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:

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.

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.”

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.

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.

If you feel you’re being reactive rather than intentional, have compassion for yourself. Then look beyond your own behaviors to what might be triggering your explosive reactions.

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.

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.

that regulation in a child’s physical body supports healthy relationships and loving interactions, in turn building the infrastructure that eventually enables the child to use reasoning, concepts, and thinking to flexibly manage life’s challenges.