modeling

Dear Parents: Please Stop Trying to Control Your Children

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

Ok, look. I’ve broached this subject over a 100 times in various forums, blogs, journals, social media posts — you name it. And I usually spend a lot of time coddling us all as we navigate the tender history of our own parenting and our parents’ parenting, and I do my best to make an honest but gentle critique of this major flaw in our current child-raising paradigm. But it’s gotten to the point where when I see another credentialed practitioner espousing the merits of “praising the right way” or “employing natural consequences”, I start banging my forehead on my palm.

We have got to get this tired notion out of our heads, friends. We’ve got to quit our addiction to Behaviorism.

It should be pointed out, for those of you who’ve never heard the story, that Behaviorism — a pseudoscience based on the notion that human behavior is a malleable commodity to be controlled and harvested for economic advantage — was designed to make subjects do whatever they were told. Not simply to do what was preferable, or intelligent, or kind, but anything that was commanded and associated with reward and/or punishment. And frankly, it’s very effective in certain cases, to a certain extent, and more so with adults than children. But it just so happens to have us all focussing on the least important thing about us humans.

We are not just what we do. Nor are we merely valuable for what someone else can make us do.

Consider the implications of that, if you will, for just a moment…

When it comes to raising our children — we want them to know, and understand, and feel it in their bones, that we love, and value, and cherish them for no other reason than that they are. That they exist. Not because of what they do, or will do if we turn the right screws. And because we want them to never even question their worth to us, and to develop a healthy sense of self-worth — we absolutely have to stop dealing with them solely on the level of how to make them do just what we want.

We have been tricked into thinking that A+B=C, when in fact, A+B only ever equals (A+B). When we take a child (A) and add Behavioristic manipulation (B), we do not automatically get cooperation (C) and we certainly don’t guarantee getting a controlled or “good” child. All we ever assure ourselves under that equation is that we get a manipulated child. That child not only learns to manipulate others in her life, she also learns that none of us matter except inasmuch as we allow ourselves to be what someone else wants us to be. I hope as you read it to yourself, you hear/d how dangerous that is.

The raw truth is that we don’t actually want our children to grow up to be easily controlled. So we had better stop training them for that way of life and that variety of perspective on themselves.

“So then,” you may wonder, “how the H do we get our kids to do what we want??” And the answer is we ask. That’s it. That’s all there is to the magic of cooperation. That’s our only (dignified, nonviolent) tool for getting what we want with anyone else in the world. Why would we use any other method with our kids? Why should we? Unless we screw it up by trying to manipulate them all the time, our children are the most likely humans on the planet to cooperate with us — far and away more willing to do what we ask far more often than anyone anywhere ever. And while we’re at it, maybe we want to have more reasonable expectations in terms of how much we ask them to do and how much they’re willing to do.

No one on Earth ought to live life being willing to do whatever we ask of them regardless of what it is or how they feel just because we ask. Not even our own kids.

If we want cooperation from our kids — because why would we really want more than that — then we would do well to focus on co-operating with them. When we co-operate, we’re not just complying or expecting compliance, we’re actually working together — operating in company. No one is trying to make anyone else do stuff all the time, and no one is just doing for the other all the time either. We’re doing together — we’re meeting needs together, we’re accomplishing goals together, we wading through all the things that come up for each of us together. The idea that we should rely on our children to be or do more than that is simply an unreasonable expectation that Behaviorism has hoodwinked us into chasing.

And when we ask, and they say “No,” or whine and stall, or throw themselves bodily onto the floor — and they will just because they are human and they are young — our job is not to double-down on trying to force or bribe them into respectfully performing our will. As leaders in the co-operative field of the family, our job is to work together in order to be able to work together! If one part of the unit is having trouble functioning normally, we help it! We don’t override it, or ignore it, or coax it to just go ahead and operate as is.

In order to address breakdowns in co-operation, we get curious. We look for the feelings beneath what our children are doing or not doing. We look to see if there are underlying needs they are attempting to meet.

And when we find something down there below the behavioral surface — because when they won’t do what we ask, it’s almost always due to some uncomfortable emotion(s) or unmet need(s) they’re feeling — we pause the “-operation” and focus on the “co-”. We connect. If there are feelings blocking our children’s ability to work with us, then we look at those together, and offer our children empathy and touch as we hear and make room for their emotions. If there are, as yet, unmet needs lurking below the disquieting feelings, then we look to help our children address those. Before we expect that they will be able to operate again.

