If you feel worried about messing up your kid, today’s episode is for you. I’m teaching you how practicing attunement will help you build a more connected relationship with your child and create emotional health within them.
You’ll Learn:
As moms, we feel really scared that we’re going to mess up our kids. This is a normal fear, and it comes up because you really care a lot. You want to do a good job and raise emotionally healthy kids. Attunement is a big way that we do this. Listen to learn how.
Emotional health and feeling secure are rooted in having a strong attachment with your parent. So, the way to trauma-proof your child is through attunement, which is about seeing them and soothing them.
In the Calm Mama Process of Calm, Connect, Limit Set, Correct, attunement the “Connect” step. When we talk about validating emotion, we're talking about attunement.
In this process, you are becoming aware of your child's emotional state. If they're misbehaving, crying, asking for something - whatever you’re seeing on the outside, you are also trying to figure out what might be going on on the inside.
You’re understanding that your child has an inner life. They're walking through the world experiencing something. They have their own thoughts, feelings, reactions, and a perspective on life.
When you are regularly attuning to your child, they feel safe and secure. And from that secure place, they are willing to trust others, to be vulnerable, to take risks, to grow, to change, to self-reflect, to have self compassion - all these traits that are part of being an emotionally healthy person.
Attunement also normalizes emotions, creates a shame-free environment for processing negative emotion, and helps your child become more self-aware (another key for emotional health).
Of course, there are no guarantees. There are always factors that are out of our control. But generally speaking, the more secure a child’s attachment is with their parent, the more likely they are to have an emotionally healthy life.
As we talk about attunement, the goal is not for you to do a, b, and c to make sure your kid turns out okay. It’s an opportunity to look at yourself and decide how you want to show up as a parent and what kind of strategies you want to use in your family.
Being seen and validated is really, really powerful. And a little bit of attunement goes a long way toward compliance. Not only is it an effective parenting strategy, but it’s also helpful for your kid in the long term.
It models the process of emotional regulation. You help them understand the messy inside feelings. You give them language to communicate it and to cope with it. When you do this over and over again, your child eventually learns how to do that for themselves.
Step 1: See. Attunement starts by just paying attention - looking at your child’s behavior and wondering what could be going on underneath. You’ll see clues like their behavior, body language, or words. Your role as a parent is to try to slip into their narrative, their emotional state. Then, you can respond to that emotional state and try to help them through it.
Step 2: Soothe. When your child is in distress or having a negative experience, they need soothing. Sometimes this is as simple as communicating to them, “You are not alone. I see you. I’m here to support...
