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

by Daniel J. Siegel

children whose parents talk with them about their experiences tend to have better access to the memories of those experiences. 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.

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.

“name it to tame it” technique, he sat down with his daughter and retold the story

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. Another approach you can take if your child doesn’t feel like talking is to ask her to draw a picture of the event or, if she’s old enough, write about it. If you sense that she is reluctant to talk to you, encourage her to talk to someone else—a friend, another adult, or even a sibling who will be a good listener.

What kids often need, especially when they experience strong emotions, is to have someone help them use their left brain to make sense of what’s going on—to put things in order and to name these big and scary right-brain feelings so they can deal with them effectively. This is what storytelling does: it allows us to understand ourselves and our world by using both our left and right hemispheres together.

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.

Even children much younger than Katie—as young as ten to twelve months—respond well to telling stories.

When we help our children name their pain and their fears, we help them tame them. Whole-Brain Kids:

“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.”

the first thing a parent needs to do is to connect with the child and help him calm himself down. This can often be accomplished through loving touch and a soothing tone of voice. Or, if he has gone so far that he’s in danger of hurting himself or someone else or destroying property, you may have to hold him close and calmly talk him down as you remove him from the scene. You

So your first task, when your child’s upstairs brain has been hijacked by his downstairs brain, is to help calm his amygdala.

When you ask simple questions that encourage the consideration of another’s feelings, you are building your child’s ability to feel empathy.

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

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.

Unless kids can make sense of their painful memories, they may experience sleep disturbances, debilitating phobias, and other problems.

So how do we help our children when they’re suffering from the effects of past negative experiences? 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.

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.

Studies have clearly shown that the very act of recalling and expressing an event through journaling can improve immune and heart function, as well as general well-being.

Researchers who study human personality tell us that shyness is to a large extent genetic. It’s actually a part of a person’s core makeup present at birth. However, as in the case of Ian, that doesn’t mean that shyness isn’t changeable to a significant degree. In fact, the way parents handle their child’s shyness has a big impact on how the child deals with that aspect of his or her personality, as well as how shy the child is later on. The

Let someone begin a story, then after one sentence, the next person has to add to it, followed by the next person, and so on.

You can also use fun, and even silliness, to shift your children’s state of mind when they become stuck in an angry or defiant state.

“discipline” really means “to teach”—not “to punish.”