Issuu

Praise for Raising Securely Attached Kids

“Eli Harwood brings infectious-fun energy, vulnerability, and fresh perspectives without shaming or blaming. Not only is Raising Securely Attached Kids a practical and actionable guide, it’s grounded in science and entertaining to read. There is truly nothing that matters more to me in my life than building secure relationships with my children and loved ones.”

—HILARY SWANK , actress, storyteller, mom of twins

“Eli Harwood teaches the essentials of attachment which can help us as parents all “show up” in ways that enable our children to become securely attached to us. This security then enables our kids to develop resilience and the capacity to connect with others in deeply rewarding ways.”

—DANIEL J. SIEGEL , M.D., New York Times–bestselling co-author of The Whole Brain Child

“Raising Securely Attached Kids is a comprehensive road map for parents who want to raise securely attached, emotionally healthy children. Eli Harwood breaks down the science of attachment to offer practical insights for cultivating parent-child relationships based on safety, connection, and collaboration. A parenting must-read.”

—ALYSSA BLASK CAMPBELL , M.Ed., author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions

“Eli uses her charm, humor, and compelling storytelling ability to weave together a narrative that will guide parents toward a deep and transformative relationship with their children.”

—TAMMY SCHAMUHN , author of The Parenting Handbook and cofounder of the Institute of Child Psychology

“Insightful, profound, poignant. This book seamlessly translates cutting-edge research into practical wisdom. Eli Harwood brings an outstanding fusion of knowledge and heart to the world of parenting.”

—DR. GALIT ATLAS , author of Emotional Inheritance

ELI HARWOOD , MA, LPC

Printed in the United States

SASQUATCH BOOKS with colophon is a registered trademark of Blue Star Press, LLC

29 28 27 26 25 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Authorised Rep Compliance Ltd., Ground Floor, 71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, D02 P593, Ireland. www.arccompliance.com

Editor: Jill Saginario

Production editor: Peggy Gannon

Designer: Anna Goldstein

Cover art and design: Maricor/Maricar

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harwood, Eli, author.

Title: Raising securely attached kids / Eli Harwood, MA, LPC.

Description: Seattle, WA : Sasquatch Books, [2024]

Identifiers: LCCN 2024009793 | ISBN 9781632175465 (paperback) | ISBN 9781632175472 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Attachment behavior in children.

Classification: LCC BF723.A75 H36 2024 | DDC 155.4/182--dc23/ eng/20230221. LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009793

ISBN: 978-1-63217-546-5

Sasquatch Books 1325 Fourth Avenue, Suite 1025 Seattle, WA 98101

SasquatchBooks.com

Sasquatch Books is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers, and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council™-certified paper.

Dedicated to Slate, Remi, and Rune

You three are the best string of luck I have ever encountered. No matter how big you get, how crispy or soggy you feel, or how far you wander in the world, you will always have my arms to run to when you need a warm shelter and a place to be known.

Introduction

There are so many good books and guides available to help us all learn how to parent in conscious, smart, and effective ways. While those resources are wonderful and can be a huge help in navigating particularly challenging situations or stages, clients often come to me reporting that the techniques or approaches in these books “don’t work,” and that they have had to fall back on parenting techniques that they don’t want to use, like yelling, shaming, and punishing.

When I check out the books they have been consulting, they usually offer sound parenting advice. But the advice written in them is advice that works brilliantly if and only if we have already cultivated a secure attachment pattern with our children. Attachment research is clear: the quality of the relationship between a caregiver and a child is the first ingredient necessary for helping our children to learn, grow, and thrive. While it’s great to learn an acronym to help us stick to a consistent routine, it won’t do diddly-squat in the long run if our children don’t emotionally trust us.

Creating a secure relationship with our children is the foundational step in helping them live deeply fulfilling, meaningful, and connected lives. When our children feel seen, heard, supported, and emotionally soothed by us, the practical parenting tips and tricks work way more often.

A connected relationship is truly the most outstanding ingredient needed to raise a well-regulated, socially capable, all-around secure kid who grows into a caring, confident, and resilient adult.

Secure attachment also benefits us by making for a far more enjoyable child-rearing process. Instead of being at odds with our

children in a constant battle for power, we get to be their allies and supporters as they navigate this wild ride we call life.

