Parents are encouraged to look at child behavior in a different perspective than a punishment-based mindset. Children need abundant nurturing and an authentic, open bond with their parents based in trust rather than in fear.

This doesn’t mean that AP parents never say “no.” In fact, boundary-setting is very important to Attachment Parenting. What it means is that AP parents approach discipline in a different way — instead of punishing for undesirable behavior, they teach and guide their children through non-punitive ways. AP parents strive to teach problem-solving.

It’s also important for AP parents to teach emotional health by modeling. Take tantrums, for example, a natural response to boundary setting for a toddler or young child. Tantrums, or “losing it,” is a learned response for adults. A parent who “loses it” in response to their child’s behavior and punishes the child isn’t meeting that child’s need for guidance into how to handle strong emotions like frustration and disappointment, but actually teaching the child that tantrums can’t be controlled except by lashing out at others — or alternatively, stuffing emotions in the case of a parent who is more likely to not set firm boundaries. AP parents are able to identify and respond to their own strong emotions, and therefore are then able to teach their children in how to manage their own tantrums over time through emotion-coaching and problem-solving.

For example, for children — and, to be honest, adults too — a meltdown may be precipitated by tiredness, hunger, illness or a feeling of emotional disconnect from others. These contributors can be addressed, which can significantly and immediately reduce the number of tantrums. The remaining tantrums can then be addressed from a point of view of what emotional needs is the child trying to express: Does the child feel misunderstood? Does the child need more choices? Does the child need help learning a new skill?

I like to say that discipline begins at birth, because parents are always teaching their child something, even newborn babies, by how they respond and what priority they give to a warm, compassionate but balanced parent-child relationship. Positive discipline is rooted in the right relationship between a parent and child.

For some of us, this may not be a bad thing. Despite life’s challenges, we have overcome. And we are now free to share and inspire and support others on their journeys to hopefully do the same.

For others, if there was an option to go back in time and make a different choice at a critical point in time, we would gladly do so – no matter how much change would occur after that choice, because any change to our lives would be better than where we’re at now.

Of course we don’t have a time machine. We can’t go back in time and make different choices. We have to live with what our lives have become, for better or for worse.

And for many of us, what set the stage of our life’s challenges date back clear into childhood. It wouldn’t have made any difference what choices we had made. The choices that mattered, that determined our life course, were those of our parents.

And according to a recent study by Johns Hopkins University and published in the December 2014 edition of the journal Health Affairs, the choices of parents are affecting nearly half of all children’s lives — and not in a good way.

The study found, from analyzing data from the 2011-12 National Survey of Children’s Health, that 48 percent of all children in the United States have experienced an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), basically a fancy name for childhood trauma.

My colleague, Jane Stevens of ACEs Too High, can more fully explain the science behind the ACE. While not every hurt qualifies as an event severe enough to detour a child’s emotional development, what does qualify as an ACE is scientifically shown to be traumatic enough to a child to cause lasting effect, including:

• Living in extreme poverty
• Experienced parental separation or divorce
• Lived with someone with alcoholism or substance abuse
• Witnessed or a victim of neighborhood violence
• Lived with someone who is mentally ill or suicidal
• Witnessed domestic violence
• Had a parent who served time in jail
• Been a victim of racial or ethnic discrimination
• Experienced the death of a parent.

So, to review, 48 percent of all U.S. children – nearly every 1 in 2 children – have experienced one of these childhood traumas. In addition, 23 percent of U.S. children have experienced two or more of these traumatic events.

Those are startling statistics.

Even more so, that list of childhood events that qualify as a traumatizing ACE don’t even seem that bad in some cases. Probably anyone reading this knows someone who has experienced separation or divorce, for example. It’s so common that it now seems deceivingly benign. But an ACE is nothing to underestimate.

Besides being emotionally traumatizing in the short-term, research reveals that ACEs predispose children to eventually develop chronic disease as adults, such as cancer, heart disease and mental illness, as well as being a perpetrator or victim of violence. The more ACEs a person has, the greater his or her risk.

On an individual level, these outcomes of ACEs are devastating. On a societal level, ACEs are responsible for a great chunk of workplace absenteeism and for much of the costs in health care, mental health case and criminal justice.

And ACEs are unlikely to occur alone – having one ACE means you’re more likely to have two or more. So the children involved in the Johns Hopkins study who were found to have just one ACE are not in the free and clear: Follow-up studies are likely to find that these children acquired additional ACEs with age.

At this point, I want to make something clear: I believe that the vast majority of parents are doing the very best they can with the resources and support that are available to them.

And at any one time, numerous parent support organizations are working to expand their services to be able to offer and provide more and better, free or low-cost support to mothers and fathers who are actively striving to improve their parenting skills and family relationships.

We are not able to jump in a time machine, turn the clock back and undo a choice that we made at a critical point in our child’s life, but we can resolve to start right now — in this moment — to move toward making better choices in the future. And there are organizations, like Attachment Parenting International, available to help you do this.

And for those of you who are not parents, it is a sound investment to donate — little or small — to parent support organizations, for a better future not only for today’s children but for tomorrow’s society.

But we are less likely to ask ourselves if we are doing okay.

It may be that we assume we are flourishing if our children are. Parenting is so personal, and by our very biology, much of our own self-worth can be tied into how well we feel our children are doing.

It may be that we feel selfish or guilty if we feel that we are not flourishing alongside our children – if we are feeling burnt out, if we feel that our life balance is off.

We may fear that if we take a bit of “me” time that our children will suffer, since they won’t be getting all of our attention.

