In this episode, Dr. Tim Jordan describes the concept of parents being a “safe base” that allows their daughter to have the courage to venture out, take risks, have adventures and cope with any adversities she experiences that allow her to develop resiliency and confidence. This process begins in infancy and extends throughout their daughter’s life.
For information on Dr. Jordan and his wife’s personal growth weekend retreats and summer camps that help girls gain self-awareness, self-confidence, coping skills, and leadership skills, go to his website at Camp Weloki for Girls.
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The Most Important Factor In Girls Gaining Confidence And Resilience
Welcome back to the show. I am welcoming you back with a question. We’ll start with a question. Are you aware of the most important factor when it comes to kids overcoming childhood adversity? Are you aware of how that same factor plays out through childhood and adolescent years, plays out with young adults, and even is an important factor in your life as an adult? I’ll start out talking about my younger kids in this show but I will start extending it to teenagers and adults as I go along. Make sure you stay tuned in for the whole episode so you learn about that important factor.
The important factor for little kids is connection. Your history of relational connection growing up is the most important factor in overcoming childhood adversity. Your connectedness to your family, parents, community, and culture is most predictive of your health history as you grow older. Connectedness has the ability to counteract adversity. It’s the most important factor to counteract the adversity of growing up. It’s also interesting that when adversity hits is also important because the younger you get that trauma or adversity, the harder it is to overcome it, especially in the first two years of life. That’s where I want to start talking about what kids need.
Safe Base
This is a concept I’ve been talking about for years. I’d started learning about it back in my fellowship day with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton back in Boston. I learned about safe bases. What does it mean to have a safe base? A safe base is having someone that you can rely on. It starts when the baby is born. When a baby is fussing and crying and they have a concerned caretaker who comes to them and discovers what the problem is, whether it is a wet diaper, they’re hungry, or they need to be held, if an adult is there to meet that need warmly and consistently, then that person becomes that baby’s safe base right from the start. It’s interesting what happens when babies don’t have that safe face.
I remember in my fellowship, there was a man named Ed Tronick who helped out at the child development center where I was training. He had done some experiments with some other people. They would have babies sitting in a pumpkin seat, and then they would have a mom walk in who had a good connection with the baby and had been present. This is a 2 or 3-month-old baby. They would sit down and then they would start this beautiful interaction. The baby would look at the mom. Their eyes would brighten. The baby would coo and the mother would coo back. The mother would make a noise and then the baby would make a noise back. They had this beautiful back-and-forth rhythm which became the template for all future relationships.
They would tell the mom halfway through, “This time, I want you to have what they call a still face or a blank face. No matter what the baby does, show no expression.” The mom would sit down and have that still face or that blank face and they would smile and giggle like they always did. When the mom didn’t respond with a response back, the baby would get this quizzical look. The baby would smile some more. They would giggle. They might even slump over in their chair and come back up. They tried all these different maneuvers to try and get the connection with their mom back that they had previously. All those things that they tried to do were positive. They were laughing, giggling, smiling, and all that.
They would do the same thing with a baby who was depressed in the first 2 or 3 months of life. They had a different interaction with the baby. When the mom would come in and sit down in front of that baby with a still face, the baby didn’t try 5, 6, or so of those positive attempts to get their mom’s attention. What the baby would do is try once, and if they got nothing from the mom, they shut down and got angry. They would grimace and show an angry response. They would fuss as if to say, “I’ve been alive for 2 or 3 months. I’ve learned that you’re not going to meet my needs and it makes me mad. It’s hard for me to regulate myself when I don’t have that safe base.” That was by 2 or 3 months of life.
The concept of every baby or every newborn having a safe base that they can count on and learn to count on is so important not just to overcome adversity, but to have positive relationships for the rest of their life. It starts when the baby’s hungry, thirsty, or cold. If they have a warm, attentive caretaker coming and meeting their needs, then they feel like, “I’m loved. I’m important. People notice me. People meet my needs. I can learn to trust that people will meet my needs.”
When a baby is upset and we pick them up in our arms and rock them back and forth, that rhythmic movement is calming for a baby. If we pair that with maybe breastfeeding, feeding with a bottle, or looking them in the face and talking to them, that does not only relate calming down to the rocking movement, a bottle, or a pacifier, but they also equate that warm feeling with this person or this human being. They are like, “Human beings, I can learn to trust that they will be there for me to meet my needs.”
