![]() ![]() Siegel gave for helping out kids with mental integration, I particularly liked the idea of "Connect and Redirect." This recognizes that when our kids are in a "right brain" state, dominated by emotion and physicality, trying to address them in a "left brain" mode with words and reason won't work. Healthy mind parenting tip: connect and redirect I like this image of well-being, and think it will be useful for helping me work through my own low points, as well as my son’s. He described what it's like when we're in a state of mental integration using the acronym FACES: Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, Stable. Siegel believes that all difficulties of the mind, whether severe disturbances such as schizophrenia or something as common as an episode of road rage, can be understood as a failure of integration that leads us to become chaotic, rigid or to oscillate between these extremes. The banks represent extremes that our minds fall into when we're not doing well.ĭr. The healthy, flowing state in the middle is flexible, coherent and integrated. Siegal offered an image of mental health as a flowing river, bounded on one side by rigidity and on the other by chaos. This is a powerful idea because it means that we’re not doomed to replay past patterns, and that even if we ourselves suffered from insecure attachment as children, we can provide secure attachment to our own kids. Siegel covers this idea in depth in his book Parenting from the Inside Out. If our kids are showing signs of insecure attachment, doing our own work on our own past may actually be the best place to start to address the issue. The key for us as parents is to have developed a coherent narrative of our own upbringing. Siegel emphasized that all parents can have a secure attachment with their children, regardless of what their own childhood experiences were like. The 4 “S”s are tools that can work with our kids up through adolescence. I like this summary because it provides tools and ideas that stretch beyond the core “attachment parenting” ideas that are common for infants (“baby-wearing,” co-sleeping, breast-feeding, responsiveness to crying, etc.).
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