Some of us may wish to give our children more attention than we had growing up, and so we may be timid to give ourselves more “me” time because it feels like we may be taking too much.

And it can take a while for parents to feel confident in their parenting approach, so that they are able to feel better about taking “me” time.

Or perhaps your children are at ages or stages that makes it difficult to take “me” time.

There may be another reason why you’re reluctant to make changes so that you feel that you’re flourishing, but balance a critical part of healthy, loving parenting. If you’re dealing with burn-out or trying to figure out how to gain more life balance, reading Attachment Parenting International’s Eighth Principle of Parenting: Strive for Personal and Family Balance can give you some ideas to get started on adding more “me” time to your life and start you back on the path of flourishing.

So, how do you know if you and your children are flourishing? Check out the list on AP Month.

The diagnosis is a relief in some ways: I now have an explanation for a collection of confusing symptoms and I have a starting place for learning how to manage those symptoms and work toward wellness — well, at least more wellness than I’ve been having lately. But in other ways, it’s a hard thing to swallow. I was hopeful for a diagnosis that included some sort of easy fix, like a diet or magic pill that took it all away. The treatment for Sjogren’s is far from that.

My doctor feels that I may have had Sjogren’s for much longer than I thought I did, that my recurrent kidney stones starting way back in college may have been my first sign of things to come. But knowing what I know from my journalistic connections through Attachment Parenting International, I wonder if there weren’t tell-tale signs even earlier.

Last spring, I had the opportunity to talk with a fellow health journalist, Jane Ellen Stevens, editor of ACEs Too High, a news site that reports on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and our society. ACEs refer to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego, California, USA. The ACE Study investigated associations between childhood maltreatment and later-life health and well-being.

The results suggest that certain adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death as well as poor quality of life in the United States. The theory is that ACEs form the foundation for social, emotional and cognitive impairment that then lead to adoption of health-risk behaviors, which then lead to disease, disability and social problems.

So what kinds of experiences are considered ACEs? ACEs Too High provides a quiz where readers can determine their ACE score, as well as their Resilience Score. Most of the questions ask about events that would be classified as overt abuse or neglect, but there is a question included that seems fairly common in our society: divorce. As a person’s ACE score increases, so do the risks; an ACE score of 4 or more puts a person at high risk. On the flip side of the ACE coin is resilience, and ACEs Too High includes that quiz, too, under the ACE quiz. Questions for this quiz revolve around warm, loving interactions with parents.

Many scientific researchers will tell you that the ACE Study is specifically for at-risk populations, people who have multiple risk factors such as extreme poverty, severe mental illness, etc., to a point where people are unable to escape the chronic and toxic stress in their lives. But Jane’s journalistic research delves into the idea–and I believe, fact–that ACEs are not limited to the most disadvantaged of our society, that the effect of ACEs can be felt through all socioeconomic statuses of Western culture.

There are others who feel this same way, too. For example, researchers involved with the ACE Study admit that just one-third of the middle-class population included in the ACE Study had an ACE score of 0 (zero). And if any one category was experienced, there was an 87% likelihood that at least one additional category was present.

“One in six individuals had an ACE score of 4 or more, and one in nine had an ACE score of 5 or more. Thus, every physician sees several high ACE score patients each day. Typically, they are the most difficult patients of the day. Women were 50% more likely than men to have experienced five or more categories of adverse childhood experiences. We believe that here is a key to what in mainstream epidemiology appears as women’s natural proneness to ill-defined health problems like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome and chronic non-malignant pain syndromes. In light of our findings, we now see these as medical constructs, artifacts resulting from medical blindness to social realities and ignorance of the impact of gender.”

~ Vincent J. Felitti, MD and Robert F. Anda, MD, MS, co-principal investigators, ACE Study

Which brings me back to my diagnosis of Sjogren’s Syndrome, which like many autoimmune disorders could probably be defined as a “chronic non-malignant pain syndrome.”

I do not feel that my childhood was adverse, and my ACE score is low, but I do know that was a very anxious child and continue to deal with anxiety from time to time. I feel that ACEs may not be the full picture. In my journalistic work in child temperament, I feel that this also has a huge influence in how a child may perceive an ACE or even how his/her ACE score impacts personal health and mental well-being. Therefore, in my opinion, the intersection of child temperament and ACE could be highly individualistic. While the trends found in the ACE Study are still there, some child temperaments could be more prone to the negative effects of ACEs so that fewer ACEs could affect one person more so than another, and vice versa. While there is nothing scientific about my gut feeling, I have this nagging feeling that my lifelong struggle with anxiety probably has something to do with my illness.

Moving forward, this knowledge gives me even more motivation to continue educating and supporting parents to raise their children in a way that promote secure attachment, healthy parent-child relationships, emotional literacy and, ultimately, Resilience Score.

And what is that bigger picture?

I recently read a study published this year in the Journal of Human Lactation that compared low-income and middle- to higher-income women on their perspectives of breastfeeding. It found that higher-income women were more likely to want to breastfeed despite the challenges and to seek out support to make that happen. Low-income women also wanted to breastfeed but were OK with switching to formula if they encountered any challenges. And low-income women were more likely to see breastfeeding less as a relationship tool and more as simply a feeding choice, and that bottle-feeding freed up time for new moms by allowing her to shift feeding duties to someone else. Middle- and higher-income women were more likely to see breastfeeding both as a nutritional/health benefit and in light of relationship with the new baby; their challenges centered more on how to continue breastfeeding when returning back to work.

