Practicing Attunement to Create Emotional Health

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If you feel worried about messing up your kid, today’s episode is for you. I’m teaching you how practicing attunement will help you build a more connected relationship with your child and create emotional health within them. 

Moms often say things to me like, “I traumatized my kid,” “I yelled at them,” “I’m ruining my kid,” or “I’m gonna have a bad relationship with them.”

As moms, we feel really scared that we’re going to mess up our kids. This is a normal fear, and it comes up because you really care a lot. You want to do a good job and raise emotionally healthy kids. Attunement is a big way that we do this.

What Is Attunement?

Emotional health and feeling secure are rooted in having a strong attachment with your parent. So, the way to trauma-proof your child is through attunement, which is about seeing them and soothing them. 

In the Calm Mama Process of Calm, Connect, Limit Set, Correct, attunement the “Connect” step. When we talk about validating emotion, we're talking about attunement. 

In this process, you are becoming aware of your child's emotional state. If they're misbehaving, crying, asking for something - whatever you’re seeing on the outside, you are also trying to figure out what might be going on on the inside.

You’re understanding that your child has an inner life. They're walking through the world experiencing something. They have their own thoughts, feelings, reactions, and a perspective on life.

When you are regularly attuning to your child, they feel safe and secure. And from that secure place, they are willing to trust others, to be vulnerable, to take risks, to grow, to change, to self-reflect, to have self compassion - all these traits that are part of being an emotionally healthy person.

Attunement also normalizes emotions, creates a shame-free environment for processing negative emotion, and helps your child become more self-aware (another key for emotional health).

Of course, there are no guarantees. There are always factors that are out of our control. But generally speaking, the more secure a child’s attachment is with their parent, the more likely they are to have an emotionally healthy life.

As we talk about attunement, the goal is not for you to do a, b, and c to make sure your kid turns out okay. It’s an opportunity to look at yourself and decide how you want to show up as a parent and what kind of strategies you want to use in your family. 

Practicing Attunement

Being seen and validated is really, really powerful. And a little bit of attunement goes a long way toward compliance. Not only is it an effective parenting strategy, but it’s also helpful for your kid in the long term. 

It models the process of emotional regulation. You help them understand the messy inside feelings. You give them language to communicate it and to cope with it. When you do this over and over again, your child eventually learns how to do that for themselves. 

Step 1: See. Attunement starts by just paying attention - looking at your child’s behavior and wondering what could be going on underneath. You’ll see clues like their behavior, body language, or words. Your role as a parent is to try to slip into their narrative, their emotional state. Then, you can respond to that emotional state and try to help them through it.

Step 2: Soothe. When your child is in distress or having a negative experience, they need soothing. Sometimes this is as simple as communicating to them, “You are not alone. I see you. I’m here to support you.” 

Soothing is not about solving problems. “Fix it” energy is not really soothing energy. Rescuing your kid from their problem, convincing them that things are okay, or trying to minimize it and tell them it’s not a big deal will not make them feel supported, either. 

Attunement is coming alongside them and validating their experience, recognizing that their experience is real and true. Listen to them, respect their state of mind, and try to see the world from their point of view. 

At the same time, we recognize that not all behavior is acceptable. If your kid is acting in a way that causes a problem or just doesn’t work for your family, we want to validate their feelings without validating the behavior. Offer other ways to communicate, process, or cope with their feelings. 

Common Obstacles

A child’s natural state is to seek support from their caregivers. And we want our kids to believe that we are their safe space, their home base. You are your kid’s anchor in a storm. My mom used to say to me, “Home is where I am,” and I love that. 

We want to offer our children reliability and consistency in our caregiving, but we aren’t always able to do that because we aren’t always calm. 

The biggest obstacle to attunement is our own emotional dysregulation, our emotional disconnection from ourselves. We are not willing to be vulnerable with ourselves. 

If you aren’t attuned to yourself, it is going to be very difficult for you to attune to someone else. If you're not aware of your emotional state, how can you be aware of someone else's emotional state?

This is where the “Calm” piece of the Calm Mama Process comes in. The Pause Break and the other tools we use in this step are an invitation for you to get to know yourself, to find out who you are, especially as a mom. What are you even thinking and feeling these days? Get to know yourself in a compassionate way. 

Another reason attunement is really hard is because our child's emotional state can trigger our nervous system. You might start out calm, but then your kid has a screaming fit and it's so loud that you end up feeling really overwhelmed by their behavior. 

Your brain tells you that you have to “fix it, change it, stop it, solve it” in order to feel calm, so you might try to shut down your child’s emotions to shut down the behavior. Attuning is a better way, but it’s really hard to do when you are in your stress response. 

Think about which of your kid’s behaviors trigger you. Is it noise? Is it when the house is really messy? Is it when they say mean things or hurt their sibling? Figure out what bothers you and why. 

Attunement is also confusing because, as the parent, you are the person who is causing some of your kid’s pain, and then you’re also supposed to help soothe that pain. There is a constant tension in parenting because you are the person who enforces the rules AND you're the person who soothes your child when they are mad about the rules. That can be really confusing for you and them.

It can actually be easier to hold a boundary when you feel calm and you feel compassion toward your kid. You can acknowledge the struggle and still be firm because you’re not in your own anger, frustration, guilt or overwhelm. You’re in their narrative. 

For example,  your kid wants a cookie, and you tell them “no”. Then, you say, “You're sad that I said no to a cookie,” and then they kinda look at you like, just give me the cookie, and then we'll both feel better. But you have to hold your compassionate limit. 

You can be empathetic that bedtime is hard, and it's still bedtime. You can be acknowledge that going to school sucks, and it's still time to go to school.

When you’re overwhelmed, when you want to be connecting with your kids, but instead you're yelling at them - Pause. Stop. Reset your nervous system and your mental state. Calm and connect to yourself. 

When To Attune

There is no need for perfection here. You are not expected to attend every emotional big feeling cycle that you're invited to. You don't have to be consistently attuned to your child. Not only is this impossible, it’s also unhealthy. 

All of our relationships are designed to flow in between connection and separation. Your children need to have that, too. There are times when they’ll want you to attune with them and give support, and times when they need to self-soothe and problem solve on their own. 

Think of it as a rhythm and flow. You connect when you can and you separate. You let them problem solve, and then you also come to them. 

You invite them into a conversation. Do you want some help and support? Are you looking for someone to help you with this?

We want to give them the support they need while also communicating to them that they have everything inside of them that they need to soothe themselves. It's so empowering for your children to have autonomy over their own emotional well-being.

The ultimate goal is for our kids to be able to calm their own nervous systems and to soothe themselves. When your kids know they can count on you, you don't need to be always available. And giving your kids the chance to care for themselves helps them become more confident and resilient.

You’ll Learn:

• What attunement is and why it’s important for emotional health
• 2 simple steps to practice attunement
• Examples of what it looks like to be attuned to your child
• What not to say when your kid is struggling
• Common obstacles to attuning to your child (and what to do about them)

Resources:

• Episode 2: Getting to Calm with the Pause Break
• Episode 88: Co-Regulation During a Meltdown