The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind

by Daniel J. Siegel

because a survive moment is also a thrive moment, where the important, meaningful work of parenting takes place.

So that’s the bad news: you have to wait for your child’s brain to develop. That’s right. No matter how brilliant you think your preschooler is, she does not have the brain of a ten-year-old, and won’t for several years.

Your left brain loves and desires order. It is logical, literal, linguistic (it likes words), and linear (it puts things in a sequence or order). The left brain loves that all four of these words begin with the letter L. (It also loves lists.)

The right brain, on the other hand, is holistic and nonverbal, sending and receiving signals that allow us to communicate, such as facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice, posture, and gestures. Instead of details and order, our right brain cares about the big picture—the meaning and feel of an experience—and specializes in images, emotions, and personal memories. We get a “gut feeling” or “heart-felt sense” from our right brain. Some say the right brain is more intuitive and emotional,

In terms of development, very young children are right-hemisphere dominant, especially during their first three years.

The goal is to avoid living in an emotional flood or an emotional desert.

when a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.

“connect and redirect” method, and it begins with helping our kids “feel felt” before we try to solve problems or address the situation logically.

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.

One of the best ways to promote this type of integration is to help retell the story of the frightening or painful experience.

Children are much more apt to share and talk while building something, playing cards, or riding in the car than when you sit down and look them right in the face and ask them to open up.

To tell a story that makes sense, the left brain must put things in order, using words and logic. The right brain contributes the bodily sensations, raw emotions, and personal memories, so we can see the whole picture and communicate our experience. This is the scientific explanation behind why journaling and talking about a difficult event can be so powerful in helping us heal. In fact, research shows that merely assigning a name or label to what we feel literally calms down the activity of the emotional circuitry in the right hemisphere.

When right and left brain are integrated, we can approach parenting from both a grounded, left-brained, rational place—one that lets us make important decisions, solve problems, and enforce boundaries—and from a right-brained, emotionally connected place where we’re aware of the feelings and sensations of our body and emotions, so we can lovingly respond to our children’s needs. Then we’ll be parenting with our whole brain.

A parent who recognizes an upstairs tantrum is left with one clear response: never negotiate with a terrorist. An upstairs tantrum calls for firm boundaries and a clear discussion about appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

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.

Simply by drawing your child’s attention to other people’s emotions during everyday encounters, you can open up whole new levels of compassion within them and exercise their upstairs brain.

“Neurons that fire together wire together.”

Our past absolutely shapes our present and future. And it does so via associations within the brain.

The memory that enables you to change your baby without knowing that you are remembering is called implicit memory. Your ability to recall learning to change a diaper (or to recall any other specific moment) is explicit memory.

The problem with an implicit memory, especially of a painful or negative experience, is that when we aren’t aware of it, it becomes a buried land mine that can limit us in significant and sometimes debilitating ways.

So how do we help our children when they’re suffering from the effects of past negative experiences? We shine the light of awareness on those implicit memories, making them explicit so that our child can become aware of them and deal with them in an intentional way.

Sometimes parents hope that their children will “just forget about” painful experiences they’ve undergone, but what kids really need is for parents to teach them healthy ways to integrate implicit and explicit memories, turning even painful experiences into sources of power and self-understanding.

But she also helped him understand the power of his mind, and how by directing his attention, he could take control and, to a great extent, actually choose how he felt, and how he wanted to respond to different situations.

Those fears and worries were definitely part of him, but they didn’t represent the totality of his being.

The danger is that the temporary state of mind can be perceived as a permanent part of their self. The state comes to be seen as a trait that defines who they are.

SIFT through all the sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts

the brain is set up for interpersonal integration. Just as its many different parts are made to work together, each individual brain is made to relate with the brain of each person we interact with. Interpersonal integration means that we honor and nurture our differences while cultivating our connections with one another.

It’s really not an exaggeration to say that the kind of relationships you provide for your children will affect generations to come. We can impact the future of the world by caring well for our children and by being intentional in giving them the kinds of relationships that we value and that we want them to see as normal.

In fact, the way parents handle their child’s shyness has a big impact on how the child deals with that aspect of his or her personality, as well as how shy the child is later on.

Just as we don’t want our kids to be only right-brained or only left-brained, we also don’t want them to be only individualistic, leaving them selfish and isolated, or only relational, leaving them needy, dependent, and vulnerable to unhealthy and harmful relationships. We want them to be whole-brained, and enjoy integrated relationships.

We want to make this point as clearly as possible: early experience is not fate. By making sense of your past you can free yourself from what might otherwise be a cross-generational legacy of pain and insecure attachment, and instead create an inheritance of nurturance and love for your children.

But the beauty of the whole-brain perspective is that it lets you understand that even the mistakes are opportunities to grow and learn.