Elaine retweetledi
Your baby thrives on predictability.
Specifically, yours.
This week I’ve been talking about attachment, which holds long lasting consequences for your child’s mental and physical health (not to mention their cognitive development).
Secure attachments in infancy occur when parents’ interactions with their babies are:
Warm.
Responsive.
Safe.
And consistently so.
I’ve shared lots of important tips in the past. Tips on reading to your child. Tips on play. Tips on language development.
But I want to be clear that attachment has nothing to do with the number of toys or books in your home. Or how well you interact most of the time.
Attachment is a product of your predictability. It’s how you interact EVERY time. It’s what you teach your child to expect from you as their caregiver.
Inconsistency in the way adults interact with children - warm and responsive one day and potentially cold and distracted the next - is detrimental to secure attachment. When children don’t know what to expect from day to day, it creates anxiety.
And this activates the body’s stress response systems. Continually.
This is one reason that it’s so important for parents to thoughtfully manage their own stress, exhaustion, safety, and mental health needs.
When you aren’t at your best for yourself, you likely won’t be at your best for your baby.
As an aside, consistency is also why I’ve spoken out about viral social media trends that undermine trust and predictability by inserting chaotic behaviors into the parent-child relationship.
Several months ago - if you can believe it - it was unexpectedly cracking open an egg on your child’s forehead.
This week it seems to be throwing slices of American cheese at/onto your baby’s head/face. (I wish I was making this up.)
While it’s easy for us as to dismiss such behaviors as jokes, to young children they are detrimental for precisely the reason some adults may find them funny: they’re unexpected.
But when your otherwise kind and attentive parent randomly acts with callousness - if even for a moment - it breaks a stable pattern.
It provides a new data point that suggests you may be warm and caring… but also may not be dependably. And this is precisely what undermines attachment.
(The good news is that an otherwise stable attachment is unlikely to be permanently disrupted by one dumb mistake. We all make them. Still… don’t. Just don’t.)
Be kind, be responsive, and do it predictably.
I’ll never share the kind of videos I described above. In their place, enjoy this warm and secure interaction between storyoferica (IG) and her happy little one.
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