When we address feelings — whether it is manic exuberance or riling anger or tender anxiety — we remove the burden blocking our children’s emotional drive to work with us. And when we focus our efforts on helping our children meet their needs — rather than on securing their unflinching compliance — we remove the obstacle(s) to their willingness to help us meet our needs. When we co-operate with them, then they naturally cooperate with us. C+C=(C+C)! It’s as simple as that.

If you find yourself needing more convincing on how terribly behavior-focussed parenting serves us all (parents and children alike), I encourage you to delve into the works of Alfie Kohn. Unconditional Parenting and Punished by Rewards are his two most notable tomes on the subject, and should be enough to convince even the most empirically-minded among us. You can also order a DVD of Kohn delivering an excellent address on Unconditional Parenting at the UP link above, for those of you who can’t stand to ever read another parenting book in your life.

The bottomline of all this is simply that we don’t need to control our children’s behavior to make them “good” people. We just need to understand them and support them in being their best selves.

So please, my dear fellow parents, let’s all decide to be done with critiquing and manipulating how our children behave. And instead, let’s get laser-focussed on co-operating to meet needs and to process those underlying feelings, before we ask our kids to do anything else. We’ll all get much further if we agree to go together.

For those of you who want more information or who want support while navigating the subtleties of co-operation, I happily invite you to come and get it!

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Be well.

 

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! ❤

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Be well.

Meet Your Emotional Brain — or — Whose “Tantrum” *is* This, Anyway?!

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / 4 Comments

Today we’re going on a journey to the center of our brains! I’d like to introduce you to the Cingulate Cortex. Cingulate Cortex, this is the people. People, Cingulate Cortex.cingulate_gyrusThis is one heck of an amazing structure handling a number of  functions that just so happen to share processing with regions of the neocortex (all the white above) — though at less-to-more conscious levels, respectively. It is one of the primary areas in the brain which is activated in both infants who are in distress and crying, and in the adults who are hearing and responding to those infants (Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, pg 106); and its development is experience-dependent. Today we’ll take a look at why our cingulate matters to our abilities to parent and handle emotion (in ourselves and our kids); why it matters to our children’s emotional, cognitive, sensory, and motor development; and how to grow healthy, resilient, and fully empowered cingulates in the brains of all our future generations for a more peaceful and empathetic world.

Here’s a weird factoid. Did you know we’re one of only a thimbleful of species capable of parenting in a way that is anything but virtually identical to the manner in which we were parented. That is, of all other species on Earth only humans, and arguably the higher primates or dolphins, can parent differently than their parents did. All other animals repeat exactly, or as nearly as they can physically muster to exactly, the same parenting choices, maneuvers, and nurturing processes as their parents and their parents’ parents, and so on into the historical predawn.

It is this one fact alone “that got us the wound and will get us well” in our parenting. Because we can change our parenting with our thinking, humans have changed parenting from its natural, “out of Eden” state — with whole family clans raising the progeny year after year including them in the society by rite and ritual in a timely and natural fashion as it was done before them and before them — to its postmodern postindustrial equivalent — single-parent or “nuclear” families living in relative parenting isolation far from relatives or other like-minded parents, kids are sent away from their parents and/or other loving care-givers far too soon, for far too long each day, and at great internal duress for financial reasons and/or misguided intellectual pursuits, learning is placed over experience and development, “socialization” via isolation with ones peers has replaced actually being socialized to the broad spectrum of society. Being able to change our parenting with our thinking f*#%ed up the whole beautiful nurturing system that our biology had perfected into sheer glorious magic. But. Because we can change our parenting, we don’t have to be stuck with parenting how we were parented; and even if we were (somehow, miraculously!) parented well in our own upbringing, we can still improve on that mold based on what we learn about parenting our own children.

Remember this when you find yourself doing exactly what you never wanted to do as a parent; when you find yourself being your Dad, or your Mom; when you find yourself having to leave the room because your child’s emotions are simply too much for you. Remember it every time you (re)act from the programming you got as a kid instead of from your parenting ideals. A big hunk of your brain just can’t help itself because if you weren’t parented through your emotions well as a kid (and let’s face it, who the hell was…), your brain built fewer connections to the parts you need to be able to parent your children through their emotional processing. By the time you get to parenting, hopefully, you have had other opportunities in life to re-parent yourself a bit, and/or develop other healthy neural and functional process-habits, but you never get a chance to redo those that one gets when one is parented with the “full measure” of emotional as well as physical nurturing. Remember, though, that we can change the way our brains function in response to our children being upset, and while we’re parenting them just happens to be an ideal time to do so.

