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

by Daniel J. Siegel

Being with a life partner who is securely attached as an adult can help someone with insecurity move toward a more free, connected pattern of relating to others. We are always open to change!

Thanks Lori!

For years Dan has used a helpful analogy for confronting our past. If trauma is like a dog bite, we can understand how our natural impulse is to pull away from it. So if a dog bites you on the hand, and you pull your hand away, he digs his teeth in even more strongly and your struggle worsens the injury of the bite. But if instead you shove your hand down the dog’s throat, he’ll gag and actually release his grip on your hand, minimizing the damage and optimizing the healing. Trauma is just like that. 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.

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.

blame her for her emotional response, telling her, “You’re going to have to toughen up some day.”

All of the brain’s attention, all of the body’s resources, go first to survival and seeking safety.

Safety, then, is the opposite of threat. It’s also the first step toward strong attachment: A caregiver helps the child be safe and therefore feel safe.

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

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.

problems thinking clearly under stress.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)

ACEs disrupt neurodevelopment and can have lifelong effects on children’s overall health, their ability to relate to others, their capacity to handle adversity, their overall quality of life, and even their expected life span.

Nadine Burke Harris’s book The Deepest Well.

You love your children, and you’d never want to have a negative impact on their development. But you likely need to get help to protect them, whether from someone else or yourself.

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.

Oh boy

even when parents don’t commit physical violence against their children, they can of course undermine their children’s secure attachment if they humiliate, shame, or yell at them, or use fear-based strategies to purposely frighten them for the sake of discipline or eliciting cooperation. Or when they create situations full of tension and

You’re going to show up for your kids emotionally, to be sure, and you may even support them by helping them problem-solve. That’s an important step in creating security because they know you are there for them. But that doesn’t mean that you prevent or fix all of their problems. Instead, you walk beside them through their pain, helping them see that they are strong enough to handle a difficult situation and come out okay. That’s how they’ll learn to feel safe taking chances.

eight-year-old on his first sleepover might need to be picked up in the middle of the night. In other words, that might not be the time to leave him to struggle.

The Yes Brain we wrote a whole section about figuring out what kids need from us in various situations, either pushin’ or cushion. Sometimes they need pushin’ (where we challenge them to do more than they realize they can do), whereas at other times they need some cushion (where we step in to help because they aren’t able to handle a situation on their own).

Make a commitment that you won’t be the source of fear in your home.

even making certain facial expressions can produce fear in our children.

Moments of anger and frustration simply come with being a parent. As far as we know, there’s no way around them. And there’s not supposed to be. Feelings themselves are good, even healthy. But what we do with those feelings can be threatening if we’re not careful.

That’s our second suggestion for creating safety and helping build your children’s sense of belonging: to realize that when you react to your kids from a threatened brain state, you can still repair the breach in the relationship. In doing so, you can provide your kids with all kinds of valuable experiences—even if you’re not acting exactly how you’d like.

reliable, repeated patterns of communication through which you essentially say to your child, “Whatever the source of your distress or fear, you can rely on me for a safe harbor to protect you from the terrifying storms of life.”

How do you think your child would want you to respond when he or she comes to you feeling upset after a difficult interaction with you? What could you change? How did repair happen in your family after a subtle or severe rupture when you were growing up? How do you initiate repair now as a parent?

That’s what the carefully conducted research reveals: The attachment strategies we learn as children are open to growth and development throughout the life span.

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.

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.

perceiving, making sense, and responding

The feeling of helplessness in anyone can cloud the ability to create the triad of connection.

Life is hard and complex, and having the intention to create clear and consistent connection is the best we can offer—repairing when it doesn’t go well, and maintaining the mindset to show up as best we can as life unfolds.

That’s what mindsight can offer: the ability to know your own mind, as well as the mind of another. For

You can address family expectations about laundry and room maintenance later, when she can really listen.

When we define our kids like this, using labels or comparisons—or sometimes even diagnoses—to capture and categorize them, we prevent ourselves from really seeing them in the totality of who they are. Yes, we are human and our brains organize the incoming streams of energy flow as concepts and categories. It’s just what our brains do. But part of our challenge is to identify such categories and liberate our own minds from their often constraining impact on how we see our child.

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It’s unlikely that she will feel more at ease if you tell her, “Don’t worry about it—there’s no reason to be nervous.” Yes, we want to reassure our kids, and to be there for them to let them know they’ll be okay. But that’s far different from denying what they’re feeling, and explicitly telling them not to trust their emotions.

You’ve experienced this over and over again, even from the time your children were infants. When your baby saw a new person enter the room, or tripped and fell, he immediately looked to you for a signal as to how to respond. He wanted to know, Should I be afraid right now? Am I safe? And based on how you reacted, he learned how to gauge his own reaction—both in his behavior and in how his emotions were shaped and expressed. This interaction is called “social referencing,” and it represents the very beginning of your child’s development into an emotionally aware human. He’s seeing you.

The point is that our kids learn to interpret fairly precisely how we feel not only about how safe the world at large is, but also how we feel when they communicate their emotions. They might get the repeated message that we truly see them and want to know how they feel—including when their feelings are negative or even scary—and that we will show up emotionally, regardless of how they feel. Or, maybe we communicate just the opposite.

It’s about making them feel free to share their feelings, even the big and scary ones that threaten to overwhelm them.

When we dismiss or minimize or blame or shame our kids because of their emotions, we prevent them from showing us who they are.

Shame powerfully impedes the act of seeing.

It is, ironically, “safer” to believe that the reason your needs are not being met is because there is something wrong with you, rather than that your parents—whom you depend on for your very survival—are actually not dependable.

In fact, research shows that a frequent experience of shame during childhood correlates with a significantly higher likelihood of anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges.

Of course there are times when we need to challenge our kids to do more than they realize they can do. We don’t want them to miss out on the fun of a water slide simply because they’re nervous, or to skip a whole soccer season because they feel anxious about going to the first practice. That’s not what it means to see and support them. Likewise, we want to be realistic. Seeing a child means being aware of both strengths and weaknesses. So when you observe skills your child needs to work on—whether it’s patience, manners, impulse control, empathy, or something else—the loving thing to do is to give them practice in those areas.

Again, this isn’t about coddling them or never asking them to try something new or go beyond what feels comfortable. The point is to allow them to show us what they’re really feeling, so we can be present to their experience and help them deal with the big emotions threatening to take them over. It’s about seeing them for who they really are.

We can learn a great deal about our kids simply by slowing down and observing them. Seeing openly is made more likely when we challenge categories of understanding.

FBA

taking an attitude of curiosity rather than immediate judgment.

curiosity is key. It’s one of the most important tools a caring parent can use.

a large percentage of what babies and young children do is part of an instinctual drive to learn and explore.

we encourage parents to “chase the why” behind kids’ behavior.

as we keep saying, children definitely need boundaries, and it’s our job to teach them what’s okay and what’s not.

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we’ll be much more effective disciplinarians (teachers) if we can curiously chase the why and determine exactly what’s going on in the child’s mind and where the behavior came from in the first place.