Working Didn’t Keep Me From Building Secure Attachment With My Kids

There’s a message circulating right now that worries me: that secure attachment requires mothers to spend enormous amounts of time physically with their children, and that separation, particularly separation for work, puts children at risk.

I worked throughout my children’s lives. My daughters are now 17 and 19. They are emotionally and psychologically healthy, resilient young women, and I have deeply connected relationships with both of them. There are countless factors that have contributed to who they have become, and I’m certainly not suggesting that my working is responsible for their well-being.

But I’m also not willing to describe their well-being as something that happened despite my work because, in some important ways, my work has been part of how I built the relationships I have with them.

Secure attachment was never about making sure my children were attached to me at all times. It was about building a relationship sturdy enough to hold all of it: connection and separation, delight and disappointment, my mistakes and our repairs, their dependence on me and their growing independence from me.

And much of that was built in what I did when we were together.

What secure attachment actually means

The word “attachment” gets thrown around a lot right now, especially on social media. And I think sometimes the word itself creates confusion.

A securely attached child is not a child who is literally attached to their mother all the time.

Secure attachment describes the quality of a relationship. A secure relationship provides a child with a steady, predictable and safe home base. The child can move out into the world and come back. They can experience distress without fearing that the relationship will disappear. They can depend on a parent and, over time, become increasingly independent from that parent.

Of course time together matters. You cannot build a relationship without spending time in relationship. But quantity of time is not the same thing as quality of relationship. Rather than getting caught up in the fear that I’m not spending enough time with my children, I have been far more interested in another question throughout my years as a mother: How am I showing up when we are together?

Here are some of the things I’ve committed to in order to show up in a healthy and secure way.

I have taken my own well-being seriously

This might be the most important one.

I’ve always understood that I’m part of the environment my children are growing up in. My nervous system enters the room with me. My exhaustion enters the room with me. So do my curiosity, patience, humor, flexibility and capacity to listen.

Taking care of myself has never felt separate from taking care of my children. I have prioritized sleep. I move my body. I eat well. I spend time outside. I maintain friendships and relationships that matter to me. I pay attention to my own mental health.

And I work.

My work keeps my brain active. It gives me purpose, inspiration and intellectual stimulation. It connects me with parts of myself that exist outside of motherhood. For me, meaningful work has been one of the things that helps me stay psychologically healthy.

That doesn’t mean I have walked through the door every evening perfectly regulated and delighted to see everyone. Of course I haven’t, so please don;t mistake me for being super-human. It means I have tried to take responsibility for maintaining the internal resources that allow me to be available to my children when I’m with them.

My work hasn’t simply existed alongside my parenting. At times, it has helped resource it.

I paid attention to goodbye and hello

Because I worked, separation was part of our lives, so I paid attention to it.

Drop-off and pickup. Leaving and coming home. Bedtime and mornings. These have always been places where I’ve dedicated myself to intentional presence. These moments didn’t have to be long or elaborate. Often they were tiny. Eye contact. Putting my phone away. Getting down on the floor. A hug. Paying attention to a face. Letting a child be sad that I was leaving rather than trying to convince her that she shouldn’t be.

And then coming back.

Over and over again, my children experienced the rhythm of separation and reunion. Mom leaves. I am safe. Other people can care for me. Mom comes back. We reconnect. Our relationship is still here.

I think we sometimes become so focused on preventing separation that we overlook something important: children can learn security through the experience of separation and reunion too.

I tried to know my children rather than constantly direct them

One of the great temptations of parenting is to spend a tremendous amount of time telling our children what to do. Put your shoes on. Finish your breakfast. Hurry up. Don’t touch that. Here’s what you should say. Here’s how you should handle it. Here’s why you don’t need to be upset.

Some of that is parenting. Kids need guidance. But relationships also need curiosity.

I have tried to remain interested in who my children actually are, rather than becoming overly focused on shaping them into who I think they should be. That has meant listening, watching, asking questions, letting them guide play, and being curious about their opinions, even when I don’t share them.

It has also meant following their emotional experience instead of immediately trying to change it. If something was exciting to them, I wanted to understand their excitement. If something was disappointing, I tried to meet them in the disappointment. If they were angry, I didn’t need to talk them out of being angry.

I haven’t always done this well. But the goal has been to communicate something very simple: I see you. I hear you. I want to know what it is like to be you.

We played

There has also been a lot of silliness in our house. Dancing in the kitchen. Making things. Running around outside. Games. Jokes. Being ridiculous together.

