In the experience of being mothers or fathers, in addition to the moments of dreams and fantasies of what the future child will be like and what we will be like, there is the moment of the encounter with the baby.
Motherhood and fatherhood are not only subjective experiences, they are also social experiences. In this sense, the development of the newborn’s mental health will depend on the quality of the interactions with his or her most relevant caregivers: father, mother, grandparents, caregivers, etc.
The quality of these interactions depends on different factors:
- Desire for child
- Support network
- Family and work reconciliation
- Parental competencies
Likewise, parental competencies constitute a care system, i.e. the ability to care for, protect and educate minors, fostering healthy development and secure attachment.
How do you bond with your baby?
When a baby is upset, behaviors that express discomfort or pain are activated. If there is an adult who is attuned to this discomfort and comes to the baby’s aid every time he starts to cry, the expectation will be generated that there is an adult available when needed. This bond of security and trust will lead the child to look for that figure, who provides reassurance in times of stress.
There are many possible attachment styles, which will depend on the style provided by the parents, the subtlety of their parental competencies and their personal characteristics.
How do we care for our children?
Parental competencies are associated with social parenting, since they can be developed by significant people other than the parents. Thus, every adult or institution is a care system, where adults can support a child in need.
These are the most important skills to carry out an adequate care system:
- Ability to be attentive to indicators and signals in the child (moments of anxiety, uneasiness, fear, different emotional states, pain, feelings or sensations that bring discomfort) and to offer a bond of trust and security in those moments of stress, with appropriate responses to their needs. The child will learn that when he/she feels bad there will always be an adult who will come to his/her aid.
- Empathy. This is the ability to understand the child’s emotional states and to tune in to them, thus providing an adequate response for their regulation.
- Mentalization capacity, which allows inferring mental states in oneself and in others. Parents who have this capacity will promote in the exchange all the advantages of a development of emotional intelligence in the child.
- Capacity of emotional regulation. The fact of having learned to calm oneself helps us to transmit ways of calming oneself to one’s own children. First that calmness for the child is given from the outside, but then it is incorporated as an internal model of self-regulation.
In the emotional intimacy achieved in the early interaction the fundamental thing is nonverbal communication, tone of voice, facial expression and posture, which is given with a quality of tone, rhythm and intensity. This nonverbal communication has a great unconscious influence on the regulation between the infant and the significant adult, both mind and body.
One of my professional tasks with parents is to help foster the development or acquisition of appropriate parenting skills for the healthy development of the child.
Although these skills and bonds can be improved throughout life, strengthening them at an early stage offers better parenting conditions.