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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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

We don’t want our children to hurt. But we also want them to do more than simply get through their difficult times; we want them to face their troubles and grow from them.

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. Tina’s approach with her son is one that we call the “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.

The first is developmental: while the downstairs brain is well developed even at birth, the upstairs brain isn’t fully mature until a person reaches his mid-twenties. In fact, it’s one of the last parts of the brain to develop. 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.

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. A good response in this situation would be to calmly explain, “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.” Then it’s important to follow through on those consequences if the behavior doesn’t stop.

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.

We need to help children understand that the clouds of their emotions can (and will) roll on by. They won’t feel sad or angry or hurt or lonely forever. This is a difficult concept for kids to understand at first. When they hurt or when they’re scared, it’s sometimes hard for them to imagine that they won’t always suffer. Taking the long view isn’t usually that easy even for an adult, much less a young child. So we have to help them understand that feelings are temporary—on average, an emotion comes and goes in ninety seconds.

He was upset that his trip to Dodger Stadium had been postponed, so she took the opportunity to introduce him to the “windshield of awareness”: “Look at all the spots on our windshield. These spots are like all the different things you are thinking and feeling right now. There are a lot! See this smudge right here? That’s how mad you feel at Dad right now. And those yellow bug guts? That’s your disappointment that you’re not going to get to go to the game tonight. But see that splat right there? That’s how much you believe Dad when he says he’ll take you next weekend. And that one there is how you know you can have a good day today anyway because you get to eat lunch and play kickball at recess with Ryan.…”

One of the best ways to begin orienting kids to what’s on their rim is to help them learn to SIFT through all the sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that are affecting them. By paying attention to their physical sensations, for example, children can become much more aware of what’s going on inside their bodies. They can learn to recognize stomach butterflies as markers of anxiety, a desire to hit as anger or frustration, heavy shoulders as sadness, and so on. They can identify tension in their body when they’re nervous, then learn to relax their shoulders and take deep breaths to calm themselves. Simply recognizing different sensations like hunger, tiredness, excitement, and grumpiness can give children a great deal of understanding and ultimately influence over their feelings. In addition to sensations, we need to teach our kids to SIFT for images that are affecting the way they look at and interact with the world. Some images remain from the past, like the memory of a parent on a hospital gurney, or an embarrassing moment at school. Others might be fabricated from their imaginations or even nightmares they’ve had. A child who worries about being left out and isolated at recess might, for example, picture herself on a lonely swing by herself. Or another child might struggle with nighttime fears as a result of the images he remembers from a scary dream. When a child becomes aware of the images that are active in his mind,

sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts—can

One of the best tools you give your kids for when they feel anxious or afraid, or even when they’re having trouble falling asleep, is to teach them to visualize a place where they feel calm and peaceful: floating on a raft in a pool, sitting next to a river they remember from a camping trip, or swinging in a hammock at their grandparents’ house.