416. A deep dive into strengthening your child’s attachment as they grow: What children need from us at every stage of development

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:00):

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Securely Attached. So for those of you who are new here, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren. I’m a clinical psychologist and mom of two and I specialize in child development and parenting support. And on this podcast, I take all of my clinical experience along with the insights I’ve gained through my own parenting journey and I distill everything down into practical, realistic guidance that you can actually use in your day-to-day life. And today we’re going to be doing a deep dive into something that really sits at the heart of so much about what we talk about here, which is how to build and maintain a secure relationship with your child, not just in one moment or one phase, but across development. Because one of the things that I think can feel really confusing in parenting is that what works at one stage suddenly stops working at the next.

(00:54):

So you finally feel like you’ve gotten your footing and then your child shifts their needs change and you are often left trying to figure out how to adapt right alongside them. So what I want to do in this episode is really zoom out and give you a framework for understanding how your role as a parent evolves over time and how to stay really anchored in the relationship even as everything else, especially our child is changing. So before we get into that, I want to briefly ground us in two ideas that are going to be woven throughout this conversation. And the first is this idea of being a secure base. So at its core, being a secure base means that we as a parent are able to be a reliable source of comfort, safety and connection for our child. And when a child feels secure in that relationship, they know that this secure base is going to be there when they look up or when they need to refuel or reconnect.

(02:00):

They are actually, because of that knowledge that I can rely on this secure base to be here, it actually gives our kids the confidence to go out away from us, to explore, to take risks and to engage with the world because they know that they can come back to us when they need to reconnect or refuel or be soothed. So that’s a really important functional element to attachment is that the parent is able to take on this role of the secure base. Okay. The second concept is atunement. Attunement is our ability as a parent to notice what’s going on for our child. What cues are we picking up? They can be very explicit cues. They could be really subtle, implicit cues, but we are able to notice those cues, to tune in to those cues and not just notice them but make sense of them to decode those cues, to extract from them some sense of information and action on our part that then we are able to use that information to respond to our child in a way that meets their need in that moment.

(03:22):

Not perfectly, not making them happy all the time, but meets their need, need for safety, need for comfort, need for security, need for their core basic needs to be met. And we don’t have to do this perfectly either. We just need to be consistent enough over time that our kid feels seen, safe, and supported by us in a way that they can rely on that. It doesn’t mean they will receive it every time they need it. It just means that they have internalized us as a steady and reliable source of that need meeting. And if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you’ve definitely heard me talk about both of these concepts in a lot more depth. And if you want to hear more about these specific topics about secure base and attunement, I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to link some episodes in the show notes that go much more into detail about both of these things.

(04:27):

But in this episode, what we’re really going to focus on is how these two principles show up differently depending on where our child is developmentally.

(04:40):

So to do that, to sort of map our kids’ development across their lifespan and sort of track how our role as a parent, our role as being their secure base and our ability to attune to them and what we are attuning to is going to evolve as our kid gets older. So we’re going to do this by mapping these kind of core needs and core tasks of parenthood, core needs of our child and core tasks with parenthood, onto a framework that’s based off of Eric Erickson’s stages of psychosocial development. Erik Erikson was a psychoanalyst and developmental theorist who identified eight core stages of psychosocial development that we all move through across our lifespan. He’s a very, very pivotal figure in developmental psychology. Everyone that goes to grad school to become a psychologist is going to take a developmental child class and they are going to learn about Erik Erikson’s 8 stages of psychosocial development.

(05:47):

And in each of these stages, there is kind of this primary developmental conflict or tension that we must learn to navigate and integrate in order to continue developing this healthy sense of self and a healthy relationship to others and to sort of move through these stages. And each stage really asks us to contend with a different developmental task and each stage builds upon the ones before it, creating a complex but interconnected evolution of our identity, our relationships and our sense of self as we get older. And what’s particularly useful about Erikson’s framework for parents and why I really liked it for the focus of this conversation is that each developmental task that a child is moving through shifts what that child needs from us, their parents or their secure base from a relational standpoint. So there are eight stages in total. They span infancy through older adulthood all the way to the very end of life.

