Your toddler throws a tantrum in the middle of a store. Your preschooler refuses to get dressed. Your fifth-grader sulks on the bench instead of playing on the field. Do children conspire to make their parents’ lives endlessly challenging? No—it’s just their developing brain calling the shots!
In this pioneering, practical audiobook, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson demystify the meltdowns and aggravation, explaining the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,” which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids can seem—and feel—so out of control. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth. Raise calmer, happier children using twelve key strategies, including:
• Name It to Tame It: Corral raging right-brain behavior through left-brain storytelling, appealing to the left brain’s affinity for words and reasoning to calm emotional storms and bodily tension.
• Engage, Don’t Enrage: Keep your child thinking and listening, instead of purely reacting.
• Move It or Lose It: Use physical activities to shift your child’s emotional state.
• Let the Clouds of Emotion Roll By: Guide your children when they are stuck on a negative emotion, and help them understand that feelings come and go.
• SIFT: Help children pay attention to the Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts within them so that they can make better decisions and be more flexible.
• Connect Through Conflict: Use discord to encourage empathy and greater social success.
Complete with clear explanations, age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles, and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.
Fantastic, immediately useful book I have a 1 year old daughter and was hoping this book would help me communicate with her and build her mental resiliency. It does that and so much more. WIthout getting lost in needless academic discussions of learning and (bio)psychology, the book provides very concrete insights and recommendations for improving a child’s ability to be mentally strong and healthy, and cope with stress. It also provides extensive example dialogues and scenarios involving a parent and his/her child; these…
So much more than I expected. The Whole-Brain Child was so much more than I was expecting. I selected it because my daughter was going through some struggles with her 2 year old twins and my other daughter’s 4 year old went through several weeks of separation from his mom and dad and now has to adjust to life with twin brothers. I was looking for things I might be able to do or to pass on to them that might help. What I wasn’t expecting was getting some insight into why I feel it necessary to have dessert after a meal…
Very Helpful, Easy to Implement Nurturing Strategies As a new parent, I am just beginning to read up child development, discipline, and parenting. This short book gets right to the point and gives parents twelve key strategies that will help them parent their kids without losing it. The twelve strategies are:1: Connect and Redirect: Connect emotionally, redirect logically2: Name It To Tame It: Taming emotions through storytelling3: Engage, Don’t Enrage: Appeal to logic and planning, not to emotion4:…