274. The lifelong impact of early relationships: How secure attachment influences children’s ability to make sense of their experiences and cope in the face of adversity with Dr. Alan Sroufe

What role do early attachment relationships play in shaping who we become? In this episode, Dr. Alan Sroufe, a pioneering researcher in attachment, shares decades of insights from his groundbreaking longitudinal study.

Together we explore:

  • How Dr. Sroufe’s research answered the question: Do early experiences leave a lasting legacy?
  • Why resilience isn’t just about thriving in the face of adversity, but is deeply rooted in the strength of attachment relationships.
  • The importance of early relationships in helping children develop a sense of safety, positive self-worth, and durable relationships.
  • A hopeful message that attachment isn’t fixed and that secure relationships in adolescence and adulthood can change developmental trajectories, even after challenging childhoods.
  • Why the quality, not quantity, of time with your child matters most (and what babies can teach us about connection).
  • How parents can help shape the meaning children make of their world and guide them through challenges with empathy.

Dr. Sroufe’s work shows that while early experiences are never erased, they’re always building blocks for growth—and recovery is always possible.

READ THE BOOK DR. ALAN’S RECOMMENDS PARENTS START WITH:

📚 A Compelling Idea: How We Become the Persons We Are

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES AND RESOURCES:

👉🏻 Click HERE to download my free guide, The Four Pillars of Fostering Secure Attachment, helping you parent with a focus on attunement and trust.

GET MY ON-DEMAND COURSE FOR PARENTING SENSITIVE CHILDREN:

👉🏻 Learn more about Parenting by Design, my guided program for increasing behavioral and emotional regulation in sensitive kids.

CHECK OUT ADDITIONAL PODCAST EPISODES YOU MAY LIKE:

🎧 Breaking the cycle of insecure attachment: How to support your child’s secure attachment even if you didn’t grow up with it with Dr. Miriam Steele

🎧 Secure attachment is optimal, but insecure attachment may not be as bad as we think with Dr. Or Dagan

🎧 How to use the principles of attachment science to make parenting easier

🎧 Can my kid be securely attached to me if I’m insecurely attached in my adult relationships?

Click here to read the full transcript

Dr. Alan (00:00):

While new experiences can change my meaning system, the kind of experiences I seek, my interpretations of the experiences that I encounter and the reactions that I create from other people are all influenced by the meaning system I bring. So I go into the preschool and I don’t turn to teachers when I’m disappointed or upset. I can’t find out that they would’ve responded to me. That’s the problem in a nutshell. It isn’t that infancy scars you and is inevitably a crippling experience or something. It’s that it starts you on a pathway and it’s a way of engaging the world that tends to be self perpetuating.

Dr. Sarah (00:51):

Have you ever wondered just how much your child’s early experiences really matter or if the bonds that you’re building now with them will really shape who they become years down the road? Today’s guest, Dr. Alan Sroufe, has spent his career answering these very questions. Dr. Sroufe is a renowned psychologist and attachment researcher whose groundbreaking longitudinal study has provided some of the most compelling evidence on the importance of early relationships and how they influence development over a lifetime. In this episode, we’ll uncover what his decades long research has revealed about attachment resilience and our incredible capacity for growth and healing even when the odds might be stacked against us. This episode is full of eye-opening insights, really practical takeaways, and a deep sense of hope. I cannot begin to tell you what an honor it was to have this conversation with Dr. Sroufe. Now let’s dive in and learn from one of the leading voices in the science of attachment.

(02:01):

Does your child feel their emotions deeply get overwhelmed around lots of people or noise, have trouble with transitions or changes to the routine and seemingly go from zero to 60 in an instant? That might mean they have a sensitive nervous system for these kids. The standard parenting strategies that you see all over your Instagram feed or you hear your friends say, work so well for their kids might just not land or worse, they may even make sensitive kids more explosive, more emotional, or more flooded. And that’s exactly why I created Parenting By Design, my guided program for increasing behavioral and emotional regulation in sensitive kids. In it, you’ll learn how to customize your parenting approach and tailor it to suit the needs of your unique child’s brain, body and temperament, which can be the game changer you need when nothing else feels like it’s worked.

(02:52):

So how do we do this? You’ll start with eight video modules, which you’ll have lifetime access to so you can watch them whenever is most convenient for you, and you can go back anytime whenever you need a little refresher. Plus, you’ll also get a suite of handouts and cheat sheets that I’ve created specifically for parents of sensitive, spicy and strong-willed kids. And these will walk you through exactly how to tailor these strategies to fit your unique child. So if you’re ready to move beyond the parenting scripts, tricks and hacks that just don’t seem to work for your kid, then check out Parenting By Design. You can find the link in the episode description wherever you’re streaming this episode or just go to drsarahbren.com/parentingbydesign to sign up and learn more about this program. That’s drsarahbren.com/parentingbydesign.

