Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive

by Daniel J. Siegel

When there is a mismatch between a child’s need for connection and a significant adult’s indifferent responses, the child can feel isolated and alone. When a child’s emotions are activated, the child often needs connection. At those moments of increased need, children are most vulnerable to insensitivity.

We may have learned in our own childhood that emotions are “bad” and therefore our children’s as well as our own emotions may be uncomfortable for us. Such experiences and such beliefs may block our ability to be present fully in our relationships. Our children benefit when we express our feelings directly, simply, and in nonthreatening ways. A child wants to know not only what his parents think but also how they feel. When we’re upset, angry, or disappointed, excited, proud, or delighted, we can let our children know. Children need to know that we have feelings too. When we express our emotions, our children learn what is important to us as well as witness a model for the healthy expression of emotion. Children learn to be empathic through seeing the ways in which we emotionally respond, not just in the words we say. We can be authentic and passionate as we respect both our children’s and our own experiences.

TABLE 5. COLLABORATIVE COMMUNICATION PROCESSES OF COMMUNICATION Receive—Process—Respond PATHWAYS TO COLLABORATION Explore—Understand—Join PATHWAYS TO DISCONNECTION Interrogate—Judge—Fix

Our sense of self becomes defined by the contingent ways in which we connect with others. Our brains are structured to be connected to other brains. Collaborative communication involves the spontaneous connection of each side of the brain to that of the other person as we share signals in both the verbal (left) and nonverbal (right) domains. This dance of communication not only enables us to feel close and connected to others but also allows our minds to feel coherent and in balance. Our sense of “I” is profoundly influenced by how we belong to a “we.”

respond to the message that was sent. Receiving a message in both its verbal and nonverbal forms is the first part of the communicative process. Verbal signals include words that describe our ideas, thoughts, feelings, and any entity that can be translated into words. These come from the left side of our brains. Nonverbal signals include eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, gestures, posture, and the timing and intensity of response. These are both sent and received by the right side of our brains. Often, the emotional, meaning-making aspects of communication come primarily from our right hemispheres. It is crucial to pay close attention to the nonverbal component of all communication. Through the sharing of these nonverbal signals deep connections are created between two individuals.

When we listen to our child’s signals we can learn more about his state of mind and point of view. Our understanding of our child is of primary importance as we internally process the signals we have received. This internal work of processing also involves our own assessments of the experience. A true collaboration involves the blending of both minds, which gives respect to an understanding of both our own and our child’s experience. 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. Parents may begin to resent their child for being too demanding. If parents forget to consider their own internal state and take into consideration only the needs and desires of their child, it can leave the parent feeling angry and exhausted and the child feeling insecure from a lack of boundaries.

contingent response is not just a mirror reflecting back to the other person an exact replica of the sent signals. Such a mirroring can be extremely frustrating. “I’m so mad that I can’t go to the park!” a boy said to his mother. Her mirroring response “You feel mad that you can’t go to the park” led him to cover his ears and stomp out of the room. Instead, a collaborative response might go something like this: “I know you really want to go to the park today. I wish we could go too. It can be disappointing and frustrating when plans have to change.” This response reveals that the mother has received his signals, has processed them in a way that shows that she understands his state of mind, and shares them in a way that reflects not only what he has said, but also the fullness of his emotional experience.

Judging makes assumptions about “right or wrong” aspects of the other person’s experience. We may be critical of another person’s different approach even as we are trying to receive her signals. Sometimes these judgments come from rigid mental models that we have within ourselves. Often, we may be unaware of these internal models and the biases they create that keep us from being open and receptive. For example, because you wish your daughter could be more outgoing, you may reveal your disappointment in her through your questions and your behavior. You may give the message, indirectly through nonverbal signals of disapproval or directly through the words you choose, that she is defective in some way. “If only you would be nice to your friends, I’m sure they’d want to play with you more.” Or “Why don’t you act like your cousin Susie? She’s always friendly.” These judgmental statements do not help your child feel understood or supported and do not boost her self-confidence.

skills. But automatically trying to fix things before we have joined with our children’s experience can be both intrusive and disrespectful.

