Kendall Rosario's Key Ideas from Raising a Secure Child
by Kent Hoffman, Glen Cooper, Bert Powell

…beware of overprivileging your child’s emotions. As also discussed in chapter 4, sometimes in the process of trying to be sensitive to our children’s emotional needs, we inadvertently teach our children that every feeling they have is paramount and must be attended to “now” - which actually thwarts resilience.

The Circle of Security was devised as a simple roadmap, a way to quickly and accurately know what need our child is exhibiting in any given moment.

The circle depicts all three of the central or core needs within the attachment system defined by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth; care seeking, exploration, and caregiving.

… our experience of trusting the ones to whom we’re attached helps us learn to regulate our own emotions by giving us someone to regulate them for us and then regulate them with us (so-called coregulation) so that, eventually, we learn how to do this by ourselves.

Without any help, young children lose interest and self-confidence if success continually eludes them. They’ll also miss out on learning that others can be a resource for learning. With too much help, they won’t learn to trust in their own capacity and won’t develop the creative use of frustration to learn new skills. They may also learn that they can’t do important tasks without our direction. In these ways, learning is hampered.

Bigger and stronger without kind becomes mean. Kind without bigger and stronger becomes weak. And we always need wisdom to know the necessary balance, especially as this needed balance is never a cookie-cutter easy-to-apply formula available in each new circumstance.