A New Approach to Developing Secure Attachment

Modern moms are held to impossible standards. It no longer feels like enough to just love our children and keep them safe—now we feel that we must be child development experts, saying the right thing in every moment to support our children’s emotional health. 

This comes from a wonderful place. We want to break cycles and help our children thrive. We want them to become happy, healthy, well-adjusted adults. We want to maintain a strong relationship with them. And, perhaps most pressing, we want to avoid “messing them up.” 

However, in our goal to support our children emotionally, we have come to fear our mistakes—to believe that if we don’t respond the “right” way, we’re going to cause irreparable harm. 

But is that fear based in reality? Are our mistakes potentially paving the way for future emotional struggles? Do we have to be perfect to create secure attachment? And how do we create secure attachment when we don’t even have it ourselves? 

These are the fears, doubts, and questions that so many moms are carrying the weight of. But attachment research doesn’t actually tell us we need to take all of this pressure onto our shoulders. 

Attachment isn’t created by moms who carry everything on their shoulders and put their needs last. In fact, our children might benefit from a different approach. 

This week on The Momwell Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Kelley, co-founder of Therapist Uncensored and co-author of Secure Relating, to talk about attachment research, what our children actually need, and how to create secure attachments in all of our relationships. 

How Our Attachment Style Forms Over Time and Impacts Us as Moms

If we want to develop a secure attachment style, we have to understand what “attachment” really is. It’s not necessarily a fixed goal—it’s an ongoing process that starts the day we’re born. 

Dr. Kelley said that attachment is deeper than just how we think, how we feel, and the assumptions we make—the experiences in our life, even from a young age, impact our nervous system development, playing a role in how secure we feel.  

When we hear about “attachment” now on social media, we’re often talking about adult attachment—not early attachment formed in childhood. Dr. Kelley pointed out that it’s important to understand the differences. They’re related, but they aren’t the same. 

Our nervous system is trained to respond to our experiences—ones that are often stored in our unconscious memory. That’s why early caregiving relationships can impact us throughout our entire life. 

For example, if our parents became overwhelmed or sent us away when we showed signs of emotion, our nervous system might have learned that our feelings are bad—it might even start shutting our emotions down altogether. 

Breaking cycles isn’t about developing a “secure attachment style.” 

This is hard to overcome later. We might avoid conflict with a partner or find ourselves triggered by our children’s feelings because our body fears emotions. This can lead us to carry out cycles we don’t want to pass on—and leave us feeling extremely guilty in the process. 

It takes a lot of self-work to rewrite those early experiences and retrain our nervous systems—and it can make us feel hopeless, as if our lack of secure attachment has destined us to struggle as parents. 

But Dr. Kelley believes the answer to breaking cycles isn’t about developing a “secure attachment style.” We can take a different approach, creating change and breaking cycles despite our early experiences. 

Overcoming the Pressure around Developing Secure Attachment

If we focus too much on developing a secure attachment style, we can start to feel defeated or fearful. Our attachment style feels like a fixed thing—difficult to change. But Dr. Kelley focuses instead on secure relating. 

As moms, we feel a lot of pressure to break cycles and show up differently for our children—but our fear of causing harm can lead us to hold ourselves to unreasonable standards. 

We might become so concerned about our mistakes that we miss out on being present with our children. We want so desperately to be good moms. But in our search for perfection, we forget our own humanity.

Being a good mom doesn’t require perfection. That’s hard to remember in a society that tells us we need to constantly be and do more. 

Secure relating is an action step. It doesn’t require perfection. It doesn’t assign us a “type.” And it doesn’t focus on the result. Instead, it focuses on taking care of our needs, building emotional regulation skills, and moving step by step away from a defensive and reactionary state into mindful self-awareness. 

The most important thing moms can do is relax and let go of the pressure. 

Dr. Kelley said that the most important thing moms can do is relax and let go of the pressure—this becomes the launching point for securely relating to our children. 

To securely relate to ourselves, we need to avoid judgment for our feelings. From there, we can focus on noticing when we feel activated, grounding ourselves, and forming a positive relationship with our emotions. 

As we develop these skills, we can also model for our children how to build that same self-security and acceptance.

Gender Norms and How Attachment Research Gets Misused

It’s also important to remember that we don’t need to take everything on our shoulders in order to form secure relationships with our kids. 

Dr. Kelley pointed out that attachment research can be misused to shame working moms or tell us that we should be home with our children. At the same time, care work is undervalued and underrecognized. This creates a pressure for moms to work as if they don’t have children and mother as if they don’t have jobs. 

But evidence doesn’t support the idea that moms are the only ones who can create secure attachment for children. 

Children need strong relationships with secure caregivers, but this can come in all forms—and in fact, they benefit from multiple secure attachments. This can come from family members, partners, quality caregivers and daycare providers. 

The myth that moms must be the primary caregivers does a disservice to moms and their partners. 

Moms deserve to not be pushed to burnout levels or held to unreasonable standards, and partners deserve to build strong attachments and bonds with their children. And children benefit when they can view both parents as nurturers and individuals with needs and interests.

How Moms Can Securely Relate to Themselves

As moms, we often focus so much on building up our children’s self-esteem and helping them developing a secure attachment style that we overlook ourselves. 

But if we want children to value themselves, we need to model that. 

Dr. Kelley pointed out that it’s easy to internalize messaging from the media that diminishes our self-worth and devalues care work. 

If we don't value ourselves, we send the message to our children that we're not valuable. But we can break away from this social messaging and maintain our sense of self-worth. 

We can advocate for ourselves, create change within our partnerships, and push for change on a systemic level. We can develop a society that views care work as important—and also as a responsibility that belongs to the entire family, not just moms. 

Moms shouldn’t be selfless—they should be valued. 

Dr. Kelley pointed out that moms are conditioned to be “selfless.” But we have value. We can’t erase ourselves or our needs. Moms shouldn’t be selfless—they should be valued. 

If we want to securely relate to our children, we first need to securely relate to ourselves. That means recognizing our value, respecting our needs, allowing ourselves to matter, and modeling care and consideration for ourselves. 

How to Value Moms on a Systemic Level

Secure attachment is more than an individual experience. Dr. Kelley said we should realize we need each other as a village—that we all need to connect, as mothers, children, partners, and beyond. 

She said that fostering security means prioritizing and valuing caregiving and the role of caregivers in a system that overlooks moms and devalues care work. 

Fostering security means prioritizing and valuing caregiving in a system that overlooks moms. 

The messaging about moms and their value in the world impact everyone—and Dr. Kelley pointed out that these are heavily embedded in our culture. 

She believes that building up secure connection and attachments is important, and that we all benefit from creating large-scale secure attachment. This means calling for policies that value education and caregivers—and voting for candidates who are supportive of moms, children, and families. 

Dr. Kelley said if we don’t nurture our system and the people who take care of our children, then the divisive nature of our society will only get worse. 

Instead, we can focus on connection, coming together, reducing judgment, and finding ways to relate with each other more securely. 

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