FAQ

Yes of course! (And this is covered in even more detail in the blog section, if you really want the detailed deeper dive.) I'm going to summarize from the Circle of Security research .

1.  Secure babies and children aren't stressed. 

2. Secure kids/adolescents/adults just do better at learning. 

3. Secure attachment keeps kids on a healthy, resilient developmental path as they grow.  

4. Early security gives children a healthy sense of self.  

5. A healthy sense of self  leads to confidence.

6. Secure attachment is the birthplace of real self esteem. 

7. There's so much good research now showing that connection and relationships are the key to health and happiness throughout life.  Secure attachment is one of the important underpinnings of social competence and good social relationships are essential for all sorts of health outcomes, including physical and mental health, up to and including mortality risk! 

8.  Yes, there's no getting away from it; secure attachment is connected to better health across the lifespan. 

9. Securely attached children  generally have a good capacity for emotional regulation...the ability to  manage their feelings so they can cotinue to think. Not becoming overwhelmed and hostage to feeling states allows a child to get on with  life-learning, playing, making friends.  The skill of emotional self regulation is generally felt to be one of the most essential life skills.

Well actually, no.

We all love our babies and no-one wakes up in the morning and says 'I'm going to create insecurity in my kids today!'  But the statistics on  secure and insecure attachment say that in spite of our good intentions and fairly widespread knowledge of attachment parenting a lot of babies are not getting to solid security.

That's certainly a great start, but there are many factors that govern how we parent, and lots of things can get in the way of optimal being-with and soothing our baby. Families are under a lot of economic pressure these days, and child care is sometimes less than optimal. Add in busyness, lack of time and the general ups-and-downs of life and that’s a lot of balls in the air.

Then we have our own experiences of being parented and this is huge. Unless we can look back at how we ourselves were brought up and make sense of our early family life and childhood experiences, it will come back and give us a brick upside the head. Possibly many bricks.

We all bring to parenting a truckload of emotions, beliefs, blind spots, hot spots and echoes (sometimes quite loud ones) of our own childhood attachment. Stuff that we hardly recognise as coming from the past, that can get in the way of connecting with your baby and in doing the things that support and grow secure attachment. 

Around 50-60% of babies in middle class samples are securely attached. Which means that upwards of 4 in 10 babies aren't. (Not wanting in any way to be classist or judgemental, but the reality is that there is a strong correlation between low socioeconomic status and higher rates of insecure and particularly, disorganized attachment.) Anecdotal evidence also suggests that we're seeing less secure attachment in babies and more specifically, less of the most most secure subsection as measured in the Strange Situation Assessment (the assessment tool we use at one year to assess babies that sits at the heart of attachment theory). There's a detailed explanation of that in the blog too. 

At this point, I'd recommend that you read the blog which gives you an overview of attachment theory. But here's the short version: the remainder are insecure avoidant or insecure anxious.  Which means these babies have had to develop very specific strategies in order to get closeness with their caregiver, and while these strategies work...sort of...they have serious costs and disadvantages. 

Unfortunately no. There is a small group of babies who haven't been able to work out any strategy at all for getting the closeness they need. When formally assessed, we call these bubs disorganised, and this is a group who do very poorly in life. They are grossly overrepresented in statistics of mental illness, poor physical health and relationships, antisocial behaviour from preschool onwards, crime and imprisonment. 

Long term collection of data seems to indicate that about 10% of babies will be classified as insecure disorganised. But here's the thing: we see low level and pockets of disorganization in up to 15-20% of mainstream baby-caregiver pairs. Not enough to warrant a fully disorganised score, but still of significance. 

As a clinician I’ve come to see that a reliable enough trustworthy and tender loving presence is precisely what many people didn’t adequately receive and so as adults, at some level (consciously but mostly unconsciously) they can’t believe it is actually possible.

Most of us had loving well intentioned mums and dads, but difficult circumstances… parental confusion, anxiety/depression, generational struggles, family discord - the stress of things like immigration, a sick child, financial pressures, relationship conflict or breakdown, unresolved trauma etc… these type of things can really get in the way of parenting to security                  

So if you don’t have enough accessible affection within a stable relationship with a parent, you can develop painful self-beliefs. Things like “something is wrong with me.” “I’m not good enough.” “It’s my fault.”  “It’s up to me.” “the only person I can rely on is myself”, “I’m not wanted”, “I’m alone”, “I can’t have THOSE feelings” and so on. All the evidence and longitudinal studies indicate there are incontrovertible links between childhood attachment experience and adult relational competence. 

Or to put it more simply, the way we’re loved when we’re very young determines how easy (or hard) we find intimacy, closeness and connection as adults.