(03:43):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(04:12):

Welcome everyone back to the securely attached podcast. It is a profound honor to be sitting with Dr. Alan Sroufe right now. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Alan (04:28):

You are very welcome. It’s my pleasure.

Dr. Sarah (04:31):

So if people are, I mean, I’ve studied your work in grad school. You are a major, major critical influence in the field of attachment research, but a lot of people who listen to this podcast are not reading journals of psychology. So if people, I was hoping we could orient people a little bit to sort of the hallmark study, this longitudinal research that you did, the Minnesota longitudinal study of risk and adaptation that really set the stage for everything else we’re going to talk about today.

Dr. Alan (05:08):

Sure. We were actually very fortunate that with the help of government funding and literally hundreds of graduate students over the years that worked on this project to be involved in probably what was the most comprehensive study of development individuals that’s ever been done. When I say it’s comprehensive, we tried to measure everything you could think of at every age. And this included by the time these children were 18 months old, we had directly them or them with their parents 11 times. There were some 250 children. And in addition to these direct observations, we had lots of interview data and testing and various formal assessments of the children. We studied not just their attachment relationships though that was the heart of our study, but temperament, cognitive development, language, peer relations, and also representational measures, drawings, projective tests, interviews with the children themselves as well as their parents.

(06:29):

So it was very comprehensive age by age by age, and we began before the children were born believing that if you want to understand development, development has a particular nature and it can be described best by saying it builds upon itself. Every phase of development is the foundation for the next phase. As one friend of mine put it, every beginning is an outcome and every outcome is a beginning and that’s the nature of development. So we believed from the start we had to be there very early and that including measuring the circumstances surrounding the families before the child was even born, the amount of stress they were under, the amount of social support they had and so forth. And we interviewed the parents before the child was born. We were there, we weren’t there, but we got ratings done by nurses in the newborn nursery. We did early infant neurological exams in the first days of life and so forth. So the study was comprehensive age by age. These individuals are now the oldest ones are 50 years old and the study…

Dr. Sarah (07:40):

Yeah, this study started in the seventies.

Dr. Alan (07:42):

It did. They were recruited in 1974 and 75 it began. Then the oldest child is now 50 that was born in.

Dr. Sarah (07:55):

And you are still following these individuals, the study is, right?

Dr. Alan (08:00):

Yes. I’m personally doing more fishing and walking and other people are doing this forward.

Dr. Sarah (08:08):

But the legacy remains. I mean, are there any studies that have followed human beings from before they were born all the way until they are now having children of their own?

Dr. Alan (08:21):

Not really. Prior to this, there were some studies that began in infancy and followed kids to adulthood but not age by age by age like we did. And their measures were cruder and in retrospect not properly aimed because the theory wasn’t available to guide what they studied. So for example, if you want to understand how children in school are dependent or aggressive, you can’t do that by asking if they were aggressive as babies or dependent as babies. They weren’t aggressive as babies because they weren’t sophisticated enough at that tender age to understand how to be deliberately hurtful to someone else. And of course they were dependent. All of them were dependent as babies. So you’re going to get nowhere with that. And so you needed an entirely different approach. And our approach was based on the premise that before there is an individual, there is a relationship and it’s that relationship and the patterning of the interactions and that relationship that are the foundation for what will become the individual. And that’s what we were able to show very powerfully.

Dr. Sarah (09:40):

Yeah, it’s so interesting because I’ll often talk about that as the blueprint. These early attachment relationships become a blueprint that we then use throughout our life to anticipate how other people are going to respond to us in the world and meet our needs or help us feel safe. And obviously as we get older and move in throughout life and throughout development, we have other interactions with other attachment relationships, peer relationships, romantic partners, all those things that edit the blueprint. But that core first writing of the blueprint, right? That’s our initial attachment relationships.

Dr. Alan (10:23):

And it almost can’t be otherwise. It’s the nature of the mind. We here in Minnesota have great expectations that the month of January will be cold. We have that expectation based on experience. We couldn’t think otherwise. You won’t find anyone here that thinks that January will be warm. Now maybe it will be.

Dr. Sarah (10:51):

Right.

Dr. Alan (10:52):

But the idea of building expectations based on your experience is part of human nature. It can’t be otherwise. And at the same time as you suggested, that does not mean that there can’t be change. We started out in this study because of where the field was 50 years ago and not actually having any evidence. That early experience mattered if you can believe that. But there just wasn’t any data that showed that was true. And there were some people writing that. It isn’t true. Life’s like a tape recorder. You just record a new recording and the first stuff is erased. We didn’t believe that. So the first question of this study was does early experience attachment and a lot of other things we measured in terms of parental support for the child, does that actually leave a lasting legacy? Yes, it does. But very quickly we moved on to the question of can there be change and is change also lawful? Can we understand and predict change following change? What happens to early experience? Our thesis was, I’ll give you some great examples of that in a second, but our thesis was even following change, early experience isn’t released isn’t a race. You now have this cumulative history and it’s all relevant. So perhaps the topic of resilience will bring us right to the heart of this. It’s been a very popular concept in psychology and in fact, every time there’s a flut or something, we hear about how resilient that community is.

