1-Page Summary

From sibling arguments to temper tantrums, parents constantly have to manage conflict. Amidst the chaos, parents sometimes feel like the best they can do is to survive these challenges and restore peace. However, moments of conflict are the most pivotal opportunities to promote your child’s psychological development. With some basic understanding of your child’s developing brain, you can approach challenging situations with the tools to turn them into teachable moments.

Different regions of the brain manage different functions—for example, the right side of the brain is associated with creativity and big-picture thinking, while the left side of the brain is logic-oriented. These different regions work both individually and in collaboration. However, when one part of your brain starts to take control, then you lose mental and emotional equilibrium. This lack of integration causes you to act out, and, in children, it leads to tantrums, irrational anxiety, and general misbehavior. In contrast, when the different parts of your brain are integrated, you function at your best—socially, mentally, and emotionally.

Through the whole-brain approach, you’ll learn to recognize when your child’s mind is off-balance, and how to guide her back to integration. In the process, your child will learn about her own mind and emotions, which leads to long-term benefits, including:

Additionally, you’ll gain insight into your own emotions. You can apply many of the same strategies yourself, so that you’re not just teaching your child about integration, but also modeling it.

Integrating the Left and Right Brains

The first two regions of the brain we’ll talk about are the left and right hemispheres—or, as they’re commonly referred to, the left brain and right brain.

The right brain manages:

The left brain manages:

On one hand, if you rely too heavily on your right brain, you face an emotional flood, bombarded with feelings and physical sensations, unable to make sense of it all. On the other hand, if you rely too heavily on your left brain, you end up in an emotional desert in which you lose compassion, empathy, and big-picture perspective.

The whole-brain approach fosters horizontal integration between the left and right brains, helping you use both your logic and your emotions to understand your experiences, your thoughts, your behaviors, and those of the people around you. Let’s explore two strategies for helping children integrate their left and right brains.

Horizontal Integration Strategy #1: Connect With Emotions, Redirect to Logic

If your child is in the midst of a right-brain takeover and you try to cut through her emotions with logic, she won’t be able to process your reasoning. Instead, take this two-step approach:

  1. Connect with the right brain. Show your child that you understand how she’s feeling. Use nonverbal cues, such as hugging her and speaking in a nurturing voice.
  2. Redirect to the left brain: Once your child is calm, integrate her left brain using reasoning. Address your child’s concerns with logical explanations, or brainstorm solutions together. If your child has been acting inappropriately, explain why her behavior was unacceptable and what the consequences will be, if necessary. She’ll be better able to learn the lesson when she’s in an integrated state.

Horizontal Integration Strategy #2: Help Your Child Tell the Stories of Difficult Memories

Painful and scary experiences can overwhelm your child with emotion, even long after the experience ends. For example, 9-year-old Bella developed anxiety about flushing toilets after she flushed once and watched the water overflow.

Help your child integrate her left brain by telling the story of what happened (order and sequence) and how it made her feel (language). While the right brain processes your personal memories and emotions, the left brain makes sense of them, which is what allows you to attain closure so that the memory doesn’t haunt you.

When you help your child tell her story:

Integrating the Upstairs and Downstairs Brains

Imagine your brain is a two-story house.

Your downstairs brain controls primitive functions, such as:

Your upstairs brain controls high-level thinking, such as:

A mind that’s vertically integrated is like a house with an accessible stairway connecting the upstairs and downstairs brains. The upstairs brain tempers the impulses and strong emotions of the downstairs brain, while the downstairs brain contributes emotions and gut instincts to upstairs decision-making. However, when you feel intense fear or anger, your downstairs brain blocks the stairway to your upstairs brain, making high-level thinking nearly impossible.

Even when they’re not dealing with downstairs-brain takeovers, children have limited use of their upstairs brains, which don’t fully mature until they’re in their mid-20s. This makes it even more important that you:

  1. Use the following strategies to help your child develop her upstairs brain
  2. Manage your expectations of your child’s ability to use her upstairs brain

Downstairs-Upstairs Strategy #1: Engage the Upstairs Brain

Any time you react to your child’s behavior, be aware of whether you’re engaging the downstairs or upstairs brain. When your child’s downstairs brain is on the verge of taking over—whether she’s upset about chores or frustrated with homework—you have two choices:

  1. Use your authority to command your child to obey, which may get results, but also antagonizes her downstairs brain.
  2. Engage the upstairs brain to reach a resolution, which empowers your child to be part of the solution.

If your child is acting out, first, connect emotionally by using gentle touch and a soft voice. Try to identify how your child is feeling and why. When she begins to calm down and open up emotionally, the stairway connecting her downstairs and upstairs brains is becoming unblocked.

At this point, invite your child to help you brainstorm a solution, or to offer a suggestion for negotiation. This gives your child a chance to practice analytical thinking, self-reflection, and empathy. Once you reach a resolution, address misbehavior, if necessary, and talk about more appropriate ways to handle similar situations and big emotions in the future.

Downstairs-Upstairs Strategy #2: Give Your Child Upstairs-Brain Workouts

The more your child practices using her upstairs brain, the stronger it becomes. If she doesn’t use her upstairs brain enough, it could lose some of its functional capacity, which is especially concerning because the upstairs brain plays a major role in mental health and social and emotional intelligence.

Let’s look at the upstairs brain’s key functions, and how to help your child work those mental muscles:

In addition to talking about and teaching these skills, it’s essential that you model these behaviors for your children, since your child learns how to navigate the world by watching your example.

Downstairs-Upstairs Strategy #3: Move Your Body to Calm Your Mind

If your child’s downstairs brain is blocking the stairway to her upstairs brain, physical movement can clear the passage. When you recognize that your child is upset and needs to get moving, always empathize and connect with her emotionally first. Then, there are two ways to introduce movement:

  1. Get her to physically relax by instructing her to breathe deeply or relax her muscles.
  2. Get your child moving in a more active way, in order to get the anxious energy out. Explain that moving will help her brain calm down, and suggest that she do some jumping jacks, play a game like tag, or go on a walk together.

Integrating Memories

Sometimes your child may have a strong and unexpected reaction to something for no apparent reason—for example, she refuses to take swimming lessons, even though she’s taken them before and she normally loves swimming. If the issue isn’t simply that your child is tired, hungry, or in a sour mood, it’s likely that a memory is haunting your child and making her act irrationally without her realizing why.

Your brain records memories as a mixture of sensations, thoughts, and emotions, and it creates associations among those sensations and emotions. For example, your child’s brain connected the sound of a swim instructor’s whistle with her anxiety about jumping into the deep end. As a result, the sound of a whistle triggers that association and makes her feel a twinge of anxiety as she remembers those swim lessons.

All of the individual sensations, thoughts, and emotions associated with a memory are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When you think or talk about an experience, you integrate all the pieces to form a complete picture of the memory, so that you can recall it later. However, if you don’t integrate the memory—because the experience was scary or painful—then the pieces float around your brain in a jumble, but the associations among sensations and emotions are still intact. This means that the sound of a whistle can trigger your child’s anxiety, but she won’t have the conscious memory to recall the stressful swim lesson and understand why she’s feeling anxious.

Unintegrated memories can create anxiety around everyday activities, injure your child’s self-confidence, and impede her ability to trust others. As long as your child is unaware of the source of the fear, anxiety, or anger that her unintegrated memories are triggering, then she remains a victim of them. Help your child regain control of her emotions by making her aware of the memory and how it’s affecting her, and help her tell the story of her memory in order to put the puzzle pieces together.

Unintegrated Memory Strategy #1: Give Your Child a Memory Remote Control

Your child may be reluctant to revisit a painful or scary experience. In order to help your child get through the memory, give her an imaginary remote control—she can pause the story before it gets scary and fast-forward through the difficult parts. This tactic gives your child some control and allows her to confront the painful memory at her own pace. If your child isn’t ready to revisit the difficult parts of the memory yet, don’t push her—but, eventually, she must tell the entire story in order to integrate the memory.

Your child will need to go through the story multiple times, whenever the emotions from that memory start resurfacing. Over time, the memory will lose its power over the present because your child will be able to recognize it as something that happened in the past.

Unintegrated Memory Strategy #2: Practice Remembering

Help your child have fewer unintegrated memories in the first place by getting her to process experiences as they happen. Encourage your child to develop a habit of remembering things by frequently asking her questions about her day, her experiences, and her thoughts and feelings.

Instead of vague questions (such as, “How was your day?”), ask more specific questions (such as, “What were the best and hardest parts of your day?”) that require more focused remembering. If your child is reluctant to talk, turn it into a game (for example, ask her two tell you two things that happened that day and one thing that didn’t, and then guess which was made up), encourage your child to journal, or work together to create a memory book of trips and events.