The point of me bringing this up is that, in regards to this study, breastfeeding can be seen as simply a feeding choice on par with formula, based on how much time a woman feels she has, or it can be seen as a bonding mechanism in addition to its nutritional/health benefits that are in fact superior to formula. It’s a matter of perspective, but a choice that can have far-reaching repercussions. As the great bulk of research on breastfeeding shows, the nutritional and health benefits far outweigh that of formula, and the bonding aspect tends to be easier with breastfeeding than bottle-feeding.

So is it enough in this case that babies just get fed, whether by formula or breastfeeding, without regards to the latter’s benefits? Should we just be happy that babies are getting fed at all? Anyone who works to support women with breastfeeding, or to promote breastfeeding, or to research breastfeeding–and there are a whole lot of people in this area–beg to differ.

Attachment Parenting is the same sort of thing. Attachment Parenting is an approach that embodies sensitive responsiveness and literally be applied to almost any parenting style or method. And there is a lot of research showing not only the benefits, but the importance, even essentiality, of raising children with secure attachment. And sensitive responsiveness is well-researched to be at the crux of developing a secure attachment within a child. But there are also a lot of people who see it as a bonus, but not something that is crucial, to a person’s life success–just as breastfeeding can be viewed: just something that’d be nice to do if we have enough time to do it.

The big picture is that sensitive responsiveness in parenting does very much matter. Yes, kids can survive without it. Yes, children can grow up to be fairly functioning members of society whether or not they have a secure attachment or received sensitive responsiveness from their caregivers, but with it, they can do so much more: They can be at peace with themselves and others, compassionate and empathetic, connected and confident in promoting health, peace and good will toward one another.

From the point of view of many in our society, these are “nice” traits to have, but not as central to the value systems for personal success, which may more often include competition and a certain amount of self-preservation. Yet, the bulk of attachment research shows sensitive responsiveness and secure attachment to be central to healthy child development.

I hear, from time to time, that Attachment Parenting is not the only way to form a secure attachment with your child.

“Attachment” is very literally the relationship style between parent and child, and “secure” or “insecure” describes the quality of that relationship style. Secure attachment develops out of an appropriate and sensitive responsiveness to a child by a consistent, loving caregiver. Consistency and sensitivity, especially in moments of distress, are key.

The hallmark of a secure parent-child attachment is trust but also includes affection and empathy. Children with insecure attachment are more likely to have difficulty with social skills, behavior and emotional self-regulation, language development and school readiness, as well as more likely to develop low self-esteem and obesity, to name a few. Adults with insecure attachment continue to struggle with relationships and stress-coping.

Often, the question above is being asked by someone referring to the stereotypical “attachment parenting” lifestyle—the vision coming to mind of a mother giving birth at home, wearing her baby in a sling, breastfeeding through toddlerhood and other child rearing techniques that constitute choices some parents make but are not what define Attachment Parenting.

Attachment Parenting is a term that covers any parenting philosophy with the goal of forming secure parent-child attachment. The attachment parenting lifestyle is included under the Attachment Parenting umbrella, but it’s far from the only option.

This is why I capitalize Attachment Parenting, to differentiate it from the attachment parenting lifestyle. Attachment Parenting is an approach to child rearing and child care that embodies sensitive responsiveness by a consistent, loving caregiver. Under this umbrella, there are myriad lifestyles that parents can choose. What’s important is the approach we apply to the parenting techniques we use.

Many parents, whether they associate themselves with Attachment Parenting or not, are likely already incorporating some aspect of the Attachment Parenting approach in their child rearing philosophy. It very naturally gives our children an extra boost in life, and most parents lean toward giving the gift of secure attachment to their children.

The fact is, according to attachment research, the majority of the population has a secure attachment. This is found both in attachment research relating to children as well as a related scientific branch looking at adult attachment styles. For example, a 2014 review of attachment studies by the University of Bristol found that 60% of infants develop secure attachment. This is good news in that it’s a good chance, overall, that parents are forming warm, safe bonds with their children.

On the flip side of this is the knowledge that 4 out of 10 children are not developing a secure attachment with their parents. According to the Bristol review, the 40% of all children found to be insecurely attached are split into 25% who are avoidant, meaning they avoid their parents because their parents ignore their emotional needs, and 15% who are ambivalent, meaning they resist their parents because their parents cause them distress.

I found this review to be particularly interesting because it addresses the point that insecure attachment is not an issue that is limited to low-income, at-risk families but that it’s a problem that can affect all social classes—though undoubtedly families with multiple risk factors are at higher risk of developing insecure attachment. And as I’ve seen in many studies, the Bristol researchers reported that boys tend to be more affected by early parenting than girls.

So while the chances are good that a child is growing up in an affectionate, empathic, warm and trusting home, it’s not so much comfort for those families struggling to break out of the parenting habits that lead to insecure attachment.

But there is hope. Parents can change the patterns of how they relate to others when parenting a new generation, and even for parents of children beyond the critical “birth through age 3” time frame when the attachment foundation is set, there is still time to alter a child’s relationship tendencies. It’s harder to re-parent children with an insecure attachment than it is to create a secure attachment with an infant from the get-go, but not impossible by any means.

And while insecurely attached children can grow into functioning members of society—attachment quality is but one of many contributors to success in adulthood—secure attachment provides an advantage. However, for some children in certain circumstances, secure attachment can be crucial for their healthy development; for example, children who were born prematurely, adopted, have special needs, have a high-needs temperament or are involved in a difficult custody case.

In trying to find an analogy for what secure and insecure attachment does for a child, think about the difference between reading to your child at home versus relying solely on the school system to teach your child to read. Though a typically developing child would likely learn to read adequately enough without a parent’s support, a child whose parents model a love of literacy at home is given that much more a boost. For at-risk children, though, it is essential that they are being read to at home, in addition to what they learn in the classroom.

