Raising Securely Attached Kids (using Connection-focused Parenting To Create Confidence, Empathy, And Resilience)

Create a secure emotional bond with your children—for a close, fulfilling parent-child relationship that lasts a lifetime. Therapist and wildly popular attachment research expert Eli Harwood (@attachmentnerd) illuminates attachment theory as foundational to the only parenting approach proven to have a lasting impact.

Though there have been countless studies on how attachment styles affect our romantic relationships, Raising Securely Attached Kids is the first book to reframe the subject for caregivers and children.

Licensed therapist and highly sought-after attachment research expert Eli Harwood illuminates the science that explores our innate human need to bond with other humans, and helps us harness it as the only parenting approach proven to have a lasting impact. Her loyal following—fast approaching the millions—connects to Eli’s accessible approach that helps everyone form secure and close relationships with their kids, which helps them develop resilience, confidence, and form close relationships in the future.

“Eli Harwood brings infectious-fun energy, vulnerability, and fresh perspectives without shaming or blaming. Not only is Raising Securely Attached Kids a practical and actionable guide, it’s grounded in science and entertaining to read.” —Hilary Swank, actress, storyteller, mom of twins

Hopeful and inspiring, this essential evidence-based guide shows parents, educators, and anyone with children in their lives that they are not alone in the questions and concerns they may have about raising confident, capable, and caring kids.

Covering every parenting era from new-borns to adults, Raising Securely Attached Kids teaches simple, real-life strategies that will help you:

• Move past old patterns from your childhood to become the parent or caregiver you yearn to be—no matter what you went through growing up
• Resolve past attachment traumas so you can offer a calm, connected, and secure base
• Create a secure attachment relationship with your kids by choosing connection over control
• Build and reinforce a strong foundation of trust with scripts and practical tools
• Understand that it’s never too late to create a stronger bond with your children

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Most Important Lesson
Author Eli Harwood sets the stage for understanding attachment in the parenting context and the mindsets necessary for a parent to cultivate a secure relationship, and how children learn whether or not they can rely on us for connection and support.

Chapter 2: Connection is the Most Powerful Form of Influence
This chapter explores the emotional side of parenting and the importance of those challenging moments when our kids are submerged deep into their feelings.

Chapter 3: They Can Feel What You Don’t Heal
This chapter focuses on the ways that our unresolved traumas from the past and our dysfunctional relationships in the present affect our children and how we can heal them in order not to pass them down to our kids.

Chapter 4: Feelings are for Feeling
In a world full of so much misconception regarding emotional health, this chapter helps you build your child''s emotional intelligence through mythbusting current mindsets about what it means to be emotionally healthy.

Chapter 5: Structure is Nurture''s Best Friend
This chapter discusses the power of playful connection and enthusiastic delight, and empowers parents to cultivate positive interactions and explores dominance vs. connection.

Chapter 6: Secure Conflict
This chapter gets into the nitty gritty of conflict with our children and the different ways it shows up in them and us and how to take a discovery mindset instead of a fear mindset