About This Resource: This interactive tool from Stafford & Associates Counseling walks through core emotional needs — such as safety, connection, and autonomy — that every child is born with. When a need is met well enough, healthy development follows; when it goes chronically unmet, an Early Maladaptive Schema can grow to fill the gap. Each entry reads forward from the core need, to what its absence felt like growing up, to the schema(s) it can become, to what re-meeting that need can look like in adult life and in therapy.