Knowing and accepting her temperament will enable you to offer her support while at the same time nurturing her ability to gradually develop her courage and reach out to others. With your attunement and understanding, she can become more secure. Feeling supported by you, she can brave the world with more strength and willingness to try new things. Instead of trying to fix, think of trying to join. Be sure to keep an open mind as you try to understand your children’s perspectives.

Becoming aware of both the process and the content of our interpersonal communication is a fundamental part of coherent self-knowledge.

When parents have leftover or unresolved issues, they often project this baggage onto interactions with their child. The child’s signals are then filtered through a rigid lens of the parents’ model of the world, the distortions of their closed and unreceptive minds. When parents are locked into their own point of view as the only point of view, they shut down their channels for open collaborative communication.

Our lives reflect both the process of connection and the content of what happened to us in the past. Our families of origin have shaped not only what we remember about our childhoods, but also how we have come to remember our lives and create a coherent mind. The give-and-take of contingent collaborative communication may not come naturally because it was not a part of our own childhood. Fortunately, though, we can learn to listen to our child and become aware of his perspective as well as our own. Parents’ patterns of communication shape the coherence of their child’s mind. Becoming aware of both the process and the content of our interpersonal communication is a fundamental part of coherent self-knowledge.

The infant had the same series of reactions as in the “still-face” situation, when the mother shows no facial responses: the baby got restless, agitated, disorganized, and then withdrew. This study clearly showed that infants need more than just the upbeat responses of their parents. They need those connections to be contingent.

We likely need the same contingency throughout our lives. Our sense of self is created within the relationships we have with each other. Contingent communication enables us to feel coherent, to neurally create a core self that is full and alive, and to go out in the world with a sense of vigor and vitality.

The idea that communication with significant others shapes who we are is not new. A Russian psychologist named Lev Vygotsky wrote in the 1920s that thought is internalized dialogue. How we come to talk to ourselves is shaped by how others have talked with us. Those who study narrative as a central feature of how we come to define ourselves hold a similar view: we construct the narrative of our lives based on the nature of the interactions we have had with others. The child psychiatrist Daniel Stern, drawing on research on infant development, beautifully described how interactions between parent and child shape the development of the self during the early years of life.

These convergent views suggest that our self is neurologically created in layers of circuitry that embed both our momentary interactions with a dynamic world and the accumulation of experience as embedded in our various forms of memory. As memory itself is reshaped by recollection and by the process of creating new and ever-evolving neural connections, so too does our sense of self remain open to growth and development. Such development of a coherent sense of self may involve the interactions of our here-and-now self experience with others as well as our mental time travel that enables us to create a past-present-future integrating and reflective autobiographical self as we live in dynamic and ever-interacting internal and social worlds.

Harry Potter/ Healing inner child

This distinction is particularly relevant to raising children for a number of reasons. Early in life, during the first year or two, the infant is primarily a right-hemisphere creature. Knowing how to use your own right hemisphere is crucial to making connections with your young child. As the child grows into preschool age, the corpus callosum, the bands of tissue connecting the two hemispheres, is quite immature. This condition leads children at this age to have an innate difficulty “putting words to their feelings.” Sometimes their right hemispheres may be so intensely reacting that they enter a temper tantrum, a state in which they cannot use language to communicate. Nonverbal soothing communication may be best in these situations. Schools generally emphasize left-hemisphere processing over right-hemisphere. Adults, having been raised in those schools, often collude to reinforce this unfair bias toward words and logic. It is difficult for right-mode processing to make a case for itself without resorting to the logic of words for persuasion. Someone has got to stick up for the right hemisphere! Remember, the right-hemisphere brain processes are important for self-regulation, a sense of self, and empathic connections to others. Finding ways to encourage your child’s right-hemisphere development and its integration with the left may be crucial for developing a sense of resilience and well-being.

Attachment lays a foundation for how a child comes to approach the world, and a healthy attachment in the early years provides a secure base from which children can learn about themselves and others.

