childhood development

Losing “No” and Finding “Yes!”

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / Leave a comment

nurturing

I have written directly about a portion of the discourse I want to take up in this post in some detail before, and referred to this notion multiple times. Thus far, however, I have only closely considered the “no” side of the equation. I want to spend some time today talking more about the “yes” side of parenting. I’ll explain more what I mean by that in a minute, but first, I want to lay a particular foundation of perspective on the role of the parent in child-rearing.

I don’t want to waste your time with remedial parenting concepts, but for those of you who haven’t thought about it, or have been taught the opposite, or once knew but have forgotten — there are two basic perspectives/approaches to raising children. One idea is that we as parents have to continually curb and redirect the otherwise negative impulses of the pretty little chaos balls affectionately called kids (which is the same thing we call baby goats). The other version is that people are born essentially good and kind, and they just need to be educated in how our current society manages the expression of those natural drives. One path is dominated by containment, control, and demand for compliance; the other by empowerment, trust, and cooperation. One is the domain of “No.”. The other is the land of “Yes!”. Depending on which side of this proverbial coin we find ourselves, we will either be more inclined to be a force for narrowing our children’s scope of experience (and therefore the scope of their development as well), or a force for broadening their horizons (and thereby increasing the potential of their development).

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good reasons for a decisive “No”. The problem is simply that too often, if you’ve been brought up or taught to think of the first camp as the superior one, the “no”‘s can quickly get completely out of hand and become a habitual and unnecessarily common response. The main issues with too many “no”‘s are that they get weaker and weaker the more often they are employed, and they put us on the losing end of our children’s biology. Our children have a serious, almost insuppressible urge to experience — to explore, to create, and to enjoy being. That is their prime directive, and this drive must be honoured — the mind-body system won’t let them be daunted in this task. If we fail to meet this need and/or continually subjugate it to our preferences for control and homogeneity and social etiquette, then with or without our kids’ knowledge of it or ability to control it, that biological impulse will find other expressions. Period. This is why so many parents, once headed down the “no” road, find themselves in an endless echo of self-parroting — “No, no, no-no-no-no-no, no, NO!”. They’ve inadvertently stopped-up the normal flow of exploratory impulses so much that it is springing leaks all over the place, and generally the leaks are much worse (i.e. messier, less socially acceptable, and/or otherwise harder to handle), and take more work to stop — both, because there is “pent-up’ force behind them, and because the methods of stopping them simultaneously get less and less a/effective.

Wilhelm Reich (a well-known student of Freud’s in his day) theorized in depth about this mechanism of human biology, and although he is sometimes discounted because of his other theories (see “cloud busters”), I think he got it absolutely right on this one. In his estimation, when the normal impulse drives of a child are repeatedly thwarted and/or repressed, then the child forms an energetic block in a corresponding part of the physical body that in the eventual becomes what Reich called “neuro-muscular  and character armor”. The armor then takes over the repression of the corresponding impulses and thereby creates neuroses. So it is a potentially serious trespass against our children to regularly thwart their need to experience and let their natural impulses flow freely.

The bottom line for the moment is that if we choose, or have been duped into choosing, the  parenting approach of constantly controlling our kids’ behaviors, and wind up getting caught in the habit of “no”-ing our way through every day — we are doing our children a life-long disservice. The parenting mythology that presides over much of what we think of as “normal” and “right” for how to raise our children would have us think that if we don’t control them they will be out of control — but the reality is that the more we try to control them, the more they shift toward a systemic lack of self-control.

But enough about that at present — let’s flip that coin over and take a look at the other side, shall we?

If we adopt the second of the two general parenting perspectives I listed above, and seek instead to reside in an attitude of acceptance, allowance, and empowerment of our children’s natural drives toward exploration and experience, then pretty much the entire terrain of raising our children is altered for the better (that is, for the easier and the more developmentally productive). If we make “yes” our habitual response, look for ways to meet our children’s needs (in this case, a need for information about/interaction with life), and work with our children toward finding mutually satisfying means of honouring their inner drives, then we not only make it easier for them to do exactly what they have come here to do, but we also make it easier for us to get cooperation from them when we need it. Put another way, if we aren’t constantly thwarting their impulses, then fewer of those impulses will need to find side-exits and/or other (less desirable) avenues of expression. And remember, the secondary and tertiary avenues of expressing these repressed drives are almost always less desirable — both to us and to our children’s developing psyches.

Now let’s be very mindful here, I know we are treading dangerously close to that dreaded chasm of Permissiveness… I know we have quite a bit of cultural fear and mythos built around what happens if you just let these lawless half-pints run free. I know there’s even some decent research that seems to show that “kids with no boundaries” turn out worse than “kids raised under an iron thumb”. So, I want it to be clear — both for those of you who do carry some fear of permissiveness and those who don’t — I am not talking about turning a blind eye to what your children do, giving them the green light to run recklessly amuck, or ignoring issues when they arise. And further, I am not even trying to tell you to blindly agree to everything your kids want or begin.

