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

by Daniel J. Siegel

when it comes to your children, you’re aiming a lot higher than mere survival.

Survive. Thrive.

It’s almost as if your brain has multiple personalities—some rational, some irrational; some reflective, some reactive.

The key to thriving is to help these parts work well together—to integrate them.

It’s easy to see when our kids aren’t integrated—they become overwhelmed by their emotions, confused and chaotic. They can’t respond calmly and capably to the situation at hand. Tantrums, meltdowns, aggression, and most of the other challenging experiences of parenting—and life—are a result of a loss of integration, also known as dis-integration.

we want them to be horizontally integrated, so that their left-brain logic can work well with their right-brain emotion. We also want them to be vertically integrated, so that the physically higher parts of their brain, which let them thoughtfully consider their actions, work well with the lower parts, which are more concerned with instinct, gut reactions, and survival.

What molds our brain? Experience. Even into old age, our experiences actually change the physical structure of the brain. When

No matter how brilliant you think your preschooler is, she does not have the brain of a ten-year-old, and won’t for several years. 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.

Harmony emerges from integration. Chaos and rigidity arise when integration is blocked.

Many of the challenges we face as parents result from the times when our kids aren’t in the flow, when they’re either too chaotic or too rigid. Your three-year-old won’t share his toy boat at the park? Rigidity. He erupts into crying, yelling, and throwing sand when his new friend takes the boat away? Chaos.

Two Brains Are Better Than One Integrating the Left and the Right

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. Logic, responsibilities, and time don’t exist for them yet.

But when a toddler begins asking “Why?” all the time, you know that the left brain is beginning to really kick in. Why? Because our left brain likes to know the linear cause-effect relationships in the world—and to express that logic with language.

We don’t want our children to hurt. But we also want them to do more than simply get through their difficult times;

Tina stopped herself. Instead she used the connect-and-redirect technique. She pulled him close, rubbed his back, and with a nurturing tone of voice, said, “Sometimes it’s just really hard, isn’t it? I would never forget about you. You are always in my mind, and I always want you to know how special you are to me.”

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.

our society, we’re trained to work things out using our words and our logic. But when your four-year-old is absolutely furious because he can’t walk on the ceiling like Spider-Man (as Tina’s son once was), that’s probably not the best time to give him an introductory lesson in the laws of physics. Or when your eleven-year-old is feeling hurt because it seems that his sister is receiving preferential treatment (as Dan’s son felt on occasion), the appropriate response isn’t to get out a scorecard showing that you reprimand each of your children in equal measure.

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.

Whole-Brain Strategy #2: Name It to Tame It: Telling Stories to Calm Big Emotions

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.

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.

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.

The drive to understand why things happen to us is so strong that the brain will continue to try making sense of an experience until it succeeds. As parents, we can help this process along through storytelling.

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.”

Whole-Brain Kids: Teach Your Kids About the Two Sides of the Brain

The first is developmental: while the downstairs brain is well developed even at birth, the upstairs brain isn’t fully mature until a person reaches his mid-twenties.

This is really important information for parents to understand, because it means that all of the abilities on the list above—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. Since the upstairs brain is still under construction, it isn’t capable of fully functioning all the time, meaning that it can’t be integrated with the downstairs brain and consistently work at its best.

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. She makes a conscious choice to act out, to push buttons and terrorize you until she get what she wants. 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. The reason she can stop is that she is using her upstairs brain at that moment.

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. A good response in this situation would be to calmly explain, “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.”

If you refuse to give in to upstairs tantrums—regardless of the age of your child—you’ll stop seeing them on a regular basis. 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. Your toddler becomes so angry that you poured water on his head to wash his hair that he begins screaming, throwing toys out of the tub, and wildly swinging his fists, trying to hit you. In this case, the lower parts of his brain—in particular his amygdala—take over and hijack his upstairs brain. He’s not even close to being in a state of integration. 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. He’s flipped his lid.

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

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.

The point is to let your children wrestle with the decision and live with the consequences.

Scientists are beginning more and more to think that empathy has its roots in a complex system of what are being called mirror neurons,

Another way to exercise this part of the brain is to offer hypothetical situations, which kids often love: Would it be OK to run a red light if there was an emergency? If a bully was picking on someone at school and there were no adults around, what would you do?

Research has shown that bodily movement directly affects brain chemistry.

a lot of the emotion we feel actually begins in the body.

This is what memory essentially is—association.

“Neurons that fire together wire together.”

That’s how memory works. One experience (the end of ballet class) causes certain neurons to fire, and those neurons can get wired to neurons from another experience (getting bubble gum). Then each time we undergo the first experience, our brain connects it with the second one. Thus, when ballet ends, our brain triggers an expectation of getting gum. The trigger might be an internal event—a thought or a feeling—or an external event that the brain associates with something from your past.

Myth #2: Memory is like a photocopy machine. When you call up memories, you see accurate, exact reproductions of what took place in the past. You remember yourself on your first date with ridiculous hair and clothes, and you laugh at your own nervousness. Or you see the doctor holding up your newborn and you relive the intense emotions of that moment. Again, that’s not quite how it happens. Well, the ridiculous hair and clothes may have really happened, but memory is not an exact reproduction of events from your past. 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.

You’ve had those conversations with your sibling or your spouse where after you tell a story about something, they say “That’s not how it happened!” 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.

These two types of memory interweave and work together in your normal everyday living. 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.

Seriously. In fact, this is one of the best things you can do. You can say, “Brain, thanks for trying to keep me safe and protect me, but I don’t need to be afraid of swimming anymore. These are new lessons with a new teacher, a new pool, and I’m a new kid who already knows how to swim. So, brain, I’m just going to blow out the butterflies from my stomach with some big, slow breaths, like this. And I’m going to focus on the good stuff about swimming.” Does that seem weird, to talk to your brain like that?

Often kids are doing their best; they just need us to attend to their basic needs.

Just like you might fast- forward through the scary parts of a movie or rewind to watch your fa-vorite scene again, the remote of the mind is a tool that gives your child some control while revisiting an unpleasant memory.