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

by Daniel J. Siegel

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.

That’s one kind of memory: past experiences (changing diaper after diaper) influence your behavior in the present (changing this particular diaper) without any realization that your memory has even been triggered.

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. Usually when we talk about memory, we mean what is technically explicit memory: a conscious recollection of a past experience. But we need to know about both kinds of memory, for our own sake as well as for that of our children. By getting a clear handle on these two different types of memory, we can provide our kids with what they need as they grow and mature and deal with difficult experiences.

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.

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. The brain remembers many events whether we’re aware of them or not, so when we have difficult experiences—anything from a twisted ankle to the death of someone we love—these painful moments get embedded in the brain and begin to affect us. 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. That helps explain why children (as well as adults) often react strongly to situations without being aware of why they are so upset. Unless kids can make sense of their painful memories, they may experience sleep disturbances, debilitating phobias, and other problems.

We’re not saying that memory integration is a parental cure-all that will prevent all outbursts and irrational reactions. But it is a powerful tool for dealing with difficult experiences from the past, and you’ll be grateful to know about it the next time your child is struggling for some unknown reason.

In fact, before you over-analyze the situation, HALT and check the basics: is your little Jedi simply hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? If so, these problems can be fixed pretty easily.

memories. But sometimes, if a child is feeling the effects of an especially painful experience from the past, she may not be ready to remember the entire experience. In that case, you can introduce her to her internal DVD player, which comes with a remote control that lets her replay an experience in her mind. It can also pause, rewind, and fast-forward. Just like you might fast-forward through the scary parts of a movie or rewind to watch your favorite scene again, the remote of the mind is a tool that gives your child some control while revisiting an unpleasant memory.

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.

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.”

Simply by asking questions and encouraging recollection, you can help your kids remember and understand important events from the past, which will help them better understand what’s happening to them in the present.

The basic concept, as you can see from the diagram on this page, is that our mind can be pictured as a bicycle wheel, with a hub at the center and spokes radiating toward the outer rim. The rim represents anything we can pay attention to or become aware of: our thoughts and feelings, our dreams and desires, our memories, our perceptions of the outside world, and the sensations from our body. The hub is the inner place of the mind from which we become aware of all that’s happening around and within us. It’s basically our prefrontal cortex, which you’ll remember helps to integrate the whole brain. The hub represents part of what’s called the executive brain, because it’s from this place that we make our best decisions; it’s also the part of the brain that allows us to connect deeply to others and to ourselves. Our awareness resides in the hub, and from here we can focus on the various points on the rim of our wheel.

Mindsight let him see what was happening in his own mind, so he could understand that he was the one giving all this time and energy to these rim points, and that if he wanted, he could return to his hub, where he could see the big picture and focus on other rim points instead.

We need to help children understand that the clouds of their emotions can (and will) roll on by. They won’t feel sad or angry or hurt or lonely forever. This is a difficult concept for kids to understand at first. When they hurt or when they’re scared, it’s sometimes hard for them to imagine that they won’t always suffer. Taking the long view isn’t usually that easy even for an adult, much less a young child. So we have to help them understand that feelings are temporary—on average, an emotion comes and goes in ninety seconds. If we can communicate to our children how fleeting most feelings are, then we can help them develop the mindsight on display in the boy we mentioned earlier who corrected himself and said, “I’m not dumb; I just feel dumb right now.”

One of the best ways to begin orienting kids to what’s on their rim is to help them learn to SIFT through all the sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that are affecting them.

By paying attention to their physical sensations, for example, children can become much more aware of what’s going on inside their bodies.

In addition to sensations, we need to teach our kids to SIFT for images that are affecting the way they look at and interact with the world.

When a child becomes aware of the images that are active in his mind, he can use his mindsight to take control of those images and greatly diminish the power they have over him.

Kids can also be taught to SIFT for feelings and emotions they are experiencing. Take time to ask kids how they feel, and help them be specific, so they can go from vague emotional descriptors like “fine” and “bad” to more precise ones, like “disappointed,” “anxious,” “jealous,” and “excited.” 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. As a result, they don’t use a full spectrum of emotions in their responses, and instead paint their emotional pictures primarily in black and white. Ideally, we want our kids to recognize that there’s a colorful rainbow of rich emotions within them, and to pay attention to these different possibilities.

You can see how a calming mindsight exercise like this could be a simple but powerful tool to help a child deal with fears and other challenging emotions. Plus, mindsight exercises lead to integration, because as you know, where we focus our attention, neurons fire and become active, then wire to other neurons.