Coparent Academy Podcast
Lifechanging Coparenting
Coparent Academy Podcast
#145 - How Responsive Parenting Shapes a Child’s Attachment
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Attachment isn’t just about emotions—it’s a survival strategy wired into our DNA. From the moment we’re born, we rely on our caregivers to shape how we connect with the world. But how does this work? And what happens when those connections break down?
* Watch this episode on YouTube (https://youtu.be/7ecu1EYplTU?si=Qvaw4zrCHd4xYpri)
In this episode, we discuss:
- Why attachment is a survival mechanism, not just a bond.
- How parents shape their child’s emotional security.
- The Still Face Experiment—a powerful study on caregiver responsiveness.
Understanding attachment helps us build stronger, healthier relationships—from childhood to adulthood. It's the science of connection.
For more resources and in-depth courses visit www.coparentacademy.com.
Have questions or comments? We’d love to hear from you! Send them to ron@coparentacademy.com.
The Significance of Infant Attachment
Speaker 1Attachment isn't just about growing loving bonds . It's not about being close to somebody . For an infant , attachment is survival . It's hard-coded into our DNA and how we express that DNA encoding is the result of our experiences in this life . So there are three key things that I want to get across in this video . One attachment is about survival . It's not just about forming loving bonds . Two as parents , we shape our children's attachment by how we respond to them . In three , if we're mindful of these first two facts and understand the power that we as parents yield to help shape how our children are going to form social bonds and relationships with their friends , with their romantic partners , with their own children throughout their life , we can be armed with that information and make better choices than maybe we have been about how to react to our children in the moment , even when they're annoying us , even when we have 10,000 other things going on . With this information , my hope is that you're going to understand , if you don't already , how better to respond to your child to help them form better attachments now and in the future . All right , so let's build this foundation .
Speaker 1First , human babies are helpless . That's because we're what's known as an altricial species . I know that's a big word , but here's what it means . If a species is altricial , it means that they're young , are hatched or born in a very immature and helpless condition so as to require care for some period of time . And we're not the only species human beings that are altricial . There are tons of others . Here's some examples Cats are altricial . Many species of birds are altricial Kangaroos and other marsupials they're altricial as well . Now , not all species are altricial . Some species are what they refer to as precocial , and here's the difference . A precocial species is one in which the young are relatively mature and mobile for the moment of birth or hatching . And there's tons of examples of precocial species as well . We've got horses , mallards , whales all precocial species crocodiles there are tons of them where the young are born and they just kind of get to go on .
Speaker 1But regardless of whether we're born helpless like a human baby , or whether we are born ready to go like a crocodile , how our parents and the others in our community or other caregivers respond to us as we're developing is going to shape how we attach . Our attachment is always shaped by our experiences . It's incredibly hard to try to think about what it's like to be an infant . I mean , I don't know about you , but at this point it's hard for me to remember what it was like to be a I don't know eight-year-old , ten-year-old teenager . Kind of hard to remember exactly what it was like . We have our versions of it , but it's not true .
Speaker 1So there's some analogies that we can think about in terms of how an infant feels coming into this world , but one that I think may strike home to lots of folks is being a visitor in a foreign land and this doesn't have to be an actual foreign land , like if you've done lots of international travel , especially when you got started doing it . This probably resonates with you . You land , you go through customs , you're scared , maybe at the very beginning , right , you don't speak the language of these officials who have great power over you . You don't quite know where to go . You're having to trust all of these people . You're depending on their kindness . You may not speak the language . You can't tell what the signs say . You're not sure how the currency works . You're not sure what the food is going to taste like . You're not sure if the food is going to be safe for you to eat , for lots of different reasons it could be just sanitation or it could be spice .