Simple actions like holding a baby and responding to her needs quickly, without concern of spoiling, and acknowledging a baby’s unhappiness with facial expressions and reassuring him with soothing tones, are examples of behaviors that lead to secure attachment over time. While the attachment foundations are set in the infant and toddler years, it has been found through research that attachment quality can and does change over time so the positive, compassionate exchanges established between the parent and infant should continue throughout childhood and adolescence. It is because attachment quality changes over time, too, that a child with an insecure attachment foundation isn’t necessarily doomed if the parent is willing to change how he or she relates to the child.

So how are parents supposed to know what to do to raise their child with secure attachment? Well, many already do, if they themselves grew up in an environment that promoted a secure attachment. For those who are trying to do something different than what they grew up with, or who may be challenged by modern life stresses such as dual-income parents or divorce, there are various parenting programs and organizations to support parents, such as Attachment Parenting International (API). API’s Eight Principles of Parenting are available to guide parents in how to model and practice emotional literacy and compassionate living with their children, no matter their lifestyle choices. These types of programs and organizations make it possible for parents and the professionals who support them to apply the vital findings found through more than 60 years of attachment research. Our children deserve it.

And that’s why Attachment Parenting matters.

API celebrates every person’s unique traits, but some children’s differences set them apart from societal expectations enough that daily interactions—whether at home, childcare or school—can be challenging. Rather than viewing our children through the lens of understanding, however, our society’s response is often to see these differences as “symptoms” of a disorder and to follow up with treatments that may not resolve the problem.

I am excited to share a discussion with Barbara Probst, PhD, LCSW, author of When the Labels Don’t Fit, on her approach to facilitate understanding among parents and teachers in order to discover a new relationship with sometimes-challenging children based on appreciation and respect instead of illness.

RITA: What inspired your alternative approach to “treating” children whose differences often lead them to being diagnosed with disorder?

DR. PROBST: I feel quite strongly about the way our culture seems to be viewing every difference, difficulty, struggle and quirk—every extreme or unusual behavior—as a disorder, especially when it comes to kids!

The idea for When the Labels Don’t Fit really grew out of my experience as a clinical social worker. So many parents were coming to me with kids who were intense, complex, confusing, rigid, provocative, volatile, inconsistent—challenging children who had either been given multiple diagnoses and treatments, none of which really helped, or whom no diagnosis seemed to fit. These parents were understandably looking for some kind of explanation, some way to make sense of their child’s behavior. Yet the only thing they were offered was a negative framework, a way to categorize their child by what was supposedly wrong or missing.

There was no framework that also took into account a child’s strengths, talents, affinities, needs, style, temperament—the things a child loves and gravitates toward—as tools for understanding how that child responds to the world and who he or she really is. There seemed to be an assumption that “naming the disorder” was the key to assessing what was going on and making it better—as in the medical way, “fixing the problem” by diagnosis and cure—but it was obvious that this narrow approach wasn’t really helping anyone, neither kids nor their parents.

I got curious and started to investigate the whole “diagnosis explosion”—more and more kids receiving psychiatric labels, at younger and younger ages, for fewer and milder symptoms. The statistics are pretty staggering! For instance, one in every five American children meets current criteria for a psychological disorder, with three times as many kids now being diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disorders than were diagnosed 15 years ago. It makes you wonder if there’s really something wrong with 20% of our kids or something wrong with our definition of “normal.”

As a culture, we’ve pathologized a whole range of traits and ways of interacting with the world that used to be part of the variety of human experience. Some of the difficulties come from a poor fit with the environment, some from the struggles that are just part of living and growing up, and some are from unrealistic expectations and intolerance for kids who push the envelope or make us uncomfortable.

It’s not that a child’s struggles aren’t real or that some kids aren’t truly hard to raise. Certainly, there are kids who do things that seem odd or excessive at various points in their development, and of course it’s painful for parents when they can’t seem to reach or handle a child they love. And it’s not that “anything goes” or that kids don’t need to understand limits and develop empathy. But finding a disease-based category for the child’s problems isn’t the answer either! Just because a child has difficulty managing stimulation or frustration, hates change or needs to ground herself through touch, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those difficulties are indicators of an underlying pathology.

RITA: This is what many parents refer to as “spiritedness” or “high needs.”

DR. PROBST: I knew there had to be a better, more direct way to understand and help these challenging kids and their parents. I began focusing on the specific issue or trait, rather than the label that “explained” the trait as a symptom of one or another disease, zooming in to the feature, like perfectionism or impatience, that lay behind the problematic behavior. I wanted to understand who a child is, not what disorder he or she has—to be truly solution-focused and figure out why the roof was leaking instead of how to reward the child for mopping the wet floor.

RITA: That’s a great analogy. How did this approach work in the field?

DR. PROBST: I began to apply this new approach in my work, looking for a “difficult” child’s core features as the key to what made that child tick. Again and again, this new approach brought practical and positive results where nothing had helped before—in an amazingly short time!

I began to give presentations and workshops to parents, educators and mental health professionals, showing them how to use the temperamental map I’d developed to figure out how unusual or extreme traits interact with elements of the environment, and then how to target strategies—concretely and proactively—to a child’s specific features. It was so empowering! It gave parents real hope.

They began to see their challenging child as someone intriguing instead of someone to control or fear. What a great experience!

RITA: What temperamental differences do you find create the most friction? How would you define a “challenging child”?

