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Regina Pally, M.D.
Dr. Pally is a teacher and psychiatrist who received her medical degree from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and has been in practice for more than 20 years. She is the Founder and Co-director of the non-profit organization called Center for Reflective Communities (CRC). CRC promotes healthy development in children by strengthen the relationship bonds that children have with all the people who care for them. CRC partners with agencies, organizations and schools to bring its reflective programs out into the community.
Her recently published book, The Reflective Parent: How to do less and relate more with your kids, aims to help parents feel less stressed and more confident in their role as parent. The book provides all the parent-child relationship building tools most closely associated with children doing well throughout life- emotionally, socially, academically, and at work. Her ideas about raising children are a synthesis of her psychiatric work, her work with CRC, her parenting experiences, well as her background in neuroscience and child development.
Goals of the Program
Our Approach: No judgement No blame of Parents
- We assume every parent is trying their best, even parents who find the role of being a parent especially challenging.
- We hold an accepting, understanding, non-judgmental attitude toward each and every parent, to create a trusting relationship so parents feel safe enough to be honest and open about what they are feeling and thinking.
What we know: Responsive Parenting is more effective than Reactive Parenting
- Children do better in life when their parent is able to make sense of what the child is experiencing on the inside, such as what they are needing, feeling, and communicating and uses that understanding to guide their respond to the child.
- Children do better when responses tend to be more calming, empathic, and kind, than when they tend to be more hostile, aggressive, and hurtful.
- Parenting can be very rewarding and stir up positive emotions such as love, joy and pride; But even under the best of circumstance parenting is also very stressful and stirs up negative emotions, such as Anxiety, Guilt, Shame and Anger
- When a parent lives with adverse circumstances, such as low income, single parenthood, lack of family support, or community violence, their stress level and emotional arousal increases.
- Neuroscience tells us high levels of stress and emotional arousal interfere with a parent’s ability to understand and be appropriately responsive to their child.
- The stressed, emotionally overwhelmed parent is typically more immediately reactive with anger, impatience and criticism toward their child, rather than able to be more thoughtfully responsive to what the child is experiencing.
Our Goal: Put on your own oxygen mask first
- Provide parents with a set of skills that calm their high stress and emotions, so that they are better able to retain an ability to understand and respond appropriately to what is going on inside their child.
- The most important skill is Reflective Function, (RF) which means a parent can look inside themselves and make sense of what they are experiencing as well as looking inside their child to make sense of what the child is experiencing. This two-way understanding enables the parent to utilize all the other skills.
- The other skills include: pushing the pause button; grounding & mindfulness; unconditional acceptance of self & child; tolerating uncertainty and the unknown; balancing empathy and limits; building self-confidence; being able to turn to others for help when needed.