Let's consider the first developmental theme:
BONDING
In truth, bonding begins even before a baby is born and continues for a lifetime. We never outgrow our need for secure attachments. We can understand bonding as shared attention and shared engagement between parents and children.
Infants bond through their experiences of:
Scent
Touch
Tone of voice
Facial recognition
And Emotional energy
Parents often amplify their babies’ joy through eye contact. Additionally, using a gently rising tone of voice expands the babies’ ability to tolerate intensity. Parents also use touch and tone of voice to soothe painful affects, which helps babies develop self-soothing abilities.
In addition, parents and children often experience what is called “separation anxiety.” Its purpose is to keep parents and children in close enough proximity and contact to protect them from danger. This anxiety is also part of the non-verbal language of bonding. Adults (both men and women) experience separation anxiety when their babies are in distress.
Babies and children also can experience separation anxiety when they lose contact with their mommies and daddies. For example, I’m 18 months old and looking at a leaf, I look up see my caregiver, and return my attention to the leaf. Or, I look up and don’t see my caregiver, drop the leaf, and anxiously look for him or her.
When adults have an experience of anxiety upon hearing their child in distress, they want to take actions that relieve the cry of distress in the child, which also relieves their own anxiety. This empathy moves us to feed, soothe, and warm our babies. When infants and children become more regulated as their needs are met, the distress changes to satisfaction, and we become more regulated as well.
THE PARENTING PROCESS GUIDELINE FOR BONDING IS:
MAKE CONTACT. PROTECT THE BOND; DO NOT THREATEN EITHER EMOTIONAL ABANDONMENT OR INVASION.
Let's consider what this means.
In making contact with our kids, we need to be sensitive to their non-verbal body language in order not to activate stress responses which will interfere with our ability to connect.
Are they present or dissociated? Are their muscles very tense? Do they appear collapsed? Are they averting their gaze? If we physically move too close or too far away, depending on the sensibilities of each unique child, we may trigger a defensive reaction in our relationships, no matter what our words are. Changing our rhythm from chase and dodge to contact and play depends on our ability to stay present enough to track ourselves and our kids in order to create a rhythm of safe contact. Sensitivity to non-verbal cues also lets us track when we are verbally “too close or too far away” for our kids to feel safe and inhibits us from making verbal threats like, “If you don’t listen and get in the car right now, I will leave you in the supermarket!”
Remember: having a non-verbal experience of either invasion or abandonment can disrupt the feeling of closeness.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Welcome to the Parenting Process
My name is Eileen Paris, Ph.D., and I am a licensed marriage, family and child counselor in California. I have been listening to the needs of children and families for more than forty years. In addition, I co-authored the book, "I'll Never Do To My Kids What My Parents Did to Me!" A Guide to Conscious Parenting (available through Amazon) and have given numerous presentations and seminars to mental health professionals and educators around the world.
I have developed a model for parent education called, The Parenting Process. In order to bring a psychological change to our “global society”, we not only need a vision, but also a healing intervention. To become more fully ourselves, more related to others and our planet, we must begin with the way that we parent. I am speaking here of raising children who have a sense of self, and who experience their capacity to live in relationship. Raising emotionally healthy children touches the concerns of all of us because a foundation of emotional health underlies our ability to maintain a connection with ourselves, each other and our planet.
It is crucial to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. As Theodore Roszak states in The Voice of the Earth., “....as if the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles.” He continues... “The great changes our runaway industrial civilization must make if we are to keep the planet healthy will not come about by the force of reason alone or the influence of fact. Rather, they will come by way of psychological transformation.”
The goal of the Parenting Process is to enable children to develop an experience a positive sense of self. Children who can recognize and express their own unique feelings and still have empathy for others will grow into adults who are not torn between their need for intimacy and for independence.These children will be more prepared to meet the emotional demands of the future and to nurture the life of the planet.
The Parenting Process draws on the theories of developmental psychology, contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and infant research and is a culmination of years of practice as a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and infant mental health specialist. I have taken my experience as a parent and grandparent, as well as my education as a professional and have developed an original method that serves to facilitate a healthy parent-child relationship.
Here is an Outline of the Parenting Process.
Part One:
Legacies: When we interpret experiences with our children in the present through the emotional lens of our own early painful experiences, we can miss understanding and attending to their meanings and developmental needs. I call this susceptibility a “tender spot”. We are going to explore together how we can begin to identify our own history of “tender spots.”
Fragmentation: When “tender spots” organize our interpretation of an experience our nervous system can become dysregulated. The meaning or intensity of the feeling can overwhelm our sense of safety, and we can potentially lose our sense of emotional balance and our bodily sense of well-being.
Grounding: Refers to regaining our emotional balance, our bodily sense of well-being. Instead of being caught in repetitive and painful interpretations of events, regaining a more regulated state of calm and presence often helps us give more attuned attention to both the needs of our kids and ourselves.
