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

by Daniel J. Siegel

When shame occurs, there is a physiological reaction; children may have an ache in their stomach, heaviness in their chest, and an impulse to avoid eye contact. They may feel deflated and withdrawn and begin to think of themselves as being “bad” and defective.

Sustained and frequent toxic ruptures may lead to significant negative effects on the child’s growing sense of self. It is important that these ruptures be repaired in an empathic, effective, and timely manner so that the child’s developing identity is not damaged.

Although the occurrence of toxic ruptures should be avoided, when they do occur we can use them as an opportunity for increased personal insight and enhanced interpersonal understanding. In the repair process the child learns that although the going might get rough at times, reconnection can be achieved, bringing with it a new sense of closeness with a parent.

Repeated, prolonged, and unrepaired experiences of toxic ruptures are damaging to the child’s developing mind. If we have had repeated experiences of toxic rupture without repair in our own childhoods, shame may play a significant role in our mental lives, even outside our awareness. Sudden shifts in our feelings and in our communication with others may indicate that the shame defenses are becoming activated. Experiences in which we feel vulnerable or powerless can trigger the defenses that our minds have constructed to protect us from awareness of such a painful state of shame when we were children. These defenses may persist into our adulthoods and influence our parenting. Reflection is an important process in beginning to unravel the complex and rapid mechanisms of a shame dynamic that may be impairing our ability to parent effectively.

Taking time away from the interaction is important. Breathing deeply and relaxing the mind by not continuing to think about the rupture can help to create a more peaceful and calm state of mind. It may be helpful to do something physical in order to shift the intensity of the mood and utilize the adrenaline-driven energy in a nonharmful way. Moving your body can help to change your mood and give you a fresh perspective on the situation. Going outdoors and being in nature can have a calming influence on your mind. Getting a drink of water, making a cup of tea, or changing your physical location can often help you break out of a low-road rut.

Reconciliation does not happen if you are trying to place blame. As the parent, you have the responsibility to own your behavior and know your internal issues.

After beginning with your stated intentions to make a reconnection and your acknowledgment of the difficulties that you have been having with each other, you can listen to your child’s feelings and thoughts. Do not interrogate him. Curb any tendency to judge the responses you hear. Just listen. Be open to his point of view. You do not need to defend yourself. Listen to your child’s experience before you share your own experience of the interaction. Be sure to join with your child by reflecting back how you hear his experience of the events. Pay attention to both the content of the perceptions as well as the meaning of the emotional experience.

Children who do not have these important limit-setting experiences may have an underdevelopment of the emotional clutch, which is a building block of response flexibility. Parents who don’t want to be identified as the “bad parent” often resist setting limits and are unable to provide their children with these important developmental experiences. Their child’s emotional clutch is not developed enough to allow her to rechannel her energy in productive ways. One of our roles as parents is to facilitate our children’s development of their ability to balance the brakes and accelerators that enable them to delay gratification and modify their impulses. This means that our children learn to hear “no” but also to maintain their spirit and belief in themselves. These are essential components of emotional intelligence. Your child is excited about throwing toys or climbing on the kitchen counters. We say “no.” The brakes are slammed on. We help to redirect him toward actions that will satisfy both his energy and his desire for movement so we say, “You could go outside and get that basket of balls. I bet you could throw those really far,” or “The counters aren’t for climbing but you could go outside and climb to the top of the tower by your swing set. You could probably see really far from up there.” Now the accelerator is turned on again when the child senses your attunement to his inner state of excitement about throwing or climbing; the brakes turn off as the accelerator now redir...

Parents help teach children to regulate this emotional clutch in order to balance their accelerator and brakes. In order to do this, a parent needs to be able to tolerate the tension and discomfort that a child may experience when the parent sets a limit. If a parent cannot tolerate a child’s being upset it is very difficult for the child to learn to regulate her emotions. A limit-setting “no” is best followed by calm, clear follow-through by the parent. If we always capitulate and give our child what she wants just to keep her from being upset, we will not support our child in developing a healthy ability to apply the brakes and redirect an activity. It is not necessary or even helpful to verbally reason with our children all the time. If we only value the logical mind, we’ll get into endless arguments and negotiations, and our children will think that if they make a reasonable argument, we should always act according to their wishes. Sometimes it’s okay to say, “No, that’s just not okay with me” or “I understand how you feel, but I’m not going to change my mind.” We don’t have to explain all of our decisions or give a reason for everything we do and expect our children to readily agree with us.

If we scream and yell at a child when she complains after we say “no,” we will generate the unfortunate response of deepening a sense of toxic shame and humiliation. With toxic shame, the child feels disconnected from us, misunderstood, and as though his or her impulses are “bad” rather than misguided and in need of rechanneling. If a child also experiences anger from the parent, then the prefrontal region may have brakes applied (after “no”) with continued accelerator application (in response to the parental anger). This is a toxic situation, like trying to drive a car with both the accelerator and brakes applied. The result of the child’s emotional clutch failing to disengage the accelerator when the brakes are applied ...

The example of a choir can help illustrate the sense of complexity. If all the singers sing exactly the same notes in the same way, this would be rigidity—a boring, but loud, output of sounds. If each member of the choir sings totally independently of one another, this would be cacophony and chaos. Complexity, the path between these two extremes, is the same as harmony. Harmony emerges when differentiation and linkage unfold over time. That’s our definition of integration. And so complex systems self-organize in an optimal way by linking differentiated elements to each other. The subjective feeling at the extremes away from this integration is boredom on the one hand and anxiety on the other. The rich, vitalizing, energized sense of complexity, of integration, has a vibrant quality to it that emerges when systems are able to move in their natural, self-organizational flow toward complexity, toward harmony.