Parenting from the Inside Out
How parents' reflection on their own attachment shapes how they raise secure children.
Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell have quite deftly managed to translate highly complex neuroscientific and psychological matters into lay strategies for effective parenting.
Daniel J. Siegel, a child psychiatrist working in interpersonal neurobiology, and Mary Hartzell, an early childhood educator, set out how a parent's own attachment history shapes daily interaction with a child. They argue that the strongest predictor of a child's security is not what happened to the parent but how far the parent has come to make sense of it, arriving at a coherent account of early life. Unexamined experience, they hold, surfaces as reactive states that disrupt attuned contact.
The book links adult attachment research and studies of memory and the developing brain to ordinary parenting moments: rupture and repair, contingent communication, and the reflective stance Siegel calls mindsight. For a clinician, it offers a clear model of how internal working models pass between generations, and language for helping parents observe their own reactions. It first appeared in 2003; the anniversary edition followed in 2013.
About the authors
Daniel Siegel
Daniel J. Siegel is an American physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Trained in pediatrics and in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry, he founded the approach he calls interpersonal neurobiology and serves as director of education at the Mindsight Institute. He is founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology and the author of many books, among them The Developing Mind, Mindsight, Brainstorm, and Aware. He was a founding co-director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.
Mary Hartzell
Mary Hartzell is an American child development specialist and parent educator. She received her master's degree in early childhood education and psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). For more than thirty years she has taught children, parents, and teachers, and she directs the First Presbyterian Preschool of Santa Monica, California. She is known as co-author, with the psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, of "Parenting from the Inside Out," which links a parent's self-understanding to the way they raise children.
Details
- 2003
- TarcherPerigee
- TarcherPerigee
- 336
- 9780399165108