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

by Daniel J. Siegel

When you know about the upstairs and downstairs brain, you can also see that there are really two different types of tantrums.

An upstairs tantrum occurs when a child essentially decides to throw a fit.

Despite her dramatic and seemingly heartfelt pleas, she could instantly stop the tantrum if she wanted to—for instance, if you gave in to her demands or reminded her that she is about to lose a cherished privilege.

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.

Since upstairs tantrums are intentional, children will stop returning to that particular strategy when they learn that it’s ineffective—and often even leads to negative results.

A downstairs tantrum is completely different. Here, a child becomes so upset that he’s no longer able to use his upstairs brain.

In fact, the stress hormones flooding his little body mean that virtually no part of his higher brain is fully functioning. As a result, he’s literally incapable—momentarily, at least—of controlling his body or emotions, and of using all of those higher-order thinking skills, like considering consequences, solving problems, or considering others’ feelings.

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.

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

Once he is in a more receptive place, you can also talk about appropriate and inappropriate behavior, and about any possible consequences (“I know you were really angry about the water splashing in your face. But it’s not OK to hit when you’re mad. You can use words and tell Daddy, ‘I don’t like that. Please stop’ ”). Your discipline can now maintain your authority—that’s crucial—but

but you can do so from a more informed and compassionate position. And your child is more likely to internalize the lesson because you’re teaching it when his brain is more receptive to learning.

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.

Decision making requires what’s called executive functioning, which occurs when the upstairs brain weighs different options.

Whenever you can do so responsibly, avoid solving and resist rescuing, even when they make minor mistakes or not-so-great choices.

When your child is old enough to be able to write—or even just draw—you might give him a journal and encourage daily writing or drawing. This ritual can enhance his ability to pay attention to and understand his internal landscape.

Or for a younger child, have her draw pictures that tell a story. The more your kids think about what’s going on within themselves, the more they will develop the ability to understand and respond to what’s going on in the worlds within and around them.

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.

The point is to challenge your children to think about how they act, and to consider the implications of their decisions. In doing so, you give your kids practice thinking through moral and ethical principles, which, with your guidance, will become the foundation for the way they make decisions for the rest of their lives.

Research has shown that bodily movement directly affects brain chemistry. 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.

Our churning stomach and tense shoulders send physical messages of anxiety to the brain before we even consciously realize that we’re nervous.

The flow of energy and information from the body up into our brain stem, into our limbic region, and then up into the cortex, changes our bodily states, our emotional states, and our thoughts.

However you do it, the point is to help your child regain some sort of balance and control by moving their body,

which can remove blockages and pave the way for integration to return.

First, do no harm. Close your mouth to avoid saying something you’ll regret. Put your hands behind your back to avoid any kind of rough physical contact.

Second, remove yourself from the situation and collect yourself. There’s nothing wrong with taking a breather, especially when it means protecting your child.

Do jumping jacks. Try some yoga stretches. Take slow, deep breaths. Do whatever it takes to regain some of the control you lost when your amygdala hijacked your upstairs brain.

Finally, repair. Quickly. Reconnect with your child as soon as you are calm and feeling more in control of yourself.

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.

In other words, every new experience causes certain neurons to fire, and when they do, they wire together, or link up, with other neurons that are firing at the same time.

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. Thus memories are distorted—sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly—even though you believe you are being accurate.

Your state of mind when you encoded the memory and the state of mind you’re in when you recall it influence and change the memory itself. So the story you actually tell is less history and more historical fiction.

The memory that enables you to change your baby without knowing that you are remembering is called implicit memory. Your ability to recall learning to change a diaper (or

to recall any other specific moment) is explicit memory.

explicit memory: a conscious recollection of a ...

We encode implicit memory throughout our lives, and in the first eighteen months we encode only implicitly.

The problem with an implicit memory, especially of a painful or negative experience, is that when we aren’t aware of it, it becomes a buried land mine that can limit us in significant and sometimes debilitating ways.

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.

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.

It’s called the hippocampus, and it can be considered the “search engine” of memory retrieval.

When we don’t offer a place for children to express their feelings and recall what happened after an overwhelming event, their implicit-only memories remain in dis-integrated form, leaving the children with no way to make sense of their experience.

The more you promote this type of memory integration in your child, the less often you will see irrational responses to what’s happening now that are really leftover reactions from the past.

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.

understanding our own mind as well as understanding the mind of another.

That left him spending all of his time working and studying and practicing and worrying, when he could have been paying attention to other, more productive rim points, like his confidence in his musical ability, his belief that he was smart, and his desire to just relax and have fun from time to time.

But if her parents can help her integrate the many parts of herself, recognizing the various rim points on her wheel, she can avoid identifying solely with this one particular feeling in this one particular moment.

With intention and effort, we can acquire new mental skills. What’s more, when we direct our attention in a new way, we are actually creating a new experience that can change both the activity and ultimately the structure of the brain itself.

This entire process—from neural activation to neural growth and strengthened connections—is neuroplasticity. Essentially, it means that the brain itself is plastic, or changing, based on what we experience, and what we give our attention to. And these new neural connections, created when we pay attention to something, in turn alter the way we respond to and interact with our world. This is how practice can become a skill and how a state can become a trait, for good or for bad.