The Power of Showing Up
Argues that consistent parental presence builds secure attachment.
There is parenting magic in this book.
Siegel and Bryson set out a parenting framework organised around four qualities a child needs from a caregiver: to feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure. Written for a general readership, the book translates attachment research and interpersonal neurobiology into repeatable caregiving moves, and it treats security as something built through ordinary repair rather than through never failing the child.
The argument rests on the claim that presence, not performance, does the formative work: a caregiver who reliably returns, attunes, and comforts lays down the internal working models that later regulate emotion and relationship. The authors connect this to research on earned secure attachment, holding that a parent's own history need not be reproduced.
For a clinician, the value is a shared vocabulary for the developmental substrate that patients bring into the consulting room. The Four S's give a compact way to map where early attunement was thin, and to name, in non-technical terms, what a reparative relationship supplies.
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.
Tina Payne Bryson
Tina Payne Bryson is an American psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker (LCSW). She founded and directs the Center for Connection, a mental health clinic in Pasadena, California. A graduate of Baylor University, she earned her PhD at the University of Southern California, where her research addressed attachment, childrearing and interpersonal neurobiology. With Daniel J. Siegel she co-wrote The Whole-Brain Child, No-Drama Discipline and The Yes Brain, works that apply brain science to parenting and child development.
Details
- 2020
- Ballantine Books
- Ballantine Books
- 256
- 9781524797713