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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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...