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

by Daniel J. Siegel

how self-understanding influences the approach you bring to your role as a parent.

a child’s security of attachment to parents is very

strongly connected to the parents’ understanding of their own early-life experiences.

The way we communicate with our children has a profound impact on how they develop.

Our ability to have sensitive, reciprocal communication nurtures a child’s sense of security, and these trusting secure relationships help children do well in many areas of their lives. Our ability to communicate effectively in creating security in our children is most strongly predicted by our having made sense of the events of our own early life.

Making sense of our life enables us to understand and integrate our own childhood experiences, positive o...

as part of our ongoing life story. We can’t change what happened to us as children but we can change the w...

By freeing ourselves from the constraints of our past, we can offer our children the spontaneous and connecting relationships that enable them to thrive. By deepening our ability to understand our own emotional experience, we are better able to relate empathically with our children and promote their self-understanding and healthy development.

In the absence of reflection, history often repeats itself, and parents are vulnerable to passing on to their children unhealthy patterns from the past.

By making sense of our lives we can deepen a capacity for self-understanding and bring coherence to our emotional experience, our views of the world, and our interactions with our children.

Parent-child relationships offer one very important part of the early experience that directly shapes a child’s emerging personality. Emotional intelligence, self-esteem, cognitive abilities, and social skills are built on this early attachment relationship. How parents have reflected on their lives directly shapes the nature of that relationship.

children who have had a positive connection in life have a source of resilience for dealing with life’s challenges.

When we are mindful, we live in the present moment and are aware of our own thoughts and feelings and also are open to those of our children.

The ability to stay present with clarity within ourselves allows us to be fully present with others and to respect each person’s individual experience.

Children learn about themselves by the way we communicate with them. When we are preoccupied with the past or worried about the future, we are physically present with our children but are mentally absent.

Being mindful as a parent means having intention in your actions. With intention, you purposefully choose your behavior with your child’s emotional well-being in mind. Children can readily detect intention and thrive when there is purposeful interaction with their parents. It is within our children’s emotional connections with us that they develop a deeper sense of themselves and a capacity for relating.

If you approach such challenges as a burden, parenting can become an unpleasant chore.

Having the attitude that you can learn throughout your life enables you to approach parenting with an open mind, as a journey of discovery.

Experience shapes neural connections in the brain. Therefore, experience shapes the mind. Interpersonal relationships and self-reflection foster the ongoing growth of the mind:

being a parent offers us an opportunity to continue to learn as we reflect on our experiences from new and ever-evolving points of view. Parenting also gives us the opportunity to create an attitude of openness in our children as we nurture their curiosity and support their ongoing explorations of the world. The complex and often challenging interactions of parenting give us the opportunity to create new possibilities for the growth and development of our children and ourselves.

Response flexibility is the ability of the mind to sort through a wide variety of mental processes, such as impulses, ideas, and feelings, and come up with a thoughtful, nonautomatic response. Rather than merely automatically reacting to a situation, an individual can reflect and intentionally choose an appropriate direction of action.

Response flexibility is the opposite of a “knee-jerk reaction.” It involves the capacity to delay gratification and to inhibit impulsive behaviors. This ability is a cornerstone of emotional maturity and compassionate relationships.

When tired, hungry, frustrated, disappointed, or angered, we can lose the ability to be reflective and become limited in our capacity to choose our behaviors. We may be swept up in our own emotions and lose perspective. At these times, we can no longer think clearly and are at high risk of overreacting and causing distress to our children.

Parents can learn how to achieve this balance and nurture flexibility in their children by modeling flexible responses in their own interactions. When we are flexible, we have a choice about what behaviors to enact and what parental approach and values to support. We have the ability to be proactive and not just reactive.

Response flexibility enables us to contain a wide array of emotions and to think through how we will respond after we consider another’s point of view. When parents have the ability to respond with flexibility to their children, it is more likely that their children will develop flexibility as well.

Mindsight is the ability to perceive our own minds and the minds of others.

Mindsight depends upon the ability of the mind to create mental symbols of the mind itself. This ability allows us to focus on the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sensations, memories, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions of others as well as of ourselves. These are the basic elements of the mind that we can perceive and use to understand our children and ourselves.

Talking with children about their thoughts, memories, and feelings provides them with the essential interpersonal experiences necessary for self-understanding and building their social skills.

The nonverbal messages of eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, gestures, body posture, and the timing and intensity of response are also extremely important elements of communication. These nonverbal signals may reveal our internal processes more directly than our words.