Integrating All the Parts of Your Child’s Self

There are many parts of you—you may be a parent, an employee, a spouse, a son or daughter, a mentor, and a student. Think of all your parts as spokes on a wheel, and the hub in the center is your self-awareness of all the parts that make you whole. On the rim of this wheel of awareness are the feelings, thoughts, memories, physical sensations, goals, dreams, and perceptions that can pull at your attention. For example, you can feel anxious about a presentation at work, excited for an upcoming vacation, and tired from getting up early this morning.

If you put all of your attention on your work presentation, that anxiety will determine your state of mind until you change your focus. If you remain stuck on that rim point for too long, you become dis-integrated with the other parts of yourself, and you may start to believe that your work life—and your anxiety—defines you, rather than being just one aspect of who you are.

However, when you’re in your hub, you can recognize and integrate the different aspects of yourself and the various things that you can give your attention to in any given moment. From your hub, you can choose where to put your attention, thus determining your mood and state of mind. This self-awareness requires you to frequently pause and reflect on how you’re feeling, what you’re focusing on, and which rim points deserve your attention. Help your child develop these skills using the following strategies.

Self-Integration Strategy #1: Explain That Feelings Are Temporary

Although it’s important that your child acknowledges her feelings—rather than denying and suppressing them—she must also understand that emotions are temporary, and that they don’t define who she is. Explain to your child that emotions are like the weather: There’s no doubt that the clouds and the rain are real, but you also know that they won’t last forever. She can trust that she’ll feel differently soon.

When your child is consumed by emotion, it can be hard for her to imagine ever feeling better. Remind her of a recent time—maybe earlier that day—when she was happy.

Self-Integration Strategy #2: Help Your Child Recognize Her Rim Points

Introduce your child to the idea that she can feel many things at once, and then help her to notice what she’s feeling. If she’s upset that her friend canceled a playdate, acknowledge that she’s feeling disappointed, and point out that another part of her also feels excited about their plans to reschedule, and another part of her is thinking about what she’s going to play during recess today.

Use the acronym SIFT to help your child identify her many rim points:

  1. Sensations include hunger as well as the ways that emotions affect the body, such as butterflies in your stomach. When your child understands that emotions and physical sensations are connected, she can also learn to relax her muscles and take deep breaths in order to calm herself down.
  2. Images include images from memories and from your child’s imagination and dreams, all of which can affect how your child interprets and reacts to the present. For example, if your child remembers the image of her being picked last for teams during recess, she’s inclined to feel left out among her peers. When she understands the power these images have on her, she can put them in perspective by integrating the other parts of herself, such as her role as the confident team leader on a class project.
  3. Feelings and emotions can be symptomatic of an experience, but they can also influence your experience. For example, if you get upset about hitting traffic on the way to your picnic, you're more likely to get annoyed at the noise from the children playing nearby. When your child recognizes how she’s feeling and how it’s affecting her outlook, she has more power to choose to feel differently.
  4. Thoughts include the things you think about, your self-talk, and how you narrate your experiences. When your child becomes more aware of her thoughts, she doesn’t have to be a victim of them—instead, she can direct them in a positive way and reject negative thoughts.

Self-Integration Strategy #3: Guide Your Child to Her Hub

When your child gets stuck on a rim point, use calming techniques that help your child zoom out and shift her attention to other rim points. As your child notices other rim points, she gets back to her hub, where she can choose where to direct her attention. One technique is to bring her attention to her physical sensation by focusing on her breath. Have your child lie down and close her eyes, and tell her to pay attention to the air flowing in and out of her mouth and nose and her stomach moving with each breath.

Another technique is to tell your child to think of a place where she feels calm, and to visualize herself in that place—for example, rocking in her grandparents’ hammock, or floating on a pool raft. With practice, your child will develop a lifelong habit of using these tools, which will keep her in the hub.

Integrating Your Child With Other People

As your child develops an increasingly integrated mind, she’ll learn to use empathy to understand other people’s minds and build healthy relationships without compromising her sense of self. However, sharing and empathy won’t come automatically to your child—she’s still learning how to interpret her own thoughts and emotions, let alone anyone else’s. Your child needs your help to learn and practice the skill of empathy, just like she practices other skills such as reading.

Give your child plenty of opportunities to interact and build friendships with other children, and offer support when your child needs it. Additionally, use your own relationship with your child to model empathy, sharing, and consideration. Through early relationships with parents, caregivers, siblings, relatives, friends, and teachers, your child will learn how to navigate relationships for the rest of her life.

Interpersonal Integration Strategy #1: Have Fun as a Family

Showing your child how fun and rewarding it is to be in a relationship with you—her first and primary relationship—will encourage her to build healthy relationships with other people, as well. Additionally, encourage fun and healthy sibling relationships among your children. While it’s practically inevitable that siblings will fight, having fun together is the best predictor of a strong bond that will last into adulthood. As long as the fun outweighs the fighting, they’ll likely enjoy a close relationship as adults.

Interpersonal Integration Strategy #2: Practice Empathy Through Disagreements

Although unpleasant, every disagreement your child has—with you, with a sibling, or with a friend—is an opportunity to teach her healthy and effective ways to manage conflict. Resolving a disagreement requires multiple social skills that your child needs help developing. There are three key skills to teach your child:

  1. Seeing another person’s perspective: It’s especially difficult for children to consider someone else’s perspective when they’re upset, since their social circuitry is still developing. Teach your child this skill by frequently asking questions about how someone else might feel and why someone may have reacted in a certain way.
  2. Interpreting nonverbal communication: Point out people’s body language, and explain the emotions it reflects. Understanding nonverbal cues—including posture and tone of voice—helps your child develop empathy and connect with people.
  3. Making amends: Teach your child that, sometimes, she needs to more than simply apologize to make things right after an argument—for example, replacing something that was broken, or writing a letter of apology. This skill requires your child to consider the other person’s perspective, in order to understand why the other person is upset and how to make him feel better.

Introduction

When your child throws a tantrum or refuses to share a toy with her brother, your challenge, as a parent, is not only to manage the conflict, but also—ideally—to teach your child a valuable life lesson. You may try reasoning with her and explaining why it’s important to share, but your logic doesn’t get through to her. It may feel like the best you can do is to find a way to end the argument. However, with some basic understanding of your child’s developing brain, you can approach challenging situations with the tools to turn them into teachable moments.

Different regions of the brain manage different functions. For example, the right side of the brain is associated with creativity and big-picture thinking, while the left side of the brain is logic-oriented. Keeping a balance between complementary parts of the brain helps you navigate life with even-mindedness. In contrast, when one part of the brain dominates, you lose mental and emotional equilibrium. In children, this lack of integration leads to tantrums, irrational anxiety, and general misbehavior. Through the whole-brain approach, you’ll learn to recognize when your child’s mind is off-balance, and how to guide her back to integration.

In the process, your child will learn about her own mind and emotions, which leads to long-term benefits, including:

The book’s authors draw on their decades of experience as child and adolescent psychotherapists, as researchers and educators who teach parents and childcare professionals about children’s developing brains, and as parents. The brain science is presented simply, and it’s coupled with practical applications for children of different ages, with a focus on infancy to early adolescence.

The authors first explain the concept of integration—of maintaining balance between complementary regions of the brain—which is at the core of the whole-brain philosophy. With that foundation, they then explore:

You’ll also gain insight into your own emotions, and you can apply many of the same strategies that you teach your child yourself. In fact, when you model self-awareness and emotional processing yourself, it helps your child to adopt those habits more effectively. Using the integration techniques will also help you to keep a cool head and calmly use these strategies in the midst of your child’s meltdown.

Chapter 1: The Importance of Integration

The different parts of your brain work individually and in collaboration, similarly to employees within a company. Each job is distinctly different, but they all work together in order to make the company successful; if the company were missing any one of these employees, the organization would either be extremely dysfunctional or fail altogether.

The same is true for your brain. Each region of your brain is responsible for a distinct set of tasks, which we’ll explore in the coming chapters. You function optimally—socially, mentally, and emotionally—when the different parts of your brain are integrated. Maintaining integration is the basis of the whole-brain child parenting method.

Think of integration like navigating a boat down a river: The ride is smoothest when you’re floating right down the middle, in a balanced, integrated way. If you become dis-integrated and veer too much to one side, you risk getting tangled in the chaos of one riverbank—where you feel like you don’t have control—or stuck in the obstacles on the opposite riverbank—where you become too rigid and attempt to control everything. Dis-integration leads to behaviors such as aggression and emotional withdrawal.