Before I go on, I want to go back just a moment and underscore that when you hear your kid(s) scream, your cingulate cortex lights up just like your kid(s). Your brains are having the same meltdown. Automatically. This means: 1) You’ve got to cool out to be able to function, and 2) You can use your own cool-out and the same techniques you use on yourself with your children to cool out their brains and help them get back to executive brain functionality as well.

For those of you who’ve yet to see it, this a chart that we (at the Center for Emotional Education) created, which we aptly titled the Brain Tree. Ain’t it pertty, y’all?! 
brain-small

When stressful emotion strikes (whether it is high or low emotion), our kids especially and to a lesser extent, we ourselves, lose access to the upper limbs and branches of the brain tree — that whole neocortex where all of our executive functions (like making a compassionate choice, or creating a solution to a perceived problem, regulating impulses, even calming the brain itself) take place — and the energy of the tree recedes into the trunk for protection, if protection doesn’t come (in the form of emotional connection), then the brain tree’s energy recedes further into its primal roots. The cingulate cortex is in the trunk of the tree. Because of the way our brains mirror the cingulate reaction our kids are having when they are upset, and because we lose access to our children when they slide further down into root survival reactions, I think of the cingulate cortex as an important neuro-emotional link between us and our children. It’s here, where from early on and throughout development we can return together when there is trouble, when executive functioning fails, or emotional stress derails things — we do anyway since we mirror our upset kids, and we ought to intentionally since that is what helps them get back to intellectual/executive brain functioning. Which is why most of us need to reprogram our own processing around emotion…

Let’s get a little more intimate with the cingulate cortex for a second, here, too. The cingulate is a mind-boggling component of the brain — in part, because it is at the center of so many important top-down brain processes, being “involved in cognitive, emotional, sensory, and motor processing, integrating input from the entire cortex with subcortical structures” (The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, p106). If there is damage to this area or incomplete development, then consequences can range from “decreased maternal behavior”, “emotional instability”, and “increased response to stress”, to “decreased empathy”, “decreased expressiveness”, “inappropriate social behavior”, and “impulsiveness and increased motor activity”, not to mention “mutism” (p107). One notable part of the development of the cingulate is that “early neglect, stress, and trauma may negatively impact the development and organization of [its] cells, resulting in deficits in the abilities organized by the cingulate” (p108), thereby creating a life-long effect on cognitive and emotional functioning. Another note-worthy part of the cingulate’s development is a kind of entrainment with the parent’s emotional and cognitive states, such that, even without saying or doing anything (that we’d be conscious of) in particular, we provide input which unconsciously shapes the infrastructure of our children’s social brains. All of this neuro-speak basically just means that our kids are picking up what we knowingly put before them, but they are also picking up, and developing based on, the stuff we think we’re keeping to ourselves. Our emotional states, our outlooks on life, our ways of handling our emotions — all are being sensed and mimicked by our children’s brains, particularly the cingulate cortex.

Returning to the brain tree, then — when kids go into the trunk, so to speak, and lose their executive abilities, during “emotional winters, droughts, and heat-waves”, then we have to meet them with calming touch, soothing countenance and approach, out-loud empathizing, hugging, nursing, and/or listening in order to assist them in emotional processing and offloading, and eventually inspire their brains to reach back up into the neocortex long enough to trigger the message to the limbic-trunk system to stop sending out stress brain chemicals and start sending out ones that make our kids feel more secure and more connected with us and further able to calm down, think more clearly, and act more compassionately, etc., etc.. When we do it a lot over time, we give our kids better coping skills in the moment and a brighter developmental future — we can make those branches flourish just by making sure to nurture that trunk whenever necessary (and the roots, of course, too, earlier in development and more generally). And the wonderful thing is, we get plenty of opportunities to help them process their emotions!

Back to us for a moment, because, remember our brains can’t tell (at least at first) just who is having these emotions. Emotion is a trigger for a lot of us, right? It’s bad enough to have my own without having someone else’s! If we got good programming from our parents and/or picked up skills along the way, then we can process our emotions in a top-down fashion, we manage duress in creative ways and keep our brains from emitting more than a necessary amount of stress hormones. We mellow out our cingulate response, we link with our kids and mellow their cingulates out, we model empathy and tenderness and compassion and their brains mirror it back. They get back to growing branches, and actually, so do we!