(07:04):

But for the purposes of this conversation, we’re primarily going to focus on the stages most relevant to parenting and child development. So we’re going to talk about the first seven … Well, the first six stages and then we’re going to talk about the seventh stage because as parents, we’re in that stage probably.

(07:21):

Okay. So in the earliest stage, which is an infancy, it’s really this core developmental conflict or tension that we’re navigating and trying to integrate is trust versus mistrust. And we’re going to talk in depth about what each of these tasks, what kind of navigating these tasks results in, like what it really looks like, but I’m just going to list them all out first and then we’ll go into them. But infancy, it’s about trust versus mistrust. As toddlers, it shifts into being about autonomy versus feeling shame and doubt. Then in the third stage, which is the preschool years, the task and the conflict is really around initiative versus guilt. Then as kids move into the fourth stage, which is in the school age years, we’re looking at a conflict around industry versus inferiority and then from there we move into adolescence and the focus here really turns to identity versus role confusion.

(08:27):

Then into young adulthood, the conflict is really around intimacy versus isolation. And then we’re going to end our talk with touching a little bit on the seventh stage, which is midlife and this task, the kind of core conflict there is around generativity versus stagnation. And the reason why I want to tie this one is because that’s really where many of us as parents are sitting right now because development does not end with our children. We are also in our own stage of development. And so understanding how our own developmental needs and tasks and conflicts inform how we show up in the world and how we see ourself and how we relate to our children and other people in our life is also really useful and so I didn’t want to leave that out. Now, importantly, this isn’t class. This is not about memorizing stages. No one’s going to get a quiz at the end.

(09:24):

It’s not also about getting any of this exactly right. It’s really about understanding that what is driving your child’s needs at each stage can really help inform how we as parents can show up in a way that is going to support and strengthen our secure relationship with our child by allowing us to be attuned and to be the secure bas that that developmental stag really needs us to be. So with that in mind, let’s start by talking a little bit more in depth about the first stage of development. So in stage on it’s termed trust versus mistrust, and this is intimacy. So the core developmental task for a child to sort of … They have to navigate trust versus mistrust. It happens in the first year of life and this core question that this baby is grappling with is, can I rely on the world to meet my needs?

(10:28):

Their core developmental task is to establish a basic sense of trust that the environment and very crucially people in it will be consistent, reliable, and nurturing. And so we as parents, like what is our job? If we want to work on attunement, if we know attunement is one of the most direct paths towards being that secure base for our kid, we have to think about if this is our child’s task, what’s our job in this task in supporting this task for them? And if their job is to determine, will people in my life meet my needs, then guess what? We’re that person in infancy and our job to be effectively attuned to our child is to respond to our infant’s needs reliably and predictably most of the time. Again, I can’t say it enough, good enough. Good enough parenting is optimal.

(11:33):

It’s not a second place. It is the gold standard. We cannot get it right all the time. We’re not supposed to be able to get it right all the time. It’s a north star, right? Being responsive and predictable and soothing allows our child to internalize that we are trustworthy and the world is safe and they feel secure enough to explore because they know that we’re this reliable space for them, but we are going to misatune. Actually, misattunement is really important in attachment because when we misatune, so let’s say our child is crying because they’re cold and we give them a bottle, that’s a misattunement, right? We misread the cues. We didn’t meet their need. When they need to burp and we swaddle them and sing them a lullaby. They can’t tell us what they need. They can only show us and they’re not that great at communicating at this stage.

(12:41):

We do a lot of guessing in infancy. If we had to get it right in order to have a secure attachment with our kids, we wouldn’t be doing very well. So the whole point is that we want to be aiming for attunement, but we don’t have to get it right all the time. And so when we misattune, it’s actually kind of the building block of this first initial kind of aha moment for the child. It’s usually pretty unconscious in infancy, but there’s this budding beginnings of this sense of, “Oh, you’re you, I’m me. ” Because when a baby’s born, they’re completely merged. They blend where they end and where the parent begins. But when we slowly misattune an appropriate amount of times with our kid, this inevitable misattunement, it’s like how they start to know, “Oh wait, we’re not one being. I have this need and you’re not meeting it.

