When your emotions are regulated, you are ready to experience the activation and integration of all aspects of the brain, including your various cognitive abilities. Within this integrated functioning, you are best able to make sense of the present situation, including its associations with the past and future. The emotional meaning of an event contributes to its cognitive meaning and together they enable you to decide on the best possible, unique, response to the situation. These decisions involve what is known as your reflective functioning and are the subject of this chapter.
How many of us parents have found ourselves yelling at our children over having done something that they should not have done (tracking mud over the kitchen floor) only to find out that someone else (maybe even our partners) did that and our children were innocent? Or we yelled at our children for doing something that we saw them do (going to their friend’s house down the street before cutting the grass) only to find out that they acted for a reason of which we approved (their friend’s parent asked to borrow a rake). All of us would say that we should know why our children did something before evaluating what they did, but too often we evaluate before knowing—before we make good sense of what they did. Too often our anger preempts our deeper understanding. Not only is that embarrassing for us when there really was no reason for the anger, but it also is detrimental to our relationships with our children—who assume (and often rightfully so) that we make negative assumptions about their behavior before really understanding what their behavior is all about. We certainly don’t appreciate it when our friends or colleagues do it to us.
Parents are best able to make sense of a given event or behavior when they can maintain an open, curious attitude of “What’s that about?”, holding back the quick reaction system, before responding to the event. Why react in anger to a child’s behavior before first knowing what the behavior means?—unless anger is necessary to put an immediate stop to behavior that is truly dangerous and/or hurtful to self or other. When parents do believe that a consequence is necessary for a certain behavior, it is still crucial to make sense of the behavior in order to know the most appropriate consequence. Making good sense is the gold standard of the kind of enriched, integrative brain processing wherein emotion and cognition—with the help of that anterior cingulate bridge we discussed previously—are robustly linked.
Making good sense of your child’s behavior, as well as your own, is a multistep process that is easier said then done. It takes more brain power and brain time to make really useful sense because our quick appraisal system—the one that can trigger our reactions in less than a 10th of a second—easily preempts our slower, higher thought processes and can commit us to judgment and action before we’ve even begun to use the higher parts of our brains to figure out what’s really going on. We all tend to respond more quickly, with less use of our big prefrontal cortex, in very familiar relationships, such as the ones we have with our children and spouses/partners, than we do in most other relationships in our lives. Familiarity fosters a short-hand way of using our brains that is highly automatic, often literally thoughtless, typically not careful (full of care). We just don’t use our brakes as readily at home as we do outside of home where we tend to be more careful and vigilant about the way we respond to people.
Although our home-based ways of using our brains with each other is efficient and can save a lot of energy, changing these patterns when change is needed takes a lot of mindful effort and care: Change requires the use of our executive capacity, the brain power we experience when we access the highest, most uniquely human parts of our brains. We need to access these higher brain regions in order to slow things down, practice the emotion regulation processes described in the last chapter, and spend more time thinking, reflecting, and being curious about what is going on in our relationship with our children. Trying to change well-worn patterns of parental behavior and meaning making is not a task to be taken lightly. Let’s take a look at the process of meaning making and how it relates to the way you are using your brain—to the brain state you are in when you are trying to make sense of your kids’ behavior.
The meaning we derive from our experiences depends on how we are using our brains, both at the time of the experience and later, when we are reviewing or reflecting on that experience (if we get to that point of taking a second or third look). We make different meaning or sense of things depending on which of three states we are in, as described in Chapter 1 and based on Porges’s (2011) polyvagal model of our nervous system: (1) the open-minded, socially engaged state; (2) the mobilized defensive state of fight or flight; and (3) the immobilized-with-fear state. Let’s look at the three kinds of meaning that these states produce.
• Open-minded meaning (smart vagal system “on”): “Something is going on here that I need to understand. This isn’t the ‘same old, same old’ that my child is showing me. I’ll hold back my urge to react and spend a little time being curious here.”
• Mobilized defensive meaning (sympathetic fight–flight system “on”): “My child is disrespecting me and I’m not going to stand for it. I need to defend my role as parent and show him who’s in charge here!”
• Immobilized defensive meaning (lower, more primitive vagal system “on”): “Oh no! This is really bad. Nothing I can do. I’m dying here! I’m not really here and this isn’t really happening!”
The meaning we make determines the action we take. And, in a circular fashion, the action we take affects the meaning we make and our relationship with our child. In our open-minded state, we don’t go with our fastest, first appraisal reaction because this is the work of that neuroception process we described in Chapter 1, the process wherein our right-brain amygdala can put a spin on what’s going on in much less time than it takes for us to really think about what’s going on. Remember, your amygdala on the right side of your brain can detect a “possible threat” in about 100 milliseconds, a 10th of a second. In most dealings with your child you can probably afford to take another 300–500 milliseconds to process the situation a bit more before you really need to do something.
So, in open mind, I let these “first responder” moments pass, maybe noticing them, calling them what they are (“false alarms,” etc.), and keeping my mind open to process the information more fully before I go to “output,” to action—kind of like waiting to send that e-mail I wrote in the heat of the moment and giving myself more time to reflect on what is really going on and what would be best to do about it before hitting that Send button). This is why we put the chapter on emotion regulation before this one on making sense. You have to use your brakes on your “quick responder” system to allow both the emotional moment and the impulse to act on that emotion pass if you are going to give your big thinking brain, your prefrontal cortex, time to do more work and make better sense of what is going on. Hopefully, only a few moments in life actually require that we act within less than half a second to deal effectively with a situation.