Parent-Infant Connection and Behavioral Synchrony
Speaker 1So there's lots that you don't know when you're a visitor in a foreign land . But it doesn't have to just be foreign travel . For example , if you've ever been in the military as I was your first day going through your in-processing is kind of different . Then you get down toward range , to your basic training . You're meeting all these different people . It's a whole new world , especially for me . It was an entirely different world than anything I'd ever experienced before , wasn't quite sure about the rules , the social dynamics were different for me . I was with people who I had never met before , people from backgrounds I'd never experienced before . So again , you're trying to seek out safe harbors , you're trying to figure out how to navigate the situation .
Speaker 1That's how infants are when they're born into the world , except they're at even more of a disadvantage . They can't fully see , right . They don't have developed intellectual capabilities , right . They're going off of instinct , but not just instinct . Nature helps us out there , and one way in which nature helps us is by encoding not just the infants but also the parents for connection . Part of the way in which infants and their caregivers are wired to care for each other , are wired to develop together , is called behavioral synchrony . Let's listen to Dr Ruth Feldman as she explains what it means to have behavioral synchrony .
Speaker 2Biobehavioral synchrony is defined as the coordination of biology and behavior between attachment partners during social contact . In all mammals , the parents' mature physiological systems can externally regulate the infants' immature physiological systems through the coordination of social cues during moments of contact .
Speaker 1This is true for all sorts of species , but it seems especially true in humans . Let's listen again as Dr Feldman talks about how humans are special in this aspect .
Speaker 2So in human we found that during moments of face-to-face interactions parent and infant coordinate their behavior in the gaze , affect vocal and touch modalities . Those coordinated behavior provide a template for biological synchrony between the parent and infant heart rhythms , for coordinated release of oxytocin and for brain-to-brain synchrony between critical nodes of the social brain .
Speaker 1So the question then is how does that behavioral synchrony work ? What , in our body , permits two different creatures right ? Although we're related , we're two different individual humans . What permits us to engage in this behavioral synchrony ? And Dr Feldman further explains that it is the oxytocin network . She's going to talk about a few different things , but I'm going to focus on two . The first feature of the oxytocin system that is really important is that it is highly integrative , and what that means is that it is in every part of our body . I know that I personally was thinking about oxytocin just being maybe something in the brain , but that's not true . It is present in all of our major systems , as far as I understand , but we're gonna hear dr feldman talk more about that oxytocin is a highly integrative system .
Speaker 2Not only that it crosstalks with several systems in the brain , with the extended amygdala system , with a dopamine reward system , but also there are there are receptors for oxytocin throughout the body , in many body organs . So oxytocin integrates body and brain , organism and environment .
Speaker 1The second thing that I thought was super cool about the oxytocin system is that it is ancient . It is a very ancient molecule present in all vertebrate species that has evolved to help us manage stress . So let's listen to Dr Feldman as she talks more about that .
Speaker 2The next feature of the oxytocin system is that it is a very ancient molecule . It is thought to evolve from gene duplication in jawed fish approximately 600 million years ago and is found in all vertebrate and some invertebrate species . Now , interestingly , in all species from nematodes , lizard or fish to humans , oxytocin is implicated in basic life functions that aim to manage stress , such as water conservation or energy balance or thermal regulation . But these functions have been repurposed so that oxytocin became supported , supportive of social function , so that oxytocin across all species evolve , so that the organism can use social relationship to manage the stresses involved in harsh ecologies .
Speaker 1Okay . So now that we understand the science behind it , this behavioral synchrony and the oxytocin system and its role from Dr Feldman , let's take a look at this in a real-life example , and this is the Still Face Experiment . The Still Face Experiment was conducted in the 70s and published in 1978 by Dr Edward Tronick . It seems a little harsh when you look at it . I can't imagine necessarily signing my own baby up for it , but it's important and it changed the landscape in terms of how psychologists thought about infant caregiver dynamics . First let's listen to Dr Tronica explain what the landscape was in terms of infant caregiver relations prior to the SILFACE experiment . Then we're going to come back and we're going to watch .
