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March 4 - March 8, 2019
The rate of brain maturation is largely influenced by the genes we inherit. But the degree of integration may be exactly what we can influence in our day-to-day parenting.
The good news is that by using everyday moments, you can influence how well your child’s brain grows toward integration.
We’re talking about simply being present with your children so you can help them become better integrated.
An integrated brain results in improved decision making, better control of body and emotions, fuller self-understanding, stronger relationships, and success in school.
It’s based on the concept of integration and involves an understanding of the complex dynamics surrounding relationships and the brain. A simple way to express it, though, is to describe mental health as our ability to remain in a “river of well-being.”
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.
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.
Harmony emerges from integration. Chaos and rigidity arise when integration is blocked.
That was his “survive” goal.
That was his “thrive” goal.
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, on the other hand, is holistic and nonverbal, sending and receiving signals that allow us to communicate, such as facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice, posture, and gestures. Instead of details and order, our right brain cares about the big picture—the meaning and feel of an experience—and specializes in images, emotions, and personal memories. We get a “gut feeling” or “heart-felt sense” from our right brain. Some say the right brain is more intuitive and emotional, and we’ll use those terms in the following pages as a helpful shorthand to talk about what the right
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the left brain cares about the letter of the law
The right brain, on the other hand, cares about the spirit of the law,
In terms of development, very young children are right-hemisphere dominant, especially during their first three years.
the corpus callosum is a bundle of fibers that runs along the center of the brain, connecting the right hemisphere with the left.
The communication that takes place between the two sides of our brain is conducted across these fibers, allowing the two hemispheres to work as a team—which is exactly what we want for our kids.
They’re absolutely crucial if we are to live meaningfully, but we don’t want them to completely rule our lives.
she needed to pay attention to, and even honor, what was going on in her right brain, since the right brain is more directly connected to our bodily sensations and the input from lower parts of the brain that combine together to create our emotions.
This type of left-brain, logical response would hit an unreceptive right-brain brick wall and create a gulf between them.
Instead she used the connect-and-redirect technique.
In a moment like this, parents wonder whether their child is really in need or just trying to stall bedtime. Whole-brain parenting doesn’t mean letting
yourself be manipulated or reinforcing bad behavior. On the contrary, by understanding how your child’s brain works, you can create cooperation much more quickly and often with far less drama.
when a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.
“attunement,”
Instead, we can use these opportunities to realize that at these moments, logic isn’t our primary vehicle for bringing some sort of sanity to the conversation.
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.
After responding with the right, Tina could then redirect with the left.
you might decide to wait until your child is in a more integrated state of mind to talk logically with him about his feelings and behaviors.
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.
In this way, Doug helped his daughter name her fears and emotions so that she could then tame them.
Instead, we can gently encourage them by beginning the story and asking them to fill in the details, and if they’re not interested, we can give them space and talk later.
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.
Healing from a difficult experience emerges when the left side works with the right to tell our life stories. When children learn to pay attention to and share their own stories, they can respond in healthy ways to everything from a scraped elbow to a major loss or trauma.
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.
Because of what he had learned, he recognized that his daughter’s brain was linking several events together: being dropped off at school, getting sick, having her father leave, and feeling afraid.
As a result, when it came time to pack up and go to school, her brain and body started telling her, “Bad idea: school = feeling sick = Dad gone = afraid.”
He also knew that autobiographical memory is stored in the right side of the brain, and understood that the details of her getting sick had become linked in her memory and caused her right hemisphere to shift into overdrive.
When we can give words to our frightening
and painful experiences—when we literally come to terms with them—they often become much less frightening and painful.
Now I try to remember to connect first and solve second.
The downstairs brain includes the brain stem and the limbic region, which are located in the lower parts of the brain, from the top of your neck to about the bridge of your nose. Scientists talk about these lower areas as being more primitive because they are responsible for basic functions (like breathing and blinking), for innate reactions and impulses (like fight and flight), and for strong emotions (like anger and fear).
Your upstairs brain is completely
different. It’s made up of the cerebral cortex and its various parts—particularly the ones directly behind your forehead, including what’s called the middle prefrontal cortex. Unlike your more basic downstairs brain, the upstairs brain is more evolved and can give you a fuller perspective on your world.
Whereas the downstairs brain is primitive, the upstairs brain is highly sophisticated, controlling some of your most important higher-order and analytical thinking.
But when a child’s upstairs brain is working well, she can regulate her emotions, consider consequences, think before acting, and consider how others feel—all of which will help her thrive in different areas of her life, as well as help her family survive day-to-day difficulties.
When a fully functioning staircase is in place, the upper and lower parts of the brain are vertically integrated.
the behaviors and skills we want and expect our kids to demonstrate, like sound decision making, control of their emotions and bodies, empathy, self-understanding, and morality—are dependent on a part of their brain that hasn’t fully developed yet.
Our amygdala (pronounced uh-MIG-duh-luh) is about the size and shape of an almond and is part of the limbic area, which resides in the downstairs brain.
