When we begin to know ourselves in an open and self-supportive way, we take the first step to encourage our children to know themselves.
Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn’t like.
Early experience shapes the structure and function of the brain. This reveals the fundamental way in which gene expression is determined by experience.
While the days of parenting may seem so long, the years are so short.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.
Writing in a journal activates the narrator function of our minds. Studies have suggested that simply writing down our account of a challenging experience can lower physiological reactivity and increase our sense of well-being, even if we never show what we’ve written to anyone else.
Loss of someone we love cannot be adequately expressed with words. Grappling with loss, struggling with disconnection and despair, fills us with a sense of anguish and actual pain. Indeed, the parts of our brain that process physical pain overlap with the neural centers that record social ruptures and rejection. Loss rips us apart.
In a brain scan, relational pain – that caused by isolation during punishment – can look the same as physical abuse. Is alone in the corner the best place for your child?
Inviting our thoughts and feelings into awareness allows us to learn from them rather than be driven by them.
Our state of mind can turn even neutral comments into fighting words, distorting what we hear to fit what we fear.
As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children. Another.
Say yes to the feelings, even as you say no to the behavior.
Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people’s feelings more fully.
One of the key practical lessons of modern neuroscience is that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain’s firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself.
Effective discipline means that we’re not only stopping a bad behavior or promoting a good one, but also teaching skills and nurturing the connections in our children’s brains that will help them make better decisions and handle themselves well in the future.
For a child or an adult, it’s extremely powerful to hear someone say, “I get you. I understand. I see why you feel this way.” This kind of empathy disarms us.
Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention.
Connection means that we give our kids our attention, that we respect them enough to listen to them, that we value their contribution to problem solving, and that we communicate to them that we’re on their side – whether we like the way they’re acting or not.
The best predictor of a child’s security of attachment is not what happened to his parents as children, but rather how his parents made sense of those childhood experiences.
Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows.