Attachment-Focused Parenting: Effective Strategies to Care for Children (Norton Professional Books (Hardcover))

by Daniel A. Hughes

At the core of successful parenting practices and optimal child development is the child’s secure attachment relationship with his or her parents. This reality has often been overlooked, much as a fish overlooks water, in favor of theories that stress the importance of rewards and consequences for childhood behaviors to facilitate parents’ influence over their child’s development. This has been thought to be a straightforward, one-directional process, whereby a child’s good behavior would increase when it was followed by a positive consequence chosen by the parents. Other behaviors were thought to decrease if they were followed by either no consequence or a negative one. The relational context in which such consequences were applied was often overlooked in early behavioral programs. Later efforts attempted to define the parent-child relationship within the same learning theory that stressed the parents’ reinforcing opportunities and abilities. By doing so, the rich and comprehensive reciprocal relationship and interpersonal learning that exists between parent and child were often overlooked.

individual child. A book on raising children would be much easier to write if we could say that at a certain age, in a certain situation, parents should always respond to their child’s behavior in one specific way. A compilation of such behaviors could become the parental text to keep handy for review in a difficult situation. However, such a book would necessarily ignore fundamental factors in the nature of an effective parent-child relationship and attachment security. These factors involve the necessity of the parent knowing the meaning of the behavior before knowing how best to respond to it. Such meaning involves the thoughts, feelings, wishes, intentions, perceptions, values, and memories associated with the behavior. Finding the meaning of the behavior, along with the most appropriate response, requires that there be a reciprocal relationship between parent and child. The child’s response continuously guides the parent to choose to modify, fine-tune, or even completely change a prior decision.

A book on raising children would be much easier to write if we could say that at a certain age, in a certain situation, parents should always respond to their child’s behavior in one specific way. A compilation of such behaviors could become the parental text to keep handy for review in a difficult situation. However, such a book would necessarily ignore fundamental factors in the nature of an effective parent-child relationship and attachment security. These factors involve the necessity of the parent knowing the meaning of the behavior before knowing how best to respond to it. Such meaning involves the thoughts, feelings, wishes, intentions, perceptions, values, and memories associated with the behavior. Finding the meaning of the behavior, along with the most appropriate response, requires that there be a reciprocal relationship between parent and child. The child’s response continuously guides the parent to choose to modify, fine-tune, or even completely change a prior decision.

It is this reciprocal dance of the experience of the parent and child of each other that enables the interaction to be helpful in dealing with the current situation. The child learns as much from his ability to influence his parent’s guidance of his behavior as he does from the guidance itself.

Rather than seeking compliance, the parent is providing an alliance in which her perspective and experience contribute to the success of the child’s actions but do not control these actions.