When living with small children, even the most common everyday actions we make can produce strife. Which way you cut the sandwich or the color plate on which it’s served can produce a full-scale outburst of crying, thrashing or throwing oneself on the floor for a young child. When our son started having tantrums, my husband came up with a nickname for the episodes. He called each episode a “total toddler meltdown” (TTM). Using a funny term provided some comic relief from the stress of those experiences, but gradually, we came to learn tantrums and general upset in young children is usually natural and largely unavoidable. Toddlers are incapable of controlling their feelings and impulses because the frontal part of their brains hasn’t fully developed yet. I was surprised to learn during medical school that this frontal area of the brain (called the frontal lobe) is still developing into our mid-20s, maybe even close to thirty years old.
The frontal lobe controls executive functioning—the ability to think, plan, organize, reason, understand abstract concepts, modify one’s responses to achieve a goal, make decisions, manage emotions, and develop social understanding. People often speculate about where in the brain lies this nebulous thing we call “the mind,” and I guess it is located here. Given the range of tasks included in executive functioning, toddlers have trouble not only with tantrums but also with minor frustrations, which is why even the daily routine can be full of distress for them. The next time your toddler is struggling, remember they don’t have the capacity to control these executive functions yet, but this is the time of their life when they learn. Their ability learn this control begins gaining momentum around ages 3 to 5 (sources vary), even after which it has many years to go before reaching maturity. There is much to develop during this time since adult humans have the largest frontal cortex volume of any of the primates, followed by the lesser developed chimpanzees and orangutans. Next time you take your toddler to the zoo, take a good look at them next to the chimps. The toddler years will make more sense.
The Brain and its Functions
The frontal lobe is part of what’s called the “forebrain.” The forebrain is the main area we imagine when we think of the brain, with its covering of white-grey squiggly ridges. Besides the frontal lobe, the forebrain also contains the remaining three lobes (parietal, temporal, occipital) and the limbic system. The limbic system is located deep inside the brain and comprised of a variety of structures involving emotions, basic drives and memory. This is where the fight, flight or freeze response is generated. Below that, sitting on top of the brainstem, is the “midbrain” which is involved with auditory and visual processing. Further below is the “hindbrain,” which contains the brainstem and then flows into the spinal cord. The hindbrain or brainstem is referred to as the “lower” parts of the brain – being lower down physically, meaning closer to the tailbone of the animal but also because it regulates basic bodily functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, swallowing, and sleep. These lower parts of the brain were present in primitive people, make up the brains of animals and our children are born with them fully operational. Unlike the frontal lobe which increases its functionality from childhood, the limbic system and brainstem are hardwired from birth to be functional so they may aid in the survival of the organism. The baby animal or human needs to be able to regulate basic physiological functions such as eating, breathing, and sleeping. They also need to know whether to fight, flee, or freeze in response to the threat of a predator in order to survive into adulthood. As a survival mechanism, our fear response naturally diminishes the functions of the frontal brain, such as thinking and concentration. Our body wants us to just react to save ourselves and not take too much time to think about it—time during which we could become prey for another animal.
Mental Computing
You may be wondering what all this has to do with parenting. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on the frontal lobe, the limbic system and the brainstem (see image.) If you think about your brain as a computer, imagine the limbic system and brainstem as the hardware. It’s wired in – been there in humans and animals for thousands of years and it will always be there – you can’t change it. Then imagine the frontal lobe as containing the software. The content of what you think can be changed, like running updates – newer, different programs, with the original hardware in place. In fact, the hardware is a vital part of what allows software to work.
As the young child grows, their frontal brain naturally develops, but how this happens varies based on the way they are taught by those in the world around them. Children learn to think and regulate their emotions by watching their parents and modeling their behavior. While we want to model good behavior for them, it is quite an onerous task when they are doing something really annoying such as yelling, screaming, engaging in some other reprehensible behavior, or just acting completely irrationally. When we see this happening, our primitive brain gets triggered and our animal instincts kick in—someone is aggressing us and we want to yell back or run away, or we feel frozen and incapable of acting (fight, flight, or freeze response). However, giving in to some of those immediate impulses, such as raising our voices with our kids or walking away in frustration, teaches the toddler that when they’re upset, they should also yell or run away from their problems. Many people take this teaching into their adult lives, often creating difficulties for them later on. It is also natural for toddlers and small children to have big feelings because they cannot regulate them yet; when we get visibly upset by their outward display of emotions, it affirms that it is okay to get dysregulated when feelings overwhelm us. They can also learn from our intense reaction that their feelings are scary or the world is not a place where their feelings are acceptable to others.
