A friend linked me this podcast, The Psychology of Parenting with Dan Siegel, and said she thought I’d like it. It’s essentially about how parenting isn’t really about the child, but about learning about oneself. I immediately recognized Dan Siegel’s name. About two years ago, I read a book he co-authored called The Whole Brain Child, and I really liked the overall takeaways of the book; it resonated with me at the time because it discussed what I already believed, which is that who we are is shaped by our past and past experience; based on those past experiences, we can improve ourselves for our children. I was even more intrigued when I later found out that Dan Siegel went into this area of research driven by his own mercurial childhood, with a raging father and and an emotionally avoidant mother. He is on a long, never-ending journey to understanding his past, present, and future!
I listened to the podcast in full today. During the podcast, he goes through high level points of what drives healthy child development, which has been summed up (pretty smartly!) as the “4 S’s,” which I still remember from reading his book:
- Safe: The child feels protected from physical and emotional harm. This includes caregivers avoiding frightening behavior and repairing the relationship after mistakes.
- Seen: The caregiver looks beneath the child’s behavior and tries to understand their feelings, thoughts, and inner experience.
- Soothed: When the child is distressed, the caregiver helps them through it. Over time, this repeated “inter-soothing” helps the child learn to soothe themselves.
- Secure: This develops from consistently feeling safe, seen, and soothed. The child learns, “I can rely on my caregiver, I am worthy of care, and I can handle difficult feelings.”
His takeaway: the key idea is not perfect parenting, but reliably showing up and repairing when things go wrong. In Siegel’s framework, secure attachment grows from the repeated overall pattern—not from preventing every disappointment, conflict, or tantrum.
What I did not write about two years ago but thought a lot about after reading The Whole Brain Child was how the 4 S’s noted here are a summary of everything Ed lacked. He never felt safe from physical or emotional harm, as my parents repeatedly screamed and yelled at him. My mom used to hit him as a child, sometimes for things that weren’t even “wrong.” My dad would roar like a lion in the house and constantly criticize and name call him. There was never any semblance of “repair”: they’d just go about their day as though nothing happened after. Ed frequently told me he felt invisible to our dad. He’d be right in the room and not hear anything he said. Our dad preferred talking to himself than talking to us. To “understand feelings” of one’s own child is a pretty impossible task when our dad could not even understand his own feelings. Our parents rarely “soothed” us; instead when they saw us down, they’d double down and add more doubt, making us feel even worse. Ed never felt like he could rely on my parents to share anything, so even when he got abused by a teacher in elementary school, my parents didn’t find out about it until after he died, when they went through his belongings and read about it in a college essay he wrote.
The truth is that I don’t really think I experienced any of the four S’s with our parents, either, yet I turned out completely differently. And I still think a huge part of this is because I found mentors in my middle and high school teachers who really looked after me, nurtured me, and made me feel “seen” and truly understood.
We can’t bring Ed back. We can’t change my parents. But we can use all this past history to inform how we move forward, and how I choose to parent Kaia. I hope I am always able to make her feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure. And when I am not, that I am able to be a fucking adult about it and admit my wrongs, apologize, take ownership, and move forward with her.