There’s a moment that happens in our house most evenings, somewhere between dinner cleanup and the chaos of bath time. My two-year-old will tug at my leg, arms up, wanting nothing more than to be held.
And my five-year-old will appear with a book or a question or just a look that says, “See me.” In those moments, I have a choice. I can keep moving through the mental checklist, or I can stop.
What I’ve learned, both through living it and through everything I’ve read about how children develop, is that stopping matters more than almost anything else we do.
The one thing our children need from us every single day is our full, undivided attention. Not for hours. Not with elaborate plans. Just ten minutes of being truly present, with nothing else competing for our focus. It sounds simple, but it shapes everything.
Why presence is the foundation of secure attachment
When we talk about what children need to thrive emotionally, the research keeps pointing back to one thing: secure attachment. This is the deep sense a child develops that they are safe, that they matter, and that someone will be there for them.
As noted by the American Psychological Association, secure attachment in early childhood creates a template for how children will approach relationships throughout their lives.
Attachment isn’t built through grand gestures or perfect parenting. It’s built through thousands of small moments where a child reaches out and a parent responds. When your toddler shows you a rock they found and you crouch down to really look at it with them, that’s attachment.
When your preschooler tells you a rambling story and you listen without rushing them along, that’s attachment too.
These moments of connection tell your child something profound: “You are worth my time. Your thoughts matter. Your feelings are safe with me.” And that message, repeated day after day, becomes the internal voice they carry into adulthood.
What ten minutes of undivided attention actually looks like
I want to be clear about what I mean by undivided attention, because it’s easy to think we’re giving it when we’re actually only half there. Undivided attention means your phone is in another room or face down and silent.
It means you’re not mentally planning tomorrow’s schedule or replaying a conversation from work. It means your body and your mind are both with your child.
For my daughter, this often looks like sitting together on her bed before lights out, letting her lead the conversation wherever it wants to go. Sometimes she talks about her friends. Sometimes she asks questions about the moon or why people get old. I don’t direct it. I just follow.
For my son, it’s often physical. We’ll build a tower together, or I’ll let him climb all over me while we make silly sounds. He doesn’t need words yet. He needs my eyes on him, my hands available, my laughter mixing with his.
The key is that the child feels your presence. They can tell the difference between a parent who is physically there but mentally elsewhere and a parent who has truly arrived.
The science behind why this shapes how they love
There’s a reason this daily practice matters so much for your child’s future relationships. The patterns we establish in early childhood become what psychologists call “internal working models” of relationships.
Dr. John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, described these as mental blueprints that guide how we expect others to treat us and how we treat them in return.
A child who consistently experiences a parent being present and responsive develops the belief that relationships are safe, that people can be trusted, and that they themselves are worthy of love and attention. This belief doesn’t just stay in childhood.
Research published in the National Institutes of Health has shown that early attachment patterns predict relationship satisfaction and emotional regulation well into adulthood.
When you give your child ten minutes of genuine presence each day, you’re not just making them feel good in the moment. You’re literally wiring their brain to expect love, to seek healthy connection, and to believe they deserve it.
Why it has to be every day
You might wonder if this really needs to happen daily. Can’t we make up for busy days with extra time on weekends? The honest answer is that consistency matters enormously to children, especially young ones.
Children don’t experience time the way adults do. A day without connection can feel like an eternity to a three-year-old. Their sense of security isn’t built on occasional big deposits of attention.
It’s built on the reliable, predictable rhythm of daily connection. They need to know that no matter what else happens, this time together will come.
I’ve noticed this with my own kids. On days when life gets away from me and I realize I never really stopped to be with them, there’s a shift. More whining. More clinginess. More testing of boundaries.
It’s as if their little systems are saying, “I need to know you’re still here.” When I make that ten minutes happen, even on the hardest days, something settles in them. And honestly, something settles in me too.
How to protect this time when life is overwhelming
I know what you might be thinking. Ten minutes sounds easy, but some days even that feels impossible. There are dishes and deadlines and a hundred small emergencies pulling at you. I get it. I live it.
What helps me is treating this time as non-negotiable, the same way I’d treat giving my kids food or putting them to bed. It’s not optional. It’s not something I do if there’s time left over. It’s something I build the rest of the day around.
Sometimes this means letting the dishes wait. Sometimes it means saying no to one more email before bed. Sometimes it means my husband and I tag-team so each of us gets one-on-one time with each child. We don’t do it perfectly. But we do it consistently enough that our kids have come to expect it and count on it.
If you’re struggling to find the time, start by looking at transitions. The moments right after school or daycare, right before bed, right after waking up. These are natural windows where connection can happen without adding anything to your schedule. You’re already there. You just have to arrive fully.
What happens when you miss it
Let me say something important: you will miss days. You will have seasons where you’re barely surviving and ten minutes of presence feels like a luxury you can’t afford. That’s okay. Parenting is not about perfection.
What matters is the pattern over time. Children are remarkably resilient when the overall relationship is strong. They can handle a distracted parent sometimes, a stressed parent sometimes, even an absent parent sometimes, if the foundation of connection is solid.
As parenting educator Janet Lansbury has noted, “Children don’t need us to be perfect. They need us to be real and to repair when we miss the mark.”
So when you realize you’ve gone a few days without really being present, don’t spiral into guilt. Just come back. Sit down. Look your child in the eyes. Let them feel you there. The repair is part of the relationship too, and it teaches them something valuable about how love works.
The gift that keeps giving
One of the most beautiful things about this practice is that it benefits you as much as your child. When I sit with my daughter and really listen to her, I remember why I wanted to be a mother. When I let my son climb into my lap and just be held, I feel my own nervous system calm down.
In a world that constantly demands our attention, choosing to give it fully to our children is a radical act. It pushes back against the noise and the rush. It says that this moment, this person, matters more than everything else competing for my focus.
And here’s what I’ve come to believe: the way we love our children becomes the way they learn to love. The attention we give them becomes the attention they learn to give others. The presence we offer becomes the presence they seek and offer in their own relationships someday.
Closing thoughts
Ten minutes. That’s all it takes to tell your child, in a language deeper than words, that they are seen and valued and safe. It costs nothing but your attention. It requires nothing but your willingness to stop and arrive.
Tonight, or tomorrow morning, or whenever you next have a quiet moment with your child, try it. Put everything else down. Look at them. Listen. Let them lead. Notice how it feels for both of you.
This small daily practice is one of the most powerful things you can do as a parent. It builds the emotional foundation your child will stand on for the rest of their life. And it reminds you, in the midst of all the doing, what parenting is really about: connection, presence, love.
