# The Psychology Of Parenting | Dr. Dan Siegel

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/finding-mastery-with-dr-michael-gervais-4955/the-psychology-of-parenting-dr-dan-siegel
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/finding-mastery-with-dr-michael-gervais-4955/the-psychology-of-parenting-dr-dan-siegel.md
Podcast: [Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais](https://stenobird.com/podcast/finding-mastery-with-dr-michael-gervais-4955)
Published: 2026-07-01T07:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://findingmastery.com/podcasts/dan-siegel
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/120/rss.art19.com/episodes/37f2e80d-7bf0-41b2-855d-cfe5b3d1a739.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/finding-mastery-with-dr-michael-gervais-4955/episodes/the-psychology-of-parenting-dr-dan-siegel
Duration seconds: 5627

## Resource

What if the most important work of parenting isn’t about your child at all... but about understanding yourself? Dr. Dan Siegel is a Harvard-trained clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, a neuroscientist, and one of the leading voices helping us understand how relationships shape the developing mind. He has authored over 20 books, five of them New York Times bestsellers, including co-authoring The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline. Trained as a developmental attachment researcher through the National Institute of Mental Health, Dan has spent more than 40 years studying how the adults who care for children influence who those children become. And his interest isn’t only academic. Dan describes his own childhood as decidedly non-optimal... a father who was intrusive and at times terrifying, a mother who was emotionally distant. He carried every non-secure attachment stance into adulthood, and earned security later in life, with the help of a therapist who finally saw him. What he found over those four decades reframes how we think about raising kids. The research is remarkably clear: how a parent has made sense of their own childhood, assessed before their baby is even born, predicts how that child will attach. Children don’t need perfect parents. They need three things... to be seen, to be soothed, and to be safe. When those are reliably present, a fourth emerges: security. And when we inevitably blow it, because every parent does, what matters most is the repair. As Dan puts it, there’s no such thing as perfect parenting. There’s just being present. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Dan walks through the science of attachment and why the pop-culture version on social media is quoting a different field entirely, the myth that a mother should be a…

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## Transcript

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