(13:40):

” It’s different than when they’re in the womb and like every need is immediately instantly met. It’s that space between you and me, that’s what misattunements create and that space actually becomes the relational field. So our misattunements to our child is actually what allows our child to start to understand that they are them, we are us, there is a separateness between us and we are in relationship with another person. And that’s beautiful. That’s such an important part of development. So our misattunements in this stage create the budding beginnings of the concept of relationship. So I always think that’s very validating to parents who are worried about messing up. So our goal in this moment is to help build our child’s capacity to trust. That’s what parental atunement at this stage of development looks like. Let’s move on to the second stage of development, which is autonomy versus shame and doubt.

(14:45):

This is in the toddlerhood stage around ages one to three. And the really big core developmental task here for the child is for increasing independence as they learn that they’re capable of doing more things themselves. They have this emerging desire for independence. They’re really learning that they can and can’t do certain things by themselves. They are learning to walk, they’re learning to talk, they’re learning to choose and say no. And this core question that they are really going to be grappling with during this stage of development is, can I be my own person and still be accepted? Can I be my own person and still be loved? An attunement for the parents at this stage is about balancing encouragement with being that safe container. So that’s that relationship that think of like this invisible thread, this invisible string between our child. In infancy, it’s not that long.

(15:38):

In toddlerhood, it’s going to get a little longer. We want to create this balance between allowing them to try things for themselves, feed themselves, get dressed themselves probably quite unsuccessfully explore the world, see what happens when I drop my plate on the floor within reason. It might be that we say dinner’s over, right? That’s them learning where the boundaries are, where the edges are. But attunement in this stage looks like giving them enough space to try, but not so much space that they feel abandoned or that they feel so frustrated or they create so much failure that they feel like they can’t do it because when they do fail, because they’re going to, we want to help them kind of feel like it’s okay to try. It’s okay to make mistakes. And again, I really want to reassure all the parents here that we don’t need to do this perfectly.

(16:50):

The stage is called autonomy versus shame and doubt. And this idea is like being attuned means we want to help them build autonomy while also staving off shame and doubt. So being reassuring, being supportive, scaffolding things to help them maybe get them closer to the finish line and let them cross it themselves, setting them up for success. But there are going to be times when we might shame our kid inadvertently or on purpose. Sometimes we get hot, we lose it and we cause them to feel ashamed. We’re going to miss the mark. That’s okay. We can always repair and these moments of repair really actually deepen our ability to help our child kind of build this core sense of secure attachment with us.

(17:42):

Repair is a very important part of parenthood and actually a really important part of attachment. So let’s move on to the third stage of development, which is initiative versus guilt. This is in preschool, the preschool early childhood years around ages three to five. And the core developmental task at this stage of life is to really develop a sense of initiative by exploring, creating and expressing ideas through play and interaction. And the core question a child is going to be really grappling with at this stage of development is why does the world work the way it does? They are super eager to plan, play, imagine, ask questions, assert themselves. They’re going to ask why constantly. And attunement here for us is really about encouraging curiosity and imaginative play while creating an environment where the child’s ideas are met with interest and validation. Again, this string, this invisible string between us and our child’s getting longer.

(18:54):

It’s going to tie itself into some knots as they’re building a giant fort that collapses. I think here we run into one of the biggest challenges I think with parenting in our current society and our current state of things because this is where in the first two stages of development, we’re really parenting in this beautifully closed system. It’s like we’re at home, maybe we’re just outside of our bubble, maybe we’re interacting with like nursery schools or like nannies, but like for the most part, the world is still so small. At this stage, preschool, early childhood, not only is our kid interacting more with the world, but we as parents are interacting more with the world. And that also means we are internalizing, we are soaking up a lot more pressure, fear of judgment, fear of failure. And I also think this can lead to a time in kids’ lives and parents’ lives because we are so busy. We are booked and busy and our kids are booked and busy and we’re living in a time where kids are really, they’re highly scheduled and school can be really structured and really like more and more it’s this pull towards kindergarten is a new first grade and putting a lot of developmentally kind of advanced pressure on kids to having more quote productive time and actually less time for this open-ended exploration of the world, this play, this boredom, this unstructured white spac.