People of any age can have moments of dis-integration, but children face the added challenge of having a brain that isn’t fully developed. Since various regions of the brain mature at different paces, a preschooler is ruled by emotions because her sense of logic is still developing. You’ll be teaching your child to integrate her mind while parts of her brain are not yet fully operational, so the strategies we’ll explore have two functions:

  1. Exercise different regions of her brain, which will aid the development of those regions
  2. Integrate the different regions as they develop

Integration Rewires the Brain

Research shows that experiences shape your brain throughout life. This happens through a multistep process:

  1. When you experience something, certain neurons—or brain cells—fire a charge through their attached circuits. Which neurons fire depends on what you experience; the smell of pancakes activates certain neurons, while a feeling of happiness makes different neurons fire.
  2. When neurons fire together, they create a connection—for example, linking the smell of pancakes with the feeling of happiness.
  3. Repeated experiences strengthen this association, rewiring the brain to trigger happiness when you smell pancakes.

As a parent, you shape most of your child’s early experiences—from the way you discipline to the music you play—meaning that you have the power to mold your child’s brain through those experiences. When you help your child integrate the various regions of her brain, her brain creates these neural connections between those regions. The more you help her practice integration, the more it strengthens those connections, so that her brain physically becomes more integrated. And, since rewiring continues throughout life, it’s never too late to integrate your own brain using the whole-brain approach.

Exercise: How Do You Keep Your Mind at Peace?

Before we discuss the whole-brain strategies for integration, reflect on the techniques you already use.

Chapter 2: Integrating the Left and Right Brains

The first two complementary regions of the brain we’ll talk about are the left and right hemispheres—or, as they’re commonly referred to, the left brain and right brain.

The left brain:

The right brain:

If you rely too heavily on your left brain, you end up in an emotional desert. You operate only with cold, calculating logic, neglecting your and others’ emotions. In an emotional desert, you lose compassion, empathy, and big-picture perspective. Teens often retreat to emotional deserts, because it gives them a feeling of control when they become overwhelmed by the emotional overload of adolescence.

In contrast, if you rely too heavily on your right brain, you face an emotional flood. You’re bombarded with feelings and physical sensations, unable to make sense of it all. Babies and toddlers are ruled by their right brains, because they don’t start developing command of logic until around age 3—however, parents can still effectively guide them to age-appropriate reasoning.

When you’re horizontally integrated between the left and right brains, you use both your logic and your emotions to understand your experiences, your thoughts, your behaviors, and those of the people around you. Let’s explore two strategies for helping children integrate their left and right brains.

Horizontal Integration Strategy #1: Connect With Emotions, Redirect to Logic

When your child is in the midst of an emotional flood of pent-up frustrations or irrational fears, her right brain has taken over and created a barrier to her logical left brain. If you try to cut through her flood of emotions with logic, she won’t be able to process your reasoning. Instead, connect with her first on an emotional level, so that she feels understood. Then, as she calms down, integrate her left brain by redirecting her attention to reasoning.

Here’s how the strategy played out in one instance between one of the authors and her 7-year-old son: Not long after bedtime, Tina’s son got out of bed and told her that he felt that she never did anything nice for him, he hated homework, and he was mad that his birthday was still 10 months away.

Instead of scolding him for getting out of bed or dismissing his grievances, Tina applied this strategy:

1) Connect with the right brain: Tina recognized that her son was simply overwhelmed with feelings. She needed to let her son know that she understood and cared about his concerns. Even when your child’s concerns seem trivial or bizarre, they matter to him, and your response should respect that.

Tina connected with her son through right-brain nonverbal communication: She embraced him, rubbed his back, and spoke to him in a nurturing voice. This response gave her son the emotional space to explain that he felt that his brother got more of Tina’s attention, and that homework ate up too much of his leisure time. As he spoke, his emotional flood ebbed.

2) Redirect to the left brain: At this point, Tina’s son was calm enough that he could be receptive to some logic. Tina addressed each of his concerns with explanations and plans, which helped her son connect the emotions he was feeling with logical resolutions. For example, she suggested that they brainstorm how to make homework more pleasant.

Even if Tina had suspected her son’s complaints were a ploy to delay going to sleep, the connect-and-redirect strategy was the most efficient and effective way of getting him back to bed quickly. If she had simply scolded him, the situation may have escalated into a struggle that would have upset them both and taken more time to resolve.

Keep in mind that while a right-brain takeover may explain your child’s emotional behavior, it doesn’t excuse your child for breaking rules. If your child is acting inappropriately, stop the bad behavior, connect with her emotionally, give her time to calm down, and then engage her left brain while talking about why her behavior was unacceptable and what the consequences will be.

Applying This Strategy to Left-Brain Takeovers

Paradoxically, the same approach applies not just to right-brain takeovers, but also to left-brain takeovers, when your child denies her emotions and retreats to her left brain. The reason is that emotions are still at the root of the problem—your child is simply reacting to them differently.

Use nonverbal cues to show interest in how your child is feeling. Help her identify her physical sensations, so that she can recognize the emotions behind them (for example, you physically tense up when you’re stressed or upset). Once your child reconnects with her right brain, connect with her emotionally, and then integrate the left brain.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Tailor this strategy to your child’s age and developmental maturity with these tips.

Ages 0-3: Begin teaching your child about emotions from a young age. When your child acts out, first, identify your child’s emotion, tell her that you recognize that she’s feeling that way, and use nonverbal communication to reinforce your understanding and empathy. Second, after your child feels seen and understood, make it clear why her behavior was inappropriate. Third, suggest an acceptable, alternative behavior, or simply shift to another activity.

Ages 3-9: Since your child is old enough to verbalize how she’s feeling, hear her out. Then, reiterate what you’ve heard from her, in order to show her that you hear her and you understand. Finally, talk to her about a more appropriate way to behave, and work with her to problem solve. For example, if she lashed out because she’s frustrated and disappointed that her friend canceled their playdate today, brainstorm another activity she can do today, or another day they can reschedule the playdate.

Ages 9-12: As you listen to your child and mirror back her feelings, be cautious to avoid sounding patronizing. Since your child is beginning to grapple with new aspects of maturity and independence, show her respect by clearly explaining the natural consequences of her actions or your reasoning in doling out discipline, if necessary.

Horizontal Integration Strategy #2: Help Your Child Recount Difficult Memories

Painful and scary experiences can cause a right-brain takeover, even long after the experience ends. Using the same principles as the connect-and-redirect strategy, help your child tell the story of the experience and how it made her feel. This approach applies left-brain language and order—naming the child’s emotions and telling the story in sequence—to the right-brain emotional reactions, which consequently become more manageable.

While the right brain processes your personal memories and emotions, the left brain makes sense of them, which is what allows you to attain closure so that the memory doesn’t haunt you. When children learn to organize memories into stories and then share those stories, they can use those skills to work through difficult experiences for the rest of their lives. Research shows that storytelling—either verbally or through journaling—calms emotion-driven activity in the right brain.

For example, after 9-year-old Bella watched the toilet overflow after she flushed it, she developed anxiety about flushing. Bella’s father prompted her to retell what had happened the day the toilet overflowed. He began to outline the sequence of events, and he asked her to fill in details about what happened and how she had reacted. Every time Bella’s anxiety resurfaced, her father went through the story with her. Over time, this exercise helped Bella process what had happened, and her anxiety waned.

This strategy is especially important when your child has been through a traumatic event, like a car accident. Although you may want to steer your child away from the subject in an effort to avoid upsetting her, she needs the opportunity to process the event and her emotions so that she can move forward, instead of fixating on an unresolved traumatic experience.

When you help your child tell her story:

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: Even before your child can talk, name emotions as often as possible. When you’re telling a story, you’ll need to do most of the narrating, and you may want to act out certain events. Children as young as 10 to 12 months can benefit from a parent retelling the story of a painful experience.

Ages 3-6: Although your child’s verbal skills are well-developed, she may still need to lean on you to lead the storytelling when she’s upset. Start the story, and pause to give her an opportunity to pick it up from there. If she doesn’t, continue to narrate while offering her the chance to jump in at any point.

Ages 6-9: At this age, your child can take the reins on storytelling, but she might still need you to nudge her along. As she narrates, ask questions to encourage her to fill in details.

Ages 9-12: Acknowledge how your child is feeling, then let her take the lead on the storytelling; your primary role is to ask questions to prompt the story, and to be patient and present as she tells it in her own way and her own time. If your child is reluctant to talk about a particularly difficult memory, encourage her to journal or help her brainstorm another person she can talk to.

Exercise: Reflect on an Incident of Left-Right Dis-Integration

Reflect on a recent example of left-right dis-integration and how you could have handled it so that you can quickly recognize and resolve it next time.

Chapter 3: Integrating the Upstairs and Downstairs Brains

In addition to horizontal integration between your child’s left and right brains, it’s important to facilitate vertical integration between the lower and upper regions of the brain—we’ll call them the downstairs and upstairs brains.