The caregiver’s smell, touch, and voice, and then holding them and rocking them, all that becomes connected with regulating themselves and connecting. If they get that warm reception and their needs are met warmly and consistently, then they start getting nice chemicals released in their body that cause them to feel calm and connected.
On the other hand, if a caregiver is not there consistently for them and/or they’re there in a negative way, they’re angry, or they have a flat, depressed face, then the baby’s stress response systems get sensitized. They become harder to regulate. They become sensitized to not having their needs met. That’s a pattern because their brain is growing so much and forming so much. When that gets wired into a brain, that’s a tough thing to overcome as they get older, especially if it keeps happening.
Once babies discover they have a safe base, then they have the ability to go away from that safe base and feel confident. Think about a 2 or 3-year-old. You go to a holiday party and there are all kinds of relatives there. There are people there. When parents walk in the door, many kids will latch onto their parents’ legs. That’s showing you, “There are a lot of people. My stress response has been triggered not a lot but a little bit.”
Once babies discover they have a safe base, they can go away from it and feel confident. Share on XThey’re hanging onto your pants leg or wanting to sit in your lap for a little bit is their way of saying, “I need to check this out. I need to regulate myself. Once I notice it for a while, if I’ve had a safe base for my life so far, then I have the confidence to disembark from my mom or dad’s lap, go out, explore the world, talk to people, and do life.
If I start to feel a little stressed again, I can come back. I know my mom or dad is always there to greet me with a smile and say, “It’s okay. Come here. I’ll give you a big hug. I got you. You’re fine.” That gives you the strength and confidence to then go back out into the world and have your adventures and explore. It’s coming home and going back out. That pattern gets established in those first several years of life.
It’s so important because we want our kids to have the confidence to go out into the world and explore. We want them to go out into the world, meet people, have adventures, and have a normal, regular life. On a physiological level, when they are going out into the world, they get a little bit stressed or a little bit worried, and they are not quite sure of things, and then they come back and get that nice warm, loving person that reassures them, what happens is they’re allowed to take some small risks to have some dysregulation. They’re like, “I’m a little bit uncertain about this. That’s not overwhelming. It’s a small one.” When they learn that they can handle that and they can cope, that builds confidence and resilience in them that they will take with them forever.
That will happen thousands of times in their childhood, going out and having these small bits of being a little bit stressed, a new environment, or whatever. When they learn that they can cope with that, that’s what builds their resilience. There will be more things than walking away at a family party. They need to walk down to the bus stop to grade school. It may be the first few times you go down there with them until they get the comfort to say, “I can do this. I meet my friends from the neighborhood, we talk, I get on the bus, and then it’s fine.” You have the safe base that might be there for the first several times, but then the parent can let go because the child has realized, “I can do this. I don’t need my mom and dad. I can handle this.”
Every year, they get a new teacher. Every year, they get typically new classmates or a new mix of kids. Every year, they get a little stressed with a new teacher who has new rules and a different personality. Every year, they get different kids in a class to relate with. Maybe your best friend or your two best friends aren’t in your class that year.
Participating on a new sports team or a theater group or being in a dance class, a music class, or whatever it may be, all those activities create more opportunities for a controllable, small, predictable stress that helps them build the tolerance and resilience that they can handle it because they have and their parents have allowed them to. They go out and they come back.
Participating in sports or other recreational activities creates more opportunities for controllable and predictable stress. This helps children build tolerance and resilience. Share on XEliminating Anxiety
This safe base process does not happen if parents are anxious. If you have an anxious mom or dad and you go to that party, and they have lots of anxieties for whatever their reasons are, when a child looks at them, what they don’t see is, “You got this. This is great. Go have some fun. I’m here if you need me.” What they see when they look back is a worried face or an anxious face.
That gets transmitted to the kid, and then the kid is less open to new things, taking risks, and all that because they’re carrying that anxiety with them. The normal amount of uncertainty and anxiety that comes from new situations, they’ve added to that of their mom or their dad. That can become overwhelming. Kids will become less willing to take risks and less willing to go away from the nest and grow up if you will.
Anxiety in parents started back in the ‘80s. There has always been some anxiety. I read a book one time. I can’t remember what the title was. It was about the history of anxiety and parenting. In the ‘80s, some big things happened. We started hearing about the concept of stranger danger. That phrase had not been in our lexicon before that, but in the ‘80s, we started talking about it.
