Breaking the Cycle of Insecure Attachment: A Guide for Parents
Many parents want to give their kids the childhood they wish they had, including unconditional love, support, and emotional stability.
However, if you grew up without a consistent or emotionally available caregiver, you may find parenting a struggle. Without a stable template to work from, you may have developed a pattern of connecting with others called “insecure attachment.”
Insecure attachment is shaped by our early childhood experiences, and while they’re stable traits, this doesn’t mean they’re set in stone. With awareness and support, you can disrupt intergenerational trauma and attachment issues that may be holding you and your family back from thriving.
On this page, we’ll explore how breaking insecure attachment cycles can support you in building a stronger connection with your child, including:
- Where insecure attachment comes from
- Signs of struggling with insecure attachment
- The role of trauma
- Strategies for creating secure attachments with children and teens
- Healing as a parent and family
- Finding professional support
Where Does Insecure Attachment Come From?
When thinking about insecure attachment, it’s good to have a basic understanding of attachment theory. This theory, developed by psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby in the 1950s, details how attachments affect us throughout our lives. In essence, our earliest relationships with parents or caregivers can have a vast impact on how we regulate our emotions and create emotional connections with others.1
This information leads us to the different attachment styles and how they can affect thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in various ways, which we discuss next.
The Different Attachment Styles
The attachment styles we know today are based on the research of Mary Ainsworth and her experiment, the “Strange Situation.” From this experiment, three initial attachment styles were discovered: secure, insecure-anxious, and insecure-avoidant. Another style was added later: insecure-disorganized.2
Each attachment style forms based on how well a child’s needs are met. If a baby or infant is distressed or uncertain about something, they’re innately driven to reach out to their parents or caregivers for reassurance or comfort. They might do this through signals such as cries or clinging, and how the caregiver consistently responds forms the basis of future emotional connections.1
For instance, if the child’s cues are responded to consistently and sensitively, a secure attachment typically forms. However, if the child perceives that their basic and emotional needs are being rejected, neglected, or inconsistently met, this can result in an insecure attachment.
Unfortunately, the impact of insecure attachment can affect all aspects of life. For instance, you may experience difficulties forming healthy relationships with others, believe that the world isn’t a safe place, or think that other people can’t be depended on. These impacts come from how people form an internal working model based on their early understanding of how their needs will be treated, and can continue throughout life without intervention.
Intergenerational Trauma and Attachment Issues
You may be wondering how your teen developed an insecure attachment, even if you did your best to be a consistent parent. Sometimes, insecure attachments happen even with the best intentions. They can stem from a variety of factors such as later trauma, stressful environments, and transgenerational attachment.
Transgenerational attachment trauma is when insecure attachment patterns are passed down through the family. It describes how patterns of connection, such as how you show love to others, handle emotions, and deal with conflict, can be transmitted between generations when there’s no healing or resolution. It’s passed not only through behaviors but through genetics, as trauma has the ability to alter our genes.5
Therefore, understanding the influence of trauma on parenting is key to changing insecure attachment patterns and creating healthier connections – even if you haven’t fully healed from it yet.
How Trauma Shapes Parenting
If you have never felt safe in relationships, it can be difficult to model secure connections to your children. Unintentionally, you may find yourself replicating the parenting styles you experienced as a child.6 For example, you may unwittingly be overly critical of your kid or feel completely overwhelmed trying to fulfill their needs. This isn’t a parenting failure – it’s a sign of unhealed wounds caused by trauma.
With the right support, breaking the trauma cycle is achievable. Therapy for transgenerational trauma can help you process previous experiences and learn to parent your child in a more secure and healthy way.
Signs You May Be Struggling With Insecure Attachment
Attachment traits are often subconscious, so how do you know if you are insecurely attached as a parent? The following are some common signs of insecure attachment in parents:3,4
- Not responding to your child’s needs consistently
- Difficulty recognizing or interpreting your child’s cues for attention
- Discomfort with displays of affection
- Being emotionally unavailable or distant to your child
- Disliking expressions of emotion, such as your child crying
- Expecting children to be overly independent
- Being unpredictable in your caregiving
- Overly controlling behavior
- Fearing emotional vulnerability and abandonment
- Experiencing a disconnection with your child
- Reluctance to accept help from others
- Seeking constant reassurance from others (including your child)
- Excessive fears associated with your child, including around your ability to parent them and the risk of them being harmed
If some of these points resonate with you, try not to worry. Remember that attachment styles aren’t set in stone, and that support is available to help you develop a more secure attachment with your child. Self-awareness is the first step toward creating positive change.
Parenting Strategies for Secure Attachment
Before we dive into some strategies for cultivating secure attachment, it’s good to know what secure attachment is and how it shows up in children and teens.
Secure Attachment in Kids and Teens
A child with secure attachment knows that they can go to their caregiver for reassurance and be comforted and supported by them. This awareness gives them a secure base and positive template for building healthy relationships as they grow.
Some of the signs of secure attachment in children and adolescents include:7-9
- Good self-esteem and self-confidence
- Ability to form and maintain healthy relationships with others
- Respecting and maintaining healthy boundaries
- Openly communicating needs and feelings
- Trusting other people to an appropriate level
- Showing empathy toward other people
- Balanced emotional regulation
- Ability to make decisions and take responsibility for their actions
Now that you’re aware of the signs of secure attachment in teens, the following information covers how to help them reach more security.
Maintaining Consistency
One of the best ways to encourage secure attachment development in children is to provide them with consistency. Having a reliable caregiver who meets their needs regularly leads to feelings of stability and safety. Children can then trust that their parents will give them the care and attention that they need. Consistency includes modeling healthy emotion regulation, maintaining boundaries and rules, and creating a stable routine.
