The Power of Soft Hearts

Parenthood is above all a relationship, not a skill to be acquired. Attachment is not a behavior to be learned but a connection to be sought.

Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids

Right now I am in Vancouver, BC, right smack in the middle of a two-week training with Dr. Gordon Neufeld. It has been a phenomenal week of integration for me, bringing together many threads of how maturation works with much greater clarity. And at the same time, it has provoked just as many questions as it has answers. This is how I know I am in the right place.

I will use this post to summarize the core of Gordon’s model: The key to raising children is to be in right relationship with them, help them preserve their soft hearts, and then nature will do the beautiful work of maturing them into their full potential.

Please accept my apologies if this post appears somewhat redundant as these ideas have been reflected throughout my previous posts. However, Gordon’s distillation is especially eloquent and very much alive for me right now, so I have decided to share it with you in hopes that we may all benefit from my trip to Vancouver.

What science has found is that emotional vitality is the engine of maturation. The more defended we become — the more walls we put up in our psyche and in our relationships that impede the flow of this emotional vitality — the less nature can do the work of wiring up the brain in the direction of maturity.

At the center of our children’s psyche is the fundamental need to feel securely attached to those who are caring for them. This is the pre-eminent need in every human psyche. If we do not respond to our children in ways that preserve their emotional vitality, but instead provoke them into chronic states of alarm, their brain will naturally move to defend them from this intensely uncomfortable anxiety.

The intelligence of the attachment system moves our children to depend on us, and moves us as parents to care for the child. This is to say that attachment is arranged hierarchically. There is an alpha member (the parent) and a dependent member (the child). When both child and parent embody their natural positions, the relationship flows smoothly and is nourishing for both parties. When we as parents are an embodiment of confidence — when we are moved to protect and to care for our children above all else — then they relax into their dependent mode, look to us for guidance, and want to be good for us. This is not the display of power over our children, but rather an embodiment of authority that aligns the relationship in a way that gives us the inherent power to do our parenting from within the appropriate context that nature intended.

When our children are fulfilled with abundant relational nourishment, they move quite naturally into the first of three threads of the developmental process: their emergent energy. With emergence our children move to become their own person, wanting to do things themselves, and taking responsibility for their actions (which may or may not be consonant with their current developmental capacities of course, but this motivational energy is the key first ingredient). This is the natural source of autonomy and independence and cannot be demanded, punished, or rewarded into existence prematurely.

When we help our children face the limits in life — the boundaries of others, their own limitations, or the rules of our family and society that we all must face at one point or another — they develop their capacity to stay in contact with their soft hearts, to adapt to life, and to become resilient in the face of adversity. This is the creation and magnification of their adaptive energy. It requires helping our children face the unchangeable things in life by holding them firmly and lovingly in the place where they feel their sadness, disappointment, and grief around the inevitable. And when the tears of winter wind down on their own accord, invariably the spring of emergence will return. The depth of our joy and love are directly determined by the depth of our contact with sadness and loss.

And when the time is right, our children’s minds become capable of having mixed feelings about things. This developmental achievement — which takes a life-time to master — rapidly diminishes aggression and naturally leads to more creative and complex solutions to the inevitable contradictions in life. The acquisition of this integrative energy is best supported in the context of right relationship. Our parental displays of patience, understanding, and self-control become the modeling our children need to help support the growth of the Pre-Frontal Cortex responsible for the most mature of our human capacities.

Take Home: If you want good behavior from your children, your best bet is to help them towards maturity. Maturation proceeds unimpeded when our children feel safe in the context of a secure attachment relationship. This security results when we are an embodiment of love and natural authority for our children. When our children are free to rest from the pursuit of our love and acceptance, the emotional vitality of their soft hearts is maintained and fuels the emergence of the deepest and most beautiful qualities of our humanity.

A deep bow of appreciation to my wife Kari and my son Kai for making this trip possible. Your sacrifice, support, and love crack my heart with gratitude. I love and miss you terribly.

And a special thanks to Gordon Neufeld whose clarity and tenderness is waking up hearts all over this world.
You can learn more about Gordon’s incredibly practical work at www.gordonneufeld.com