excerpt from a post by Dr Vanessa Lapointe
"...And if all the adults in the land really internalized that truth, then we could change the world. You see, we are attachment organisms by design. We are a social species. We are meant to live in the context of deep, meaningful, emotional relationships.
What does that have to do with your “attention-seeking child”? Everything!
It works like this: children are not yet fully developed humans. Their brains and hearts are still working to figure it all out. As such, they do not have a full understanding of their bodies and the feelings that sometimes take them over. They also do not have a well-rounded vocabulary that they can put to use in communicating their needs about those feelings. This leaves them with only one modality in terms of effectively communicating their needs to you – behavior. This is true of younger children just as much as it is true of adolescents.
Referring to your child’s behaviors in a derogatory or dismissive way as simply “attention- seeking” is highly problematic. This is a child who will feel neither seen nor heard. This is a child who will have to turn up the volume even louder to have their needs met. And perhaps even more concerning, this is a child who may shut down and cease to attachment-seek, looking to other troublesome sources to meet their deep needs of connection and emotional regulation.
Knowing this, we can see that children do not engage in challenging behaviours for a good time – or “just” to attention-seek. They engage in these behaviours because they are struggling. They are wired neurologically and soulfully to seek connection with their big people in order to manage this struggle. This is not “just attention-seeking”. This is attachment-seeking!
Children have no choice but to seek connection with you in their moments of struggle.
Change The Perspective to Attachment-Seeking
The next time you catch yourself thinking your child is attention-seeking, switch it around to understanding them as attachment-seeking and sit quietly in that space. What is your child’s unmet need? How can you be their answer even if you don’t know the answer? As a human being with a heart, how can you respond to your own little human being so that they will feel known and understood and cared for by you?
Connection is the Answer
The bottom line is this: children will engage in behavior to get your attention – because they have to! They have no other way as creatures of attachment. They are not attention-seeking – they are attachment-seeking. So if the need be attachment, then the answer be connection.
This is the science of child development.
This is how we grow children up in the best possible way.
This is how we change the world."
(Read complete original article here)
Comentarios