Children at first rely on caretakers and adults to help them cope when they feel overwhelming feelings such as fear, anger, sadness, disappointment, confusion.

You can notice how little self-regulation children have.

When an infant falls down in a park, it will often not have any response.

It will look up to its mother and it will base its response whether the mother looks shocked and the child might cry, but if the mother

giggles and smiles, the child might smile.

Because the child can't make sense of the physical experience of falling down,

all the sensations of confusion and overwhelm, and match it to a coherent emotion.

It relies on the adults to cue the emotion and then it also relies on the adults to alleviate the emotion to what's called modulate. So the child you might notice with

infants they'll be hysterically screaming and then the parent will fish out

desperately some toy and put it before the infant will suddenly smile and become more fascinated with,

that's my imitation of an infant.

So for a while this process of having a motion seeking connection with secure adults works

and then what happens is eventually there is a time of all of our lives where we begin to separate,

individually.

We aren't around our caretakers as much.

And essentially what happens is strong emotions occur, but there's nobody to run and connect with to soothe and regulate and help us process the strong overwhelming feeling.

So what does the child do? The child relies on

thinking to step in and control the situation.

So our thoughts actually begin, as Winnicott suggested,

not as a way to help decide what actions to take in life.

But actually our thoughts start out as a way to produce the sense that somebody is there

with us to help us regulate, distract ourselves from really overwhelming, painful, difficult emotions.

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