The downstairs brain encompasses the brainstem and limbic region, which are located between the top of your neck and the bridge of your nose. The downstairs brain controls basic functions, as well as knee-jerk reactions, enabling you to act before you think, which can be crucial for survival and safety. These functions include:

The upstairs brain comprises the various parts of the cerebral cortex, which sits behind your forehead and right under the top of your head. The upstairs brain is responsible for high-level thinking, allowing you to think through context, consequences, and the impact your actions may have on others. These processes include:

A mind that’s vertically integrated between the downstairs and upstairs brains is like a house with an easily accessible stairway connecting the upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs brain tempers the impulses and strong emotions of the downstairs brain, while the downstairs brain contributes emotions and gut instincts to upstairs decision-making. However, when you experience intense fear or anger, your downstairs brain takes over and blocks the stairway to your upstairs brain.

Children have an added challenge to vertical integration, because their upstairs brains don’t fully mature until they’re in their mid-20s. This makes it even more important that you:

  1. Use the following strategies to help your child develop her upstairs brain
  2. Manage your expectations of your child’s ability to use her upstairs brain

Downstairs-Upstairs Strategy #1: Engage the Upstairs Brain

When your child’s downstairs brain is on the verge of taking over—whether she’s upset about chores or refusing to finish dinner—you have two choices:

  1. Use your authority to command your child to obey, which may get results but will antagonize her downstairs brain in the process.
  2. Engage the upstairs brain to reach a resolution, which empowers your child to be part of the solution.

If your child is upset and experiencing a downstairs-brain takeover, start by taking the connect-and-redirect strategy. Connect emotionally by using soft touch and voice to try to identify how your child is feeling and why. When your child begins to calm down and open up emotionally, it’s a signal that the stairway connecting her downstairs and upstairs brains is becoming unblocked.

At this point, engage your child’s upstairs brain by inviting her to help you brainstorm a solution, or to offer a suggestion for negotiation. Encouraging your child to participate in the problem solving has several benefits:

Once you’ve worked together to reach a resolution, address misbehavior, if necessary, and talk about appropriate ways of handling similar situations and big emotions in the future.

Upstairs and Downstairs Tantrums

Sometimes your child’s downstairs-brain takeover can lead to a tantrum. Although conventional wisdom tells parents to ignore tantrums to avoid encouraging the bad behavior, that approach doesn’t facilitate integration—instead, use the strategy we just discussed to help your child calm down and engage her upstairs brain.

In contrast to emotion-driven downstairs tantrums, upstairs tantrums are strategic, manipulative tantrums that a child intentionally throws, in hopes of getting her parents to give in to her demands. This tantrum requires analytical thinking and decision-making—thus, it’s a product of the upstairs brain. With the upstairs brain already engaged, you can use reasoning to explain to your child why the tantrum is inappropriate and what the consequences will be if she continues to act out. Stand firm and carry through with consequences, if necessary.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: “No” tends to trigger toddlers’ downstairs brains. Avoid using “no” unless you really need to, and try to stay calm and redirect. For example, instead of simply telling your toddler to stop banging the mirror with her stick, engage her problem-solving upstairs brain by suggesting that you go outside together to find another use for the stick.

Ages 3-6: When your child misbehaves, instead of responding with a statement (such as, “That’s not a nice thing to say”), respond with a question that requires her to use her upstairs brain. For example, rather than merely telling her that her behavior is inappropriate, ask her to brainstorm a more acceptable way of acting. Give her positive reinforcement when she thinks of a better alternative.

Ages 6-9: Do as much as you can to engage your child’s upstairs brain, which is going through significant growth at this age. If she’s upset about a decision you’ve made, explain your thought process, ask her if she has a different suggestion, and negotiate (within parameters that are acceptable to you).

Ages 9-12: Your child’s upstairs brain is still undergoing tremendous growth—so use it (and avoid saying, “Because I said so,” which will likely enrage her downstairs brain). Whenever possible, ask your child to help you in decision-making and problem-solving.

Downstairs-Upstairs Strategy #2: Give Your Child Upstairs-Brain Workouts

The more your child practices using her upstairs brain, the stronger it becomes. If she doesn’t use her upstairs brain enough, it could lose some of its functional capacity, which is especially concerning because the upstairs brain plays a major role in mental health and social and emotional intelligence.

In addition to talking about and teaching these skills, it’s essential that you model these behaviors for your children. Since your child learns how to navigate the world by watching your example, modeling thoughtful decision-making, self-control, self-understanding, empathy, and morality is the best way to instill these values.

Now, let’s look at the upstairs brain’s key functions, and how to help your child work those mental muscles.

Decision-Making

Decision-making requires evaluating multiple options, projecting what the outcome of each option would be, and then weighing the pros and cons of those outcomes. When your child is young, give her simple decisions to make, such as choosing which shirt to wear. As she gets older, her decisions should be increasingly complicated and have increasingly substantial consequences.

As long as your child’s decision doesn’t cause significant harm, refrain from stepping in and steering her to another option or rescuing her from the consequences of her decision. Struggling through the decision-making process and dealing with its outcomes are both critical aspects of learning, practicing, and building decision-making skills.

Emotional and Physical Control

Teach your child to recognize when her downstairs brain is taking over, and how to regain control with her upstairs brain. These skills will help her prevent downstairs-brain takeovers, so that she can make good decisions when she’s upset.

Teach your child common calming techniques, such as:

Self-Understanding

If your child examines how she feels and why, she’ll improve her self-understanding, which gives her the insight to make well-informed decisions, manage her emotions, and understand the world and people around her. Ask your child questions that look beyond the surface level—not just the “what,” but the “why.” For example, “Why did your brother’s comment make you upset?” or “Why did you feel homesick at sleepaway camp?” You can also encourage her to practice self-reflection by regularly writing or drawing in a journal.

Empathy

As your child improves her self-understanding, she’ll be able to apply those skills to understanding others, as well. If your child gets into the habit of thinking about how other people feel, it will lead her to developing empathy and compassion. Point out people you and your child encounter throughout the day—people at school, strangers you see in public, or characters in a book. Ask your child to surmise how someone feels and why.

In addition to simple observations, show your child how empathy factors into the decisions you make. For example, if she finds a toy at the park and wants to bring it home, instead of simply saying “no,” ask her to consider how the lost toy’s owner might feel if he looks for his toy and finds that it’s gone.

Morality

Each skill we’ve discussed builds off of the previous ones—and morality is the culmination of all of them. Morality involves controlling your emotions, accessing self-understanding and empathy and, ultimately, reaching a decision about what serves everyone’s best interests.

Ask your child questions that challenge her to consider the morals and ethics of day-to-day and hypothetical situations. For example, ask your child what she’d do if she saw someone being bullied and there was no adult around to help.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: Give your child age-appropriate decisions to make herself, such as which shirt to wear. You may want to offer options instead of making the choice open-ended. Additionally, when you read with your child, ask questions to push her to go beyond the surface. For example, ask how a character is feeling and why, or how she thinks an issue in the story will be resolved.

Ages 3-6: As your child matures, give her increasingly difficult decisions to make. At this age, your child can also handle hypothetical questions, so play “What would you do?” games that challenge her to solve a dilemma. For example, ask what she’d do if she found a toy at the park that she wanted, but she knew it must belong to another child.

Ages 6-9: Give your child increasingly difficult decisions to make. As much as possible without putting her in danger, let her struggle with the decision and live with the consequences. It’s more important that she learns how to make a decision—even if she has to learn from her mistakes—than it is that she makes the right decision every time. Additionally, talk to your child about her beliefs, desires, and intentions, and speculate with her about how other people feel in various situations.

Ages 9-12: Continue giving your child decisions to make, having reflective conversations, and posing hypothetical dilemmas. As she gets older and more mature, increase the difficulty of her decisions and the depth of your conversations.

Downstairs-Upstairs Strategy #3: Move Your Body to Calm Your Mind

When your child’s downstairs-brain is blocking the staircase to her upstairs brain, physical movement can clear the passage. Not only does your physical state reflect your emotions—for example, causing your muscles to tense when you’re anxious—but research shows that physical actions can also influence your emotional state, which means that you can counteract intense emotions with deliberate physical movements.

When you recognize that your child is upset and needs to get moving, always empathize and connect with her emotionally first. Then, there are two ways to introduce movement:

  1. Get her to physically relax by instructing her to breathe deeply or relax her muscles.
  2. Get her moving in a more active way, in order to get the anxious energy out. Explain that moving around will help her brain calm down and suggest that she does some jumping jacks, play a game like tag, or go on a bike ride together.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: Once you’ve connected emotionally, find a playful way to get her to move—for example, suggest you race to the other side of the house, tickle her, or play follow the leader.

Ages 3-6: You’ll probably have no trouble getting a child this age to move around. You may even find it helpful to discuss her emotions while moving—for example, play catch while you talk about what made her feel angry.

Ages 6-9: As your child gets older, there are more ways you can get her moving, such as going for a bike ride or doing yoga. Explain to your child how her upstairs and downstairs brains work, and why moving will help her to calm down and give her the power to have more control of her feelings.

