Six Needs of Every Child
How does a parent create a loving, safe environment for their child to share their feelings, feel understood, and know they are valued?
Children are born with a desire to love, attach, and depend on others for comfort and connection. These connections and close relationships help shape their brains, nervous systems, and emotional reactions.
A child develops their understanding of self and others primarily through their daily interactions with their parents and others. Parents are tasked with the responsibility to learn six essential skills that every child needs to experience in the home to create a safe place for children to develop into healthy, balanced, emotionally regulated adults.
Attunement
Responsiveness
Engagement
Ability to Regulate Child’s Responses
Handle Negative Emotions
Willingness to Repair
To begin, a parent must learn how to attune, respond, and engage with their child deeply, authentically, and connectedly. An attuned parent is aware of and understands their child’s feelings, needs, and experiences and is not distracted by their own feelings, needs, and experiences.
Attunement
Attunement is when a parent can describe and reflect their child’s inner world and the feelings they are expressing. The parent will notice their child’s facial expressions, behaviors, and nonverbal cues leading the child to feel understood, connected, and valued by their parent. This attunement allows the child to safely process through their experiences and find clarity, healing, and growth.
Responsiveness
A responsive parent notices when their child becomes distressed, mad, sad, or afraid and can comfort their child through both verbal and nonverbal cues in a caring and kind manner. This responsiveness creates a safe, genuine, and emotional connection with their child. The parent becomes a source of security, protection, and contact of comfort.
Engagement
An engaged parent is genuinely interested and desires to truly know their child’s hearts, wishes, goals, thoughts, and desires. A child that is pursued by their parent in a loving way experiences a sense of value, worth, and importance.
The engaged parent learns how to validate their child’s experiences and responses rather than teaching them to be different.
When a parent can be attuned, responsive, and engaged with their child, an intimate, safe environment is established for the child to have the freedom to express their feelings, understand their experiences, be comforted and feel understood, heard, and valued.
Ability to Regulate Child’s Responses
Next, a parent must learn how to regulate their child’s physical responses, handle negative emotions, and be willing to apologize.
As a child experiences new or difficult situations, their bodies might respond somatically with increased/decreased heart rate, high/low blood pressure, rapid breathing, numbing, or fatigue. These bodily reactions are normal responses to panic, fear, worry, boredom, or under-stimulation.
It is important that a parent develops the ability to teach their child how to regulate their physical responses by remaining calm, present, and engaged.
The goal of the parent is to help their child return to an emotionally regulated state of being, which is described by feeling a calm alertness, peace, and presence.
The opposite of being emotionally regulated would be to feel panic, fear, anxiety, depression, or numbed out. It is important that a parent knows how to regulate their own emotions first so that they can assist in regulating their child’s emotions.
Handle Negative Emotions
It is important for a parent to learn how to welcome their child’s negative emotions of anger, sadness, or fear. Children need to feel that all their emotions and experiences will be accepted, received, and honored by their parents.
A home that creates allowance for these negative emotions communicates safety and acceptance.
Willingness To Repair
Lastly, a parent must be willing to apologize when they have hurt, harmed, or wronged their child.
A healthy, trusting relationship is built on the parent’s ability to say sorry, take responsibility, and apologize when they hurt others or lose control of their emotions. This teaches children to learn accountability, how to repair relationships, and not to fear conflict.
Every child needs a safe place to make sense of their experiences, receive comfort, express themselves freely, and feel understood. If these needs are met in the home by the parents, a child will gain the ability to develop a positive sense of self, learn healthy communication skills, regulate their emotions, and respect others and self. When a parent learns to respond to their child in an empathetic, patient, validating, accepting, and authentic way during their times of need, a connected, safe place is created, allowing space for the child to explore, grow, and mature into a healthy, balanced, resilient adult.
Melissa focuses on establishing a safe, comfortable, and trusting environment that allows space to assist individuals in strengthening and developing their relationships with God, self, and others. She enjoys working with children, teens, parents, married couples, engaged couples, and families.
To schedule your free consultation with Melissa, email
MBlower@emmausroadcounseling.com or call 858-633-3661.
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