The Circle of Security
An evidence-based parenting support program
Are there negative loops that you and your child keep getting caught in?
Are you struggling with parent-child relationships?
Do you need help to reduce child behavioral and emotional problems?
The Circle of Security program can help you foster a secure attachment with your child. Securely attached children typically have better emotional regulation, problem-solving abilities, quality relationships and friendships and overall wellbeing.
Getting Started is Simple
1. Make an Appointment
Discuss your challenges with a psychologist. Together, you will develop a personalised treatment plan to achieve your goals.
2. Commence Therapy
Therapy with an accredited Circle of Security psychologist can be one of the most effective ways to enhance your relationship with your children and develop a secure attachment.
3. Experience the Benefits
Secure attachment in childhood is associated with reduced behavioural issues, lower parenting stress and lifelong benefits such as better self-esteem and satisfaction.
How the Circle of Security and therapy can help you be better at parenting
Therapy provides a space to explore your parenting experiences openly and without feeling judged, which can be enormously therapeutic in itself. Understanding your child’s needs and your responses to them will lead to more closeness and enhance parent-child relationships.
Parenting Support
Whilst incredibly rewarding, it can equally be frustrating, and extraordinarily demanding at times. How can we be sure we are giving our child what he or she needs the most?
Sometimes children behave in ways that cause us stress, worry or embarrassment. Often their behaviour is like the smoke, and what we can work together to understand is where is the fire? What is it that your child needs from you? Sometimes parents notice their own responses are telling them something about their experience of parenting:
Building a Secure Attachment
Every person’s experience of parenting is unique, but a child’s need for an attachment with their caregiver is universal. Attachment theory has helped us to understand that across cultures children are innately driven to keep their caregivers close by, for both protection and connection. When we think about attachment we are talking about the AND that exists between caregiver and child. Research has shown that children who have a secure attachment with their caregiver/s experience a whole host of benefits [1], including:
- higher self-esteem;
- being able to turn to their parents when they need help;
- more lasting friendships;
- being better able to solve interpersonal problems; and
- knowing how to be kind to those around them.
Secure attachment helps children grow into healthy adults
Secure attachment as a child benefits us as adults as well. Feeling securely attached in childhood gives us a framework for our adult life that includes:
- being able to trust the people you love;
- learning that emotions are safe;
- being better able to work with others to work out our problems;
- being able to be autonomous but also connected with others, which is the key to well-functioning relationships.
What your child needs is ‘good enough’ parenting
The creators of the Circle of Security intervention, an attachment-based parenting support intervention, have gathered evidence that tells us as parents, we are not aiming for perfection. What our child needs is ‘good enough’ parenting (Powell et al., 2016). And, importantly, it’s never too late.
[1] Powell, B., Cooper, G., Hoffman, K., & Marvin, B. (2016). The circle of security intervention: Enhancing attachment in early parent-child relationships. Guilford Publications.