Some people worry that the findings of attachment research indicate that our early years create our destiny. In fact, the research shows that relationships with parents can change and as they do the child’s attachment changes. This means that it’s never too late to create positive change in a child’s life. Studies also demonstrate that a nurturing relationship with someone other than a parent in which the child feels understood and safe provides an important source of resilience, a seed in the child’s mind that can be developed later on as the child grows. Relationships with relatives, teachers, childcare providers, and counselors can provide an important source of connection for the growing child. These relationships don’t replace a secure attachment with a primary caregiver, but they are a source of strength for the child’s developing

TABLE 6. THE ABC’S OF ATTACHMENT The ABC’s of attachment are the developmental sequence of attunement, balance, and coherence. Attunement—Aligning your own internal state with those of your children. Often accomplished by the contingent sharing of nonverbal signals. Balance—Your children attain balance of their body, emotions, and states of mind through attunement with you. Coherence—The sense of integration that is acquired by your children through your relationship with them in which they are able to come to feel both internally integrated and interpersonally connected to others.

Repeated experiences of her father’s entering a trancelike state when she becomes distressed will have a profound impact on the development of his daughter’s ability to tolerate and regulate her own intense emotions. These experiences with her father teach her that intense emotion is disorganizing. His overly emotional state creates a disconnection that keeps her from making sense of her own internal and interpersonal world. His entry into a preoccupation with his own unresolved traumas leaves her alone at a time when she desperately needs connection. His nonverbal signals, such as holding her too tightly and the frightened look on his face, create further distress. These experiences are disorienting because they create a sense of fear in his daughter that parallels the fear her father feels of his own mother as well as his fear of being unable to soothe his daughter’s distress.

We are not destined to repeat the patterns of our parents or of our past. Making sense of our lives enables us to build on positive experiences as we move beyond the limitations of our past and create a new way of living for ourselves and for our children. Making sense of our own lives can help us to provide our children with relationships that promote their sense of well-being, give them tools for building an internal sense of security and resilience, and offer them interpersonal skills that enable them to make meaningful, compassionate connections in the future. How we have come to make sense of our lives, how we tell a coherent story of our early life experiences, is the best predictor of how our children will become attached to us. Adults who have made sense of their lives have an adult security of attachment and are likely to have children who are securely attached to them. Enabling our children to build a secure attachment lays a foundation for their future healthy development.

Relationships, both personal and therapeutic, appear to be able to help an individual develop from an incoherent (insecure) to a more coherent (secure) functioning of the mind. Such growth is carried out through relationships that help an individual to heal old wounds and transform defensive approaches to intimacy.

An earned secure adult attachment is one in which the narrative is coherent, but there were difficult times in childhood attachment. Earned security reflects how an adult has come to make sense of his or her early life history. The story earlier in this chapter about the woman with a manic-depressive father is an example of how one parent with earned security might describe her experiences.

Dismissing Adult Attachment For adults whose early life may have included a predominance of parental emotional unavailability and rejection, a dismissing stance toward attachment may be found. As parents their children’s relationships with them are often characterized by avoidant attachments. These parents appear to have little sensitivity to the child’s signals. The inner world of such adults seems to function with independence as its hallmark: being disconnected from intimacy and perhaps even from the emotional signals of their own bodies. Their narratives reflect this isolation, and they frequently insist that they do not recall their childhood experiences. Life seems to be lived without a sense that others or the past contribute to the evolving nature of the self. One proposal is that these adults live in a predominantly left mode of processing, especially when interacting with others. In spite of these mechanisms that minimize the importance of relationships, a number of studies suggest that the children and adults in this grouping have bodily reactions that indicate that their nonconscious minds still value the importance of others in their lives. Their behavior and their conscious thoughts appear to have adapted to an emotionally barren home environment by producing an avoidant and dismissing stance toward attachment and intimacy. In response to questions about her childhood experiences a mother of an avoidantly attached child made the following self-reflective comm...

