The First Five Years Shape Everything: What Parents Need to Know About Secure Attachment
- Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A.
- Jul 20
- 6 min read
By Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. | DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist, DubaiOriginally aired on MBC1 Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab, July 19, 2020
One of the most common beliefs I encounter in my clinical work — and in conversations across the Arab world — is that children are too young to have real emotions. That feelings are an adult matter. That a small child does not truly experience distress, insecurity, or fear in any meaningful way.
I want to respectfully challenge that belief entirely. In fact, I would argue the opposite: the emotional experiences of the first five years of life are among the most formative a human being will ever have. The entirety of a child's adult emotional life rests on what happens in early childhood — in the family home, in the quality of the bond between caregiver and child, and in the messages that child receives, consciously and unconsciously, about whether the world is safe.
What Healthy Emotional Development Looks Like
One of the clearest ways to assess whether a child is developing in a healthy emotional direction is through the lens of secure attachment — the quality of the bond that forms between the child and their primary caregivers in the first years of life.
A child with secure attachment moves through the world with a particular quality of ease. They are comfortable being the centre of attention and equally comfortable being independent. They engage socially with curiosity rather than anxiety — open to new people, but with appropriate, healthy caution in unfamiliar situations. They are confident in themselves while remaining genuinely comfortable with others. They have what we call in developmental psychology a sense of agency — a felt sense that they can affect their environment, that they matter, that their needs will be responded to.
This quality of security, established in early childhood, becomes the foundation on which every subsequent relationship is built — with peers, with teachers, with future partners, with the world at large (Bowlby, 1969; Ainsworth et al., 1978).
How Attachment Is Formed — and Where It Can Go Wrong
Secure attachment is not simply something a child is born with. It is built — through thousands of small interactions in the first years of life — and a very large part of it depends on parenting practices and the emotional climate of the home.
The window between birth and age four or five is critical. During this period, the child is forming their foundational answer to two essential questions: Is the world safe? Are other people safe?
When a child's needs are responded to consistently, warmly, and predictably — when they cry and someone comes, when they are frightened and someone soothes them, when they explore and someone remains reliably available — they build an internal model of the world as safe and of people as trustworthy. This is secure attachment.
When the response they receive is inconsistent, absent, frightening, or conditional, a different model forms. The child learns: I am only safe when I stay very close to this adult. The world is unpredictable. I cannot trust that my needs will be met. This is the root of anxious attachment — and its consequences reach far into adulthood (Schore, 2001; Siegel, 2012).
What Children Feel at Home — Even When Nothing Is Said
Something I emphasise to the parents I work with is this: children are exquisitely sensitive to the emotional atmosphere of the home, even when no one has spoken a word about it.
Many Arabic families manage conflict by avoiding it — by not discussing tension, not naming disagreements, maintaining a surface calm. The intention is protective. But children do not read the surface. They read the nervous system.
The level of background tension in a home — the unresolved arguments, the emotional distance between parents, the suppressed stress — wires a child's nervous system in real time. A home where issues arise and are discussed openly, where adults model the resolution of conflict with warmth and respect, where the emotional environment is genuinely soft and safe: this is what gives a child's nervous system the conditions it needs to develop in a healthy way (Siegel & Hartzell, 2003).
This is not about perfection. No home is without conflict. What matters is the pattern: that repair happens, that connection is restored, that the child sees adults navigating difficulty and coming back to one another with love.
The Adult Consequences of Insecure Attachment
I work primarily with adults — and what I see in the clinic, consistently, is the long shadow of early attachment experiences.
Adults with insecure attachment patterns face a cluster of difficulties that can significantly impair their quality of life: challenges in intimate relationships, difficulty trusting others, a nervous system that remains in a heightened state of alertness because it was wired for threat rather than safety. They are more vulnerable to anxiety disorders — because their nervous system has been shaped, from its earliest development, on anxious patterns. The associations between insecure attachment and virtually every major mental health presentation are well-established in the literature (van IJzendoorn, 1995; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007).
When I explain this to parents, I am not trying to alarm them. I am trying to convey the extraordinary power they hold. The quality of the home environment you create, the consistency and warmth of your responsiveness to your child — these are not small things. They are the architecture of a human being's inner life.
Seeing Your Child as a Separate Person
One more thing I raise regularly with the parents I support: the importance of recognising your child as an individual — a person in their own right, with their own inner world, their own needs, their own emerging sense of self.
In Arab culture, we are deeply interconnected. Parents and children are often understood as profoundly continuous with one another, which has many beautiful qualities. But when this connection crosses into enmeshment — when the child's individuality is subsumed entirely into the parent's world, when no space is made for the child's separate preferences, opinions, or boundaries — something important is lost.
The world Arabic children are being raised to enter is a globalised, highly individualistic one. A child who has never had their individuality acknowledged — who has never been asked their opinion, who has never been given age-appropriate choices, who has never experienced their own boundaries as worthy of respect — enters that world without the internal tools to navigate it safely.
Practically, this begins very simply: ask your child what they prefer. Give them choices appropriate to their age. Take their opinion seriously, even when you ultimately make a different decision. These small acts of recognition build, over time, a child who knows who they are — and who knows when someone is not treating them with the respect they deserve.
References
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.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. Guilford Press.
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.
Siegel, D. J., & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the inside out. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
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
About the Author
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist based in Dubai and UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. With over 15 years of experience supporting adults and couples across the UAE and GCC through anxiety, stress, burnout, and relationship challenges, she is a regular contributor to MBC, Sky News Arabia, Dubai TV, and BBC Arabic, and the creator of the Anxiety Reset online course series.
Do you want to raise a child who feels secure, confident, and emotionally resilient?Working with a clinical psychologist can help you identify and shift the patterns that matter most.Book a session →Explore the online courses →Follow on Instagram →
Related Posts
Comments