(20:44):

And so I think that not only is our sort of task in this period of time to encourage curiosity and imaginative play with our kids, but we also have to create this environment that is conducive to that. And sometimes that means kind of pushing up against some of the societal expectations or the perceived pressures maybe to have all this enrichment and extracurriculars and so many classes and protect a little bit more of the white space, of the downtime, of the being bored. We have to become a bit of a gatekeeper for the white space for kids at this age because it’s a really fundamental, developmental task that they have to grapple with, which is, how do I experiment with the world?

(21:36):

It doesn’t need to be elaborate at all, right? It can look like letting them choose the walking path to the playground. It could look like them just inventing a game that makes absolutely no sense and just kind of being in it for the ride, even if it’s not … We don’t need to correct the creative process even if we don’t follow it. Maybe allowing them to just kind of make a snack on their own, make a mess, giving them open-ended play with less product and outcome focus, but more process and really creating some protected space for time that’s like want nothing time, child-led play that’s just where we’re just following their lead because really the task at this stage for our kid is for them to be able to learn, my ideas matter. I can create, I can initiate and my parents are interested in what I have to say and do.

(22:44):

There’s so many things about parenting that are amazing. There’s so many things about parenting that are legitimately challenging, but as our kids interface with the world more, it is that much more challenging. We have more that we are trying to mitigate as parents as we play this dance with how long is this string getting and finding that sweet spot of how far can I let my kid go before they’re going to need me to come in as their secure base. Let’s talk a little bit about the next stage, stage four, which is industry and inferiority. This is school-aged kids, this is around ages like five to 12-ish. Their core developmental task is striving to master skills, feel competent and be recognized for their accomplishments. And one of their big kind of developmental questions here is, can I do things well? Can I achieve? Am I competent?

(23:41):

And there’s a very big pivot for parents at this phase. Our attunement task at this phase is really about fostering a growth mindset and allowing for imperfection. But up until now, like we said, that string has been relatively small. It might in the last stage have expanded outside of our home into school, but from a developmental sort of what is my child’s core attention on, who is the person I’m tracking when I think about my secure base, who is it? Our kids are so laser focused on us up until the first three stages, like we’re their world, which kind of makes parenting on some level a little bit simpler because we don’t have to contend for our kids kind of not just their conscious focus, but like their entire system’s focused. They’re always tracking us. So our influence is strong, our sway is strong. If we shift, they shift, which can be really helpful.

(25:04):

When our kids get to this age, their attention is going to start to move outward, away from us towards peers, towards school, sports, their own interests, their world outside of the home. They’re still really rooted in the family system. They’re super rooted in the secure base, but their sphere is expanding and so our sphere of influence shifts a little bit too. And this is tough for parents. This is tough because a lot of the things that used to work don’t work so well anymore. Our ability to kind of get our child on board with something they don’t want to do or stretch their distress tolerance or stretch their frustration tolerance or help them kind of like push outside of their comfort zone. It’s harder for us to get that kind of buy-in as a parent at these ages. We’re not at the adolescent stage where they’re just completely like, boom, bursting out of that sphere of influence and like off for the races, but we need to expand the sphere a good amount.

