Does Your Inner Child Even Like You?

Sanah Habbib
May 6
3 min read

Let us rewind to the 1950s, a period dominated by the prevailing belief that survival, not affection, was the primary driver of early attachment. Within this context, psychologist Harry Harlow, working at the University of Wisconsin, radically transformed our understanding of safety, love, and psychological wholeness. While behaviourists of the time argued that infants bonded with their mothers solely because of nourishment, Harlow proposed a different thesis: that it was affection, not mere sustenance, that lay at the heart of healthy development. His pioneering, and often controversial, research with rhesus monkeys offered compelling evidence for this paradigm shift.

In Harlow’s experiments, infant monkeys were separated from their mothers and subjected to environments of emotional and physical deprivation. Some were isolated from social contact; others were denied comforting stimuli. Though provided with food, these monkeys displayed profoundly disturbed behaviours: compulsive rocking, self-harm, hyper-vigilance, and emotional withdrawal.

The breakthrough came with the introduction of the “cloth mother”—a foam-wrapped surrogate offering no nourishment, warmth, or speech, only the sensation of softness. Remarkably, the infant monkeys clung to this surrogate with desperate preference, despite the absence of food. What they sought wasn’t sustenance—it was comfort, connection, presence. The simple act of touch became their sanctuary. In that embrace, Harlow’s hypothesis was confirmed: affection—not mere survival—was foundational to psychological safety and secure attachment.

Fast forward to our present moment—a world that champions freedom, choice, and endless possibility. And yet, paradoxically, we find ourselves shackled by the pressure of constant reinvention. This freedom, we’re told, is liberating. But in practice, it demands perpetual self-improvement, unrelenting adaptation, and the sculpting of identities tailored to shifting ideals. We are led to believe we are in control—of our selves, our paths, our destinies. Yet existing today often feels like a performance: an exhausting exercise in perfecting the image rather than inhabiting the self.

This is the great paradox of modern life: the freedom to choose is entangled with the inescapable expectation to transform, not in pursuit of truth, but of acceptance.

The very idea of safety, once embodied in Harlow’s soft surrogate, is increasingly illusory. We surround ourselves with comforts, distractions, and digital touchpoints that promise connection. Yet these simulations rarely offer the grounding, embodied safety we long for. Instead, safety has become conditional, fragile, fleeting, transactional. It demands our constant performance and vigilance, like a carousel spinning endlessly, the illusion of stability just out of reach. We build frameworks of protection, only to watch them fracture with every societal shift, technological advancement, or layer of scrutiny.

In this atmosphere, self-assurance becomes a performance in itself. We are urged to be confident, decisive, certain. But often, this assurance is a brittle mask, an armour against the gnawing uncertainty beneath. It’s no longer enough to be at ease in our own skin; we must prove our worth, repeatedly, just to stay visible. And over time, this endless affirmation becomes wearying. Each declaration of "I am enough" is eclipsed by the next demand to refine, upgrade, adapt. We begin to wonder: is the self we are so desperately affirming truly ours, or a version sculpted in the shadow of expectation?

What remains is a fragmented self—restless, reshaped, and perpetually becoming. Harlow’s monkeys, deprived of comfort and connection, reveal a vital truth: we cannot thrive without something steady to hold onto—something real, something unchanging. Yet in modern life, that anchor is slipping from our grasp. We’ve been trained to attach to images, ideals, performances—while the messier, more uncertain parts of us go unseen, un held.

And so we arrive at the question: Does your inner child even like you?

If Harlow taught us anything, it’s that comfort, not competence, is the root of secure attachment. Yet in adulthood, we chase competence at the cost of comfort. We forget how to soothe ourselves. We become our own wire mothers—functional but cold, sufficient but loveless. We survive, but barely feel.

The task now is not perfection. It is not reinvention. It is the act of returning, again and again, to the core of who we are. To unearth the parts buried under survival. To extend warmth to the versions of ourselves that never needed fixing, only listening.

Because in the quiet moments, beneath the noise of productivity, the theatre of confidence, and the smog of self-optimisation, your inner child still waits. And they are not looking for performance.