My point here is really only to argue that our job as parents is to nurture growth — that is, to give what is needed to grow. We want them to grow strong, well-rooted, and full. The seed of the oak doesn’t need to be held back from becoming a thorn bush — it just needs to be allowed to become the tree it was born to be. Our children are born to become healthy, happy adults, and they are destined by their own biology to mature in flawless fashion — so long as we don’t blow the whole operation with mistrust, anxiety, disconnection, or ill-concieved plans to dominate the natural processes of development with 50’s Behaviorist psycho-babble.

Therefore, and in order to best serve the natural progression(s) of our children’s development, I believe in the following:

• When our children want to explore, want to try something out, want to taste CD’s, or draw on themselves — we let them. If isn’t a big deal and — as Alfie Kohn so eloquently charges in Unconditional Parenting — if we don’t have a reason to say, “No,” then we say, “Yes!”. We make room, make way, and make nice about it — we don’t try to make our children feel guilty about it, or gross, or in any way unacceptable — when we allow their impulses, we do it with a smile.

• When we can’t, or (the virtual equivalent) we really don’t want to agree to or allow the current experiment, we don’t immediately or automatically refuse. Instead, we do one or more of these:

  1. We empathize — as much as we are able while rooted in our own shoes, we try to get a sense of what it’s like over there in the kid-shoes. They just want to do stuff, and they unconsciously know that it is in their best interest to do stuff and lots of it. They’re driven — without being able to ascertain why — to just go for it. And it’s hard to fit that into a prim, ordered, almost mechanical adult world. It’s really hard to be all jazzed about some idea and have the overlords blare “NO” in your face without any good reason. It’s really really hard to just suck it up, when you get blown out of the water time and time again. When we can get in touch with those feelings — it softens our rigidity, and reminds us to be more allowing, and to make room for healthy development.
  2. We defer — generally by saying something like, “Yes you can do that tomorrow,” or “After lunch,” or we offer some other version of delaying the timing so that we can get on board with the idea, and/or finish what we are doing in order to assist, etc..
  3. We negotiate — we look for a way or ways to honour our preferences and boundaries while still making room for honouring their preferences and drives. Sometimes it may only require a simple tweaking of arrangements, other times it takes a delicate and empathetic finesse. Either way, it is worthwhile in the moment, and in the long-term for the modeling and bond-maintenance it offers.
  4. We address the root need — we may not like the original plan of drawing on the dining room wall with a Sharpie, but we can find a wall that is acceptable to draw on, or another surface, or something just as fun. Under any particular impulse or interest is a more basic one, often we can address and allow that without allowing something we don’t want.
  5. We explain and comfort — we do say “No” multiple times a day: when we have a good reason, when safety is an issue, and when we are just too darned tired or currently juggling too many things to accommodate. When we have a good reason (and our girls are highly trained to look for one when they hear “No”), we tell them about it. We let them know why it doesn’t make sense to us for them to rearrange the entire living room and build a fort right before the grandparents fly in for a visit. We  explain, and then, if and when they have feelings about the denial, we offer them genuine empathy and consolation if they want it. Tonight, I just held Echo and petted her head for 15 minutes, identifying with and validating her feelings because she was upset that she preferred not to wear the headphones to listen to her audio story and we weren’t in agreement to let her play it outloud in the living room because it disturbed Xi’s concentration on the homework she needed to finish. I wasn’t going to change my mind about it, and she wasn’t ready to move on or negotiate a settlement, so I just held her where she was. After awhile her feelings calmed, and she wanted to go talk to Mama about it — they got her set up with headphones and she listened happily until dinner. That scenario is so common that we often say empathizing with our children’s feelings evaporates 80% of the issues that arise without ever addressing or redressing the issue itself.

• For everything between the two poles of what we can immediately allow and what we cannot allow at all — we þεη∂ and strrrreeeeeettcchh and lean in the direction of becoming more open and more allowing and more condoning of our children’s natural impulses and drives to connect with and root themselves in this world and this life as it truly is — not just as is readily convenient for us. It is among the many blessings of this journey as parents to learn to be more compassionate, more understanding, more accepting, and more trusting  of the natural flow of life. Some of us may have been thwarted so much in our lives that it literally hurts to open ourselves to more allowing and more faith in the benevolent process of becoming, but if we can be that brave and remain dedicated, it will surely heal us in ways we cannot even imagine (yet!) — and it will certainly mean that we’ve offered our children the best chance at lifelong health and happiness that we can muster.

And in truth — that’s all we have to do as parents — just give them the best possible chance that we’re able to provide for them to grow to their fullest potential. That means empowering them to follow their natural drives for input and experience, trusting the miraculous design of their biology to do what it was built (tested, reformulated, rebuilt and retested, in perpetuity) to do, and cooperating with, both, the natural processes of maturation and with the little beings we are hoping to help mature. In a word nurturing. To me, that all means saying a whole lot more “Yes!”‘s than “No”‘s, and allowing a whole lot more than barring our children’s being children. After all, it’s always children who do the growing up, whether we adults try to control it or not…

May we all become skilled at nurturing the natural in our children with courage and grace, and plenty of “YES”‘s!

*

Be well, my fellow people-growers.

