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

by Daniel J. Siegel

One message we deliver over and over whenever we write about parenting is that you don’t have to be perfect. Nobody is. There’s no such thing as flawless child-rearing.

Showing up means what it sounds like. It means being there for your kids. It means being physically present, as well as providing a quality of presence. Provide it when you’re meeting their needs; when you’re expressing your love to them; when you’re disciplining them; when you’re laughing together; even when you’re arguing with them.

Showing up means bringing your whole being—your attention and awareness—when you’re with your child. When we show up, we are mentally and emotionally present for our child in that moment. In many ways, there is no other time but now—this present moment of time—and you are in charge of learning how to show up in ways that will both greatly empower you as a parent and promote resilience and strength in your child. It’s this power of presence that enables us to create an empowered mind for our children—even if we mess up on a regular basis.

As we’ll soon explain, the longitudinal research on child development clearly demonstrates that one of the very best predictors for how any child turns out—in terms of happiness, social and emotional development, leadership skills, meaningful relationships, and even academic and career success—is whether they developed security from having at least one person who showed up for them.

Predictable care that supports a healthy and empowering relationship embodies what we call the “Four S’s”—helping kids feel (1) safe—they feel protected and sheltered from harm; (2) seen—they know you care about them and pay attention to them; (3) soothed—they know you’ll be there for them when they’re hurting; and (4) secure—based on the other S’s, they trust you to predictably help them feel “at home” in the world, then learn to help themselves feel safe, seen, and soothed.

Neuroplasticity explains how the actual physical architecture of the brain adapts to new experiences and information, reorganizing itself and creating new neural pathways based on what a person sees, hears, touches, thinks about, practices, and so on. Anything we give attention to, anything we emphasize in our experiences and interactions, creates new links in the brain. Where attention goes, neurons fire. And where neurons fire, they wire, or join together.

your reliable presence in the lives of your children can significantly impact the physical architecture and connectivity in their brains, creating mental models and expectations about the way the world works.

A mental model is a summary the brain makes that creates a generalization of many repeated experiences. Such mental models are constructed from the past, filter our current experience, and shape how we anticipate and sometimes even sculpt our future interactions.

Kids learn who they are and who they can and should be, in both good times and bad, through their interactions with us, their parents. Showing up thus creates in our kids neural pathways that lead to selfhood, grit, strength, and resilience.

This is how they learn that even when mistakes are made and harsh words spoken, we still love each other and want to make things right again. That message, when consistently delivered, leads to a feeling of safety. Remember, the key is repair, repair, repair. There’s no such thing as perfect parenting.

We have to let them learn that with life comes pain, but that lesson should be accompanied by the deep awareness that they’ll never have to suffer alone.

Showing up isn’t the goal of parenting. Rather, it’s the means by which you move toward your desired outcome. The actual goal is what’s called secure attachment.

Your job as a parent is not to prevent them from experiencing setbacks and failures, but to give them the tools and emotional resilience they need to weather life’s storms, and then to walk beside them through those storms.

History is not destiny. Our past can be understood so that it doesn’t dictate our present and our future. We don’t have to run from our past, nor do we have to be enslaved by it.

History is not destiny.

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.

In fact, even if one parent fails to show up, but another caregiver does provide the kind of constancy and predictability a child needs, that child will receive many of those same benefits that come with secure attachment.

Securely attached babies—meaning that the relationship with that parent is secure—show clear signs of missing their mother when she leaves the room, actively greet her when she returns, then settle down quickly and return to their toys and activities once the mother is back in the room.

The first group of insecurely attached children, when observed in the Strange Situation, demonstrate what’s called an avoidant attachment. When their mother leaves them alone, they focus most intently on the toys in the room. In fact, they show practically no external distress or anger when their mother departs, and they ignore or even avoid her when she returns.

a child can be avoidantly attached to one parent, but still enjoy secure attachment, along with the benefits that come with it, with another caregiver.

The second group of children with insecure attachment fall into what’s called ambivalent attachment. Here the parents show their children neither consistent nurturing and attunement nor consistent indifference and insensitivity. Instead, what characterizes the early years of life for these children is parental inconsistency. They have a parent who is sometimes attuned, sensitive, and responsive, and at other times not. As a result, the attachment relationship causes this child great anxiety and ambivalence regarding whether they can trust this parent.

The third and most distressed type of insecure attachment is disorganized attachment, where a child has trouble deciding how to respond when the mother returns to the room, and as a result demonstrates disorganized, disoriented, or chaotic behavior. The child might appear terrified, then approach the mother, then withdraw, then fall on the floor helpless and cry, then freeze up. The child may even cling to the mother while simultaneously pulling away. Disorganized attachment results when children find their parents severely unattuned, when the parents are frightening, and/or when the parents themselves are frightened.

Amazingly, as you may have heard, the right and left sides of the brain are quite different in many ways—the timing of their development (right first), their structure (right more interconnected within itself), and their functions (right has a broad, wide attentional focus whereas the left has a narrow focus; the right receives input from the lower areas, including the body, whereas the left tends to specialize in linguistic symbols—our spoken and written language).

Briefly, three systems in the brain are involved in how attachment influences our deepest networks. One is the reward system that extends from the downstairs to the upstairs brain. Attachment is rewarding. The second is the system that senses and regulates the body—and thus is fundamental to our sense of survival. The third is sometimes called the “mentalizing” network, meaning how we sense the mind of our caregivers and ultimately of ourselves with what we simply call mindsight.

Attachment science reveals that avoidantly attached children tend to develop what’s called dismissing attachment as adults. They come to live emotionally distant lives, dismissive of the importance of relationships, often avoiding closeness and rejecting attempts to relate on a deep or meaningful level.

