The New Approach: Interpersonal Neurobiology
In my work with clients, we always talk, at least a little bit, about Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPN) and basic understandings of it can make parenting soooo much easier.
Dr. Dan Siegel, a Harvard trained physician, author, speaker, professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, and co-founding director of The Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, has pioneered this area of study, and his findings been nothing short of pivotal in informing how we now view best practices in parenting — and how we can better understand child development, psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, recovery from trauma, and more.
Through studying IPN, we now know that the way parents interact with their children shapes child brain development, child behavior, and child mental health (including self-confidence and self-esteem). We now know that the way parents respond when children ask questions, make mistakes, express fears and joys, and engage in plain-old everyday conversation informs how children perceive themselves, their abilities, other people, and many of their deepest belief systems.
The parent-child relationship - which includes how you interact with your child, how they respond to this, and how they interact with you, and how you respond to that, and the felt emotional sense that takes place for both - hugely influences how children act, feel, learn, rest, play; and ultimately, how they conceptualize themselves and the world around them.
Several key components should be present in a healthy parent-child relationship, and one is that it is crucial that children have a voice. Children need their thoughts and feelings to be valued and heard. They also need their parents to model healthy behavior for them and to demonstrate how to handle challenging emotions. Children also need to be treated with fairness and kindness. Limit-setting is important, and children need this to be done in a consistent, fair, predictable, balanced way.
In thinking about the relationship you have with your child, ask yourself: What are the qualities you would use to describe it?
Is it: Tense? Light? Easy? Stressful? Consistent? Inconsistent? Steady? Volatile? Joyful? Threatening? Balanced? Playful? Fun? Serious?
The purpose here is to think, objectively, about how would it feel to be the child in the relationship you currently have with him or her.
What we learn through the study of IPN is that how a child experiences his/her experiences with their parent informs them about who they are. A child will draw conclusions about him/herself based on the relationship dynamic he/she has with you.
If a child is always in trouble, he or she might believe that he/she is “bad.” A child who is constantly praised may believe that he or she is really, really good. A child who is not picked up on time from school on a regular basis may believe that he or she is not important or not valuable.
These are simplified examples, but the main point here is to see that children will interpret what happens, and they will internalize it. How they internalize it deeply impacts many facets of their development.
Parent-child interactions literally shape how children view themselves, you, the world around them, and their own abilities (self/confidence/self-esteem).
The important news here is that you have a lot of power. What you do deeply matters. When you set limits in fair and kind ways, (when you treat kids, in general, in fair and kind ways), when connection is in tact, when you can attune, when the two-way-street is bidirectional, and when you handle resistance and upset in emotionally fair and intelligent ways - this has a deeply positive effect that can benefit your child in the present and for years to come.
More good news is that children are resilient. “Repair work” can be deeply effective, in case there are hurts or misunderstandings, at present. There is plenty of reason to believe relationships can be mended and can heal.