it’s essential to help a child calm down—to regulate the body—before talking, reasoning, or offering incentives can succeed.

Most parenting approaches focus not on the whole child, but on the child’s behaviors—and how parents should respond to particular kinds of behavior. And they suggest responses to behavior that are oriented to the child’s brain: reasoning, requesting, or offering incentives, rewards, or consequences.

Our best parenting decisions aren’t focused simply on our child’s behaviors or thoughts but rather on our child’s body and the unique way each child continually processes, interprets, and experiences their world.

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.

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.

What we’ll typically find is a depleted body budget driving the “bad” behaviors, which aren’t actually bad but subconsciously protective.

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.