Here are a couple of reasons probably why. One of them is that cable TV was in swing at that point. When an abduction happened, it wasn’t like you either heard about it once or whatever. You heard about it 24/7 for weeks. It’s all the people in the news could talk about. We had to put people’s kids’ names and faces on milk cartons. We had AMBER Alerts. We had all these things that kept it alive in our minds that the world is a scary place for us and our children. The message that came from people verbatim was, “Do not let your kids out of your sight. This is too dangerous of a world to do that.” A lot of parents took that to heart. We became anxious.
In the ‘80s also, we heard about these super predator teenagers, especially in big cities, who were harassing people and doing crime, etc. That adds some fears also to that. There were more school shootings. We heard about those. Columbine happened in 1998. I believe it was the late ‘90s. We started hearing about those 24/7. All of that created anxiety in parents, which made it harder for parents to feel like they could let their kids go out into the world.
We were able to go out into the world and explore. In my generation at least, we were able to be gone all day unsupervised. No phone, no attachment to home, no checking in every hour. We were gone, and then at dinnertime, we came home. My mom had a bell or a ringer thing outside our porch. She would ring that. That was our clue down the street that it was time to come home for dinner.
That fear was a hard thing. We want our kids to have lots of autonomy, time for downtime, and unsupervised play. We want them to be out in the world, taking risks, and having adventures so that they are out in the world in what people call discover mode. Meaning, I have a safe base that I can count on. I’m free to go out and discover my world, new people, kids, games, unstructured play, adventure, risk-taking, and all that. Those are so important for kids’ development. Our kids are missing out because of that.
We have a lot of kids instead who are anxious. Their families are anxious. The culture is anxious. We’re worried about abductions, etc. Kids are not so much in discover mode as they are in defend mode. They are always on edge as if something bad is going to happen. That curtails their sense of adventure. They become less open to risk and less open to new things. That also is affecting our kids, their happiness, and their ability to grow up confident and resilient.
I’ve told you in these episodes before that when I have a girl in my counseling practice who’s struggling with a teacher for various reasons, I always encourage them to go and have a sit-down with the teacher, look them in the eye, and let them know how they’re feeling, what they want, and what’s causing them to be unhappy in their class.
If they’re young kids, like first, second, or third grade-ish kind of kids, sometimes I’ll say, “If you want to have your mom or dad go with you, then that’s okay, but I want them to sit behind you in the back of the class. They’re there to support you but not to talk for you. It is so important that you advocate for yourself.” I had a lot of kids who did that. The parents didn’t talk and let their kids handle it. The safe base was there in case they needed it because they were a first grader sitting in front of a 20, 40, or 50-year-old adult. That was a controllable, moderate amount of stress and risk that they took, but they had their safe base there so they’re willing to take it.
When they were done and they got a good result, then they were left with, “It’s good for me to do that. I was a little bit scared and worried. I got a little bit stressed but I managed it. That is another building block of confidence and resilience that if my life isn’t going the way I want, I can make it different or at least attempt to make it different.” Sometimes, teachers don’t always listen, but most of the time, in my experience, they do. There are so many experiences that you can give to your kids and opportunities to allow your kids to experience that.
Ongoing Process
I told you at the beginning that this doesn’t stop when they get into grade school, middle school, or high school. All the way through, our kids come back and check in with us like that little three-year-old toddler did. They need our safe base. They need somebody to bounce things off of. They need a sounding board. They also need someone who when they come home and are like, “I’m so horrible. I can’t do anything,” who says, “I hear you. It sounds like you’re frustrated.”
Children need somebody to bounce things off and a sounding board to depend on. Share on XThey need someone who looks at them with eyes that say, “I believe in you. I know who you are. This right now is a momentary issue. I get it. It’s tough sometimes. You’re going to get through it. I know you. I believe in you. I trust you. You got this.” That’s the safe base with your middle schooler, high schooler, or son or daughter in college. They need us to not be anxious and join their anxiety.
All those transitions, starting high school, starting college, and leaving college, and when there are all these amounts of anxiety and uncertainty that go hand in hand with those transitions, if your kids had a safe base all the way through up to that point, you or someone has been that safe base. They then have the ability to do that. They know they can cope because they’ve coped many times in their lives.
