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February 13 - March 2, 2024
the moments you are just trying to survive are actually opportunities to help your child thrive.
As children develop, their brains “mirror” their parent’s brain. In other words, the parent’s own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child’s brain.
integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children.
Mindsight and The Developing Mind, 2nd edition.)
However, one of the surprises that has shaken the very foundations of neuroscience is the discovery that the brain is actually “plastic,” or moldable. This means that the brain physically changes throughout the course of our lives, not just in childhood, as we had previously assumed.
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.
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.)
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.
but the basic idea is that while the left brain is logical, linguistic, and literal, the right brain is emotional, nonverbal, experiential, and autobiographical—and it doesn’t care at all that these words don’t begin with the same letter.
In terms of development, very young children are right-hemisphere dominant, especially during their first three years.
Denial of our emotions isn’t the only danger we face when we rely too heavily on our left brain. We can also become too literal, leaving us without a sense of perspective, where we miss the meaning that comes from putting things in context (a specialty of the right brain).
when a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.
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.
The key here is that when your child is drowning in a right-brain emotional flood, you’ll do yourself (and your child) a big favor if you connect before you redirect. This approach can be a life preserver that helps keep your child’s head above water, and keeps you from being pulled under along with him.
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.
The right side of our brain processes our emotions and autobiographical memories, but our left side is what makes sense of these feelings and recollections. Healing from a difficult experience emerges when the left side works with the right to tell our life stories.
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.
When we help our children name their pain and their fears, we help them tame them.
not only is the upstairs brain under construction, but even the part of it that can function becomes inaccessible during moments of high emotion or stress.
Sometimes they can use their upstairs brain, and sometimes they can’t. Just knowing this and adjusting our expectations can help us see that our kids are often doing the best they can with the brain they have.
Why do you think you made that choice? What made you feel that way? Why do you think you didn’t do well on your test—was it because you were hurrying, or is this just really difficult material?
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.
Whole-Brain Kids: Teach Your Kids About Their Downstairs and Upstairs Brain
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.
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.
Just recounting basic facts like this helps develop your child’s memory and prepares her for interacting with more significant memories down the road.
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.
When we become aware of the multitude of changing emotions and forces at work around us and within us, we can acknowledge them and even embrace them as parts of ourselves—but we don’t have to allow them to bully us or define us.
