I went to a fabulous talk with Deborah McNamara the other night. She’s a student of Gordon Neufeld, one of our local but internationally well-known parenting authors. The talk was about attachment parenting, a topic dear to my heart. As a baby, my daughter led me to attachment parenting because she literally wanted to be attached to me at all times. That’s not what it means, of course. Attachment parenting is all about creating secure relationships with your child, with the idea that this will help them become more independent and confident people as they grow.
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert at creating secure attachments. While my daughter and I have a great relationship, we’re still really working on one of the points that was discussed in the talk. That’s matchmaking. What is matchmaking? Well, it’s what you do when you introduce your child to someone new, particularly someone who is going to take care of that child in some way. When our preschool teacher came to visit our home with some play dough and a puppet before we entered the threes class, that was matchmaking.
When you match make, you bring the comfort of your relationship with your child to another relationship. Over the next month, I’m hoping to work on having my daughter join a music class. She adores music, and the class is wonderful, but it is not parent participation. This means that we’ll go through some trauma if I just leave her. I have tried before, and it doesn’t fly with my kid. She needs matchmaking, and she needs it in spades.
The first step will be to meet her teacher and look around the classroom. Then, we might sit out in the hall as the children do a class. Gradually, I hope that by having me help her become familiar with the environment, the class, and the teacher, she’ll feel able to allow me to leave. The attachment that we have will have transferred to a new environment and a new person she will trust that the new person is able to care for her, since mommy says so.
Do you have a child who has separation anxiety? What do you do about it? Have you tried matchmaking?