Communication also plays a big role here. The way you communicate with your child can be the difference between them feeling that they are loved and respected or unimportant and unsafe.
Improving Parent-Child Emotional Connection
There are several strategies you can use to strengthen the emotional connection you have with your child. One way is to create a safe space for open communication. By doing so, your child knows they can come to you if they have problems or want to share how they feel. Actively listening – demonstrating a real interest in what your child is saying, making eye contact, and putting away any distractions – tells them that they are important to you.
Another strategy is to spend quality time together. Make sure that you have one-on-one time with your child doing activities that you both enjoy so that you have opportunities to connect. This taps into synchrony, an important element of a parent-child bond.
Balance Autonomy With Dependence
The teenage years can be a tricky time for adolescents and their parents. However, creating and maintaining a secure attachment in the teen years is just as important as when they were younger. Your teenager may be growing more independent by the day, but they still need your support. It may just look different from when they were a toddler.
To balance their need for dependence with autonomy, you could try some of the following strategies:
- Validate their emotions: You don’t have to agree with everything your teen says, but acknowledging how they feel can help build trust. It shows them you take their emotions seriously.
- Respect their independence: Teens usually start to pull away from their parents at some point, yearning for autonomy and self-reliance. You can help them do this safely by setting agreed-upon boundaries. This helps to create a balanced and respectful relationship between you both.
- Repair after conflict: Conflicts or differences of opinion will happen regardless of how good your relationship is. The important part is how you reconnect. Staying calm, coming back to them, and admitting if you were wrong about something shows your child that you are still there for them, no matter what happened.
Mental Health Services for Healing Insecure Attachments
Although attachment styles typically form within the first few years of life, it is possible to change them at any point with the right support. The following information covers how parents can heal attachment wounds, as well as therapy options for family recovery as a unit.
Helping Parents With Insecure Attachment Styles
Before you can offer a secure attachment to your child, you may need to heal the parts of yourself that didn’t receive that safety and consistency. This starts with self-awareness. If you recognized some of the signs or symptoms of insecure attachment from earlier, it may be time to do some investigating. Practices like journaling and mindfulness can help you discover the automatic emotional patterns you follow.
Working with a therapist who specializes in mental health services for parenting and attachment can help you process traumatic experiences. They can provide you with tools to regulate your emotions and help you rewrite your template for relating to others, allowing you to enjoy healthier, more secure connections. Our adult mental health treatment team at Mission Prep can guide you in this process if attachment repair is something you need.
Family Counseling for Attachment Healing
Attachment-based family therapy is an evidence-based, structured family counseling approach stemming from attachment theory. Attachment repair therapy for families guides the way to rebuilding healthy, secure connections. Therapy sessions involve the whole family and address events and relationships within the unit to improve trust, connections, communication, and a sense of safety and security.10,11
Whether you are seeking help for yourself, your teen, or your entire family, therapy can give you the right support to heal from insecure attachments.
Breaking the Trauma Cycle With Mission Prep
Recovering from insecure attachment as a parent isn’t always an easy task, but it is completely possible. Self-awareness, healing your own emotional patterns, and building secure connections with your child can help you start the essential work of breaking the cycle of insecure attachment. And you don’t have to do this alone.
At Mission Prep, we’re here to help. Our team of experts is ready to guide your family through the process of creating healthier, happier connections. If you’re interested to learn more about how our team can help, contact us today through our secure form. We’re here for you, every step of the way.
References
- McGarvie, S., PhD. (2025, March 27). Attachment Theory, Bowlby’s Stages & Attachment Styles. PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/attachment-theory/
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., & Bell, S. M. (1970). Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation. Child Development, 41(1), 49–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/1127388
- Nguyen, J. (n.d.). What is avoidant attachment in relationships? Verywell Mind. Retrieved [August 6th 2025], from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-avoidant-attachment-in-relationships-8600201
- Wright, B., Fearon, P., Garside, M., Tsappis, E., Amoah, E., Glaser, D., Allgar, V., Minnis, H., Woolgar, M., Churchill, R., McMillan, D., Fonagy, P., O’Sullivan, A., & McHale, M. (2023, February 1). Understanding of attachment difficulties. Routinely Used Interventions to Improve Attachment in Infants and Young Children: A National Survey and Two Systematic Reviews – NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK588783/
- Gillespie, C. (2025, March 13). What is generational trauma? Health. https://www.health.com/condition/ptsd/generational-trauma
- Cristobal, P. S., Santelices, M. P., & Fuenzalida, D. a. M. (2017). Manifestation of trauma: The effect of early traumatic experiences and adult attachment on parental reflective functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00449
- Wisner, W. (2024, April 8). What does it mean to have secure attachment? Health. https://www.health.com/secure-attachment-style-8621886
- Gupta, S. (2024, April 18). What does secure attachment look and feel like? Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/secure-attachment-signs-benefits-and-how-to-cultivate-it-8628802
- Shumaker, D. M., Deutsch, R. M., & Brenninkmeyer, L. (2009). How do I connect? Attachment issues in adolescence. Journal of Child Custody, 6(1–2), 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/15379410902894866
- Ewing, E. S. K., Diamond, G., & Levy, S. (2015). Attachment-based family therapy for depressed and suicidal adolescents: theory, clinical model and empirical support. Attachment & Human Development, 17(2), 136–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2015.1006384
- Diamond, G., Siqueland, L., & Diamond, G. M. (2003). Attachment-based family therapy for depressed adolescents: programmatic treatment development. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 6(2), 107–127. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1023782510786
