PDF Summary:The Whole-Brain Child, by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

From sibling arguments to temper tantrums, parents constantly have to manage conflict. These challenging moments are pivotal opportunities to promote your child’s psychological development. The Whole-Brain Child explains the neurological and developmental reasons for many of your child’s meltdowns and misbehaviors. When the different parts of your child’s brain—such as the logical left brain and the emotional right brain—are not integrated, it makes your child mentally and emotionally off-balance, which causes her to act out.

The book teaches you how to diagnose signs of dis-integration, as well as strategies to help your child to re-integrate her mind. With these tools, your child will develop a stronger relationship with you, increase her self-awareness and emotional self-control, and build the foundation for a lifetime of healthy relationships and mental and emotional stability.

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• Self-understanding: Self-understanding provides the insight to make well-informed decisions, manage emotions, and understand the world and people around you. Ask your child questions that look beyond the surface level—not just the “what,” but the “why.” For example, “Why did your brother’s comment make you upset?” You can also encourage her to practice self-reflection by regularly writing or drawing in a journal.
• Empathy: As your child improves her self-understanding, she’ll be able to apply those skills to understanding others, as well. If your child gets into the habit of thinking about how other people feel, it will lead her to develop empathy and compassion. Ask your child to surmise how people feel and why—whether it’s someone at school, a stranger in public, or a character in a book.
• Morality: Morality involves controlling your emotions enough to access self-understanding and empathy, in order to reach a sound decision about what would serve everyone’s best interest. Pose questions that challenge your child to consider the morals and ethics of day-to-day or hypothetical situations. For example, ask her what she’d do if she saw someone being bullied, but there was no adult around to help.

In addition to talking about and teaching these skills, it’s essential that you model these behaviors for your children, since your child learns how to navigate the world by watching your example.

Downstairs-Upstairs Strategy #3: Move Your Body to Calm Your Mind

If your child’s downstairs brain is blocking the stairway to her upstairs brain, physical movement can clear the passage. When you recognize that your child is upset and needs to get moving, always empathize and connect with her emotionally first. Then, there are two ways to introduce movement:

1. Get her to physically relax by instructing her to breathe deeply or relax her muscles.
2. Get your child moving in a more active way, in order to get the anxious energy out. Explain that moving will help her brain calm down, and suggest that she do some jumping jacks, play a game like tag, or go on a walk together.

Integrating Memories

Sometimes your child may have a strong and unexpected reaction to something for no apparent reason—for example, she refuses to take swimming lessons, even though she’s taken them before and she normally loves swimming. If the issue isn’t simply that your child is tired, hungry, or in a sour mood, it’s likely that a memory is haunting your child and making her act irrationally without her realizing why.

Your brain records memories as a mixture of sensations, thoughts, and emotions, and it creates associations among those sensations and emotions. For example, your child’s brain connected the sound of a swim instructor’s whistle with her anxiety about jumping into the deep end. As a result, the sound of a whistle triggers that association and makes her feel a twinge of anxiety as she remembers those swim lessons.

All of the individual sensations, thoughts, and emotions associated with a memory are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When you think or talk about an experience, you integrate all the pieces to form a complete picture of the memory, so that you can recall it later. However, if you don’t integrate the memory—because the experience was scary or painful—then the pieces float around your brain in a jumble, but the associations among sensations and emotions are still intact. This means that the sound of a whistle can trigger your child’s anxiety, but she won’t have the conscious memory to recall the stressful swim lesson and understand why she’s feeling anxious.

Unintegrated memories can create anxiety around everyday activities, injure your child’s self-confidence, and impede her ability to trust others. As long as your child is unaware of the source of the fear, anxiety, or anger that her unintegrated memories are triggering, then she remains a victim of them. Help your child regain control of her emotions by making her aware of the memory and how it’s affecting her, and help her tell the story of her memory in order to put the puzzle pieces together.

Unintegrated Memory Strategy #1: Give Your Child a Memory Remote Control

Your child may be reluctant to revisit a painful or scary experience. In order to help your child get through the memory, give her an imaginary remote control—she can pause the story before it gets scary and fast-forward through the difficult parts. This tactic gives your child some control and allows her to confront the painful memory at her own pace. If your child isn’t ready to revisit the difficult parts of the memory yet, don’t push her—but, eventually, she must tell the entire story in order to integrate the memory.

Your child will need to go through the story multiple times, whenever the emotions from that memory start resurfacing. Over time, the memory will lose its power over the present because your child will be able to recognize it as something that happened in the past.

Unintegrated Memory Strategy #2: Practice Remembering

Help your child have fewer unintegrated memories in the first place by getting her to process experiences as they happen. Encourage your child to develop a habit of remembering things by frequently asking her questions about her day, her experiences, and her thoughts and feelings.

Instead of vague questions (such as, “How was your day?”), ask more specific questions (such as, “What were the best and hardest parts of your day?”) that require more focused remembering. If your child is reluctant to talk, turn it into a game (for example, ask her two tell you two things that happened that day and one thing that didn’t, and then guess which was made up), encourage your child to journal, or work together to create a memory book of trips and events.

Integrating All the Parts of Your Child’s Self

There are many parts of you—you may be a parent, an employee, a spouse, a son or daughter, a mentor, and a student. Think of all your parts as spokes on a wheel, and the hub in the center is your self-awareness of all the parts that make you whole. On the rim of this wheel of awareness are the feelings, thoughts, memories, physical sensations, goals, dreams, and perceptions that can pull at your attention. For example, you can feel anxious about a presentation at work, excited for an upcoming vacation, and tired from getting up early this morning.