If we were parented well, then we have an easier time neuro-psychologically speaking than other parents who were not. If we’ve been emotionally nurtured then we have brains better trained to deal with emotions and upset, and we not only experience the benefits of that, but we can pass it on to our children by being fully, totally, and how-ever-long-it-takes-ly present with them while we assist in their emotional processing. To help ourselves build better neural pathways for making ourselves better emotional support for our children, we can practice empathizing on them (we’ll get neurally better at it after awhile), we can self-empathize (yes, actually recognize and look at our own feelings while we are having them), and wait (because patience will help). So basically the same steps we use to help our children process their emotions is what works best for helping us process ours in the moment, and develop better neural capabilities for helping ourselves and them in the future. Cool, ain’t it? It’s such a nice package, in fact, that I tend to think our kids express their emotions as they do, and require our help to process their emotions as they do in order for us all to get neurally better at it.

Now we just have to remember to count on it…

When, my partner, Natalie was in labor, one of the few things I whispered into her ear (besides “I love you so much…”) was that if she wanted to she could think of the contractions as guests that she was welcoming at the door, all coming to bring her our baby. Reading back over it now, it’s a wonder she didn’t hit me, but the effect at the time was that she leaned into the idea. She began to see each contraction as something to bring on, rather than shy away from, and she kept her mind on the goal. I think the brain changes we all go through in parenting are much the same. Even if we were parented well, becoming a parent develops us in ways we can’t possibly imagine beforehand. We grow parts of our brains that were hitherto almost unseen. Some of the terrain we cross to get there is a revisiting of places we crossed during our own upbringing, but much of it is new. We can welcome it, and get on board with the process, or go down kicking and screaming about how hard it is or how awful our parents may have been… I believe we’ll get further welcoming the process of our own development — further for ourselves, and further for our little developing progeny, too.

So, I say go for it!

  • When your kid’s emotional sh!t hits the fan, and you get all caught up in the cingulate cortex entrainment, give yourself some empathy. Say in your head or out-loud: “I feel so triggered by this!” or “I feel so pissed right now!” or “I get stressed out when they/you are upset!”. Get some neuro-psycholgical distance from your own emotional upheaval, and give yourself a chance to get back to your own  executive brain functioning — that is, your empathy (for others in this case), your creativity, your calming brain processing, etc..
  • Practice making space for your child(ren)’s emotional processing. Realize that the expression of their emotional upheaval is often a biological attempt to get connection and help with emotional processing. Approach them with empathy and tenderness and touch and (if it’s still part of your parenting tool kit) nursing. All of these help the emotional process, and get intellectual brain functioning back on line.
  • And, again, model empathy. This is how we teach what we want our kids to do for themselves and others; and this is how we trigger their brains into mirroring empathy for themselves and others.
  • And, also again, wait. Empathy, when done fully and honestly, will make room for and then settle feelings and help get “issues” “solved” with a kind of ease that I can only call magic. Not always, but often enough to mention, when we give our children full space to have their upset feelings about particular situations, scenarios, interactions, or issues, those so-called “problems” vanish as the feelings subside. But also, teaching empathy is a process, both neural and functional. Wait for it to develop and nurture it as it does.

Now that we’ve met the cingulate cortex, and become familiar with each other a bit — let’s get down to making peace with emotional processing and growing amazing brain trees! For more on how to do that, look here.

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Be well, my fellow brain arborists.

Co-Operation Beats Compliance Every Time

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / 4 Comments

deaf“How many times do I have to tell you?!” “When are you going to learn?” “If you don’t listen to me…!”  If you’ve ever been around kids for more than a minute, you’ve likely heard some of their parents say at least something like these phrases. If you’ve been a parent longer than a couple years, you’ve likely said one or more of them yourself. At the very least, almost all of us have had similar lines lobbed at us from time to time by our own parents when we were growing up.

The fact is, we parents often find ourselves repeating what we say in a barrage of stuttered phrases, “like a tobacco-auctioneer”: “Come here. Come here. Come’ere. C’mere. C’mere. Here! Here! HERE!” or “No. No. Nonononono! NO!” or “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stoppit. Stoppit. STOPPIT!”. It’s not uncommon. It’s easy to slip into. And part of it is the nature of being the only (supposedly…) rational, full-brained person in the room. But the other fact is, it’s easy to get carried away thinking that our little ones need us to act that way in order to get them to comply with, or even hear, our requests, and “behave!”.

Biologically speaking, our kids are designed to follow our lead. Period. If we don’t screw that up by being too demanding all the time, too inflexible, too authoritarian, too retributive, too exacting, or too permissive (which is actually rarer than we’re taught to think…) — then our kids grow into adolescence trusting our leadership, relying on our authority, and doing (mostly) as we’d prefer. Yes, if we’ve raised them right, they’ll learn to question authority along the way, and we’d do well to entertain those questions in more than a perfunctory manner; but by and large, even when they have questions, they’re still respecting whose role is whose, they’re still looking to our leadership, and they’re still more geared toward following us than not. All we have to do is honour our own roles as leaders by being informative guides, confident captains, and loving parents. I’ve written some on all of those topics before (see the links), but today I want to spend a little more time on the last piece — leadership through love.

The truth is, almost every kid is by nature more compliant than almost every adult (read that again if you need to); it’s just that we’ve been taught to expect them to do every-single-thing-we-ever-say — and that’s not reasonable, no one will ever live up to such a ridiculous ideal, not without losing their own identity anyway… So we have this skewed notion of what’s normal for children — what signifies normal cooperation, and conformity (what we all call “compliance”) — and we expect way more of it from them than makes sense. Even so, expecting that our kids will follow our lead is waaay more productive for everyone involved than assuming the opposite. Mostly, this is because kids rise to meet our expectations of them. If we treat them like convicts, they act like convicts. If we treat them as cooperative, rookie members of our family team, and expect that most of the time, they’ll “eventually get it” (if they don’t already), then 8 times out of 10, that’s what we’ll see.

The single best way to increase cooperation (both, ahead of the game and in the moment) is to turn up the connection. Because they’re born to follow us, and because they’re by nature more likely to do what we say than anyone else ever would be; the only thing we really need to do to get more of that (aside from not screwing it up!) is lean into the natural bond we already share, and that our biology has tuned to perfection for just such a purpose, and let the relationship do it’s magic. By connecting with them, we prove their significance to us, we show them that they belong with us, and both the neurobiology and the psychology of that connection are so compelling that they almost can’t not do what we ask. And all it takes is spending a little time, giving out some hugs, maybe doing a bit of playing, reading, and wrestling — and voila — you’re connecting!

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The bottom line, for the moment is, if your kid isn’t listening to you — I mean really not listening to what you say or request or expect — instead of checking the behavior, maybe  check in with the relationship. Look for ways to communicate significance and belonging to your child, and practice making time and space to connect. Take him on a date just the two of you — his choice. Take her to the park and play together — her lead. Take ten minutes and just snuggle on the couch — and try to be the last one to let go. Leave love notes (even if they’re just crappy pictures). Give free kisses. Hold hands. Smile freely. In a word — relate!

I promise you, it is surprising how much easier it is to get cooperation from a deeply-connected kid. And when we get practiced at throwing our own cooperation into the mix, too (for modeling and bonding purposes, at least!) — well, the difference is hard to believe. In fact, I’m personally convinced (by my own 16, 14, and 10 year-old) that if we get really skilled at co-operating with them (i.e. using our natural leadership, connecting, and working with them to find mutually satisfying solutions to issues as they arise) then we no longer need to worry about enforcing compliance or insuring conformity. When we’re working together to meet needs, be empathetic to feelings, and get things done — we’re working together! We don’t have to demand compliance, because we’re working together. We don’t have to punish them for noncompliance in order to instill obedience, because we’re working together. We don’t have to do anything to them to make them do what we say, because we’re working together.

If we’re not working together with our kids to get everyone’s needs met — that is, co-operating — well, then we’re working too hard. And that’s all there is to it. If we want more cooperation from them, then what we need to do is give more of it to them. If we want them to care about us enough to do what we ask even when they’d rather not, then we have to show them how much we care about them. It’s a direct proportion and a turn key operation. And if you aren’t already — it’s high time you and your family started cashing in!

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To get you started and/or keep you going, here’s some “working with” phrases you can try out that engender an atmosphere of and invite co-operation:

• “It seems like, right now, you are wanting X, and I am wanting Y. How can we make it  work for both of us?”
• “I’d like to help, can you tell me what you need?”
• “I’d like your help with something real quick.” and/or “Can you help me for a minute?”
• “How can we make it a game?” or “What’s the fun version?!”
• “We have to go in the next 10 minutes. Is there anything you want to do before we leave?” then “We’re going to be leaving in about 2 more minutes. Any ‘last things’ you need to do or get?”.
• “I was thinking I’d like to ______ before we leave the park/playground/exploratorium today. What’s one thing you want to do before we leave? Which do you want to do first?”
• “What’s the funnest/#1-super-secret/safest way to get to the car from here? Go!”
• “Since we have to interrupt your game, what part of this do you want to bring with us?”
• “What do you want/need before we _______ ?” or just “What do you need?”
• “How do you want to handle that/this?”
• “What can we do about _________?”
• “What’s your idea…” or “Do you have any ideas for…”
• “Well, we’re in this together. What’s our plan?”
• “This (situation, scenario, dynamic, interaction, etc.) isn’t working for me. Can we/ I’d like to/ I’d prefer we/ Let’s try/ What if we…”
• “That wasn’t what we agreed…/ That wasn’t what I asked for… Do you need more information/time/hugs?”
•”I’d like us to follow-through on what we discussed.” or “I think we should do as we agreed.”
•”We still have to _______ . How can we/I make it easier for you/us?”
• “Will you help me figure out what to do here?”
• “I’m willing to _______ . What are you willing to do?”
• “We can’t ________ . Do you have any other ideas?”
• “Honey, will you please bring me that ______ ?”
• “Will you/everyone please ______ ?”
• “Can we/we all agree to _______ ?”
• “What’s your vote?”
• “What would help?”
• “Do you have a preference?”
• “My favorite way is to… What’s your favorite way?” then if necessary, “Which one sounds more fun/better/easier to you right now?”
• “We have to _______ . What part do you want to pick/choose/make-up/design?”
• Or (no matter the topic) use singing, “We gotta ______ right now. Or I’m gonna have a cow! We gotta do it right away. Or I’ll have to buy some haa-aay!”
• And, of course, don’t forget the NVC classic, which, being a classic, is always in style — “I’m feeling ________ . I need _________ . Will you  ______?”

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If you want (or desperately need!) help turning your current family dynamic around to a more connected, co-operative version — don’t hesitate to reach out. No matter where you are, or what style of parenting you’ve been using up to now, we can get you on a better feeling course faster than you’d believe possible. Contact me and let’s set up a complimentary consultation to discuss your situation right away.

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Be well.

Parenting Doesn’t Have to Suck

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

I’ve written and talked about this before in some detail elsewhere, but when I read Glennon Melton’s article, “Don’t Carpe Diem“, about how hard she thinks parenting is, I was thrown once more into a theoretical tizzy, and tantrum-like even stomped my foot on the floor as I said, “Parenting isn’t hard.” And then adamantly, as if the computer screen wasn’t listening closely enough to me, I added, “Raising a kid is easy! It’s being ‘parents’ that makes it hard!”. But neither the computer nor the author of the article were answering (especially since the comment option was closed on the article, and she’s gone on to write a book…).

Now don’t get me wrong on at least 3 counts (on all others, feel free to get me wrong if you must… 😉 ) —   1) Of course there are situations in nearly every single day of parenting any child that have emotional intensity, or involve disagreement, or that require negotiation, or that ask us to look more deeply at ourselves, or that leave us questioning. And 2) there are, also of course, many families out there who are actually dealing with a developmental or congenital condition that makes all of the normal types of child-growing processes more difficult. And finally, 3) I know, regardless of the situation, or how it arose, if you’re struggling in parenting, the next to last thing you need is someone giving you a hard time about it — the very last thing is to get down on yourself.

So with those disclaimers firmly in place, I do want to share a couple of thoughts with you about how we’ve been taught to make things harder on ourselves and our kids, and how we can make it all a bit easier. Today, though, instead of launching into a lengthy diatribe about all of the different facets of my philosophy of enjoying parenting — especially since I have done so at length already more than once — I just want to talk about the general concepts and then direct you to further reading as your interest inspires. I hope you’ll forgive the redundancy — I am mostly here to soothe my own thoughts about it, but I’m also feeling a great deal of empathy for you parents out there that are just suffering through unnecessarily, everyday. My heart goes out to you. You deserve to feel good and have nice kids.

So, beginning somewhat in the middle of things… Here’s the central thesis that I want you to at least have trouble forgetting about for a day or so: if you are struggling through your parenting days, especially if you are doing so alone, and you feel as though this whole operation of raising your kids is basically hell with a mythical silver lining — It. Doesn’t. Have. To. BE. Like. THIS. If parenting had been as difficult as modern society has made it for our whole history, our species would’ve died out ages ago.

Simply put, there are strategies that make raising kids easier and more enjoyable, and others that are currently more popular that do the opposite. Generally speaking these strategies break into groups over whether they are strategies that are designed to “work with” our children and their biology, or strategies that are designed to “do things to” our children to control them. I don’t mean that to sound sinister, just simplifying for the sake of time — I’m sure there aren’t more than a few parents who’ve actually thought, “How do I control them? I know! By doing things to them! Bwahahahaha….”. Nevertheless, until quite recently (and believe me there is a rising tide already), the predominant thinking on parenting since at least the 50’s has been that the best way to get children to behave like adults is to attempt to control and modify the behaviours themselves by doing things to kids to make them want to behave in certain ways. This Pavlovian approach means we give rewards and punishments of various sorts to try to reinforce or discourage certain behaviors, and there’s little room in this approach for any of the feelings anyone is having or the relationship between the parents and children.

