The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind

Whole-Brain Strategy #5: Move It or Lose It: Moving the Body to Avoid Losing the Mind

everything that happens to us—the music we hear, the people we love, the books we read, the kind of discipline we receive, the emotions we feel—profoundly affects the way our brain develops.

We shine the light of awareness on those implicit memories, making them explicit so that our child can become aware of them and deal with

Logic, responsibilities, and time don’t exist for them yet. But when a toddler begins asking “Why?” all the time, you know that the left brain is beginning to really kick in.

Implicit memories are often positive and work in our favor, like when we fully expect to be loved by those around us simply because we’ve always been loved.

“connect and redirect” method, and it begins with helping our kids “feel felt” before we try to solve problems or address the situation logically.

When she helped him retell the story over and over again (“Eea woo woo”), she defused the scary and traumatic emotions in his right brain so that they didn’t rule him. She did so by bringing in factual details and logic from his left brain—which, at two years old, is just beginning to develop—so that he could deal with the accident

What else? Thoughts

For example, children whose parents talk with them about their experiences tend to have better access to the memories of those experiences. 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.