They’ve built up resilience, which means, “I faced adversity before. I faced these moments of uncertainty and I got through them. If I did it all the way through in the past, I know I can do it again now.” That is what gives kids not just resilience but also a sense of optimism, confidence, and self-reliance. It is so important for all of our kids. It doesn’t stop.
A safe base gives kids not just resilience but also a sense of optimism, confidence, and self-reliance. Share on XMy wife and I have three adult children, two of them with their own children and one on the way. When they start to get to the point of thinking about being married, sometimes, they will check back in with us. They have questions. Also, when they come home, that’s still a safe base for them. Two of them live in big cities. They’re out in nature here. They relax. They get more grounded. It also reminds them of their past.
They got upset one year ago. Our tradition during the Christmas holiday is to have homemade ravioli. My family used to make them. I’m half Italian. The older people let go of that so we started buying them at some Italian stores down the Italian section in St. Louis. That’s one of our traditions. There’s a homemade meat sauce for the ravioli that was my great-grandfather’s recipe from Italy. It’s amazing. It takes all day to make it.
There are all these rituals that we have around that meal. One year, if we leave anything out, our kids notice and they don’t like it. Part of their safe base is those rituals that we have that they have learned to rely on. It makes them feel at home. It’s like, “This is our family. This is who we are.” They like for us to keep those kinds of things going.
One time, there was an eighteen-year-old and he was giving advice to his parents. This was before he was leaving for college. He said, “I want you to stay in the same house, in the same marriage, and in the same career. I want you to stay sitting by the phone for my phone call. Answer me if I call you right away but never be upset if I don’t call you right back. Don’t touch my bedroom.” They want things to be the same, the safe base. Even as adults with their own children, they’ve touched base with us many times about raising kids. There were questions about getting their baby to sleep through the night. There were all kinds of questions you have when you’re a new parent. We’re the safe base that they can come to.
The safe base is not always parents. Research has shown that it doesn’t have to be parents. It needs to be somebody. It could be an aunt, an uncle, a grandmother, a grandfather, a teacher, a coach, or a mentor of some kind. It is somebody who has taken that kid under their wing when they were growing up, was there for them, saw the best in them, and was there when they were in need so the kids can know they have somebody they can rely on or they have some safe base. Sometimes, it’s not the parents because of all kinds of situations in the kids’ lives.
Believe me. Having counseled kids for 30 or 35 years, I’ve heard every story. Having someone is key. I hope it’s you, a mom or a dad who’s reading this. They need somebody. They need a safe base starting out and forever. They also need opportunities to walk off, explore the world, and take risks. They need so much in their childhood unsupervised times where they can take care of themselves, take risks, and learn how to take risks, take care of themselves with risks, create their own safety, and handle their own conflicts with their buddies down the street. They need all of that to develop resilience because those are regular, controllable, manageable stresses. When they’re allowed to experience those, and I’m sorry for being over your heads, that’s the building blocks of resilience and self-confidence that they can do it.
Episode Wrap-up
Let me read to you as I close here. One of my favorite sayings is by someone named Kaleel Jamison. It goes like this, “Relationships of all kinds are like sand held in your hand. Held loosely with an open hand, the sand remains where it is. The minute you close your hand and squeeze tightly to hold on, the sand trickles through your fingers. You may hold on to some of it, but most of it will be spilled. A relationship is like that. Held loosely with respect and freedom for the other person, it is likely to remain intact. Hold too tightly, too possessively, and the relationship slips away and is lost.”
That’s the balance that you can create with your kids all along the way as well as your young adult children and adult children if you will. If you hold on enough, you’re still the safe base, but you’re allowing them the freedom to do their thing. Find that balance with your kids. Be very mindful of being that safe base for them. Ask your kids how they want you to support them, especially as they get into the pre-teen and teen years. The support changes over time.
If you want to be a safe base that they come to or that they can rely on and you want to remain an influence in their life, make sure you ask questions all along the way about, “How do you want me to support you now that you’re in middle school or high school?” or “You’re going off to college. How do you want me to support you now as a college freshman?” If you do that, you can remain their safe base throughout their lives. That’s so important for them and also for us. It’s a way we connect.
Thank you so much for being here. As always, please feel free to pass these on to your friends. Let them know about this show, especially if it’s a topic you think might be of interest to them. Be sure you come back again for another brand-new episode which I’ll be putting out. I appreciate you stopping by. I’ll see you back here with a new episode.