One of the most rewarding experiences for me
has been to study brain science
and apply it to the experience of parenting.
And the hand model of the brain that I use to teach parents
is very useful to understand that.
So if you take your thumb and put it in the middle of your palm,
put your fingers over the top.
This is a very useful model of the brain
and when we can actually see in front of us
what's going on in the brain
then we can change what the brain does.
So let me walk you through very basically
what happens in this brain and the structures in it
and it goes like this.
The spinal cord comes up, representing the wrist
and then you have coming up into the skull
the brain stem and the limbic area which work together
to regulate arousal and your emotions
and the way you have a fight-flight-freeze response.
These are below the cortex, the limbic and brain stem areas
and the cortex is this higher part of the brain
that allows us to perceive the outside world
and to think and reason.
And this frontmost part of the brain right behind your forehead,
so the person's orientated like this, is actually the part
that regulates the subcortical, limbic, and brainstem areas.
This regulation is very important
because sometimes we can have all sorts of things happen
in our life: we're tired, we're exhausted,
someone pushes a particular emotional button,
and we can flip our lids.
So rather than being tuned in,
and connected and balanced, and flexible,
we can lose all that flexibility, even lose moral reasoning
and act in ways that are terrifying to others
including our children.
Now, you can actually bring yourself back online
and come back to the high road and make a repair with your child
and that's important to explain to them
and you can also use this hand model of the brain
to explain to children even as young as five and six
how to understand when their emotions
are rising up from the brainstem and limbic areas here
and how it's overriding the prefrontal area
and making it so they may be about to flip their lids.
So I've had kids come tell me
that they're about to go flip their lids and they need a break.
They need a time out.
And by even just naming that, they can tame it.
And that's the power of using the hand model for ourselves
and our children
to help us all make sense
of what goes on in the emotional communication
that we have in the course of day-to-day life.