Ages 9-12: Clearly explain this strategy to your child, so that she can not only practice it with you, but also get into the habit of using it on her own.

Tips for Parents to Avoid Flipping Their Lids

People of all ages flip their lids every now and then. When you feel like you’re about to flip your lid at your child, follow these steps:

  1. Keep your mouth physically closed to ensure you don’t say something you shouldn’t.
  2. Keep your hands behind your back to ensure you don’t touch anyone more forcefully than you should.
  3. Give yourself a short break to calm down. Tell your child that you need to get yourself calm—this way your child won’t feel personally rejected—and then step away for a moment.
  4. Use the physical movement strategy we discussed to re-engage your upstairs brain: Breathe deeply, stretch, jump up and down, or run around for a minute.
  5. Once you’re calm, reconnect with your child. If you lashed out while you were upset, apologize and take responsibility. Do this all as soon as possible in order to repair and maintain a strong relationship with your child.

Exercise: Exercise Your Child’s Upstairs Brain

Brainstorm ways to develop your child’s upstairs-brain abilities.

Chapter 4: Integrating Implicit and Explicit Memories

Downstairs-brain and right-brain takeovers are usually triggered by something in the present—but, sometimes, your child may have a strong and unexpected reaction to something because of something in the past. For example, if your child normally loves swimming, but she’s refusing to take swimming lessons, it’s possible that a past experience is haunting your child and making her act irrationally without her realizing why.

In order to explain this, first we’ll explore two myths about memory, and the truth about how memory actually works. Then, we’ll explain how subconscious memories affect your child’s behavior, and how you can help.

How Memory Works

There are a few common myths about memory that hinder people’s ability to understand and manage their memories. Just like the other brain functions we’ve discussed, when you know how your brain stores and processes memories, you can prevent them from controlling you.

Myth #1: Your Memory Is an Organized Record of Your Experiences

The first myth is that your memory is like a filing cabinet that holds an organized record of all your life experiences. In reality, memory is a network of associations you make among the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that comprise an experience.

Every experience causes neurons (brain cells) to fire off electrical signals in response to particular smells, sights, tastes, sounds, sensations, emotions, or thoughts. For example, certain neurons fire because your child hears a whistle, others fire in response to the anxiety she feels because her swim instructor is forcing her to jump into the deep end. All those neurons firing at the same time become linked in the brain, creating associations—your swim instructor blowing the whistle for you to jump in the pool—which you recall as a memory.

The more often certain neurons fire together, the stronger the association becomes. Eventually, one sensation triggers your child to expect the second sensation, and she can’t hear a whistle without feeling anxious. In other words, your child’s past experiences and the associations they’ve created directly impact how she perceives each present moment.

Myth #2: Your Memory Is an Accurate Record

Have you ever been talking about a shared memory with a friend and found out that she remembers the event differently? Memories are not accurate records of events—in fact, every time you remember something, the act of recalling the memory alters it.

Just as your mood and thoughts during the experience become encoded as part of the memory, your state of mind when you recall the event becomes associated with the memory, as well. Sometimes the mood and environment you’re in when you remember something can alter the memory significantly.

The Power of Implicit Memory

There are two types of memory:

  1. An explicit memory is one that you deliberately recall, which is typically what people are referring to when they talk about memories.
  2. An implicit memory is knowledge that you draw upon without even thinking about it. For example, skills such as driving a car are procedural implicit memories because you don’t have to think about what you’re doing every time you step on the gas or hit your turn signal. Implicit memories also include a process called priming, in which a child’s earliest memories form the foundation for how she’ll view the world for the rest of her life—whether her parents are attentive or indifferent, their treatment will dictate her expectations in future relationships.

(Shortform note: A third type of implicit memory is called classical conditioning, which is when an association forms between two stimuli and causes you to respond in a certain way. Physiologist Ivan Pavlov discovered classical conditioning in his famous dog-treat experiment. The integration strategies we’ll discuss will target this type of implicit memory.)

All of the individual sensations, thoughts, and emotions associated with a memory are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When you think or talk about an experience, you integrate all the pieces to form a complete picture of the memory in the context of your life story. However, if you don’t integrate the memory—because the experience was scary or painful—then the pieces float around your brain in a jumble. When you have unintegrated implicit memories, the associations among the sensations, thoughts, and emotions are still intact. This means that a present experience can trigger an emotion, but you don’t know why.

Unintegrated memories can create anxiety around everyday activities, injure your child’s self-confidence, and impede her ability to trust others. As long as your child is unaware of the source of the fear, anxiety, or anger that her unintegrated memories are triggering, then she remains a victim of them. This can cause sleep issues, phobias, and other physical, mental, and emotional problems.

Helping Your Child Integrate Memories

Teach your child to regain control of her emotions by becoming aware of the memory and how it’s affecting her, and by integrating the memory through telling the story of the experience. When she integrates her memories, she fleshes out the big picture of her life experiences, and she can separate the emotions of her past experience from her current experience.

As a parent, help your child take control of her memory and her present experience using these steps:

  1. Explain that your brain remembers things even when you don’t realize it, and that these memories can make you feel a certain way because of something that happened in the past.
  2. Suggest that this could be happening now, and that may be why your child is feeling the way she’s feeling. Help her to tell the story of the sad, scary, or frustrating experience that’s impacting her now. As we talked about in Chapter 2, telling the story will help your child integrate her left and right brains, and it will lessen the memory’s emotional power over her.
  3. Talk about all the ways her experience will be different this time around. For example, if your child is nervous about swim lessons, point out that she already knows how to swim and she’ll have different instructors.
  4. Ask her to think of all the positive memories she has associated with this activity, so that she can focus on those instead of the negative memory.
  5. Tell her that she can talk to her brain. She can thank her brain for trying to warn and protect her, and then she can tell her brain all the reasons that this experience will be different.
  6. Help her to come up with a code word or phrase to remind her brain of all this if she starts to get anxious again later.

Implicit Memory Strategy #1: Give Your Child a Memory Remote Control

When parts of the memory are scary or painful for your child to recollect, she may not want to revisit it. In order to help your child get through the memory, give her an imaginary remote control that gives her the power to pause the story before it gets scary and fast-forward through the difficult portions. This tactic gives your child some control and allows her to confront the memory at her own pace. After you’ve made it through the story once, suggest to your child that you rewind to the parts of the story that you skipped past the first time. If your child isn’t ready to revisit the difficult parts of the memory yet, don’t push it—but, eventually, it’s essential that she tells the entire story.

Your child will need to go through the story multiple times, whenever the emotions from that memory start creeping back in. Over time, the memory will lose its power over the present as it becomes integrated into your child’s personal narrative.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: At this age, your child may be more captivated by the storytelling and less interested in pausing or fast-forwarding. Your child may simply want you to repeat the story over and over again. Although this can be tedious for you, remember that it’s important for your child’s development.

Ages 3-6: Your preschool-aged child probably loves telling stories, so encourage her to do it as much as possible. Have your child tell stories about any experience she has, with a special focus on significant events that you want her to remember.

Ages 6-12: Your child may be more reluctant to revisit scary or painful memories, so it can help to explain to her why it’s so important to put the puzzle pieces of her memory together. Emphasize that the remote control gives her the power to control the story.

Implicit Memory Strategy #2: Practice Remembering

Help your child have fewer unintegrated implicit memories in the first place by getting her to process experiences as they happen. Encourage your child to develop a habit of remembering things by frequently asking her questions about her day, her experiences, and her thoughts and feelings.

Instead of vague questions (such as, “How was your day?”), ask more specific questions (such as, “What were the best and hardest parts of your day?”) that require more focused remembering. If your child is reluctant to talk, you can:

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: Keep questions simple. Ask your child about what happened that day. Help her recall certain details, and prompt her to fill in others.

Ages 3-6: Play memory games in which your child has to connect photos with certain memories. When it comes to significant events that you want to ensure your child remembers, take turns sharing memorable details.

Ages 6-9: Whether you’re at the dinner table, in the car, or getting ready for bedtime, make a habit of asking questions to encourage your child to recount details of her day and experiences.

Ages 9-12: Continue the habit of asking questions and showing interest when your child talks about her experiences. Create a scrapbook together, or encourage her to keep a journal.

Parents Must Integrate Their Implicit Memories

The longer you live, the more memories you acquire, and the greater the potential for unintegrated implicit memories to influence your day-to-day life. It’s important for all adults to identify and integrate unprocessed memories, but the stakes are higher for parents, because:

  1. Children can sense their parents’ emotions. You may be smiling and playing with your child, and she can still pick up on your underlying stress or fear—even if you’re not consciously aware that you’re feeling that way. It’s difficult for your child to feel happy or at ease when you’re upset.
  2. Implicit memories can trigger emotions that negatively affect how you interact with your child. Your child may say or do something that triggers you to lash out, overreact, or withdraw.