Enjoying your child and sharing in the awe of discovering what it means to be alive, to be a person in a wondrous world, is crucial for the development of your child’s positive sense of self. When we are respectful and compassionate toward ourselves and our children, we often gain a fresh perspective that can enrich our enjoyment of life together.

When parents feel pressure in their busy lives, they may often feel strained to keep up with all the details of managing family schedules.

Children need to be enjoyed and valued, not managed.

We often focus on the problems of life rather than on the possibilities for enjoyment and learning available to us. When we are too busy doing things for our children, we forget how important it is to simply be with them. We can delight in the opportunity to join with our children in the amazing experience of growing together. Learning...

When we become a parent, we bring with us issues from our own past that influence the way we parent our children. Experiences that are not fully processed may create unresolved and leftover issues that influence how we react to our children.

When this happens our responses toward our children often take the form of strong emotional reactions, impulsive behaviors, distortions in our perceptions, or sensations in our bodies. These intense states of mind impair our ability to think clearly and remain flexible and affect our interactions and relationships with our children. At these times, we’re not acting like the parent we want to be and are often left wondering why this role of parenting sometimes seems to “bring out the worst in us.”

To our role of parenting we bring our own emotional baggage, which can unpredictably interfere in our relationship with our children. Leftover issues or unresolved trauma and loss involve significant themes from the past that stem from repeated experiences early in life that were difficult and emotionally significant. These issues, especially if we have not reflected on them and integrated them into our self-understanding, can continue to affect us in the present. For example, if your mother often left the house without saying

Self-understanding can pave the way to resolve these leftover issues. Leftover issues often affect our parenting and cause us and our children needless frustration and conflict.

Unresolved issues are similar to leftover issues, but they are more extreme, involving a more disorganizing influence on both our internal lives and our interpersonal relationships. Experiences that were profoundly overwhelming and may have involved a deep sense of helplessness, despair, loss, terror, and perhaps betrayal are often at the root of unresolved conditions.

Separation may continue to create anxiety and affect the child’s ability to have a healthy separation from her own child later in life. As a parent she may also have difficulty connecting to her child, since her own attachment was broken abruptly and she received no support.

When the child becomes a parent without the opportunity to process these events and make sense of these frightening early experiences, emotional,

behavioral, perceptual, and bodily memories may continue to intrude on her life. These unresolved issues can profoundly im...

Several factors make the retrieval of a certain memory more likely. These include the associations linked to the memory, the theme or gist of the experience, the phase of life of the person who is remembering, and the interpersonal context and the individual’s state of mind at the time of encoding and at recall.

There is often a reason why traumatic experiences are not processed in a way that makes them readily available for later retrieval. During the trauma, an adaptation to survive can include the focusing of attention away from the horrifying aspects of an experience.

Also, it may be that excessive stress and hormonal secretion during a trauma directly impair the functioning of parts of the brain necessary for autobiographical memories to be stored.

After the trauma, recollection of those details encoded in only nonverbal form will likely evoke distressful emotio...

As interns we attempted to avoid the overwhelming awareness of the patients’ passive, helpless, and vulnerable experience by identifying ourselves only as active, empowered, and invulnerable medical workers.

The child’s vulnerability became a threat to our active but nonconscious effort to avoid our feelings of vulnerability and helplessness. In retrospect, the children’s vulnerability became the enemy. There was often little we could do to cure their devastating illnesses, and our inability to help them added to the overwhelming sense of sadness and despair that we felt. We were fighting against disease, fighting the existential reality of death and despair during that relentless and sleepless year. Helplessness had to become the furthest thing from our conscious minds or we would have collapsed. Vulnerability became the target of our anger toward the villain of disease we could not conquer.

Even with love and the best of intentions, we may be filled with old defenses that make our children’s experiences intolerable to us. This may be the origin of “parental ambivalence.” When their lives provoke the intolerable emotion in us, our inability to be aware of it consciously and to make sense of it in our own lives leaves us at risk of being unable to tolerate it in our children. This intolerance can take the form of becoming blind to or ignoring our children’s emotions, which gives them a sense of unreality and disconnects them from their own feelings. Or our intolerance may lead to a more assertive act such as irritability or an outright though not consciously intended attack on the child’s emotional state of vulnerability and helplessness. Then, the unsuspecting child becomes the recipient of hostile responses that become woven into his internal sense of identity and directly

impair his ability to tolerate those very same emotions in himself.

By understanding ourselves we give our children the chance to develop their own sense of vitality and the freedom to experience their own emotional worlds without restrictions and fear.