Raising Securely Attached Kids: Using Connection-Focused Parenting to Create Confidence, Empathy, and Resilience (Parenting Book Series, Band 2) - Softcover

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ELI HARWOOD, MA, LPC is a licensed therapist, best-selling author, and highly sought-after educator who has more than 17 years of experience helping people process relational traumas and develop secure connections with their children. She is on a mission to help make the world a better place, one relationship at a time. In addition to her clinical work, Harwood also offers online courses and in-person retreats to help individuals better understand their attachment styles and build stronger bonds. She has also served as a faculty member at The Denver Family Institute and is the author of Securely Attached. Eli has three children, one husband, two cats, and an extraordinary number of plants. Learn more about her work at AttachmentNerd.com.

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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 report 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 do, like yelling, shaming, and punishing. 

When I check out the books they have been consulting, they are usually giving sound parenting advice. But, the advice written in them is advice that works brilliantly IF and ONLY IF, we have already cultivated a secure way of relating to our children. And while it’s great to learn an acronym to help us stick to consistent discipline, 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 to helping them to live a deeply fulfilling, meaningful, and connected life. When our children feel seen, heard, supported and emotionally soothed by us, all the other parenting tips and tricks start to work much better. 

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 what attachment pattern you developed in childhood and why you respond and act in certain ways during emotional moments with your children 
• Guide you in resolving past attachment traumas or insecurities
• Provide secure scripts that you can use in specific scenarios with your kids 
• Provide practical tools for building trust and repairing conflicts and cultivate a culture of cooperation between you and your children
• Show you what to do about the tricky or uncomfortable topics that we all face in our parenting journey 
• Encourage you to (securely) release the reins of influence as your children grow in independence

I want to clear up two misconceptions about attachment first.

Fact #1: Attachment Research and Connection Focused Parenting IS NOT NEW.
This is not a trend or something I personally discovered or made up. 

It is a human adaptation that has been practiced in every indigenous culture since the beginning of human existence. While it may seem new in contrast to parenting trends of the past couple of centuries, those disconnected patterns happened as a result of wars, colonizations, and influential people who did not have a solid understanding of attachment science. 

For instance in the 1930s, Dr. John Watson, one of the founders of behaviorism gave this advice to parents in his book, Behaviorism: “Never, never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning.”  Disconnected parenting advice like Dr Watson’s went viral in the 1900’s and merged with the unresolved traumas that many people were navigating during that era. These ideas have been around long enough to feel old-school, but in the context of humanity, they are but a blip on the radar.

And, even as a behavioristic idea of parenting was making waves in popular thought, simultaneously researchers like Harry Harlow and John Bowlby were questioning the validity of those notions and began 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 are reading, some of these ideas may seem new to you, but I want you to remember that secure attachment patterns are as old-school as human survival and adaptation and have been validated by an incredibly rich and valid body of research that has been happening since the 1950s. You’re not hopping onto a new band wagon here, you’re tapping into some of the oldest wisdom around. The wisdom of human attachment. 

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 and the nerdy studies because it helped me to trust this research, and to see its validity. 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 hopping on 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 with its wisdom! This book is my attempt to marry the two. To take the incredible science given to us by some very special smarty-pants over the last 70+ years, and to translate it into words and concepts that we can all understand and apply in our parenting journey. 
This book is meant to help you support your child in an optimal developmental process, create a deeply secure bond with them, and 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. Sears, a pediatrician who created a parenting philosophy that is loosely based on attachment ideas, but 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, bedsharing, and baby wearing. While none of these recommendations are inherently harmful to an attachment dynamic, they are not the keys to secure attachment. The key is in 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! 

Glad we got that out of the way. You’re almost ready to start, but I have a few goodies and guidelines to help you along your merry way! 

Attachment Nerd Word List
In order to best help us all understand what the science says and how to actually apply it, there are a few nerdy terms that come from the land of academia, that I just cannot find a way to de-nerdify. So I made us all a Nerd Word List. 

Read through these wordy-words real quick before you start reading the chapters to help keep us on the same page about some of these very important ideas. Don’t worry, there won’t be a test later. 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. 

Regulated: Calm. A “regulated” nervous system means that the...