Dr. Dan Siegel on Conscious Parenting

Erik Lenderman opened the session by welcoming listeners to A Psychology of the Future, the online summit he hosts, and introduced his guest for the day, Dr. Daniel Siegel. Siegel earned his medical degree at Harvard and did his postgraduate training at UCLA, covering pediatrics along with child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry. He has spent years studying mindfulness and developing clinical approaches around it, and he has written widely on how to raise children with intelligence, compassion, and awareness.

Asked to describe the arc of his work, where it started and where it was heading, Siegel traced it back to medical school. His first real interest took shape in pediatrics, where he kept asking how adults might help children grow well. That question followed him into psychiatry and then child psychiatry, and eventually pushed him toward research on the way a parent's interactions with a child shape the child's development.

Along that path he found himself collaborating with scientists from fields that rarely sit at the same table. He wanted to pull together everything he was being taught, so he drew on math and physics, chemistry and biology, psychology and sociology, linguistics and anthropology. The range ran from the abstract and mathematical all the way over to the cultural and social.

What he was after was a single way of looking at human development and human experience that could hold all of those angles at once. That effort has a name. It emerged in the early 1990s and is called interpersonal neurobiology, and Siegel described it as a framework for letting science inform ordinary life. A parent, for instance, can take what research has uncovered and put it to practical use while raising a child.

He also spoke briefly about how he shares the work. Much of it is written for professionals: he founded and edits a Norton series in the field that now runs to more than three dozen textbooks. Outside that series he has produced books for undergraduate and graduate courses as well as books written directly for parents.