That’s what integration does: it coordinates and balances the separate regions of the brain that it links together. It’s easy to see when our kids aren’t integrated – they become overwhelmed by their emotions, confused and chaotic. They can’t respond calmly and capably to the situation at hand. Tantrums, meltdowns, aggression, and most of the other challenging experiences of parenting – and life – are a result of a loss of integration, also known as dis-integration.
Reduce words Embrace emotions Describe, don’t preach Involve your child in the discipline Reframe a no into a conditional yes Emphasize the positive Creatively approach the situation Teach mindsight tools.
There’s no question about it: consistency is crucial when it comes to raising and disciplining our children.
Part of truly loving our kids, and giving them what they need, means offering them clear and consistent boundaries, creating predictable structure in their lives, as well as having high expectations for them.
Physically and genetically, our brains may not have evolved much in the last forty thousand years – but our minds have. A baby born today would be much the same as a baby born tens of thousands of years ago. But if we were able to compare the intricate neural structure of an adult brain in today’s modern society with that of an adult brain from forty thousand years ago, we’d find huge differences.
Rules about respect and behavior aren’t thrown out the window simply because a child’s left hemisphere is disengaged. For example, whatever behavior is inappropriate in your family – being disrespectful, hurting someone, throwing things – should remain off-limits even in moments of high emotion.
Imagine the last time you felt really sad or angry or upset. How would it have felt if someone you love told you, “You need to calm down,” or “It’s not that big a deal”? Or what if you were told to “go be by yourself until you’re calm and ready to be nice and happy”? These responses would feel awful, wouldn’t they? Yet these are the kinds of things we tell our kids all the time. When we do, we actually increase their internal distress, leading to more acting out, not less.
Rather than trying to shelter our children from life’s inevitable difficulties, we can help them integrate those experiences into their understanding of the world and learn from them. How our kids make sense of their young lives is not only about what happens to them but also about how their parents, teachers, and other caregivers respond.
Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children’s pain or make things worse. Actually, telling the story is often exactly what children need, both to make sense of the event and to move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened.
We want our kids to expect that their needs can be understood and consistently met. But we don’t want our kids to expect that their desires and whims will always be met.
While group collaboration can certainly be a source of collective intelligence, it can also get you to jump off a cliff or drive too fast. And that’s probably why some form of continued connection to the adults and their adult perspectives still exists in traditional cultures, and even in our animal cousins. Without adults around, young adolescents can literally go wild.
Remember, there are plenty of ways to spoil children – by giving them too many things, by rescuing them from every challenge, by never allowing them to deal with defeat and disappointment – but we can never spoil them by giving them too much of our love and attention. That’s what the connection.
An important take-home message is that it is vital to keep the lines of connection and communication open and to remember that we all – adolescents and adults – need to be members of a connected community.
Many parents these days, however, are learning that discipline will be much more respectful – and, yes, effective – if they initiate a collaborative, reciprocal, bidirectional dialogue, rather than delivering a monologue.
Other recent studies demonstrate that children who are taught to read music and play the keyboard undergo significant changes in their brain and have an advanced capacity for what’s called “spatial sensorimotor mapping.
I’m too angry to have a helpful conversation right now, so I’m going to take some time to calm down, and then we’ll talk in a bit.
Children need to understand the way the world works: what’s permissible and what’s not.
The absence of limits and boundaries is actually quite stressful, and stressed kids are more reactive.
Attunement requires presence but is a process of focused attention and clear perception. We.
When we spend money on others, for example, we feel more content than when we spend money on ourselves. This is a kind of well-being rooted in meaning, connection, and equanimity – called eudaimonia by the ancient Greeks and in modern times perhaps called “inner” or “true” happiness.