How to Understand and Fulfill Your Child’s Attachment Needs

Your child came into existence with an instinct to seek closeness to a special person who will provide comfort, protection, and help with overwhelming emotional experiences. Your child also has an inborn drive to follow their curiosity and desires for learning and mastery. As children develop, they move between these two needs, seeking attachment or mastery, hundreds of times each day, usually without much warning.

It takes a sensitively attuned caregiver to understand what a child needs. And even when you can guess what they need, it’s not always easy to meet it. It can be slightly uncomfortable or profoundly frightening to meet some of your child’s needs, particularly if many of your own needs for autonomy and attachment went unmet in your childhood.

The good news is that when you’re able to understand what’s really happening with your child, you can see what they need in the moment. And you can consciously choose to meet that need through your relationship with them. You can break generational patterns of parent-child disconnection and pass down connection instead.

The creators of the Circle of Security parenting intervention designed a graphic to give parents a visual way of understanding the relational dance of secure attachment. The “parent” is depicted as two hands at the narrow end of the left side of an oval, i.e. "the circle." The child begins here, at the "secure base," and then moves away from the parent to explore the world at the far end of the oval. When the child experiences an internal or external sense of threat or danger, the child moves back towards the parent on the left side of the oval, towards the "safe haven."

Let’s take a closer look.

When your child needs you to be a secure base

When you’ve just filled your child’s connection cup, they feel confident, calm, and safe. Their nervous system is at equilibrium, allowing their exploratory system to do its thing.

Now they’re on the top of the circle, ready to venture away from you to explore their environment and go where their curiosity takes them. You might feel tempted to push your child to do things they don’t have the ability to do yet, focus solely on what your child accomplishes or achieves, or rush in to help them do it “right”. But instead, your job is to monitor their safety, to be interested and delighted in them and what they’re doing, and to be available when...

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