Attachment processes are the field of study within the science of psychology that I think about the most. In some way, everyone has an attachment story. Recently about parenting styles, which parenting style do you have? You encounter questions such as these and you evaluate your parenting skills thanks to the answers given to these questions. I would like to point out that a parent's parenting skills are shaped by his or her own attachment story. Therefore, first of all, as an adult, we need to examine our attachment processes with our own parents with a little more awareness.
Dear Nilüfer Devecigil, in her book "The Way of Light", explains beautifully how an attachment process affects both a person's parenting and their relationship. It is a book that I can definitely recommend to read in order to analyze ourselves better. I would like to share a metaphor in the book here. Thanks to this metaphor, we can summarize children's operating system very well. I was using a similar expression, but the metaphor in the book summarized it in a way that everyone can understand much better.
“Let's think of a two-storey duplex house. Let this house be our brain. The upper floor of the house is the wise part that we call sophisticated. This includes behavioral regulations such as speech, reasoning, planning, decision-making and impulse control. The lower floor of the house is our primitive part. Our most basic functions such as breathing, feeding, sleeping and staying safe are located here. When we are born, we have billions of nerve cells. However, what is important is more than the number of nerve cells, but how these nerve cells relate to each other. If the parent trusts his baby at this point and responds whenever he needs it, the perception that this world and relationships are reliable will develop for the baby, and the nerve cells will create networks for this.
Now that we know that this house has two floors, the ground floor and the upper floor. We can understand that the connection is interrelated. When a baby is born, the primitive functions located below are present in it. There is no need to learn how to feed. It automatically meets this need thanks to its sucking reflex. The real issue is how the parent creates the connections of the upper floor. Time is required for this to occur. However It is necessary to act consciously over time. Harmonious relationship experiences between parent and baby are needed. Eye contact, touching, singing, holding her, calming her when she cries, introducing her to stimuli in the environment when she is calm... THE BRAIN LIVES BY RELATIONSHIP. We need to keep our brains full! He cannot manage to organize and cannot have a relationship with the upper floor. For example; When a child hears a frightening sound, the primitive part evokes a feeling of fear in every child. However, if he/she is faced with a parent who has acquired self-regulation skills, the reaction will be as follows: The sound was scary, but it has passed now... If the parent has not regulated the downstairs well, the child cannot calm down or has tantrums as a result of that frightening sound.
The first years of life. The more traumatic processes occur, the more difficult the behavior becomes in later times. Among the traumas of the early years; It can be expressed as stress in the womb, problems experienced at birth, medical operations, natural disasters, negligence and violation. The situation we call neglect sends a message to a child that YOU ARE NOT HERE, meaning their emotional needs are not met. Therefore, neglect and attachment processes are highly interrelated.
Our body secretes the cortisol hormone during stress. A small dose of this hormone ensures growth. However, if the amount of cotisol in the body increases, stress turns into "toxic stress". If toxic stress is present in children's bodies, even their brain structure can be affected. Toxic stress causes the child to grow by preventing many functions in the upper floor of the house from being fulfilled. And in later years, the likelihood of depression, heart problems, obesity, alcohol and substance addiction, and antisocial behavior problems increases. In short, the entire structure of the house changes and it becomes a different house.”
I explain the importance of our children's first years at every opportunity. I want us to save this moment while we have the opportunity. Let the child enjoy the resources of safe relationships to the fullest, so that he can use these resources in a healthy way on his journey to becoming an individual. to culture When I think about our society and the families I meet based on our characteristics, we fall short in this bonding story. First of all, we think that only the mother should raise these resources and we see the role of a father as very limited in his parenting skills. At this point, we go to the resources that the parent, who cannot transfer the resources to his children, cannot receive from his own parents. This is a very important issue and can turn into a vicious circle. That's why we call it awareness. However, we encounter a situation that we see as a cultural situation: The parent, who is not in the child's life until the high school years on average, also applies with complaints that this child does not study, does not listen to me... But repairing this process with a parent who has not used the resources to establish a safe relationship in time will be a more difficult and labor-intensive process. This is why all my struggle is; To develop the connection networks of the duplex house firmly in the first years of life before it is too late.
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