Top 120 Daniel J. Siegel Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Connection is about walking through the hard times with our children and being there for them when they’re emotionally suffering, just like we would if they scraped their knee and were physically suffering.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

52. “We will honor the controversy, and explore possibilities rather than assert absolutes.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

53. “Effective discipline means that we’re not only stopping a bad behavior or promoting a good one, but also teaching skills and nurturing the connections in our children’s brains that will help them make better decisions and handle themselves well in the future.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

54. “Grief allows you to let go of something you’ve lost only when you begin to accept what you now have in its place.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

55. “When parents don’t take responsibility for their own unfinished business, they miss an opportunity not only to become better parents but also to continue their own development. People who remain in the dark about the origins of their behaviors and intense emotional responses are unaware of their unresolved issues and the parental ambivalence they create.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

56. “It’s also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child’s feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It’s vital that we treat them as such in our response.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

57. “When such resonance is enacted with positive regard, a deep feeling of coherence emerges with the subjective sensation of harmony. When.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

58. “The absence of limits and boundaries is actually quite stressful, and stressed kids are more reactive.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

59. “The key to clinical attunement is to be willing to say “I don’t know” and “tell me more.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

60. “That’s what integration does: it coordinates and balances the separate regions of the brain that it links together. It’s easy to see when our kids aren’t integrated – they become overwhelmed by their emotions, confused and chaotic. They can’t respond calmly and capably to the situation at hand. Tantrums, meltdowns, aggression, and most of the other challenging experiences of parenting – and life – are a result of a loss of integration, also known as dis-integration.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

61. “One of the key practical lessons of modern neuroscience is that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain’s firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

62. “Part of truly loving our kids, and giving them what they need, means offering them clear and consistent boundaries, creating predictable structure in their lives, as well as having high expectations for them.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

63. “Recent studies have found that the best predictor for good sibling relationships later in life is how much fun the kids have together when they’re young. The rate of conflict can even be high, as long as there’s plenty of fun to balance it out. The real danger comes when the siblings just ignore each other. There may be less tension to deal with, but that’s also a recipe for a cold and distant relationship as adults.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

64. “Healing from a difficult experience emerges when the left side works with the right to tell our life stories.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

65. “Remember, there are plenty of ways to spoil children – by giving them too many things, by rescuing them from every challenge, by never allowing them to deal with defeat and disappointment – but we can never spoil them by giving them too much of our love and attention. That’s what the connection.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

66. “Engage, don’t enrage.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

67. “Mindsight is a teachable skill at the heart of being empathic and insightful, moral and compassionate.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

68. “What molds our brain? Experience. Even into old age, our experiences actually change the physical structure of the brain. When we undergo an experience, our brain cells – called neurons – become active, or “fire.” The brain has one hundred billion neurons, each with an average of ten thousand connections to other neurons.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

69. “Loss of someone we love cannot be adequately expressed with words. Grappling with loss, struggling with disconnection and despair, fills us with a sense of anguish and actual pain. Indeed, the parts of our brain that process physical pain overlap with the neural centers that record social ruptures and rejection. Loss rips us apart.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

70. “As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children. Another.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

71. “You can discipline in a way that’s high on relationship, high on respect, and low on drama and conflict – and.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

72. “Having neurons wire together can be a good thing. A positive experience with a math teacher can lead to neural connections that link math with pleasure, accomplishment, and feeling good about yourself as a student. But the opposite is equally true. Negative experiences with a harsh instructor or a timed test and the anxiety that accompanies it can form connections in the brain that create a serious obstacle to the enjoyment not only of math and numbers, but exams and even school in general.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

73. “When you see your child’s behavior trending in a direction you don’t like, ask yourself, “Is he hungry, angry, lonely, or tired?”