If you notice yourself reacting in a way that doesn’t suit the situation, reflect on your behavior. First, check in with yourself, as you would with your child: Are you overly tired, hungry, or upset about something else? Then, if those factors don’t entirely explain your feelings and behavior, consider whether an implicit memory is affecting you.

Ask yourself if this situation is reminding you of something in your past. Reflect upon your own childhood, your relationship with your parents, and other memories that may be pertinent. If you hit upon something, journal, think through the memory, or tell the story to someone. This process will free you from the memory so that you don’t bring that baggage into your relationship with your child.

Exercise: Recognize the Influence of Implicit Memories

Your child’s implicit memories may be impacting her behavior more often than you realize.

Chapter 5: Integrating All the Parts of Yourself

In addition to integrating memories and different regions of your brain, integrating the various parts of who you are helps you remain calm and in control of your thoughts and emotions. There are many parts of you—including parent, employee, and mentor. There are probably parts of you that are insecure, and other parts that are self-assured.

Think of all your parts as spokes on a wheel, and your self-awareness of your various parts is the hub in the center. On the rim of this wheel of awareness are all the things that can grab your attention—such as feelings, thoughts, memories, physical sensations, goals, dreams, and perceptions of the world around you.

whole-brain-child-hub.png

When you’re in your hub, you can acknowledge all the different aspects of yourself and all the various things that you can give your attention to in any given moment—such as the mild ache in your back, your lunch options, the memory of last weekend’s camping trip, and anxiety about your upcoming work presentation. If you put all of your attention on one thing, you can become stuck on that rim point, and that one thing determines your state of mind until you change your focus. For example, if you focus entirely on your work presentation, anxiety will consume you.

If you’re stuck on the rim, you may begin to neglect your other rim points and think that just one rim point defines you; in other words, when you’re stuck on a rim point, you confuse how you feel with who you are. For example, if you focus on your presentation and feeling anxious, then you begin to think that you are an anxious person.

By contrast, from your hub, you clearly see that each rim point is just a part of your experience—meaning that your anxiety can coexist with your hunger and the ache in your back. Self-integration entails recognizing all of your spokes and rim points and putting them into perspective as parts of a whole. This helps you to see yourself as a multifaceted person, and it prevents one rim point from feeling all-consuming.

Choose Where You Focus Your Attention

The wheel of awareness gives you the power to choose where to put your attention, thus determining your mood and state of mind. Understanding how and why you feel the way you do is half of “mindsight,” which is the foundation of good mental health. (The other half of mindsight how someone else feels and why, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter.)

Improving your mindsight requires you to frequently pause and reflect on how you’re feeling, what you’re focusing on, and which rim points deserve your attention. The more you practice, the more adept you’ll become at focusing your attention, which allows you to choose how you experience things. Rather than being subject to external forces, you become an active participant.

For example, Josh was a high-achieving child who focused on anxiety-inducing rim points, including his fear of getting a B on a test and his worry that he’d botch his solo in the upcoming music performance. When Josh identified other rim points—such as his confidence as a baseball player—it reminded him that there was more to him than his grades and his music performance. With this perspective, he still felt some anxiety about his grade and his solo, but it only represented part of his experience.

Let’s explore some strategies to help your child stay centered in her hub, where she can see and integrate the various parts of herself.

Self-Integration Strategy #1: Explain That Feelings Are Temporary

The strategies we’ve discussed so far have reinforced how important it is that your child acknowledges and embraces her feelings, rather than denying and suppressing them. While embracing her feelings, your child also needs to understand that emotions are temporary, and that they don’t define who she is—feelings are states, not traits. When your child understands that an emotion is temporary and doesn’t define her, she can recognize and integrate her other rim points. Explain to your child that emotions are like the weather: There’s no doubt that the clouds and the rain are real, but you also know that they won’t last forever.

When your child is consumed by difficult emotions, it can be hard for her to imagine ever feeling better. If she can’t visualize it in the future, remind her of a recent time—maybe earlier that day—when she was happy or felt differently about the very thing that has upset her now. This will help her to gain a bigger-picture perspective of her spectrum of emotions.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: Help your child begin to understand the difference between “feel” and “am.” Validate how she’s feeling and comfort her if she needs it, but also help her to understand that she will feel differently in a little while.

Ages 3-6: The emotional right brain still dominates at this age, so it may be hard for your child to grasp that she won’t always feel the way she feels now. Comfort her and let her know she’ll feel better soon—you may even ask her when she thinks she’ll feel happier.

Ages 6-9: Reinforce the distinction between “feel” and “am.” When your child is having a hard time seeing past her current emotion, ask her how she thinks she’ll feel in five minutes, five hours, five days, five months, and five years.

Ages 9-12: At this age, your child has the mental maturity to understand that emotions are temporary—however, it can still be difficult to internalize that fact. When she’s upset, first connect with her emotionally so that she feels understood, and then remind her that these feelings will pass.

Self-Integration Strategy #2: Help Your Child Recognize Her Rim Points

The first step to using the wheel of awareness and successfully self-integrating is recognizing your various rim points in a given moment. Introduce your child to the idea that she can feel many things at once, and then help her to notice what she’s feeling.

Use everyday opportunities to illustrate how different feelings can coexist. If she’s upset that her friend cancelled a playdate for this weekend, acknowledge that she’s feeling disappointed, and help her to recognize that another part of her probably feels excited about their plans to reschedule the following weekend, and still another part of her is probably thinking about what she’s going to play during recess today.

Try using the acronym SIFT to orient your child to her many rim points:

1) Sensations include hunger and tiredness as well as the many ways that emotions affect the body. For example, your child can learn that butterflies in her stomach mean that she’s nervous. When your child understands that emotions and physical sensations are tied together, she can also learn to relax her muscles and take deep breaths in order to calm herself down.

2) Images include images from memories and from your child’s imagination and dreams, all of which can affect how she’s interpreting and reacting to the present. For example, if your child remembers the image of her being picked last for teams during recess, she’s inclined to feel left out among her peers. When she understands the power these images have on her, she can put them in perspective by integrating the other parts of herself, such as her role as the confident team leader on a class project.

3) Feelings and emotions can be symptomatic of an experience, but they can also influence your experience. For example, if you hit traffic on the way to your picnic and it puts you in a sour mood, you're more likely to get annoyed at the noise from the children playing nearby. If your child can recognize how she’s feeling and how it’s affecting her outlook, she has more power to choose to feel differently.

Avoid generalizing all emotions into broad categories—such as sad, angry, and happy—and, instead, teach your child about the nuances of emotions. Before your child is old enough to talk, name her disappointments, frustrations, and other complex emotions. As she gets older, acknowledge that, sometimes, she may feel a mix of emotions all at once. Exposing your child to a broad spectrum of emotions will give her the tools to experience and identify complex emotions.

4) Thoughts include the things you think about, your self-talk, and how you narrate your experiences. When your child becomes more aware of her thoughts, she doesn’t have to remain a victim of them—instead, she can direct them in a positive direction and reject negativity.

When your child practices using SIFT to check in with herself, she can begin to see how all of her thoughts and feelings are interconnected and collectively determine her state of mind. Your child will begin to understand her power to alter any aspect of SIFT, which creates a domino effect to change her state of mind.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: Start to build your child’s awareness of her mind and body. Ask her questions that lead her through SIFT, but offer some specifics to help her along. For example, “Are you tired?” for sensations; “What picture do you see in your head when you think of your cousin’s house?” for images; “It’s frustrating when your sister knocks down your toys, isn’t it?” for feelings; and “What do you think will happen at your friend’s birthday party this weekend?” for thoughts.

Ages 3-6: Continue to develop your child’s awareness of her mind and body through questions that hit upon each aspect of SIFT.

Ages 6-9: At this age, explain the wheel of awareness and SIFT to your child. Do frequent SIFT check-ins with your child, which will help her develop the habit of noticing how she’s feeling.

Ages 9-12: Regularly remind your child of the wheel of awareness, and help her to SIFT through her feelings. The more this becomes a habit, the more control she will feel as she enters adolescence, which can feel chaotic and out-of-control.

Self-Integration Strategy #3: Guide Your Child to Her Hub

When your child gets stuck on a rim point, use calming techniques that help your child zoom out and shift her attention to other rim points. As your child notices other rim points, she gets back to her hub, where she can choose where to direct her attention.

One technique is to bring her attention to her physical sensation by focusing on her breath. Beginning when your child is four or five, guide her through this exercise:

  1. Instruct her to lie still and quietly. Tell her to look around the room by moving only her eyes.
  2. Point out that there are many things she can look at—the books on the shelf, the toys on the floor, the TV in the corner—but she has the power to choose what she focuses on. Similarly, she can choose what to focus on inside her body and mind.
  3. Ask your child to close her eyes and notice any sounds she can hear. Explain that she wouldn’t have been able to hear those sounds if she’d been focused on something else, but she chose to pause and listen.
  4. Tell your child to switch her attention to her breathing. Direct her to focus on the air flowing in and out of her mouth and nose, then on her chest moving up and down, and, finally, on her stomach moving with each breath.
  5. Instruct your child to continue focusing on her breath. Tell her that if she starts thinking about something else, to simply refocus on her breath.
  6. Stop talking and give your child a couple minutes to quietly focus on her breathing.

