Child Rearing

https://www.make.do/

Kid Podcasts

To Know

  • Caring for others
    • Gift Giving
    • Thank You Notes
    • Tipping
  • Survival
    • Cooking
    • Paying Bills
    • Bureaucracy
  • General Cleaning
    • Laundry
    • Dishes
    • Tidying
  • General Cross Training

Whole Brain Child

Parenting with the Brain in Mind

Two Brains are Better than One: Integrating the Left and the Right

Building the Staircase of the Mind: Integrating the Upstairs and the Downstairs Brain

Kill the Butterflies! Integrating Memory for Growth and Healing

The United States of Me: Integrating the Many Parts of the Self

The Me-We Connection: Integrating Self and Other

Bringing It All Together

Refrigerator Sheet

Introduction

  • Survive and thrive: Watch for ways to take the difficult parenting moments when you’re simply trying to survive, and turn them into opportunities for your children to thrive.
  • Integration → Health and success: The brain performs at its best when its different parts work together in a coordinated and balanced way. An integrated brain results in improved decision making, better control of body and emotions, fuller self understanding, stronger relationships, and success in school.
  • The River of Wellbeing: The more integrated our kids are, the more they can remain in the river of well being, avoiding the bank of chaos on one side, and the bank of rigidity on the other.

Chapter 1: Integrating the Left and Right Brain

  • Left + right = clarity and understanding: Help your kids use both the logical left brain and the emotional right brain so they can live balanced, meaningful, and creative lives full of connected relationships.
  • What You Can Do: Helping your child work from both sides of the brain
    • Connect and Redirect: When your child is ups et, connect first emotionally, right brain to right brain. Then, once your child is more in control and receptive, bring in the left brain lessons and discipline.
    • Name it to Tame It: When big, right brain emotions are raging out of control, help your kids tell the story about what’s upsetting them. In doing so, they’ll use their left brain to make sense of their experience and feel more in control.

Chapter 2 : Integrating the Upstairs Brain and the Downstairs Brain

  • Be patient with the upstairs brain: Unlike the primitive downstairs brain, which is intact at birth, the sophisticated upstairs brain is “under construction” during childhood and adolescence. Plus, it’s especially vulnerable to being “hi jacked” by the downstairs brain, especially in high emotion situations. So don’t expect your children to make good decisions all the time, or to remain in control of their emotions and actions.

  • What You Can Do: Helping develop and integrate your child’s upstairs brain

    • Engage, don’t enrage: In high stress situations, engage your child’s upstairs brain, rather than triggering the downstairs brain. Don’t immediately play the “Because I said so!” card. Instead, appeal to your child’s higher order thinking skills. Ask questions, ask for alternatives, even negotiate.
    • Use it or lose it: Provide lots of opportunities to exercise the upstairs brain so it can be strong and integrated with the downstairs brain and the body. Play “What would you do?” games and present them with dilemmas. Avoid rescuing them from difficult decisions.
    • Move it or lose it: When a child has lost touch with his upstairs brain, a powerful way to help him regain balance is to have him move his body.

Chapter 3: Integrating Memory

  • Make the implicit explicit: Help your kids make their imp licit memories explicit, so that past experiences don’t affect them in debilitating ways. By narrating past events they can look at what’s happened and make good, intentional decisions about how to handle those memories.
  • What You Can Do: Helping your child integrate implicit and explicit memories
    • Use the remote of the mind: After a painful event, a child may be reluctant to narrate what happened. The internal remote lets her pause, rewind, and fast a story as she tells it, so she can maintain control over how much of it she views.
    • Remember to remember: Help your kids exercise their memory by giving them lots of practice at remembering. In the car, at the dinner table, wherever: help your kids talk about their experiences, so they can integrate their implicit and explicit memories.