QUESTIONS FOR PARENTAL SELF-REFLECTION What was it like growing up? Who was in your family? How did you get along with your parents early in your childhood? How did the relationship evolve throughout your youth and up until the present time? How did your relationship with your mother and father differ and how were they similar? Are there ways in which you try to be like, or try not to be like, each of your parents? Did you ever feel rejected or threatened by your parents? Were there other experiences you had that felt overwhelming or traumatizing in your life, during childhood or beyond? Do any of these experiences still feel very much alive? Do they continue to influence your life? How did your parents discipline you as a child? What impact did that have on your childhood, and how do you feel it affects your role as a parent now? Do you recall your earliest separations from your parents? What was it like? Did you ever have prolonged separations from your parents? Did anyone significant in your life die during your childhood, or later in your life? What was that like for you at the time, and how does that loss affect you now? How did your parents communicate with you when you were happy and excited? Did they join with you in your enthusiasm? When you were distressed or unhappy as a child, what would happen? Did your father and mother respond differently to you during these emotional times? How? Was there anyone else besides your parents in your childhood who took care of y...

We have found that the general framework provided by attachment research is useful for deepening self-understanding and for pointing to some pathways toward change. Research demonstrates that growth toward security of attachment is quite possible. Though the movement toward security is often associated with healthy and healing relationships with friends, lovers, teachers, or therapists, beginning with the process of deepening your self-understanding can serve as an invitation to enhance your connections with others. Moving toward security offers an enriched way of life for both you and your children.

Avoidance and a Dismissing Stance For those whose histories included a sense of emotional unavailability and a lack of attuned, nurturing parenting, there may have been an adaptation that minimizes the importance of interpersonal relationships and the communication of emotion. This minimizing stance may have been very adaptive to children raised in an emotional desert. Children do the best they can, and reducing dependence on emotionally unavailable caregivers may have been an appropriate and useful adaptation for their survival. As this adaptive response continues, children may have a decreased connection not only to their parents but to other people as well. Although studies reveal that individuals with avoidant attachment have mindsight and can take others’ perspectives, their defensive state of mind appears to reduce their motivation to be open to the emotional experiences of others. In addition, there may be a decreased access to and awareness of their own emotions. These avoidant adaptations can be seen as a minimization of right-mode processing in favor of a predominance of left-mode thinking in order to reduce their emotional vulnerability. With this perspective, one can imagine that the degree of bilateral integration connecting the right and left modes of processing may be quite minimal as well. This may be revealed in how people with this early history do appear to have very underdeveloped life stories. Often they insist that they don’t remember the details of t...

Approaches toward changing these adaptations are those that promote bilateral integration. Often right-mode processing may be underdeveloped, demonstrated by the possession of minimal mindsight abilities, diminished self-awareness, and at times a decreased ability to perceive the nonverbal signals of others. Self-reflection may be limited because it is primarily the logical and nonautobiographical left mode that becomes engaged. For this reason, efforts to activate the right mode may be helpful and necessary. Research has shown the presence of heightened physiological reactions in these people during discussion of attachment-related issues, in contrast to their comments minimizing the importance of attachments. This indicates the reality that their minds respond as though relationships are significant, even if behavior and overt attitude do not reveal this emotional valuing of connections. In other words, the inborn attachment system that values relationships is still intact, even though the person’s adaptation has required a minimization approach. This view is crucial in considering how to reach out to individuals who may have spent much of their lives automatically minimizing ...

Ambivalence and a Preoccupied Stance A different kind of adaptation occurs in response to a family life with inconsistently available parents and can yield a sense of anxiety about whether or not others are dependable. This response to inconsistent or intrusive parenting can yield a feeling of ambivalence and uncertainty. This may be experienced by an adult as a desperate need for others and a simultaneous sinking feeling that one’s own needs can never be met. There may be a sense of urgency for connection that may ironically push others away and thus create a self-reinforcing feedback loop that others indeed are not dependable.

shame and how it may have been a part of our early life histories can help to free us from the ruts that these emotional reactions can create in our relationships with others. We may have developed layers of psychological defense that protect us from being consciously aware of what would otherwise be disabling anxiety, self-doubt, and painful emotions. Unfortunately, such defenses may prevent us from being aware of how these implicit emotional processes may directly influence our approach to our children. We may project onto them unwanted aspects of our own internal experience, such as anger at their helplessness and vulnerability. In this way, defenses that protected us during an earlier time may blind us from understanding our own internal pain and impair our ability to parent well.