As an alternative, guide your child to think of a place where she feels calm, and to visualize herself in that place—for example, rocking in her grandparents’ hammock or floating on a pool raft.

With practice, your child will develop a lifelong habit of using these tools, which will keep her in the hub and strengthen the neural connections in her brain between this quiet focus and a feeling of calm.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: Use a prop to help your child notice her breathing: Put a toy boat on her stomach while she lies on her back, and tell her to notice how it goes up and down as she takes big breaths in and out. Although you’ll need to keep the exercise brief before she loses interest, she’ll benefit from feeling calm and connecting with her body in this way.

Ages 3-6: This is still a great age to use a prop for breathing exercises, and your child may be able to practice mindful breathing for a bit longer than before. Additionally, take advantage of your child’s active imagination by guiding her through a visualization to help her relax.

Ages 6-9: Children at this age can have more appreciation for the feelings of calm and focus that they get from breathing exercises and visualizations. Guide your child through these kinds of exercises, and let her know that she can use the same techniques whenever she needs to calm herself down.

Ages 9-12: Help your child understand and feel the benefits of connecting with her body to calm her mind. Guide her through breathing and visualization exercises, or look up other calming techniques online. Encourage her to use these tools whenever she needs to, which will give her some feeling of control during adolescence (and for the rest of her life).

Tips for Parents to Get Back to Their Hubs

When you get stuck on the rim point of anger and frustration that inevitably comes with parenting, you lose sight of the joy of parenting, and resentment can seep in.

When you notice yourself getting stuck on one thought or feeling, pause and cool off. You can:

Additionally, you can ask yourself these questions:

After thinking about those questions, how do you feel? Is your state of mind different than it was a few minutes ago? These questions distance you from the rim point you’re stuck on, so that you can get back to your hub, see the bigger picture, and direct your attention elsewhere.

As a parent, the mindsight you gain from being in your hub allows you to:

Exercise: Orient Your Child to Her Hub

Your child’s age and developmental level will affect how well she grasps the concept of a wheel of awareness. Brainstorm ways to introduce your child to the principles of self-integration and to direct her to the hub.

Chapter 6: Integrating Yourself With People Around You

In the last chapter, we explored the first aspect of mindsight: understanding your own mind. Now, let’s talk about the other aspect: understanding other people’s minds, or, simply, empathy. Empathy involves reading nonverbal cues to recognize how others are feeling, and seeing other people’s perspectives. Empathy also improves your child’s ability to communicate effectively and compromise, all of which helps her to connect with others.

Research shows that people experience a stronger sense of personal meaning and deeper happiness through helping and connecting with others, rather than solely taking care of their own concerns. In other words, your “me” greatly benefits from being part of a “we.” To this end, it’s important to help your child develop skills for interpersonal integration—maintaining a strong sense of self while integrating into a community, with consideration for other people’s needs, feelings, and perspectives. As your child develops an increasingly integrated mind, she’ll be better able to connect with others and nurture healthy relationships without compromising her sense of self.

Humans Are Wired to Connect With Others

The human brain is designed to connect with others: It interprets cues from other people, and it helps you respond accordingly. Additionally, since every experience you have creates new neural connections, your interactions with other people literally help to shape your brain.

Mirror neurons are a major factor in this process. When you watch someone else pick up a glass of water, your mirror neurons fire as if you had taken a sip of water. Your mirror neurons prepare you to reflect what you expect another person to do or feel. When your mirror neurons help you to understand another person’s emotions, you not only reflect them back, but you also absorb them. For example, if you’re particularly stressed one day, you may notice that your child also becomes somewhat anxious. This all means that humans are wired with the capacity to empathize and connect with other people.

(Shortform note: At the time this book was written, some scientists suspected that mirror neurons were the building blocks of empathy. However, more recent research has weakened that theory.)

Although your child has the mental capacity for empathy, she needs your help to learn and practice it. In fact, just like other skills, some children are naturally more or less adept at empathy than others, and they simply need more help developing it. Give your child plenty of opportunities to interact and build friendships with other children—which will put them in situations that require empathy—and offer support when your child needs it.

Your Child’s Mental State Aids or Impedes Empathy

When you’re trying to teach your child a lesson in empathy and connecting with others, be aware of whether your child has access to her upstairs brain, which controls empathy. If her upstairs brain is online, she’s in a receptive mental state. In this state, her social circuitry is switched on, which makes her physically, mentally, and emotionally more open to connecting with other people. By contrast, if your child’s downstairs brain is blocking the stairway to her upstairs brain, she’s in a reactive state. It’s nearly impossible to be open and empathetic with other people when you’re in this state.

If you pay attention to which state your child is in, it will help you to determine how to handle outbursts and misbehavior. As we discussed in the upstairs-downstairs brain strategies, when your child’s downstairs brain has taken over and she’s in a reactive state, comfort and support her before you attempt to reason with her.

Model Healthy Relationships

One of the best ways to encourage empathy in your child is to make sure that the relationship you have with her is strong, loving, and joyful. Your child’s early relationships will teach her how to navigate relationships for the rest of her life. Specifically, she’ll learn:

From the time your child is a baby, she’s learning what to expect from other people through her interactions with you (as discussed in Chapter 4). If she feels loved and if her needs are met, then she’ll expect to find love and support in her relationships with others. However, if your child doesn’t feel cared for and is left to figure out how to soothe herself, the part of her brain that’s built for relationships can shut down because it’s not getting the human connection it needs.

Interpersonal Integration Strategy #1: Have Fun as a Family

Showing your child how fun and rewarding it is to be in a relationship with you—her first and primary relationship—will encourage her to build healthy relationships with other people, as well. When you have fun with your child, she gets a burst of dopamine, a brain chemical that motivates her to repeat the experience; in this case, the dopamine makes her want to seek out strong, healthy bonds with others.

Additionally, encourage fun and healthy sibling relationships among your children. While it’s practically inevitable that siblings will fight, having fun together is the best predictor of a strong bond that will last into adulthood. As long as the fun outweighs the fighting, they’ll likely enjoy a close relationship as adults.

There are many ways to inject some fun into your daily family life, such as:

This is not to say that play should replace boundaries and discipline, because structure is also essential for your child’s development. However, you can take a playful approach to parenting. When your child is upset—as long as you acknowledge and validate how she’s feeling—responding in a silly way can help your child get unstuck from that rim point. For example, if you're giving your daughter a bath and she angrily insists that dad washes her hair, instead of getting frustrated and explaining that dad is busy, try being silly and pretending to be dad.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Tailor this strategy to your child’s age and developmental maturity with these tips.

Ages 0-3: Play with your child. Get on the ground with her, follow her lead, join her in playing with her toys, and tickle her.

Ages 3-6: Encourage your child to have fun with her siblings and relatives. Also, try using silliness to avoid power struggles and meltdowns.

Ages 6-9: Whether it’s a spontaneous water fight or a weekly movie night, incorporate fun into daily life. Dance, play, be silly, and make a point of creating opportunities to have fun and make happy memories.

Ages 9-12: As your child approaches adolescence, she may want to spend more time with her friends and less with you. However, if you consistently have fun with your child and maintain a strong connection, she’ll value the time she spends with you and want to continue enjoying time together, even as a teenager. Interactive games, sports, gardening, cooking, and day- or weekend-long trips are some of the many ways to bond and create treasured memories.

Interpersonal Integration Strategy #2: Practice Empathy Through Disagreements

Although unpleasant, every disagreement your child has—with you, with a sibling, or with a friend—is an opportunity to teach her healthy and effective ways to manage conflict. Resolving a disagreement requires multiple social skills that your child needs help developing.

Skill #1: Seeing Another Person’s Perspective

It’s difficult to stop and consider someone else’s perspective when you’re upset. Help your child practice this skill by frequently asking questions about how someone else might feel and why someone may have reacted in a certain way. Pose these questions after an interaction you or your child has, about strangers you observe, or about characters in a book. This will get your child in the habit of thinking about other people’s perspectives.

Then, when your child is in the midst of an argument, put these skills to work. First, stay calm and demonstrate empathy. If your child comes to you complaining that her brother called her a name, resist the urge to dismiss and deny her grievance by asking how she provoked her brother or telling her to stay away from him. Instead, connect emotionally with your child, and then help her consider her brother’s perspective, and ask her what might have made her brother so upset that he would lash out.