(26:13):

We need to allow them room to like orient outward and play a little further afield, but while they’re still kind of with us, it’s like a tricky duality to hold as a parent at this stage of development. And I think there’s also some core challenges that emerge in parenthood at this time. One is that kids really do begin valuing peer approval so much more at this stage. And so as parents, we can start to feel a bit sidelined, but I think it’s really important to remember our goal is to compete with peers. Our goal is to just stay that secure base and while allowing this outward orientation. I think we have to remember that even though our kids looking away towards peer, they’re still super in our sphere of influence. And so being that kind of confident sort of trust, like our trust in our authority in this moment and our capacity to influence our kids and like they need to look away, but they’re still with us.

(27:25):

We’re holding the frame, we’re the container, we’re the source of safety still. I think that’s very important for us to remember because sometimes we can think, “Ooh, they’ve already exited.” And then we sort of stop trying to be the secure base, but that’s a little premature. We got to kind of let them live in this gray space of, “I want to feel like I don’t need my mom and dad, but we’re right there and we could be there quietly, a little quieter. Another really core challenge that comes up at this stage of development for kids is there’s a lot of … It’s where perfectionism can really start to kind of come on to play because they are really looking outward and their goal, remember this core developmental task is to really try to feel competent and to master skills and be recognized for their accomplishments.

(28:23):

That’s totally developmentally normal. It’s very, very healthy, but it can sometimes create a bit of like a laser focus on like, ” Am I doing it right? Am I getting it right? Tell me I’m getting it right. Please reassure me I’m getting it right. “And when we kind of play into that feedback loop a little too much, it can kind of like serve to maintain that narrow focus and their focus is going to narrow by itself. We want to be the stretcher of the Zoom out. So here is where this growth mindset work for parents really is important. We want to support them, we want to help them, we want to guide them. We also really want to let them cross the finish line themselves, even if that means like the homework’s wrong or they get a bad grade or they don’t get it right.

(29:13):

And this can feel super difficult in a culture that really pressures both parents and kids to like have this really intense achievement pressure. Sometimes it can be very valuable to sit on our hands and just sit and quiet for a little bit like when our kids are seeking a lot of reassurance or they want us to help them correct things and make it perfect to just sort of validate the feeling like, ” Oh, it’s really hard. You really want it to be so you have this idea in your head and it’s not coming out the way you want it to and it’s very frustrating and I get that. And I know you could handle this. Let’s see what you do come up with So validating the effort, validating the process, helping them to build this growth mindset that failure is not bad and learning from mistakes is so valuable.That’s a big challenge I think because it does butt up against some of the internalized pressures that we as parents have and our kids certainly have as well to be high achieving.

(30:28):

And we can sometimes say things that like the process is more important than the outcome, but we’re always checking the outcome or we’re feeling a lot of pressure that they get the great grade or they … It’s about finding balance. It’s not about saying it doesn’t matter, but it’s also because it might, but it’s also about saying putting it in relativity. How much does this matter and can we stretch our distress tolerance and capacity to handle a little bit of failure and figuring it out and mess? We want to let things be imperfect and have mistakes and have struggle.

(31:14):

One thing I will often sort of say to families is when we focus, really focus on achievement, it can backfire. When we actually, if we focus instead of an achievement but on helping our child figure out what their ideas are, what their interests are, following their thread of ideas, kind of working on their capacity for self-actualization rather than achievement in and of itself. The reality is when we support our child’s capacity for self-actualization, achievement almost always follows. But when we focus on achievement, that may or may not lead to self-actualization and that actually is really more important. At the end of the day, we just really want our kids to be able to know who they are, know what interests them, construct their own ideas, build upon those ideas, even if those things aren’t productive or impressive or going to get a particular accolade.

(32:29):

It’s tricky because I think there is a tremendous amount of deconditioning we have to be willing to do at this stage as parents because we’ve probably all grew up in to some degree some of this sort of toxic achievement culture. And I want to be very clear, I’m not saying that achievement is toxic, but if we want to support achievement, that’s usually the byproduct of this stage of really helping them figure out how to have this connection with industriousness versus achievement. One more important challenge that comes from this stage to stage four, because they are starting to orient more towards peers at this stage, this is when comparison, especially social comparisons, just to really come up big for kids. And so this can be another kind of core challenge that happens in parenthood is how do I help my kids navigate this constant comparing? Again, their tendency to compare themselves to others at this stage of development is totally healthy and developmentally appropriate, but so comparison and of itself is not a problem, but we have to give children the tools that fit this stage versus like right now kids this age are using tools to compare themselves to others that are developmentally far more advanced than the stage that they are at.

