…h us the best way to get our needs met. As neuropsychologist and author of Parenting from the Inside Out, Dr. Daniel Siegel puts it, “From the moment we are born we must work for a living.” A mother who doesn’t respond to our cries can teach us that staying quiet is the ideal strategy to get her to care for us. A father who is intermittently available, sometimes dousing us with affection and other times disappearing, teaches us we need to cling to…
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…g power, control, or fear. While standards for behavior are important, the parenting question is how to help my child express sadness, fear, disappointment, or anger without becoming hostile. Focusing on how a child “should” behave or insisting that a teen “can’t talk to me that way” is frankly inaccurate. The truth is no matter what rules are set, expectations held, or punishments given, it is the child’s self-control that is the issue. In the ab…
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…ith at least one primary caregiver in order for their social and emotional development to occur normally. Without this attachment, they will suffer serious psychological and social impairment. During the first two years, how the parents or caregivers respond to their infants, particularly during times of distress, establishes the types of patterns of attachment their children form. These patterns will go on to guide the child’s feelings, thoughts…
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…defended, negative side of our personality that is opposed to our ongoing development. The voice consists of the negative thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that oppose our best interests and diminish our self-esteem. It encourages and strongly influences self-defeating and self-destructive behavior. This hostile, judgmental advisor also warns us about other people, promoting angry and cynical attitudes toward others and creating a negative, pessimi…
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…defended, negative side of our personality that is opposed to our ongoing development. The voice consists of the negative thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that oppose our best interests and diminish our self-esteem. Acknowledging what you are grateful goes directly against the voice. Focusing on the positive circumstances and personal interactions that are enhancing your life weakens the voice’s attacks on you. It defuses the angry and cynical att…
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…lusion of omnipotence by focusing on death as something that is avoidable. Developmental psychologists have established that a mature cognitive understanding of death occurs around the age of 9-10, but prior to that children do not recognize that death is inevitable. Young children think of death as only occurring due to accidental or violent causes and therefore as something that can be avoided through proper vigilance (look both ways before cros…
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…ity can come from our early attachment style. Dr. Daniel Siegel, author of Parenting from the Inside Out, says the key to healthy attachment is in the four S’s, feeling safe, seen, soothed and secure. Whether children are being shamed or praised, they are, most likely, not feeling seen by the parent for who they really are. They may start to feel insecurity and lose a sense of their actual abilities. A healthy attitude for parents to maintain is t…
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…es of a desperate few. The increase of killing sprees, the availability of guns, the chemical imbalance of brains, and the rampant use—as well as abuse—of medications are but symptoms of a much wider problem that is rarely, if ever, addressed in media outlets, and that is the problem of psychological polarization. Psychological polarization is the elevation of one point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view and it pervades our…
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…was maybe a kind of exaggeration of some of the very strict, rather aloof parenting practices that were in the culture. And that may have also contributed to this growing need, this desperate need to design one’s entire cultural and individual life style around avoiding a sense of invisibility before life, before existence. An entire world design to avoid a realization that at some level, we’re nothing. We’re decaying. We’re a speck. So you can s…
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…the face of death. In a lively and candid style, Dr. Solomon discusses the development of Terror Management Theory, the ways in which people form defenses against death anxiety and the concept of life affirming death awareness, arguing that we can “accept the reality of the human condition and parlay that into bringing out the best in us. ” He also addresses the societal effects of death awareness, including the social nature of human beings, the…
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