I think play is easy to underestimate because there isn’t necessarily a measurable outcome at the end of it. But that’s partly the point. Play doesn’t need an agenda. Nobody needs to learn anything. Nobody needs to improve. Nobody needs to accomplish something. We just get to enjoy each other.

For someone like me, who knows how to be productive and loves accomplishing things, this has been important. Relationships need spaces where nothing is being optimized, and joy, laughter, and unstructured togetherness can exist.

I welcomed other people into their world

I have never wanted my children to believe that I am the only person from whom they can experience safety, love, or care.

I’ve supported and genuinely enjoyed watching their relationships with their dad, teachers, childcare providers, my friends and other important people in their lives. Those relationships weren’t competition for mine, they expanded my children’s world.

This is particularly important when we talk about working mothers because childcare is so often discussed through the lens of what a child is losing when their mother isn’t there.

I think there’s another question worth asking: Who else is my child getting to love and be loved by?

A child having another trusted adult who delights in them, knows them, comforts them and becomes part of their world doesn’t make their relationship with their mother smaller.

I have held boundaries even when my children didn’t like them

Secure attachment does not mean keeping your child happy with you. That distinction is super important.

Children are supposed to push against boundaries. They’re figuring out where the edges are. They’re learning what happens when they want something desperately and someone else says no. My job wasn’t to prevent that disappointment. My job was to keep them safe, make decisions in service of their health and well-being, and remain in relationship with them while they had feelings about those decisions.

That might sound like, “I know you are furious that screen time is over. It’s still over.” Or, “I know you don’t want me to leave tonight. Dad is here with you, and I’m going to go. I’ll see you in the morning.” Or, with older kids, “I understand why you want to do this. I know you’re disappointed. My answer is still no.”

Their disappointment didn’t mean the boundary was wrong, and their anger didn’t mean our relationship was in danger. I could empathize without giving in. And I could trust that our relationship was sturdy enough to tolerate their unhappiness with me.

And I repaired. A lot.

I have missed cues. I have misunderstood. I have been impatient. I have reacted instead of listened. I have said things I wished I hadn’t said. I have gotten it wrong. Many, many times I have gotten it wrong. Of course I have. I am a human being in relationships with other human beings.

What I’ve tried very hard to do is notice when that happens and take 100% ownership for my 100%. Sometimes that means apologizing. Sometimes it means going back to a conversation and saying, “I don’t think I handled that very well.” Sometimes it means listening when one of my kids tells me that something I did hurt them without immediately explaining why I did it.

Repair is a coming back together.

And I think this is one of the places where our cultural ideas about good mothering can actually get in the way of secure relationships. If I believe being a good mother means getting it right, then acknowledging that I got it wrong can feel threatening. If I believe good mothering making sure their children feel happy all the time, then making rom for my kids’ discomfort will be nearly impossible.

But my children don’t need a mother who never gets it wrong, nor do they need me to make sure they always feel good. They need to know that when something happens between us, we can come back and deal with it.

And eventually, security has to make room for independence

My daughters don’t need me in the ways they did when they were two or five or ten. That’s not a failure of attachment. That’s part of its purpose.

As children grow, a secure home base gives them somewhere to venture out from. Their world gets bigger. They form friendships we aren’t part of. They have experiences without us. They develop ideas we didn’t give them. Eventually they make decisions we wouldn’t necessarily make ourselves.

I want that for my girls. I don’t want closeness with me to require dependence on me. I want them to know that they can move toward their own lives and that our relationship can stretch with them.

Working motherhood was part of this story

There are many, many factors that contribute to how a child develops. Temperament, genetics, family circumstances, relationships, community and luck all play a part. So when I look at my daughters today and see emotionally and psychologically healthy, resilient young women, I’m not interested in using them as proof that I did everything right.

Trust me. I didn’t.

But I am willing to talk about them because I think mothers deserve to hear stories that complicate the frightening message that working outside the home necessarily damages children or prevents secure attachment.

I worked throughout my children’s lives, and I didn’t build security with them despite that fact. In some ways, working gave me opportunities to practice the very things that security requires. I learned to separate and come back. I learned to trust other people to love my children. I maintained parts of myself that helped me remain engaged and alive. My daughters learned that love could survive absence, that more than one person could be a source of safety, and that their mother could have a meaningful life of her own and still be deeply, reliably theirs.

And through thousands of completely ordinary moments, we built relationships that could hold a lot. Not because I was always there, but because they learned that our relationship was.