Brain Development
 
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Parenting with the Brain in Mind
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April  2023 

Most parents want their children to be happy, resilient, and productive, but parenting a child is not easy! It's helpful to have an understanding of how the brain works, so that you can apply basic knowledge in those challenging times.

There are many different parts to our brain,  each with a different job, and we need all the parts to work as whole in order for us to function at our best.  

When children are taught to use their whole brain, they become more balanced and healthy overall, with heightened capacity for self-awareness, empathy, and relationship-building.

This Snapshot explores some of the strategies you can use to help your child engage their whole brain from the book The Whole Brain Child  by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson.  
Integrating the Left and Right Brain
Integration is the key concept underlying the strategies in the book. The focus is on helping kids make connections between different areas of the brain as they work to make sense of their emotions and thoughts. Mental health and well-being is enhanced when all areas of the brain  work well together.
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The two sides of our brains are different. The left side likes lists, sequences, logic, language, details, rules, and order.

The right side pays attention to nonverbal signals, emotions, images, personal memories, music, art, and creativity.

The two sides are connected by a bundle of fibers because we need them to work together, to be integrated.
Young kids, are mostly operating from their right brains because they haven’t developed the abilities to use logic, understand time, use words to express feelings, etc. It’s important to help them use both sides of their brains. Here are three strategies that will help a child of any age  integrate their left and right brain:
Connect and Redirect.  When your child is upset, logic often won’t work until we’ve responded to the right brain’s emotional needs. Acknowledging feelings in a nonjudgmental way, using physical touch, empathetic facial expressions, and a nurturing tone of voice, are all ways you use your right brain to connect. By starting with this you allow your child to “feel felt” before you begin trying to solve problems or address the situation.
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Redirect with the Left. Once you sense that your child’s brain has settled enough that it can handle a left-brain, logical approach, you can then redirect by problem-solving with your child or making suggestions on what they can do now that they are feeling calmer and more in control.

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Name It to Tame It: Telling Stories to Calm Big Emotions
Too often we “dismiss and deny” the emotions of children. We try to talk kids out of their feelings, or we avoid painful issues. Instead, pick a time when you and your child are feeling calm, and have a story-telling conversation about the difficult event. 
This strategy integrates both sides of the brain – words from the left brain and emotions from the right brain. Storytelling helps your child calm their flooded right brain and access their logical left-brain to explain and put things in order after an upsetting event. Remember what upsets children may seem trivial to adults but it is important not to dismiss it as "nothing".

Integrating the Upstairs and Downstairs Brain
Imagine the brain as a two-story house. The downstairs brain develops early and is responsible for bodily functions like breathing, as well as strong emotional reactions like fight, flight and freeze.

There’s a small structure in the downstairs brain that causes us to react emotionally without thinking. Sometimes this is good,  when we need to react fast to something life threatening. But often it gets us into trouble when we just react to experiences that aren’t life-threatening. 
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The upstairs brain develops later in childhood and on into adulthood. It’s the place where good decisions, self understanding, emotional control, empathy, and a sense of right and wrong all take place. Even though the upstairs brain isn’t fully on-line yet, parents can still appeal to it using the following strategies: 

Engage, Don't Enrage. First make sure you have connected with the right brain. Then, once calm, engage their upstairs brain in problem-solving. When you ask your child to think things through, or brainstorm a solution, you are engaging their upstairs brain.
Making age appropriate decisions about what to wear, what to have for a snack, what sport to play, etc. Even if you can foresee that their choice might lead to their regret, resist the urge to rescue your child. You can however help them predict possible outcomes.

Ask questions that help them think about and reflect on their feelings, and predict what they might feel and handle new situations. Ask questions about the feelings of others, about what someone’s actions might suggest about how they feel, about what might make someone feel better, etc. 
A strong upstairs brain balances out the reactive downstairs brain, and is essential for social-emotional intelligence. So look for daily opportunities to help your child practice upstairs brain skills. This includes:

Teach them calming techniques like taking a deep breath, count to ten, or take a time-out.

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Move It or Lose It: Moving the Body to Avoid Losing the Mind.
 
Movement changes brain chemistry, so when kids are near a breaking point and aren’t connecting with their upstairs brain, get them moving to integrate their brain. The same is true for adults.
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When children have an understanding of how their brains work, conversations with them about their behaviors and emotions tend to feel much less like personal attacks and more like collaborative problem solving. The upstairs/downstairs brain information is pretty easy for children to understand, and this video with with co-author of The Whole-Brain Child is a great way to get that conversation started.
Integrating Memories
Memories are tricky because they’re not just experiences filed away in a file cabinet, exactly as they happened. And they’re not exact photocopies of the experience, either. When we don’t help our kids integrate their difficult memories, their emotions will show up in their behavior – which can confuse both them and us. Here are some strategies to help your child integrate their unhappy memories:
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Use the Remote of the Mind: Replaying Memories. Just as telling a “story” or narrative about a strong emotion is naming it to tame it, here we help kids get in touch with their unhappy and challenging memories to integrate them. We can ask kids to think of their minds as a remote control that can fast-forward, skip, pause, and stop when remembering painful experiences. 

If an experience is too upsetting or painful for your child to be ready to talk about in its entirety right away, they can use the "remote control of the mind" to fast forward, rewind, and pause the story. This allows your child to have some control over revisiting unpleasant memories. Knowing that they are able to skip past a part they are not ready to talk about can help your child feel more comfortable about allowing you to revisit the event at a later date. 

Remembering to Remember. You can also help your children strengthen their ability to focus on details of the present moment. This strategy focuses on simply being more intentional about using everyday moments with your kids to help develop their brains and teach them important life and relationship skills.

Make daily family conversations a habit so kids always have a chance to talk about their experiences and memories.
Ask open-ended questions that will get them thinking and encourage them to share more than a “yes” or “no.” Instead of “How was your day?” ask them, “What was your favorite part of the day?” and “Tell me about recess.” Ask them about their not-so favorite parts of the day, too.

Have a regular family movie night where you watch movies you’ve made of your kids, family, and experiences.
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Spend time having fun, playing, and enjoying each other‘s company. Every time you have enjoyable experiences with kids, their brains release a “reward” chemical called dopamine, and they learn that relationships are rewarding.
From birth, children's experiences help to constantly rewire their brains so that the different areas of the brain can connect more easily and constructively.

Parenting with the brain in mind supports this integration and will have a positive impact on your child's life now and into the future!
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There is More!
There is too much information to include in a Snapshot format. However if you want to read more here it is!

The United States of Me: Integrating the Many Parts of the Self
In this chapter the authors introduce the idea of “Mindsight,” a term coined by Dan Siegel that mean understanding our own minds, which then we can then use to understand the minds of...

Resources and Sources

FamilySmart - Dr Ross Greene

May 4 - Join FamilySmart for a presentation and Q & A with Dr. Ross Greene as he speaks about how Collaborative and Proactive Solutions can help us show our kids we care about them. Solving problems together creates connection and allows our children to be a part of finding solutions to what is causing their concerning behaviour. Dr. Greene‘s work reminds us that things go better for everyone, when we solve problems together and that kids do well if they can. 

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The content provided through the Snapshots is for information purposes only. The Snapshots include information that is general in nature and cannot address the many individual child rearing challenges parents and caregivers may experience. Therefore it is the readers’ responsibility to determine the suitability of the information for their specific needs.

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