Skill #2: Interpreting Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication—including posture, gestures, facial expression, and tone of voice—is a major aspect of communication. (Shortform note: In fact, experts say that nonverbal cues account for a far larger percentage of communication than merely the words that are spoken.) The more your child practices reading nonverbal cues, the more empathy she’ll develop, and the better she’ll be able to connect with people.

Help your child learn to read nonverbal cues by helping her to notice other people’s body language and explaining the emotions it reflects. For example, after your child wins her soccer game, point out that her friend on the losing team is looking at the ground and has her shoulders slumped, which probably means she’s feeling disappointed about the loss.

Skill #3: Making Amends

When your child has an argument, sometimes an apology isn’t enough to smooth things over. Teach your child that there are times when she needs to do a follow-up action to make things right after a conflict, and help her to determine the appropriate action. There are generally two kinds of responses she can take:

  1. A direct response: Fixing, rebuilding, or replacing something that was broken during the argument.
  2. A relational response: Taking another approach to show regret and mend the relationship, such as writing a letter of apology, doing something kind for the other person, or drawing a picture to give to the other person.

When you prompt your child to decide which kind of response is needed and how to carry that out, she gets to practice empathy and attuning to another person’s feelings. First, she has to imagine the other person’s perspective enough to imagine why he’s upset. Then she has to put herself in his shoes to determine what might make him feel better.

Tips for Using This Strategy at Different Ages

Ages 0-3: At this age, your child’s ability to share and empathize is limited. Nonetheless, when she gets into a conflict with another child, help her to identify her emotions, guide her toward recognizing the other child’s emotions, help her come up with a resolution, and then shift her focus to another activity.

Ages 3-6: At this age, your child is better able to practice taking turns, sharing, apologizing, and forgiving. Talk with her about the give-and-take required in relationships, explain how important it is to be considerate of other people (even when she’s upset), and lead by example.

Ages 6-9: Be more explicit with your child about the three skills we discussed, and help her to practice them. After you explain the importance of considering other people’s perspectives, go to a public place together to observe people and speculate what they might be feeling. When you teach her about nonverbal communication, challenge her to think of as many examples as you can, such as shrugging your shoulders or raising your eyebrows. When you talk about making amends when an apology isn’t enough, brainstorm a recent incident and something your child can still do to make things right.

Ages 9-12: As your child gets older and more mature, continue talking about and helping her to practice these skills. Explain that conflicts are opportunities to problem-solve and to strengthen the relationship.

Tips for Parents for Strong Connections With Their Children

Research shows that if you consistently respond to your child with empathy, she will thrive physically, emotionally, socially, and academically. The strategies we’ve discussed all help you connect with your child. However, one of the biggest factors determining the strength of your relationship with your child is how you’ve made sense of your relationship with your parents.

Your childhood experiences create the foundation for your life narrative, which is the story you create to make sense of who you are, how you feel about the past, why your parents (and other significant people) behaved a certain way, and how all of those factors shaped you. Just as implicit memories that haven’t been integrated can affect your present behavior without you realizing it, an unexamined childhood and lack of coherent narrative can have the same effect (in fact, implicit memories can play a role in this).

For example, if your father’s parents were cold and unsupportive, then he would’ve had to learn how to comfort himself as a child. Consequently, it’s likely that he took a similar approach to parenting you, telling you to suppress your feelings when you were sad or upset. If you don’t reflect on the wounds that produced your parents’ behavior and how their behavior affected you—through therapy, journaling, or talking with a friend or spouse—then you’re likely to repeat the pattern with your own child.

However, if you examine your experiences and create a coherent life narrative, then you can determine how you want to raise your children. Rather than repeating the pattern or blindly doing the opposite, learn from your own childhood experiences and be deliberate about your approach to parenting.

Exercise: Develop Your Child’s Empathy

Empathy is a skill, not a trait. Brainstorm how to help your child develop it.

Appendix: Explaining the Whole-Brain Approach to Your Child

Giving your child a kid-friendly explanation of the brain science behind the strategies we’ve discussed will help her to understand what’s going on in her mind and why these strategies are helpful. Use the suggestions below to help your child grasp the concepts.

Left and Right Brains

In order to illustrate the concepts of the left and right brains, explain that:

  1. The brain has many different parts that do different jobs. Sometimes different parts of the brain act on their own, but the brain works best when all the parts work together.
  2. The right side of the brain pays attention to your emotions. When your emotions get really big, it feels like they’re taking over your whole brain and body, which can make you do and say things that you normally wouldn’t. This can feel like a big wave that’s crashing over you.
  3. When you notice your emotions getting big, the left side of your brain uses words to help you describe how you’re feeling. When you get the two sides of your brain to team up like this, it helps you to calm down. This lets you surf the wave of emotion safely and calmly back to shore.

Upstairs and Downstairs Brains

In order to illustrate the upstairs and downstairs brains, use your hand to represent the brain:

  1. Make a fist and explain that this is the brain.
  2. While holding up your fist, explain that there’s an upstairs brain, which makes decisions and leads you to do what’s right, even when you’re upset.
  3. Lift your four fingers just enough to expose your thumb resting against the palm of your hand. Explain that your thumb is part of the downstairs brain, which creates big feelings, like love and frustration.
  4. Explain that there’s nothing wrong with being upset. Bring your fingers back down over your thumb to create a fist, and show that your upstairs brain is hugging your downstairs brain so that, when you’re upset, you can express how you're feeling and still make good decisions.
  5. Put your four fingers straight up, exposing your thumb against your palm. Explain that, sometimes, you may get so upset that you flip your lid. When you flip your lid, your upstairs brain is no longer hugging your downstairs brain to keep it calm.
  6. Suggest that, the next time your child gets really upset, she makes a brain with her hand and puts her fingers up to show that she’s flipped her lid. Then, she should slowly bring the fingers back down to hug her thumb, which will remind her to use her upstairs brain to calm down the downstairs brain.

Memory Integration

In order to help your child understand memory integration, explain that:

  1. Your brain remembers events and experiences in pieces, like the pieces of a puzzle. Each piece has a different part of the memory, including what you saw, what you heard, what you smelled, what you were thinking, and how you felt.
  2. When you tell the story of what happened, your brain puts the pieces together to create the big picture.
  3. It’s fun telling stories about happy times, but it can be hard to talk about memories that are scary, sad, or confusing, because you don’t want to remember what it felt like to be sad or afraid.
  4. Even if it’s hard to talk about, it’s important to still tell the stories of scary and sad memories. If you don’t think or talk about the memory, then the puzzle pieces never get put together, and they end up jumbled, floating around your head.
  5. When the puzzle pieces of your memory are all jumbled, thoughts or feelings from that memory can come back, and you don’t know why you’re feeling that way because you don’t have the full picture of the memory in your head. For example, if a dog barked at you once and it scared you so much that you didn’t want to talk or think about it, the puzzle pieces floating around your head will have a dog, a loud bark, and fear. Then, when you see a different dog, you might feel afraid and not know why. If you put the pieces of your scary memory together, you’ll see that you felt afraid because that dog barked at you, but that doesn’t mean that other dogs will bark at you, so you don’t have to be afraid of all dogs.

Self-Integration

Self-integration can be difficult to grasp, so point to her experiences and use visual analogies (like the wheel of awareness) to illustrate this concept:

  1. Ask her to think of a time when she felt stuck on a particular feeling—for example, when she had a fight with her brother and felt angry for the rest of the afternoon.
  2. Explain to your child that there are many pieces of her that make her who she is, and that the part of her that was angry was just one piece. At the same time, a different piece of her might have been feeling tired, and another piece might have been thinking about the soccer game she had that morning.
  3. Ask her to picture her mind as a bicycle wheel. Explain that the rim of the wheel has all the things that she thinks about and feels at any given moment, such as her anger, her soccer game, and feeling tired. At the center is the hub, a calm place where she can see everything on the rim and choose what to focus on.
  4. Tell her that when she’s stuck on one thing on the rim—like being angry at her brother—then she’s ignoring all the other parts of herself. But she can learn to go back to the hub, where she has the power to choose to focus on a different part of herself and get unstuck from her anger. When she’s in her hub, she may still feel angry, but she won’t be stuck on that feeling.
  5. Let her know that you’ll help her get back to her hub when she gets stuck (using the strategies we described), and soon she’ll learn to get there on her own.

Mindsight

Follow these steps to talk to your child about mindsight:

  1. Explain that mindsight means seeing with your mind, just like eyesight means seeing with your eyes.
  2. Tell her that there are two parts of mindsight. The first part is looking inside your own mind to notice how your body feels, what pictures you see in your head, what emotions you’re feeling, and what you’re thinking.
  3. The second part of mindsight is looking inside someone else’s mind. Explain that sometimes, when you and a friend get in an argument, part of the problem is that you’re not thinking about why the other person is feeling or acting a certain way. But, when you see someone else’s perspective, it helps you both to be happier and to have a stronger friendship.