Quotes from Daniel J. Siegel

While the days of parenting may seem so long, the years are so short.

Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioural consequences.

Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235)

Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like.

Writing in a journal activates the narrator function of our minds. Studies have suggested that simply writing down our account of a challenging experience can lower physiological reactivity and increase our sense of well-being, even if we never show what we've written to anyone else.

We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves. (p. 221)

At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.

For "full" emotional communication, one person needs to allow his state of mind to be influenced by that of the other.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.

Our state of mind can turn even neutral comments into fighting words, distorting what we hear to fit what we fear.

Inviting our thoughts and feelings into awareness allows us to learn from them rather than be driven by them.

Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people's feelings more fully.

Loss of someone we love cannot be adequately expressed with words. Grappling with loss, struggling with disconnection and despair, fills us with a sense of anguish and actual pain. Indeed, the parts of our brain that process physical pain overlap with the neural centers that record social ruptures and rejection. Loss rips us apart.

Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows.

For a child or an adult, it's extremely powerful to hear someone say, "I get you. I understand. I see why you feel this way." This kind of empathy disarms us.

It's also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child's feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It's vital that we treat them as such in our response.

Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one's own intention.

As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children. Another

One of the key practical lessons of modern neuroscience is that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain's firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself.

Say yes to the feelings, even as you say no to the behavior.

Integration is not the same as blending. Integration requires that we maintain elements of our differentiated selves while also promoting our linkage. Becoming a part of a "we: does not mean losing a "me." Integration as a focus of intervention among a range of domains of integration becomes the fundamental basis for how we apply interpersonal neurobiology principles to the nurturing of healthy relationships.

The best predictor of a child's security of attachment is not what happened to his parents as children, but rather how his parents made sense of those childhood experiences.

Effective discipline means that we're not only stopping a bad behavior or promoting a good one, but also teaching skills and nurturing the connections in our children's brains that will help them make better decisions and handle themselves well in the future.

Adolescents who are absorbing negative messages about who they are and what is expected of them may sink to that level instead of realizing their true potential. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.