If you wanted to learn how to play piano, how much of your learning process would be tapping on that desire and how much would actually be sitting at a piano and practicing?
Children are dependents and their brains are still developing. Emotions are the engine that drives that growth. To grow into their potential, children need to feel their feelings.
Developmental Psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld includes emotional expression as one of the four irreducible needs of the child: attachment, emotions, rest and play – in that order. The engine of emotions needs to be respected, along with the support of the foundational developmental need of co-regulation through secure connection, aka attachment.
Attachment and Co-Regulation
We are wired to connect; attachment is a biological imperative. When in danger, young mammals run to another safe mammal as opposed to a safe place. A secure connection is the safety we are wired to seek out. When children experience overwhelming emotion, they seek out someone, not to make the emotion go away, but to be with them in the emotion.
Feeling is part of a healthy life and life delivers feelings our way. Children need secure grown-ups to help them organize their feelings – this co-regulation is the emotional practice that children need to develop emotional intelligence, resilience and self-esteem. A secure connection provides attuned, responsive care that makes a child feel safe to their core – genuinely seen, soothed and valued.
In brief, developmentally respectful EFT with children is all about co-regulation; it is shared in the context of relationship – in the presence of an attachment figure or proxy in whose care the child can truly rest –and rest is not referring to sleep but to the capacity for the child to BE in their feelings AND to have their needs met with ease, without any effort on their part.
Best practice in tapping with children lets children be children and satisfies all four of their irreducible developmental needs. Children learn independence through deep dependence; they learn self-regulation through consistent and rich co-regulation. A child doesn’t ‘act out’ but reacts to their environment. Behaviour is communication. ‘Misbehaviour’ in children is typically an indication of the stress of not having one or more of their irreducible needs met.
Tapping with Children
If you were in an environment that required you wear an oxygen mask to breathe and a person without a mask approached you for help with a problem, or was ‘misbehaving’, would you tap with them or provide them with an oxygen mask first? For children, tend to their biological needs first and foremost.
In this context, sharing EFT with children essentially comes down to an adult modeling tapping while holding space for the child's developmental needs in the moment. There's no agenda and it's not about the tapping; it's a matter of being with – allowing the process to unfold as it needs to. Human development is a biological force; nature will do what it is so skillfully designed to do, in good time – children don't need to be rushed into adulthood; their brains aren't fully equipped for that until their 20's.
Children will take from repeated co-regulation experiences whatever about EFT is relevant to them and apply it for themselves when needed. They learn through our modeling. Have you ever heard a child swear perfectly in context without ever explicitly being taught to? Be an example of self-regulation and a beacon of secure presence for co-regulation; first and foremost preserve children's biological need for connection – secure connection with a grown up is a child's answer.
The Ethics of Tapping with Children
As an Attachment Specialist, I see good reason for EFTi's position on tapping with children:
"It is important to realise that children are not just small adults, and EFT training does not automatically prepare the practitioner for working with them. Unless the practitioner is otherwise qualified to work with children, such work should be undertaken with great caution, if at all." (EFTi Code of Conduct and Ethics, 2021).
Also referenced in the EFTi Code of Conduct and Ethics is the United Nations Rights of the Child, which defines a child as any person under the age of 18 years. The human brain doesn’t mature until at the very earliest 18 years of age. A child's brain is not an adult brain.
It takes a village to grow up a child; it is truly deep work. To best support children, build the capacity of primary caregivers to hold space for children's developmental needs. Children are dependents, they 'orbit' around the sun that is their primary caregiver. Work with the sun in a child's life to affect the orbit of the child. Be part of the village; share EFT as a way to support the caregivers in children's lives.
Wildflower is an Accredited Certified Advanced EFT Practitioner
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