(12:33):

Very popular term. It’s a very useful term, but historically it’s been defined in a rather circular way. How do you know these children are resilient? Well, they’re doing well in the face of adversity. Why are they doing well in the face of adversity? Well, because they’re resilient. That’s what I mean by circularity. It’s as though the resilience just was there some magical quality that some children simply had. We didn’t believe that. We believe that like everything else, competence, pathology, everything develops, resiliency develops. How can we show that? Well, we were able to measure resilience in two of the fundamental ways that it’s measured. One is take some aspect of adversity. In this case, we looked at life’s stress, how much stress is the family under? And we found, as had many others that when families are in high stress, there’s more behavior problems in the children.

(13:36):

But not all children in families of high stress show behavior problems. So by definition, those children are resilient. We were able to show that if you had, in addition to your measures, say in third grade, a family stress and behavior problems, if you had attachment history for example in infancy, you could predict which children and families of high stress would not ever be behavior problems and it was much more likely to be those who had secure histories. In other words, even during troubling times, some kids continue to believe that they will be okay, that things will get better, but those beliefs are their experience. They’re not something that some of us are just born with, they’re created. The other way we measured resilience is that some children who show behavior problems at a given age, let’s say between ages three and five years old, troubled preschoolers, some of them when you look in later will have remitted their problems, they’ll be doing better and some won’t.

(14:46):

So those who are doing better, you can say why are they doing better? Well, they’re resilient. Where did that come from? And again, attachment history, if you were secure in your attachment as an infant and are showing behavior problems as a 4-year-old, you are more likely to remit those problems than someone who has a less supportive developmental history. So the early experience isn’t erased. And in fact, children who had been anxiously attached and then are doing better in elementary school remain more vulnerable if they encounter subsequent stresses or challenges. It works the same way with any developmental trajectory. We trace this through lots of ages.

Dr. Sarah (15:37):

So what I’m hearing is when you get that early secure attachment, that foundational sense of I trust that the world is relatively safe for me to be in and that the adults that I care about are relatively reliably able to meet my needs, that creates a pathway for them to be resilient. But that doesn’t mean, and this is why the longitudinal study is so fascinating and important, is you could still see a securely attached infant have challenges in preschool, and if the study stopped there, you might draw the wrong conclusion, right? But because you kept following up and looking at the long-term outcomes of these individuals, you could say, okay, well they got a little bit better actually when these developmental environmental stressors kind of lifted, right? Maybe they were having a challenge adapting to this new structure of first grade, right? Sitting still at a desk was not working with them or they had a tricky relationship but the teacher or peers were distracting them, whatever it is, new sibling, all the things that throw sandbags in the boat, if you will, that can shake them up. But it’s not necessarily because there’s a problem with the attachment. Still could be a predictor of stability long-term.

Dr. Alan (17:03):

Of course it can be quite nuanced. Of course there are individuals who were secure in their attachments who have lifelong problems because stuff keeps raining down on them. But the fact is, if you do research like we did, you’re measuring the stuff that’s raining down on them and you’re accounting for the fact that those children are off path, so to speak.

(17:27):

And children who were off path and get back on the path, you can account for that also if you have the right kind of data. So children that had problems in elementary school but did not carry them into adolescence, which is not a huge group because if you’re troubled in childhood, adolescence is usually difficult, but it’s not for everybody. Some of them come back. What we found was both early support in the form of attachment and other parenting and later changes in the current circumstances, stress going down. I mean, one of the big predictors we found because we were studying a poverty sample where many of the mothers were single mothers and unsupported, oftentimes forming a stable partnership, all you’re measuring is mom formed a stable partnership, her living situation became stable or stress decrease, not even. And you’re finding that the child’s behavior problems are remitted when parental depression resolves, kids who were troubled get better. So it’s lawful and coherent. Now the thing I wanted to say, because you had a central part of what you get from attachment, but you get number one, a feeling of safety. If you are in a secure attachment, you also get that the expectation that others are resource and will respond to me. Along with that, you’re getting the expectation that my efforts will elicit the response that I need.

(19:14):

You believe in relationships, you see the value in relationships. You have positive expectations about others. You have positive expectations about yourself. You also have an understanding that this is the basic way relationships work. So we predicted very strongly which children would be empathic with other children by the empathy they themselves had experienced. So they didn’t just learn to be the person who can receive care. They learned that’s how it works. So later when I see somebody else vulnerable or hurting, my understanding of relationships is that it is my role to do something helpful, even if I’m a young child and that means go get a teacher. I’m not going to dress a wound or give stitches to another preschooler or something, but I can be concerned. I can recognize this kid is hurting and I can do something that’s helpful.

