4. Universal Truth No. 2: All Children Have Innate, Neurological Responses to Stress
The ParentShift Solutions Process outlined in Part Three begins with something we call “the zone.” The zone is a wholly unscientific concept that we’ve invented to help parents understand strong emotions, both in their children and in themselves. We, personally, have been greatly aided by the notion, as have scores of other families, and we hope you will be, too.
Think of the zone as the state of our minds when we are experiencing generally positive emotions. We are in the zone when we are feeling love, joy, excitement, gratitude, balance, and contentment. In the zone is also where cooperation is possible. It’s where we can easily make decisions, be creative, listen to what others are saying, and learn new skills. Sure, we might feel some stress in the zone, but it’s generally the kind that helps us get things done rather than the debilitating or defeating kind.
The zone is where we want to spend most of our time. It’s where we’d like our kids to spend most of their time.
But, of course, none of us can be in the zone all the time. Life happens. People say and do (and tweet!) things that hit us the wrong way and trigger deeply negative emotions, including extreme fear and anger. When that happens, we are “out of the zone.” No longer can we calmly and rationally work through our problems in a thoughtful way. We have become dysregulated, and our bodies need time to return to a state of balance.
Again, the concept of the zone is a term of art; there are no hard and fast rules here, and we urge you to use your common sense to determine for yourself whether you believe you or your child has left the zone—or is on the way out. Experiencing mildly distressing emotions—such as frustration, irritation, or disappointment—certainly doesn’t mean we have left the zone. But once those emotions pile up, any little thing may activate our stress response, and out we go.
The Real Reason You “Can’t Think Straight”
To really understand why we leave the zone, and how to get back in it once we’ve left, we first need some basic knowledge about how the brain works. And we do mean basic. The brain is an incredibly complicated part of the anatomy. Here, we have done our best to walk the line between accuracy and clarity, but we acknowledge that what follows is just a gloss of the brain’s anatomy and chemistry. Our purpose in keeping it as simple as possible is to help make you better parents, not better neurologists. We are indebted to Daniel Siegel, executive director of the Mindset Institute, for offering his expertise in a few key areas. To get a much fuller picture of the child’s brain, however, we strongly suggest you check out his books with Tina Payne Bryson, including The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline—as well as his famous “hand model” of the brain.
With that said, in a nutshell, we’ll be touching on three components of the brain: the brainstem (survival brain), the limbic system, and the frontal lobe.
1. Survival Brain
The first area, located near the bottom of the skull, is the brainstem, aka survival brain. This is the oldest, simplest part of the brain. It controls basic bodily functions and comes online at birth. It is why newborns, who “know” almost nothing, have the ability to eat, sleep, and breathe. Requiring no words and sensitive to any perceived threat of danger, brainstem functions are what allow babies to cry when hungry, scared, or hurt. Even reptiles are capable of this type of thinking, which is why you sometimes will hear the brainstem referred to as “reptile brain.”
Survival-brain reactions often are described as fight-or-flight responses. There are actually a bunch of “F” words—fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and faint—but they all refer to our base responses to extreme stress. When our brains perceive we are being threatened, our brains trigger a slew of physical changes that prepare us to survive by any means necessary.
Fight: resisting the threat
Flight: running away
Freeze: going totally still (a deer in headlights)
Fawn: submitting entirely (a dog showing its belly)
Faint: losing consciousness
Now, here’s an important detail: When activated, survival brain can’t be quickly reversed. This is because certain hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, are released into the bloodstream, both of which take time to dissipate. Our heart rates increase and pupils dilate, we may get tunnel vision, we may shake, and we may even experience hearing loss. Blood is shunted to the large muscle groups and away from the frontal lobe and extremities, causing loss of fine motor skills, judgment, and even, sometimes, words.
2. Limbic System
The second area, located in the middle of the brain, is the limbic system, or what is sometimes called “mammal brain.” Because it’s responsible for memory and processing emotion, the limbic system is the part of the brain that decides whether what we are experiencing is friend or enemy, scary or ridiculous. Babies’ limbic systems start lighting up in MRIs at six weeks old, which accounts for why most babies start smiling and displaying surprise around that time. The emotionality of the limbic system is why it’s called “mammal brain.” It accounts for much of the behavior we see in dogs, cats, and other nonhuman mammals. As human development expert Carrie Contey explained in a 2011 video called “Parenting the Triune Brain,” the mammal brain is all about connection. When children crave connection and fail to get it, they might whine or fuss. They may grow irritated or annoyed, or act crabby. But what they really want, Contey says, is for someone to connect with them, to show them they are being “seen” on an emotional level.
3. Frontal Lobe
Located at the top front of our skulls—right behind our foreheads—sits the frontal lobe. This part of the brain is the largest and, by far, the slowest to develop in humans. And it’s responsible for all high-level thinking: communication, problem-solving, logic, reason, flexibility, empathy, self-regulation, and other uniquely human capabilities. For this reason, the frontal lobe is sometimes referred to as our “human brain.”
