The Secure Base

John Bowlby, a British psychologist whose thinking and research laid the foundations for attachment theory, once made the statement that "life is best organized as a series of daring adventures from a secure base."

This offers an engaging image of the parent-child relationship. Think of it as a dance in which the partners have to be acutely tuned in to the slightest movement of each other in order to maintain a graceful balance.

The early part of the dance is all about creating the secure base. In infancy, parental ability to read baby cues and respond predictably supports the development of trust, an underlying security that the world is a good place, and there are familiar, predictable people in it who care for the baby.

This secure base is the safe zone, to which children will return again and again for renewal and reassurance throughout their developing years, indeed for their whole lives.

As these early attachments flourish, a positive foundation is laid for all development that will follow. And this development comes partly as a result of that "series of daring adventures."

Children cannot remain long at any one stage of behavior and accomplishment; the human childhood is long, but not long enough for them to get stuck, and it requires new experiences and efforts for them to move on, interspersed with a return to the comfort of the safe and familiar.

Toddlerhood is a time when parents have to be ever alert to the changing nature of the parent-child relationship—-the dance steps change.

After months of being inside the comfortable cocoon where parents and children are quite focused on each other, the little one discovers there is a great world out there to be explored and conquered.

Before most parents realize it, their youngsters are pulling away, trying to establish themselves as separate beings. They take courageous steps, often literally launching themselves into space.

They bump up against other small explorers, often wounding their feelings and sense of self, and perhaps most adventurous of all, they pull away from the very adults who are the source of their security. Watch a toddler entering a challenging new situation, and you will see illustrated this notion of "daring adventures from a secure base."

Often staying physically close to the parent who exemplifies the secure base, when they do venture forth, they occasionally glance back to make sure that security is within reach. Farther and farther they go, until they are able to remain distant and on their own for longer periods.

The same dance will happen with the next daring adventures, whether moving within the neighborhood, to school, to overnight stays, and so on. Parents of college age children will be able to describe the ways their kids come back to the secure base.

One more comment about this: The secure base is somewhere to go back to. If parents insist on being so involved in their children's lives at any stage from toddlerhood on that they are going along to smooth the way for them, the adventures become less daring, as there is no distance.

Secure bases don't move; they truly are foundations.

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© Growing Child 2012 Please feel free to forward this article to a friend.