DR. PROBST: Let me start by saying a word about temperament. Temperament is your essential nature, your innate way of being in the world. The early view of temperament, however, like the model Chess and Thomas developed in the mid-1970s, tended to present temperament as a series of good/bad polarities: attentive or distractible, adaptable or inflexible, and so on. I find that quite biased and value-laden, to be honest, like another set of pejorative labels.

It’s really about the fit between traits and context, not about some traits being intrinsically better than others. After all, a highly tenacious child who won’t cede her turn at the kindergarten easel until she’s satisfied with her painting is seen as resistant and antisocial, but she’s seen as admirably persistent in the science lab.

More broadly, if we lived in a culture that valued curiosity and responsiveness instead of order and self-restraint, we’d think that a child who could sit still for an hour, ignoring all the interesting people and impressions around him, as having “attention surplus disorder”!

So it varies, and traits that seem to be problematic in one situation or at one age can be an asset in another, the seeds of a child’s authenticity and fulfillment.

In addition, temperamental traits exist on a continuum, like a high need for stimulation or a low tolerance for change. Although traits in the middle may make you more mellow and adaptable to a wider range of contexts, no trait is inherently “better” or “worse” than another.

Think of it descriptively, rather than judgmentally: Some kids go off on tangents, some can’t bear to leave something unfinished, some find comfort in order and repetition or, on the contrary, always want change. Some like to plunge right in while others take time to warm up and then need to disengage slowly. Within each dimension, there’s a range, with a child tending toward the high or low end when he’s stressed.

Friction is more likely to arise, then, when a trait or its manifestation is at one of the extreme ends of the continuum, especially when the environment has a narrow zone of tolerance. A fixed time schedule—“It’s 10:00, put away your journals and get ready for recess”—can cause a shrieking tantrum in a child who has to “complete his mission” or needs to stop incrementally. A classroom full of stimulating choices can make a perfectionistic child, overwhelmed by all the roads not taken no matter what she chooses, highly anxious or irritable.

RITA: What about temperamental difference between a child and an adult?

DR. PROBST: By “environment,” I also mean the people in the child’s world. If you’re a parent who thinks spontaneity is fun, for example, and you have a child for whom that’s distressing and who really needs to know ahead of time exactly what to expect in order to feel safe, or vice versa, you’re more likely to encounter misunderstanding and conflict. For example, does your child prefer to know what she’s getting for her birthday, or does she want to be surprised?

So it’s often the mismatch, rather than the trait itself, especially when a child hasn’t matured enough to develop a repertoire of coping strategies or is blamed by adults who expect him to be the one to do all the adapting, rather than being curious and open to small changes in the environment that might create “wiggle room” or a “margin of tolerance.”

It’s also important to remember that different traits can lie behind the same challenging behavior, so you need to step back and figure out why your angry child won’t go to bed. Is it because of an irregular inner rhythm or pajamas that “don’t feel right”? Does he need to disengage a bit at a time because of high intensity and focus? Does she need to finish her game because she’s a perfectionist who can’t bear to leave something incomplete? Does he need a set of tactile markers to anchor the verbal instructions?

Threats, logic, cajoling, even offers of kindness and generosity—“how about an extra story?”—may have nothing to do with the reason your child refuses to go to bed. It’s like throwing solution darts at a situation in the hope that one will somehow stick! It’s not a matter of changing the exterior result—getting the child to “behave” and go to bed—but of understanding the interior cause and the child’s interaction with elements of the environment, including space, timing, tempo and sensory factors.

So a “challenging child” is one whose unusual, extreme or erratic traits have been misunderstood and mishandled, often due to a poor contextual fit. Your child’s need for movement or silence or control still must be met proactively, but a need that’s been respected and met, even partially, tends to lead to far less “challenging behavior” than a need that’s been ignored, denied or shamed.

RITA: What steps would you suggest for a parent seeking to learn a different way to look at and act toward their child?

DR. PROBST: One of the most powerful things parents can do is to change their language. Describe your child, to yourself and to her, as organized rather than obsessive, curious about life rather than distractible. Instead of calling her picky, tell her: “You sure do know what you like!” Instead of stubborn: “You’re not a quitter!” That helps her feel she’s not fundamentally defective and helps you feel more open and positive, which results in a less tense relationship that benefits everyone.

You can also use language to put borders around troublesome behavior. “You’re the kind of person who has a tough time with disappointment (or waiting, feeling rushed or feeling there are too many rules for how to do something).” That gives a precise, bounded and concrete place to begin, rather than making a child feel globally wrong or defective.

When a trait like low adaptability, for instance, is likely to pose a problem, talk about it in advance. Name it, predict and use respectful curiosity to help your child make a plan: “It really bothers you when kids change the rules for Capture the Flag. Variations aren’t fun to you; it just feels like they’re ruining the game. So what’s your plan if that happens today? Any ideas about what you can do?”

If your child has had a successful experience of managing a similar situation in the past, remind him of his past success and let him be the expert: “Remember how well you handled things that time the pizza place turned out to be closed? What was the secret of your success?”

If he’s not yet been able to handle it well, offer a suggestion in the spirit of experimentation. Collaborate with your child as detectives or scientists on a quest for data: “Well, I know something that tends to help people who like things to stay the same. Are you game to try and let me know if it helps?”

Tell your child: “I see that you really like to make your own decisions.” Include that feature in advance, rather than punishing your child afterward for asserting her desire to be in control. Give her a way to be involved in the decision about how to clean up, for example, before it’s time to clean up.

This kind of practical, respectful approach is so much more effective than trying to maintain complicated systems of points and penalties! Remember that your child is doing the best he can under the circumstances, given his limited resources. It’s not about reward and punishment, but about the power of self-knowledge. Your goal, in the end, is to help your child be happy and successful because of who he is.