Dr. Sarah (20:14):

And I believe that my efforts have value, right? I believe I can be an agent.

Dr. Alan (20:18):

Yes. And this is how we got onto the important role of meaning because there’s an example that our book starts out with of two kids entering our nursery school and there’s music playing and kids are dancing around and having a good time and the first child that comes in goes up to somebody and asks them to dance with them and they say no, and this child goes off into a corner under a table and salts for a long time. Second child comes in and by chance went up to that same little girl asked her to dance. She said no. She skipped on over to somebody else and asked them and they said yes, and they joined the fund. Now you could say that those two children had the same experience from one point of view. They both approached this child, they both got turned down.

(21:15):

They both have the cognitive abilities as preschoolers to understand that their invitation was rejected. But from another point of view, you can say they have vastly different experience. The first child had a devastating feeling of rejection and went up. The second child perhaps didn’t even feel rejected at all. You may have thought, don’t know what’s with her today, but or just, oh, it’s no biggie. Because what’s different is how the same situation looks to each child. In a way, each child is in their own nursery school because of the meanings they brought forward. And it isn’t just from the first year of life though that was the heart of our study. We studied how parents, when their children were toddlers, how they supported and guided and provided limits for them, which is also critically important because it’s a training ground for regulation. So some kids come off to the preschool not only able to regulate themselves, but believing that they can regulate themselves and believing that if something bad happens, it can be addressed and there can be recovery.

(22:40):

And so early experience in primary relationships does a ton. People have written about how it tunes. The central nervous system actually impacts brain development true enough, how it impacts your exploratory competence. Because when you’re feeling safe, you can explore the environment more. And if you can share things with your parent and they share your joy, you’re more motivated to share discoveries and so forth. All true. But the thing that we wanted to add to that is it’s also what things mean to you is affected by your early experience. So it isn’t just that you can regulate yourself, it’s that you believe you can regulate yourself. There’s a saying who said this? Oh, some poet. They’re so good poets. Some things have to be believed to be seen as opposed to seeing is believed, believing is seeing.

Dr. Sarah (23:40):

Yeah.

Dr. Alan (23:41):

I love that. What happens when you’re a 10 or 11-year-old and you have an argument with your best friend, which by 10 and 11 many kids have this really close friendship with someone. What if you have an argument, will that make the relationship end? Well, you can look at that very different ways. You can see that in very different terms and that children with secure histories tend to have the idea that no relationships are durable. Relationships can take conflict. In fact, as one child said to us, I think you’d even be better friends after that because you’d understand each other better. This is an 11-year-old kid said this. I mean, amazing stuff. I’ll give this one more example then go back to what you want to talk about. It was this great study that our German colleagues did that I was involved with because to write it in English for an English journal, they wanted some help.

(24:40):

And one of them was a student I had trained, so I knew these people well. They showed five-year-olds a cartoon strip, three pictures. The first picture, a child’s building a tower with blocks. The second picture, another child walks by the third picture of the tower has fallen down. And you ask these old children what happened here? Those with secure histories tend to say things like, this child must have accidentally knocked down the tower. He’ll probably help them build it back up again. Kids with histories, especially of what is called avoidant attachment, tend to say this child came by and knocked that tower down. There’s nothing in the pictures that conveys hostile intent. It’s ambiguous. When situations are ambiguous especially, that’s when we all see things in terms of our constructed meaning systems. We found that over and over with all the assessments we did. Story stem completions, this little boys in the woods, he got lost. What will happen next? Or when they were older, show ’em a picture of four kids playing and another kid standing off at the side. What’s going on here? Some kids will say, well, these kids are playing and this kid came along. They’ll invite him to play and then they’ll all be friends. Some kids will say, they kicked this kid out and he’s going to go home sad. There’s nothing in the picture that tells you that.

Dr. Sarah (26:22):

Right? I wonder too, what you’re talking about makes me think of, so the more ambiguous a situation is, right, the more we have to guess. And that’s true for kids, but it’s also true for parents. And I feel like parents are finding themselves prone to guessing the internal experience of the kids a lot, especially obviously in infancy and these early years before they’re verbal, but constantly we’re guessing. And I’m curious too what your research and you’re reflecting on this idea of meaning-making from the parental standpoint what you found and how that impacts, because obviously the parents influence the children who influence. It’s this dance, right?

