Jerry Seinfeld Analyzes Modern-Day Parenting
Key 3 • Create Safety, Trust, & Belonging
Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
-Bill Ayers
Key Concepts
• A child needs emotional safety to grow.
• Your actions affect your child’s emotional safety.
• See from your child’s point of view.
• To sustain emotional safety, seek connection-first, last, and always.
• To maintain safety, trust, and belonging, nurture family connections.
A child’s presence is a gift he or she is giving to a parent. A parent’s unconditional acceptance and appreciation for that gift completes the bonding process that is essential to an infant’s sense of safety, trust, and belonging in the world. When needs for unconditional love and acceptance are met in infancy and early childhood, a message ripples through a young life to form a foundation of self-acceptance: I am accepted by others; therefore, I can accept myself. Safety, trust, and belonging needs are met first by the family and then in an ever-widening arc that extends to peers at school, other community members, and eventually to co-workers and the larger world. With unconditional acceptance at home, kids are much more willing to learn from and be guided by their parents rather than try to meet needs for acceptance outside the home. Family substitutes such as cliques and gangs are usually last resorts for young people who are desperately trying to find a way to meet their need to belong, somewhere. The need to belong is so powerful that meeting these needs somewhere is much better than nowhere. This key will show you ways to make home your child’s number one place to belong.
I have never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love.
-Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
A Child Needs Emotional Safety to Grow
At the foundation of all human needs are those for food, water, shelter, and physical safety. These are indisputable needs the world over. Babies need to be dry and warm, well fed, clothed, and protected from physical harm, and they communicate their needs loudly. Creating safety and trust for your children, however, goes far beyond meeting physical needs. Recent brain research establishes the importance of a less commonly recognized or talked-about safety requirement-the need for emotional safety. When infants or children of any age experience a physical or emotional threat, they become anxious and afraid. Hormones are secreted that automatically shut down the thinking, learning, and reasoning zones of the brain to prepare the child to defend himself or to run away from the danger.1 These are very primitive fight, flight, or freeze responses that
are triggered daily in the lives of children who don’t feel safe. When, from very early ages, major portions of the brain shut down under emotionally stressful conditions, a child’s brain development, success in learning, and ability to relate to others can be seriously affected.2
• Your Actions Affect Your Child’s Emotional Safety
Some of the experiences that children interpret as dangerous include adults raising their voices, name-calling, comparing one child’s mistakes with other children’s successes, threatening punishment or consequences, shaking, hitting, and spanking. These highly charged ways of interacting cause children to question whether they are safe and secure with the people who care for them. Without a deep sense of safety and trust, they are cautious and hesitant about investigating their world.
They are often full of self-doubt in the face of opportunities to explore and learn. They are often afraid to ask questions or take risks, and prefer a limited, safe range of options and strategies for meeting their needs. When children feel emotionally safe, they are relaxed in their world and are excited to investigate it. They explore, ask questions, take risks, and remain open to a wide range of ways to meet vital needs. Joseph Chilton Pearce and Michael Mendizza3 take this point one giant step further. They say that it’s not only what we do but also our state of mind and heart when we do it that children pick up on. They claim there is no difference between the state of one’s consciousness and the environment created by that consciousness. If a mother prepares a meal for her family every evening, all the while feeling angry about what happened at work that day and resentful that she is spending so much time cooking instead of doing something more interesting and fun, what will her children learn from the experience of eating meals together?
What will they learn if, instead, she sings a song and thinks about how cooking this meal meets her needs to nurture her family and spend time together? Whatever you do, children will remember most of all the state you’re in-the quality of aliveness, the joy or lack of it.
• See from Your Child’s Point of View
Your kids want you to see them for who they are and what they can do. Recognition of their challenges and celebration of their accomplishments shows that you care and strengthens the bond of trust between you. To understand what needs are foremost and pressing at each stage of their lives, it is helpful to be aware of the developmental stages your kids are going through and to notice what is uniquely true about the child in front of you.
Understand Developmental Stages
An infant’s brain is not fully developed at birth. In fact, it is now believed that some parts of the brain aren’t fully formed until the early to mid twenties. So we all grow into our adult thinking capacities at our own preprogrammed pace. Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are self-absorbed and gradually develop the capacity to consider others. Developmentally they aren’t ready to share toys, take turns, or to see another person’s point of view. They have no way of understanding how long ten minutes or an hour is, and of course they have very few years of experience in the world to draw upon for making sound decisions. If you expect adult thinking and behaviors before your child is developmentally ready to perform them, you threaten her sense of emotional security and undermine her ability and desire to trust you. Out of love for you, your toddler will make her best attempt to share toys or to understand another child’s feelings; however, when she is unable to sustain her effort, she will feel confused and discouraged because she wants to do something she isn’t yet developmentally able to do. Neither threats nor bribes can affect her actions. They only make her feel helpless that she can’t do something you want her to do.
Trying to meet parents’ expectations but not being ready to do so is a common experience for kids from infancy through their teens. Drinking from a cup, eating with a spoon, and tying shoes can’t be done before brain and muscles are ready. A child expected to read before specific physical and conceptual readiness is in place may be excited to learn the skills. However, if he is judged or teased on his performance and called lazy or stupid for not doing well, he will feel discouraged. He is interested and smart; he just isn’t ready for what is being asked of him. Teens go through their own stages. They need consideration and respect for the challenges they face and their timetable for maturing. Many parents deal harshly with what they view as the poor judgment of their teens. Judgment, however, is a capacity that they grow. The young person’s brain needs a chance to mature into making sound judgments. Teens need practice and a parent’s patience with missteps along the way. If you heed developmental cues and take your lead from your children about what they are ready to do, you will ensure that they will feel safe and ready for the next steps in their growth process.
1. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence.
2. Allan Schore, Affect Regulation, and the Origin of the Self.
3. Mendizza and Pearce, Magical Parent, Magical Child.
