Parenting with Hope

Parenting With Hope

Parenting is a journey filled with uncertainties. No parent can guarantee their child’s emotional, physical, or spiritual outcome. However, with intentional guidance, support, and an environment of acceptance, parents can set their children on a path to healthy choices for a good life. 

Basic Needs

A child comes into the world with endless needs and relies entirely on their parents. They have no resources outside of their parents. The parents’ number one duty is to consistently provide an environment where the child has their basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, safety, security, and love.  In his well-known Hierarchy of Needs, Abraham Maslow proposes that all humans are designed with basic needs that must be met for normal stages of growth to occur; otherwise,  deficiencies in their normal development occur.

Emotional Needs

While the physical needs of food, clothing, and shelter tend to be the needs that most often readily get met in a child’s life, the requirements for safety, love, and security are frequently neglected, especially if they were ignored in the parent’s childhood. This can create a generational legacy of emotional dysfunction. However, recovery is possible through awareness and education, breaking the cycle and allowing for a new legacy of emotional and spiritual growth within the family. My biological family focused on showing love in actions but lacked the vocabulary of love. Involvement in a college Christian ministry helped me to become more emotionally intelligent. I took the new emotional vocabulary I had learned back to my family of origin, who was very receptive. The Biblical truth of loving in word and deed is the hunger of the human heart. An African Proverb says, “If someone loves you, love them in return.”

Attachment

The concept of parenting meeting a child’s emotional needs is called “Attachment.”  This approach involves regularly drawing your child close rather than pushing them away, creating an environment where they feel safe with you instead of afraid. What the child needs most is your safe and consistent presence. Adam Young, a leading expert on attachment theory, says, “A parent that connects well with their child 30% of the time has a good chance of producing a secure child.” 

Secure  Attachment

According to Adam Young, an expert on childhood attachment, in an article entitled “The Big Six, a child needs 6 things from their parents for secure attachment (Mom and Dad are often attuned to you and responsive to your needs/wants:

1.  Attunement:  knowing what the child is feeling on the inside
2. Responsiveness:  responding to the child’s emotions with comfort, care, and kindness
3. Engagement:   Pursuing your child with an engaged heart
4. Ability to Regulate Your Arousal:  Teaching the child to calm their own anxiety and spring to life again when shutting down
5. Strong Enough to Manage Your Negative Emotions:  Welcoming the child’s big emotions, like anger, sadness, and fear, in a loving and meaningful way
6. Willingness to Repair:  The parent’s willingness to own and rectify failures when they occur.

Insecure Attachment

Young also goes on to describe 2 main types of insecure attachment. 

1.  Avoidant:  The child’s needs are frequently not met and the child comes to believe that communicating with his needs has no influence on the caregiver (On your own and no one is there)
2. Ambivalent:  A child experiences her caregiver as inconsistent and, at times, intrusive (Inner Franticness).”

Tronick’s Still Face Baby is an excellent depiction of secure and insecure attachment with a baby. Click on the following link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Jw0-LExyc

Parenting Styles

There is no perfect parenting style. Each parenting generation has its strengths and weaknesses. Researchers list three main types of parenting:

1. Authoritarian: The parent is controlling. 
2. Permissive:  The parent relinquishes their authority to the child.
3. Authoritative:  The parent gives the child loving and firm guidance within safe boundaries

A Healthy Parenting Style

One parenting style promotes letting the baby cry himself to sleep, and giving  all  attention might “spoil the child.” Another style encourages bowing to the child’s every whimper. It is best to avoid extremes. A child needs to learn how to soothe himself, and a child does not need to be told no, or he will learn entitlement, but a child left to himself will not have a pathway to successful development. A kind and compassionate parent is needed to provide a path for receiving care, and she will eventually be able to give care. Every child wants to be seen and heard in a safe environment. However, being able to listen to your child typically depends on how your parents make room for your voice to be heard.   If you were not raised in a safe environment where you were seen, heard, and understood, it increases the likelihood that you will raise your children in the same type of insecure environment. Yet, you can get help with your parenting struggles and give your child a chance at secure attachment. Take a step in passing on good attunement to the next generation. You can grow in Parenting  With Hope. To schedule an appointment with Julia Henderson, contact Lifeworks Counseling at 601-790-0583.