Dr. Alan (27:09):

And before we even go into this, because since a lot of parents have a tendency to be thinking, oh no, I’m doing this all wrong. I’m ruining my kid. First of all, one of the lessons from our work, remember these were parents born in poverty, mostly single mothers, half of them were teenagers. High stress and still approximately half the kids, slightly more than half were securely attached and about half wound up doing relatively well. And you may say, oh my God, half didn’t. But remember we’re studying parents that were against it all that weren’t supported and so forth. That means that you don’t have to be perfect at all. At all. And all my gurus, Ainsworth Bowlby, they all say the same thing, Eric Erickson, you don’t have to be perfect wincott good enough. You don’t have to be perfect. And the second thing, the kids nested within the relationship. The relationship is nested within other relationships and those are nested in a broader social support system and those are nested in our society. So there’s no finger pointing at parents. If I ever feel like pointing a finger, it’s at society and policies that are in place.

Dr. Sarah (28:32):

And I’ve even part of the findings too in terms of what were some of the predictors of change. So if you had a kid who showed up early in the study as insecurely attached, but you saw a shift in their attachment over time because attachment is actually changeable. It’s not this fixed thing, but one of the predictors, correct me if I’ve got this incorrect, was that when maternal stress went down and support surrounding the parent went up, that you would see that change. So it’s not the parent causing the insecure attachment, so to speak. It’s like it’s the constellation of all these things and when we lift up the parent, we can predict that that can impact the child.

Dr. Alan (29:16):

Absolutely. The other thing, it is true of course that our histories, our own histories impact our parenting. It’s very irritating when you find yourself doing something like your father did that you didn’t think was good, but you’re going to tend to do that because that’s the models you internalize, but you can get out front and that’s most of the intervention studies with parents are about teaching the parents to understand how their own histories impact on their perceptions of the child. The one thing I would say, especially to expecting parents is that babies are excellent teachers. Okay, here’s the prototype scenario for looking at parents reading infants. You’re face to face with the baby, you’re talking with them. Maybe they’re in their highchair, they’ve been eating, they stop eating and you’re talking with them and you’re smiling and cooing and vocalizing and doing stuff we do with babies and they’re following you back.

(30:27):

You follow their lead, they change the behavior, you change it. They do a big yawn and you do a big exaggerated yawn and eyes wide open and then they start to make some noise. You say, oh, you’re going to say something. You’re going to say you’re doing all this. The baby gets over aroused. You didn’t quite get it. So you still keep interacting and they’ll turn away. Even a six month old baby will turn away from that. That’s an easy sign to read if you understand the principles of timing, what you’re doing to the baby’s receptivity, and if you misread that well, you’ll get them crying and then you’ll say, oh, that was too much. Okay, okay, I’m sorry. They’re good teachers. This is not rocket science. It’s more complicated than rocket science in some ways, but we have it. It’s built into us.

Dr. Sarah (31:23):

Right? It’s like such a robust system. That’s our thing I think parents misunderstand about attachment is that it’s really fragile and we can damage it very easily. We have to kind of walk on eggshells to make sure that we don’t miss attune to our kid and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get it right all the time for fear that, oh, we could break their attachment security.

Dr. Alan (31:48):

Yeah, they’re going to be attached to you no matter what you do. That was one of the first findings in attachment research is people were totally confused by it. How can kids who are maltreated, why are they attached to their parents? Why do they want to go back home and so forth? They have no choice. You will be attached to whoever is there interacting with you. Now, it is good to have a lot of good quality interaction with your child, and it would be nice if we had better parental leave policies if we were as advanced as every other industrial country is, but we’re not. So parents have a challenge and all families have some tough decisions to make. Can one of us just work part-time? Can we do it with just one of us working? If you’re a single parent, boy, this is hard because you want to be able to feed your baby as well as interact with them. It can be challenging, but it’s also pretty robust.

Dr. Sarah (33:02):

And I also feel like with the parental stress piece, if you are a single parent who has to work full time and you get limited time with your baby or your child and you’re highly stressed and under supported outside of that, that’s going to make it way harder. But if you have supports and you have a way to take care of your basic needs and feel connected and supported, then when you get home from work, you can be, I always say quality is more important than quantity.

Dr. Alan (33:32):

Absolutely, absolutely. And there’s lots of data to support this. The Israeli Kum studies where the infants were taken care of in daycare centers and the parents saw ’em in the evenings and on weekends, the kids were clearly attached to the parents, even though the parents, even though they were raised by others from pretty young, and babies are attached to fathers who usually don’t interact with them as much as mothers do. Babies are attached to grandparents. They may see them once a week or so, because over time you can develop a closeness and responsivity and you can learn to read the baby and you can learn to know each other. So it is possible even for single working parents, and you’re absolutely right. The reason we measured life stress at every age, so that means dozens of times over the course of this study and social support, those were the two things that we measured well and consistently, and they always were important. Depression, we didn’t measure as often, but once we got particularly interested in psychopathology, we got very interested in parental depression as well as child and adolescent depression and very interesting, found very interesting stuff in those studies too. Kids who are depressed as teenagers often are depressed as adults, but as usual, many of them are not depressed as adults. What accounts for that? One of the main things we found was forming a stable partnership between adolescents and adulthood, but a stable partnership with a supportive partner.

