My friends, Amy and Jeffrey Olrick have just come out with a new book called, The 6 Needs of Every Child. I wish I could have read it while I was raising children. Here is an interview with the Olricks:

This is a  hard time for  families. You’ve written for USA Today about parenting in the pandemic and what kids need most right now. What do they need?

We’re finding our way in a new normal, but the pressure on parents is intense. Kids are feeling the strain too. Sometimes the ways they express their fear or stress can be hard to deal with. We need to have grace for each other. We also need to understand that right now, for kids’ long term health and development, it’s most important that  parents show kids they love them. 

Taking time to listen to your kids, to smile at them, hug them, laugh with them and tell them that you are glad to be together can dramatically improve their experience of this situation and help their brains grow and process stress in the future. Even if your kids aren’t behaving the way you’d like them to or they aren’t getting all their tasks accomplished, they still need moments when they feel your love. If that means that you have to take a break to regroup yourself, let your kids be on screens more than you’d like them to be, or let go of some normal expectations, that’s ok. This is a crisis situation, and our kids are going to make it out much stronger if they feel our love in the midst of it.  

Your book, The 6 Needs of Every Child: Empowering Parents & Kids through the Science of Connection, is coming out on June 9. You say that you want to help set parents free by changing the way we think about parenting. What do you mean by that?

We want to invite people to see that being a parent is not just a job, it’s a life-long relationship with a unique person. It’s natural to wonder: What should I do with my child? We believe there’s a much better question to ask. How shall I be with this child? is a question that can transform relationships and grow a child’s strength and resiliency over time.

In our book, we share stories, tools and research about how this understanding can open up opportunities for our kids and protect their mental and emotional health over a lifetime, even if things feel really hard right at this moment.

What are these 6 needs? And what makes them important?

Attachment research has uncovered that all human beings are born with 2 essential instincts that shape how they develop and grow—the instinct to go out and explore and discover the world when things are going well and the instinct to come back and find refuge in loved ones when things get hard. To grow strong and resilient, our kids need to be able to do both well—go out and explore and come back and recover.

To successfully explore in the world, our kids need our Delight, Support, and Boundaries. And when they run into trouble, as all kids inevitably do, they need to be able to come back to us to recover before they’re able to explore well again. To regather their strength and security, our kids need our Protection, Comfort, and Equipping. 

When children can move from exploration to refuge and back to exploration without getting stuck for too long, they develop a sense of security in the world that has lifelong benefits.

Parents often feel stuck when they can’t understand how to help their children, so our book explains each of these 6 needs and how to recognize and meet them. And because we know it’s helpful to have directions when you’re feeling stuck, we’ve turned the needs into a compass. When we go through hard times in our family, being able to picture the compass in our minds and consider where we can turn has helped us so much. We’re excited to share this tool with other families, too. 

You are an American family that has been living in New Zealand for the past few years. New Zealand seems to be dealing with the COVID crisis quite well. What have you learned from living there?

We have learned a lot by living in New Zealand, mainly about the strength that comes when people commit to care for each other. The first year that we lived here, an older man with dementia disappeared after wandering away from home and our whole city responded. After moving from the US, where so many people have understandably become numb to other’s suffering, we were struck by the signs we saw on the roads asking for tips to find the missing man, the way people were knocking on doors looking for him, and all the social posts about his disappearance. We saw a similar reaction after the Christchurch massacre last year when the whole country stopped to grieve the Muslim community’s devastating losses. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern offered a refrain that New Zealand embraced—“They are us.” 

There is an orientation to life and to people here that feels really beautiful, and there is power in it, too. New Zealand’s commitment to act fast when its most vulnerable people are in danger is now protecting us all. None of us know what the future holds, but only 21 people have died here from COVID. Businesses just reopened and our kids will start back to school next week. 

Loving and caring for each other are transformative acts that lead us to health and strength over time. We can start now, in our families, by turning to the little people in our lives and expressing our love for them, even when things are hard.

INTERESTED IN PURCHASING THIS BOOK? HERE IS THE LINK.