For those with layers of defense that may cover up an internal state of shame, it may be useful to recall that the belief that the self is defective is a child’s conclusion, arising from noncontingent connections with parents. Realizing that “I am lovable” is important and can take the place of internal thoughts such as “I am not loved” or “I am unlovable.” Finding ways that work to help the right hemisphere learn to self-soothe are the keys to growth for this form of adaptation. You can give yourself the tools that your parents were not able to offer to you as a child. In many ways, this is parenting yourself from the inside out.

INSIDE-OUT EXERCISES Set aside some time to respond to the questions for parental self-reflection. After waiting for at least a day, return to your written responses and read them aloud to yourself. What do you notice? How do your responses feel to you? How do you wish your parents might have offered you a different experience of being parented? How have these experiences shaped your own attitudes toward and interactions with your child? What are the most important lessons you have learned from this reflective process? Our life stories are not fixed and sealed in cement. They evolve as we grow and continue the lifelong process of making sense of our lives. Let yourself be open to your own lifelong development. Without taking time to think about your answers in advance, write for several minutes completing the sentences “A good mother is . . .” or “A good father is . . .” Now, read what you have written aloud to yourself or to someone you trust. Is there anything on the list of responses that you feel you received from your own parent? There may be many; there may be few or none. Of these responses, which qualities do you feel you give to your own children at this time? Choose one quality that you would like to develop initially as an area of growth. Reread the discussion in “Adult Attachment,” above, of the categories of attachment in children and adults and “Attachment Categories”. Now write down your thoughts about how these classifications relate to your own experience ...

The proposal here regarding attachment experiences and the “dismissing” grouping is that the emotionally unengaging family lives of these individuals when they were children did not enable the laying down of easily recalled details of their childhood family experiences. There may be factual knowledge—of television shows, sports events, and facts about family events—but little autobiographical recollection. A unique feature of explicit autobiographical memory is that it has a sense of self and time. It appears to be mediated in a different set of circuits, those primarily within the right hemisphere, than explicit semantic/factual memory, within the left hemisphere. In this manner, the insistence on lack of recall, mediated by being raised in an emotional desert, creates an underdeveloped right-hemisphere autobiographical-knowing process, or autonoesis.

Movement toward security for these individuals would likely involve the activation or development of these underutilized brain mechanisms. In these individuals, experiences are to be encouraged that can access the various dimensions of right-hemisphere functioning, including nonverbal communication, awareness of the body, appreciation of emotional states in oneself and others, autobiographical recollection, and attuning to and aligning with others’ mental states. Providing the supportive encouragement for the gradual activation of these emotional and interpersonal processes may help the individual to learn to tolerate vulnerability and intimacy with trusted others. Such experiential learning could then help transform the individual’s state of mind with respect to attachment toward security.

When you are feeling stressed or find yourself in situations with your child that trigger past unresolved issues, your mind may shut off and become inflexible. This inflexibility can be an indication that you are entering a different state of mind that directly impairs your ability to think clearly and maintain an emotional connection to your child. We call this a low mode of processing. When in a lower mode of processing, which we’ll call the low road, you may become flooded by feelings such as fear, sadness, or rage. These intense emotions can lead you to have knee-jerk reactions instead of thoughtful responses. When emotional reactions replace mindfulness, you’re on the low road and it is very unlikely that you will be able to maintain nurturing communication and connection with your child.

The conditions that elicit such low-road reactions in a parent may resemble relationship situations or traumatic experiences from the parent’s own past. A parent is especially vulnerable to being triggered and heading down the low road during many everyday moments in parenting when he or she is responding to a child’s testing of limits, attending to a child’s distress, or negotiating bedtime and other separations.

When the parent is in a low road of processing she can’t respond to her child in an effective way. The best thing to do if a parent becomes aware of her intense anger and aggressive behavior is to stop interacting with her child. Until a parent has calmed down, the situation will probably get worse. The parent will most likely continue to become more out of control and the child will become more frightened.

