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. 

The Roots of Violence: of Stress and Children

The Roots of Violence: of Stress and Children

As a nation we are horrified by an epidemic of mass shootings at the hands of young killers and by an escalation of bullying in our schools.  Though many constructive solutions have been offered, something is being left out of our national dialogue.  This something is what science has to say.  

Findings from decades of child development research have given us a new lens with which to understand children’s needs, and may shed some light on the escalation of violence at the hands of young people. The field is exploding with new information, yet pediatricians, educators, and mental health therapists are often unaware of this science, or the breadth of the research and its implications.  Recently the American Academy of Pediatrics incorporated some of this information into a policy statement warning that toxic stress early in life, or even before birth, can harm children for life.  (“Early Childhood Adversity, Toxic Stress, and the Role of Pediatricians:  Translating Developmental Science into Lifelong Health” Pediatrics 2012; 129:e224-e231).

 The results of this research tell us that babies and young children are much more sensitive to stress and to nonverbal communication from adults than we ever knew. Scientists are also telling us that mutual interactions of joy and delight between parents and children, especially in the early years, are crucial to healthy brain development and to their ability to manage strong positive and negative emotions throughout life.  This ability to regulate the highs and lows of emotional life is the key to stable mental health as an adult.  Difficulties with emotional regulation are at the core of most mental health disorders.  

For children, a “felt sense” (different from an intellectual knowing) of being valued and understood on the inside is essential to the regulation of their nervous system, and their ability to have full access to their neocortex.  When there is something stressful in the child’s environment— everything from mom and dad being stressed about everyday life, to a divorce, to someone died, to moving, to a medical procedure—children need to have someone they can trust to help them understand how it makes them feel.  

We now know that children can be easily traumatized by everyday events without adults realizing it.  There are specific tools that can be taught to parents, to educators, and to every adult who relates to children, to help them help children manage these stressful events.  This would include right brain to right brain communication which soothes the limbic system and develops autonomous emotional regulation—for example, paying attention to eye contact, tone of voice, and timing and intensity of communication; offering validating comments such as “That must have been scary!; or “So, that’s how it was for you!”; or enjoying sensory rich activities together such as kneading dough, drawing, music, playing sports, or dancing.  Also, children can be taught to identify stress in their bodies, techniques to reduce their stress, and what to do if they are about to “flip their lid”. When this type of relationship connection does not happen for a child, we often see an escalation in difficult behaviors, from obstinacy to extreme violence. 

Attachment Theory scientists talk about “attunement.”  This is a special kind of connection with the child where the adult is completely undistracted, and can relate to the child almost as if the adult were in the mind of the child.  Attunement fosters spontaneous sharing, a feeling of being understood, and allows the adult to gently explore what is on the child’s mind.  Attuned communication has a huge impact on a child’s overall behavior, and builds their mirror neurons.  Strong mirror neurons are what gives children the ability to have empathy for others—not moral teachings or zero tolerance policies.  Empathy in turn prevents aggression and violence.

Doctors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, in their book Hold on to Your Kids, explain “counterwill” (disobedience) and the “the making of bullies”. They convey that, though counterwill (“I want my own way.”; “You can’t tell me what to do.” etc.) is normal in children, it can be tamed through, and only through, a strong attachment relationship, not methods to control and punish.  That means that if children feel truly connected to their parents or to the adults in charge, and feel safe to lean on them emotionally, they are more likely to listen and to drop their counterwill impulses. In other words, if I, as a child, feel safe to tell you how I really feel inside about stuff, and trust that you are not going to judge my feelings or dismiss them, I am going to feel close to you and want to listen to your rules even if I do not want to. I am also going to absorb your core values.  You do not have to drill them into me. 

Neufield and Mate go on to describe bullying as a lack of emotional vulnerability stemming from weak attachment connections.  If a child does not feel emotionally safe to lean on an adult attachment figure, then they harden their tender feelings, such as fear, anxiety, love, caring, etc., and defend them by lashing out.  Or, they may turn against themselves and harm themselves. They may also try to find an attachment substitute by becoming obsessively attached to their peers and push away their parents.  But this doesn’t feel safe either, because another child cannot protect them. 

Mate and Neufield explain how a strong peer orientation culture is harmful to children and that; in fact, there is much about our modern life which interferes with the type of attachment relationships children need for healthy mental development.

 So, yes, we need to get assault weapons off our streets.  And, as a society, we need to stop producing bullies and mass murderers.  Children are not born that way.  Society creates them.  No, it is not a specific gene.  The science of epigenetics tells us that the caretaking environment helps to determine which genes are expressed.

I hope that we can bring this vast amount of empirical science into our local, state, and national dialogue. We have the scientific evidence to prevent violence, but will our culture and our politics allow it?

Loving and Compassionate Parenting: A Short Summary

Loving and Compassionate Parenting: A Short Summary

Science is now telling us that loving and compassionate parenting is the most powerful tool available to influence children’s behavior. This is in contrast to a child raising culture which has been based on controlling discipline, and on logic and behavioral consequences. Attachment researchers and neuroscientists 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 child’s brain. 

 Dr. Allan Score, famous neuroscientist at UCLA, refers to the mother as the “psychobiological regulator” of the infant, meaning that she is the regulator of the baby’s nervous system. (This is also true for dad or any primary caretaker.) From the 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. “What’s outside goes inside.” Repeated empirical studies also show that having experiences of joy, delight, and empathy with the parent are at the heart of healthy child development in all domains.

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. It also encourages us to create the space in our daily interactions with our child to listen to their behavior. Negative behavior is a form of unconscious communication which says that our child needs our attention in some manner. It is up to adults to creatively and lovingly figure out what the child needs.

Science is also telling us that our own capacity as parents to be tuned into our child is largely dependent upon how we were parented ourselves. So, to understand our own parenting styles, we need to reflect on and to understand how we were parented.

Resources: Parenting From the Inside Out, by Dan Siegel and Mary Hartselle; circleofsecurity.org,  beyondconsequences.com; Attachment Parenting books by Dr. Sears; attachmentparentinginternational.org.