Looking for Emotional Safety? Check Childhood First.

We keep telling ourselves to “regulate,” “heal,” and “find safety within.” But what if safety is something we’re meant to receive first, long before we’re expected to create it on our own?

Coming Back to Safety

Today I want to share some thoughts about safety. The kind of safety everyone talks about. The kind we’re told we should find within ourselves so we can calm our nervous systems.

Very often we hear that to bloom, make grounded decisions, enjoy life, and heal, we need to feel safe. And so much of inner work is, in one way or another, a return to safety: feeling safe in the relationship with a therapist, feeling safe at home, telling our protective parts that we are safe now.

“I am safety for myself. I am surrounded by safety.”

I repeat versions of this often. I also write extensively about how important safety is especially for highly sensitive people to be able to heal in almost any environment. For many people on a healing journey, safety is the baseline: establishing enough safety to find, rewrite, change, or simply soften what hurts.

And still… it strikes me how hard we have to search for safety. Sometimes it feels like we lost it somewhere along the way. I even dare to say that many of us didn’t experience enough safety while growing up, at least not consistently enough to have it “wired” as something we can return to without effort.

That’s the angle I want to explore today: what helps a child grow up with a deeper, steadier sense of safety.

This isn’t a post about physical safety hazards around children. You can find plenty of information about that. This is about emotional safety, which gets discussed far less. And as you already know me, I’ll be looking through a highly sensitive lens.

Safety Starts in Relationship

When I say “emotional safety,” I don’t mean a life without frustration, disappointment, or hard moments. I mean the felt sense of: I’m not alone in this. Someone bigger and steadier has me. I can rest.

This is where Gordon Neufeld’s attachment-based approach has deeply influenced me as a parent. In Neufeld’s language, attachment isn’t a parenting trend, it’s a fundamental drive for closeness and connection, and it’s the ground from which healthy development can unfold.

And Darcia Narvaez has shaped my thinking in a similar way, especially through her focus on what early humans may have expected for optimal development: lots of warmth, touch, responsiveness, and community support.

The First Attachment: Closeness and Co-Regulation

A child needs a strong, safe attachment to at least one primary caregiver, often a parent or the person doing most of the daily care. It is about closeness, responsiveness, and repeated moments of being met.

A newborn’s nervous system is regulated through co-regulation, through an adult who offers steady presence, soothing, and a sense of “I’ve got you.” Physical closeness can be one of the most powerful ways this happens: warmth, voice, smell, eye contact, gentle touch, being held. Not the only way, but a primary way many babies feel safe enough to settle.

This is one place where Narvaez’s influence lands strongly for me. Her work has helped me take seriously the idea that early life thrives with a lot of contact, affection, and responsiveness as nourishment.

And this is where I’ll be honest about my bias as a parent. Don’t even get me started on bottles with formula versus breastfeeding, or sleep training versus co-sleeping because I have opinions, and I know how personal and charged these conversations can become. What I’m trying to say here isn’t “one right way.” It’s something more basic: when early caregiving prioritizes closeness, responsiveness, and connection—especially around stress and separation—it supports a felt sense of safety.

That’s the principle. How each family lives it will look different.

Two Harbors Are Better Than One

We can also aim to build a secure attachment with another adult in the home, often the other parent, but it can be any consistent, caring adult who is truly present in the child’s life.

Imagine being a child with not only one safe harbor, but two. Two stable adults who can nurture you and meet your needs. Two people you can rest into.

And then imagine something even rarer: those two adults living in enough harmony that the child doesn’t have to carry tension on their small shoulders.

I’m not an idealist. I know what real partnerships go through, especially in the early years of parenting. These can be some of the toughest seasons adults ever live. But when parents (or caregivers) manage to support each other and repair conflict in a healthier way, the child sees something essential: that relationships can hold strain and still return to connection.

That, too, creates safety.

The Home as a Nervous-System Nest

With this, we build a safe home, not a perfect home, but a home where the emotional climate is steady enough for a child to thrive.

This matters even more because every child is different. Some children are highly sensitive. Some are intense. Some are quiet observers. Some need more time to warm up. Some feel everything through their bodies first.

When a parent learns to see the child in front of them—who they truly are, and what their nervous system needs in this season—decisions change. We stop parenting from the pressure of what society expects and start parenting from attunement.

In that kind of home, a child can grow with more freedom to play, to explore, and to return for comfort without shame.

Sometimes it feels like a fairy tale when I write it: two stable, emotionally attuned adults in a safe home.

What kind of world would we live in if this were the norm?

The Village: Adults Who Hold the Lead

We also shape safety through the wider circle of people our child is in contact with. This might be the “village” we often talked about and often missed: grandparents, aunts, uncles, close family friends, people who know the child and can be trusted.

Yes, siblings and cousins can be wonderful. Peer relationships can be meaningful. But here’s where Neufeld’s work has been clarifying for me: children do best when caring, responsible adults “hold the lead,” and when adults matter more than peers as the main source of direction, comfort, and belonging.

That doesn’t mean peers are bad. It means peers can’t replace mature care.

When children become primarily oriented around other children for belonging and identity, it can create a subtle instability because children can’t reliably provide the steadiness children need.

Choosing Communities That Feel Safe

Of course, we don’t live only with family members in modern society. So we as parents often have to choose communities: activities, groups, schools, playground cultures, and daily routines that put our children in contact with other adults and other children.

It makes an enormous difference what kind of people our children experience, and what kind of emotional tone lives in those spaces.

A safer worldview forms when a child learns, early on: Home isn’t the only place that’s supportive. The world has pockets of warmth. Adults can be trusted. My needs won’t be mocked.

And I keep coming back to this: in any setting, a child needs at least one attached adult, someone they can rely on, someone who can help them to feel safe and regulate.

Children aren’t meant to manage chronic stress, relational chaos, or forced independence. Yet many young children are asked to spend large portions of their days in systems that can struggle to provide consistent, attachment-rich conditions but offer high turnover, large groups, rushed transitions, and very little room for true connection.

The Bigger Picture

When we consciously and intuitively create emotionally safe environments for our children, we prevent so many future struggles: health struggles, relationship struggles, self-worth struggles.

I believe that when we create emotional safety for children, we heal the world.

It would be so much easier for any person to return to safety or to find that feeling within themselves if they grew up in an emotionally safe environment. Not because life stayed easy, but because safety was their default setting. Because, in childhood, their caregivers were a natural safe haven.

And maybe this is the most hopeful part: even if we didn’t grow up with that kind of safety, we can still create more of it now inside our homes, inside our relationships, and inside the small communities our children will one day call “normal.”