Child Attachment Quotes & Sayings

The attachment to parental figures I am trying to describe here is an attachment to parents who have inflicted injury on their children. It is an attachment that prevents us from helping ourselves. The unfulfilled natural needs of the child are later transferred to therapists, partners, or our own children. We cannot believe that those needs were really ignored, or possibly even trampled on by our parents in such a way that we were forced to repress them. We hope that the other people we relate to will finally give us what we have been looking for, understand, support, and respect us, and relieve us of the difficult decisions life brings with it. As these expectations are fostered by the denial of childhood reality, we cannot give them up. As I said earlier, they cannot be relinquished by an act of will. But they will disappear in time if we are determined to face up to our own truth. This is not easy. It is almost always painful. But it is possible. In — Alice Miller

What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self. — John Bowlby

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

Attachments that are not fostered may lend to the child's inability to properly attach or have no attachment at all. — Asa Don Brown

Traumatic experiences in early childhood may interfere with the child's ability to securely attach. — Asa Don Brown

And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respect, without conflict and without resentment. It is the hardest lesson to learn that the goal of parenthood is not to reign forever but to abdicate gracefully at the right time. — Sydney J. Harris

Attachment begins early but grows slowly. There are no shortcuts. Verbal guarantees of safety or nurturance carry no more weight than those for hair-replacement systems and miracle slicers. A therapist must prove trustworthy over time. Only consistent experiential demonstrations, in times of both quietude and turbulence, convince the child. Though all children love to be wined and dined, the safety, understanding, warmth, and containment of therapy are what foster trust and ultimately seduce the child patient. (41) — Richard Bromfield

My mother didn't find motherhood easy. I've heard her saying that. She didn't breastfeed me. I woke up when I was breastfeeding my own child thinking, 'How can a woman feel an attachment to a child without breast-feeding?' — Jade Jagger

Maternal/child attachment is mostly eroded in increments. The separation begins in hospitals, where mothers are not only made to feel inferior to medical professionals in relation
to their infants, but regularly separated from their infants. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

A child's attachment process begins within the first year of life ... — Asa Don Brown

Attachment is misery, but from the very beginning the child is taught for attachment. The mother will say to the child, "Love me; I am your mother." The father will say, "Love me; I am your father" - as if someone is a father or a mother so he becomes automatically lovable. — Rajneesh

Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience - like crossing the street without holding my hand - I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear - the extreme love of one's child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw - children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first. — Sarah Ruhl

By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure. — Judith Lewis Herman

All over now. He is either in joy or nothingness.
(So why grieve?
The worst of it, for him, is over.)
Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing. — George Saunders

The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers. — Warwick Middleton

Avoidant attachment: Whether the mother is present or absent, the child behaves the same - neither noticing nor caring whether she or a stranger is there. Because the child isn't agitated when the mother leaves, there is no need for soothing. In adulthood, people with this attachment style aren't comfortable with intimacy and closeness, and so they avoid it. — Robin S. Rosenberg

A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely, an insecurely attached child may view the world as a dangerous place in which other people are to be treated with great caution, and see himself as ineffective and unworthy of love. These assumptions are relatively stable and enduring: those built up in the early years of life are particularly persistent and unlikely to be modified by subsequent experience. — Jeremy Holmes

In between every action and reaction, there is a space. Usually the space is extremely small because we react so quickly, but take notice of that space and expand it. Be aware in that space that you have a choice to make. You can choose how to respond, and choose wisely, because the next step you take will teach your child how to handle anger and could either strengthen or damage your relationship. — Rebecca Eanes

young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persist
Bowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., Boston, M., and Rosenbluth, D. (1956). The effects of mother-child separation: A follow-up study. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 29, 211-249. — John Bowlby

As a group, attachment-challenged children need to be looked at differently. This is a group of children who have experiences and fears of being separated from parent figures. Until they can rebuild some of their emotional security, their time in child-care must be restricted. — Deborah D. Gray

Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time, they should have mastered the following tasks:

1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving up a sense of self and one's freedom to be apart,