Here’s the thing, though — and modern history is replete with examples of this scenario — in stepping into the process of child-rearing, B.F. Skinner and the wave of Behaviorists traveling in his wake, interrupted a process that Nature had already spent epochs perfecting. We humans arrived at where we are, not by controlling our children’s behaviours, but by nurturing their development. We became the preeminent species on the planet, not by using CIO, or catching our children being good, not by star charts, and time-outs (“…from positive reinforcement”, as it was originally called), not by any means of reigning in what children do — but by caring for who they are. There weren’t any theories on how to get kids to behave and do what you say and be good — there were just little families and villages welcoming new members, caring for their needs and teaching them about living. There was already a natural flow of maturation and becoming, before we got so smart that we f#cked it up.

Now, we are the living legacy of that nonsense. Many of us were parented so poorly — not necessarily without love or decent intentions, and purely by accident, really, but poorly for what humans need, nonetheless — that we don’t have what millennia of parents before us took for granted in terms of a natural balance of our own, a natural sense of self-assurance, natural attachment to the Earth, natural parental instincts, inherent trust in the natural process of which are a part, or naturalized experience with how our species nurtures babies. We’re social test-tube humans — manipulated by our own science into this unnatural and alien state of dissociation with what is normal even for ourselves. But don’t worry — we aren’t too far gone yet, and as I already mentioned, there are many of us who are already daring to not swim upstream, and who instead are learning to go with the natural flow. And I’m here to reassure you — you can come right on in, the water is fine!

Too good to be true, you say… Full of canal water, am I? Did someone call me a snake-oil peddler?! A blasphemer?!!

Well the honest truth is that if we can get all of the BS that we’ve been asked to swallow about how parenting is “supposed” to be out of our proverbial systems, and get back to parenting in line with our biology and in line with our real intentions for our children’s development — the whole thing really is easier, even though we’re all coming at it somewhat handicapped. And it doesn’t have to involve any of the sort of strategizing, surveillance, or coercion of certain behaviours with which modern parents get so distracted and distressed today. I don’t just say that based on theory, or clinical research — though there is plenty of both — I say that there is a better, easier, happier way in parenting because I live it.

Before you get mad at me for that, remember my disclaimer(s)… Even we, in our better, easier, happier experience, have issues arise everyday, struggles to get passed, and stupid-crap-that-sucks dropped into our metaphorical laps. I’m not saying that there is a way to parent that doesn’t involve different humans living life together and trying to figure out how to stay alive. I’m not even saying, “I enjoy every minute of that precious, precious time because I know I’ll never get it back…” or anything of such sappy sort. The sh!t does hit the fan in our house, too.

The difference in our home — and the difference that makes all the difference — is that, rather than working on our kids to make them do good, we’re working with them to help them be well. That may require certain intentions, and I think it does prescribe certain actions, but they aren’t difficult, and once habitual, undoubtedly have the ability to improve your quality of life. That doesn’t sound so bad does it?

The basic epicenter of this work — both what you are working with and what you are working toward — is the relationship. This is the magical key that Nature gave us to make us her current pinnacle. Everything about us is built to accommodate relating. It is the way we succeed in life, and in infancy, and everything in human maturation depends on it utterly. So if you remember nothing else, remember that the key to a happier parenthood is to act in service of having a warm relationship both now and forever with your children, by and for relating with them. That’s how you help them learn everything they need to know about being here. That’s how you guide them. That’s how you make it easier. AND that’s how you enjoy it more.

Of course, and again, there are certain actions that are more and less in line with serving the relationship. Letting our children walk all over us and have everything always and only the way(s) they want it without regard or respect for our (own) feelings, and/or repeatedly ignoring it when we are mistreated, and/or withholding information about how people, things, and life work from them — do not serve our relationships with our kids. Throwing them screaming into time-out because they have some feeling(s) and need(s) driving them to get help in the ways we’ve shown them we’re available to “help” — that is, “traditionally” doling out punishment, taking things without asking, disrespecting them, making them perform politenesses, judging and scolding, being physically rough — also not too cool for an enduring relationship. If we want to relate with them in the long run (think: getting to see our grandkids…), then we would do well to make that easier by how we relate with them in the short term.

There’s a great long list of various things parents can do in order to make relating with kids better, easier, and happier for every one in the family. Just click here to find my current more detailed list(s).

