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

by Daniel J. Siegel

the moments you are just trying to survive are actually opportunities to help your child thrive.

Since she knew the importance of helping her son’s brain process the frightening experience, she helped him tell and retell the events so that he could process his fear and go on with his daily routines in a healthy and balanced way. Over the next few days, Marco brought up the accident less and less, until it became just another of his life experiences—albeit

Integration takes the distinct parts of your brain and helps them work together as a whole.

Tantrums, meltdowns, aggression, and most of the other challenging experiences of parenting—and life—are a result of a loss of integration, also known as dis-integration.

So one extreme is chaos, where there’s a total lack of control. The other extreme is rigidity, where there’s too much control, leading to a lack of flexibility and adaptability. We all move back and forth between these two banks as we go through our days—especially as we’re trying to survive parenting.

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 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.

By asking her to tell the story about the fight with her best friend and having her pause the story at different times to observe subtle shifts in her feelings, I was able to reintroduce Amanda to her real emotions and to help her deal with them in a productive way. This is how I tried to connect with both her right brain with its feelings, bodily sensations, and images and with her left brain, with its words and ability to tell the linear story of her experience. When we see how this happens in the brain, we can understand how linking the two sides to each other can completely change the outcome of an interaction.

He was in a right-brain, nonrational, emotional flood, and a left-brain response would have been a lose-lose approach.

when a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.

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.

But with the whole-brain approach, we understand that it’s generally a good idea to discuss misbehavior and its consequences after the child has calmed down, since moments of emotional flooding are not the best times for lessons to be learned.

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.

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.

One of the best ways to promote integration in our children is to become better integrated ourselves.

When right and left brain are integrated, we can approach parenting from both a grounded, left-brained, rational place—one that lets us make important decisions, solve problems, and enforce boundaries—and from a right-brained, emotionally connected place where we’re aware of the feelings and sensations of our body and emotions, so we can lovingly respond to our children’s needs.

It’s unrealistic to expect them always to be rational, regulate their emotions, make good decisions, think before acting, and be empathetic—all of the things a developed upstairs brain helps them do. They can demonstrate some of these qualities to varying degrees much of the time, depending on their age. But for the most part, kids just don’t have the biological skill set to do so all the time. Sometimes they can use their upstairs brain, and sometimes they can’t. Just knowing this and adjusting our expectations can help us see that our kids are often doing the best they can with the brain they have.

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.

Whereas a child throwing an upstairs tantrum needs a parent to quickly set firm boundaries, an appropriate response to a downstairs tantrum is much more nurturing and comforting. As in the “connect and redirect” technique we discussed in chapter 2, the first thing a parent needs to do is to connect with the child and help him calm himself down.

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.

An allowance is another terrific way to give older kids practice at dealing with difficult dilemmas. The experience of deciding between buying a computer game now or continuing to save for that new bike is a powerful way to exercise the upstairs brain. 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.

Teach them to take a deep breath, or count to ten. Help them express their feelings. Let them stomp their feet or punch a pillow.

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.

Scientists are beginning more and more to think that empathy has its roots in a complex system of what are being called mirror neurons, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter. The more you give your child’s upstairs brain practice at thinking of others, the more capable he will be of having compassion.

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.

Research shows that when we change our physical state—through movement or relaxation, for example—we can 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.)

When fear, anger, frustration, and other big emotions overpower children and they act in ways that don’t make sense, there may be an easily fixable reason. They may simply be hungry or tired. Or maybe they’ve been in the car too long.

memory is all about associations. As an association machine, the brain processes something in the present moment—an idea, a feeling, a smell, an image—and links that experience with similar experiences from the past. These past experiences strongly influence how we understand what we see or feel.

memory is the way an event from the past influences us in the present.

That’s how memory works. One experience (the end of ballet class) causes certain neurons to fire, and those neurons can get wired to neurons from another experience (getting bubble gum). Then each time we undergo the first experience, our brain connects it with the second one. Thus, when ballet ends, our brain triggers an expectation of getting gum.

Whenever you retrieve a memory, you alter it. What you recall may be close to exactly what happened, but the very act of recalling an experience changes it, sometimes in significant ways. To put it scientifically, memory retrieval activates a neural cluster similar to, but not identical with, the one created at the time of encoding.

We encode implicit memory throughout our lives, and in the first eighteen months we encode only implicitly. An infant encodes the smells and tastes and sounds of home and parents, the sensations in her belly when she’s hungry, the bliss of warm milk, the way her mother’s body stiffens in response to a certain relative’s arrival. Implicit memory encodes our perceptions, our emotions, our bodily sensations, and, as we get older, behaviors like learning to crawl and walk and ride a bike and eventually change a diaper.

implicit memories cause us to form expectations about the way the world works, based on our previous experiences.

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.

It’s in this transformation—from implicit to explicit—that the real power of integrating memory brings insight, understanding, and even healing.

Even though we’re not aware of their origins in the past, implicit memories can still create fear, avoidance, sadness, and other painful emotions and bodily sensations.

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.

As you learn about the brain and consider all of the information we’re offering here, don’t forget about the simple and the obvious, the little things you already know. Common sense can take you a long way.

Remember, your goal is to help your kids take the troubling experiences that are impacting them without their knowledge—the scattered puzzle pieces in their mind—and make those experiences explicit so that the whole picture in the puzzle can be seen with clarity and meaning. By introducing them to the remote of the mind, which controls their internal DVD player, you make the storytelling process much less scary, because you offer them some control over what they deal with, so they can interact with it at their own pace. They can then look at an experience that scared (or angered or frustrated) them without having to immediately relive it scene for scene.

So our second suggestion is simply that you remember to remember. During your various activities, help your kids talk about their experiences, so they can integrate their implicit and explicit memories. This is especially important when it comes to the most important and valuable moments of their lives. The more you can help bring those noteworthy moments into their explicit memory—such as family experiences, important friendships, or rites of passage—then the clearer and more influential those experiences will be.

Just recounting basic facts like this helps develop your child’s memory and prepares her for interacting with more significant memories down the road.

If you have trouble drawing out some meaty details about your child’s life, be creative. One trick for younger school-age kids is to play a guessing game when you pick them up from school. Say, “Tell me two things that really happened today, and one thing that didn’t. Then I’ll guess which two are true.”

Unexamined (or dis-integrated) memories cause all kinds of problems for any adult trying to live a healthy, relational life.

If you’re reacting in ways you can’t explain or justify, it’s probably time to ask, “What’s going on here? Is this reminding me of something? And where in the world are my feelings and behavior coming from?”

The simple act of acknowledging different points along the rim can take her a long way toward gaining control and shifting her negative feelings.

There’s a lot of scientific evidence demonstrating that focused attention leads to the reshaping of the brain.

learning to use the wheel of awareness and change where his attention was directed naturally changed Jason’s perspective—but it did much more than that.