Making better sense of your child’s behavior may involve a shift in your perspective on parenting, especially if you have been parenting with a stressed-out brain. Remember how stress can make you “simplistic,” reacting with one of your quick self-defense systems and using mostly reflexive reactions to your child, rather than more thoughtful responses based on more reflection? If you have been accustomed to making sense of your child’s behavior using your defense systems, as described above, you are used to making sense very quickly and automatically, without really using your big brain as fully as you could if you could slow down and give yourself the luxury of more time, more brain time, to construct better, more useful meaning. So, making better sense may mean a shift in your approach from a mostly behavioral focus to a relationship focus, a focus on understanding your child’s behavior more before you decide how to respond. This involves using more of your parenting brain and less of your defensive, stressed-out brain.
The fact that you are reading these words means that you are already at least considering making some changes in how you are going about being a parent. You are brave enough to be willing to rethink your role as a parent, and this is a huge step, one that already represents a change in the way you are using your brain. If you are giving this book a chance to change your mind about some things you haven’t questioned before, you are already cooking with gas; you have already activated your prefrontal cortex, awakening your powers of reflection.
The shift in thinking about parenting that we are proposing represents a shift from judging and reacting to your child’s behavior to understanding his or her mind better. The best way to deepen that understanding is for you to have a more open and engaged relationship with your child, to open your brain and heart and ears to your child in ways that maybe you haven’t been able to do in a very long time, or maybe have never been able to do. Based on our clinical experience, our understanding of the parenting brain, and the growing body of research about what kids need from us in order to thrive and not just survive, we believe that making the shift from a behavioral perspective to a relational perspective can change the way you feel about your children, strengthen your connections with them, and help them learn the things you’ve been trying to teach them.
To make this shift in your parenting, we want to help you turn on the highest regions of your brain, the parts in the middle and near the top of your frontal lobe, the regions called the middle prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These are the most uniquely human regions of your brain, and if you’ve been stressed out for a while, you may not have been using them very much. You may have been using the lower region of your prefrontal cortex, your orbital region just above your eyes, to react to your child’s behavior, to put the brakes on some of your frustration or resentment, and to try to figure out what rewards and consequences would work better to change his or her behavior. But you have probably not been moving up much higher in your big brain to those regions of your prefrontal cortex that lie above the orbital region: your middle prefrontal cortex, which can help you attune more deeply to your child’s mind (to mentalize) and your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the topmost region that can help you think more deeply about your relationship with your child and come up with ideas and plans about how to really make it better (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target, 2002).
This kind of attunement, reflection, and “relational thinking” is pretty heavy lifting in brain terms and requires the use of these more complex regions of your brain, the last ones to mature and the first to shut down on you when you are experiencing too much stress. You need to wake up these higher regions in order to shift your mind from thinking about your child in a “me versus him” mode to a “we” mode (Siegel, 2010) of “we’re in this together.” When you start to make this shift and literally to “change your mind” about your relationship with your child—now understanding his behavior within the context of your relationship—you are getting ready to do the essential attachment-focused work with your child that can repair your relationship, help you to really get to know him or her, and get on with your lives together in a much more fulfilling way.
Making sense of your children’s behavior, and your own, is not simply a cognitive process consisting of accumulating the facts associated with a behavioral event and then, in the fashion of a judge, deciding what happened, what were the mitigating circumstances, and what is the most appropriate consequence. Such knowledge is limited and does not extend our awareness into the human realities of our children’s experiences and our relationships with them. The value of emotion regulation that we discussed in the last chapter is not simply to prevent our emotions from becoming dysregulated. The value is to increase the depth and scope of our minds, broadening our awareness to include an awareness of our children in relationship with us, the attuned awareness of our children’s inner lives, and an openness to understanding them without judgment. Making better, richer sense includes “walking a mile” in our children’s shoes in order to experience empathy for their experience.
For these reasons, the more cognitive regions of the prefrontal cortex need the input from the deeper regions of our brains, our affective core. This is where that anterior cingulate brain bridge needs to do its thing, linking your lower limbic system (your emotional brain) to your higher thinking brain system, so that you can “feel and deal” effectively. (The prefrontal cortex also needs the help of your insula, your visceral brain, which gives you an intuitive sense of a situation in order to attune more deeply and immediately to your children’s states.)
Thus, emotion regulation, once it is established, has not completed its job. It is not inactive during the more cognitive process of making sense. This is really an interpersonal neurobiological process that begins with affect regulation and progresses to a linking of affect regulation with better meaning making, with cognitive processes that are being “informed” by regulated emotion and their affective expression. This is an integrative process that gets to the place that cognitive–behavioral interventions are intended to go. But this brain-based intervention model does it more effectively by incorporating the way the brain works: by honoring the limbic system and its contribution to intersubjective learning when it is both regulated and available to provide intuitive and empathic awareness of our children’s worlds.
The effective regulation of our emotions represents the first step in a multistep process of creating new ways of viewing and understanding the parenting process. Once established, emotion regulation pathways create a readiness for integrative functioning within your brain as well as better connections with your children’s brains (i.e., interpersonal neurobiology). With regulated affect, you can more readily activate the core parenting systems that we have been stressing. If parents become engaged in trying to make sense of their children’s functioning, they will experience the desire to approach their children and get closer to them via an engaged dialogue (Parental Approach System) and to enjoy the interaction more (Parental Reward System). They are also likely to have a deeper interest in their children (Parental Child-Reading System and mentalization) and to see the deeper meanings in their interactions and in whatever behaviors are occurring (Parental Meaning-Making System). With regulated affect, the integrative functioning of the brain (Parental Executive System) is more effective, with all areas of the prefrontal cortex becoming involved, often with the aid of the anterior cingulate.