Chapter 4: Integrating the Many Parts of Myself

  • The Wheel of awareness: Sometimes our kids get stuck on one particular point on the rim of their wheel of awareness, and lose sight of the many other parts of themselves. We need to give them mindsight, so they can be aware of what’s happening in their own mind. Then they can choose where they focus their attention, integrating the different aspects of themselves and gaining more control over how they feel.
  • What You Can Do: Introducing your child to the wheel of awareness
    • Let the clouds of emotion roll by: Remind kids that feelings come and go. Fear and frustration and loneliness are temporary states, not enduring traits.
    • SIFT: Help your children pay attention to the Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts within them. They can’t understand and change their inner experiences until they are first aware of what’s going on inside.
    • Exercise mindsight: Mindsight practices teach children to calm themselves and focus their attention where they want.

Chapter 5: Integrating Self and Other

  • Wired for “we”: Watch for ways to capitalize on the brain’s built capacity for social interaction, especially by being intentional about creating positive mental models of relationships. Parents and other important caregivers create children’s expectations about relationships that will affect and guide them throughout their lives. Help them develop mindsight, which offers them insight into themselves as individuals, and empathy for and connection with those around them.
  • What You Can Do: Helping your child integrate self and other
    • Enjoy each other: Build fun into the family, so that your kids enjoy positive and satisfying experiences with the people they ’re with the most.
    • Connect through conflict: Try not to view conflict as merely an obstacle to avoid. Instead, use it as an opportunity to teach your kids essential relationship skills, like seeing other people’s perspectives, reading nonverbal cues, and making amends.

How to Talk so Kids Will Listen etc

Helping Children Deal with Their Feelings

Children Need to Have Their Feelings Accepted and Respected

  1. You can listen quietly and attentively
  2. You can acknowledge their feelings with a word ("Oh", "Mmmm", "I see")
  3. You can give the feeling a name ("That must be frustrating!")
  4. You can give the child his wishes in fantasy ("I wish I could give you fruit right now!")

All feelings can be accepted. Certain actions must be limited.

Engaging Cooperation

  1. Describe (What you see or the problem.)
  • There's a wet towel on the bed!
  1. Give Information
  • The towel is getting my blanket wet
  1. Say it with a word
  • The towel!
  1. Talk about your feelings
  • I don't like sleeping in a wet bed
  1. Write a note
  • Please put me back so I can dry

Alternatives to Punishment

  1. Point out a way to be helpful.
  2. Express strong disapproval (without attacking character)
  3. State your expectations.
  4. Show the child how to make amends.
  5. Give a choice.
  6. Take action.
  7. Allow the child to experience the consequence of their misbehavior.

To Problem Solve

  1. Talk about your child's feelings and needs.
  2. Talk about your feelings and needs.
  3. Brainstorm together to find a mutually agreeable solution.
  4. Write down all the idea without evaluating.
  5. Decide which suggestions you like, which you don't like, and which you plan to follow through on.

Encouraging Autonomy

  1. Let children make choices
  2. Show respect for a child's struggle
  3. Don't ask too many questions
  4. Don't rush to answer questions
  5. Encourage children to use sources outside the home
  6. Don't take away hope

More Ways to Encourage Autonomy

  1. Let him own his own body
  2. Stay out of the minutiae of a child's life
  3. Don't talk about a child in front of him--no matter how young the child
  4. Let a child answer for himself
  5. Show respect for your child's eventual "readiness"
  6. Watch out for too many "no's"

Praise

Instead of Evaluating, Describe

  1. Describe what you see
  2. Describe what you feel
  3. Sum up the child's praiseworthy behavior with a word

Cautions:

  1. Praise should be age appropriate; praising a teenager for brushing his teeth every day is actually an insult.
  2. Avoid praise that points at past failures.
  3. Beware excessive enthusiasm.
  4. Be prepared for a lot of repetition of what you praise.

Freeing Children from Playing Roles

To Free Children from Playing Roles:

  1. Look for opportunities to show the child a new picture of himself.
  2. Put children in situations where they can see themselves differently.
  3. Let children overhear you say something positive about them.
  4. Model the behavior you'd like to see.
  5. Be a storehouse for your child's special moments.
  6. When your child acts according to the old label, state your feelings and/or your expectations.