Dr. Dan Siegel on Conscious Parenting
The whole point of writing these books was to pull from several fields at once and answer a practical question for parents: what can I do to understand myself first? The science of attachment points there. When you grasp who you are, you can offer your child the sort of experiences that let them grow well. The first book came out of that idea. I wrote it with Mary Hartzell, who ran my daughter's preschool, and we called it "Parenting from the Inside Out."
What that book does is take the research on attachment and bring it down to the level of everyday life. It asks parents to look at how their own history shaped them, how they became who they are. Do that work, and you can loosen the grip of the less-than-ideal experiences you lived through. You arrive at something researchers call a coherent self-understanding, and it happens to be the strongest predictor we have of how securely a child will attach to you. That was the first of four parenting books I've written, some on my own and some with colleagues.
Erik asked a direct question: what can parents actually take from a conversation like this and use with their kids, right from birth?
I had been chewing on that same question for years, partly because I was raising children while a lot of this research was unfolding. As a father I kept asking what our family could pull from the science and put into practice. As a clinician I asked what I could hand to the parents I worked with. As a teacher I asked what was worth passing along. The clearest take-home message is this: if you only start in one place, start by reflecting on your own past.
The reason is counterintuitive. What determines how we treat our children isn't the events of our childhood themselves. It's whether we've made sense of those events. Say some painful things happened to me. If I never turn back and ask how they affected me, how they felt, what they did to the way I developed, then I'm leaving them unexamined. That reflecting, the looking back and sorting through, is what I mean by making sense.
The research is fairly blunt about the stakes. Without that process, I'm likely to hand my children the same difficulties that were handed to me. With it, even a brutal history stops being a sentence passed down the generations. Making sense of what happened frees you from repeating it.
So the practical first step, and the reason I opened my parenting writing with "Parenting from the Inside Out," is to go through your history with some care. Sort out the parts that helped you, the parts that were neutral, the parts that hurt. See the full picture rather than a selected version of it. That's what the research suggests is the best move, and it's open to any parent raising a child.