As this year's guest speaker for Forty Carrots' Free Community Speaker Event, Dr. Tina Payne Bryson touched on prominent talking points for parents, including 'The Power of Showing Up'. Bryson is the author of the Bottom Line for Baby and co-author (with Dan Siegel) of two New York Times Best Sellers—The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline—each of which has been translated into over fifty languages, as well as The Yes Brain and The Power of Showing Up. She is the Founder and Executive Director of The Center for Connection, a multidisciplinary clinical practice in Southern California. Dr. Bryson conducts workshops for parents, educators, and clinicians all over the world, and she frequently consults with schools, businesses, and other organizations. 

In an interview with Wes Roberts in our December 2021 magazine issue, Dr. Bryson shared her thoughts on parenting in today’s chaotic world. In the excerpt below, she speaks to the way parents and caregivers can create a securely attached relationship with their children by using the four S’s, so that the child will feel at home in the world as they interact with others. 

The first S stands for safe and that really is about protecting our children from harm, but it's also creating a safe harbor away from the stress and the chaos of the world. Our homes, our relationships are safe harbors for our children. The second S is for seen which is about tuning into the mind behind the behavior and helping them feel seen. Soothe is to help comfort, nurture, calm them when they're really in distress. So for example the child doesn't want to get out of the bathtub, we practice seen by saying, you're really disappointed about getting out of the tub. So we’re connecting with the mind behind the behavior of the feelings he has and then soothing him, saying “It's okay, if you need to cry, I'm right here with you.”  Then wrap the towel around him and comfort him to settle him down. When kids have enough of this repeated they develop that fourth S of security, which is really where their brain wires to know that someone's going to show up for them and then they learn how to show up for themselves, how to keep themselves safe and seen, and understand themselves and soothe themselves. There are a lot of things in the world as parents that we can't control, and that's, that's hard for us to accept, but it's the truth. So what we want to do is what we can within our control to give our kids the highest capacity they have and the most resilience possible. 

To learn more about this year's Forty Carrots Free Community Speaker Event, click here