Copyright
2012 by More Than Sound LLC - All Rights Reserved
Published by More Than Sound LLC
Northampton MA
Better Parents, Better Spouses, Better People / Daniel Goleman / Daniel Siegel
1st Digital Edition / transcribed from the Wired to Connect Audio Series
ISBN 978-1-934441-23-7
Daniel Goleman: I’m here in the Berkshires with my good friend Daniel Siegel, who came out to give a presentation nearby, and agreed to join me for a conversation about the ways in which his work and my work intersect. When I wrote Emotional Intelligence and then again with Social Intelligence I found myself going to Dan’s work and finding it a pivotal concept for me, because one of my main premises has been that experience sculpts the brain, particularly in childhood, and that we need to be thoughtful, we need to be effective, and we need to be productive in how we interact with children – as parents, as teachers, or as grandparents. How we interact with a child really does matter, not in any given moment so much, but over time, and through repeated patterns. Dan, your work has been so seminal in making both the scientific and the clinical case for this. So my first question for you is, for a child, how does experience sculpt the brain?
Daniel Siegel: First let me say Dan, it’s a pleasure to be here with you, and I appreciate being here in the Berkshires, because a lot of my development from my childhood emerged not so far from here, when I was a medical student in Boston at Harvard. One of my father figures in medical school, a fellow named Tom Whitfield, helped me grow up and really influenced my own development. As a pediatrician, he taught me that the root to caring for people was to really care about them, and when I became a child psychiatrist I think I took those lessons I learned here and really was interested in exploring how the things that we do as parents (because now I have two children, and I know you have two as well) how does what we do really influence them? So, I tried to draw on science to answer that question, and in integrating a number of different perspectives from actual research, was able to put together a picture that shows that the way that we as parents tune into the internal world of our children shapes the way their minds develop.
You can actually look at functions in the brain to show, in fact, these experiences we provide as parents actually shape the brain in particular ways that allow a child to balance their emotions, to connect with other people in an open and receptive way, and even to meet their own intellectual potential. So in all those different developmental paths: social, emotional and cognitive – parents influence children. What’s exciting now is to try and get that information out there, because one of the findings which really blew my mind was as an attachment research fellow, I came across the work of Mary Main at UC Berkeley, who found that the best predictor of how parents would treat their children wasn’t so much what happened to the parents in their own childhood, which is what a lot of people say, but it’s actually how the parents have made sense of what happened to them in childhood. That difference is really important, because no matter what has happened to us in our childhood – if we make sense of it, the research proves that our children can thrive.
Goleman: What do you mean make sense of? Can you give an example – maybe a clinical example?
Siegel: Sure. What the research on attachment shows is that making sense means you turn to your memories to understand what’s happened to you in your past. How it's shaped you in positive ways, in perhaps not-so-positive ways, and that allows you to go beneath those adaptations you’ve made from the past so that you can free yourself from them, because you’ve seen them for what they are: habits of your mind. I’ll give you an example – some people are raised by caregivers who are not tuned into the internal life of their own mind. For example, parents who don’t recognize their emotions, or parents who only respond to their behaviors and don’t look at their intentions.
Let’s say a child’s angry and is starting to throw something. A parent in this situation, instead of saying, "I see your anger and I understand why you’re throwing that object at the door." Instead, they would just give the child a consequence for throwing something at the door and the emotion behind the behavior is not recognized, it’s not seen.
Goleman: So what you’re recommending is that a parent not just deal with a kid who’s naughty, but look at what the child is feeling, and why is he or she being that way right now. And acknowledge that explicitly; say something about it.
Siegel: Exactly. So say a parent could say, "I see you’re angry and I understand that’s why you threw the pencil. Throwing the pencil is not okay. Damaging property is not okay, but let’s talk about your emotion. Let’s talk about it in an intelligent way, in an emotionally intelligent way. Let’s talk about what’s going on inside of you, what’s driving your behavior."
Goleman: But, you wouldn’t say it that way to a kid. You’d say "So why are you mad?" I suppose.
Siegel: You might say, "I see you being angry and I understand that’s why you threw the pencil. Let’s talk about what you’re feeling." You would say it like that, but the only kind of parents who say that, it turns out, are parents who’ve done that for themselves. So, in this case we’re talking about a child raised by someone who doesn’t do that. They themselves develop a kind of disconnection from their own internal world. They don’t have what I call Mindsight, that is, the ability to see their own mind or see the mind of someone else. Mindsight is a term that I had to invent, because in English we didn’t seem to have a word that embraced the idea of insight into your own mind and empathy for understanding another person’s mind. We just didn’t have one word, so when I was writing a book called The Developing Mind I needed something to write so I invented this word Mindsight, meaning you see the mind.