This book will:

• Help you create a secure attachment relationship with your children across different developmental stages

• Reflect on attachment patterns you developed in childhood and why you respond in certain ways during emotional moments with your children

• Guide you in resolving past attachment traumas or insecurities so they don’t hinder your ability to offer calm, connected, and secure relationships with your children

• Provide secure scripts and practical tools you can use in specific scenarios with your kids to build trust and repair conflicts

• Show you what to do about the tricky or uncomfortable topics we all face in our parenting journey

• Encourage you to (securely) release the reins of influence as your children grow in independence

FACT #1: ATTACHMENT RESEARCH AND CONNECTION- FOCUSED PARENTING IS NOT NEW

I want to clear up a misconception. Connection-focused parenting is not a trend or something I personally discovered or made up. A close, connected parent-child relationship is an instinct inside both us and our children designed to help protect our young by keeping them close to us, especially in moments of danger or perceived danger. It has been practiced in every Indigenous culture since the beginning of human existence. And it even exists as an instinct in all mammals to varying degrees. While using attachment

theory to guide a connection-focused parenting style may seem new in contrast to parenting trends of the past couple of centuries, those “old-timey” parenting advice trends are not as old as our instinct to form secure attachments with our children. The patterns that we often think of as “old-school” happened relatively recently in the span of human existence as a result of wars, colonization, economic and natural disasters, and the influence of people who did not have a solid understanding of attachment science. (Thankfully, we do now.)

For instance, in the 1930s, Dr. John Watson, one of the founders of behaviorism, gave this advice to parents in his book Behaviorism: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.” In response to this notion, I think Homer J. Simpson said it best: “Doh!” (With accompanying head slap.)

Disconnected parenting advice like Dr. Watson’s went viral in the 1900s and merged with the unresolved traumas that many people were navigating during that era.

As behaviorism-based parenting was making waves in popular thought in the 1950s and ’60s, researchers like Harry Harlow and John Bowlby began questioning the validity of those notions by doing important studies on the relationship between children and parents, and the long-term impacts that come with different levels of connection in those relationships.

As you read, some of these ideas may seem new to you, but remember that secure attachment patterns are as old-school as human survival and adaptation instincts. Attachment science has been validated by an incredibly rich and complex body of research that has been happening continuously since the 1950s and replicated over and over again across many cultures.

You’re not hopping onto a new bandwagon here, you’re tapping into some of the oldest wisdom around: the wisdom of close human relationships. While attachment science has been around since the 1950s, a wider knowledge of the subject of attachment in the greater culture and community has not.

When I first started studying attachment in 2007, the resources available were exclusively intended for nerdy graduate students like myself. Full of big words, lots of scientific data, and very little guidance on how to heal or shift attachment patterns. I loved the big words because it helped me to trust this research. But I also felt uncomfortable with the fact that these incredible truths about the parent-child relationship were inaccessible and obscure for anyone outside of the research and clinical world.

While we need the scientific data to ensure that we are not simply joining some random internet parenting trend, we also need the data to be accessible and easy to apply so that we can actually improve our lives! In these pages, I’ll take the incredible science given to us by some very special smarty-pants folks over the last seventy-plus years, and translate it into easy-to-understand words and concepts so that it’s practical to apply in our parenting journey.

I know, however, that some of you are like me and you want to dig into the science facts behind attachment research, so I have set aside some of the nerdier data for you fellow attachment nerds in sections called Nerd Alerts. If science and studies make you repeatedly yawn and want to doodle on a notebook, feel free to skip the Nerd Alerts and stay with the stories, scripts, and tips!

This book is meant to help you support your child in an optimal developmental process, to create a deeply secure bond with them, and to help you identify how to use connection to guide them (and you) through those challenging crucible moments that every parent and child encounters along the way.

FACT #2: SECURELY ATTACHED PARENTING IS NOT THE SAME AS ATTACHMENT PARENTING

The term “attachment parenting” was coined by Dr. William Sears, a pediatrician who created a parenting philosophy that is loosely based on attachment ideas, but he makes some correlations that are not indicated by the developmental attachment science. His work was very popular in the 2000s and advocated for specific infant care strategies such as breastfeeding, bed-sharing, and babywearing. While none of these recommendations are inherently harmful to an attachment dynamic, they are not the keys to secure attachment. The keys are emotional connection and co-regulation. Don’t worry if that sounds abstract right now; by the end of this book, you will know exactly what it takes to create a secure attachment with your child!

ATTACHMENT NERD WORD LIST

In order to best help us all understand what the science says about raising securely attached kids and how to actually apply it in real life, there are a few nerdy terms that come from the land of academia that I just cannot find a way to de-nerdify.