But off the top of my head and roughly in developmental order, I’d say:

  • We ought to consciously nurture inutero development and calm, have as gentle and natural of a birth as we can manage, and do all the groovy AP bonding stuff — chest-to-chest time, extended baby-wearing, extended nursing, extended co-sleeping, immediate responsiveness, tender and empathetic nurturing, etc. — first. Those are our first main tasks, and they all center around making baby feel welcome and safe. If we can do those with close attention, then we will have already made everything that we want to do in parenting exponentially easier for everyone involved. Srsly.
  • Inform inform inform. Give our growing humans lots and lots and lots of information. Read, and talk, and process, and teach, and share, and explain, and repeat. I would add a little common sense caution here, though, about right timing and right presentation — we do want to consider our audience. The point here, in terms of this current discussion, is to teach them about how people like to relate and be related with. They need all the information ever recorded about harmonious human interactions because they’ve never had any before us.
  • Be how we want them to be. This goes with the above, but refers specifically to what we show. Despite the old adage, children will not comply with, “Do as I say, not as I do”. The mirror neurons in their brains, simply won’t let them. So let’s just do everyone a favor and as much as we are able, and as often as we can muster it: be kind, empathetic, polite, helpful, interested, attentive, affectionate, honest, authentic, human, and everything else we hope for our children to be. Their brains will learn it just by being around us.
  • Recognize our own worth. Somewhere shortly after early parent-infancy, or a little later if we’re “lucky”, most natural moms/dads/caregivers start thinking and/or being told that being a parent is not quite enough. That we ought to be getting back to the career, taking on a hobby, cleaning the house more, focusing on our “self” more, or starting a revolution. “Sure parenting your wee ones is great, everyone needs do that, but send ’em off to pre-school as soon as you can so you can get back to…” as they often tell us. But the truth is, parenting is the single most important endeavor on the planet. Period. We can’t do anything more important, especially if we have kids already… It is absolutely enough to be doing our best at raising our children (which includes taking good care of ourselves, too, of course!). Tell anyone that you need to tell, including yourself, this.
  • Use empathy. Every time with everyone involved. It will soothe us in our dealings if we can empathize with ourselves and the little one(s) we’re dealing with at the moment. And it will soothe them as well to know that we identify with what is going on for them. We can call out those feelings in our heads and/or out loud to our children, so we have a full-brained response and/or they hear, and let ourselves and/or our kids know when we understand their feelings. If, and especially when, we cannot or wish not to comply with our children’s preference(s), we can be with them through their feelings, genuinely and as unhurriedly as we’re able. We can say no and still hold them while they cry about it. Doing so helps natural feelings get processed more smoothly, models caring for others’ feelings to our children, and nurtures the relationship that inspires teamwork and cooperation.
  • Look for how to use that teamwork and cooperation rather than coercion and manipulation to solve issues. When something needs fixing, it is the team’s mutual issue, and it get’s worked out by working it out. This again strengthens the relationship in multiple ways, not the least of which is engendering and maintaining trust.
  • Get some community. We honestly weren’t designed to parent in single family homes, or in an isolated SAHM or SAHD situation — that’s not the natural model for raising humans. To some degree we’re stuck with what we’re stuck with, in that most of us can’t go back to village life where we wore our babies to the fields, and had village and family child-care. Most of us don’t have anything like that, so we have to reach out and take hold of any like minded community we can when it presents itself. If you don’t feel like you have any options, it may be important enough to make some. You’ll be glad you did… If you do have community — then by all means, do what you have to do to commune — capitalize on your good fortune and share the bounty of a tightknit village.
  • And don’t for get to have fun! Laughing and playing with our kids is not only good for our relationships with them, it’s also good for reducing our own stress and increasing our resilience. We ought to be looking for it, using it to salve potentially rough moments, enjoying it when it comes randomly, and letting it guide our choices. We can trust in the process, we know our value, we can afford to relax a little and have a good time. After all, isn’t that what we’re talking about here?!

If you want more of my thoughts on the subject of how to stop having a crappy time parenting, and how to start having a lot more fun — check out these posts: the last post of the “Choose Your Own Adventure Parenting” three-post series here; more information on how to work with the little people here; some thoughts on making leadership easier here; and a few more thoughts on using information to improve the quality of your parenting existence here.

I sincerely hope you have the time of your lives. I hope you can honestly say, parenting is so fun! You deserve that…

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Be well.

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PS — If you want support getting into the groove of having a stellar, fulfilling, rewarding,  joyful, and easy parenting life — get in touch with me, it’s what I do for a living, and I’d like nothing more than to help you!

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)

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Be well.