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5.01.2024

Tips for Bonding with Young Children

Becoming a new parent is a beautiful experience. It can evoke feelings of joy and excitement, but it can also leave some parents feeling unprepared and anxious. These feelings are okay! After all, being a parent requires mastering many new skills, big and small, especially for new parents. 

If you've ever felt this way, you're not alone. A 2012 study by the Essential Parent Company showed that around 80 percent of the new parents surveyed felt both anxious and completely unprepared for the practical skills needed to care for their new baby [1]. 

Rest assured; perfection is never expected. Being in sync with your child 100 percent of the time is not a requirement to develop a healthy relationship with them. In fact, it's normal to go back and forth between being in sync and out of sync with your child.

It’s how we repair and bond with our young children in between the ‘out of sync’ moments that can have a lasting impact on them long past early childhood. 

Some parents may have never had a healthy example of what repair and bonding look like, so it's okay to feel unprepared on how to go about repairing their relationship with their child. 

During the ‘repair’ process, it's important to recognize and validate their emotions. This will gradually help them regulate their emotions in childhood and beyond. 

So how do we do this? 

John Gottman, a world-renowned psychologist and founder of the Gottman Institute, has come up with five tips for being what he calls an ‘Emotion Coach’ for your child:

• Be aware of your child’s emotions.
• Recognize your child’s expression of emotion as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching.
• Listen with empathy and validate your child’s feelings.
• Help your child learn to label their emotions with words.
• Set limits when you are helping your child solve problems or deal with upsetting situations appropriately [2].

It’s not just our moments of repair that matter, but the bonding moments in between. Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of creating a healthy bond with your child at a young age.

Benefits of Bonding with Young Children

Bonding with your child during moments of being in sync is a great way to establish a healthy relationship with them when they are young. This will help create secure attachment between you and your child, which can ease the pressure when we are not in sync with them. 

Bonding is the process of creating a loving, healthy attachment to your child. Often, we are already instinctively bonding with our children without even knowing the weight of these simple and sweet moments. 

There are many benefits to bonding with children that we can explore. For example, bonding:

• Establishes trust by showing that you are a safe place for your child to come to.
• Helps your child learn more about their own feelings.
• Builds stronger communication skills.
• Helps them to learn how to deal with tough stuff (now and later).
• Builds their brains.

Bonding with your child helps them feel safe and happy in their relationship with you. It can show that they can count on you, which gives them the comfort to explore the world, knowing that they have a safe home base to come back to. This sets the foundation for future friendships they will have because it shows young children what good relationships can look like.

When we give children the space to express themselves and be a part of our lives, we are letting them figure out their emotions with our support. When children have a caring listener as a parent, they can grow more confident in expressing themselves. Also, through bonding activities, we might use feeling words that children are unfamiliar with, which will help them better understand their complex emotions.

Bonding involves interacting with your child through conversations, storytelling, and usually requires just the right amount of being silly. By encouraging our children to verbally express themselves, we are building our little one’s communication skills as well as non-verbal communication skills. Non-verbal communication can look like something as simple as eye contact to show you are listening or smiling to show love and support.

When we have a moment to have a conversation with our children, we can use our imaginations to play scenarios with them in a safe environment. This may seem simple, but it establishes stronger problem-solving skills that are necessary to deal with difficult situations. Through these interactions, children learn to navigate challenges, adapt to new situations, and find creative solutions to problems. These problem-solving abilities are valuable assets that help children confront and overcome difficulties later in life.

Lastly, when we are spending time with the children in our lives, we can use these moments to build their brains big and strong! Bonding activities like reading, playing games, and chatting are great for a child’s brain. Children love learning through play, so making it fun just makes it more brain-building.

Bonding with Vroom

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of creating a bond with your child, let’s talk about the ways you can interact with a young child in a way that promotes a healthy bond with them using Vroom. Vroom’s 5 Brain Building Basics are used to promote your child’s brain development while spending time with them. Think of these as a framework to get the most out of your interactions:

All of these Vroom Brain Building Basics are rooted in the science of growing our children’s brains healthy and strong. Vroom's 5 Brain Building Basics are essential for building a strong parent-child relationship because they promote effective communication, emotional connection, autonomy, trust, and learning. By incorporating these principles into their daily interactions with children, parents lay the foundation for healthy development, resilience, and lifelong success. 

The best part is that you are probably already doing many, or all, of these things. Whether you’ve realized it or not. You are making a difference in your child’s life with every interaction, and you already have what it takes to be a brain-builder!

For more information on how to use Vroom to build your relationship with your child, please visit https://www.childrenscabinet.org/vroom/.

1. Essential Parent Co. Survey of parental anxiety’ unpublished manuscript. N = 500 new and expectant parents. 2012
2. Gottman Institute. (n.d.). The still face experiment: A lesson in emotional intelligence. Retrieved from https://www.gottman.com/blog/research-still-face-experiment/