*

Want support? Come check out our offerings for parents at the Center for Emotional Education:  http://www.centerforemotionaleducation.com/engage/ ❤

Digging a Little Deeper than “Misbehavior”

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / 2 Comments

emotionalstructurepostersmallSo — there’s this dirty little parenting myth that started decades ago and that lingers still in the rarely mentioned corners of the current social parenting contract corrupting the ears of those who listen, and driving opposition into the hearts of families everywhere. I make it sound sinister, because — well, it is. No one set out to make it so. No one started the parenting shift toward managing positive and negative behaviors as a strategy for instilling character and making our children become good people in order to hurt anyone. No one made Behaviorism the predominant psychological model underpinning all of Western Society’s parenting in order to be mean. We’ve just wound up justifying being mean in order to make our kids good people.

Over time, and according to the predominant mythos, we’ve adopted the habit — the behavioral trait, if you will — of dealing with our kids on the level of behaviors almost exclusively. We’re constantly mowing down behaviors we don’t like (only to have others crop up in their stead), and desperately watering and nurturing and pruning to cultivate the behaviors we do like. Culturally, especially in America, we’re obsessed with “halting misbehavior in it’s tracks!” and just as vehemently if not more so with “catching them being good”, in order of course to make them do whatever that good behavior was more. We’ve been coaxed into believing that if we do these things — if we make them do more good actions and not do as many bad actions — that our children will then in due course (and with due diligence on our parts) become good people. They’ll choose to do the good things we’ve made or bribed them into doing because we’ve made it habitual for them to do so (especially if there’s a reward or punishment around to be the parent in our stead…). They may hate us for it, but they’ll be good people with a strong sense of discipline the myth assures us.

Now, honestly, it would be one thing if this were a viable method. If it worked (particularly, if it was, as the myth portends, the only thing that worked), then it’d be worth considering as an approach to at least ponder from time to time, to pepper in, so to speak. But it doesn’t even do what it set out to do. The scientifically proven method that works so well on so many other species, that even works quite well with adult humans, when applied to human children over time fails utterly at both instilling the behaviors it sets out to instill and inhibiting those behaviors it sets out to inhibit. It furthermore creates resistance to, both, the preferred behaviors and to the system by which the behaviors are manipulated; it also creates a preference for the prohibited behaviors or others of their kind. If you need convincing go to the man who burned down the Behaviorism tower, himself, Alfie Kohn. His quintessential books, Punished by Rewards, and Unconditional Parenting, collect and elucidate the reams of psychological research uncovering the inability of the Behavioristic approach to control our children’s actions — especially in the long run, and especially if there isn’t a reward-and-punisher standing over them.

You know why it doesn’t work? Because we humans are funny. We’re simpler and more complex than Behaviorism pretends. As it turns out, there’s a whole lot that goes into why we choose, or subconsciously move toward, certain actions and not others. Whether we are going to be rewarded or punished (if we’re caught) doesn’t always enter into the equation when humans are embroiled in their amazing interactions with each other. Most of the time we’re acting because of something we think or feel that motivates us — often in spite of almost all the consequences, as we tend to pay way more attention to the outcomes that agree with what we’re motivated toward. Good feelings — which biochemically tend to also invoke good thoughts, resulting in more good feelings, and so on, — inspire actions that most of us like. Less comfortable feelings, especially those ones we’d pretty much all call “bad”, make us biochemically uncomfortable in our minds and bodies; and one of the most common ways of discharging this discomfort is in destructive, disharmonious, uncooperative, even violent action. And if strong emotion is involved, particularly with kids, then there is a loss of higher brain function, and a diminished ability to make “good choices”, to feel empathy, to act compassionately, to even be self-aware, or able to control impulses, or calm down.

This is one reason it’s unfair to expect a child who is feeling awful to do anything other than “misbehave”. They are almost incapable of choosing another course because their feelings are interrupting their brain’s ability to control itself. They are out of their minds. They plead temporary insanity! Give ’em a break judge! 😉

If we really want to effect how our children are behaving, we have to get down underneath the actions themselves, and take a good look at the feelings involved. If it helps, think of their actions as physical code for their feelings. Usually if the feelings are uncomfortable, if the kid is acting out because she feels so rotten, it’s because she has a need (perceived or not) that is going unmet. It’s a further “complexity” in human psychology, but a simple truth, that those “uncomfortable feelings” I describe above, that lead to what we might generally call “disagreeable actions”, most commonly spring from needs that are lingering, causing unsafe, disconnective, unworthy, untrusting feelings or the like which then spring into other feelings of anger and rage and antagonism in order to protect the brain from fear.

It goes like this: unmet needs lead to uncomfortable feelings and out of those come disagreeable actions. And the opposite is how we respond: if we don’t like the actions, then we attempt to assist with the feelings informing the actions, and afterward (because co-processing feelings should always come first) if necessary, we address any underlying unmet needs involved with the uncomfortable feelings (recognizing that often just letting out some uncomfortable feelings and/or getting the connection that comes from doing the process together is enough and no other needs have to be addressed right then). In my opinion, all of parenting is distilled into managing the two directions of this flow.

As Jane Nelsen of the Positive Discipline movement boils it down, “When children feel better, they do better.” I’d go further to say, when children feel better, they think better, they function better, and they’re more capable. At the level of neurochemistry, we empower our children to be “on their best behavior”, simply by being connected to them and helping them get their needs met.