RITA: Some parents still struggle to set limits with their children. It’s as if they and their child aren’t talking the same language.

DR. PROBST: A few core principles lie behind the more than 60 practical strategies in When the Labels Don’t Fit. One principle is to proactively and concretely match the strategy to the feature. For instance, a child who has difficulty feeling time needs a way to organize externally what she can’t organize internally. Tell her: “Two more times going down the slide,” (a unit of action), rather than, “Five more minutes till we have to leave the playground.”

A child who can’t bear disappointment needs a backup plan that’s already in place right from the beginning. For example: “My Plan B is chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream if they don’t have rocky road.” Your child can figure out his backup plan before getting in the car to go out for ice cream, then write it on an index card and put it in his pocket. Unexpected let-downs are harder, but the Plan B approach will be more likely to be accepted if your child has already practiced it in other situations.

A child with a 10-minute attention span needs a planned break after eight minutes.

A child who needs to control and becomes angry at not being in control needs a safe avenue to express power with temporal and spatial boundaries. What can she control? Can you give her a Magic Coin that she can “spend” each day on something where she can be the “boss”? That helps her learn to make and live with choices. Remember: If the only power you give a strong-willed child is the power to refuse, she will surely use it.

And so on. Once you get the idea that it all stems from “the kind of kid this is,” it becomes so much easier to be effective.

Another important principle is to show your child that you “get it.” Don’t try to make your child feel better by telling him that “it’s not a big deal”—to him it is—or that he doesn’t really feel what he feels. A child who’s hurt or angry at being rejected needs you to respect his reality and his temperament. If you deny or dismiss his experience, he’ll think you’re lying or don’t care or both. It’s better to say, “I get that it really hurts.”

Then think about his temperament. Is he the kind of person who feels better when he plunges into a new activity or when he has a quiet space to be alone? Does he tend to ruminate and thus need diversion to interrupt the cycle, or does he lock his feelings away and need help bringing them to the surface?

Too often, unfortunately, we end up rewarding a child for not being himself. A child who needs to touch or move, for instance, gets praised for not touching or not moving, rather than being given a safe way to meet his temperamental need for touch or movement. Then we’re surprised when that child becomes depressed or anxious or hostile.

Begin at the level where success is possible and build from there. Lowering the necessary dose gradually can be an empowering way to help a child manage her need for movement, praise, control and so on.

RITA: How do parents know when they may need more help, when a child should be evaluated for ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.?

DR. PROBST: Certainly there are children whose difficulties go beyond an unusual temperament or poor temperament-environment fit. It would be just as wrong to dismiss a serious condition as it would be to over-diagnose a minor one. When we call every moody adolescent “bipolar” or every fidgety preschooler “ADHD,” we trivialize the very real suffering of those who truly do merit the label.

Deciding if a child may have an enduring problem beyond a quirky temperament is a complex process. It’s important to remember, however, that there’s no objective test for any of these diagnoses like there are for medical conditions like asthma or diabetes; the determination is always a subjective one. The criteria rely heavily on words like “frequently” and “often” and on checklists completed by adults rather than on a child’s self-report.

But if difficulties persist despite strategies to reduce stress and maximize adaptation, are present under a wide range of circumstances and cause significant impairment, then it may be wise to seek an outside evaluation.

It’s also important to remember that a child may still need help, even if she doesn’t necessarily meet the criteria for an official mental health diagnosis. The way our insurance reimbursement system is set up requires some diagnosis in order to justify the need for treatment under the principle of “medical necessity.” So the mental health clinician may select the label that seems the closest match, the least stigmatizing or the most likely to get the child the services he needs.

Yet in working with the child, what’s often more significant than the formal label are the specific impairing traits, which may or may not correspond to items on the official symptom list. For instance, “doesn’t feel time” and “is a perfectionist” aren’t on the list for any of the educational or mental health categories, even though they’re common problems.

RITA: Thank you so much, Dr. Probst, for your time and insights! Can you share any final thoughts on this topic?

DR. PROBST: It’s vitally important for us to keep questioning the idea that “difficult” or “different” means disordered! We need to reject the idea that every child who’s hard to handle or doesn’t fit in has a psychiatric disorder.

Many children go through tough times or seem extreme, eccentric, provocative or immature at various points in their development. But that doesn’t mean they have a disease that needs to be cured, medicated or taken as the most important aspect of who they are.

We need to ask the right questions. Instead of trying to figure out if a child has ADHD, Asperger syndrome or bipolar disorder, we need to take the labels apart, zoom in to understand each feature and find specific places where change is possible.

We need to identify the source of a problem—usually in unmet needs, discord and imbalance, not from something inherently wrong or missing in the child’s makeup—before trying to solve it by generic approaches. We need to tailor every strategy to fit a child’s specific traits and needs, and to take responsibility for how we, too, need to adapt. We can’t ask our kids to do all the work.

Part of the core of Attachment Parenting is teaching our children about emotions—what they’re feeling and what to do about it, as well as how to empathize with others—a skill referred to as “emotional literacy” by parenting consultants like Ann Corwin, PhD, MEd, of Laguna Niguel, California, USA.

We know more than ever that emotional literacy is critical for healthy human development. Unfortunately it’s a skill that was not regularly nurtured in past generations, and many parents are learning about difficult emotions like jealousy and disappointment alongside their children. It was evident as I talked with Ann, mother to two grown children, that her life’s passion is in empowering parents in strengthening their relationships with their children and that emotional literacy is very much central to her work.