When you start relating to your children in this open-minded way, you will have different kinds of experiences with them than you have when you are stressed out. These new experiences of being curious and listening more empathically to children will give you “new food for thought,” new information with which to create new meaning. So the quality of meaning you make depends both on your state of mind and on the kinds of interactions you are having with your child, the kind of material you have to work with when you create your narrative or “story” about being a parent. When your child is feeling more liked, seen, and heard—feeling safer to come close to you and share more of his or her inner self with you, to be “more real”—you will accumulate some great raw material for editing your old, more negative story about being a parent. By learning more about who your child really is, and is becoming, you expand your mind—you literally create more pathways in your brain—for holding your child in your thoughts and “playing” with those thoughts of him or her. Slowing down the way you use your brain in your relationship with your child allows for some good “slow-cooked” meaning, a more creative and satisfying kind of storytelling. Now you and your child are able to openly communicate with each other in a manner that makes you both receptive to being influenced by the thoughts and wishes of the other. Your mutually regulated emotional states foster slower, deeper, richer “co-construction” of meaning, the kind of meaning making that stimulates reflection and makes you want to revisit the events of the day and savor at least some of them. Now it feels safer to revisit these places in your mind and put them in your mental workspace, your “working memory,” to reappraise them and to integrate them into your autobiographical memory system, your memories of living in connection with your child through joyful times and harder times.
Parents (and children too) are best able to make sense of a situation when they engage in reflective functioning. This is a unique form of mental activity wherein the focus is on the inner life of self and other. Such a broad cognitive focus is the most successful when it occurs within the open, intersubjective space that we have been describing. Seeing the big picture entails making sense of current events and behaviors in the context of the family history and goals and the interrelated and independent stories of all members of the family. In understanding the inner lives of self and other, the whole brain needs to be functioning and integrative. Imagine that an eight-year-old boy steals from his mother on the second day of school, after getting into trouble for fighting with his sister, shortly before his mother leaves on a business trip. To know the meaning of his stealing, it might well be necessary to have an understanding of his relationships with both of his parents and his sister, his school history, his history of fighting and stealing, and how he acted in the past when he was separated from his mother.
Also, the emotional tone of the understanding contributes to its deeper meaning. In order to understand another’s inner life, it is crucial that a person be aware of, and responsive to, the nonverbal communications of the other. This awareness, which is outside of one’s conscious focus, often emerges from the attuned, resonating, nonverbal, reciprocal communications that occur rapidly between one person and the other. Affective–reflective dialogue, described in the last chapter, is ideally suited for facilitating reflective functioning for both parents and children.
Reflective functioning in relation to yourself as a parent requires an openness toward, and acceptance of, your parent-related memories, thoughts, emotions, intentions, wishes, perceptions, judgments, and values. When aspects of your inner life are associated with shame or terror, rage or despair, it is unlikely that you will direct your attention to them. To the extent that parents or children are able to be aware of and accept their inner lives, they will have a greater sense of safety and be more likely to understand the meaning of their specific thoughts, emotions, and wishes. They will understand how these relate to their history as well as the present situation. With good reflective functioning, parents will be likely to understand why they reacted with anger toward their child when he or she did something that usually does not bother them.
Reflective functioning in relation to your children requires the same open space, or acceptance, of whatever features of their inner lives are being expressed by their behavior. A distinction to note: Although the behavior might be evaluated, the inner life features that influenced the behavior are not. Such acceptance of the inner lives of your children is certainly enhanced through love and, in turn, facilitates the deepening of your love for them. When parents do not experience an active love for their children any longer, their ability to reflect on them and their behavior will tend to be restricted to a negative, evaluative stance that does not include their children’s perspectives.
Reflective functioning rests squarely on the foundation of emotional safety, both yours with your own thoughts and feelings, and your children’s with being near you. When you feel safe enough to fully explore your own inner life and the impact that an event is having on you, then the full, richer meaning of that event is more likely to be understood.
Reflective functioning might include questions such as the following:
• Why did my son [daughter] do that?
• What did he want to accomplish?
• Is that important to him? If so, why?
• What does he think about what he did?
• Does his behavior mean anything with regard to how he sees our relationship?
• Did he see any negative consequences to what he did? If so, why did he still do it?
• If I set a limit about that behavior, what will he think is my motive?
• What is my motive for being concerned about it?
• Do I think that his behavior says something about me as parent, and if so, does that influence how I see it and deal with it?
• Is my response to his behavior influenced—for better or worse—by my own attachment history?
• How do I see that behavior as related to our relationship?
• If I really try to take his perspective, does that help me to understand what he did better?
• If I really take his perspective, does that help me to know how to best handle it?
• Am I open to understanding his perspective? If not, why not?
