Parenting from the Inside Out

What Hacker News says

1. boonSep 2019
   "The Whole Brain Child" is an excellent primer on how children's brains work and behaviors are exhibited, and from researchers in this area. I'm now listening to the follow-up "No-Drama Discipline", and hoping it will provide even more practical advice in this area.

   "How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen, and How to Listen So Your Kids Will Talk" is also good.

   "Parenting From The Inside Out" is a gut punch about getting your own psychological problems addressed first.

   I'll also say that prioritizing sleep (as best as you can), proper diet, exercise, and healthy boundaries between work/home are sometimes so much more important than any book you could be reading.

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2. AceyManSep 2017
   Off the top of my head, "Unconditional Parenting" by Alfie Kohn is a seminal text in the field. "Parenting From the Inside Out" by Daniel Siegel & Mary Hartzell is wonderful as well.
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3. btillyJan 2011
   I disagree with this but it is giving me pause for thought. It sounds like you're lying to them about what is acceptable behaviour?

   No lying at all. You're just taking a concrete rule and setting soft and hard boundaries. Expect testing of the soft boundaries. But set them so that hard boundaries aren't reached.

   For instance you have a set of stairs and an exploratory 3 year old. Successfully getting on to area around the top of the stairs gets the kid told to come back. If the kid doesn't come back right away, the kid gets picked up and carried away. If the kid tries to go to the stairs, the kid gets a time-out.

   With these rules, you can expect to see exploration of how far over the line the toe can go before being told to come back. Expect fetching to become a game. But your kid won't actually go down the stairs. (Of course in this simple case a gate makes more sense.)

   >Just training kids with operant conditioning is not sufficient to be a decent parent.

   I assume you mean parent in the limited sense of social educator else this is something of a truism; could you expand on this?

   I'm going to suggest the book Parenting From The Inside-Out for an exploration of the ways in which our interactions with our children shape their ability to integrate their emotional and logical responses of the world into a useful, coherent, whole.

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4. btillyAug 2010
   Parenting from the Inside-Out. If you're willing to work your way through it slowly, and do the exercises, it is invaluable. If you just read and understand it intellectually, the benefit is not nearly so great.
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5. n4r9Jun 2026
   It's "learning how to..." rather than "learning that...". Good self-help books can provide a framework to understand how your own childhood development influences your current behaviours, and how you can work to change. I'm currently reading "Parenting from the Inside Out" which goes into both the psychology and neurology of the developing brain, and explains how insecure childhood attachment can propagate across generations. I have a mixture of dismissive/avoidant and anxious attachment thought patterns, and it's been helpful to put this into context by reflecting on my own childhood and where they might have come from. Those patterns gradually feel less like something I'm "stuck with" and more like something I can challenge and master.
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6. jtr1Jun 2022
   I’m reading “Parenting from the Inside Out” right now and it dives into a lot of the ideas you’ve mentioned, looking at how memories and self-narrative formed in early childhood, but also how they inform adult responses to the experience of parenthood.
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