From the chapter ‘The early years‘
Duncan Fraser, Therapeutic coach and founder of Useful & Kind Unlimited and the Mindful Leadership Foundation
Love.
That’s it. Love. Unconditional love. Tough love. Selfless love. Attached love. Not hippy love. Not sex. But the searing power to make the world better through love of self, others and the world.[i] Do we learn to love, or is it inbuilt? How do we learn to do it well? How do we care and act to make things better during our one go on earth? And in particular, how do we learn to love as parents? From our parents? What if their circumstances prevented them from being the best they could be for us to become all that we could be?
My proposal is that we teach love in a new way, bringing awareness to teenagers about care, compassion, relationships and parenting that will help them, will help them to help others, and give them a real sense of their place in making the world better.
There is over 50 years’ worth of evidence about what many have known intuitively for millennia: that spontaneous, present, emotionally available attention from parent to child can create a psychological security that lasts from generation to generation. And yet not all of us enjoy that secure attachment. As parents we are busy and distracted, we have other children to care for, or we simply don’t feel we know what to do or how to meet a child’s needs.
John Bowlby[ii] and his successors revolutionised understanding of the impact of the first few years of life on our thoughts, feelings and actions. His ‘attachment theory’ (further developed by Mary Ainsworth and colleagues)[iii] showed that we, humans, are programmed to be physically close to our primary caregiver in order to meet our physical, psychological and emotional needs. We get close not only for food, comfort and affection, but also, critically, for safety and security. When we are secure, we feel bold enough to move away to explore, learn and grow, until we feel insecure from a perceived threat and then we return to the source of security. In order to achieve a secure attachment as babies, we simply need someone who brings consistent empathy, rapidly responds to our anxiety, and freely and appropriately engages in social interaction or play.
We are born believing that we are the world – that we are it and that it is us. We feel we are a part of our caregiver, and only become aware of the separation and loss from them later on when we realise, unconsciously, that we are on our own and totally dependent on another person to get our needs met. We are born totally dependent on a caregiver; if humans had evolved to be born with brains as big as they need to be from birth, with all the information and learning required to survive, then the skull would be too large to get down the birth canal!
How do we get our needs met without language in the first 18–24 months of life? Even in these early vital moments, when we become aware of our dependence on another, we start to learn what we need to do (smile, gurgle, cry) in order to get attention. This empathy and attunement[iv], [v] is the ability to feel others’ feelings and to be in tune with them and to respond accordingly to meet their needs. The discovery of mirror neurons proved what we have known instinctually: that there is an important mirroring of feeling between child and caregiver and vice versa, and all of this happens without language. So even very early on we make a ‘mental model’ of how to be in the world in order to get our needs met.
However, primary caregivers have their own needs. They may have other children to look after. They may have anxieties, addictions, concerns – in other words, they are human. They may not always be able to meet the child’s attachment needs. Babies have to make sense of this confusing world. Expecting the perfect caregiver, there is disappointment. In the face of this, the baby constantly adapts and develops a ‘mental model’[vi] of how their world is.
It is in this marvellous dance between child and caregiver that an understanding forms of how to be safe, sane and well in the world.
These attachments provide a relationship in which the infant will:
- seek proximity to the attachment figure;
- have a sense of a safe haven – in which when s/he is upset, the attachment figure will soothe their distress;
- develop an ‘internal working model of a secure base’, an internal sense of the self with the other, that will provide them with security to explore the world, have a sense of well-being and to soothe themselves in times of distress in the future.
In an ideal world, parents would be able to give their children this kind of empowering attention[vii],[viii] and attachment in order that they are secure, resilient and able to make sense of relationships, authority and have a sense of their own agency and place in the world.
It is hard to accept that who we are, how we are in relationships and our responses to authority and power are all considerably informed before we have language. This means that in later life we often respond to situations without knowing why we do: whether to a teacher, a boss, a reportee or to a world situation.
This is why it is so important to put children at the heart of our and their futures.
In order to have a better future for all, we need children to feel, experience and live this security knowing that they are safe, prized, accepted, loved and celebrated, not just for what they do, and certainly not just the numbers on their test scores, but for who they are and who they fully can be.
Not all of us are, or can be, securely attached. So how do we break the cycle of creating poor attachments? How do we help to improve awareness, understanding and practice of love, compassion, care, parenting and prosociality? If we can achieve this, we will have individuals who are better able to accept and understand themselves, with a much greater understanding of how love, understanding and compassion can lead to much greater relationships between people and peoples (accepting and celebrating difference), and develop a much better sensitivity to our role as carers and guardians of the planet.
A different way to think of this is the Barack Obama invitation for us all to be ‘useful and kind’, which elegantly combines Bentham’s utilitarian notion of the ‘best for the most’ with all we now know about the benefits of kindness, empathy, compassion, concern and prosocial action.
We must give children the option to learn how to balance being ‘useful and kind to self, others and the world’ through a programme that understands the journey from early attachment to adult relationships and opportunities to make the world better. Such a programme might include:
| Self | Others | World |
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Creating securely attached children, who are confident and robust enough to make their and our worlds better, takes more than a village. It takes knowledgeable, well-supported parenting, and a culture and society that values us all equally. This is about moving away from the competition, individualism, greed and scant regard for future generations, and moving towards a world that values and measures success by the collective good, well-being and flourishing of all its citizens.
My practical and achievable proposal is to develop a short programme of classes for school Years 10 and 11 (children aged 14 to 16) to develop awareness of love, compassion, care, parenting, attachment, relationships and agency.
Based on, but broadening out from, the highly successful Canadian programme Roots of Empathy, it will give practical ways in which to understand attachment and how attachment relates to a teenager’s own hopes, fears and aspirations. It will, in turn, inform their own sense of self, friendships, relationships, parenting and leadership. This will lead to better self-awareness, stronger relationships and a more cared-for planet.
Notes
[i] Useful & Kind Unlimited (no date) ‘Home’, www.usefulandkindunlimited.com
[ii] Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment; (1973) Separation; (1980) Loss, New York: Basic Books; (1979) The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds; (2005) A Secure Base, Abingdon: Routledge.
[iii] Ainsworth, M.D.S., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E. and Wall, S. (1978) Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation, Hilllsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
[iv] Erksine, R.G. (1998) ‘Attunement and involvement: Therapeutic responses to relational needs’, International Journal of Psychotherapy, 3(3): 235–44.
[v] Gerhard, S. (2004) Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain, Hove: Brunner-Routledge.
[vi] Siegel, D. (1999) The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, New York: Guilford Press.
[vii] Siegel, D. (1999) The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, New York: Guilford Press.
[viii] Cassidy, J. and Shaver, P.R. (eds) (1999) Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research and Clinical Applications, New York: Guilford Press.
[ix] Harris, T.A. (2012) I’m Ok, You’re Ok: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis, London: Arrow Books.