Attachment and Parenting: Making Room for the Child and the Parent
Attachment theory can offer parents a helpful way to understand their child’s emotional needs and the relationship between attachment and parenting.
Despite this knowledge parenting can certainly be one of the most challenging things we do. While trying to meet the needs of a baby or child, we can find ourselves face to face with our own earliest experiences. A child’s tears, anger or need for closeness may stir something in us that feels much larger than the moment at hand.
Attachment theory helps us understand why. John Bowlby described the importance of a trusted caregiver who offers a secure base: someone a child can turn to for comfort and, from that place of safety, venture out to explore. Research has also found a relationship between caregivers’ sensitivity and children’s attachment security. These ideas matter deeply, but they can leave parents with a daunting question: What if I struggle to be that person for my child?
What does secure attachment mean in parenting?
Secure attachment in parenting is not about being a perfect parent or getting everything right. It develops through the many everyday moments in which a child experiences their parent or caregiver as available, responsive and interested in what they are feeling. A securely attached child can gradually learn that they can turn to their caregiver for comfort when things feel difficult, and use that sense of safety as a base from which to explore the world. Misunderstandings and difficult moments are inevitable. What matters is that there are opportunities to reconnect and repair, helping the child learn that relationships can remain safe even when things go wrong.
How a Parent’s Own Attachment Experiences Can Affect Parenting
Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues used the phrase “ghosts in the nursery” to describe how painful experiences from a parent’s past can become present in their relationship with a child. A toddler’s refusal may bring back an old feeling of powerlessness. A baby’s crying may awaken distress that the parent cannot immediately explain. We may react before we have had a chance to think.
I see this in my work with parents, and I know from my own parenting that insight alone does not always make a difficult moment easy. When we feel overwhelmed, it can be hard to offer the calm presence our child needs. This is why attachment focused support must care for the parent as well as the child. Parents need opportunities to be heard, to reflect on what is happening for them, and to find support with their own unmet needs. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of my toddler’s need for me with my first child. Exploring this with a therapist helped me connect those feelings to my own childhood, as my father’s mental illness and my mother’s disability meant I had taken on a reversal of roles with me taking on the parent role. That moment of recognition helped me understand why the appropriate needs of a toddler could feel so overwhelming to me.
Attachment theory is sometimes confused with a particular set of parenting practices, but secure attachment is not determined by whether a parent follows a specific approach to feeding, sleeping, carrying or comforting their child. What matters is the quality of the relationship over time: how a child experiences their caregiver’s availability, responsiveness and willingness to reconnect with them which can inevitably shape how we approach meeting these needs.
Attachment, Children’s Behaviour and Emotional Needs
When a child behaves in a way we find difficult, it is tempting to focus entirely on stopping the behaviour or whats wrong with the child. In Aware Parenting which is an attachment and trauma informed approach developed by Aletha Solter we invite another question: What might be happening for this child right now?
They may need help with something practical. They may be frustrated by a limit they cannot change. Or they may be carrying feelings that have built up through the day. We still need to keep people safe and hold appropriate limits, but we can do so with curiosity and warmth. Aletha Solter suggests in her work on alternatives to rewards and punishment to look for underlying needs and feelings and accumulated stress or trauma which opens up a more connected response.
The same curiosity is useful when we behave in ways we regret. Are we exhausted? Unsupported? Reminded, perhaps without realising it, of something from our own childhood? Understanding does not remove responsibility. It gives us a place to begin.
Building Secure Attachment Through Connection and Play
One father who came to a workshop of mine told me how relieved he felt when he understood that he did not always have to fix the problem behind his child’s tears. Sometimes he could simply sit beside his child, listen and stay close.
That distinction matters. We should respond to a child’s needs and take their distress seriously. But if the biscuit has broken and cannot be made whole again, our presence may be more helpful than another attempt to make the feeling disappear. Solter’s work encourages parents to listen to children’s crying while remaining attentive to their needs and offering loving contact.
Play can offer another way into connection. I often encourage parents to set aside at least 30 minutes of non-directive play each week, where the child leads the play and the adult gives them their full attention. Put the phone away, make sure you have the energy to be present, and let the child decide what to do with the toys or materials available. There is no lesson to teach and no outcome to achieve. The child has the experience of being interesting to you.
Solter describes several forms of “attachment play”, including child led play and playful games that can help families reconnect. In my experience, a few attentive minutes can change the atmosphere between a parent and child, particularly when everyday life has become full of instructions and hurry.
Why Repair Matters for Parent-Child Attachment
There will be moments when we lose our patience or miss what our child needs. Attachment gives us a reason to return to those moments and repair the connection.
I remember being angry with one of my children, who had stormed off upset. My three-year-old noticed what I had not yet managed to see and suggested a familiar game we called “I was hoping to find you there.” Her invitation helped me soften. When my child returned, I said “I was hoping to find you there!” I could see her body relax, and I was able to apologise.
That moment stays with me because my child did not need a perfect mother. She needed me to find my way back to her. Repair can be as simple, and as meaningful, as acknowledging that we shouted, saying sorry, listening, and showing through our actions that the relationship is safe again.
Caring for the people who care for children
We ask a great deal of parents. It is harder to respond with patience when someone is isolated, living with conflict, worried about money or struggling with their mental health. Telling parents to be more attuned is of little use unless we also ask what support would help them.
Attachment is a relationship, and relationships need care. That may mean a friend who can listen without judgement, a parent group, practical help, or therapeutic support when past experiences feel too painful to manage alone. Children, too, may benefit from additional support when their feelings or behaviour become overwhelming for the family.
For me, the hopeful message of attachment theory and the Aware Parenting approach I teach is that connection can be nurtured. We can notice what happens between us and our children. We can learn what helps us stay present, listen to feelings, make time for play and return after difficult moments. Most importantly as we care for the parent, we make more room for the child.
References
Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory. Routledge.
De Wolff, M. S., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (1997). “Sensitivity and attachment: A meta-analysis on parental antecedents of infant attachment.” Child Development, 68(4), 571–591.
Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). “Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant–mother relationships.” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14(3), 387–421.
Solter, A. J. Attachment Play. Shining Star Press.
About Rebecca
Rebecca Sheikh is Chair of the International Attachment Network and an attachment-focused parenting practitioner and educator. She holds an MA in Counselling in Education from the Tavistock and is a certified Aware Parenting Instructor. Rebecca’s work supports parents and families through attachment-focused, trauma-informed approaches, with a particular interest in helping parents deepen connection, understand children’s emotional needs, and move beyond punishment-and-reward models of parenting.
