Dr Daniel J. Siegel is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute. He has written several acclaimed books including Parenting from the Inside Out, The Mindful Brain, Mindsight and The Developing Mind. The whole-brain approach fosters horizontal integration between the left and right brains, helping you use both your logic and your emotions to understand your experiences, your thoughts, your behaviors, and those of the people around you. Let’s explore two strategies for helping children integrate their left and right brains. Horizontal Integration Strategy #1: Connect With Emotions, Redirect to Logic The concept at the heart of Marianna's response, and of this book, is integration. A clear understanding of integration will give you the power to completely transform the way you think about parenting your kids. It can help you enjoy them more and better prepare them to live emotionally rich and rewarding lives.

Don’t force your child to retell the story if she’s not ready or not in the mood. Children often find it easier to talk while doing some other activity, such as playing a game or driving in the car. If your child still resists talking, encourage her to write about the memory, draw a picture of it, or talk to someone else about it. Think of all your parts as spokes on a wheel, and your self-awareness of your various parts is the hub in the center. On the rim of this wheel of awareness are all the things that can grab your attention—such as feelings, thoughts, memories, physical sensations, goals, dreams, and perceptions of the world around you.The upstairs brain comprises the various parts of the cerebral cortex, which sits behind your forehead and right under the top of your head. The upstairs brain is responsible for high-level thinking, allowing you to think through context, consequences, and the impact your actions may have on others. These processes include: Painful and scary experiences can overwhelm your child with emotion, even long after the experience ends. For example, 9-year-old Bella developed anxiety about flushing toilets after she flushed once and watched the water overflow.

In the last chapter, we explored the first aspect of mindsight: understanding your own mind. Now, let’s talk about the other aspect: understanding other people’s minds, or, simply, empathy. Empathy involves reading nonverbal cues to recognize how others are feeling, and seeing other people’s perspectives. Empathy also improves your child’s ability to communicate effectively and compromise, all of which helps her to connect with others. If you rely too heavily on your left brain, you end up in an emotional desert. You operate only with cold, calculating logic, neglecting your and others’ emotions. In an emotional desert, you lose compassion, empathy, and big-picture perspective. Teens often retreat to emotional deserts, because it gives them a feeling of control when they become overwhelmed by the emotional overload of adolescence. 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.

Processes autobiographical memories (Shortform note: Autobiographical memories are memories of personal experiences, as opposed to memories of information, such as a grocery list.)

In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson offer a revolutionary approach to child rearing with twelve key strategies that foster healthy brain development, leading to calmer, happier children. The authors explain—and make accessible—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 throw tantrums, fight, or sulk in silence. 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. In allowing Marco to repeatedly retell the story, Marianna was helping him understand what had happened so he could begin to deal with it emotionally. Since she knew the importance of helping her son's brain process the frightening experience, she helped him tell and retell the events so that he could process his fear and go on with his daily routines in a healthy and balanced way. Over the next few days, Marco brought up the accident less and less, until it became just another of his life experiences-albeit an important one. That's what we want to do for each of our kids: help their brain become more integrated so they can use their mental resources to full capacity. This is exactly what Marianna did for Marco. When she helped him retell the story over and over again ("Eea woo woo"), she defused the scary and traumatic emotions in his right brain so that they didn't rule him. She did so by bringing in factual details and logic from his left brain-which, at two years old, is just beginning to develop-so that he could deal with the accident in a way that made sense to him. Most of us don't think about the fact that our brain has many different parts with different jobs. For example, you have a left side of the brain that helps you think logically and organize thoughts into sentences, and a right side that helps you experience emotions and read nonverbal cues. You also have a "reptile brain" that allows you to act instinctually and make split-second survival decisions, and a "mammal brain" that leads you toward connection and relationships. One part of your brain is devoted to dealing with memory; another to making moral and ethical decisions. It's almost as if your brain has multiple personalities-some rational, some irrational; some reflective, some reactive. No wonder we can seem like different people at different times!The right side of the brain pays attention to your emotions. When your emotions get really big, it feels like they’re taking over your whole brain and body, which can make you do and say things that you normally wouldn’t. This can feel like a big wave that’s crashing over you.