Low-road interactions that are repeated and not repaired can impair the basic ABC’s of attachment. Children need us to attune to them in order to achieve the physiological balance that enables them to create a coherent mind. Coherence is the state of mind in which the internal world is able to adapt to an ever-changing external world of experiences. Coherence enables an emerging sense of being connected to oneself and with others.

Becoming aware of our bodily sensations is a first step to understanding the experience on the low road. Making a conscious effort to alter our bodily reactions on the low road can help to free us from the prison of these ingrained reflexes. The brain looks to the body to know how it feels and to assess the meaning of things; thus, becoming aware of our bodily reactions can be a direct and effective means to deal with low-road immersion.

As these lower-mode states occur they may become ingrained in a form of implicit memory in which they become more likely to be activated. In other words, the neural firing patterns of a low-road, disconnected state may become more readily re-created when they have occurred with emotional intensity in the past.

The road to recovery may likely involve new forms of learning that enable us to regain the prefrontal capacity to integrate bodily, emotional, self-reflective, and interpersonal experience into a coherent whole.

with our children, who are waiting for us to return. As a mother in one of our workshops shared with us, knowing about the hand model of the brain and the idea of low-road behaviors, she came to realize that while these frequent moments of “flipping her lid” weren’t her fault, it was her responsibility to make a repair and try to reduce the occurrences of these nonintegrated states. Knowing about the brain can help you let go of self-blame and shame that make reconnecting with our children so difficult. Instead, we can realize that the brain just works this way, and we can use our minds to take responsibility for our behaviors and make a repair with our child.

rupture in order to initiate a repair process. Ruptures without repair lead to a deepening sense of disconnection between parent and child. Prolonged disconnection can create shame and humiliation that is toxic for the child’s growing sense of self. For these reasons, it is imperative that parents take responsibility and make a timely reconnection with their children after a rupture.

Our minds are fundamentally linked to others’ through the sending and receiving of signals. Ruptured connection, especially of our nonverbal signals, separates our primary emotions from the other person and we are cast adrift and can no longer sense our own minds within the mind of the other. We no longer feel felt, but instead feel misunderstood and alone. When this linkage with an important person in our lives is broken, our minds will quite likely experience a disruption in balanced and coherent functioning. We are not meant to live in isolation, but are dependent on one another for emotional well-being.

It can be difficult for a parent to provide structure and boundaries for his child while simultaneously offering collaborative communication and emotional alignment and connection. How can a parent achieve this? Balancing structure and connection is a basic goal we can move toward but is impossible ever to fully achieve. As parents learn to balance their own emotions without swinging between feelings of guilt and feelings of anger toward their child they are better able to give their child both nurture and structure. Being kind and empathic toward yourself can help you not get overly involved in your own emotional reactions to your child.

All of these situations of benign rupture can be frequent in our daily lives with our children. When children are feeling emotional, whether they are excited or upset, they have a heightened need to be understood. It is at these times that even benign ruptures may be especially painful for children. Making repairs in a timely and caring manner is important if children are to build and maintain a sense of resilience and vitality.

Many times, empathic and reflective comments can help your child move on past his frustration at not getting what he wanted. However, even if the parent offers the most supportive response, a child may still feel upset and adamant about his desire, no matter what you say or do. Allowing your child to have his distress without trying to punish him or indulge him can offer him the opportunity to learn how to tolerate his own emotional discomfort. You do not have to fix the situation by giving in or by trying to get rid of his uncomfortable feelings. Letting your child have his emotion and letting him know that you understand that it’s hard not to get what he wants is the kindest and most helpful thing you can do for your child at that moment.

off!” The morning has deteriorated into a yelling match as Mom and Dad try to wrestle the bunny grass away. They have a strong sense of how foolish this all is. Jack is angry and getting more furious by the moment. Exasperated, the parents offer some ineffectual consequence as a “compromise” in which the bunny grass ends up in a “time-out” and is put in the cupboard. Later in the day, while his parents are away, Jack talks his babysitter into letting him scatter the grass all over the house. “Sure, Mom lets me do it,” he tells her.