the women paired with their spouses, the experimenters found that couples with higher reported marital relationship satisfaction had even less of a stress response than their slightly less satisfied peers.
The bottom line: Receiving comfort from and connection to our primary attachment figures bolsters our ability to tolerate distress.
Traumatized children are undoubtedly experiencing more distress than a woman who participated in a study knowing she would be receiving electric shocks. More than ever, they need an available, reliable hand to hold.
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After a potentially traumatic experience your child’s understanding of herself and the world around her may be rocked. By standing with her and being available to her–extending your hand, so to speak–you are telling your child she is not alone in this confusing and scary time.
She has a grounded, trusted figure to understand her, keep her safe, and see her through.
Adapted from Has Your Child Been Traumatized? by Melissa Goldberg Mintz. Copyright 2022 The Guilford Press.
Written by Melissa Goldberg Mintz Psy.D.
Originally Appeared on Psychology Today
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