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"Stop Pushing Me!”
Why connection, not pushing, is the key to children's healthy independence.
Posted September 7, 2020 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Imagine you are standing at the edge of a diving board, water dancing a vertiginous distance below. It’s your first time on the high dive, and your knees wobble slightly as you consider your toes on the edge of the unknown. Your coach, standing behind you, suddenly proclaims, “Okay, enough dilly-dallying” and pushes you off the edge.
Your journey from the board to the water could take any number of forms: a flop, a plop, a painful plunge, or an accidentally perfect swan dive. But whatever the outcome, the journey from a starting place of being pushed will likely be both terrifying and profoundly lonely. And for a long time after it’s over, our relationship with our coach may take on feelings of distrust, anger, resentment, and shame. With perspective, most would recognize that this is not effective coaching.
Yet in many ways, this is precisely how we “coach” our children toward taking the leap toward independence — with a push. This push to independence takes many forms: the push to sleep train, toilet train, self-soothe, separate from parents, relinquish security objects, prepare for preschool, or later, to move out of the house — the push to do each of these things as early as possible. Like learning to dive, these are worthwhile goals (some are necessary milestones), but we do harm when we push children to meet such goals without needed support, encouragement, and children’s own sense of readiness and consent.
The push toward independence in child-rearing is not universal (and notably, children grow into well-adjusted, autonomous adults even in cultures without such predilections). Social pressures on parents to raise children who are “self-sufficient” are strongest in Western societies like Australia, the UK, and United States. These pressures have deep roots in our individualist culture: Two of the “founding fathers” of Western psychology famously advised parents to withhold affection from their children to foster adult-like independence and productivity as early as possible. “We need less sentimentality and more spanking,” G. Stanley Hall asserted in 1899. In his book on child-rearing, John B. Watson1 advised parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound…”
But after decades of research following the pioneering work of Harry Harlow and John Bowlby, psychologists now know the opposite is true: It is the lack of a loving and supportive caregiver in times of need that is “a dangerous instrument” for child development, and the feeling of being pushed off the diving board and into aloneness that produces “a never-healing wound” with pain that reaches well into adulthood.2,3,4,5
What this work clarifies is that children who can depend on a caregiver to act as a “secure base” — to be available and responsive in times of need — gain confidence to explore their world and overcome challenges. This phenomenon is visible in thousands of observations of parents and children in the Strange Situation: When their secure base is present and available, young children explore new environments more; if their secure base leaves the room, their exploration plummets.6 It is also visible on the baseball field: In a telling study of 3- to 12-year-olds racing around a baseball diamond, children ran faster and were less likely to stumble or fall when their parents were available and responsive, compared to when parents were engrossed in their cell phone.7
In fact, a central function of an effective caregiver, according to John Bowlby, is to provide “a secure base from which to explore,” not one to cling to or hide behind. It is this confidence in a secure base — a felt sense of trust that someone “has their back” in times of trouble — that gives children the internal resources to grow into successful, autonomous adults.8 In a society that pressures children and adults alike toward hyper-independence, the idea that connection is the ground from which healthy independence can grow is both radical and powerfully transformative.
Now imagine you’re back on the diving board, eyeing the challenge ahead of you with trepidation. But this time, your coach acts as a secure base, saying, “I know it’s scary, and I’m right here with you. You’ve worked hard at this, and I’m confident you’ll be okay, even if you make a mistake. When you’re ready, take a deep breath and go for it! I’ll be waiting to hear all about it when it’s over.” Notice that the secure base doesn’t “coddle” or let you off the hook — you still have to take the leap into the unknown. But the experience is altered: You are not alone, and there is a spreading sense of strength, warmth, and confidence in that knowledge. You are supported, calmed by this person’s presence, assured of being connected to something beyond your own fear.
We can be this person for our children as they stand on their own diving boards, ready to take the next leap into starting preschool, or standing up to a bully, or trying out for the school play, or going away to college. When we feel the familiar urge to push, we could instead ask, “What would a secure base do?”
References
[1] Watson, J.B., & Watson, R.A. (1928). Psychological care of infant and child. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
[2] Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books.
[3] Harlow, H.F. (1958). The Nature of Love. American Psychologist, 13, 673-685.
[4] Fox, N., Nelson, C., & Zeanah, C. (2017). The effects of psychosocial deprivation on attachment: Lessons from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 45, 441-450.
[5] Rutter, M. (2006). The Promotion of Resilience in the Face of Adversity. In A. Clarke-Stewart & J. Dunn (Eds.), The Jacobs Foundation series on adolescence. Families count: Effects on child and adolescent development (pp. 26–52). Cambridge University Press.
[6] Ainsworth, M., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
[7] Stupica, Brandi. (2016). Rounding the bases with a secure base. Attachment & Human Development, 18, 1-18.
[8] Sroufe, A.L. (2005). Attachment and development: A prospective, longitudinal study from birth to adulthood. Attachment & human development, 7, 349-67.