(35:31):

Who was able to do that? We found those who had secure attachment infancy were more likely, even though they were depressed as teenagers were more likely to form a good partnership because again, they brought forth the meaning system that I’m having a struggle here, but I can turn to someone else. I’m worth it. I’m a valuable person. I’m not giving them a bad deal, but I can turn to them and with their support, I can get better and perhaps I’m supporting them too. One of the things we, especially some other attachment researchers have studied is in adult couples providing secure base support for your partner reciprocally is predicted by attachment history.

Dr. Sarah (36:20):

That’s so interesting. We talk about it a lot in terms of the parent child dynamic, but again, it’s like we’re just rolling through the generations. We bring all the stuff that our parents brought to how they raised us. We bring all of our own childhood experiences and lifelong experiences into parenthood. Our children activate lots of things for us that we may or may not be aware. We’re bringing into that dynamic that can form and influence our children’s meaning making systems or their blueprints, and then they’re going to keep going on to have that same stuff inform the way they approach relationships, whether it’s peer relationships, romantic relationships, and eventually potentially parenthood.

Dr. Alan (37:04):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah (37:04):

Like relationship is the common well meaning to your point, your research just meaning making is the common thread, but meaning making happens inside of the relationship.

Dr. Alan (37:15):

Absolutely. Relationships are the core context for meaning making, and that’s not just true in infancy and early childhood. That’s true forever. Forever, and it expands out. It’s very interesting and complicated to try to put together a whole history. You had these experiences with your parents early on. Then you had different experiences with your parents. Then your parents got divorced and remarried and you had different experiences with those people and you had peers and you had teachers and you had coaches, and you had mentors, and it all impacts your meaning system.

(37:57):

But again, keep in mind at every step it’s building upon what was there already. Why is there so much continuity and development? When you look at it this way? One reason is while new experiences can change my meaning system, the kind of experiences I seek, my interpretations of the experiences that I encounter and the reactions that I create from other people are all influenced by the meaning system I bring. So I go into the preschool and I don’t turn to teachers when I’m disappointed or upset. I can’t find out that they would’ve responded to me. That’s the problem in a nutshell. It isn’t that infancy scars you and leaves and is inevitably a crippling experience or something. It’s that it starts you on a pathway and it’s a way of engaging the world that tends to be self perpetuating. Unless your family changes or you encounter a preschool teacher or a therapist or a coach or somebody else, that doesn’t react to you the way your system suggests. So our preschool teachers, sweet people that they were, when they saw a kid go off by himself under the table, they would’ve gone over there. They would’ve recognized that. They would’ve understood. There’s a child that is not able to come to me with disappointment. I’ve got to be more alert to when that child is disappointed or upset, he’s not going to show it to me.

Dr. Sarah (39:43):

So that’s an example of an adult, in this case, a teacher, not a parent, but an adult and a caregiver adapting and adjusting their strategy to be responsive to the unique individual things that that child is showing them.

Dr. Alan (39:57):

A hundred percent. Who do you think gets time out in kindergarten?

Dr. Sarah (40:02):

The kids who need the most connection?

Dr. Alan (40:05):

Well, yeah. Kids that have been chronically emotionally rejected. We were able to show that in detail and keep in mind these are well-trained nursery school teachers and still even I myself, I couldn’t believe it. I’m in an observation booth or in a nursery school with a camera. I’m not able to do any rating or anything of kids. I knew too much about them, but I could be in there and watch them, and I saw a kid once pick up a firetruck and hit another little kid over the head with it, and I just about lost it. I wanted to go, and then I thought, what am I doing? First of all, wasn’t my business. I called a teacher’s attention to it, but secondly, what you say that is completely unacceptable, but you don’t fly off the handle and rage.

Dr. Sarah (40:58):

What do we do? Because I know parents are listening and they’re like, my kid threw a firetruck. I had another kid on a play date in front of me. What do I do in that situation to hold a boundary that is firm and clear and warm that supports that sense of attachment, security, and I see you, I’m going to help you here.

Dr. Alan (41:21):

I don’t know that you have to expect yourself to be warm in that.

Dr. Sarah (41:26):

Okay. Perfect.

Dr. Alan (41:27):

You have to expect yourself to not lose control. It’s not easy. And of course, again, if you lose control once in a while, nobody dies. It’s what happens most of the time.

(41:41):

What I encourage teachers to do with that kid that needs time out, of course, this is in my ideal preschool, which we had, is an aide goes with the kid, takes him across to another room, sits down and says, you’re not ready to be in there with the other kids right now. I’m just going to sit there until you’re ready to be with the other children. You let me know when you’re ready. You don’t play with them. It’s not fun and games. You’re not rewarding them, but you’re communicating. That’s not acceptable. You’re also communicating. Doesn’t matter what you do, you’re not going to be isolated here. It’s tough.