Reflective functioning does not consist of simply asking these questions in an analytical or judgmental way. It requires that as you explore the possible factors that are the context of the behavior—its meaning—that you accept these factors and not evaluate them. Your intention here is to understand, not judge. In this open, reflective mode, you turn the light of your curiosity on all possible factors, within your child and yourself, that might help you to understand the behavior better. There is no need to avoid thinking about certain possibilities. Your approach system is fully “on,” enabling you to move toward and explore whatever is going on with your child. Both you and your child are safe with any of the emerging thoughts you both may have about the meaning of the behavior. There is no reason to experience shame for a thought, emotion, or wish. Reflective functioning also requires that you be open to your emotional responsiveness to your child as you are being curious and trying to understand the meaning of his or her behavior. The understanding that you are able to attain when you include your experience of empathy for your child and are engaged in open attunement with his or her experience is much richer and extends much further into the child’s inner world than would occur if you took an evaluative, analytical, stance.
Emily (mom) received a phone call from the school that her 16-year-old son Frank attends. She was told that Frank had yelled at his teacher in a manner that was seen as being very inappropriate. Emily believes that teachers ought to be treated with respect, and she also was confused as to why her son would mistreat his teacher. She sees him coming up the driveway and she meets him at the door.
| Emily: | Hi, Frank. |
| Frank: | Hi, Mom. |
| Emily: | Before you get ready to head out for your soccer game, after you get a snack, would you stop back here? I’d like to talk to you a bit. |
| Frank: | What about? |
| Emily: | I got a call from school. |
| Frank: | They called you! Why don’t they just let it drop! |
| Emily: | Sounds like it’s still bothering you! |
| Frank: | Yeah, it is! I got in trouble for telling Mrs. Stephenson to back off. Why doesn’t she get in trouble for nagging me so much? |
| Emily: | Why don’t you tell me about it. |
| Frank: | She just doesn’t stop! She says that I’ve got to study more! And more! And more! |
| Emily: | I don’t understand, Son. I thought that you were doing well in her class. |
| Frank: | I am! So it doesn’t seem that it’s any of her business if I don’t do great on the college exams. |
| Emily: | What do you mean? |
| Frank: | She got me this book to study for the college exams and wants me to go over it with her after school. When I thanked her but said that I’ve got a lot going on after school and don’t have the time to stay, she said that she wanted me to do a chapter at home twice a week and she’d ask me questions about it during my recess. I again said, that I’d pass—I’ve got a lot going on. |
| Emily: | She wanted to help you get ready for the college exams—and you thanked her but said that you’ll manage on your own? Is that right? |
| Frank: | Yeah. Eveything was cool, if she’d have just let it rest at that. |
| Emily: | So then what happened? |
| Frank: | She got annoyed and said that I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. It would have big implications for my future. |
| Emily: | And then? |
| Frank: | When I still said that I wasn’t interested, she said that she was disappointed in me and that if I wanted her to be proud of me, I’d better do what she wanted. |
| Emily: | And you said … |
| Frank: | Well, that’s where I lost it a bit. I kinda told her I really didn’t care. |
| Emily: | In those words? |
| Frank: | That I didn’t give a shit if she was proud of me or not. |
| Emily: | Ah, now I understand better, Frank. Thanks for letting me know. So why do you think that you lost it and said that? What was going on for you right then? |
| Frank: | She didn’t seem to have a right to say that! I’m doing fine in her class. I get good grades and don’t cause her any grief. |
| Emily: | So it seems to you that she should be fine with you … or proud of you already. |
| Frank: | Yeah! Why should she pull that on me? I should be able to say how much studying I want to do for the exams without her judging me like that if I’m not doing everything that she wants me to do. It has nothing to do with her class! |
| Emily: | I hear you saying that you would have been OK if she’d pushed you about her class, but this seemed like it was too much pushing about something that was your call. |
| Frank: | Yeah, mom, it doesn’t seem right! Saying that she’s disappointed in me, that she won’t be proud of me. You never talk to me like that! Maybe you’d have a right to say those things, I don’t know, but I do know that she doesn’t. |
| Emily: | I see why this was so hard for you. I see you as someone who tries to handle his responsibilities and really does quite well. I think that you’re proud of the job you do at school and of the relationships you have with your teachers … |
| Frank: | Yeah, I am. And it’s like none of that matters to her. |
| Emily: | And you’re right. I might say that I’m disappointed or not proud of something that you do, but never that I’m disappointed in you, or not proud of you … |
| Frank: | So why did she say that? |
| Emily: | What do you think? |
| Frank: | Seemed like a power trip. |
| Emily: | Maybe. Does she seem that way to you—that she likes to use power over the students? |
| Frank: | No, she doesn’t. And that’s why it seemed so unfair. I thought that we had a good relationship and that she liked me and what I do in her class. |
| Emily: | Then why do you think she said that? |
| Frank: | Wants me to do well? Thought that would motivate me to try harder? |
| Emily: | Do you think? |
| Frank: | Maybe. But she really has a poor way of showing it! |
| Emily: | So you’re saying that if she wanted to help you, she might have done it differently or said it differently. She gave you that book to help, I’d guess, not to have power over you. |
| Frank: | Yeah, and that was really nice. But why pull out that “disappointed” and “not proud” stuff? |
| Emily: | I don’t know, Frank. Maybe she felt that she was giving you a gift and you were not appreciating it. And she is trying hard to help and, to her, you don’t seem to care. |
| Frank: | But I did feel good about it! If she had just left it alone. |
| Emily: | Then you would not have said “I don’t give a shit!” |
| Frank: | So they told you what I said? |
| Emily: | Yeah, they did. |
| Frank: | Are you disappointed in me now? |
| Emily: | No, Frank, not in you. Never in you. |
| Frank: | Maybe in what I said? |
| Emily: | That’s right. Are you OK that I wish you hadn’t said that? |
| Frank: | I guess. I guess I wish that I hadn’t either. |
| Emily: | Any thoughts about what you might do about it? |
| Frank: | Tell Mrs. Stephenson that I’m sorry. |
| Emily: | That would be hard, I’d bet. |
| Frank: | Yeah, it would. But I shouldn’t have said that to her. And maybe I could ask her if I could borrow her book and maybe study it some on the weekends when I have extra time. |
| Emily: | My guess is that she’d like that. And like that you worked it out with her. |
| Frank: | Yeah, she probably would. |
| Emily: | Frank … I’m always proud of you. And now I’m proud of how you’re handling this. You made a mistake, you admit it, and you’re fixing it. I like how you’re handling this. |
| Frank: | Thanks, Mom. Now I got to handle my friends. The word got around what I said to Mrs. Stephenson, and I think they’re going to really try to jerk me around about it. |
| Emily: | I bet they do. And if they do … you’re going to say to them … |
| Frank: | Don’t worry, mom. You won’t get any phone calls about it! |
Such a dialogue is realistic when parents engage their children with an open, accepting, curious, and empathic attitude. This kind of attitude reduces defensiveness in children and fosters their readiness—and ability—to explore their inner lives. When your children know that you just want to understand what is going on, and that they will not be judged for what they say to you, they are more likely to be open and honest about what they are thinking, feeling, and wanting. Then, through such a dialogue, their decisions about their past or future behaviors are likely to be more productive and appropriate. Such dialogues help both you and your children make more sense of what happened and develop your reflective functioning skills. And you are both making your brains better and healthier in the process.
