24/06/2022
Connection before correction. Practising mindful responses. Yet, let's be kind with ourselves when we don't get it right. 🤗
Parents usually have an idea of when difficult situations with our children need to be defused or when they don’t, although it can sometimes be the times that we can’t distinguish between the two when we get stuck in dealing with the same child behaviour again and again.
Sometimes we think it is the child that is not making sense, when the power to change the situation actually rests with us— the adult.
There is a kinder way to deal with adult/child conflict, and it’s easier on the parent and on the child. However it can be especially hard to step up into this empowered role if you never got to experience the same type of care yourself when young. For this very reason, it’s so important to be forgiving with ourselves whenever as parents we ‘get it wrong’. It’s never too late to adopt parenting techniques, because it’s never too late to heal. In fact, by promoting attunement with your child and yourself, you will be promoting the activation and growth of integrative fibres in your brain that specifically produce the feelings of connection you would have felt if you had been parented in a connected way yourself.
Without changing our scripts for repeat conflicts, the intensity of many knee-jerk adult responses can create even stronger responses in the developing brains of our children. Accordingly, maladaptive behaviours can become even more hardwired. It is commonly expected that a child can enact the reasoning and logic of an adult, but the human develops from the back to the front. That means that a child's prefrontal cortex develops last - along with their ability to reason, focus, carry out goals, and problem-solve in an advanced capacity.
As a child ages, they always crave connection and familiarity. We know that babies repeatedly throw items on the floor to seek a familiar response in parental reaction, and yet we wonder why we might feel pushed into sending an eight-year old to their room again and again, not recognising that every family action has a dual nature; it creates an immediate response AND it works to become a ‘new normal’. Where else does family culture arise from?
It is so hard to do (and perhaps impossible to manage all the time), but an easy way to judge whether a parental response to misbehaviour is appropriate or not is to pause and think— “Am I happy to be programming this as part of our ‘new normal’?” Because the more emotionally intense our reactions, the more we are ‘pouring concrete’ on our child’s neuroplastic response. And we don’t get to choose what they will enshrine or not.
When a situation is defused, it allows for oxytocin production (bonding hormones) rather than cortisol (stress hormones), and it removes the intense immediate response to feedback experienced as dopamine (the ‘concrete’ that helps enshrine a behaviour or reaction). A child is more likely to change their behaviour in a sustainable way when conflict is defused. This is a more effective way to reach shared goals than encouraging superficial responses born from fear or people-pleasing, that are environmentally dependent (with the conflict becoming part of the environment).
It helps to use knowledge of a child’s developing brain to grant them the safety of understanding a situation from within their natural state. This allows them to work towards resolution as a part of the family, not as a product of it. It takes a phenomenal amount of patience (and a modelling of self-forgiveness when you get it wrong!)— but every successful defusion of conflict counts, and the pay-off is long term.
✨ If you would like to be kept in the loop on everything Neurochild please submit your details here http://bit.ly/neurochild-connect