— Daniel J. Siegel

74. “Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people’s feelings more fully.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

75. “Presence depends upon a sense of safety. The.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

76. “An important take-home message is that it is vital to keep the lines of connection and communication open and to remember that we all – adolescents and adults – need to be members of a connected community.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

77. “As you learn about the brain and consider all of the information we’re offering here, don’t forget about the simple and the obvious, the little things you already know. Common sense can take you a long way.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

78. “Nature is far more inventive than is human imagination, and the microscopic world is not what Niels Bohr or anyone else could have guessed.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

79. “As scientists put it, the brain is plastic, or moldable. Yes, the actual physical architecture of the brain changes based on what happens to us.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

80. “Rules about respect and behavior aren’t thrown out the window simply because a child’s left hemisphere is disengaged. For example, whatever behavior is inappropriate in your family – being disrespectful, hurting someone, throwing things – should remain off-limits even in moments of high emotion.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

81. “Fear and punishment can be effective in the moment, but they don’t work over the long term. And are fear, punishment, and drama really what we want to use as primary motivators of our children? If so, we teach that power and control are the best tools to get others to do what we want them to do.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

82. “Everything they see, hear, feel, touch, or even smell impacts their brain and thus influences the way they view and interact with their world – including their family, neighbors, strangers, friends, classmates, and even themselves.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

83. “We want to help our children become better integrated so they can use their whole brain in a coordinated way. For example, we want them to be horizontally integrated, so that their left-brain logic can work well with their right-brain emotion. We also want them to be vertically integrated, so that the physically higher parts of their brain, which let them thoughtfully consider their actions, work well with the lower parts, which are more concerned with instinct, gut reactions, and survival. The.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

84. “Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children’s pain or make things worse. Actually, telling the story is often exactly what children need, both to make sense of the event and to move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

85. “This is the PART we play in helpful communication. PART means that we are present, attune, resonate, and create trust.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

86. “Every time we say “Convince me” or “Come up with a solution that works for both of us,” we give our kids the chance to practice problem solving and decision making. We help them consider appropriate behaviors and consequences, and we help them think about what another person feels and wants. All because we found a way to engage the upstairs, instead of enraging the downstairs.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

87. “Rather than simply telling them what to do and demanding that they conform to your requests, you’ll be giving them experiences that strengthen their executive functions and develop skills related to empathy, personal insight, and morality.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

88. “By helping them understand the rules and limits in their respective environments, we help build their conscience.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

89. “To state this more succinctly, awareness of the body’s state influences how we organize our lives. Knowing your body strengthens your mind.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

90. “We want our kids to expect that their needs can be understood and consistently met. But we don’t want our kids to expect that their desires and whims will always be met.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

91. “A colleague and friend, Jack Kornfield, has a great way of thinking about this important process: Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past. In this way, we forgive not to condone, not to say it was fine, but to let go of false illusions that we can change the past.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

92. “You can be grateful for what you enjoy, not longing for what you are missing.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

93. “That’s a direct lesson every parent should consider quite deeply: do we want to teach our kids that the way to resolve a conflict is to inflict physical pain, particularly on someone who is defenseless and cannot fight back?”

— Daniel J. Siegel

94. “Many parents these days, however, are learning that discipline will be much more respectful – and, yes, effective – if they initiate a collaborative, reciprocal, bidirectional dialogue, rather than delivering a monologue.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

95. “You don’t have to try too hard to have fun with your preschooler. Just being with you is paradise for him.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

96. “Saying yes to that second or third treat of the day might be easier in the short term because it avoids a meltdown. But what about tomorrow? Will treats be expected then as well? Remember, the brain makes associations from all of our experiences. Spoiling ultimately makes life harder on us as parents because we’re constantly having to deal with the demands or the meltdowns that result when our kids don’t get what they’ve come to expect: that they’ll get their way all the time.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

97. “And our disciplinary decisions go a long way toward determining how strong those connections are. The way we interact with our kids when they’re upset significantly affects how their brains develop, and therefore what kind of people they are, both today and in the years to come.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

98. “When we set limits, we help develop the parts of the upstairs brain that allow children to control themselves and regulate their behaviors and their body.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

99. “You can use all of the interactions you share – the stressful, angry ones as well as the miraculous, adorable ones – as opportunities to help them become the responsible, caring, capable people you want them to be.”

— Daniel J. Siegel

100. “While group collaboration can certainly be a source of collective intelligence, it can also get you to jump off a cliff or drive too fast. And that’s probably why some form of continued connection to the adults and their adult perspectives still exists in traditional cultures, and even in our animal cousins. Without adults around, young adolescents can literally go wild.”

— Daniel J. Siegel