On a balmy October evening, local parents gathered at Nederland Elementary School for the Mountain Strong Families parenting series sponsored by TEENS, Inc. We explored Why do Children Act That Way? by peering underneath our child’s visible behavior. The field of child development and neuroscience produce fascinating insights into what is really going on.

If we parents don’t understand the normal growth and development of a child’s brain, the behavioral expectations we have for children will continually frustrate us and make childhood feel stressful instead of a nurturing experience. So, we dug deep into understanding how the brain and social emotional skills actually develop in humans.

Challenging behavior and big emotions merely convey how the brain is functioning at that moment in time. Children act without thinking, make poor choices, and are often unable to regulate their intense emotional reactions because they are born with only 25% of their brain function. Our “downstairs” brain (where our emotions and impulsive survival mechanism reside) is fully formed at birth. But it takes up to 27 years for our “upper” thinking brain to fully form.

It’s like children are driving a car that doesn’t have any brakes in it. Even as older children are developing their thinking and social emotional skills, they can’t always access them when they are tired, hungry, or overwhelmed.

Without understanding the function and development of the brain, we may assume that children are choosing to misbehave. But everyone’s first automatic reaction is emotional and impulsive. Our brains process emotion 200 - 500 times faster than they process thought. That is why our first reaction is rarely our best response. Intense emotions immediately trigger chemical reactions that make us lash out, shut down, or try to get away from the situation. Our upper and lower brains need to be fully integrated in order to express a regulated amount of emotion interwoven with logic and empathy.

It may be counterintuitive, but our thinking brain develops when caregivers help us slow down and attend to our emotions. This allows our wise upper brain to catch up with our emotions and respond with rationality and compassion. When we recognize challenging behavior as controlled by a survival response (fight/flight/freeze), we realize that we need to speak to how a child’s brain works in order to deescalate the situation and change the behavior. The way adults respond to the children’s inability to regulate themselves will impact their brain development and determine whether their social emotional skills develop.

Parents began to realize that based on brain science, it is completely normal for children to say and do hurtful things, to be irresponsible and disrespectful. Their brains will respond differently when they develop these skills. And these skills develop when we have attuned to their emotional state. We are tasked with not reacting emotionally when they have made a mistake. If we think of children as behaving poorly, it predisposes us to react from our own downstairs brain. But when we think of a child’s brain as struggling to handle something difficult, it encourages us to help them through their distress.

Parents practiced speaking to the lower brain’s need for safety and emotional connection in order to change their child’s behavior. The first step is Speaking to the Brain Stem by using a calm tone, gentle touch, and physically getting down at the child’s level to convey safety in words and actions. The second step is to Speak to the Limbic System by attuning to their emotions by validating and empathizing with what they are feeling. Only after the child’s brain has begun to regulate, should we discuss with their upper Prefrontal Cortex how to fix the problem or make amends. Humans cannot think, learn, listen, or make a better choice when they are emotionally dysregulated. Parents and childcare workers will always want to connect before they correct a child’s behavior.

“I love how we get practical ideas to try right away with our children,” said one family who regularly attends the parenting series.

Another dad admitted that he had “never thought about first conveying safety to his children” to get them out of their fight or flight mode. He discovered that the 3-step approach to speaking to the child’s brain “made a huge difference when our child is upset and crying.”

One mom shared how her daughter used to have numerous meltdowns every day. “We’ve tried spending special one-on-one time for months, and it took a while, but then ‘boom,’ it has made all the difference in the world.” She willingly testified that being fully present and connecting with her child’s inner world of emotions invariably changed the frequency and duration of the child’s outbursts.

Are you intrigued by a class where a community of parents share their challenges and successes? Join the next Mountain Strong Families session, Nurturing Ourselves on the Parenting Journey, on Tuesday, November 1, at Nederland Elementary School. To register for dinner, childcare, and the next class, contact ann@teensinc.org.