11 August 2023

The impact of parental attunement and attachment

By Natalie Solomon, Clinical Psychologist working with Bellavista SHARE

Life has many enjoyable, wonderful moments, as well as times that are stressful, upsetting, devastating and even traumatic. These sometimes come with intensity and sometimes are part of the fabric of everyday life. Few of us will get through an entire lifetime without our resilience being seriously challenged.

The way we respond to these challenges is through resilience. Resilience –simply understood is the capacity to engage with and respond to the experiences and challenges of life with flexibility, competence, and efficacy.

Research has found that there is no single best way to cope with difficulties. Being able to adapt to a specific challenge is in fact the skill.

Advances in neuroscience suggest that capacities for resilience are innate in the brain and are hard wired by evolution. How well these capacities develop depends on quality of the early environment: attachment and parental attunement. Our life experiences shape the neural circuitry and functioning of the brain which in turn influences our responses to challenges. The human brain is a social-learning organ. It matures in interactions with other human brains. Social interactions of the child’s brain with the brains of adults nurtures biological developments and even turns on the actual expression of our some of our genes.

The attachment relationship programmes us to seek proximity to caretakers.

Through this relationship we develop an internal schema of the self with the other, this is called an “internal working model”. Secure attachment is the strongest inoculator against future trauma.

When we repeatedly respond with empathy, kindness and understanding to our children’s needs, we create an internal message that: “you are important, you matter, and you are loved”. When our children learn that calls for help are answered and solutions to problems exist, we create neural circuits that stabilise around a trustworthy sense of competence and mastery. This becomes the brains first template of resilience and serves as a lifelong buffer from stress and trauma.

Through parental attunement we develop the child’s ability to calm down their nervous system, and in time remain calm and level-headed in a crisis. Through parenting we teach our children to reflect on and make sense of experience, and as such maintain clarity during times of stress. The attachment relationship teaches children to establish trust in relationships with others and promotes the capacity to connect with resources both internal and external. Attuned parenting develops a sense of competence through experience, that one can draw on in times of stress and trauma.

Parenting for resilience involves qualities that both protect the child’s developing brain and stimulate brain growth. Attuned parenting sculpts the child’s brain for emotional resilience. It develops the child’s capacity to trust and to sustain positive relationships.

The words of Diana Fosha ring true as she notes “the roots of resilience are to be found in the felt sense of existing in the heart and mind of an empathic, at­tuned, self-possessed other”. For more information, visit www.bellavista.org.za

About Bellavista SHARE

Bellavista S.H.A.R.E. is the Education Resource Centre of Bellavista School, an independent school in Johannesburg that is widely regarded as a centre of excellence in the field of remedial education. With the Bellavista S.H.A.R.E initiative, the school harnesses the collective capacity it holds within its own staff to improve the quality of educational delivery in Southern Africa by sharing its wealth of professional knowledge, experience and collective expertise with the community of educators and health professionals working with children in the region. 

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