Jessica Heller-Bhatt: How you can best support your child with a strength-based attachment perspective

At some point or another, many of us sign up for parenting courses.

With our infants, we learn to let them cry before soothing them or rock them to sleep to foster closer attachment.

We are taught to never say ‘No!’ to our toddlers and to count to three before springing into action with our school children.

When it comes to our teenagers, it’s all about gradually increasing their independence and, for the super-informed, ‘rites of passage’ become part of the initiation to adulthood.

Be it ‘supportive parenting, ‘Montessori parenting’, ‘positive parenting’ or ‘attachment parenting’ — the list goes on.

Have you ever considered that what works for one child may not work for another?

Over the past decades, parenting approaches have changed dramatically in the context of the socially acceptable, underpinned by the contemporary research of the day.

Forty years of research testing attachment theory and clinical observations of parent-child interactions, however, have consistently shown that what really counts is your child’s unique needs — something generic parenting courses can never teach.

How you can best understand, support, and connect with your child is determined by your ability to attune to their subtle ways of communicating with you, which, in turn, depends on the manner in which you interact with them.

To learn about your child or teenager’s communication style and how to meet their individual needs, we begin to interpret the function of their behaviours, especially when under stress.

A reluctance to be settled may be understood as asking for more connection; task refusal may follow fear of failing; poor attention linked with preoccupied worries: and risk-taking behaviours used to demand more parental involvement.

Using a strength-based attachment perspective can help us find the answer to why kids do what they do!

Jessica Heller-Bhatt is a clinical psychologist registrar specialising in attachment theory and practice operating out of Denmark Family Practice and via telehealth and founder of ConnectMe Psychology.