In contrast to that dialogue is one in which stressed-out parents have already evaluated their children’s behavior and found it to be wrong. These parents are likely to have made negative assumptions about their children’s thoughts, emotions, and motives that led to the behavior (e.g., “You always want your own way,” “You are being selfish,” “You shouldn’t be jealous of your brother’s success”). Such assumptions about children’s inner lives lead to parents demanding to know “why” their children behaved as they did, with the expectation that their children will acknowledge their inappropriate motives. If their children do not agree that the parents’ negative assumptions are valid, the parents then accuse the children of being defensive and unwilling to “own up” to their faults.
This second dialogue seldom leads to productive understanding about the event being explored. There is little openness to discovering together what it means. An even greater worry is that these judgmental, fault-finding examinations lead to greater secrecy by children, leaving parents even less aware of their children’s inner lives. Stress-based interactions also lead to reduced relationship repair after a conflict. Rather than parents and children ending the discussion with a quick smile and maybe even a hug over their joint efforts to understand and resolve an issue, they are likely to go their separate ways, each resenting the behaviors of the other, each feeling defensive over their stance, neither feeling understood. This creates emotional distance in the relationship. Eventually, parents and children agree to “forget” what happened and get back to normal. This new “normal,” sadly, contains less openness, laughter, sharing, and desire to be together than existed prior to the conflict. When this sequence becomes a repetitive pattern, the relationship is likely to offer partners few reasons for seeking each other out for “comfort and joy.”
The rapidly growing interest within the mental health field in the centuries-old practice of mindfulness offers a deeper understanding of reflective functioning and ways to facilitate it. Recent brain-imaging studies of the effects of mindfulness practices on our brains have added a whole new dimension to this interest, showing that this “mindfulness stuff” has real substance, that there is a scientific basis to its beneficial effects on our functioning (Tang, Lu, Geng, et al., 2010; Posner, Sheese, Odludas, & Tang, 2006). Even more exciting for those of us interested in parenting is new neuroscientific evidence of strong links between mindulness and sensitive, attuned parenting (Fleming, Gonzalez, Afonso, & Lovic, 2008). This line of research strongly suggests that mindfulness practices, including reflective thinking, can strengthen brain processes that are important to parenting.
Definitions of mindfulness are varied, but they consistently focus on the person’s open acceptance of the here-and-now experience, focusing on it without judgment, evaluation, or efforts to change it. Within such acceptance the individual goes deeper into the present moment, trying to experience it, understand it more fully, and to especially experience what is unique about it, what lies under the concept of a tree, person, or the sound of a bird singing. A person is open to whatever is present in the here-and-now moment, being influenced by it, flexibly responding to it in a manner congruent with the person’s narrative. A person in a mindful state is not standing against, in opposition to, the event or object in the present. Rather the distinction between self and other, inside the person and outside the person, is blurred, and in fact, is itself a concept that is gently set aside in the mindful experience. There is a reciprocal influence, a back-and-forth flow of energy and openness between the “self” and “other.”
• Dan Siegel summarizes our understanding of mindfulness by describing it as “being aware, on purpose and nonjudgmentally, of what is happening as it is happening in the present moment” (2010, p. xxv).
• Tara Brach defines mindfulness as “the quality of awareness that recognizes exactly what is happening in our moment-to-moment experience” (2003, p. 27).
• James Austin tries to capture the one-of-a-kind nature of mindful awareness when he speaks of “being mindfully attuned to the fresh individuality of each present moment as it evolves into the next one, and then the next one” (2006, p. 237).
• One aspect of this mindful awareness that is focused on someone you love, is known as loving-kindness, blending mindfulness into the experience of the relationship itself (see Jon Kabat-Zinn [2005] on lovingkindness meditation).