(34:03):

And I want to be very clear, like zero judgment, zero shame we are all learning and it’s tricky right now. Kids are having access to things like social media at younger and younger ages. And so I just say this because I want parents to think about how certain access to certain things maps onto their developmental readiness for things. And because kids of this age, we’re talking about five to 12 and obviously I think five, we can say there’s a prety big difference between a five year old and 12 year old, but a lot of 12 year olds have access to social media. And the reality is because we know their orientation towards peers is going to lead to a lot of comparison, we want to be mindful of what they’re using as a mechanism for comparing themselves, right? Are they comparing themselves to kids in their class?

(34:59):

Are they comparing themselves to kids at the playground, to kids on their sports team and using that information to kind of understand who they are in relation to their peers. That’s self development, that’s okay. But if they’re using these tools to compare themselves to like filtered faces and tween fluencers, it can be way too intense for their capacity developmentally in this moment to make sense of who they are and how their sense of self stands up to these sort of artificial or really kind of like exaggerated sources of self comparison.

(35:43):

But yeah, I think social media during this developmental window in particular is just a little bit pernicious. It’s not developed for these kids and we certainly can’t control all the things that they have access to in this world, but we can be intentional and it might make sense to try to walk it back or if it’s already, it’s hard to put the cat back in the bag. But if you have already, if your kid is already experimenting on social media, then it’s really important to give them the tools to understand how do I know when I’m looking at something that’s real, how do I know when I’m looking at something that’s been filtered? How do I know when I’m looking at something that’s kind of amplified or hyped up or it’s a highlight reel? We want them to be sort of educated consumers of social media content too.

(36:36):

So if they already have access to it, that’s okay. We can give them the tools to be critical thinkers there because that’s a good protective factor as well. Okay, let’s go to stage five, identity and role confusion and this is the stage in adolescence and the core developmental task here is to really experiment with their roles, their beliefs and their sense of identity. The really core question that they’re going to be grappling with in this stage of development is, who am I? And this stage requires parents to really shift our approach to being that secure base, to being that attuned caregiver because it really requires us balancing guidance with a lot more respect for their autonomy. That string is getting really stretched at this point and there’s going to be some things that are developmentally appropriate for kids at this age that can feel really challenging for parents, but we really, our attunement task is going to be to sort of allow our teens to question, to try new things and sometimes disagree with us while still offering a safe place to return.

(37:51):

Our ability to say, “You can go, you could make big mistakes. I can even be really disappointed in you, really, really mad at you, but I’m not going anywhere. The door is always open to come back.” That is super hard with teens because teens do stuff. That’s really hard to stay kind of that steady, secure base for them because they do things that are highly triggering to us. So let’s talk a little bit about some core challenges that come up for parents during this stage that challenge our ability to be that attuned secure base. And the biggest on is the emotional volatility that comes with adolescence. And it’s really, again, it’s developmentally healthy, it’s developmentally appropriate, but it can feel really overwhelming as a parent. Your kid can totally suddenly feel like Jekyll and Hyde. You don’t know which kid you’re getting. We can really personalize that.

(38:48):

We could take it as a rejection. We can fear it’s a personality flaw in our child or it could even start to really make us fear that something’s terribly wrong, but the reality is like at this stage of development, that emotional volatility is really driven by the hormonal and neurological changes that are happening in our kids’ body. Remember back in toddlerhood there’s a little bit of that because their prefrontal cortex is just kind of coming online and it stabilizes a little bit in middle childhood, but in adolescence it’s like this huge reorganization of things again and their brains and their nervous system and their biochemistry is like massively under construction again during this time. So they are going to show up in like strange, inconsistent and super intense ways and it can make it really genuinely difficult to feel connected to our kids when they’re showing up in the Jekyll versions.

