Children seek attention from care providers for a couple of vital developmental milestones.

First and foremost, we connect for security to have our basic needs for survival met. As

infants were born premature, we have no capability of surviving on our own.

So we connect and establish bonds with caregivers

so that we can express our needs for food,

for and other nourishment, for protection. for

for warmth, for warmth, for soothing,

for soothing and so forth.

We connect also to have our emotional states and

autonomic nervous systems regulated. Human beings are a co-regulating species.

We do not lastingly regulate our nervous system, our emotional, or

affect states on our own. Human beings in fact in prolonged emotional isolation invariably become

dysregulated and if you'd like to learn more about that there are numerous

studies including the work of the great John Kocchio,

the University of Chicago, and so many other psychologists.

But a third reason we connect is to learn what to expect from others and especially to learn which situations are safe and advantageous for us in which situations are harmful and threatening. So these distinctions

between what is safe and what is dangerous, what is good for us and what is bad for us, are not inherently obvious.

No one is born knowing situations in the world that are actually bad for us, especially because so many situations in the world have changed, so it's not baked in through evolution.

The only few things we are inherently frightened of, snakes, dark, and so forth, but the bulk of the situations, interpersonal events, things that we gravitate towards or away from are

taught to us through interpersonal experience.

Children on their own can be excited and chase stray balls into traffic.

They can try to eat inedible objects. They can crawl onto window cells. They can do all kinds of dangerous things and it's the reaction of their care providers that train the child that those endeavors are harmful, not good for us,

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