Use it during a quiet conversation at home, a parenting support session, or a meeting with a health visitor, social worker, family support worker or therapeutic practitioner to help adults recognise signs that a child may not feel secure. The booklet is written for parents and carers, with plain explanations that can support discussion around children’s anxiety, separation worries, attachment needs, emotional safety and behaviour that may otherwise feel confusing or difficult to manage.
The content starts by describing how insecurity can show in children and kids, including behaviours such as struggling to keep friends, pushing away hugs or clinging too tightly, arguing over small things, needing to control situations, taking dangerous risks, hurting younger children or pets, breaking valued items, lying even when the truth is clear, hoarding food, chewing inedible objects, being overly friendly with strangers, or showing an interest in violence and fire-setting. These examples make it easier for adults to connect behaviour with underlying fear, stress or a lack of felt safety.
There is a helpful explanation of why a child may behave in these ways, including temperament, early experiences from birth to age five, prematurity, ill health, worries about a main carer’s wellbeing, domestic violence, emotional health difficulties, homelessness, poverty or other pressures around the family. Rather than presenting behaviour as simply naughty or attention-seeking, the booklet links it to a child’s internal sense of safety and their ability to manage strong feelings.
Short examples are included to show how everyday situations can be misread by an insecure child, such as a parent attending a health check and joking that the child is “driving me to an early grave”. Reflective prompts ask adults to consider whether their children are living in a more secure environment than the one they grew up in, which may be useful in parenting work, family assessment, counselling, foster care support or attachment-informed practice.
The booklet also covers children’s basic need to feel safe alongside food, warmth and shelter, and explains that some children may constantly test whether they are loved, remembered or preferred. It highlights common worries such as fear that something bad will happen, being left behind, a parent forgetting them when a new friend or baby arrives, or believing they may be better off with someone else. Bedtime is also noted as a vulnerable point because it involves separation from the carer.
