Sublime

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.

When parents say more than a sentence or two about the limit-pushing behavior, even while remaining calm, they risk creating a tale about a child with a problem (perhaps he hugs his baby sister too forcefully), which then causes the child to identify with this as his story and problem, when it was just an impulsive, momentary behavior he tried out

The twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott observed that children playing within a certain radius of their mothers display higher levels of creativity in their games than those who play farther away.

Which parent was the authoritarian one also makes a big difference. If it was the parent who did most of the childcare, then losing every battle may have started soon after birth, and there were no victories before the first attack. If it was the less involved parent, then the attacks started later, and the child already had some history of victori

it’s essential to help a child calm down—to regulate the body—before talking, reasoning, or offering incentives can succeed.

Through training the brain to seek its own stability, we can ease these terrible sequelae to early childhood neglect and abuse, regardless of the diagnosis given.