Your Child's Emotional Tuning

 

When an infant calls for help and her parent is consistently available and responsive in a
way that meets the child’s need, that child is implicitly learning that it is good to express need
because it will be satisfied in a timely manner. She can’t think at this age, of course, but her
body knows at the cellular level what is happening. This is the ground floor for emotional
balance in adulthood.
A child who experiences such emotional attunement and response from
her parents doesn’t have to escalate her expressions to magnum crying, screaming and flailing
to get mom and dad’s attention. Consequently, as an adult, she is likely to be able to do
without rapid escalation to bring attention to her needs in an intimate relationship but also in
friendships and the workplace. This truth debunks the old idea of letting children cry it
out…which we now know stresses the child’s system with large flows of cortisol and other
stress hormones that can actually do damage to her hippocampus—a part of the brain that is a
building block of IQ because of its key role in creating long-term memory.
Our degree and accuracy of responsiveness is what we might call “emotional tuning.”
Indeed, the entire neurological and hormonal system, of which the brain is the most obvious
component, is an instrument for sensing and feeling in the early years, not thinking. It is being
tuned by caregiver interaction as certainly as a piano is tuned by a piano master. This
emotional tuning determines which emotional notes, note sequences, chords and reaction speeds will
become the most common in the life of the individual. You can continue the metaphor by imagining what kind of parent interactions will lead the child to produce Wagner-like reactions rather than, say, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven or, in today’s terms, the quiet and contemplative music of Michael Hoppe or the blaring, machine-gun like emanations of metal rock and rap…as well as all the possible variations along that continuum.
Unfortunately, we parents are not perfect and there are plenty of times when we either
miss our children’s cues or are simply unable to satisfy them due to outside stresses pulling at
us—a bad economy, a catastrophic act of nature, ethnic strife and war, just to name a few of
the possibilities. So, many of us will pass through our critical and highly dependent first four or
five years experiencing something between inconsistent emotional attunement and response
from our parents to very little at all. When we arrive on the shores of adulthood and find
ourselves drawn into an intimate relationship, friendship or important workplace issue, it is
natural that these old deficits come with us and do a lot to shape the dynamics of those
relationships. The good news is that through the right kinds of courageous emotion-based
work in adulthood, those old tunes, as deeply written as they are, can gradually be rewritten
into a more harmonious musical score.
C 2012 Bob Kamm