The Whole-Brain Child

From your hub you noticed the rim points on your own wheel of awareness, and you became aware of what you were experiencing.

Teach her that she can gain control over an experience by retelling the story.

Any healthy relationship—whether it’s family, friendship, romantic, or otherwise—is made up of healthy individuals in connection with others.

Highlight the subtle but important distinction between 'I feel sad' and 'I am sad.

When neurons fire together, they grow new connections between them. Over time, the connections that result from firing lead to 'rewiring' in the brain.

A powerful way to help a child regain upstairs-downstairs balance is to have him move his body.

By returning to your hub and shifting your focus, you can begin to experience joy and gratitude about getting to parent your children—just by paying attention and deciding to direct your attention to new rim points.

By teaching our children to SIFT through the activity of their mind, we can help them recognize the different rim points at work within them, and help them gain more insight and control in their lives.

When you give your children lots of practice at remembering—by having them tell and retell their own stories—you improve their ability to integrate implicit and explicit memories.

When your child is upset, connect first emotionally, right brain to right brain.

Help your child tell the story about what’s upsetting him. In doing so, he’ll use his left brain to make sense of his experience and feel more in control.

Mindsight exercises lead to integration, because as you know, where we focus our attention, neurons fire and become active, then wire to other neurons.

Playful parenting is one of the best ways to prepare your children for relationships and encourage them to connect with others.

The act of considering the mind of another requires us to use our right hemisphere and our upstairs brain, both of which are part of the social circuitry that allows us to enjoy mature and fulfilling relationships.

A mere time-out might or might not teach Colin not to remove his brother’s things without permission, but it wouldn’t generalize into a mindsight skill.

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

When right and left brain are integrated, we can approach parenting from both a grounded, left-brained, rational place... and from a right-brained, emotionally connected place.

When our entire focus is on self-defense, no matter what we do, we stay in that reactive, 'no' state of mind.

We don’t want our kids to be only individualistic, leaving them selfish and isolated, or only relational, leaving them needy and vulnerable.

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

One of the best ways to promote integration in our children is to become better integrated ourselves.

Handling conflict well isn’t easy, even for adults, so we can’t expect too much of our children. But there are some simple skills we can teach them that will help us all survive individual conflicts, as well as help our children thrive as they move toward adulthood.

When big, right-brain emotions are raging out of control, help your kids tell the story about what’s upsetting them, so their left brain can help make sense of their experience and they can feel more in control.

When you understand a little bit about your children’s emotional needs and mental states, you can create this kind of positive outcome—even without United Nations peacekeeping forces.

By connecting with him, right brain to right brain, she was able to communicate that she was tuned in to how he was feeling.

When children experience a particular state of mind, such as feeling frustrated or lonely, they may be tempted to define themselves based on that temporary experience.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

Our job is to provide our kids with opportunity after opportunity to exercise their upstairs brain so that it can grow stronger and more powerful.

Memory is the way an event from the past influences us in the present.

When we help our kids integrate their past into their present, they can then make sense of what’s going on inside them and gain control over how they think and behave.

When we become aware of the multitude of changing emotions and forces at work around us and within us, we can acknowledge them and even embrace them as parts of ourselves—but we don’t have to allow them to bully us or define us.

By introducing them to the remote of the mind, which controls their internal DVD player, you make the storytelling process much less scary, because you offer them some control over what they deal with, so they can interact with it at their own pace.

The goal is to help your kids take the troubling experiences...and make those experiences explicit so that the whole picture in the puzzle can be seen with clarity and meaning.

Encourage empathy and self-understanding through reflective dialogues about how others feel, and your child’s own intentions, desires, and beliefs.

When we direct our attention in a new way, we are actually creating a new experience that can change both the activity and ultimately the structure of the brain itself.

Integration takes the distinct parts of your brain and helps them work together as a whole.

By focusing on your breath, you can at least begin to get back to the hub of your mind.

The moments you are just trying to survive are actually opportunities to help your child thrive.

Simply by asking questions and encouraging recollection, you can help your kids remember and understand important events from the past.

Mirror neurons may allow us not only to imitate others’ behaviors, but actually to resonate with their feelings.

The kinds of relationships they experience will lay the groundwork for how they relate to others for the rest of their lives.

By making sense of your past you can free yourself from what might otherwise be a cross-generational legacy of pain and insecure attachment.

Help your kids use both the logical left brain and the emotional right brain as a team.

The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship.

When we help our children name their pain and their fears, we help them tame them.

The more your kids think about what’s going on within themselves, the more they will develop the ability to understand and respond to what’s going on in the worlds within and around them.

To become a part of a well-functioning ‘we,’ a person needs also to remain an individual ‘me.

Every whole-brain strategy offers practical steps you can take right now to make your life as a family better and more manageable.

When big, right-brain emotions are raging out of control, help your kids tell the story about what’s upsetting them.

Connect first, then redirect.

When your child is upset, connect first emotionally, right brain to right brain. Then, once she is more in control and receptive, bring in the left-brain lessons and discipline.

You need to understand some basics about the young brain that you are helping to grow and develop.

When we undergo an experience, our brain cells—called neurons—become active, or 'fire.' The connections that result from firing lead to ‘rewiring’ in the brain.

When a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child’s feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child.

We understand that it’s generally a good idea to discuss misbehavior and its consequences after the child has calmed down, since moments of emotional flooding are not the best times for lessons to be learned.

By helping our kids connect left and right, we give them a better chance of avoiding the banks of chaos and rigidity, and of living in the flexible current of mental health and happiness.

Help your child become aware of and talk about her internal world. Ask questions that guide her toward noticing bodily sensations, mental images, feelings, and thoughts.

Feelings need to be recognized for what they are: temporary, changing conditions. They are states, not traits.

A good technique is to have them lie down and place a toy...on their stomach. Ask them to focus on the boat, watching it rise and fall as it rides the waves of breath.

When you notice that your mind is wandering and you’re thinking about something else or starting to worry, just go back to focusing on your breath.

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