Sis, Here’s What Young Kids Remind Me About Love & Attachment

I know, I know, it’s been a minute, Sis! If you're wondering where I’ve been for nearly 2 years, the short answer is I was busy having another baby and doing exactly what I tell my clients to do. Prioritizing what actually matters in the season I’m in.

My youngest just had his first birthday. Which means I've spent this whole stretch deep in the exact window where attachment gets built, moment by moment, mostly in ways too small to notice while they're happening.

Here's why I'm telling you this, and not just posting baby pictures. It turns out, the same attachment wiring that gets built in the crib gets carried straight into adulthood. We bring these early experiences into the way we love, the way we trust, the way we brace for someone to leave before they even show signs of going. Watching it form in real time, in my own kids, shows me just as much about the psychology of relationships as my training did. So here's what showing up for two young kids, while also trying to show up for clients, a business, and a marriage, reminds me about attachment. Not the textbook version. The real one that shows up in your dating life too.

Children reach constantly, and they're learning whether you'll be there.

Here's the clinical piece, in plain language. What attachment researchers call an internal working model is basically a child's evolving expectation, built from thousands of small repeated moments, about whether the people they depend on will respond when they reach. It's not formed by one big gesture or one perfect day. It's built in the accumulation of ordinary ones. A cry answered. A hand held. A "yes, I'm coming" said and followed through on.

That's good news for those of us who will never be perfect at this. The model isn't shaped by whether every single moment lands right. It's shaped by the pattern.

Which means the moments you get wrong don't have to be catastrophic, as long as they're not the whole pattern, and as long as you come back. That's where repair comes in, maybe the most underrated tool any of us have in relationships. "I'm sorry I raised my voice. I was frustrated, but that wasn't fair to you." Said to a toddler who won't remember the words but will feel the shift.

Sis, if your internal working model got built on inconsistency instead, if reaching wasn't reliably met, that doesn't disappear at eighteen. It shows up as guardedness at twenty-eight. It shows up as testing someone to see if they'll stay before you let yourself believe they will. Knowing where the pattern started doesn't excuse it. But it does mean it can be repaired, the same way it was built. In small, repeated, honest moments. Not one grand gesture.

I think about this constantly now. Not just as a therapist who helps people heal their attachment wounds for a living. As a mother stepping over toys mid-sentence. Getting interrupted by a "Mom!" from the next room. Trying to hold a business, a marriage, myself, and two small people, all at once.

And they're watching all of it. Learning what love looks and feels like from how I handle the moments I don't have it all together.

None of this is new information to me clinically. It hits different living it.

More soon.

Dr. Spesh is an Atlanta-based, Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Trauma and Relationship Expert, and founder of D.I.V.E. Therapy & Consulting.

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