Dr. Dan Siegel on Conscious Parenting
When a child falls apart, melts down, pulls inward, or digs into a fight, that behavior is information. It tells you that in this moment your child is caught somewhere between chaos and rigidity. Say she's five, and she's gutted because a friend bailed on a playdate she'd been counting on. What's happening inside her brain right then is the thing to read first.
There's an order to this. Before you do anything with your child, there's the internal work: making sense of yourself, of what this scene stirs up in you, of how upset was handled when you were small and how the people around you treated you then. Tina Bryson and I call that the inside-out approach. It runs quietly in the background. But parents also want something concrete to do with their hands and their voice, and for that we use a phrase from "The Whole-Brain Child" and "No-Drama Discipline": connect and redirect.
Start from the body. Your child lives in one, same as you, and inside that body is a brain. We try to explain how the brain works in plain terms, because when a kid is upset, the brain simply isn't running in a coherent way. That happens to all of us. So the first move is not to correct the behavior, not to distract, not to slip in a lesson. You breathe. Then you connect.
Connecting is partly physical. You get down to your child's level, or even lower, so you're under her eye line rather than looming above her. Hovering over an upset child can make things worse on its own. Dropping down tells her, without words, that you're there to understand what she's feeling. A patient of mine years ago told me that having her feelings actually felt by someone was what let her reach places inside herself she'd never been able to reach before. Feelings felt: that's the whole point of connect.
And then you keep it short. No lecture about why she shouldn't feel this way or why she should. You match your tone and your tempo to hers, because those nonverbal pieces carry as much as the words. Something simple. "Wow, this is really hard." "Ugh, that's so disappointing. Your friend didn't come for the playdate you were so excited about." What you don't do is march in with "Life is serious, a kid skipping a playdate is nothing." That's the move to skip.