RITA: Thank you, Ann, for your time. Let’s start by learning how you came into your line of work?

ANN: I have my master’s degree in education with an emphasis in early child development and behavior. I started out very early in my career with an interest in relationships. In fact, my bachelor’s degree is in sociology. I went on to earn my PhD in marriage, family and child therapy.

I started out as a postpartum consultant in a hospital. I was also a childbirth educator, a Lamaze instructor. It was then when I started to make the psychological connection between birth and biology and neurobiology, and this naturally led to an interest in attachment. I was excited to learn how attachment affects our brain, how the amygdala—which manifests our emotional and relational responses—can regenerate itself, so that even if our attachment is crummy, it can be regenerated.

At the time, I was working with Dr. William Sears [pediatrician, author of the Sears parenting library and member of API’s Board of Directors] as well.

I wrote my [PhD] dissertation on parenting in pregnancy. Basically this is teaching parents how to parent during pregnancy, so while they’re learning about the stages and phases of pregnancy, they can also learn about the stages and phases of child development to know what to expect and what is required for healthy development.

RITA: And then you opened your private practice, The Parenting Doctor (www.theparentingdoctor.com).

ANN: I was inspired by Attachment Theory. I am fascinated by how we establish a relationship and how we maintain it and how you take that long term. For example, I have been married for 37 years to the same man and feel that we both really had to understand attachment to maintain our relationship through the rocky spots.

My whole career as a parenting consultant is driven by attachment.

RITA: And you are supportive of Attachment Parenting International (API).

ANN: I have always admired API and have always kept up with Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker [API’s cofounders]. I see Attachment Parenting as what I’m practicing. I may be on a little different road, but we’re associated—we’re both trying to get emotional literacy, which is steeped in Attachment Theory, rooted in the mainstream.

I don’t think Attachment Parenting is one way to parent—it’s the only way.

I’m eclectic in that I think you can take pieces from any parenting program and those pieces can be useful to parents. But attachment education is needed by every parent.

RITA: You have developed an emotional literacy curriculum called “Pocket Full of Feelings.” Can you share more about this?

ANN: Pocket Full of Feelings started 15 years ago.

The primary question people would ask me was how to help them keep their child from doing something. How can I keep my child from having tantrums? How can I keep my child from getting kicked out of preschool? How can I get my child to warm up to Grandma? Basically, help me with this immediate problem. I always ask them: Would you rather figure out why your child is doing this and how to have a better relationship with him or her, or do you just want to stop the behavior? Fortunately, 99 percent of parents say they’d like to have a better relationship with their child.

I teach how the most powerful part of the brain is the emotional brain, because in all circumstances we feel the feeling first and then act upon that feeling. Because while our number-one need is survival—food, water, shelter—our immediate number-two need is relationship with others. This is our need for attachment. The way we do this—attach to others—is through eye contact, touching and talking.

When we feed a baby, we are making eye contact with our baby, we are touching our baby and we are talking to our baby. If you were to put milk in a bottle, give it to your baby and turn your back on your baby without talking, your baby might begin to suckle on his own but he will stop after a couple of sucks. He needs connection with you or he will suffer from failure to thrive.

We have to have a relationship with another human being or we literally can’t survive.

My daughter handmade me a burlap pocket chart, and I would use little bears to demonstrate how we carry around our emotions and how these drive our behavior. Inevitably, everywhere I went, people would ask me where they could get one of those pocket charts. And they couldn’t get one anywhere because that was the only one there was.

Then, six years ago, I met Karin Lombardo, a mother seeking solutions for an undesirable behavior her daughter was expressing. I pointed out the feeling I thought was the root cause of her daughter’s undesirable behavior (envy), went through the  simple three-step emotional literacy process with Karin, and let her take the pocket chart home with her over the weekend to practice talking about the feeling at large (envy) with her daughter. When she brought it back, she said that every parent should learn this—that instead of saying “don’t be mad” or “don’t be sad,” to tell their child that these feelings are going to come and here’s how to deal with it.

It turned out that Karin has her MA in Narrative Psychology, so I asked her to go into business with me to develop this idea. We cofounded Generation-EQ, a company committed to providing tools and solutions to aid in the development of emotional literacy and home of Pocket Full of Feelings (www.pocketfulloffeelings.com).

Pocket Full of Feelings took several years to develop, as we had to write all of the content and then we had to test it. It’s now available everywhere.

RITA: How do you hope to benefit society?

ANN: Emotional literacy has been around actually for a long time. It’s emotional intelligence, that EQ we hear about. There have been a lot of books written about it, and a lot of people talk about it. But it’s not mainstream.

We hear parents say how they have to teach their child how to read, but we don’t hear how they need to be teaching emotional literacy. We need to make emotional literacy just as much a priority to parents as school readiness. There is absolutely and positively evidence now that kids do better academically if their social-emotional needs are met.

My goal really is for parents like you and me sitting at a park and having a conversation, and maybe we ask each other about preschools. Then, we move on to talk about how our children know their colors, and then how they’re learning what emotions go with those colors and what to do about it when they have those feelings.

I don’t want this to be just some kind of sideline thing.

In this Technology Age, especially with texting, we can communicate with one another without ever hearing tone of voice or seeing facial expressions, which are vital to relationships. I saw a dad and his three-year-old child the other day, and during the entire walk, the father and child never spoke. The child never looked at his dad, because he was looking at a handheld screen. We need emotional literacy even more now than before.

Attachment Parenting International is often contacted by confused parents like a mother who recently asked, “I no longer breastfeed my baby, but I try to babywear and I like the idea of having a securely attached relationship and using positive discipline. Is it OK to do some of Attachment Parenting but not all of it?”

