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Achieve Emotional Availability with Your Child
Emotional Availability means "being there" for your kids, but it is more than picking them up from school, putting dinner on the table, or squeezing in some "quality time." They also need you to be there emotionally -- and the degree and quality of your communication and connection can play a big part in their confidence, their success in future relationships, even their success in the adult world.
Dr. Zeynep Biringen, who developed the now widely used Emotional Availability Scales, explains the principles of emotional availability and presents them along with exercises and a wealth of examples, so that you can:
- Identify your own strategies to connect with your child
- Assess the strengths and weaknesses in your current parent-child relationship
- Nourish and strengthen bonds with children of any age
- Weave an emotional "Safety net" to help kids feel more secure in a scary world
- Deal with behavior problems without creating emotional distance
- Provide support for learning and making friends
- Strengthen these bonds during times of stress, including divorce and adolescence
Be there for your kids -- from infancy to adolescence and beyond.
Encourage positive connections between siblings:
- From the start, treat each of your children in a special way. With new additions to the family, continue to make your other children feel special and give them extra time and attention.
- Not having a favorite (stated or unstated) among your children is an important beginning. Differential treatment of siblings or preferences can lead to negative consequences in terms of the self-esteem of your children. Often, favoritism can be unconscious, and so it takes a lot of soul-searching and open-mindedness to be aware of and then to work through the favoritism. Enjoying each of your children in different ways is not favoritism, but treating them in terms of a hierarchy in emotional closeness is!
- Require that your children take corrective actions for any aggressions and not merely apologize.
- Look to your own relational skills, or that of your spouse or your ex, to understand where your child might have learned bullying or being a victim. Adults are less likely to tolerate behavior in children that they tolerate in themselves or in their adult-adult relationships. It is as if adults have a license for such behavior that children have not yet earned. Remember that bullying is not always about getting into a fight. Bullying can also be more subtle -- put-downs, the cold shoulder, silent treatment, and constant criticism. Examine your child's network of relationships, including those with siblings, to understand and remedy the source of such problems.
- Teach your children problem-solving skills (preferably, win-win problem-solving skills so both are winners). They can then work out a lot of their own problems by using tools of reasoning, knowing that there are alternatives, and most important that a dialogue can go a long way. Just as you talk to your children, encourage them to talk to one another.
- Encourage children to verbally express feelings rather than act out aggression and to express such feelings in a nonhostile manner. Encourage such nonhostile behavior by behaving in harmonious and fair ways toward the children rather than aggressive and bullying ways.
- Teach your child to express his or her feelings in an assertive, not aggressive, way. Encourage your child to express his or her worries as well.
- Encourage your children to engage in positive, cooperative activities together to build a positive and pleasurable repertoire in their relationship.
- Encourage your victimized child to feel as if he or she can come and get you. Let him or her know that you will not rescue them, but you will help with the problem-solving that is needed. You might facilitate "making amends." Children feel cared for when they know a supportive person can be relied upon to help them solve their problems -- not solving the problems for them, but helping them figure it out themselves. Empowerment is the result. Don't do the work for one, the other, or the relationship. Be an available, nonintrusive presence who can structure life for your children in a sensitive and nonhostile manner.
- Read your children's emotional cues correctly and work at understanding the cues of each of your children so you can understand by the look in their eyes what they are feeling. Show your children that you are emotionally connected and available to each of them in special and unique ways. If you have trouble in this area, try building your skills in this area by talking and playing more with your child. As you spend more time with your child, you will be in a better position to understand where he or she is coming from and will more easily read emotional signals and communications. As you get to know your child better, it will become easier to understand his or her emotions.
- Nurture in each of your children and through positive interactions between siblings a sense of standards with respect to relationships -- inner standards of fairness, justice, kindness, empathy, and other aspects of morality in human behavior Also, show and describe to them "social causality," that is, "He did this because she did that"-type of thinking. Give them the words to their actions so you help them internalize such views of relationships, even very early on when they do not seem to understand it all. They will, nonetheless, be impressed by the labels, and you will get their attention.
- Have playtime with your children, either separately if it is possible for you, or together, designating the "leader" for a certain period of time. Again, such designations are in line with fairness in relationships.
- Take the responsibility to know if each of your children has his or her emotional needs met by taking the Emotional Availability Self- Assessment for each of them to see if each child is secure in his or her relationship with you. It is easier to resolve issues with these healthy emotional connections with you than without them. If the emotional connection with any of your children needs work, do that work simultaneously -- don't sidestep it, Take that responsibility!