As it turns outs, when we shrug off the Behavioristic shroud obscuring everything our children do, when we take a look underneath their actions, connect with them through empathizing with their feelings, and help them meet their underlying needs, then we get a chance to know what’s below all that, we get to know the truth — namely, that our children always already are good people. They’re like all of us — when our needs are met, and we feel good, we shine. If we give our kids the chance to act from a place of feeling good and connected and supported and with their needs met, then they will surprise us with the kind, compassionate, empathetic choices they will naturally make.

We don’t have to wonder how to make them be good, we just have to give them the chance to be the good people they already are. Yes, we’ll have to show them the ropes — teach them action codes that display feeling good in a socially conducive manner, as well as, how to get their needs met without destroying anything — and it takes time for them to develop their behavioral-linguitic abilities, and the synaptic integrity to manage their emotions and still make good choices under duress. But the goodness (and by that we all really just mean the capacity for human tenderness, social concourse, and cooperation), no matter what it takes to develop it, is always there. If we help them get their needs met, and process their emotions in healthy ways, then their goodness will blossom. And when they’re doing things that we don’t like, it’s just a sign that they need our help to keep the garden healthy.

We don’t have to be stuck spinning our wheels in the behavior-mowing game. We can get passed all that kind of maintenance. And when we do, when we nurture the soil, when we meet the garden’s needs, then the goodness comes flowering out; and we can sit back and enjoy the roses!

HS3

Now, maybe you’ve never gardened this way and you think I’m making it up… Maybe like an industrial farmer, you’re skeptical of this kind of “permaculture”, or you’re not sure how to get started. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss it more, or if you want help converting your garden. I can show you the best tools and how to dig under those weedy actions, as well as how to build up the soil so it produces the good flora that you’d rather see. Don’t hesitate to get in touch — I’m here to help! ❤

*

Be well.

The END of All Tantrums

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / Leave a comment

A tantrum is generally defined as “a violent demonstration of rage or frustration; a sudden display of bad temper”. When you dig deeper, you’ll discover that a so called “bad temper” refers to a “persisting angry mood”. And if we put that back together, it becomes a bit easier than usual to see that what we call tantrums are literally our children showing us that they are having enduring angry/upsetting emotions — that is, they are “sudden[ly] display[ing] [their] persisting angry mood”. Over time and as a result of societally-induced semantic diffusion, we have come to call any expression of unsettling emotion a “tantrum”; and we regularly intend a derogatory connotation to go along with it — even going so far as to use the term when speaking of adults to mean “any childish fit of rage or outburst of bad temper”. It’s a catchall term, to put it mildly, for any time we don’t like the emotional expression of someone else, especially if we want them to stop it.

You might be thinking — “Um… So?” — after all, who’s to say it’s a big deal that we overuse a word like tantrum, or even if we culturally decided to add some negative import to it as well? The trouble is, though, that as long as the word comes with the heavy judgement now associated with it, any use of the word carries that judgement. I’m sure you can think of other examples of the same thing in our collective word history… The point is, our intentionally negative and over-use of the word “tantrum” is overtly involved in formulating and maintaining the perspective that our children’s emotive expressions are “bad behavior”. Prejudice of that caliber will never do us any favors in parenting our kids, especially since it’s part of our job as the parents to help them learn how to manage those emotions, but it can, and I’d say that socio-historically it certainly has, made our parenting work more — well, work. 

The truth is that I think we’d do best to chuck the term completely, but rather than get embroiled in an argument for that at present, I’d like to spend a little time pointing out what’s really happening when kids have what we call a tantrum:

  1. All tantrums are just expressions of emotional processing. Period. Without the kind of judgment that gets slapped onto them when we use the word “tantrum” to describe them, emotions and their expressions are just what they are. And again, it’s one of our main parenting jobs to help our kids process their emotions and learn socially-conducive manners of expressing them, in the first place — if we don’t like the emotion(s) or the expression(s), then we need to take responsibility for both, not blame our kids for being emotional and showing it. In truth, we should thank our kids every time they have an emotional outburst, because of its potential to beneficially guide our parenting.
  2. If and when a kid has an actual tantrum — a by-the-book “violent demonstration of rage or frustration” — s/he has  suffered a neuro-emotional meltdown. It may seem intense from the outside, but it is emotional hell for them on the inside. The ability to access the higher, executive-functioning portions and mechanisms of the brain is almost completely lost to a young kid having intense emotion. First, the emotional portion of the brain takes over — in order to secure the kid some assistance through emotional-connection mechanisms — and if that doesn’t work (either in the moment, or habitually), and/or if the kid gets too stressed-out during the emotion, then the instinctual, fight-or-flight, survival portion of the brain usurps control and begins it’s “violent demonstration”. The brain only drives the kid toward such a display in order to get help.
  3. St/age-specific periods of “tantruming” are common and even less controllable for our little ones. It may coincide with a particular brain development stage that interrupts or complicates emotional processing — the so-called “terrible twos” represent a version of this, wherein the brain is simply going through a developmental shift that unsettles the evolving balance between the lower (more instinctual, emotional) portions of the brain and the higher (more rational) portions that will later be in charge of the lower portions (if development goes properly). These periods can be long, short, and/or episodic, and during them it simply doesn’t make sense to try and hold our young kids accountable for consistent rational functioning, or being immediately able to control themselves during upset; later st/age-specific types of “tantruming” — see any teenager anywhere — are no less overpowering to children’s brains, but if we’ve helped them manage emotion earlier in life, then they will have a much easier time handling themselves as they mature (not to mention that by helping them process their emotions throughout, we are nurturing that ever precious parent-child bond).
  4. Serious, chronic “tantruming” is a clear sign of a systemic emotional processing issue. There are different versions, but essentially, something in the manner in which the child has been handled — maybe during the first days, weeks, and months after birth when the instinctual brain desperately needs to be placated with a resounding broadcast of safety and security; or in the months or years that followed, when the emotional brain just as desperately needs connection, consolation, and empathy in order to navigate the intense overwhelm of nearly every emotional process. When there is an interruption in and/or to whatever degree there is a lack of support in those periods and circumstances, then the child’s ability to deal with future emotions and instinctual-fear responses is thwarted. The volume gets turned up on the emotions to inspire greater connection, better parental address, and fuller release of emotional baggage from previously under-addressed episodes.