Dr. Sarah (42:19):

It is. But what I also see a lot of parents do, obviously I’ve been the mom who flies off the handle and was like, you can’t do that. What? You’re going to hurt somebody? I freak out. Right? I’ve also been the mom who will do the sort of time in that you described, but the whole time I’ll be like, I think you were so mad, and I understand to do a lot of talking and a lot of, and sometimes I find that when I do that, I’m actually overstimulating my kid that’s already kind of…

Dr. Alan (42:51):

They’ll show you, right? They’ll let you know that that’s not taking. It is the case that Marion Niro a long time ago, the great work on empathy and what parents do to promote empathy, and it was true that one of the critical ingredients besides being empathic and nurturing the child, which is modeling empathy when a child does something inappropriate, especially if they something hurtful to someone stating very clearly that that was inappropriate and why that was hurtful to the other child, not make a big lecture out of it, a couple of sentences will do, but she found that’s very important for helping children become empathic. They got a lot to learn. Little kids, holy cow, trying to look at the world through their eyes sometime and like with preschoolers trying to interact with another preschooler, neither of them know how to do it.

Dr. Sarah (43:58):

Yeah, it could get messy real fast.

Dr. Alan (44:02):

Yeah. Bless their hearts. As my aunt Ruby would say, they’re in there, they’re hanging in there, and it’s such critical learning they’re doing. If they can hang in there and those with secure histories, of course have an easier time at it, and those in good nursery schools have an easier time at it. If they can hang in there, they’ll be set up for forming these friendships and middle childhood when they go off there because they’ll be able to stay with an interaction even when it gets tough. That’s what you learn in preschool. That’s one of the main things you learn. We think they’re learning the ABCs and stuff, and that’s fine, but the main thing they’re learning is how to do an interaction with another person that’s not very good at it and have the sticktoitiveness to do it.

Dr. Sarah (44:51):

Yeah. How do we support that in kids? We’ve been talking about meaning making and how, well, some of it’s just this, we are biologically, developmentally we’re going to try to make meaning that’s just super innate for us, but as parents, can we help shape the way our children make? Meaning obviously through the secure attachment relationship and modeling these things, but do we look at our own? How much does parental awareness of how we make meaning and project that onto our kids? What are things parents can do or keep in mind to support that?

Dr. Alan (45:31):

I think that’s helpful, especially what you just said, especially if you had a malevolent child with yourself, which I can freely say that was true for me. You’ve got more work to do to understand what things ring your bells and so forth, and if you have a partner, it’d be nice to have a relationship such that your partner can comment on when they see you get hooked by something or see you intervening too much. Sometimes you just have to let the kid wrestle with the thing for a bit and wait for them to turn to you to ask for help and give the help.

(46:15):

Especially we who are educated want to do things that our kid, we want to stimulate their brains and do stuff and prepare them for college when they’re three, so that’s one thing. Parents do these things all the time. Arranging play dates, getting together with another parent and the two children together. We did this in our intervention study here. We promoted relationships between two of the parents we were intervening with. We’d pick up one parent and child and take ’em to the home of the other parent and child one week and the next week we’d do the reverse until they got into the swing of it. We’ve helped them with transportation if they needed it because, so now you have, instead of just a single mom, you have a little community working on these things and maybe lots of the intervention studies use video feedback and it’s real helpful to parents to see, oh boy, I didn’t know I was even doing that. Now, not all parents are in a position to do that, but that’s where the other person comes in.

Dr. Sarah (47:34):

But I also wonder, because I work with couples a lot in parenting specifically, where I’ll be seeing a mom and a dad whose child is having a tough time with regulating their behaviors, regulating their affect, having trouble with peers or in school, and a lot of times I’m working with supporting the parents to support the kid, but I’m also trying to help the parents to support each other, and I know even just as if I’m getting triggered by my kid and my husband is like, you’re getting triggered by them. I’m going to be triggered by him, but outside of the moment.

Dr. Alan (48:13):

Timing is everything.

Dr. Sarah (48:14):

Yes. Can you talk about timing? I think that’s really important here.

Dr. Alan (48:19):

Yeah. I’m not suggesting the partner necessarily tell you right at that moment unless, well, they’re going to get trouble. If they do, it’s often better the next day. There’s just a tremendously great film that I hope you could find somewhere. It’s real old. It was called When the Bowel Breaks. That’s like from an old nurse realm. Have you heard of this movie?

Dr. Sarah (48:45):

I think so. Canada. That sounds really familiar.

Dr. Alan (48:48):

It’s made in Canada and it’s this couple, the Mus who do intervention with parents, and they are so gentle in their feedback.