(39:54):

I say this because one of the biggest challenges in parenthood is to navigate this time and it’s a time where like we really need to give ourselves a lot of grace and we also need to give our kids a lot of grace. It’s helpful to remember like this is temporary, this does not last forever and sort of like depersonalize a lot of it and say like, when we could say, “Okay, the hormones are raging right now, maybe this is lava, maybe this is not something I need to take literally, it can help us kind of get some space between that intense volatility. Another really core challenge that hits at this stage is that this developmental task causes adolescents to really push for agency and autonomy in a way that we’ve not yet seen in this developmental trajectory yet. It can feel deeply threatening to our authority and the thing is the stakes feel a lot higher now than when we had our like toddlers pushing back about their autonomy because these kids have way more access to the world.

(41:06):

They have way more access to risk. They have lower inhibition. They have diminished planning capacity because again, their thinking brain, their executive functioning skills are totally under construction so they’re so much more impulsive. They have their perspective taking, their risk management, all that stuff is really kind of like it’s not great at this stage, but it’s actually worse than it was at the previous stage because there’s so much cognitive development that the parts of their brain required for making these sort of more careful, thoughtful, organized decisions. It’s impaired because of the reorganization. It’s like when you’re driving through a construction zone, it gets better, but it gets worse before it gets better. And also they have a super false sense of omnipotence during this time. They’re super egocentric. It’s like toddlerhood, but just like on steroids. And so because of that, very understandably, parents are a lot more stressed about the decisions our kids are making and how comfortable we are with letting this string be as long as it now feels.

(42:18):

And when we feel stressed and when we feel like our authority is being challenged and threatened, we can really go to this very rigid authoritarian black and white place as parents because basically we feel out of control. So we trying to really grab control with our closed fists, like tight. But here’s the really tricky part. When teens feel that rigidity coming from us, they’re going to escalate too and then we get locked into these super intense power struggles. And so what’s super counterintuitive is that when we feel our authorities threatened, we want to clamp down harder, but actually what usually helps more is to zoom out and work on building more connection with our teen. And this is tricky too because our adolescents just naturally spend less time with us. Remember we were talking how at an earlier stage, like our kids are oriented out, but they’re still totally inside our sphere of influence.

(43:19):

Our adolescents have exited the sphere of influence a lot more, but they’re not untethered to us. They want to spend more time with their peers. They’re busy with academics or sports. They’re really gone more or they’re in their rooms and they’re on their phones. So even though our window of influence is genuinely narrowing, it’s not gone. We have to become super intentional about creating that connection with our kids. We have to really carve out one-on-one time, quality time to work on the relationship. And the reality is with our super self-absorbed, developmentally appropriately self-absorbed teens, we really have to index their interests to do that. So we might have to sit down and be like, ” Okay, I really want you to teach me how to play this Fortnite, or I really want you to explain something that you’re interested in to me.

(44:20):

“A lot of times side-by-side talking is a lot more accessible for teens. So anytime you have to have intense conversations with your kids, direct eye contact too much in those … So going for walks, talking during a drive, doing something together and also kind of throwing in some talking, some connection building. So parallel activities versus face-to-face activities. But yes, if you feel like your authority is being threatened, there’s little you can do in the moment. What’s so much more effective is zooming out and asking,” Okay, where can we build more connection? Where can we spend more time together? Where can we strengthen our relationship? “Because honestly, working on a relationship opens the pathway to working on almost everything else. I’m going to move to the next stage, which is intimacy versus isolation. This is young adulthood. Here, the developmental task really becomes about forming close, meaningful relationships, romantic relationships, friendships without losing one sense of self.

(45:32):

So the question that we’re asking is, can I deeply connect with others? And as parents, here is where our atunement moves to transitioning from guiding to really being a supportive sounding board. The invisible threat is never gone, but it’s not going to be this direct line anymore and that’s okay, that’s important.

