Quotes from Daniel J. Siegel

As interns we attempted to avoid the overwhelming awareness of the patients' passive, helpless, and vulnerable experience by identifying ourselves only as active, empowered, and invulnerable medical workers. The child's vulnerability became a threat to our active but nonconscious effort to avoid our feelings of vulnerability and helplessness. In retrospect, the children's vulnerability became the enemy.

descubrimiento de que el cerebro en realidad es «dúctil», o moldeable. Eso significa que el cerebro cambia físicamente a lo largo de toda nuestra vida, y no sólo en la infancia, como antes suponíamos.

Reparar el daño causado

the inappropriate use of what we can call "punishment time-outs" frequently just makes children angrier and more dysregulated, leaving them even less able to control themselves or think about what they've done.

Think back about the functions of the upstairs brain: good decision making, control over emotions and body, flexibility, empathy, self-understanding, and morality. These are the aspects of our kids' character we want to develop, right? As we put it in The Whole-Brain Child, we want to engage the upstairs brain, rather than enraging the downstairs brain. Engage, don't enrage.

research is really clear on this point. Kids who achieve the best outcomes in life—emotionally, relationally, and even educationally—have parents who raise them with a high degree of connection and nurturing, while also communicating and maintaining clear limits and high expectations.

music we hear, the people we love, the books we read, the kind of discipline we receive, the emotions we feel—profoundly affects the way our brain develops.

What's even more exciting is what happens after we appeal to the upstairs brain. When it gets engaged repeatedly, it becomes strong. Neurons that fire together wire together.

Learning this skill of distinguishing awareness from that which you are aware of will enable you to expand the container of consciousness and empower you to "taste" so much more than just a salty glass of water.

In general, our windows of tolerance determine how comfortable we feel with specific memories, issues, emotions, and bodily sensations. Within our window of tolerance we remain receptive; outside of it we become reactive.

If the sponge (mirror) neurons are our receiver, then our subcortical areas are the amplifier. These subcortical shifts are what changes in us when we attune to someone else.

Recordemos que son muchas las maneras de malcriar a los hijos —darles demasiadas cosas, rescatarlos de toda situación difícil, privarles de cualquier oportunidad para afrontar el fracaso y la decepción—, pero darles demasiado amor o atención no es una de ellas.

Simply by drawing your child's attention to other people's emotions during everyday encounters, you can open up whole new levels of compassion within them and exercise their upstairs brain. Scientists are beginning more and more to think

Mindsight is a teachable skill at the heart of being empathic and insightful, moral and compassionate. Mindsight is the basis of social and emotional intelligence, and we can model this for our children as we help guide the development of their changing brains.

we parent, and especially when we discipline, we need to work hard to understand our children's points of view, their developmental stage, and what they are ultimately capable of.

do we want to teach our kids that the way to resolve a conflict is to inflict physical pain, particularly on someone who is defenseless and cannot fight back?

We don't simply react to their external actions, we tune in to the mind behind the behavior.

this posterior firing of maps of the body represents a primary cortical representation and may involve the parietal lobe—a region that may turn out to play an important role in self-awareness and a sense of identity (for further

WHAT IS INTEGRATION AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? Most of us don't think about the fact that our brain has many different parts with different jobs. For example, you have a left side of

when kids learn even the fundamentals of playing piano, their brains develop differently from the brains of kids who don't, so they can more fully understand their own bodies in relationship to the objects around them.

La mente en desarrollo: cómo interactúan las relaciones y el cerebro para modelar nuestro ser.

cuando un niño está alterado, la lógica no suele surtir efecto hasta que hayamos respondido a las necesidades emocionales del cerebro derecho.

What we can do is help our children make sense of their experiences so that those challenges will more likely be encoded in the brain consciously as "learning experiences," rather than unconscious associations or even traumas that limit them in the future.

I know you're sad, and I understand that you want to ride with me. I would like that, too. But we can't make that work today. Would you like to climb in or would you like Daddy to help you get in the car now? Daddy will be with you to comfort you on the way to school. I love you and I'll see you this afternoon." And with that, the front-porch situation ended, with Tim holding a crying Nina as he carried her to his car.