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

neuroception.

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.

When a child is in the red, with the sympathetic nervous system in full force, the middle ear muscles shift away from distinguishing the nuances of human voices, to hearing low-frequency and predatory sounds.

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.

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.

What’s crucial isn’t understanding someone else’s guidelines but understanding how our parenting is “landing”

Feeling safe allows children to work at the top of their emerging executive functions. (Think of those things successful executives need to do to run businesses: stay focused, meet challenges, have self-discipline, and flexibly adapt to changing circumstances.)

The general sense of how you feel (“affect”) has two main features: the feeling of pleasant or unpleasant (known as “valence”) and the degree of calmness or agitation (known as “arousal”). How a person feels is “always some combination of valence and arousal.”