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

Whole-Brain Strategy #11: Increase the Family Fun Factor: Making a Point to Enjoy Each Other

Tina’s son was experiencing big waves of right-brain emotions without much left-brain logical balance.

Many of the challenges we face as parents result from the times when our kids aren’t in the flow, when they’re either too chaotic or too rigid. Your three-year-old won’t share his toy boat at the park? Rigidity. He erupts into crying, yelling, and throwing sand when his new friend takes the boat away? Chaos.

Every time we say “Convince me” or “Come up with a solution that works for both of us,” we give our kids the chance to practice problem solving and decision making. We help them consider appropriate

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

A downstairs tantrum is completely different. Here, a child becomes so upset that he’s no longer able to use his upstairs brain.

Simply by drawing your child’s attention to other people’s emotions during everyday encounters, you can open up whole new levels of compassion within them and exercise their upstairs brain.

When we don’t offer a place for children to express their feelings and recall what happened after an overwhelming event, their implicit-only memories remain in dis-integrated form, leaving the children with no way to make sense of their experience.

The downstairs brain includes the brain stem and the limbic region, which are located in the lower parts of the brain, from the top of your neck to about the bridge of your nose. Scientists talk about these lower areas as being more primitive because they are responsible for basic functions (like breathing and blinking), for innate reactions and im