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

by Daniel J. Siegel

What’s great about this survive-and-thrive approach is that you don’t have to try to carve out special time to help your children thrive. 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. That’s what this book is about: using those everyday moments with your kids to help them reach their true potential.

That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children.

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.

By first connecting with his right brain, she could then redirect with the left brain through logical explanation and planning, which required that his left hemisphere join the conversation.

moments of emotional flooding are not the best times for lessons to be learned.

the behaviors and skills we want and expect our kids to demonstrate, like sound decision making, control of their emotions and bodies, empathy, self-understanding, and morality—are dependent on a part of their brain that hasn’t fully developed yet.

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.

What all this means for us as parents is that when our kids seem to be reacting in unusually unreasonable ways, we need to consider whether an implicit memory has created a mental model that we need to help them explore.

Even as young as four or five, kids can learn to focus on their breath. A good technique is to have them lie down and place a toy—like a boat—on their stomach. Ask them to focus on the boat, watching it rise and fall as it rides the waves of breath.

Insight and empathy. If we can encourage these attributes in our kids, we will give them the gift of mindsight, offering them awareness about themselves,

Mirror neurons may also explain why younger siblings are sometimes better at sports. Before they ever join their own team, their mirror neurons have fired each of the hundreds of times they’ve watched their older siblings hit, kick, and throw a ball.

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.

There’s nothing more important you can do as a parent than to be intentional about the way you’re shaping your child’s mind. What you do matters profoundly.