It is not surprising that mindfulness involves the very areas of the brain that are involved in the brain-based parenting that we have been advocating. This finding supports Daniel Siegel’s (2010) contention that we can improve our capacity for compassion and intersubjectivity in two ways: (1) interpersonally, by practicing being openly engaged and empathic with another person, and (2) intrapersonally, through practicing mindfulness in ways that enhance our ability to let go of judgmental processes and stay more “present.”
Brain-imaging studies are showing that meditation can change the brain and that the changes occur in regions of the brain that are associated with empathy and attunement—that is, with being very attentive to your own or another person’s unfolding experience. Expert meditators show high levels of prefrontal activity, especially in the very highest regions, combined with very low levels of limbic activity. In other words, the brains of these long-time meditators look quiet and alert (Cahn & Polich, 2006; Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, Schumacher, et al., 2003; Fehmi & Robbins, 2007; Lazar, Kerr, Wasserman, et al., 2005). Even newcomers to meditation, though, appear to be able to change their brains, fostering growth in the regions that are considered to be part of the “executive attention network,” including the upper part of the anterior cingulate and part of the medial prefrontal cortex that is known to be associated with mentalizing and empathic awareness (Tang et al., 2010).
Mindfulness, then, is essentially a process of turning our attention to the present moment more fully than we ordinarily do. It involves strengthening our ability to bring our attention into the present, to suspend the usual processes we use to make quick appraisals and rapid judgments, and to enable our brains to slow down and take a longer, deeper look at what is right in front of us now, what we are actually experiencing right now.
Children are exquisitely aware of their parents’ attention and where it is being directed. Even babies track their parents’ gazes and react if a parent looks away and breaks eye contact. Maybe you’ve had the experience of your child demanding your attention when you are talking on the phone, when the moment before he or she was playing contentendly, apparently oblivious to whether you were paying attention or not. Children know instinctively whether or not we are paying attention to them.
When we are stressed out, children may draw our attention mostly by doing something annoying or by not doing something we need them to do. This kind of parental attention is very different from the kind of attention we pay when we are tuning in to what our child is saying or doing, with the intention to understand and to be with him or her in the moment, not distracted, not multitasking, not paying attention reluctantly or in anger. This “mindful” form of parental attention feels very different to children than those other kinds of attention, the annoyed kind or the distracted kind. Being the object of mindful attention makes children feel “seen” and cared about much more than the other kinds of attention.
This is why there is a strong connection between a parent’s mindfulness and the quality of the parent–child interactions. Mindful attention promotes intersubjectivity and interpersonal “resonance”—mutual feelings of being in connection. Improving your ability to pay attention in this deeper way, then, can be extremely helpful to your relationship with your child (Atkinson et al., 2005).
Mindfulness facilitates reflective functioning in that it moves the mind of the individual into the core experience of the present event, without assumptions or judgments. It suspends our values, beliefs, or biases as to what is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, good or bad. The value of mindfulness for reflective parenting is that it facilitates clear awareness and understanding. It creates an openness that enables parents to be receptive to whatever is present, rather than channeling their attention to areas of awareness that involve evaluations. A mindful awareness enables parents to be deeply aware of the thoughts, emotions, and wishes of their children. Such an awareness is invaluable in deepening parents’ knowledge of their children and their relationship with those children.
Mindfulness also is crucial if parents want to know how best to evaluate a given behavior, and what, if any, consequences might be of value in influencing that behavior in the future. Being aware of how a behavior emerged from your child’s world is likely to be the best way to know how to respond to that behavior. For many valuable insights into various ways of joining mindfulness with parenting, consider reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn (1997).
PACE is a beneficial attitude to assume in developing a mindful approach to parenting. When PACE permeates parents’ interactions with their children, it fosters and nourishes the same mindful attitude within the children. PACE creates this mindful awareness by virtue of its components:
• Playfulness. A lightness of experience and an openness to possibility and meaning are inherent in playfulness. Without this lightness, parents are more likely to adopt a very serious stance in which they cling to one way of looking at an event and responding to it. When children experience their parents’ light manner of addressing an event, they are likely to feel safer, knowing that their parents are able to explore the event within the larger context—including their relationship—which is more important than the event.
• Acceptance. By removing judgment from experience, parents are more open to fully and deeply understanding a given experience. Within the context of acceptance, this deeper awareness enables parents to discover the best response to a given child behavior. Children, when experiencing their parents’ acceptance, are also more likely to accept the event that occurred and its meaning to them, and to participate more safely in the act of understanding it and in changing their behavior if needed.
• Curiosity. Within the clear awareness of the present experience, parents are then able to adopt a not-knowing approach to its meaning. Their intent is to understand, not judge, their children’s experiences. They are engaged in an act of exploration to discover which aspects of their children’s inner lives led to their behavior. In a mindset of curiosity, parents intend to experience their children’s perspectives of the immediate situation, and in so doing, they are able to understand the situation in a way that respects their children’s perspectives. The children, when experiencing their parents’ open interest in, and desire to understand, their experiences and perspectives, are more likely to explore their own inner lives alongside their parents with the same open, nondefensive attitude. With curiosity, parents are fascinated with their children and their world.
• Empathy. This clear awareness of their children’s experience of a situation or event, when associated with an attitude of loving-kindness and compassion, enables the best possible, flexible response to their children’s behavior. The children, experiencing their parents’ loving-kindness and compassion, are likely to feel safe and to be much more open when their parents focus on some sensitive issue that concerns them. The children are less likely to become defensive and more likely to explore the meaning of their behavior with their parents. When parents initiate a dialogue about an area of concern, bringing an empathic stance into the interaction, children are likely to feel that their parents want to understand and help them rather than devalue, criticize, or change them.