2. The ability to say appropriate no's to others without fear of loss of love,

3. The ability to take appropriate no's from others without withdrawing emotionally.

Noting these tasks, a friend said half-joking, "They need to learn this by age three? How about by fourty-three?" Yes, these are tall orders but boundary development is essential in the early years of life. — Henry Cloud

He would go to his uncle's office where he would answer the telephone or run errands, all with some similitude of responsibility even if not actually of necessity; at least it was an intimation of his willingness to carry some of his own weight. He had begun it when he was a child, when he could scarcely remember, out of that blind and absolute attachment to his mother's only brother which he had never tried to reason about, and he had done it ever since; — William Faulkner

In the spiritual life one becomes just like a little child, without resentment, without attachment, full of life and joy. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Whether you call it Attachment Parenting, natural parenting, or simple maternal instincts, this false "return" to traditional parenting is just a more explicit and deliberate version of the often unnamed parenting gender divide. Whether you're wearing you baby or not, whether you're using cloth diapers or teaching your four-week-old to use the toilet; it's still women who are doing the bulk of child care, no matter what the parenting philosophy. Putting a fancy name to the fact that we're still doing all the goddamn work doesn't make it any less sexist or unfair — Jessica Valenti

The best predictor of a child's security of attachment is not what happened to his parents as children, but rather how his parents made sense of those childhood experiences. — Daniel J. Siegel

As a child, I was very careful not to erase my mother's writing on the chalkboard because I would miss her. — Joyce Rachelle

likely to form a secure attachment. The less secure the relationship attachments in our first two years, the harder it is to have good relationships throughout our lives. Little or no response to a distressed child from a caregiver may result in the child developing an avoidant behavior pattern, and low self-esteem. When a caregiver is inconsistent in response to the child's needs, the child will likely form ambivalent relationship patterns, anxiously uncertain about whether they can trust people. Finally, frightening behavior, intrusiveness, withdrawal, negativity, role confusion, and maltreatment lead to a disorganized attachment, and cause a child to feel dazed and confused. This child dissociates and compartmentalizes the traumatic experiences as — Heather Hans

As a child of the millennial generation, I was raised in a society in which we were under the misconception that women and men had reached equality. With the exception of very few matriarchal societies, women were more liberated than they had ever been in history. In America's middle class, basic education was practically handed to us. We have the ability to obtain a higher education and career without men. So it took me nearly a decade after becoming sexually active to realize that, as a woman, I was socially oppressed. I grew up in a world where a woman's abstinence until marriage was highly praised and if she must participate in premarital sex, to limit that activity to as few partners as possible. It was considered tacky to openly discuss my sexual encounters. I was also taught that, as a woman, I was hormonally programmed to be more emotional than men. If I had sex with a man, I was supposed to feel some sort of intimate attachment. If I didn't, I was a cruel-hearted slut. — Maggie Young

In the early days of my child labor activities I was an investigator with a camera attachment ... but the emphasis became reversed until the camera stole the whole show. — Lewis Hine

Dostoevsky's underground man ... observes his contemporaries striving to establish false goals where there are no naturally generated ones ... He argues they should be conscious and honest enough to recognize that the goal itself is not an absolute, and probably not even important. A strong attachment to the telos indicates that the spontaneous enjoyment the child once took in road-building has waned. — John Carroll

Why is it braver to be a single mother versus being with a partner? Being in a couple and having a child could be more challenging because there might be conflict if the male partner cannot understand the extreme attachment a woman feels when she has a child. — Monica Cruz

This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls, she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates, outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them. Worldly — Charles Dickens

Attachment parenting is at once conscious and instinctive parenting that focuses on respecting the importance of the parent-child attachment. It also recognises the necessity for secure attachment in growing compassionate, confident and peaceful human beings. Along with this, it acknowledges that mothers are truly important, not simply replaceable with products and procedures. Mothers matter, and that shouldn't mean they should lose agency in the process of becoming mothers who matter. — Chrissy Chittenden

