Revolutionary Strategies To Nourish Your Kid's Developing Brain

 How does a child's brain work? How does it grow? And why don't young children behave like adults? What does he think? How does he show reactions? Questions that go through your head whenever you experience your child's anger and stubbornness, followed by a sense of negligence and hopelessness, 

Revolutionary Strategies To Nourish Your Kid's Developing Brain

but what do you think of a book that explains how your child's brain works just like the catalog of electrical appliances explains how it works? Exciting idea, isn't it?

Neuropsychiatrist Bruce Perry and educator Tina Payne Bryson present effective parenting strategies backed by the latest neuroscience research in their book "The Full-Brained Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nourish Your Developing Child's Brain," with easy-to-implement experiences to deal with the stress of motherhood and daily parenthood, some of which are shown.

Are you always available? Do you exist? 

• The authors point out that raising happy, healthy, and creative children does not require their participation in all sports and artistic activities; rather, it requires something basic, 

• which is "presence", in the sense of evoking your being, awareness, and full attention at the moment you spend with your child, to reassure you of your presence in moments of absence, that you love him as he is regardless of his failures, and that safety and protection exist in a world in which you are.

• Your presence will help your child's emotional and social development, form meaningful relationships, and even future academic and career success. 

• To achieve this, you have to understand his feelings, hear his point of view, know his likes and dislikes, avoid actions that scare him, help him deal with his feelings, and respond to his crying.

Do they realize my existence? Does it feel visible? 

• When a child thinks of us adults, one thought goes through his mind, which is that we don't understand him at all, and what prevents the child from feeling visible and understandable is that we look at him through the glasses of our desires, fears, and problems, rather than linking his behaviors to his personality and emotions.

• Some mothers tend to repeat phrases like "he's a child," "She's shy because she's a girl," and "he's as stubborn as his father." If we categorize children as such, we prevent ourselves from seeing their true personalities and understanding their underlying feelings for any behavior.

• If your child is shy or scared when meeting an adult, don't assume he's rude or improve his social skills, understand that he's anxious or shy instead of his river because he wasn't nice, and look for the reason for his anxiety, rather than judging impulsively, calling him shy.

How to make his behavior better?

• Studies on neuroplasticity have proven the brain's ability to adapt, and that repeated experiences change the physical structure of the brain, so controlling a child's behavior is about repetition, 

• finding ways to teach him the appropriate behavior for healthy growth, responding to his misbehavior by spending time with him, and thinking of his bad behavior as an accidental event, and it will not affect how much you love him.

• Learning by experience and repetition corresponds to one of the most common methods of discipline, which is isolating the child in his room, assuming that this method gives him a "time out" to think about his bad behavior; 

• but even if you follow this method patiently and lovingly, the "time limit" teaches your child that when he makes a mistake or faces difficult times, he will have to be alone, without understanding the cause of aggressive misbehavior, 

• which is often a cry from your child to ask for his calm, and his need to communicate, so the "time out" method becomes the cause making the child more angry, less able to regulate his emotions, and more focused on how mean his parents are in punishing him.

How to make your child's brain integrated in all aspects?

• Not only is understanding the brain essential in your relationship with your child; but the authors point out the importance of integrating different parts of the brain, 

• to integrate and have appropriate expectations, language, and understanding during the difficult moments we are experiencing with our children. 

• The authors teach us to connect with our children by attracting both the logical "left" and the emotional "right" side of the brain in times of emotional turmoil and charge.

• When your child gets angry, this is not the time to discipline him and discuss his behavior, but it is the time to express and understand his feelings until his brain returns to a balanced and calm state, by showing empathy, understanding, and contact, 

• once the big feelings calm down and the child calms down, the logical left part comes in, and that is the stage where redirection and discipline can occur, which helps the child to form an understanding of his emotional experience.

 How does he show his feelings? How would he describe his feelings?

• One of the strategies of the book is the way the "upper floor" and "basement" of the brain work, which is to liken the child's mind to a two-story house, 

• in which the upper floor works on mental processes such as conscious decision-making, while the basement springs from the reaction, and when the upper floor works successfully, the lower floor will slow down his emotion, and he will begin to think before acting.

• While the "basement" brain was built entirely in childhood, the "upstairs" brain remains under construction until its twenties, and parents need to support the integration of the "basement" and "upstairs" areas of children's brains, 

• by naming and describing feelings, encouraging them to mention what they feel, helping them calm themselves, using touch, affectionate facial expressions, tones, and eye contact so that we feel that we are seeing them, and being able to reach their brain upstairs in ways that support empathy and resilience.

• Parents can then move from emotional development to social responsibility, involving their child in local charity or fundraising initiatives for a noble cause, and such a thing will teach him that he is part of a larger entity than himself.

• Moving to the quiet "green zone"

• According to the book, our children go through both optimism and frustration, such as after a happy day or hard day at work, what the authors call the angry "red zone" and the quiet "green zone."

• This interaction between two people allows the child to use you as a reference at that moment to move to the "green zone", 

• by practicing him to give himself some space to regulate his breath, stretch, walk around, drink water, simulate your system to calm yourself, and remind him that it is a temporary state, not what distinguishes him.

In the end: We have dealt with the book with the most important points, but I recommend reading it carefully to get all the necessary information, the book is one of the most important books that deal with the basic methods and strategies to understand and deal with your child and make him feel the best to establish his mind during growth to become a productive person for himself and his society after that.

I wish you all a happy family and a bright future