When Your Child Won't Let You Go: Understanding Excessive Attachment and the Science of Secure Bonding

MBC1 — SABAH AL KHAIR YA ARAB · August 11, 2020

Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A., DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist, joined the hosts of MBC1's Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab to discuss one of the most common — and most misunderstood — challenges in early childhood: excessive attachment. When a child refuses to separate, clings constantly to a caregiver, or collapses emotionally the moment a parent steps out of view, parents are often left asking: is this normal? Am I causing this? And what do I do?

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The Signs of Excessive Attachment

Not every child who loves being close to a parent is excessively attached. The clinical picture of excessive attachment has specific markers that go beyond ordinary closeness.

A child displaying excessive attachment typically seeks constant proximity to the primary caregiver, avoids any form of separation — even briefly — and reacts with intense distress when separation does occur. Crucially, the child struggles to regulate those emotions independently: the distress doesn't settle on its own, and the child has not yet developed the internal resources to soothe themselves. There is also often a reluctance — sometimes a refusal — to explore the world: to play independently, meet other children, or try new situations without the caregiver physically present.

These are not signs of a child who loves too much. They are signs that the child has not yet built the internal sense of security that would allow them to venture out — and come back.

Why It Happens: The Neuroscience of Attachment

To understand excessive attachment, it helps to understand what attachment is for in the first place.

Attachment is not simply an emotional preference. It is a biological system — one that John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist whose foundational work in the 1960s and 70s established modern attachment theory, described as a survival mechanism wired into the human infant. The infant who stays close to a protective adult survives. The system that drives that closeness is attachment.

What determines whether that system develops in a healthy direction is the quality and consistency of early caregiving experiences. On the neurological level, the development of attachment maps directly onto the development of the right hemisphere — the side of the brain most involved in emotional regulation, social connection, and stress response. Developmental neuroscientist Allan Schore, whose decades of research have traced the links between early relational experience and right-brain development, has documented how attuned, responsive caregiving literally shapes the neural architecture that underpins a child's capacity to manage emotion and tolerate separation.

When early development goes well — when the caregiver is consistently present, emotionally responsive, and able to help the child regulate distress — the child develops what attachment researchers call a secure attachment. A securely attached child feels comfortable with others, forms healthy relationships, and holds realistic expectations of the people they love. Importantly, they can tolerate separation because they trust — on a deep, pre-verbal level — that the caregiver will return.

When there are significant challenges in early development, one of the patterns that can emerge is insecure attachment. This is not a single category. The landmark research of developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth — whose Strange Situation experiments in the 1970s first mapped the landscape of attachment styles — identified several distinct subtypes, the most significant of which are anxious attachment and avoidant attachment.

Anxious Attachment: The Pattern Behind the Clinging

The child — and later, the adult — with an anxious attachment style finds it genuinely difficult to be alone. There is a persistent, low-level fear: that the attachment figure might disappear, that something bad might happen, that love is conditional and must be continuously earned. This produces behaviour that looks like over-reliance: difficulty with separation, excessive reassurance-seeking, a tendency to overexert in relationships out of fear of losing them.

Understanding this pattern is important for parents because anxious attachment in a child does not appear from nowhere. Research consistently shows that a parent's own attachment style is one of the strongest predictors of their child's attachment style. This transmission happens not through conscious teaching but through the texture of everyday interaction: how the parent responds to distress, how they handle their own anxiety, the emotional state they bring into the room. As developmental psychiatrist Daniel Siegel — whose work on interpersonal neurobiology has explored how the mind of one person shapes the mind of another — has documented, children learn from our state of being far more than from anything we explicitly say or do.

This is not a reason for guilt. It is a reason for self-awareness.

What Parents Can Actually Do

The hosts asked what parents can do when they recognise this pattern in their child. There are three practical directions.

The first is to gradually encourage healthy separateness — not by forcing separation abruptly, but by gently expanding the child's sense of their own independent self. This means creating age-appropriate space for the child's own opinions, choices, and experiences. It means allowing them to make decisions relevant to their age, to have responsibilities, to develop a sense of agency. A child who feels capable and seen as a person in their own right builds an internal foundation that makes connection with others feel safe rather than threatening.

The second is age-appropriate responsibility and engagement. Giving children tasks — small, manageable, meaningful — builds competence. Competence builds confidence. Confidence makes the world feel navigable. A child who has never been asked to do anything on their own has no evidence that they can.

The third — and this one is directed at the parent as much as the child — is working on your own inner state. When one of the hosts asked, somewhat self-consciously, whether her own anxiety about her child might be transmitting itself to him, the answer was honest: in a sense, yes. Not as blame — we are all doing our best. But children are extraordinarily attuned instruments. They read the nervous system of the adult they depend on. A parent who is genuinely calm and trusting of the child's capacity to manage sends a signal — below the level of words — that the world is safe enough to explore. A parent who hovers anxiously sends the opposite signal, however loving their intention.

Working on your own anxiety — through therapy, through mindfulness, through building your own inner security — is one of the most genuinely effective things you can do for your child's attachment.

The Most Powerful Thing: Presence

The hosts, somewhere between amusement and overwhelm at the volume of parenting advice that exists, asked for the single best piece of guidance.

The answer was simple: presence.

Not proximity. Not constant supervision. Not being in the same room at all times. Presence — in the deepest sense — means being genuinely, fully there when you are there. Not preoccupied with a phone. Not mentally elsewhere. Not physically present but emotionally unavailable. Fully connected, fully attentive, fully in contact with the person in front of you.

Research in developmental psychology consistently finds that the quality of early attachment — and therefore its lasting effect on a child's emotional and social development — is determined less by the quantity of time spent together than by the quality of attunement in that time. A parent who is genuinely present for one hour provides more security than a parent who is physically present for twelve but emotionally absent.

And underneath all of it — underneath the techniques and the advice and the neuroscience — is something even simpler. Love. The experience of being truly loved, truly seen, and truly connected is the most powerful developmental force that exists. Children who have that carry it with them. The rest, by and large, follows.

About Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi

Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist (License No. DHA-75083705) based in Dubai, and UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. She has been featured on MBC, MBC1, Sky News Arabia, Dubai TV, and BBC Arabic, and is the founder of the online courses Anxiety 101 (Level 1) and Master Yourself (Level 2).

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Related reading: Why Children Bully — and Who Is Really Responsible

References

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Schore, A. N. (2001). Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1–2), 7–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-0355(200101/04)22:1<7::AID-IMHJ2>3.0.CO;2-N

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

van IJzendoorn, M. H. (1995). Adult attachment representations, parental responsiveness, and infant attachment: A meta-analysis on the predictive validity of the Adult Attachment Interview. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 387–403. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.387