If you put all of your attention on your work presentation, that anxiety will determine your state of mind until you change your focus. If you remain stuck on that rim point for too long, you become dis-integrated with the other parts of yourself, and you may start to believe that your work life—and your anxiety—defines you, rather than being just one aspect of who you are.

However, when you’re in your hub, you can recognize and integrate the different aspects of yourself and the various things that you can give your attention to in any given moment. From your hub, you can choose where to put your attention, thus determining your mood and state of mind. This self-awareness requires you to frequently pause and reflect on how you’re feeling, what you’re focusing on, and which rim points deserve your attention. Help your child develop these skills using the following strategies.

Self-Integration Strategy #1: Explain That Feelings Are Temporary

Although it’s important that your child acknowledges her feelings—rather than denying and suppressing them—she must also understand that emotions are temporary, and that they don’t define who she is. Explain to your child that emotions are like the weather: There’s no doubt that the clouds and the rain are real, but you also know that they won’t last forever. She can trust that she’ll feel differently soon.

When your child is consumed by emotion, it can be hard for her to imagine ever feeling better. Remind her of a recent time—maybe earlier that day—when she was happy.

Self-Integration Strategy #2: Help Your Child Recognize Her Rim Points

Introduce your child to the idea that she can feel many things at once, and then help her to notice what she’s feeling. If she’s upset that her friend canceled a playdate, acknowledge that she’s feeling disappointed, and point out that another part of her also feels excited about their plans to reschedule, and another part of her is thinking about what she’s going to play during recess today.

Use the acronym SIFT to help your child identify her many rim points:

1. Sensations include hunger as well as the ways that emotions affect the body, such as butterflies in your stomach. When your child understands that emotions and physical sensations are connected, she can also learn to relax her muscles and take deep breaths in order to calm herself down.
2. Images include images from memories and from your child’s imagination and dreams, all of which can affect how your child interprets and reacts to the present. For example, if your child remembers the image of her being picked last for teams during recess, she’s inclined to feel left out among her peers. When she understands the power these images have on her, she can put them in perspective by integrating the other parts of herself, such as her role as the confident team leader on a class project.
3. Feelings and emotions can be symptomatic of an experience, but they can also influence your experience. For example, if you get upset about hitting traffic on the way to your picnic, you're more likely to get annoyed at the noise from the children playing nearby. When your child recognizes how she’s feeling and how it’s affecting her outlook, she has more power to choose to feel differently.
4. Thoughts include the things you think about, your self-talk, and how you narrate your experiences. When your child becomes more aware of her thoughts, she doesn’t have to be a victim of them—instead, she can direct them in a positive way and reject negative thoughts.

Self-Integration Strategy #3: Guide Your Child to Her Hub

When your child gets stuck on a rim point, use calming techniques that help your child zoom out and shift her attention to other rim points. As your child notices other rim points, she gets back to her hub, where she can choose where to direct her attention. One technique is to bring her attention to her physical sensation by focusing on her breath. Have your child lie down and close her eyes, and tell her to pay attention to the air flowing in and out of her mouth and nose and her stomach moving with each breath.

Another technique is to tell your child to think of a place where she feels calm, and to visualize herself in that place—for example, rocking in her grandparents’ hammock, or floating on a pool raft. With practice, your child will develop a lifelong habit of using these tools, which will keep her in the hub.

Integrating Your Child With Other People

As your child develops an increasingly integrated mind, she’ll learn to use empathy to understand other people’s minds and build healthy relationships without compromising her sense of self. However, sharing and empathy won’t come automatically to your child—she’s still learning how to interpret her own thoughts and emotions, let alone anyone else’s. Your child needs your help to learn and practice the skill of empathy, just like she practices other skills such as reading.

Give your child plenty of opportunities to interact and build friendships with other children, and offer support when your child needs it. Additionally, use your own relationship with your child to model empathy, sharing, and consideration. Through early relationships with parents, caregivers, siblings, relatives, friends, and teachers, your child will learn how to navigate relationships for the rest of her life.

Interpersonal Integration Strategy #1: Have Fun as a Family

Showing your child how fun and rewarding it is to be in a relationship with you—her first and primary relationship—will encourage her to build healthy relationships with other people, as well. Additionally, encourage fun and healthy sibling relationships among your children. While it’s practically inevitable that siblings will fight, having fun together is the best predictor of a strong bond that will last into adulthood. As long as the fun outweighs the fighting, they’ll likely enjoy a close relationship as adults.

Interpersonal Integration Strategy #2: Practice Empathy Through Disagreements

Although unpleasant, every disagreement your child has—with you, with a sibling, or with a friend—is an opportunity to teach her healthy and effective ways to manage conflict. Resolving a disagreement requires multiple social skills that your child needs help developing. There are three key skills to teach your child:

1. Seeing another person’s perspective: It’s especially difficult for children to consider someone else’s perspective when they’re upset, since their social circuitry is still developing. Teach your child this skill by frequently asking questions about how someone else might feel and why someone may have reacted in a certain way.
2. Interpreting nonverbal communication: Point out people’s body language, and explain the emotions it reflects. Understanding nonverbal cues—including posture and tone of voice—helps your child develop empathy and connect with people.
3. Making amends: Teach your child that, sometimes, she needs to more than simply apologize to make things right after an argument—for example, replacing something that was broken, or writing a letter of apology. This skill requires your child to consider the other person’s perspective, in order to understand why the other person is upset and how to make him feel better.