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August 1, 2020
Research in the field of child development has demonstrated that a child’s security of attachment to parents is very strongly connected to the parents’ understanding of their own early life experiences.
Our ability to communicate effectively in creating security in our children is most strongly predicted by our having made sense of the events of our own early life. Making sense of our life enables us to understand and integrate our own childhood experiences, positive or negative, and to accept them as part of our ongoing life story.
We can’t change what happened to us as children but we can change the way we think about those events.
In the absence of reflection, history often repeats itself, and parents are vulnerable to passing on to their children unhealthy patterns from the past.
Writing can help to free your mind from the entanglements of the past and to liberate you to better understand yourself.
The value of the exercises will come from an open attitude and thoughtful reflections.
Response flexibility is the ability of the mind to sort through a wide variety of mental processes, such as impulses, ideas, and feelings, and come up with a thoughtful, nonautomatic response.
Children challenge us to remain flexible and to maintain emotional equilibrium. It can be difficult to balance flexibility with the importance of structure in a child’s life.
Parents can learn how to achieve this balance and nurture flexibility in their children by modeling flexible responses in their own interactions. When we are flexible, we have a choice about what behaviors to enact and what parental approach and values to support.
We have the ability to be proactive and not just reactive. Response flexibility enables us to contain a wide array of emotions and to think through how we will respo...
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Mindsight is the ability to perceive our own minds and the minds of others. Our minds create representations of objects and ideas. For example, we can visualize the image of a flower or a dog in our minds, but there is no plant or animal in our heads, just a neurally constructed symbol containing information about that object.
Parents who focus on the level of mind with their children nurture the development of emotional understanding and compassion.
Talking with children about their thoughts, memories, and feelings provides them with the essential interpersonal experiences necessary for self-understanding and building their social skills.
Remembering and reflecting on the experiences of day-to-day life creates a deep sense of feeling connected and understood.
Children need to be enjoyed and valued, not managed. We often focus on the problems of life rather than on the possibilities for enjoyment and learning available to us. When we are too busy doing things for our children, we forget how important it is to simply be with them.
Experiences that are not fully processed may create unresolved and leftover issues that influence how we react to our children. These issues can easily get triggered in the parent-child relationship.
When this happens our responses toward our children often take the form of strong emotional reactions, impulsive behaviors, distortions in our perceptions, or sensations in our bodies.
These intense states of mind impair our ability to think clearly and remain flexible and affect our interactions and relationships with our children. At these times, we’re not acting like the parents we want to be and are often left wondering why this role of parenting sometimes seems to “bring out the worst in us.” Issues that are rooted in our past impact our present reality and directly ...
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Experiences that were profoundly overwhelming and may have involved a deep sense of helplessness, despair, loss, terror, and perhaps betrayal are often at the root of unresolved conditions.
I wrote in my personal journal, aware that research had demonstrated that the writing down of material about emotionally traumatic experiences can lead to profound psychological and physiological changes associated with resolution.
We often try to control our children’s feelings and behavior when actually it is our own internal experience that is triggering our upset feelings about their behavior.
If we pay attention to our own internal experiences when we are feeling upset by our children’s behavior we can begin to learn how our actions interfere with the loving relationship we want to have with our children.
With resolution of our own issues comes greater choice and flexibility in how we respond to our children. We can begin to integrate memories into our life stories that make sense of our experiences and support...
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Research into attachment has provided new understanding of how the ways parents interact with their children influence the children’s later developmental pathways. Interpersonal relationships and the patterns of communication that children experience with their caregivers have been shown to directly influence the development of mental processes.
We can thus juxtapose knowledge of how the brain gives rise to mental processes (neuroscience) with knowledge of how relationships shape mental processes (attachment research). This convergence is the essence of our scientific approach, called “interpersonal neurobiology,” and it provides a framework from which we can understand the day-to-day experience of children and their parents.
immaturity of the infant’s brain means that experiences will play a significant role in determining the unique features of emerging brain connections. Experience shapes even the very brain structures that will allow the perception of those experiences to be sensed and remembered.
The care that adults provide nurtures the development of essential mental tools for survival. These attachment experiences enable children to thrive and achieve a highly flexible and adaptive capacity for balancing their emotions, thinking, and empathic connections with others. Neuroscience demonstrates that these mental capacities emanate from the integration of particular circuits in the brain; independent findings from attachment research indicate what kinds of relationship experiences a child needs to thrive and to have these mental processes develop well.
and make sense out of their experiences. Telling your children the story of an experience can help them integrate both the events and the emotional content of that experience.
As adults we usually tell our stories with words. Children, however, even those who can understand spoken language, greatly benefit from using props like dolls and puppets or drawing pictures to help them make sense of their experiences. When children understand what has happened to them and what may happen to them, their distress is usually greatly reduced.
Our life stories can give us clues about how our present is shaped by the past.
“I see you and I’m listening to you and I’ll give back to you a reflection of yourself that is valued so you can see and value yourself too. I like you just the way you are.”
If parents only understand their own experience and don’t connect with their child’s experience, they will very likely have difficulty in developing a close and meaningful relationship with their child. On the other hand, if parents only consider their child’s point of view and neglect their own internal experience they will very likely have difficulty in setting boundaries with their child.