In the preceding chapter we explored how therapists need to be aware that parents seeking treatment for concerns with their children are likely to be experiencing intense negative emotions about themselves, their children, their relationship, and the entire parental experience. From that awareness, the therapist needs to co-regulate these negative emotional experiences before addressing the particular content associated with such states. Once their negative emotions are regulated, parents are likely to be more open to the task of making sense of the past and present family difficulties through developing and enhancing their reflective functioning. Such reflective functioning is crucial to the sensitive, high-quality parenting that we are proposing as a realistic therapeutic goal. Such functioning is crucial in efforts to reduce blocked care and to activate the brain systems that are necessary for this level of parenting.
When parents are experiencing blocked care, they are most likely in a defensive mental state wherein their focus is on the “badness” of their children’s behavior, not on making sense of the behavior. They want the behavior to stop, plain and simple. They consider behavioral change as the solution to their stress and the condition for any return to a sense of psychological safety within their home. Such a behavioral focus tends to lead parents toward a heightened focus on consequences, whether changing the consequences given for specific behaviors or making the current consequences bigger. When the solution to the problem involves such a narrow focus, it is no wonder that parents find themselves trapped. They exclaim, often in desperation: “If I let him get away with it, he’ll never stop what he’s doing!”
This is followed by: “I know that taking away his [privileges, playing sports, going out in the evening, favorite game, bike, etc.] seems harsh, but what else can I do? He can’t get away with it!”
Along with that comment is often: “He’s so mad about what I’ve done. But can’t he see that he’s brought it on himself?”
Finally, the parent is likely to say: “I just don’t enjoy parenting anymore. We never talk, or laugh, or share things like we used to. But I don’t know what else to do.”
Such comments, in the context of increasing spirals of behaviors and consequences, often only find temporary relief when the therapist focuses primarily on refining the consequences through behavioral analysis, making them more positive rather than negative, and negotiating (with the parents in control of the deck of cards) new contracts with the children. Continuing to focus on children’s unwanted behaviors and parents’ responses in terms of behavioral consequences often proves to be insufficient for the following reasons:
1. Blocked care is not addressed, making it difficult for parents to change their own behaviors sufficiently to maintain changes in their children’s behaviors.
2. Insufficient attention is given to increasing the parents’ approach, reward, child-reading, and meaning-making systems. Parenting remains a job, even a tedious or dreaded job, not the development of a deeply reciprocal parent–child relationship.
3. Parents remain in a defensive, evaluative state rather than in the open, engaged, accepting state that tends to have the greatest positive influence on the parent–child relationship. In brain terms, parents are not maintaining good vagal tone. The lower vagal circuit remains active rather than the upper “smart” vagal circuit.
4. The lack of activation of the child-reading system impedes parents’ ability to make sense of their children’s behavior.
5. All of the above suggest that the parents’ reflective functioning is not sufficiently engaged to ensure that they are able to see and succeed with the big picture—the parent–child relationship—within which the little picture—children’s behaviors—has both its meaning and its solution. In short, reflective functioning creates the understanding of the need for “correction within connection” and also that “connection precedes correction.”
Once parents have shifted out of the defensive state of mind, which is highly influenced by the amygdala and limbic system, and into the open, engaged, smart vagal state, it becomes possible to access the higher regions of the prefrontal cortex that are needed for reappraisal and for “making new sense” of their relationships with their children, and for accessing the deeper meaning of their role as parents. PACE is a way of engaging parents’ right-brain defense system first and then linking it to the therapist’s open, engaged, right brain, thereby helping parents to disengage from their protective stance and shift into engagement. Then, by maintaining the PACE process, the ongoing affective–reflective dialogue opens connections in parents’ brains between both the right and left hemispheres and also between the lower affect regulation system that connects the orbital prefrontal cortex and lower anterior cingulate regions to the limbic system and the higher flexible, reflective processes that depend upon the middle prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Example: Earlier we gave an example of a parent, Emily, who managed to have an affective–reflective dialogue with her 16-year-old son Frank. Frank had yelled at his teacher, and Emily was able to help both her son and herself make sense of the event and discover what he might do about it. Let’s now imagine that Emily had not been able to reflect on her son’s behavior. Instead she became judgmental and defensive and expressed her anger about it to a therapist for whom she sought help in deciding what to do about the behavior.
| Mom: | When I heard what he said to the teacher, I was waiting for him to get home from school, and when he walked through the door I let him have it! |
| Therapist: | What did you say? |
| Mom: | I let him know that what he did was unacceptable, that he would apologize to his teacher tomorrow, and that he was going to have some consequences for what he did that will make him think twice about being so disrespectful again. |
| Therapist: | And how did he respond? |
| Mom: | He got angry with me for not letting him tell his side! I let him know there was no side when he talked that way to his teacher! I didn’t want any excuses! |
| Therapist: | And he … |
| Mom: | He screamed “Whatever!” and headed for his room. And I let him know that talking to me that way would just make it worse for him. |
| Therapist: | So, that was difficult for you … and for him. What do you think bothered you the most about it? |
| Mom: | That he would talk that way to a teacher. He actually said to her that he did not “give a shit” about what she thought! I taught him better than to talk like that to an adult—any adult—and he says it to his teacher! Someone whom he should really respect. |
| Therapist: | I think that you’re saying that it’s very important to you that your son respect his teacher, and it bothered you a lot that he said that to her. |
| Mom: | Are you saying that I shouldn’t have gotten upset about that? |
| Therapist: | I’m sorry, Emily, if that’s the impression that I gave you. I didn’t mean that at all. I’m trying to understand what you were thinking and feeling when he walked in the door. |
[When parents move into a defensive stance during the conversation, it is often helpful for the therapist to apologize for communicating in a manner that would elicit such a response. This is not about parents being “overly sensitive.” If they experienced themselves as being judged by the therapist, then they are likely to re-engage without defensiveness only if the therapist is sorry for their sense of being blamed or judged poorly.]