One of the bottom lines here is that all emotion and emotional expression, “pitching a fit”, “being a fussy pants”, “having a hissy”, or “throwing a tantrum” have the same ends — the development and maintenance of an optimal neural network — one that can manage a wide array of tasks, critical thinking, and problem-solving, as well as process the moment-to-moment experience of life in the best possible way for the current circumstances. That is, think rationally through emotional times and even in times of fear, unless it’s safer to just instinctually react — a decision that the healthy brain makes flawlessly without our conscious involvement, but an unhealthy brain will habitually incorrectly make in favor of fight-or-flight type responses. Early on in development, one of the main ways children’s brains manage this process is by using emotional expression to get connection so that the child can get external assistance in stabilizing during emotional upset — this assistance (coming from us) helps the child’s brain form neural habits of top-down processing, and the ability to cope with future emotional processing and mitigating instinctual fear in healthy ways. If we do our part in this well, then as our children age and become more and more capable of higher executive functioning and self-managment, the neural habits we’ve helped them shape will serve them in processing and regulating their own mental states with greater success and flexibility. In later parts of their development they either capitalize on our efforts, or suffer from them (taking us along for the explosive emotional ride…).

In honour of the importance of all of the above, and again because I think that the judgement that tends to come along with it is problematic in terms of what we want for our kids — I have given up using the word “tantrum”. I don’t think we can afford to project that judgement toward our kids’ emotions — or anyone’s. I don’t think it does us parents any good to see normal emotion in that light, nor do I think it does our parenting lives any favors, nor does it offer anything beneficial to our children. So I’m chucking it completely… with one notable exception.

My fellow virtual villager and stupendous blogger, Karyn Van Der Zwet, has just come out with a book that has the last and only good use of the t-word. All About Tantrums  is out now, and though I don’t have my copy in hand yet, I have been scanning sections on Amazon — and let me tell you, it looks to be the best information available on what’s happening and how to handle it at any stage and with any specific kind of emotional expression you can imagine, all the way through the teen years! She writes:

Reaction Tantrums happen when our [whole, coordinated brain and body system, which Van Der Zwet calls the] Mega-System is hijacked by one of our brain systems. This causes our other brain systems and our body systems to either somewhat disengage or completely shut-down. In most circumstances (for those of us who are neuro-typical) Reaction Tantrums can be prevented or easily relieved. When these have habitually been prevented, or well managed, we have a strong foundation from which we can develop excellent physical health, wisdom, and maturity.

Processing Tantrums happen when our Mega-System is forced, due to circumstances or new information, to radically change how it assesses and relates to the world. They can involve rewiring our brains and can be excruciating circumstances. Processing Tantrums are essential experiences which, when well managed, end with people who behave with increased wisdom, maturity, and for whom excellent physical health is their natural state.

As Van Der Zwet points out — and without the usual judgment associated with the word — “tantrums” offer developmental opportunities and if “well-managed” (I love that term) lead toward physical, mental, and emotional health, maturity, and even wisdom. It doesn’t even sound like something to avoid when she puts it that way! It also makes plain that we have a vital role to play in those moments when our children are experiencing intense emotion — managing it well.

In current parenting mythology we still have these doltish ideas that babies and young children can manipulate us with their emotional expressions, and the best way to keep them from doing this is not to give in to these nefarious displays of defiance and coercion. We’re supposed to ignore them, punish them, or threaten them with “you want me to give you something to cry about?!” in order to make them stop exhibiting such unacceptable behavior and go back to being the compliant, pretty rag dolls they are supposed to be. As it turns out, though, as far as the child’s brain is concerned — none of the these methods contributes to a “well-managed tantrum”. The plain facts are these: 1) Young children don’t have even the remotest capability of planning and executing any manipulation whatsoever. That is high brain functioning, which isn’t even available in the sort of capacity necessary to pull off such a deception, even if young children were capable of thinking about doing it — which they aren’t. They can’t learn bad habits of getting their way just by being assisted in times of turmoil either. Seriously. 2) Ignoring their feelings and emotional expressions (however they show up), or threatening and punishing our children for displaying their emotions in ways that we dislike don’t do a single thing for getting rid of that “bad behavior”. In truth, all of those methods only make matters worse for everyone. They may even cause children significant neurological damage.