- Through your own example and through discussions with your children, help each of them learn to emit appropriate emotional signals (mostly positive) and learn to read others' emotional signals. For example, when a child frequently feels rejected by his or her friends, withdraws from interactions, and cannot talk about it for a long time (and these friends behaviors do not objectively seem rejecting and/or they try very hard to be inclusive), you might work with your child to try reacting in more appropriate ways, ways that match the intensity of the situation. Instead of sulking endlessly, she can be coached to verbally express, "Hey, I don't like it when you exclude me...so please try not to, okay?" and then move on with interactions, rather than being stuck in silent treatment.
The Impact of Your Childhood on Your Child
Your own sense of security as a child and how you think can have enormous effects on your child's sense of security with you. One interesting exercise is to ask, "What type of baby were you?" As documented in numerous research studies, we know there is a great similarity between the type of baby we raise and the type of baby we were (unless some major changes occurred within us during our adulthood to change our view of relationships). Parents who were raised in an openly communicative and sensitive manner in their own families are more likely to have secure babies. Parents who were raised to dismiss their feelings and not to value attachments tend to have babies who are avoidant. Parents who were raised in an environment where there was a lot of negative emotion, particularly anger, are more likely to have babies who are clingy and dependent, and many of these parents continue to feel anger toward their own parents.
The following questions will help you see whether you fit into any of these three categories. A majority of "yes" answers in any group identifies your category.
Secure Child Memory
1. Were you the type of baby and young child who sought out a parent immediately when you needed some comfort?
2. Do you remember being happy?
3. Do you remember getting a lot of positive attention and caring?
4. Do you remember finding it easy to connect with others, including parents and friends?
Insecure/Avoidant Child Memory
1. Were you the type of baby and young child who did not go to a parent when you felt sad, angry, or hurt?
2. Were you the type of baby and young child who grew up feeling like a loner?
3. Did you not have very many people you could turn to, or did you just not turn to others? Were you basically self-reliant or too reliant on yourself, sometimes despite your best efforts to be more connected with others?
4. Do you remember making efforts at closeness with a parent and feeling rebuffed or just not getting the type of response you, had hoped for?
5. Do you not remember much about your childhood, as hard as you might try?
6. Do you remember not being liked very much by your peers, either because you were aggressive at times or because you were a loner?
7. Do you feel that much of this discussion about feelings is "mumbo-jumbo" or "psychobabble"? Is this what your parents might say or have said about such self-assessment?
Insecure/Dependent Child Memory
1. Do you recall being very close to one parent (or more) to the point of what we call "symbiosis" or oneness with that parent?
2. Do you remember being an easily distressed sort of baby or young child?
3. Do you remember being overprotected or catered to a lot?
4. Do you recall that you were a bit younger than your age (you might still feel that way) -- not necessarily in terms of appearance, but more that people treated you as younger and didn't give you enough of a chance at responsibility?
5. Did you constantly need people around you, maybe for approval?
6. Did you constantly try to please others to the exclusion of even being aware of what your own emotional needs were?
7. Did you "take care" of younger siblings or a parent so that it seemed as if you were the parent or the roles were reversed?
Whether we were secure, avoidant, or dependent as children (recall that insecure/disorganized children typically show one of the other insecure patterns as a "core"), as adults we are free to adopt new ways of creating relationships with our own children.
Your Own Family History
People bring all kinds of personal history into parenting -- that's not a problem. The problem arises when we don't resolve those issues ourselves. Our own parents are often our only models of how to relate to children, so they usually have a powerful influence on us, no matter whether we want to emulate them or be completely different. As adults, we need to recognize the heritage we have brought with us from the family in which we ourselves were raised and to replicate what was good and eliminate what was not.
Social scientists Carol George, Nancy Kaplan, and Mary Main at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a state-of-the-art interview to assess parents' family-of-origin experiences (called the Adult Attachment Interview). The interview is very detailed and enables the interviewer to obtain information about the parent's experiences during childhood. It also does something quite tricky -- it can help us understand beyond the childhood experiences of parents by going beyond the surface of what they report. In other words, we gain information on both what they say happened as well as some things they might not consciously remember.
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Copyright © 2004 Zeynep Biringen, Ph.D. This article excerpt was reprinted with permission from the book, "Raising a Secure Child: Creating an Emotional Connection Between You and Your Child," by Zeynep Biringen, Ph.D., Perigee Books. For more information visit emotionalavailability.com or writtenvoices.com.
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