Part Two: Understanding Our Children’s Emotional Development
Healthy relationship patterns support a child’s ability to have relationships in which both self and other matter. We are going to look at using three developmental themes that underlie our abilities to create healthy relationships.
1. Bonding refers to the lifelong process of attachment and connection, which infuses the organization of safety and trust. When children can rely on the connection to their caregivers for attuned nurturing, they feel safe. Babies acquire the knowledge of safety and trust through their emotions. Emotional safety nurtures physical and emotional development.
2. Mirroring: refers to the process of providing a child with the experience of feeling seen, heard, understood, and taken seriously. Children need to feel they have been successful at communicating their emotions and that their emotions can be held, tolerated, contained, and regulated by their parents. Mirroring is a process that both strengthens the connection and supports the unfolding of individual differences in the relationships between parents and children.
3. Differentiating: refers to the process of delineating self and other in a relationship. When parents can recognize and support the right of their children to have distinct feelings of their own, they learn to differentiate themselves in a relationship safely. This enables children to experience an expanding sense of authorship of their own lives as they grow and to experience having their own mind. Deep authentic emotional closeness takes place in a dialogue between two connected, yet delineated people.
In my next blog I will discuss guidelines that support these themes and provide an opportunity for skill building. Putting the guidelines together gives us a way to think about a healthy parent/child relationship that interrupts painful family legacies from being handed down.
I have developed a model for parent education called, The Parenting Process. In order to bring a psychological change to our “global society”, we not only need a vision, but also a healing intervention. To become more fully ourselves, more related to others and our planet, we must begin with the way that we parent. I am speaking here of raising children who have a sense of self, and who experience their capacity to live in relationship. Raising emotionally healthy children touches the concerns of all of us because a foundation of emotional health underlies our ability to maintain a connection with ourselves, each other and our planet.
It is crucial to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. As Theodore Roszak states in The Voice of the Earth., “....as if the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles.” He continues... “The great changes our runaway industrial civilization must make if we are to keep the planet healthy will not come about by the force of reason alone or the influence of fact. Rather, they will come by way of psychological transformation.”
The goal of the Parenting Process is to enable children to develop an experience a positive sense of self. Children who can recognize and express their own unique feelings and still have empathy for others will grow into adults who are not torn between their need for intimacy and for independence.These children will be more prepared to meet the emotional demands of the future and to nurture the life of the planet.
The Parenting Process draws on the theories of developmental psychology, contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and infant research and is a culmination of years of practice as a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and infant mental health specialist. I have taken my experience as a parent and grandparent, as well as my education as a professional and have developed an original method that serves to facilitate a healthy parent-child relationship.
Here is an Outline of the Parenting Process.
Part One:
Legacies: When we interpret experiences with our children in the present through the emotional lens of our own early painful experiences, we can miss understanding and attending to their meanings and developmental needs. I call this susceptibility a “tender spot”. We are going to explore together how we can begin to identify our own history of “tender spots.”
Fragmentation: When “tender spots” organize our interpretation of an experience our nervous system can become dysregulated. The meaning or intensity of the feeling can overwhelm our sense of safety, and we can potentially lose our sense of emotional balance and our bodily sense of well-being.
Grounding: Refers to regaining our emotional balance, our bodily sense of well-being. Instead of being caught in repetitive and painful interpretations of events, regaining a more regulated state of calm and presence often helps us give more attuned attention to both the needs of our kids and ourselves.
Part Two: Understanding Our Children’s Emotional Development
Healthy relationship patterns support a child’s ability to have relationships in which both self and other matter. We are going to look at using three developmental themes that underlie our abilities to create healthy relationships.
1. Bonding refers to the lifelong process of attachment and connection, which infuses the organization of safety and trust. When children can rely on the connection to their caregivers for attuned nurturing, they feel safe. Babies acquire the knowledge of safety and trust through their emotions. Emotional safety nurtures physical and emotional development.
2. Mirroring: refers to the process of providing a child with the experience of feeling seen, heard, understood, and taken seriously. Children need to feel they have been successful at communicating their emotions and that their emotions can be held, tolerated, contained, and regulated by their parents. Mirroring is a process that both strengthens the connection and supports the unfolding of individual differences in the relationships between parents and children.
3. Differentiating: refers to the process of delineating self and other in a relationship. When parents can recognize and support the right of their children to have distinct feelings of their own, they learn to differentiate themselves in a relationship safely. This enables children to experience an expanding sense of authorship of their own lives as they grow and to experience having their own mind. Deep authentic emotional closeness takes place in a dialogue between two connected, yet delineated people.
In my next blog I will discuss guidelines that support these themes and provide an opportunity for skill building. Putting the guidelines together gives us a way to think about a healthy parent/child relationship that interrupts painful family legacies from being handed down.
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