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January 1 - March 18, 2024
What do you really want for your children? What qualities do you hope they develop and take into their adult lives?
children whose parents talk with them about their experiences tend to have better access to the memories of those experiences.
Shy children whose parents nurture a sense of courage by offering supportive explorations of the world tend to lose their behavioral inhibition, while those who are excessively protected or insensitively thrust into anxiety-provoking experiences without support tend to maintain their shyness.
to describe mental health as our ability to remain in a “river of well-being.”
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.)
this side of the brain as more directly influenced by the body and lower brain areas,
right brain is emotional, nonverbal, experiential,
it begins with helping our kids “feel felt” before we try to solve problems
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.
draw a picture of the event or, if she’s old enough, write about it.
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.
A parent who recognizes an upstairs tantrum is left with one clear response: never negotiate with a terrorist.
calls for firm boundaries and a clear discussion about appropriate and inappropriate behavior.
an appropriate response to a downstairs tantrum is much more nurturing and comforting. As in the “connect and
One of the best ways to foster self-understanding in your children is to ask questions that help them look beyond the surface of what they understand: Why do you think you made that choice? What made you feel that way? Why do you think you didn’t do well on your test—was it because you were hurrying, or is this just really difficult material? This is what one father did for his ten-year-old, Catherine, as he helped her pack for camp.
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.
When you ask simple questions that encourage the consideration of another’s feelings, you are building your child’s ability to feel empathy.
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.
Research has shown that bodily movement directly affects brain chemistry. So when one of your children has lost touch with his upstairs brain, a powerful way to help him regain balance is to have him move his body. Here’s a story a
change our emotional state. Try smiling for a minute—it can make you feel happier; quick, shallow breaths accompany anxiety, and if you take a slow, deep breath, you’ll likely feel calmer. (You can try these little exercises with your child to teach her how her body affects how she feels.)
The next time your children need help calming down or regaining control, look for ways to get them moving. For young kids, experiment with what might be called creative, loving trickery, as shown on this page.
Sometimes just moving your body can help your brain feel like things are going to be OK.
The memory that enables you to change your baby without knowing that you are remembering is called implicit memory.
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.
by having them tell and retell their own stories—you improve their ability to integrate implicit and explicit memories.
But it’s also true that feelings need to be recognized for what they are: temporary, changing conditions. They are states, not traits.
on average, an emotion comes and goes in ninety seconds.
