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

by Daniel J. Siegel

As children develop, their brains “mirror” their parent’s brain. In other words, the parent’s own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child’s brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children.

When neurons fire together, they grow new connections between them. Over time, the connections that result from firing lead to “rewiring” in the brain. This is incredibly exciting news. It means that we aren’t held captive for the rest of our lives by the way our brain works at this moment—we can actually rewire it so that we can be healthier and happier. This is true not only for children and adolescents, but also for each of us across the life span.

In other words, on top of our basic brain architecture and our inborn temperament, parents have much they can do to provide the kinds of experiences that will help develop a resilient, well-integrated brain.

Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people’s feelings more fully.

When we’re closest to the banks of chaos or rigidity, we’re farthest from mental and emotional health. The longer we can avoid either bank, the more time we spend enjoying the river of well-being. Much of our lives as adults can be seen as moving along these paths—sometimes in the harmony of the flow of well-being, but sometimes in chaos, in rigidity, or zigzagging back and forth between the two.

In terms of development, very young children are right-hemisphere dominant, especially during their first three years. They haven’t mastered the ability to use logic and words to express their feelings, and they live their lives completely in the moment—which is why they will drop everything to squat down and fully absorb themselves in watching a ladybug crawl along the sidewalk, not caring one bit that they are late for their toddler music class.

Whole-brain parenting doesn’t mean letting yourself be manipulated or reinforcing bad behavior.

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.

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.

It’s as if you are a lifeguard who swims out, puts your arms around your child, and helps him to shore before telling him not to swim out so far next time.

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.

Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children’s pain or make things worse. Actually, telling the story is often exactly what children need, both to make sense of the event and to move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened.

Don’t underestimate the power of a story to hold a child’s attention. Try this if you have a little one—you’ll be amazed at how helpful it can be, and how eager he’ll be to help tell future stories when he’s been hurt or feels afraid.

One of the most important skills we can teach our kids is to make good decisions in high-emotion situations like the one Grant faced here. We want them to pause before acting, to consider consequences, to think about the feelings of others, to make ethical and moral judgments.

“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.”

Again, option #1 would have been perfectly fine, even appropriate. But it also would have missed an opportunity. My son would have missed a chance to see that relationships are about connection, communication, and compromise. He would have missed a chance to feel empowered that he can make choices, affect his environment, and solve problems. In short, he would have missed an opportunity to exercise and develop his upstairs brain.

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.

When kids can make sound decisions while controlling themselves and working from empathy and self-understanding, they will develop a robust and active sense of morality, a sense of not only right and wrong, but also what is for the greater good beyond their own individual needs.

HALT and check the basics: is your little Jedi simply hungry, angry, lonely, or tired?

Once again, one of the most effective ways to promote integration is to tell stories.

The point is that the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.

One reason kids often don’t express the complexity of a particular emotion is that they haven’t yet learned to think about their feelings in a sophisticated way that recognizes the variety and richness within them.

So while we want to help our kids integrate their left and right brain, their upstairs and downstairs brain, their implicit and explicit memories, and so on, we also need to help them understand the extent to which they are connected to their family, friends, classmates, and other people in their communities.

Any healthy relationship—whether it’s family, friendship, romantic, or otherwise—is made up of healthy individuals in connection with others.

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.

So if you want to develop close long-term relationships between your kids, think of it as a math equation, where the amount of enjoyment they share together should be greater than the conflict they experience.

Too often we forget that “discipline” really means “to teach”—not “to punish.” A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioral consequences.

When you’ve become the active author of your life story and not merely the passive scribe of history as it unfolds, you can create a life that you love.

You can see how this kind of self-awareness would lead to healthier relationships down the road, and especially what it could mean for your children’s own kids when they become parents. By raising a whole-brain child, you’re actually offering your future grandchildren an important gift.