Parenting is a challenge. Our children are filled with thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviours that we can’t always understand. Countless parents find themselves desperately trying to figure out the secret to helping our children find their best behaviour and emotional reactions to situations. In her book Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behaviour and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids, Mona Delahooke demonstrates how the focus shouldn’t be on the behaviour at all but on our children and what they need from us in the moments that they are feeling overwhelmed, out of control or otherwise emotionally unregulated. Through compassion, understanding, and building strong connections, parents can better understand what their children are experiencing and how to help them overcome it.
Applying her knowledge and expertise in neuroscience, Delahooke offers to parents a new perspective; one that takes the focus from the processes that occur in the brain and puts it directly into the nervous system; the part of us responsible for thoughts and behaviours. By doing so, we shift from a belief that there are good and bad behaviours and begin to see what is truly happening for our children when they are lashing out or otherwise not behaving their best. It allows us to shift from “fix this now” to “what do you need and how can I help to provide it”.
The focus of Delahooke’s belief lies in the functioning of the autonomic nervous system, the part of us that regulates our involuntary physiological processes, as well as the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems which are divisions of the autonomic system.
Parasympathetic: The parasympathetic nervous system keeps everything running when you are in normal situations that don’t cause your body to experience stress or sense danger.
Sympathetic: The sympathetic nervous system takes over when your body is feeling stress or danger. It is the system that is responsible for the “fight or flight” reaction. Delahooke explains that seemingly negative behaviours are the nervous system taking over when someone feels stress or danger.
What Delahooke theorizes is that seemingly bad behaviour occurs when a child feels stress or senses danger and the sympathetic nervous system takes control, trying to right the situation and remove the stress for the child. Rather than try to “fix” the behaviour, parents can stay calm, connect with their child and try to work through what is causing distress in the first place.
Delahooke also explains that it is necessary to first be there for your child and connect with them before trying to talk through what has happened. By learning to recognize when both you and your child are in the right frame of mind to talk through things, parents will build better connections with their children, learn to co-regulate and, ultimately, help their children develop their own self-regulation skills.
Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behaviour and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids is an engaging and easy read which provides not only details of the science behind Delahooke’s theory but practical applications and skills that parents can start using right away.
Delahooke is also the author of Social and Emotional Development in Early Intervention: A skills Guide for Working with Children and Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges. She has also been featured on a variety of different podcasts.
