Science Supports Loving and Compassionate Parenting

Science Supports Loving and Compassionate Parenting

All parents struggle with determining which parenting approach or philosophy is best for their child.  With so many writers and theorists claiming to have the magic solution, what is a parent to believe?  I have been excited to discover that hard science is giving us some concrete answers.  Science is now confirming that loving and compassionate parenting, including parental responses of joy and delight in and with the child, is the most powerful tool available to influence children’s behavior, and to enhance their development in every area.   This is in contrast to a child raising culture which has been based on controlling discipline and on logic and behavioral consequences—what I would term fear based methods.

Developmental psychology and neuroscientists, through a very large body of interdisciplinary data, are explaining that our state of mind, and our ability to be tuned into our child’s emotional experience in such a way that our child “feels felt”, enables our child to think clearly and to be compliant.  Our facial expressions, tone of voice, and many forms of nonverbal communication are literally developing our baby’s and young child’s brain.  This continues, at a slower pace, throughout childhood.  In fact, the plasticity of the brain remains in tact through life, and can be influenced through loving relationships until the end of life.

Dr. Allan Schore, a faculty member of the UCLA School of Medicine, refers to a baby’s caretaker as the “psychobiological  regulator” of the infant, meaning that she or he is the regulator of the baby’s nervous system.  From thousands of interactions between baby and caretaker, and caretaker and toddler, the child develops his or her ability to manage stress and to have appropriate emotional responses to the world.  These interactions cause neurons to connect, and set off a cascade of chemical reactions within the body, including the production of serotonin and dopamine, two key brain chemicals targeted by mood regulating drugs such as Prozac or Zoloft, and many others.  The patterns of these interactions during the first two years of life beccome imbedded as biology, and sets the stage for the child’s response to environmental stress and stimuli throughout life. 

The experts are telling us that for optimum development, a child’s state of alertness, ranging from excitement to distress, needs to be maintained within a window of tolerance.  When the prevailing emotional climate in the child’s environment is chronically outside his or her window of tolerance, the child’s development may be impeded.  On the extreme, this may look like behavior problems, impulsivity, and childhood depression, or, on the opposite end of the continuum, it may look like withdrawal, anxiety, poor information processing, or a compromised attention span.  

Traditional child raising and educational practices such as consequences,  scolding, and various pressures to perform, can actually create an overactive amygdala (a small almond shaped portion of the limbic system in the right hemisphere of the brain at the base) which responds to stimuli with fight, flight, or freeze reactions.  These responses often occur so swiftly that they do not register with the hippocampus (the part of the brain which offers a rational response to fear or anxiety).  Thus, the cause of the response is outside the conscious awareness of the individual (child or adult), and, in that moment, the individual literally does not have the capacity to understand what is happening, or to have the capacity to reason and make choices.  These responses can occur when there does not seem to be a rational explanation for them.  

This message is not about indulgence.  But rather, it encourages us to be mindful of our own emotional state as we are providing consistency, structure, and limit setting for our children.  It also encourages us to create the space in our daily interactions with our child to listen to their behavior, to encourage the expression of their emotions, and to be ready to truly receive them.  Negative behavior is a form of communication which says that our child needs attention in some manner.  It is up to the adults to creatively and lovingly figure out what the child needs, and in this manner, to create emotional regulation for the child.  Through repeated interactions of this type, the child develops the capacity to regulate her own emotions, though assistance with this, from time to time, is needed for all human beings.

This type of parenting requires conscious attunement to the child’s cues, and sometimes may necessitate a change in lifestyle in order to pace the child’s and the parent’s stress level.  Attunement requires an undistracted parental mind. 

This paradigm shift, away from making our child responsible for negative behavior, to making ourselves responsible for regulating the emotional states of our children, can be a hard idea to swallow, especially when this runs counter to our own biological and cultural programming.  To take a step in this direction, I urge you to try an experiment.  The next time your child “acts up” or misbehaves, make your first response be taking deep breaths to calm yourself down.  When you are truly in a state of calm, approach your child with an arm on the shoulder, warm eye contact, or some other warm gesture (if your child is very young, get down to eye level with your child), and say, “Sweetie, it seems like you are upset or stressed about something.  It’s making it hard for you to _______ (fill in the blank.)  Let’s you and I figure this out.” Better yet, try this approach for two weeks.