Parenting: Childhood Bonds

Bonding is an important developmental step for babies that allows them to have healthy relationships for the rest of their life. It is crucial. The first bond for a baby is with the mother or a primary caregiver. The bond allows the child to trust and find comfort in a mother or mother figure. This bond allows the child to transfer that trust to other people in his or her life.

As a toddler, the child learns to say “No,” and this is a time when the child separates and individuates as well as goes out into the world (okay, the park) and attaches to friends, babysitters, and other people who the child sees on a regular basis. The more these bonds are encouraged, and the more the bonds are between people who are healthy and practice healthy living, the better chance a child has for successful adult relationships, romances, families and work relationships.

Attachment disorder is what children suffer when they do not successfully bond with one or both of their parents. This bonding time for attachment is usually from birth through early years. When children do not attach to their parents they have trouble attaching with other people in relationships throughout their lives. This includes friendships, romantic relationships and parent-child relationships where they are the parent.

In worst scenario cases, they children who do not attachment do not develop empathy, compassion or sympathy, and can be very cold blooded and calculated as well as narcissistic. Many criminals never attached as children.

That said, lack of attachment does not mean that a child will become a criminal. Especially if the parent is aware of the attachment issues and tries to remedy them.

Children from adoption situations or foster care situations have natural challenges attaching because they are not with their parents to attach to, physically. Introducing attachment to these children after they are adopted can be easy or difficult. It requires special intelligence, communication and intimacy. Parents should offer themselves to children for comfort, questions and basic needs on a consistent basis. This is a start because the children have not had consistency from a parental figure coming from an orphanage — or they have had it from someone else, and are now suffering abandonment issues.