This dismissing response results from the parents’ experience of never having their own emotional needs perceived and met.

ambivalently attached children become adults who live with a great deal of chaos, anxiety, and insecurity. Instead of living in an emotional desert, their responses to life typically involve an emotional flood. Their tumultuous experience results from having parents who sometimes showed up for them, and sometimes didn’t.

Kids with this ambivalent attachment pattern develop what’s called, in adults, a preoccupied attachment pattern, which is characterized by this chaotic and highly emotional way of connecting in close relationships.

But for adults who as children had parents who were terrifying and now have a disorganized attachment pattern, there is no such organizing strategy to navigate the world. They’re left in a situation to which there is no rational or effective response.

Attachment researcher Peter Fonagy uses a term called “epistemic trust” to study how the way we come to know the nature of reality—epistemology—is violated especially with disorganized attachment experiences. When terrifying events are caused by the attachment figure, the nature of what is real is shaped in such a manner as to be inconsistent with the larger world of how parents are supposed to behave. Repeated violations of this epistemic trust can fragment an internal sense of what is real, and this violation may play a role in the fragmented mental life, the dissociation, that is found with individuals with disorganized attachment histories.

That’s why this attachment pattern is called “disorganized.” One situation where this attachment pattern arises is with trauma. Scans have shown that parental abuse and neglect—what are called developmental trauma—compromise areas of the brain that enable neural integration, which may explain problems with regulation of emotion, deficient social communication, poor academic reasoning, a tendency toward interpersonal violence, and other problems seen in kids with disorganized attachment.

The parents’ interactions with their own children are intricately interwoven with their experiences with their own caregivers.

Sensitive, attuned parents who are emotionally responsive typically raise kids who are resilient and emotionally healthy, and who generally grow up to be well-adjusted and happy adults capable of cultivating mutually rewarding relationships.

It can be an incredibly liberating experience to realize that you’re not to blame for your parents’ failure to show up for you in your childhood, and that you have the power to liberate yourself now from a past you did not create. Then, out of that liberation, you can begin taking responsibility for your behavior going forward, what we clinicians call agency. As one parent put it, “I’m not to blame for what happened to me. But I am responsible for what I do now.”

When we come to “make sense” of our lives, it’s not simply an intellectual exercise. It actually reorganizes our sense of reward, body regulation, and insight. Making sense is a deeply integrative process at the core of who we are and how we become a part of a “we” in close relationships.

we don’t have to let our past experiences dominate the way we live our lives and parent our own children. We can change the narrative, and thereby alter the future for our kids and grandkids.

We naturally pull away from reflecting on the trauma, not wanting to be flooded by the painful memories or thinking, “It’s the past, so what’s the point of dwelling on something you can’t change?” But in reality, memory retrieval when combined with narrative reflections can be a memory modifier. Unresolved loss or trauma can be healed, and the coherent narrative that emerges can help us to be all the stronger because of that very process of making sense of your life. Some call that “post-traumatic growth.”

“Let everything be a teacher in life” is a strong strategy of how we can learn to thrive in the face of the inevitable and unexpected challenges life throws our way.

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.

When we talk about helping kids feel safe, we’re talking about physical as well as emotional and relational safety.

Safety is the first step toward strong attachment: A caregiver helps the child be safe and therefore feel safe.

Safety affects, in a significant manner, the way we interact with our surroundings—from the very beginning. The regulatory circuits of the brain are largely formed in the first three years of life. Then, as a child grows and the prefrontal cortex matures throughout childhood and adolescence, much depends on whether he has experienced a general sense of safety. If not, he has to remain in a heightened state of alertness and anxiety to watch for danger and try to stay safe—on his own. He must spend large amounts of resources being hypervigilant, scanning the environment, or even his caregivers’ faces, for approaching threats. If, on the other hand, his caregivers have adequately protected him and kept him safe in the world, then the child knows he’ll be safeguarded and assisted when he’s in distress.

Whereas threat creates a brain state of reactivity and survival, safety creates a brain state for receptive and engaged learning, as well as optimal development.

Parents have two primary jobs when it comes to keeping their kids safe and making them feel safe. The first is to protect them from harm. The second is to avoid becoming the source of fear and threat.

A trauma can be defined as an experience that threatens our physical survival, or one that disrupts our sense of meaning—how we make sense of life.

Practically speaking, as the research demonstrates, disorganized attachment leads to various troubling outcomes, including a fragmented sense of self; difficulty regulating emotions; trouble in close relationships; dissociation or discontinuities in consciousness when faced with challenges and stressors; and problems thinking clearly under stress.

Anytime parents abuse substances, they’re at risk of endangering their kids, either by failing to protect them or by actively causing harm.

In fact, recent studies have shown that if a baby’s parents are communicating in very angry speech within earshot, even when she is sleeping, the baby experiences an increase in neural responses across the parts of her brain that deal with emotion, stress reactivity, and regulation. She experiences threat rather than safety on a physiological level. That doesn’t mean that you and your partner should never argue. Conflict is unavoidable and, when done right, even healthy and necessary. But be mindful of your children and pay attention to how the adults in the house deal with conflict, and what effects those parental interactions might have on the kids.

When parents are reactive and angry toward the other parent, criticize the other parent, ask the child to choose or take sides, or use the child as the communicator or translator of negative information between the adults, it can create intense states of stress that the child cannot change or escape. In these cases, instead of trying to establish and reinforce stability when the child needs it most, parents may be unintentionally chipping away at their child’s ability to feel settled and safe.

Struggling a bit to figure something out while tolerating some frustration and overcoming a difficult obstacle is how a child learns that he can overcome obstacles. He’ll learn what his abilities and capabilities are when he’s faced with a difficulty and gets through it. On the other side of the challenge he’ll be stronger and more resilient.