Margot Sunderland, in her compelling book, The Science of Parenting, pooling data from several sources, makes a potent case for systemic and potentially permanent mis-development of the brain when children’s emotional expressions are ignored or negatively addressed. In one passage, Sunderland lists some effects of leaving a baby to cry without comfort: “high levels of toxic stress hormones wash over her brain; there is a withdrawal of opioids (chemicals that promote feelings of well-being) in her brain;  pain circuits in the brain are activated just as they would be if she was physically hurt; the brain and body’s stress response system can become hard-wired for oversensitivity” (pg 38). Sunderland goes on to describe some of the possible effects of an “oversensitive stress response system”.

It’s a bit like having a faulty burglar alarm in her head, which keeps going off at the smallest thing. Her brain can react to small stressors — ones that other people take in stride — as if they were big and threatening. Also, being wired for stress early in life can leave a child vulnerable to depression, anxiety disorders, stress-related physical illness, and alcohol abuse later in life. This is particularly the case with children who were left to cry as babies and then experienced a childhood of strict discipline with little warm physical affection to compensate. (pg42)

And further,

Essential systems involving the emotion chemicals opioids, norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin, which are still being established in an immature brain, may be badly affected, resulting in chemical imbalances in the brain. Low dopamine and norepinephrine levels make it more difficult for a child to focus and concentrate, which can lead to learning difficulties in comparison with other children. Low serotonin levels are a key component in many forms of depression and violent behavior. Opioids are vital to diminish feelings of fear and stress, so deactivation of opioids in parts of the brain leads to increases in negative feelings and stress, and decreases in positive feelings. (pg43)

The bottom line on all that is simply that if we don’t address our children’s upset emotions, or if we withhold our comforting (to keep them from “getting spoiled” or “learning to manipulate us”), then we necessitate their turning up the emotional volume in the short term (to get the help they desperately need) and risk training their brains to have bigger, more volatile, more “unconsolable”, and more frequent explosive emotional displays in the future; we may even be pushing them toward later substance abuse (of various kinds) as their brains still try to secure access to the chemicals naturally produced  during parental comforting. In case you’re wondering, when we do comfort our distressed little ones, the opposites happen instead. That is, we help them feel safe and secure and therefore calmer (even if they are still crying), so they don’t have to turn up the potency of their emotional expressions; and instead of training their brains to be oversensitive to stress, we train them to mitigate it themselves; and instead of leaving them vulnerable to addictive relationships with external sources of brain-calming chemicals later in life, we help them have a well-balanced, healthy brain, adept at maintaining it’s own ideal chemical stasis. In short — when we help our kids deal with upsetting feelings, we ensure that emotional processing doesn’t turn into “tantrums”.

*

Need help figuring out what to do with your upset child? Or help figuring out how to reprogram yourself and your kid(s) in the face of over-sensitive stress response systems? You can start by checking out this post, and/or picking up a copy of All About Tantrums orThe Science of Parenting. And if you really want to start making some serious changes — get in touch with me — I can help you figure out how to do it differently, and support you while you are working through it.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll come to/easily be able to see your children’s emotional expressions as just the calls for help that they naturally are; and perhaps more importantly, I hope you’ll join me in setting the story straight on “tantrums”.

*

Be well.

The Myth of the Self-Soothing Infant

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / Leave a comment

crying-baby-001I can sum up today’s post in one sentence. That wasn’t it though… 😉 It’s simply this (and it may sound familiar if you’ve read many of my posts at all): The human brain is born without the ability to manage emotional content without support; if we get help early on, then we can develop that ability, but only if (and only as much as) we are assisted in developing it. Period. That’s just all there is to it. No infant anywhere ever was born with the ability to soothe himself, calm himself down when he is upset, or cry freely and safely to completion in a healthy manner without caregiver support. And if you don’t want to read the rest of my pontification about it, that’s enough for you to know at present. If you’re like me, though, and you always want to know a little more, then by all means read on!

I’ve done a little looking around, and it was apparently around 100 years ago in his book,  The Care and Feeding of Infants, that Dr. Luther Emmet Holt publicized the notion that we should allow our infants the opportunity to practice self-soothing, say when they are upset, or when they’ve been left to fall asleep alone. “Ferberization”, “respecting babies’ right to cry”, “controlled crying”, or the less friendly Holtian terminology, “cry it out”, are all ways that parenting “experts” have referred to the practice of leaving children to manage their own emotions. We’re coached by such pundits to ignore the crying, and/or to sit nearby and not help or make eye-contact, and/or to only intervene if the child is making himself sick with the emotion or is in danger. We’re told that “giving in” to the crying, giving them attention for tears, or not allowing them the opportunity to practice self-soothing trains them to be too dependent on us and teaches them how to manipulate us with their emotional displays.

And I can’t mince words here, I have to say, that’s all a bunch of utter and complete nonsense.

