Quotes from Daniel J. Siegel

Simply put, reactivity cuts off seeing clearly.

The key here is that when your child is drowning in a right-brain emotional flood, you'll do yourself (and your child) a big favor if you connect before you redirect.

Rather than trying to shelter our children from life's inevitable difficulties, we can help them integrate those experiences into their understanding of the world and learn from them. How our kids make sense of their young lives is not only about what happens to them but also about how their parents, teachers, and other caregivers respond.

Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children's pain or make things worse. Actually, telling the story is often exactly what children need, both to make sense of the event and to move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened.

A colleague and friend, Jack Kornfield, has a great way of thinking about this important process: Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past. In this way, we forgive not to condone, not to say it was fine, but to let go of false illusions that we can change the past.

Many parents these days, however, are learning that discipline will be much more respectful—and, yes, effective—if they initiate a collaborative, reciprocal, bidirectional dialogue, rather than delivering a monologue.

Engage, don't enrage.

Grief allows you to let go of something you've lost only when you begin to accept what you now have in its place.

You don't have to get stuck in a negative experience. You don't have to be a victim to external events, or internal emotions. You can use your mind to take charge of how you feel, and how you act.

Trying to change how we actually feel by ordering ourselves to do so is a strategy that goes nowhere, fast.

behavior is communication.

attachment figure—someone who provides a safe haven where the other can be deeply seen and feel safe and secure. At other times we are the expert on the mind, and perhaps on the brain and relationships too, and on the notion of health and unhealth, ease and disease. Yet our patients are also experts in their own right, deeply knowledgeable in other domains. Our patients are certainly expert in being themselves.

Reduce words Embrace emotions Describe, don't preach Involve your child in the discipline Reframe a no into a conditional yes Emphasize the positive Creatively approach the situation Teach mindsight tools

I'm too angry to have a helpful conversation right now, so I'm going to take some time to calm down, and then we'll talk in a bit.

There's no question about it: consistency is crucial when it comes to raising and disciplining our children.

Part of truly loving our kids, and giving them what they need, means offering them clear and consistent boundaries, creating predictable structure in their lives, as well as having high expectations for them.

Children need to understand the way the world works: what's permissible and what's not.

Physically and genetically, our brains may not have evolved much in the last forty thousand years—but our minds have. A baby born today would be much the same as a baby born tens of thousands of years ago. But if we were able to compare the intricate neural structure of an adult brain in today's modern society with that of an adult brain from forty thousand years ago, we'd find huge differences.

the changes during adolescence are not something to just get through; they are qualities we actually need to hold on to in order to live a full and meaningful life in adulthood.

When your children are feeling upset, a loving touch can calm things down and help you connect, even during moments of high stress.

Rules about respect and behavior aren't thrown out the window simply because a child's left hemisphere is disengaged. For example, whatever behavior is inappropriate in your family—being disrespectful, hurting someone, throwing things—should remain off-limits even in moments of high emotion.

They need to know what our expectations are, and how we will respond if they break (or even bend) agreed-upon rules.

What you practice with intention creates a repeated state that will then become a trait that can work in the background without your effort or conscious energy.

We want our kids to expect that their needs can be understood and consistently met. But we don't want our kids to expect that their desires and whims will always be met.