A mother's body against a child's body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life ... The absence of a body against my body made attachment abstract. Made my own body dislocated and unable to rest or settle. A body pressed against your body is the beginning of nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling. It is why at one point I couldn't stop drinking and fucking. Why I needed people to touch me all the time. It had less to do with sex than location. When you press against me, or put yourself inside me. When you hold me down or lift me up, when you lie on top of me and I can feel your weight, I exist. I am here. — Eve Ensler

The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independance we must first invite dependance; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness. — Gordon Neufeld

If the mother can't break the attachment, they say that the baby can't leave this world. For him to be happy in a good place you must send the child that you must send ... and you must live. — Park Gye-Ok

When our caregivers are unavailable, most of time it has nothing to do with LOVE for the child, however, the child cannot possibly know this. The child winds up believing that the unavailable parent is not available due to some defect within the child. We believe that if we were "enough" the parent would CHOOSE to be available. — Mary Crocker Cook

Soul development depends on attachment and bonding. Every brain and body is genetically wired to develop itself, but the full soul development of brain and body depends on each child receiving the care of between two and five completely bonded caregivers. — Michael Gurian

In Separation (1973a), Bowlby puts forward a theory of agoraphobia based on the notion of anxious attachment. He sees agoraphobia, like school phobia, as an example of separation anxiety. He quotes evidence of the increased incidence of family discord in the childhoods of agoraphobics compared with controls, and suggests three possible patterns of interaction underlying the illness: role reversal between child and parent, so that the potential agoraphobic is recruited to alleviate parental separation anxiety; fears in the patient that something dreadful may happen to her mother while they are separated (often encouraged by parental threats of suicide or abandonment); and fear that something dreadful might happen to herself when away from parental protection. — Jeremy Holmes

When Patanjali says "non-attachment", he is not anti-love. Really, he is for love. Non-attachment means be natural, loving, flowing, but don't get obsessed and addicted. Addiction is the problem. Then it is like a disease. You cannot love anybody except your child - this is addiction. Then you will be in misery. Your child can die; then there is no possibility for your love to flow. Even if your child is not going to die, he will grow. And the more he grows, the more he will become independent. And then there will be pain. Every mother suffers, every father suffers. — Rajneesh

It is regarded as axiomatic that parents have more power then children. This is an inescapable biological fact; young children are completely dependent on their parents or other caring adults for survival. — Judith Lewis Herman

At each stage of development the child needs different resources from the family. During the first year, a variety of experience and the availability of the parents for attachment are primary. During the second and third years, stimulation of language development is critical. During the years prior to school entrance, information that persuades children they are loved becomes critical, and during the school years it is important for children to believe that they can succeed at the tasks they want to master. — Jerome Kagan

It was two years ago that I first met Yuki. I remember that painfully thin figure covered in dirt: malnourished, exhausted and carrying a sleeping child in his arms like it's the most precious thing in the world. — Kyuugou

I want to see her naked, " Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene's and said, "You can't have her. I love her, my daughter." My father said, "Take the younger one. She's smarter, " as he pushed me over forward.
Marlene cried because father said I was smarter even though he was just trying to manipulate Mengele. The doctor's chest grew large. — Wendy Hoffman

Secure attachment has been linked to a child's ability to successfully recover and prove resilient in the presence of a traumatic event. — Asa Don Brown

Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Attachment exerted an invisible but powerful pull on the child, just as heavenly bodies are connected by gravitational forces. But unlike gravity, attachment makes its presence known by a negative inverse square law: the further the attached person is from their secure base, the greater the pull of attachment. The 'elastic band' which constitutes the attachment bond is slack and imperceptible in the presence of a secure base. If the secure base becomes unreliable or the limits of exploration are reached, the bond tugs at the heartstrings. — Jeremy Holmes

Attachment. A secure attachment is the ability to bond; to develop a secure and safe base; an unbreakable or perceivable inability to shatter to bond between primary parental caregiver(s) and child; a quest for familiarity; an unspoken language and knowledge that a caregiver will be a permanent fixture. — Asa Don Brown

To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality had been realized - how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn't care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think. — Andrew Solomon