An Interview with Daniel Sonkin, Ph.D. on Parents' Attachment to Children Leaving Home for College

Secure attachment helps people survive temporary bouts of pain, discomfort, doubts and distress, and helps them reestablish hope, optimism, and emotional equanimity. Securely attached parents are able to protect children from parental grief (by keeping it private between parents), and to offer children their freedom but in a manner that conveys support rather than indifference or anxiety. Insecurely attached parents tend to polarize in terms of their coping, becoming either more indifferent and detached or to deny the importance of the bond, or conversely, more hyper-vigilant, worried and anxious in such a way as to magnify the importance of the bond overly, conveying dependence and a message that separation is harmful to the parent. Parents' secure attachment allows them to both support and to let their children go simultaneously, whereas their insecure attachment ends up burdening children, either by conveying their unimportance to the parent, or their over-importance.