| Mom: | You’re right! It is important to me that he treats adults with respect. |
| Therapist: | I think I understand. You raised Frank to know that respect is very important. What do you think was behind his comment to his teacher? |
| Mom: | He’s been acting more that way lately. Arguing a lot. Like he doesn’t think he has to do what he’s told to do. I think that he’s just too full of himself lately. |
| Therapist: | Any sense as to what that might be about? Arguing more, not accepting your authority so much, and maybe not accepting his teacher’s authority too? |
| Mom: | I don’t know. Probably just that adolescent thing where he thinks he knows everything. His parents and teachers don’t know anything. He never tells me what he’s thinking, so I don’t know. |
| Therapist: | I see. So you think it may be adolescence. Do you think that is why he doesn’t tell you anything too? |
| Mom: | Probably. Aren’t all adolescents that way? |
| Therapist: | No. Though some certainly are. Do you wish that he’d talk to you more? |
| Mom: | Of course I do. He used to talk all the time when he was a little kid. Even when he was around 13 or so. And then he just stopped. We used to be very close. |
| Therapist: | Sounds like you wish that you two were close like that again. |
| Mom: | I do. But I’m not going to let him get away with being disrespectful just so he’ll talk with me. |
| Therapist: | Oh, Emily, I’m sorry if I am giving you the impression that I think you should overlook what he said to the teacher. I don’t mean that at all. |
| Mom: | Then why do you keep talking about why he did it, what’s he thinking, do I want him to talk more? He did what he did, and there is no excuse. |
| Therapist: | I certainly am not looking to excuse him. I’m simply looking to understand it better and maybe to help you to figure out the best way to approach it. You’re guessing that it is simply his adolescence, partly because he doesn’t talk with you, so it is hard to know what he is thinking about why he did it. |
| Mom: | Why isn’t that searching for an excuse? Finding out why? |
| Therapist: | It would only be an excuse if it meant he is not accountable for what he did. With knowing why, he is still accountable. But if we have the reason, it would help us in knowing what is the best response to it—how best to respond so that it doesn’t happen again. |
| Mom: | So how am I supposed to know if he won’t talk to me? |
| Therapist: | Great question. We could guess. Especially if we knew of something that is happening in his life lately—with family, friends, activities. Easier, though, if he’d tell us what is going on … why he said that to his teacher and other things too. |
| Mom: | He just won’t say anything to me anymore. |
| Therapist: | And you sound like you’re sad about that. |
| Mom: | I am! He’s my son and we used to be so close! |
| Therapist: | And if we could help to get that closeness back, maybe he wouldn’t be so likely to talk like that with his teacher. |
| Mom: | So it’s my fault that he disrespected his teacher! |
| Therapist: | Emily, I don’t think that at all. I’m sorry if I gave that impression. I meant more that if he talked with you like he used to, maybe whatever was going on in him that led him to say that to his teacher—whatever that was, maybe he would have told you and you could have helped him to manage it better. |
| Mom: | So how do I get him to talk to me? |
| Therapist: | We can’t make him talk, but maybe if we helped him to feel confident that whatever he says to us about his inner life won’t be judged. He is safe in knowing that what he thinks or feels or wants will be accepted, not evaluated. |
| Mom: | I’m going to need some help. |
(The therapist and Emily now discuss the value of Emily accepting her son’s inner life and limiting her evaluations to his behaviors alone. Gradually she agrees that such dialogues were likely to help her son to speak with her more openly and to help them both make better sense of what was happening in his life.)
| Mom: | So I think that you’re saying I have to get back to the basics with Frank. |
| Therapist: | Yes, getting to know his inner life again, from his perspective and with your mind holding on to your love for him and your confidence in who he really is, under the rude words that he used with his teacher. |
| Mom: | I can do that, especially if you’re willing to coach me a bit. |
The brain-based research that we have referenced suggests that therapy would do well to combine the interpersonal and intrapersonal processes of empathy and mindfulness as robustly and intensively as possible. The therapist could incorporate these attributes through first facilitating the intersubjective experience of PACE within an affective–reflective dialogue and the resulting open engagement of parents’ smart vagal system. This experience leads to the strengthening of the anterior cingulate/insula regions, integrating areas of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, hippocampus, nucleus acumbens, and limbic system. Strengthening these pathways enhances the parents’ abilities to focus attention, be mindfully aware of self and other, and experience empathy. From there the therapist might encourage specific mindfulness practices for parents as well as related attention and empathy training tasks.
Reflective functioning results from the full integration of the five brain systems that are central in providing the quality parenting that we are advocating in this book. With reflective functioning, parents are able to both engage their emotional responses to their child, and guide these responses so that they are influenced by the meanings of their joint behaviors and the immediate situation. Within reflective functioning both the minds and hearts (the inner lives) of parents are able to openly engage the minds and hearts of their children.