Many parents could be disillusioned about what it fundamentally means to practice Attachment Parenting and where they fall into the parenting philosophy spectrum. How many parents out there wonder where they fit in?

As far as we’re concerned, you can babywear, breastfeed, cosleep, be a stay-at-home parent and more but still not be practicing Attachment Parenting if you don’t let yourself get emotionally attached to your baby or child. Or you can choose to do almost none of the above parenting techniques and still practicing Attachment Parenting as long as you form a genuine emotional connection with your child.

We’re not talking about whether you love your children or how much. What we’re talking about is a deep mutual understanding and knowledge about empathy. Secure attachment forms when we take the time to really get to know our children, from their favorite games to their persistent fears to their most cherished expressions of our love for them. It happens when we allow ourselves to cross over into their world, into their shoes, to feel what they feel and to respect those feelings as being every bit as important as our own.

Attachment Parenting isn’t about how often we take our children on outings, or how many minutes a day we spend reading to them, or even whether we use a stroller or a sling, crib or the family bed. It’s about being in tune with who your child is and what he or she needs. It’s about placing a priority not just on their physical health, but their emotional health, and recognizing the importance that parenting has in reaching that goal.

Attachment Parenting in today’s industrialized society takes something else, too: faith in our ability to parent our own children and a reliance on our inner knowledge of our children to guide us in raising them. Mainstream thinking in our corner of the world has not yet evolved to embrace the importance of a solid foundation of peaceful, secure attachment for optimal child development or to understand the damage caused to children whose emotional needs are trivialized. Parenting resources still abound with one-size-fits-all child-raising rules and fix-it-all solutions that neither respect the child nor the parent-child relationship.

Who knows your child best? You do, right? This is true, especially if you have a strong, securely attached relationship. And who knows how to parent your child best? You do, of course. Not your mother-in-law, not your best friend, not your pediatrician, Dr. Phil or the latest advice-giving expert. Every person on this planet is unique, physically and emotionally, and every child has unique needs that change as they grow. Listen to your child and to what your relationship and deep knowledge of your child tells you to do, and politely shrug off any well-meaning advice to the contrary.

De-feather all of the talk about Attachment Parenting, and you’ll find that it’s really about just one thing: connection. A true connection fosters mutual sensitivity, understanding and trust—essential ingredients for a strong, positive relationship. With a connection like this, the ride that is parenting, with all of its sunshine and its storms, is a more enjoyable and more successful journey for both the child and the parent. Our securely attached relationship with our children guides us as we escort them from their days as needy infants, along the twists, bumps, calms, chills and thrills of their childhood, adolescence and young adulthood to the great plateau of their adulthood. With their hearts and minds full from a lifetime of basking in our support, our children can carry with them the tools they need to form their own true connections with the rest of the world.

And it’s pretty hard not to form a strong connection and get to know your child really well when you do breastfeed, spend lots of time with them, wear or carry them everywhere you go, are available to them all night, use positive discipline and do the other parenting techniques that are often associated with Attachment Parenting. These are the tools that enhance the quintessential of Attachment Parenting International’s Eight Principles of Parenting: Respond with Sensitivity.

If you are a parent who trusts your instincts to nurture, who gets behind your children’s eyes and into their heads, tries to understand what it is like to live from their perspective and really gets to know them…

If you ask yourself, “How would I feel if I were in my child’s place and how would I want to be treated?”

If you strive to have the kind of connection between you and your child that brings out the best in both of you, and work to understand your child’s needs and to help her feel her best…

…You are an Attachment Parent. And as an Attachment Parent, you not only love your children, you love being with them, learning with them and building on that securely attached relationship for a lifetime.

It’s time to acknowledge that children are people.

That may sound silly, but there are parents who swear by discipline methods that don’t reflect their child’s value as a person.

This reminds me, there’s new study led by George Holden of Southern Methodist University has found—based on real-time audio recordings of parents who volunteered to wear a wire during their daily interactions—that of parents who use corporal discipline, spanking and slapping is a very frequent child-rearing practice. Read about the study here. While in other studies, which were based on parent self-reports, it was found that the average parent spanked only as a last resort for severe misbehavior, Holden’s audio recordings revealed that spanking was used as a first-line discipline method for even trivial misbehavior and that children tended to misbehave again within 10 minutes of being punished.

Parents who defend spanking as a viable discipline method often say that it should never be done in anger, yet Holden’s study found that most parents responded either impulsively or emotionally, rather than intentionally, were hitting just 30 seconds after conflict began and often for incidents like sucking fingers or getting out of a chair.

It sounds trite, but do imagine for a second that that child being spanked for sucking fingers was a person with genuine feelings of hurt and anger and confusion. Imagine that child was an adult. Imagine that child was you.

Many adults have habits that others perceive as poor habits, like smoking or fidgeting. Should an adult who is sucking their fingers be spanked or slapped? To take it a step further, many young children who have a sucking habit are actually displaying developmentally appropriate behavior.

A child is no less a person than an adult.

Parents who practice corporal punishment may believe that there are no other effective discipline methods, but there are. There are many discipline techniques that do not include corporal punishment, or even any forms of punishment, that are very effective for families. It may take a change in mindset by the parent or perhaps a change in the parent’s own stress-coping skills, but there are many discipline approaches that do not include hitting that work well.

Some organizations that promote these effective, nonpunitive discipline techniques include:
•    Attachment Parenting International
•    Center for Effective Discipline, which hosts SpankOut Day April 30th
•    Playful Parenting
•    Positive Discipline
•    Unconditional Parenting