Upstairs and Downstairs Brain

Your Child's Upstairs and Downstairs Brain*

 












OK, so you have a handle on how the brain is organized right and left.  But the brain is also organized vertically, or down to up. 

Downstairs Brain
Your "downstairs brain" takes care of a lot of important functions.  Breathing.  Heart beating. Blinking. These happen in the brain stem.  Vitally important!  

Moving up the latter, you have the part of the brain that reacts with the well known "fight or flight" response.  When you feel threatened you react without thinking.  This part is called the amygdala. The amygdala is actually a wonderfully protective part of your brain.  Think about how great it is that you pull your hand away from a fire before you realize it.  Or how helpful it is to jump back from a slithering object before you could call it a snake.  

But also think of Johnny on the playground who punches out the kid who steals his "light saber." 

Think of Sally who runs to her room and slams the door when she hears that she can't have a playdate with Samantha today. 

These emotionally charged reactions come from a part of the brain that DOES NOT STOP TO CONSIDER WHAT IT IS CHOOSING.  

Upstairs Brain
This part of the brain is called the pre-frontal cortex.  The PFC is involved when you reflect on past actions in order to make thoughtful decisions.  When you are able to control your own emotions.  When you can think about what you have done.  When you make choices that involve human characteristics of empathy and morality.   All things you would love your children to be able to do! 

Have you ever seen the commercial where the plane is flying in mid air as its being built?   That's what it's like in your child's PFC!  That's helpful to know as a parent, because all those things we'd love our kids to do-- realize their own mistakes, control their strong emotional reactions, etc... are dependent upon development that is in process. 

OK, so how does knowing about the upstairs and downstairs of your brain help you as a parent? 

*Adapted from Dan Siegel's The Whole Brain Child

Name It To Tame It: Telling Stories to Calm Big Emotions*

Your child falls and breaks her leg.  
Or watches a friend get bullied at school. 
O loses a beloved pet. 

Distressing things happen to all of us, but when you are a child, you do not have the brain development to process what has happened to you without help. 

Sometimes as parents, we feel that it would be better to take a child's mind OFF a distressing event and so we avoid talking about it.  We think we are helping them by NOT discussing hard things.  But the opposite is actually true.  

I observed this first hand with my girls a couple of months ago.  My husband and I took them for a ride in the park, and he had an accident on one of the girls' scooters.  He got banged up pretty badly--the impact against the concrete baracade literally knocked him out.  After getting daddy bandaged up and in bed to rest,   I turned to check on the girls.  They were still quite distressed!  Even though I was certain that he did not need a trip to the ER, the girls were plotting a takeover by preparing to call an ambulance to pick him up! 

I remembered this concept and we stopped to talk about what had happened.  They both had witnessed different parts of the event, so I asked them to relate what they remembered. We all filled in the details and named what we had seen.  They asked me again how I knew dad was OK as well as other questions about injuries.  Then they circled back, telling the entire story again. By the end of our conversation, they had grown considerably calmer. Over the next week, they returned to the story of dad's fall a few more times.  Each time they talked about different parts of what happened, visibly comforted by the effect of relating the sequential story.  So...

Neurologically, why does story telling help? 

Trauma is expereinced in a part of the brain that allows for a quick emotional response that is prepared to take necessary steps to survive, NOT the part of the brain that can logically tell a moment by moment story.  Actually, it has been shown that when trauma happens, the language centers of the brain have decreased capacity.  By encouraging your child child to talk about what is scary, you are literally re-engaging their left hemisphere, where language happens, enabling their left and right sides to be more integrated.    

*Adapted from Dan Siegel's The Whole Brain Child 



 

Connect and Redirect: Surfing the Emotional Waves*

CHILD: "There's NO WAY I can go to school today! Mrs. Parsons HATES me and so does everyone else!  Besides I feel HORRIBLE and I think I'm going to throw up.  If you send me to school, then you really don't care at all about me!  I'm NEVER going to school again!!!!!"

PARENT: ???!!!!!.... 