The best way to help them learn to regulate is to regulate ourselves. I’ve found that rather than acting on instinct, trying to get my mind to come online in stressful situations (like a software program) and override the hardwired animal instincts of the rest of my brain helps. If we react immediately, we’re often acting on impulse, and let me tell you, our impulses are usually not the parenting material we’re proud of later. These immediate reactions can also serve some other fear or negative thought projection we have about ourselves, such as I’m so incompetent, last time this happened it was such a disaster or People are staring, it’s embarrassing; I need to make them stop right now. We end up executing the quickest actions we can think of to extinguish those uncomfortable thoughts or feelings.
Even though I often know what I should do when I’m parenting, I’m still working on the task of actually doing it because it’s really difficult. Writing about it by no means implies that I have mastered it. Part of why I write is to reinforce these thoughts and hold them in my mind so I can hopefully do a better job of parenting my children. These are thoughts and strategies I’ve found useful, and I hope they help you too, but there are many different approaches and I’m not an expert.
The Pause
In The House of God, Samuel Shem famously writes, “At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to check your own pulse.” This phrase became widely popular in medicine because of how extremely useful it was for reminding doctors to stay calm even when the clinical situation around them was stressful and chaotic or even dire. During my own medical training, I was amazed to see how outwardly calm physicians remained when I was rotating through the emergency room or the medical-surgical wards as a student. Although patients were having serious medical calamities—cardiac arrests, respiratory failures, strokes—the doctors remained calm, controlled, and purposeful while providing treatment. As I learned more about managing medical emergencies, I saw that when under stress, paying attention to my adrenalized fight or flight response would only impair my focus. The idea of taking my own pulse, a pause to see what was going on inside of me, helped me be better equipped to care for my patients in an emergency.
When I first became a parent, I was reacting very quickly without much thought when stressed and I wasn’t too proud of the outcomes. Despite my medical training and my ability to remain calm under pressure at work, I was too emotionally involved to replicate this with my son. I felt like I was failing miserably, so I started searching for parenting books that would tell me what to do. I stumbled across a fun and practical book—Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman. In her account of raising children in both the US and France, she discusses the idea of what she terms “the pause.” In France, she explains, it was common for babies as young as two or three months old to sleep through the night, while for her American friends, this took a year or longer. She was amazed to see French toddlers and children playing independently for longer periods while their parents sipped coffee at a café, whereas American parents were continuously pulled in to intervene and settle their kids’ disputes and give suggestions for their children’s entertainment. She attributes this difference to the common French practice of taking a pause when children or babies start to fuss or cry. French parents don’t rush over to hold their babies the second they cry but rather they take a few seconds to observe them first. Serving a variety of purposes, this practice offers the baby a chance to learn self-soothing and the parents an opportunity to listen and observe while considering what the child may need.
Whether it’s medicine or parenting, taking a moment can move us from our instinctual reactions to a more controlled response with hopefully a better outcome. Whereas the last post talked about managing a crisis, this practice (I-GO) can help manage the everyday challenges of stressful child behaviors.
Identify: What are you feeling? Name it. Are you scared or embarrassed about how your child is reacting? Do you feel incapable of handling the situation? Then give yourself a positive message about the negatives you identified, such as “I can stay in control even though I’m embarrassed” or “I am capable of handling this even though I’m scared.”
Ground: Do what works for you to ground yourself. Feel your feet on the floor, count to five, take a breath or just walk into the next room. If nothing else, this can help you take a pause. The pause creates a momentary space allowing you to think about the next step.
Orient: Orient yourself toward what your child might need. Are they crankier because they’re hungry or tired? Are they bored and seeking attention? Are they protesting a directive you gave? Then try to provide what you think they need-a snack, rest, a firm direction -and provide it calmly while maintaining your own orientation.
Next time you face a stressful situation with your child, try I-GO. Good luck!