Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behavior and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids

Sometimes, it’s both possible and advisable to wait and see if a child can work on and resolve a problem on their own. But other times, it’s beneficial to identify and address or help resolve a cue of threat for a child. Here are a few examples of successfully meeting a child’s safety needs:

When parents are in the blue pathway, we might feel empty, disconnected from others, foggy, checked out, unable to think or act, or even immobilized. It’s a sign that you need to do something to feel connected to yourself and others soon, and that your body budget is significantly overdrawn.

A very powerful form of validation is to simply bear witness to your child’s struggles without automatically trying to solve them.

Instead of deeming the child’s behaviors as good or bad and then managing the behaviors, we examine the behaviors to find meaning and information about the child’s needs, and pay attention to the significance of the stress held in a child’s body.

Though many people assume that discipline is the best way to help children behave better, co-regulation is the key to developing self-regulation, which results in better behaviors as the natural end product.

Psychological resilience is built primarily through relationships, and not through teaching children how to behave or even teaching children (especially toddlers) how to calm their bodies down on their own.

Behavior shifts are often signals of a body-budget deficit and signs that the child needs emotional support, different pacing, or fewer demands to get back to the child’s appropriate challenge zone.

Remember that toddlers don’t decide that a challenge is too great; their bodies make that determination for them. When they move into the too-much challenge zone, they need us to make a deposit into their body budget—with our emotional attunement.

We need to wait to teach toddlers about using their brains to control themselves until they’re developmentally ready to do so. Before we teach self-regulation strategies, we need to make sure the child has the requisite groundwork and foundation of co-regulation. Otherwise, it’s frustrating for child and parent alike.