Speaker 1If you're on YouTube with me , we're going to watch the still face experiment , which is broken down into three parts . The first part is where the parent , in this case a mother , is engaging with her baby normally , as the baby expects . The second phase is when the mother presents a still face , when she's not engaging with the baby , she's not giving the baby any signals to respond to , and it's very disconcerting for the child . And then third is a period of repair . So we'll watch the actual still face experiment and then , after we've done that , we'll listen to Dr Tronica explain the importance of it , explain what we should take away from this experiment .
Speaker 3Babies this young are extremely responsive to the emotions and the reactivity and the social interaction that they get from the world around them . This is something that we started studying 30 , 40 years ago , when people didn't think that infants could engage in social interaction . Still , face experiment . What the mother did was she sits down and she's playing with her baby , who's about a year of age .
Speaker 1I'm like a girl .
Speaker 3And she gives a greeting to the baby . The baby gives a greeting back to her . This baby starts pointing at different places in the world and the mother's trying to engage her and play with her . They're working to coordinate their emotions and their intentions , what they want to do in the world , and that's really what the baby is used to .
Speaker 1Okay , now's the time to see the still face . Mom's going to turn away . She's going to turn back and just be flat affect , giving nothing to the baby to respond to . We're going to see what happens . The baby gets very upset , has lots of externalizing behaviors that reflect that the baby's upset , and then mom will initiate repair .
Speaker 3And then we ask the mother to not respond to the baby . The baby very quickly picks up on this and then she uses all of her abilities to try and get the mother back . She smiles at the mother , she points because she's used to the mother looking where she points . The baby puts both hands up in front of her and says what's happening here ? She makes that screechy sound at the mother like come on , why aren't we doing this ? Even in this two minutes , when they don't get the normal reaction , they react with negative emotions , they turn away , they feel the stress of it . They actually may lose control of their posture because of the stress that they're experiencing . Okay , I'm here and what are you doing ?
Speaker 1Oh yes , oh , what a big girl . Okay , now it's time for us to listen to Dr Tronick explain his takeaways from this experiment .
Speaker 3It's a little like the good , the bad and the ugly . The good is that normal stuff that goes on that we all do with our kids . The bad is when something bad happens but the infant can overcome it After all . When you stop the still face , the mother and the baby start to play again . The ugly is when you don't give the child any chance to get back to the good . There's no reparation and they're stuck in that really ugly situation .
Speaker 1So I know Dr Tannik ended on sort of a downer note talking about what happens if we're not engaging with our babies and we're not repairing , but I look at this as the opposite . I think it's amazing information to have . I have a 19 , soon-to-be 20-year-old son and I didn't know any of this . When my son was a baby I was super busy , I wasn't around a lot , probably , I know , wasn't as emotionally available as I should have been to him . Fortunately he had his mother , who was just an amazing mother , always there , always emotionally engaged , just the absolute best .
Speaker 1If I were a single father at the time , not knowing any of this , I probably would not have engaged to the extent that I now know I need to . I would have loved to have this information back then . So if you didn't know this before , if you kind of had this feeling that it was important to be emotionally available and engaged with your infant on the level that they need you to , if you kind of knew that was the case but you didn't understand the implications of it , now you do . Now you have this information to help you go back in in your daily interactions with your child and engage with them in a way that is developmentally appropriate , to help them learn how they operate in society , to learn how to form bonds and attachments , to be prepared to have this amazingly stable platform from which to have future relationships with their co-workers , their friends , their intimate partners and their own kids .
Speaker 1So , please , I ask you to take this information , integrate it into yourself , understand how important it is and make changes today and how you're engaging with your baby . If you haven't been doing it , maybe the best you could .
Exploring Developmental Attachment Stages
Speaker 1In our next episodes , we're going to be talking more about attachment . We're going to follow through some of the different developmental stages to talk about how attachment works . We're going to be getting into things like how a parent's own attachment style impacts their parenting and lots of other things like that . So thank you all for listening . I hope you have a great week .