What is a parent to do when a child is overcome with conflicting emotions?  This child has fired off 4 separate dogmatic statements... to which one should the parent respond?  Insist that the child IS going to school?  Supply evidence that Mrs. Parsons doesn't hate him?  Take the child's temperature? Provide him recent evidence of your undying affection, despite your current exasperation? Drag him by his ears out to the bus stop?

When we see our kids exploding with big feelings such as these, we can know that they are experiencing big waves of right-brain domination without much left-brain logic.  So what does our kid need at this moment?  Someone to swoop in and supply left brain evidence of their crazy-talk?

In fact that is the least effective thing a parent could do, but its exactly what seems most instinctual to a parent.  In exasperation, we try to talk some sense into them.  Or dismiss their big demands as disobedience. Obey first, THEN we'll get to the bottom of this mess, right? Or we feel they are trying to manipulate us.  They are not going to get away with this again!!  Help them see how they are wrong, right? 

Wrong. 

When a child is stuck in their right brain, they literally CANNOT at that moment think logically.  When children are overcome with emotion, they need a parent to connect with their right brain.  

1. Connect with the right
A parent who can listen empathetically and give a child a safe place to express anger will open a door to the left brain.  A nurturing tone of voice, nonverbal symbols of affection in a warm hug/touch, and non-judgmental listening help calm the emotional waves and open a path to a more integrated state. 

2. Redirect with the left
Once a child feels emotionally connected to the parent, THEN you can entertain a logical conversation about next steps and new ways of seeing things.  Not to say this always works quickly.  Sometimes waves must crash until the storm passes.  Nor is this to say that you should tolerate disrespectful or destructive behavior during big emotions.  But a child will be much more receptive to discipline AFTER the storm passes.  During a right brain flood, a child's brain simply cannot "learn a lesson."   When someone is drowning, swim out at save them FIRST before the lecture about water safety! 

*Adapted from Dan Siegel's The Whole Brain Child

Helping Children Integrate Right & Left

Most of us are familiar with right and left brain distinctives.  

We know that... (in general, though its actually much more complex!)  

Left brain involves, rational, logical, orderly, objective thinking. 
We accept that there are "left brained" people, that go into fields like mathematics, engineering, and accounting. 

Right brain involves holistic, intuitive, creative, big picture thinking. 
We accept that there are "right brained" people that thrive as musicians, artists, creative writers, etc...

But what we often don't hear is that we were MADE for both sides to function together as an integrated whole.  Our brains respond to our relational experiences.  People who we call "left brained" may lack empathy, an ability to experience emotion and consider the bigger picture.   People we call "right brained" may lack the ability to think clearly and make rational decisions when they become flooded with emotion. 

As parents, we know that our children's brains are not fully developed, and yet we can foster the integration of both sides, so that our children can learn to grab ahold of the amazing functions that are needed at different times from either side. 

Young children are right-brain dominated.  They learn by sensing things from their environment and they are not yet able to use language to express themselves.  When a child begins asking "why" all the time, you can tell their left brain development is kicking in-- they are looking to make sense of their experiences with words.  

Why is it important to help children integrate right and left?  Because you don't want your children to live in an emotional desert (L-dominated.) But we don't want children to be overtaken by an emotional flood (R-dominated.)  We want them to learn and grow from their difficulties. 

In the next post look for Siegel's first strategy for helping children integrate both right and left sides of their brain.   
 

A Peacefully Flowing River... or Not! 

The healthy functioning brain, adult or child, is what we call "integrated."  All the parts are able to function together, none shutting down another, all able to respond at their appropriate time and add its important contribution. 

*Siegel invites us to imagine a peaceful river running through the countryside.  When you're peacefully floating along in your canoe, you are in good relationship to the world around you.  You can understand what is going on inside and around you. You can react and adjust appropriately. You are at peace.

But other times, you veer too close to one of the river's two banks.  

One back stands for "CHAOS," where you feel out of control and get overwhelmed by confusion and agitation. But be careful, because if you head too far the other direction, you'll run into "RIGIDITY."  Rather than being out of control, you do all you can to BE in control. You are unable to flex or compromise, and your canoe gets stuck. 

Especially as parents, we float back and forth between these two, feeling out of control or too rigid... and so do our kids.  

Your 4 year old won't share her doll.  Rigid. 
She erupts in a crying, yelling stand off when her playmate grabs the doll away.  Chaos. 

Having these two ideas of chaos and rigidity in mind when thinking about our kids' behaviors can help us make quick sense of them.  When you see either show up, you can know that your child needs help to guide their canoe back to peaceful stability.  

But how to go about this??

*From The Whole-Brain Child, by Dan Siegel

"Brainy" Hope for Parents...and the Child in All of Us

Ok all you parents out there.  This first series is for YOU! (And for me!) 

If there's anything I've heard parents express more confusion over, it's how to handle things when their kids have tidal waves of emotion.  Freak out.  Flip their lid.  In a quick hurry, everyone present is on edge and agitated. Things can go wrong so quickly! 

I've been working my way through a REALLY helpful and extremely practical book, called The Whole Brain Child, 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, by Dan Siegel. 

I'm going to process outloud while sharing his insights with you...

The first nugget I want to plant is this: It is SO VERY HELPFUL to understand a little about your child's brain.  (And yours!) By gaining a simple grasp on a few concepts... and I PROMISE they are SIMPLE, it can revolutionize your parenting.  

It can help you know how to address your child's stress, fears, and anxieties.
(It can help you tell the difference between YOUR stress and theirs!) 
It can help you know how to speak in a way your child can hear. 
It can help you know what your child is capable of, and what they are not.

I'm not a "strategies/steps" kind of person.  Life is usually much more complicated.  But I believe this is really helpful, because it gives us a handle on how we were made.  It works not as an end in itself, but it works because this is how God designed us. 

Ready a little about the brain?? 

This Heart is Alive 

The heart is a funny thing.

It has great capacity for pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow.

It can be rejoiced in, delighted and treasured...
Ignored, stepped on, and squelched.  

It can know gratitude, the joy of giving to others...
as well as the bitterness and helplessness bent on control and protection. 

And it holds stories.  My, it is full of stories. 

But one day, we wake up, and we cannot feel what we want to feel. 
We don't know how it happened, and we don't know what to do about it. 
But all we feel is empty. or a ache in our gut. or a jittery sensation that can't rest.  

And who would want to sit very long with those kinds of feelings? 

So we fill our heart with other things. 
Busy activities. Excess food.  Excess drink. Excess TV, social media, or entertainment. Things that temporarily satisfy, good gifts taken to a harmful extreme.

Or instead of filling, we empty, creating rules that make us feel safe.
No more alcohol.  Bring on another diet.  White-knuckle your way to a new you.

The ironic thing is that both filling and emptying can have the same effect--killing the heart. And the darned thing is that we can't kill pain but keep joy.  They come together in the same package.  Toss sorrow out the window and delight disappears as well.

"This Heart is Alive."  Can you say this of yourself?  

I picture an army surgeon surveying the battlefield after a devastating fight, looking for signs of life.  Many hearts become casualties along the path of life.  "Quick--We've got a live one right here!" he shouts!  Nurses and medics rush over to bring care and comfort in the midst of pain. 

This is similar to what a helpful counselor does.  Undaunted, she's seen this before.  She brings vital nourishment.  She doesn't give up when discouragement reigns. She offers a hopeful vision for where the healing process is headed.  Sometimes it's acute pain in the present.  Other times it's long-buried scars from the past.  Or perhaps a confused and hopeless future. Either way, there are times for all of us when we need a skilled and compassionate guide to walk alongside and point the way for awhile.

If you're like me, there are days when my heart plays dead.  Days when I prefer anesthesia.  But there are other days.  Days when delight and freedom win the day.  And if you're like me, those days make you hungry for more.

These and other conversations I'd love to invite here in this blog.  Join in!