I don’t mean to be rude about it. I know that how we treat our kids is so close to our own hearts, and so subconsciously tangled with our own upbringings, self-identities, and triggers. I know that many of us are so full of disinformation about parenting, and children, and the process of maturation, that it’s tremendously difficult to weed out the good- and right-feeling options from the piles and piles of bullsh!t. I know, firsthand, what it’s like to struggle with ineptitude and inexperience when there is a living breathing tiny human depending on you to keep her alive, and well-cared-for, and healthy, let alone happy. I know the kind of reassurance it carries when someone tells you, “babies are resilient, he’ll be fine…”, “sometimes they cry like that no matter what, just let her get it all out…”,  or “eventually, they just stop on their own, if you don’t mess with them…”. And I have actually witnessed an unassisted baby cry until giving up, until stopping. I now feel certain that a baby left to cry without help, doesn’t (eventually) quit because she is “self-soothing”, but rather because her brain has shut itself down from overwhelming panic and stress. Her system is riddled with Cortisol and Adrenaline and everything but minimal homeostasis and the primitive survival mechanism of quiet “fright” is totally. switched. off. This catatonic baby isn’t soothed, it’s instinctually playing dead.

2c3495cb65031ed7615d89e62a13d908To be fair, there are kernels of truth in the myth of the self-soothing infant. Babies do sometimes cry and cry and cry, even after we’ve addressed every potential need we can think of — fed them, changed them, burped them, napped them, checked them for something causing pain or illness, etc.. Sometimes they have pressing emotional hurts that we can’t see; or need to heal lingering, even old, dormant hurts; and crying is the only way they can deal with it. Crying can be healing to be sure — but it absolutely has to be supported, “in arms” crying, in order to work in that respect.

Another kernel of truth is that infants do have some reflexive mechanisms for soothing. One is of course, suckling, which I think more than anything else refers to and/or drives the infant toward the comfort that comes from nursing, which is another major reflexive soothing mechanism. Suckling, however, and the infant’s ability to eventually get her own fist to her mouth in order to use it for that purpose is not, as the “experts” tell us, evidence of the baby willfully self-soothing. Again, suckling is an instinctual reflex — and primarily a reflex built for breastfeeding — not a conscious, “Oh, I’m feeling upset, let me calm myself down” response to upsetting stimuli. And while offering a baby a pacifier to suck on in times of duress can help calm the baby’s brain in a “bottom-up”, primitive manner by attempting to induce positive feelings instead of the painful ones, it does not help wire the brain to manage future duress in the way(s) that assisting baby with our touch, rocking, soothing words, safe arms, and empathy do (which is all called “top-down” emotional soothing).

Leaving a baby to try and “suckle it out” on her own, is akin to only letting her ever ride bikes with training wheels. She won’t be able to balance herself nearly as well if she isn’t given the opportunity to feel what that’s like (first through experiential training, then through instruction, guidance, and support from us, and then through her own practice). The same analogy can be used in the opposite way, as well, in that if we just throw her on a bike all by herself and say, “You got this, I’m going to respect your right to bike!”, and shove her off down the road, she’s going to crash just as surely as you’re reading these words. And by the way, riding a bike is comparative child’s play to mitigating our own upsetting emotions. We all know plenty of adults, or are ones ourselves, who struggle or still can’t get the hang of self-soothing…

So while the brain does come with a rudimentary reflexive positive-feeling-generating mechanism to balance out mild unrest, it is still wholly incapable of successfully employing such a mechanism when the emotional state has reached overwhelm. For one thing, the stress hormone, Cortisol, blocks the release of Oxytocin, which otherwise calms the baby and helps him feel good. An infant’s suckling is not powerful enough to manage a Cortisol cascade like that which being left to cry without support will induce. For serious upset, especially as the infant ages into toddlerhood and the reasons for upset become more complex and personal, every child needs caregiver assistance to safely discharge the feelings, calm down in the moment, and wire the synapses for being able to consciously process and regulate emotion in the future.

If, for whatever reason, we don’t provide emotional support for our upset babies and children, then we set in motion a different version of development for them — a thwarted version. This version is more hyper-reactive to stress, is more likely to respond reflexively to upset (read: more like a primitive animal than a thinking human…); and is less likely to be able to process difficult emotions, maintain impulse control, manage creative problem-solving, or consciously calm down when experiencing duress. That’s not how the brain is supposed to be wired, but it’s what has happened to whole generations of humans, and we have all suffered for it. Our prisons, hospitals, mental health centers, shelters, and “safe-places” are brimming with people who cannot manage their emotions. Current research is linking the onset of major neuro-psychological conditions like Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder with epigenetic factors including the stress-levels and access to emotional processing support one has in early childhood.

Mom-holding-her-baby-to-help-it-stop-cryingThe bottom line is that true self-soothing is a complex and learned habit of emotional processing guided by specific neural wiring achieved through the experience of being soothed. One of the many reasons for humans’ long childhood is to give us lots of opportunities to experience being supported while we cry and then being assisted in calming down. If we don’t get help in infancy and early childhood, then we never have a chance of developing that neural real estate as fully. If we have to do it on our own, as adults, it can take years and years of arduous therapy and/or conscientious self-work to reprogram our synapses for better emotional processing. And the current thinking is that (as with, for example, foreign languages) if we miss out in early development, it’s not only harder to learn later in life, we also never get the chance to master those skills as well as we would have if given proper exposure in early development (the optimal neural window for developing the proclivity for those faculties…).