(48:59):

I wonder what you think he might do if you allowed him to just play with that toy by himself for a minute kind of interventions, and then sometimes the next day they talk to them or they show them a film. You say, you see this here. I wonder what he was trying to tell you when he turned his head away there. Do you think maybe he needed a break? Is that Oh, yeah. I think you’re right. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think he needed a break there. That’s a good thing. You’re learning this. That’s good. Anyway, it’s a great movie.

Dr. Sarah (49:35):

Yeah, I mean that’s a great, but again, it speaks to this idea that when we have these abilities to have communication with our partners that’s trusting and we have this belief like, okay, I can get corrected by my partner and still seen as a competent parent because there’s this mutual respect that we both have for one another. Sure.

Dr. Alan (49:57):

You work that out ahead of time. You have that as an agreement. You’re going to do that with each other for each other. You can even set aside times where you review it.

Dr. Sarah (50:06):

Yeah. I think this is a big part of your work and what you’ve put out into the world and all of your research is that all the relationships happening around a child are important to pay attention to.

Dr. Alan (50:23):

It’s the crucible. Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (50:27):

Yeah. It’s a very complex web and that in a way that can be overwhelming, but I also think in a lot of ways that’s kind of relieving because it’s like, oh, there’s all these different places for my child to develop the benefits of these secure attachments. It’s not all on me.

Dr. Alan (50:49):

It’s definitely true.

Dr. Sarah (50:53):

If people want to learn more about your work and they want to read this new book that you’re writing or any of your other books, how can they find your work? How can they get connected to you?

Dr. Alan (51:07):

The books are probably the easiest thing. The journal articles have to be written in obscure language. It’s kind of a rule, and that’s the reason for the books, and I think the two that would be most interesting and useful to parents, one is called A Compelling Idea, and that was published about five years ago, and the best place to get that because it’s the least expensive, is from the Safer Society Foundation. They’re the publishers and they’re a nonprofit abuse prevention foundation. They’re great, and you get that book from them and it will tell parents a lot about how to negotiate things. And then this current book also would be really useful. It will be published in about May of 2025.

Dr. Sarah (52:02):

Amazing. I cannot wait. I already got to get a sneak peek and I loved every bit of it, so I can’t wait for other parents to get a chance to read it. It is, I mean, I think as a therapist it’s really helpful, but I think it’s very accessible for parents as well.

Dr. Alan (52:22):

I think it’s a better book for therapists than the preceding one was the compelling idea, although I don’t know, it was kind of a semi memoir because I did that for two reasons. One is we have to protect the identity of the people we studied, so I have to always obscure details and I can’t say the whole thing ever because then, but I could talk about my own life and struggles and therapy and stuff and not worry about that because I’m old, so I don’t care anymore. And the other thing was people always are worried that we’re saying attachment is destiny, and I fully believe I was anxiously attached, and I also believe I am relatively sane at this point and functional, and I think there are reasons for that, and the reasons are subsequent relationships, and even stuff that I learned from my parents as they aged, grew some and so forth, so I could do that in this book. And at the same time, it also gives the whole history of the project, how we started and the discoveries along the way and stuff.

Dr. Sarah (53:41):

Yeah. I feel like if people take away one thing from, I mean, there’s so many things I want people to take away from this conversation, but if they’re going to take away one, I am curious what yours would be, but for me it’s like there is just as we can predict a lot of outcomes from early attachment security that we can predictably identify the things that will shift that into a better place. There’s so much hope, there’s so much capacity for systems and relationships to improve. You are never SOL.

Dr. Alan (54:21):

Definitely true. I’ll tell you one other thing I would wish all parents to know. Yes. The purpose of life is to find meaning. That’s the preeminent human motive. Find meaning in your life. There’s nothing more meaningful than being a parent and enjoy the ride. As they say, the days are long and the years go fast.

Dr. Sarah (54:47):

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. I loved it.

Dr. Alan (54:52):

My pleasure, really.

Dr. Sarah (54:59):

Thanks so much for listening. If you are interested in learning more about attachment science, check out my free guide, the Four Pillars of Fostering Secure Attachment. In this guide, I teach you how to use the principles of attachment science to help you parent with attunement and trust by focusing on four simple things. You can work towards helping your child form a secure attachment bond, which is a predictor of so many positive aspects of mental health, including self-esteem, independence, healthier relationships with others throughout their lifespan, better academic and workplace achievement, and lower reported instances of anxiety and depression, not a small list. So to download this free guide and learn the four pillars of fostering secure attachment, go to drsarahbren.com/secure. That’s drsarahbren.com/secure. And until next time, don’t be a stranger.

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And I’m so glad you’re here!

I’m a licensed clinical psychologist and mom of two.

I love helping parents understand the building blocks of child development and how secure relationships form and thrive. Because when parents find their inner confidence, they can respond to any parenting problem that comes along and raise kids who are healthy, resilient, and kind.

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