The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired

by Daniel J. Siegel

These attachment bonds are formed when parents respond to the needs of their children and dependably provide comfort, as when they pick them up when they cry, or hold and reassure them when they are upset. When children experience this type of reliable behavior and connection, they are then freed to learn and develop without having to use attention or energy to survive, or to remain hypervigilant, watching for slight changes in their environment or in their caregivers.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past. In this way, we forgive not to condone, not to say it was fine, but to let go of false illusions that we can change the past. The acceptance and forgiveness that arise with making sense of your life are profoundly liberating. In many ways, we come to forgive ourselves for the adaptations we had to make, and to accept not only who we’ve been, but who we are now inviting ourselves to become.

At its essence, truly seeing our kids is about three main things: (1) attuning to their internal mental state in a way that lets them know that we get them, so they can “feel felt” and understood on a profound and meaningful level; (2) coming to understand their inner life by using our imagination to make sense of what is actually going on inside their mind; and (3) responding in what’s called a “contingent” way, where we respond to what we see in a timely and effective manner. Contingent communication depends on a three-step process—perceiving, making sense, and responding in this connecting, timely way—and represents a universal “triad of connection” that helps children feel felt by their caregivers. “Seeing” children in this way means focusing less on a child’s specific behavior or the external observable events of a situation, and more on the mind beneath the behavior, or what’s happening inside.

Many people don’t have this advantage. They instead grew up in families where almost all of the attention was focused on external and surface-level experiences: what they did and how they behaved, misbehaved, or achieved. Families like these can have fun with one another and enjoy activities together, but the world within is largely ignored. Dinnertime discussions might cover surface topics like current events, what the dog did, what the neighbor said, or other topics that, while being perfectly acceptable subjects of conversation, are cut off from the internal experiences of feelings, memories, meanings, and thoughts—the subjective, rich, inner nature of the mind. Their friendships might be outwardly focused as well. We all tend to have at least some relationships where we discuss superficial topics, rarely sharing vulnerabilities, thoughts, feelings, desires, or fears, and that’s fine as long as we also have significant friendships where we’re truly known and deeply know the other. The degree to which we live on the surface without a deeper understanding of ourselves, our significant others, our children, and our closest friends often correlates with how seen or unseen we felt by our attachment figures.

Attachment strategies are evoked with that particular parent, and they involve the child’s state dependent memory—images, feelings, and behaviors that are activated in the presence of that particular parent. In this situation, a child might be seen as clingy, unable to settle down and return to play. But the reality is that this is a relational state, not a feature of the child alone. In the presence of another parent with whom the child has had, for example, secure attachment, his behavior will be quite different. How can this be? As we’ve seen from the beginning of our discussions together, repeated experiences shape the brain’s creation of a mental model as it constructs a generalized schema of all the experiences the child has had with that particular individual. Mental models are a part of our state dependent memory system. This attachment mental model is activated with the present moment experience, and in this way might be of security with one parent or insecurity with another. This attachment model that has the pattern of ambivalence develops when the child has experienced repeatedly the parent’s typical response as unreliable and the parent is inconsistent at meeting his emotional needs. Sometimes in the past they had shown up for him, and sometimes they hadn’t. This behavioral pattern can also include times when the parent is emotionally intrusive, and thus so noncontingent that the parent’s own internal state dominates the communication. As we’ve seen, this coul...

one of the key factors in determining whether a particular event causes stress that is positive, tolerable, or toxic is whether the person experiencing the stress has sufficient support.