Healthy mind parenting tip: connect and redirect

I like this image of well-being, and think it will be useful for helping me work through my own low points, as well as my son’s. He described what it's like when we're in a state of mental integration using the acronym FACES: Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, Stable. Siegel believes that all difficulties of the mind, whether severe disturbances such as schizophrenia or something as common as an episode of road rage, can be understood as a failure of integration that leads us to become chaotic, rigid or to oscillate between these extremes. The banks represent extremes that our minds fall into when we're not doing well.ĭr. The healthy, flowing state in the middle is flexible, coherent and integrated. Siegal offered an image of mental health as a flowing river, bounded on one side by rigidity and on the other by chaos. This is a powerful idea because it means that we’re not doomed to replay past patterns, and that even if we ourselves suffered from insecure attachment as children, we can provide secure attachment to our own kids. Siegel covers this idea in depth in his book Parenting from the Inside Out. If our kids are showing signs of insecure attachment, doing our own work on our own past may actually be the best place to start to address the issue. The key for us as parents is to have developed a coherent narrative of our own upbringing. Siegel emphasized that all parents can have a secure attachment with their children, regardless of what their own childhood experiences were like. The 4 “S”s are tools that can work with our kids up through adolescence. I like this summary because it provides tools and ideas that stretch beyond the core “attachment parenting” ideas that are common for infants (“baby-wearing,” co-sleeping, breast-feeding, responsiveness to crying, etc.). Secure - we help them develop an internalized sense of well-being.Soothed - we help them deal with difficult emotions and situations.Safe - we avoid actions and responses that frighten or hurt them.It means perceiving them deeply and empathically - sensing the mind behind their behavior, with what Dr. Seen - this is not just seeing with the eyes.Siegel said that we can foster secure attachment if we remember the following 4 'S's. Fostering secure attachment with the four “S's'Īs parents, Dr. How we treat our kids socially and emotionally impacts them physically. This was interesting to me because it linked how children relate to their caregivers to the actual structure of their brains, not just learned habits of behavior. What research demonstrates is that the PFC is strengthened in children who have patterns of secure attachment. It gives us the ability to be emotionally balanced and self-aware, responsive instead of reactive, intentional with our bodies, empathic and intuitive. The pre-frontal cortex (PFC) is the part of our brain that is responsible for integrating all the others. Siegel began with a discussion of brain anatomy. Brain anatomy and the role of the pre-frontal cortexĭr. I highly recommend the book for a more in-depth treatment of these topics. It felt like a semester long course packed into an hour and a half, so, rather than try to repeat that pace here, I will just pass on a few points that stood out for me. It was a wonderful and inspiring presentation, and a bit overwhelming. Siegel covered a wide range of topics, from brain anatomy to the nature of what we call 'mind,' from the definition of mental health to nine different practical applications of the latest brain research to parenting. The topic was his recent book, The Whole Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind.ĭr. Dan Siegel gave the inaugural public lecture for the new “Mindful Living and Practice” initiative at the University of Washington's Center for Child and Family Well-Being.

Siegel middle school