What a Child Needs From a Parent

So far in our exploration of human needs, we’ve looked at what human needs are, and how we sometimes handle unmet needs in ways that make situations worse, not better. 

Today, I’d like to rewind our life experience back to the time when we were children, which is the period in which we learn how to meet our own needs in effective or ineffective ways. This exploration begins with how our parents provided for our needs. If our parent provided for our needs effectively, we learned the following:

• My needs are worthy of being met

• Other people enjoy meeting my needs

• It’s safe to express my needs

If our parent did not provide for our needs effectively, we learned:

• There must be something wrong with me that my needs aren’t being met

• My needs are an inconvenience for others

• I must hide my needs in order to be accepted by the world

Does the first list or the second list resonate more with you? If you’re not sure, ask yourself whether the world feels more like friend or foe to you. If you resonate more with the second list, or if the world registers with you primarily as a foe, fear not: There is a way to re-baseline our relationship to our needs. The process depends on our understanding, and we can deepen our understanding by rewinding the clock back to our childhood to identify what we learned about needs when we were the most dependent on others to meet them.

What a Child Needs From a Parent

Young children are inherently self-centered. Not yet being able to rationalize why things happen the way they do, a child believes they are the cause of bad things that happen in the world. Not yet able to provide for their own needs, a child is ultra sensitive to signs in their environment that they might be abandoned. In childhood, abandonment means death. These psychological elements make it such that a child blames themselves if:

• Mom and dad fight

• Mom or dad leave for long periods of time

• They are ignored when they cry

• They are yelled at

• They are hungry and are denied food

• They are too cold/hot and no one helps them regulate their temperature 

• They are in harm’s way and no one protects them

• They are soiled and no one cleans them

• They are abused

• Mom or dad relies on them for emotional comfort

To an adult or even an adolescent, these things are either explainable or independently solvable. An adult needn’t blame themselves if their parents are getting a divorce. An adult understands that relationships are complex and that divorce doesn’t change a parent’s love towards them. A 12-year-old doesn’t feel unworthy when they feel hungry (supposing food is not scarce). They simply find a way to meet their need for food and move on with their day.

To a young child, when needs are not met in a timely, judicious manner, they internalize a belief that there must be something wrong with them, that others don’t enjoy meeting their needs, and that the world is generally an unfriendly place.

Therefore, the goal of a parent should be to meet their children’s needs in a timely, judicious manner as often as possible. Of course, it’s impossible to be perfect at this 100% of the time. That’s not the point. The point is to communicate to the child that their needs matter, that their needs are enjoyable to respond to, and that it’s safe to express their needs. If this happens in the first few years of life, the child has a much greater chance of remaining connected to their needs as they grow up, communicating their needs to others effectively, and moving through the world with minimal friction.

Responding to a Child’s Needs

Before a child can speak, they communicate their needs through other mechanisms. They cry, they squirm, they gurgle, they burp, they flail, they pant, they squeal. 

In order for a parent to meet their child’s needs timely and judiciously, they first must be present to observe upcoming needs, then they must be skilled at interpreting the child’s signals. Interpretation is a skill at which parents become better through trial and error, and in the best case scenario, they become so in sync with their child that they know instantly that a particular facial expression means “hungry” whereas another means “this grocery store clerk scares me”. 

But perhaps our parents didn’t have the luxury of being present with us all day, ready to attend to our every need, and the people they left us with weren’t very skilled at taking care of us. Or perhaps our parents were not very literate with their own needs, and therefore didn’t learn how to interpret our needs accurately. Or maybe they were oblivious to the impact their yelling had on us, or the fact that they hit the dog in front of us, or someone told them the best way to deal with screaming babies is to ignore them. 

If this was our experience in childhood, we likely learned to cope by numbing ourselves to our needs. We likely learned that having needs is problematic, and that the best way to move through life is to pretend like we don’t have them. Fast forward thirty years, and now we believe it’s more important to please others than to please ourselves, we experience negative emotion without knowing the underlying need that triggered it, and we’re unable to express what we need in straightforward ways, instead resorting to manipulation or passive-aggression.

The way our parents (and other caretakers) responded to our needs as children lays the groundwork for how we regard and take care of our needs as adults. 

Redefining Your Adult Relationship With Needs

If you’ve arrived in adulthood and have a healthy relationship with your needs, one of two things happened: 

1. Your parents/caretakers responded to your needs in childhood in a timely, judicious manner, and modeled a healthy relationship with their own needs as you grew up so you always had a healthy role model to look up to.

2. You had a less than perfect childhood, but were determined to transform your relationship with your needs, and so learned more about needs and human well-being as you grew up.

If, as you read this, you realize that your childhood was less than perfect, and that you struggle with connecting with your needs in adulthood in a healthy way, (1) is off the table for you, but (2) is well within reach. Embarking on (2) will not only transform your relationship with your own needs, but it will help you respond to other people’s needs (including your own children’s) in a much more healthy way. 

My favorite people in life are the ones who survived seemingly unsurvivable obstacles, and embraced them as an opportunity of self-development. You can be one of those being. You can break the chain of needlessly psychologically suffering simply because you’ve forgotten how to respond to your own needs in a timely, judicious manner.

Be the parent you wish you had, not just to your own children, but to the child that lives within you. 

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