But if at any point in the book you are noticing a word that you don’t understand, come on back here and check out the glossary for guidance.

ATTUNEMENT: The skill required for emotional connection where a person is able to accurately pick up on the emotional cues of another person and receive those cues enough to communicate empathy in an effective way.

CO- REGULATION: How a parent helps a child to return to calm. It can also be used when referring to the process of emotional regulation between two adults, like two sweethearts or a therapist and their client. One calm(er) person helping a less calm person to feel seen, heard, nurtured, and therefore more regulated.

DYSREGULATED: Not calm. A person who is yelling and throwing things and running around the room name-calling is dysregulated. So is someone who is in the middle of a panic attack. Or someone who has emotionally left the room and is shut off or dissociated. A body that is unable to be both calm and present is dysregulated.

MISATTUNEMENT: A moment where someone misreads (by overreading emotion) or fails to receive the emotional state of another person (either by not noticing or by actively dismissing the emotional state).

REGULATED: Calm. A “regulated” nervous system means that the brain is not overfiring with intense emotions or under-firing in shutdown. Think of a car motor; a regulated car motor is not overheating or stalling out. A regulated child or adult is processing clearly and not blowing an emotional gasket or emotionally shutoff.

Phew. You did it. You read through the nerdy words. Do you feel fancy now? I hope so! I want all of us to inherit and adapt these attachment words into our personal parenting vocabulary and understanding. While these words originated in the research, I hope they will now belong to the people!

AGES AND STAGES AND DIVERSITY

Did you know that, as of the second I am writing this book, there are approximately 8,071,780,714 human beings on planet Earth? That’s a boatload of unique stories, family combinations, identities, and life dynamics. Each and every one of you comes with a different dynamic, perspective, and needs. Here are some thoughts to help you consider how to best use this book for your particular parenting reality.

PARENTS OF WEE ONES: If you are starting this book before you have children or while your children are still wee ones, that is super-smart stuff! It’s such a tremendous gift to you and to them to start working on your attachment patterns now. There will be content in this guide that you have not yet encountered in your parenting journey— don’t skip over it. It will help you form the kind of mindset and awareness that will keep you more on your toes and less flat out on your back when the hard stuff comes rolling down your street.

PARENTS OF SEMI- GROWNS: If you are starting this book and your children are grown-ish, maybe they are in late elementary school or in early to late adolescence, I am so stinkin’ proud of you! You may be continuing the labor it takes to keep a secure bond, or you are learning it for the first time; either way, our kids need us to be secure attachment figures for them at every stage of life.

PARENTS OF FULL- GROWNS: You are a diamond in the rough!!! To take up a book like this after your children have flown the coop means you are truly a person of great heart and integrity. Perhaps you are reading to help you understand your adult child’s perspective on their childhood, or you want to know what you could have done differently, or you are helping to raise your grandchildren and want

to give them what you were not able to give to your children. Well done, you are modeling for your family that it is never too late to grow and change, and that is no small feat.

PARENTS OF NEUROSPECIALIZED KIDS: If you have a child who has autism, ADHD, high sensitivity, cognitive impairment, or Down syndrome, you have a neurospecialized kid (often referred to as “neurodiverse” or “neurodivergent”). What that means is that your child’s brain and developmental process will not match the large portion of the bell curve of typical child development. As you read through these pages, you will notice recommendations and ideas that won’t apply to your child. Throw them out! You know your child better than anyone else on planet Earth, and definitely better than I do!

PARENTS OF CHILDREN WHO FACE IDENTITY OPPRESSION: As a straight, cisgendered white woman living in America with the financial means to care for myself and my family, I want to acknowledge that this book was written through my lens. While I worked hard to consider as many different parents as possible while I wrote this text, there will be gaps and topics that are missing for you. I honor that there are crucial dynamics that you are navigating in the world that my children and I are not. Your reality deserves space.

I hope as many of you as possible will delve into the field of attachment science and add your unique voices and viewpoints into the dialogue to accurately capture the nuance of the ways we understand humanity around such a central and pervasive topic.

PARENTS OF CHILDREN WHO KNOW CAPITAL T TRAUMA: If you and your children have had to live through present-day traumas such as domestic violence, war, relinquishment from birth families, foster care, adoption, poverty, or traumatic loss such as the death of a parent or child, you are not only trying to give your children a secure attachment with you, you are also trying to help your