Intentional, conscious self-soothing is not childs’ play. If we want our kids to develop healthy habits, and strong synapses, for it in the eventual, then we have to be serious about assisting them. It’s our job to “teach” them how to self-soothe: to make room for their emotional processing, to allow them to cry safely in our arms, and then (through our continued empathy and touch) to trigger their return to calm, and higher brain functioning. Only by doing so — over and over again, time after time, throughout early childhood — can we train their brains to do it, and do it well, for themselves. And only after years of this process, can we expect them to truly self-soothe. Anyone who tells you differently, is trying to sell you something.

So, I mentioned most of them above, but here’s the quick list of ways to wire your child’s maturing brain for eventual self-soothing prowess (remembering, of course, that these are generally for use after you’ve attempted to address any needs s/he might have):

In infancy (and with minimal upsets) —
• Warmth: it can be as simple as helping him 63981_823189107704356_1005985079256205307_ncozy up, and often the best spot is under a blanket, naked on your bare chest; it might seem perfunctory, but try it, and you’ll see magic (especially if you also use chest-to-chest time in between upsets…).
• Rocking/Movement: you know what this looks like; and if you’re like me, then you spontaneously start doing it even just looking at babies…
• Suckling: see if you can help baby find her fist to chew on; if the emotion is a little more intense, and you are ok with them, try a binky (I only encourage the use of pacifiers for upsetting moments, not a general chew-toy); or offer to breast- or bottle-feed (and yes, I am suggesting nursing for comfort — from an infant’s perspective, that’s all it ever is…).

And continuing throughout development (and/or during more serious upset) —
• Touch: gentle caresses, hugs, even just a finger on his toe helps make way for him to discharge the painful feelings and begin to change his brain chemistry, releasing Oxytocin and breaking the Cortisol grip; and remember chest-to-chest time just for fun, since it helps wire his brain for better Oxytocin release and reception.
• Taking Time: slow way down when upsetting emotion overwhelms her, make room for her feelings; and when you know she’s having a day when she needs to release, provide time for it instead of trying to coax (or threaten…) her out of it; allow for emotional processing because once it’s out and the brain chemistry shifts, then everything is easier — the birds come tweeting out, the sun warms the shimmering hills over which the rainbow arches, and all is gloriously well in the world after every major storm…
• Talking it Out: another thing that helps, especially as children age, is “using our words” — I usually hate when I hear parents robotically whine that at their kids, but — there’s good brain science that says talking about our feelings helps us process them in that “top-down” manner that once wired-in makes it easier for the brain to have tough feelings and still not lose control and go “all ape-sh!t” as they say, so let your kids talk about the feelings involved; and you, too, can use words to help you process your own feelings more easily when you’re triggered — just try naming the feelings (without blaming them on anyone…).
• Empathy: the number one way to help, especially but not only verbal kids, is to actively empathize, and here I don’t just mean to try on the perspective (although that is a necessary first step), but to (also) actually express your genuine understanding of your kid’s predicament; get down on his level and look him in the eye and let him know that you get it — when you really successfully communicate that to him, he’ll transform in front of you (he may crumble into you and weep, and then/or his pain may melt away, and then/or he will bounce out of the upset emotion into a happier state than was previously available to him).

And for you visual types who maybe haven’t see it before, here’s a lovely graphic that Natalie and I created (and which you can get here) to help illustrate all of the above:brain-small

 So now you know, if you didn’t or only suspected before, and you can tell those “experts” when they encourage you to let your infant self-soothe herself to sleep, or try to get you to stop reacting to his emotions so that he’ll learn to self-soothe — “Well, actually ‘self-soothing’ is a very complex neural process that takes years of support and guidance to properly develop. And that’s exactly what I’m doing by responding quickly and calmly to my child’s cries, and helping with my child’s emotional processing, and physically triggering the neural processes my child’s brain has to learn to do so that it can begin to do it on it’s own. Thanks though!” Feel free to print that out to have on hand and read aloud if need be. 😉

Here’s more supporting links for you:
• A parent’s video guide to skin-to-skin contact with their infants
• Great article on recent research into effects of mother’s touch on infants
• Another great article (with scientific notation!) on various aspects of emotion regulation
• One of my favorite blogger’s posts called, “What you Need to Know about Crying-it-Out”
• A great basic description of brain areas involved in emotion.
• A scholarly chapter from Stanford on conceptual foundations in emotion regulation (nice overview of some contemporary science in this arena).
• Another, even better scholarly article from Emotion and Motivation Vol. 27, No. 2 on emotion regulation (with loads of citations as well)
• An article from Genevieve Simperingham on some beneficial effects of stress-release crying as well as a little of her own experience with Aware Parenting, made popular by Aletha Solter, Ph.D.
• An article from Solter herself on “assisted crying”; also my historical source on Dr. Holt… (also with citations)

*

Be well.