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May 4 - July 17, 2024
That’s what integration does: it coordinates and balances the separate regions of the brain that it links together.
the brain is actually “plastic,” or moldable. This means that the brain physically changes throughout the course of our lives, not just in childhood, as we had previously assumed.
When neurons fire together, they grow new connections between them. Over time, the connections that result from firing lead to “rewiring” in the brain.
an integrated brain is capable of doing much more than its individual parts could accomplish alone.
The rate of brain maturation is largely influenced by the genes we inherit. But the degree of integration may be exactly what we can influence in our day-to-day parenting.
As opposed to being out of control, rigidity is when you are imposing control on everything and everyone around you. You become completely unwilling to adapt, compromise, or negotiate.
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.
while the left brain is logical, linguistic, and literal, the right brain is emotional, nonverbal, experiential, and autobiographical—and it doesn’t care at all that these words don’t begin with the same letter.
In terms of development, very young children are right-hemisphere dominant, especially during their first three years.
Denial of our emotions isn’t the only danger we face when we rely too heavily on our left brain. We can also become too literal, leaving us without a sense of perspective, where we miss the meaning that comes from putting things in context (a specialty of the right brain).
So especially if she is tired or moody, she might focus only on your words and miss your playful tone of voice and the wink that went with it.
Whole-Brain Strategy #1: Connect and Redirect: Surfing Emotional Waves
All parents experience times when their children say things and get upset about issues that don’t seem to make sense. An encounter like this can be frustrating, especially when you expect your child to be old enough to act rationally and hold a logical conversation. All of a sudden, though, he becomes upset about something ridiculous, and it seems that absolutely no amount of reasoning on your part will help. Based on our knowledge of the two sides of the brain, we know that Tina’s son was experiencing big waves of right-brain emotions without much left-brain logical balance. At a moment like
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Whole-brain parenting doesn’t mean letting yourself be manipulated or reinforcing bad behavior.
Instead of fighting against the huge waves of his emotional flood, Tina surfed them by responding to his right brain.
when a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs. We call this emotional connection “attunement,” which is how we connect deeply with another person and allow them to “feel felt.” When parent and child are tuned in to each other, they experience a sense of joining together.
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.
The key here is that when your child is drowning in a right-brain emotional flood, you’ll do yourself (and your child) a big favor if you connect before you redirect.
Whole-Brain Strategy #2: Name It to Tame It: Telling Stories to Calm Big Emotions
One of the best ways to promote this type of integration is to help retell the story of the frightening or painful experience.
We need to respect their desires about how and when to talk—especially because pressuring them to share will only backfire.
Instead, we can gently encourage them by beginning the story and asking them to fill in the details, and if they’re not interested, we can give them space and talk later.
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. Another approach you can take if your child doesn’t feel like talking is to ask her to draw a picture of the event or, if she’s old enough, write about it.
The right side of our brain processes our emotions and autobiographical memories, but our left side is what makes sense of these feelings and recollections.
Healing from a difficult experience emerges when the left side works with the right to tell our life stories. When children learn to pay attention to and share their own stories, they can respond in healthy ways to everything from a scraped elbow to a major loss or trauma.
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.
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.
He then began to help her create some new associations that school is safe and fun, reminding her of various aspects of her school that she loved. They wrote and illustrated a book together that told the story and featured her favorite places in her classroom. As kids often will, Katie wanted to read her homemade book over and over.
We want them to pause before acting, to consider consequences, to think about the feelings of others, to make ethical and moral judgments.
Scientists talk about these lower areas as being more primitive because they are responsible for basic functions (like breathing and blinking), for innate reactions and impulses (like fight and flight), and for strong emotions (like anger and fear).
while the downstairs brain is well developed even at birth, the upstairs brain isn’t fully mature until a person reaches his mid-twenties.
The upstairs brain remains under massive construction for the first few years of life, then during the teen years undergoes an extensive remodel that lasts into adulthood.
The amygdala’s job is to quickly process and express emotions, especially anger and fear.
When it does sense danger, it can completely take over, or hijack, the upstairs brain. That’s what allows us to act before we think.
The problem, though, is that especially in children, the amygdala frequently fires up and blocks the stairway connecting the upstairs and downstairs 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.
“I understand that you’re excited about the slippers, but I don’t like the way you’re acting. If you don’t stop now, you won’t get the slippers, and I’ll need to cancel your playdate this afternoon, because you’re showing me that you’re not able to handle yourself well.”
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.
The upstairs brain is like a muscle: when it gets used, it develops, gets stronger, and performs better.
The point is to let your children wrestle with the decision and live with the consequences. Whenever you can do so responsibly, avoid solving and resist rescuing, even when they make minor mistakes or not-so-great choices. After all, your goal here isn’t perfection on every decision right now, but an optimally developed upstairs brain down the road.
They won’t always make good decisions, but the more fully they practice alternatives other than lashing out, the stronger and more capable their upstairs brain will become.
The more your kids think about what’s going on within themselves, the more they will develop the ability to understand and respond to what’s going on in the worlds within and around them.
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.
exercise this part of the brain is to offer hypothetical situations,
give your kids practice thinking through moral and ethical principles, which, with your guidance, will become the foundation for the way they make decisions for the rest of their lives.
Vigorously moving his body released some of his angry energy and tension, allowing him to relax.
Little eyes are watching to see how you calm yourself down. Your actions set an example of how to make a good choice in a high-emotion moment when you’re in danger of flipping your lid.
First, do no harm. Close your mouth to avoid saying something you’ll regret. Put your hands behind your back to avoid any kind of rough physical contact.
Second, remove yourself from the situation and collect yourself.
