Create a lifetime of connection with your children.

Therapist and wildly popular attachment research expert Eli Harwood (a.k.a. Attachment Nerd) illuminates attachment theory as foundational to the only parenting approach proven to have a lasting impact.
 
How do you raise kids who are confident, capable, and caring?
 
The first ingredient is a secure and close relationship—key to helping them self-regulate and thrive later in life. When children feel seen, heard, and supported, all other parenting tips and tricks start to work.
 
Groundbreaking author Eli Harwood makes attachment theory (the science that explores the innate human need to bond with other humans) accessible and actionable in how it can help our children learn and grow into compassionate, warm adults.
 
For anyone looking to build a better life for their kids, no matter what you went through growing up yourself, these simple, real-life strategies will help you:
·        Help you create a secure attachment relationship with your kids by choosing connection over control
·        Prompt reflection on attachment patterns you developed in childhood and why you respond in certain ways during emotional moments with your children
·        Help you resolve past attachment traumas so you can gain effective skills to offer calm, connected, and secure base
·        Provide scripts and practical tools to build and reinforce a strong foundation of trust
·        Encourage you to release the reins of influence as their independence grows
 
Hopeful and inspiring, this essential evidence-based guide will show parents across different ages and stages everywhere that they are not alone in the questions and concerns they may have about their children's development. Though there have been countless studies on how attachment styles affect our romantic relationships, Raising Securely Attached Kids reframes the subject for cultivating a strong relationship between parent and child to bring transformative change to your relationships of all stripes.

ELI HARWOOD is a licensed therapist who lives in Colorado with her husband, Trevor, and their three children. Eli has been nerding out on attachment research for the past two decades and is on a mission to help make the world a better place, one relationship at a time. She continues this mission in her clinical work, her writing, and running her mouth about attachment on social media. When she isn't working to make the world a more secure place, she is playing dress-up with her kids, obsessing about her sourdough starter, and reminiscing about that one time she won a set of globes as a Price is Right contestant. Visit her at AttachmentNerd.com.

CONTENTS


Introduction

Chapter 1: The Most Important Lesson
This chapter will set 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 will explore 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 will focus 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 will focus on the power of playful connection and enthusiastic delight. It will empower parents to cultivate positive interactions and explores dominance vs. connection.

Chapter 6: Secure Conflict
This chapter will go 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 with conflict.

Chapter 7: Connection as Protection
This chapter will focus on navigating outside sources of potential harm and struggle with our children. It will help parents learn how to offer protection without sliding into fear mongering or controlling responses.  

Chapter 8: The Self-Confidence Recipe
A child can only become confident in their self if they are first able to be confident in the care of others. This chapter guides parents into how to help kids feel securely adored, understood, and supported which internalizes into positive narratives about themselves.

Chapter 9: The Tricky Topics
This chapter will dive into the terrain of the tricky conversations that every child needs their parents to have with them. It breaks down conversation by conversation the important things for parents to be aware of as they navigate these dialogues and how to effectively hear and be heard.  

Chapter 10: Letting Go *is* Staying Close
This chapter will lean into the very complex and emotional process of our children building autonomy and independence. It will address the emotional ways we come to these moments and how to offer our children the best possible launch pad to move into new stages of independence.

Appendix
Acknowledgments
References
Index