As a parent, you might have tried using a calm voice with your child, or maybe even a few deep breathing exercises, only to notice that your child’s emotions are still exploding! I have some good news for you: your child’s brain is working exactly as it should!
Supporting children through difficult emotions is tricky, to say the least. In this post, I’ll be going over a few tidbits about the brain to support this process. This information is from Dr. Siegel’s The Whole-Brain Child (a book I often recommend to parents). The two concepts that I find most helpful when working with parents and children are below, and we’ll be reviewing these in this post:
- Integrating the left and right brain
- Integrating the upstairs and downstairs brain
You might be thinking, what are the left and right brain, and the upstairs and downstairs brain? Let’s review these ideas.
The Left & Right Brains
- The left and right portions of the brain work as a team to integrate logic and emotions. The left brain is mostly responsible for logic, order, and even language. The right brain is mostly responsible for our emotions, creativity, and connection to others.
Why is it important to understand the left and right brain when it comes to parenting? Well, when our kids are upset, the left and right portions of their brain are no longer working as a team. As parents, it is our role to support our children in integrating these parts again. For example, imagine your child has been working on building a tower of blocks and it suddenly falls. You might preemptively jump to saying something along the lines of, “It’s ok, we can rebuild it”. This response speaks to the left brain (i.e., the logical side), but, your child’s right brain is likely in charge at that moment. Your child is probably feeling upset and disappointed. What strategies can we use instead? Let’s look at a few:
Connect & Redirect Strategy
- Connecting and redirecting means first emotionally connecting with your child. This might sound like “That’s so frustrating that your tower fell. I know you worked really hard on that”. Once you notice your child connecting with you on an emotional level, you can then recommend a logical redirection, like “let’s build another one together”.
Name it to Tame it Strategy
- Another way to activate the left brain when your child feels overcome with emotions is to ask your child to name their emotion. Using language (i.e., from the left brain) can bring a sense of calm. This might sound like “you’re feeling sad because the tower fell, right?”.
The second concept I’d like to cover is the ‘upstairs and downstairs brain’. Let’s look closer at this concept:
The Upstairs & Downstairs Brains
- The downstairs brain is the ground level of the brain; it’s responsible for our survival, our emotions, and impulses. This part of the brain is ready to go since birth!
- The upstairs brain is just behind our forehead. This part of the brain is responsible for things like planning, empathy, and problem-solving. This portion of the brain is not developed at birth, but rather is under construction until adulthood.
What does this mean for you and your child? It means that your child’s ability to problem-solve when feeling overwhelmed with emotion is still developing, and they need your support in these moments. These are a few ways we can support as parents:
Engage, Don’t Enrage Strategy
- We can do our best as parents to avoid shutting down our child’s emotions. For example, instead of using language like “because I said so”, try asking your child questions like, “what do you think would be helpful right now?” or “how can we work on this together?”. Here, you’re actively modelling problem solving for your child when they are unable to reach this step on their own.
Use it or Lose it Strategy
- It’s important that we support our children in using their upstairs brain as much as possible, to strengthen it. We can do this by encouraging them to think about hypothetical scenarios. For example, make it a habit to ask your child “what would you do if ____” and fill in the blank with an everyday problem that might come up. Getting your child to tap into this higher-level thinking will be helpful in strengthening the upstairs brain.
Move it or Lose it Strategy
- Moving our bodies can help us reset our emotions. This also applies to our children. The next time you notice your child is having a difficult time with their emotions, try to get them to move. This can mean walking, dancing, jumping, etc. Movement helps our upstairs and downstairs brain reconnect, getting back to a sense of clarity.
These are lifelong tools for our children, helping develop self-awareness, problem-solving, and emotion regulation. We won’t always get it right, and we shouldn’t be expected to as parents, but we can start with strengthening our connection with our children in these difficult moments.
This is a gentle reminder to the parents reading this: the role you step into every day is not an easy one. Take a moment to pause and breathe. Your calm presence is your child’s greatest teacher.
