Loving and Compassionate Parenting: A Short Summary

Loving and Compassionate Parenting: A Short Summary

Science is now telling us that loving and compassionate parenting is the most powerful tool available to influence children’s behavior. This is in contrast to a child raising culture which has been based on controlling discipline, and on logic and behavioral consequences. Attachment researchers and neuroscientists are explaining that our state of mind, and our ability to be tuned into our child’s emotional experience in such a way that our child “feels felt”, enables our child to think clearly and to be compliant. Our facial expressions, tone of voice, and many forms of nonverbal communication are literally developing our baby’s and child’s brain. 

 Dr. Allan Score, famous neuroscientist at UCLA, refers to the mother as the “psychobiological regulator” of the infant, meaning that she is the regulator of the baby’s nervous system. (This is also true for dad or any primary caretaker.) From the thousands of interactions between baby and caretaker, and caretaker and toddler, the child develops his or her ability to manage stress and to have appropriate emotional responses to the world. “What’s outside goes inside.” Repeated empirical studies also show that having experiences of joy, delight, and empathy with the parent are at the heart of healthy child development in all domains.

This message is not about indulgence. But rather, it encourages us to be mindful of our own emotional state as we are providing consistency, structure, and limit setting. It also encourages us to create the space in our daily interactions with our child to listen to their behavior. Negative behavior is a form of unconscious communication which says that our child needs our attention in some manner. It is up to adults to creatively and lovingly figure out what the child needs.

Science is also telling us that our own capacity as parents to be tuned into our child is largely dependent upon how we were parented ourselves. So, to understand our own parenting styles, we need to reflect on and to understand how we were parented.

Resources: Parenting From the Inside Out, by Dan Siegel and Mary Hartselle; circleofsecurity.org,  beyondconsequences.com; Attachment Parenting books by Dr. Sears; attachmentparentinginternational.org.