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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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 this, one of the least effective things Tina could do would be to jump right in and defend herself (“Of course I do nice things for you!”) or to argue with her son about his faulty logic (“There’s nothing I can do about making your birthday come sooner. As for the homework, that’s just something that you’ve got to do”). This type of left-brain, logical response would hit an unreceptive right-brain brick wall and create a gulf between them. After all, his logical left brain was nowhere to be found at that moment. So, had Tina responded with her left, her son would have felt like she didn’t understand him or care about his feelings. He was in a right-brain, nonrational, emotional flood, and a left-brain response would have been a lose-lose approach.