(45:58):

The reason why I wanted to include this stage is because some of you may have kids who are entering young adulthood, but a lot of you have much younger kids and I think it is still really important to understand a massive challenge that’s hitting this particular stage of development, kids who are entering this stage of development now, because if we understand some of these core challenges and a lot of them are societally influenced, we could try to create protective factors earlier now. Right now, culturally, we’re watching a tremendous amount of loneliness at this developmental stage. Remember the core navigating kind of conflict at this stage is intimacy versus isolation. And right now isolation is sort of dominating for so many young adults. There’s a bit of a loneliness epidemic that’s happening. Something is actually interrupting this developmental task for many young adults today. And so the thing we have to understand when we’re sort of reverse engineering why these kids are failing to create these intimate healthy relationships and this sense of connection with oneself as well is that intimacy requires skills and those skills don’t get developed in young adulthood.

(47:30):

They are building blocks that we build upon and at young adulthood we leverage those skills, but we’ve got to teach the core fundamental building blocks of intimacy skills from the get- go. Things like comfort with the awkwardness of human interaction, comfort with vulnerability, comfort with real life give and take of conversation and just building distress tolerance around social discomfort, unpredictability, lack of control. That’s the core challenge of intimacy, right? It’s clunky, it’s awkward, it’s not smooth all the time. And if we don’t help our kids develop the building blocks of tolerating that clunkiness and that distress and that awkwardness and the anxiety sometimes that comes with being vulnerable with another person and making a social mistake and repairing it, it’s going to be really hard to start those skills in young adulthood when the stakes are actually really high. And so we want to start kind of helping our kids now navigate skills that help them have true interpersonal vulnerability and intimacy.

(48:50):

And we can do that right now no matter what age your kids are by really supporting open emotional conversations, teaching our kids skills for empathy and perspective taking, helping them be curious about other people’s inner worlds, nurturing and holding space for and encouraging real world relationships, in- person relationships, helping kids navigate and tolerate the clunkiness of in- person interaction and just really building distress tolerance in our kids because intimacy and authentic connection are just, they are inherently awkward and messy and we got to help kids get comfortable with that discomfort and those building blocks now will help kids when they become young adults not have as much challenge with that. So we could talk about our child’s developmental stages, but I think it’s really important to recognize that like everybody follows this developmental trajectory and we have gone through all of these stages and very likely imagine many of us are actually in this stage of psychosocial development, generativity versus stagnation in mid-adulthood.

(50:07):

We’ve come full circle and here our developmental task is creating meaning beyond ourselves, contributing to family and community and thinking about like the meaning and the next generation and the legacy that we are going to impart. And I think that many of us feel enormous pressure around parenting because we think that in order to be generative, our job is to like construct the child and get everything right and create all the opportunities and really just like enhance, enhance, enhance and enrich and stimulate and do so much heavy lifting as parents. And the reality is our job really isn’t to construct the child. Our kids are already who they are. The minute they are born, they are who they are and our job isn’t really to build them. Our job is to be with them. It’s the relational task, it’s the attunement, it’s the being with, it’s the being connected by that thread and allowing that thread to get longer and longer and longer, but never really disconnected from us.

(51:19):

And just creating that sense of knowing who your kid is, being curious about your kid and creating that safe relationship and that environment through which they develop who they are. And honestly, I think that takes so much pressure off of us. It’s not easy by any means to work on this relationship, but it’s so much different than when our goal might be to craft the child. Our legacy is not about perfect parenting. It’s not about controlling every outcome. It’s not about optimization. A lot of what we’ve been fed as parents is noise and so much of parenting is about stepping back, holding space and being attuned and attunement is not perfection. It’s just presence and curiosity and responsiveness and repair when we mess up. You don’t have to get this right all the time. Good enough parenting is optimal and by simply showing up and reflecting and trying and repairing and you are already fulfilling this developmental task, you are already passing on care and wisdom and connection and your kids are probably going to be really, really solid as a result of that.

(52:36):

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