Unlike the brainstem, frontal-lobe function requires words. Kids begin to have access to the frontal lobe at about a year, around the time they start talking, but their frontal lobes are not fully developed until well into their twenties. In fact, our frontal lobes continues to develop throughout our lives—making it possible for people to change their behavior (and their parenting styles!) well into adulthood.
The Brain in Action
Now, here’s how this works. A stimulus hits your senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, touch—and instantly gets combined in your limbic system with the memories and feelings associated with that stimulus.
The amygdala, which is part of the limbic system, registers the stimulus as either dangerous or safe. If the stimulus is perceived as dangerous, the brain moves directly and immediately into fight-or-flight mode. All other emotions are bypassed; the frontal lobe is inaccessible. Only survival brain is on duty, and the result is a big reaction. When we are in survival brain, we are completely out of the zone. For example, you are walking down the street, and a car comes directly at you. Your brain perceives danger. Your brain tells your body to stop thinking, and you jump out of the way.
If the stimulus that hits your senses is perceived as safe, on the other hand, your brain remains in a state of regulation. You continue to have full access to your frontal lobe, which means you have full access to language and reasoning.
Still walking down the street, for instance, you spot a beautiful 1964 Aston Martin parked up ahead. Your brain perceives safety, and your frontal lobe, which gives you the ability to speak, remains in charge. Now that’s a cool car, you think.
In The Whole-Brain Child, Siegel and Bryson call this process going the “low road” or the “high road.” The low road being the survival brain; the high road being the frontal lobe.
To be sure, our brain’s response to stress is a mixture of nature and nurture. A person’s genetics greatly influence his specific response to stress, as well as his threshold for withstanding it. But life experience is equally as important. What startles the average child in Upstate New York, for example, will be vastly different from what startles the average child in war-torn Afghanistan.
Regardless of these variables, though, stress is processed by all brains in the same way. When a person is faced with what his unique body interprets as too much stress, he is thrown into survival mode, where physical and chemical reactions close off access to higher brain functions. It’s why, after we’ve been triggered, we find it so hard to be reasoned with. When our spouse tells us to “calm down,” it’s a bit like telling our knee to stop jerking when a doctor taps on it. We literally can’t help it.
“It is totally ineffectual to have someone tell us to calm down. Although we may comply outwardly, our ‘innards’ race on.”
—DOROTHY CORKILLE BRIGGS
Our survival brain is both our greatest asset and greatest weakness. When the brainstem is activated by a true danger, it can literally save our lives. But when a stimulus is falsely perceived as dangerous, our survival instinct can get us into trouble. Survival brain robs us of our ability to be rational, logical, or empathetic, so when we’re in this state, our typical reactions to things are exaggerated. We say and do things we later regret. Also, when survival brain is in charge, we tend to scare the people we love, which can trigger their survival brains—the doublewhammy.
Worse, the more we operate in survival brain, the harder it is to stay out of it. And that’s not only a risk to our relationships; it’s a risk to our health.
How Prolonged Stress Affects HUMAN BEINGS
Although it is normal and healthy to experience periods of great stress, prolonged stress is neither acceptable nor benign. The more frequently a person is pushed into survival brain, the more likely she is to suffer serious consequences. It’s the reason so many soldiers come back from combat situations with post traumatic stress disorder; they have spent too much time fighting for their lives.
Here are a few of the outcomes associated with too much stress and too little soothing:
• Stress eating. Because stress triggers our brain to release glucose for energy, people find that sustaining a high level of sugar in the blood can help them “cope” with prolonged stress. This is one reason people overeat when they are stressed; they are trying to regulate their bodies.
• Self-medicating. Our bodies crave balance. We want to be in the zone and are constantly seeking ways to get there. When children, especially teens, don’t know how to make that happen in healthy ways, they may self-medicate, cut themselves, or engage in other unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to get back in the zone.
• Poor health. Highly stressful environments not only compromise a child’s immune system, it also makes it less likely for children to develop stable, healthy relationships—a risk factor in a number of long-term health problems, from depression to diabetes.
“Wired Neurons”—and the Importance of Self-Regulation
An expression coined in 1949 by psychologist Donald Hebb is fittingly known as Hebb’s axiom: Neurons that fire together wire together. Hebb’s Axiom means that when we are exposed to repeated experiences, the feelings associated with those experiences become embedded in our brain’s network. We may not remember why we have these feelings, but they are there nevertheless. For instance, a child who was consistently spanked for spilling his drink at the dinner table may continue to feel fear and may even flinch at the sound of a dropped glass as an adult.
This is not to say that the brain can’t change once it’s fully developed. It can. The brain’s plasticity, another relatively new discovery in neuroscience, means that our mind is flexible and constantly evolving. It’s possible to create new associations—to “reroute” our thoughts, as it were. But, as Hebb’s research showed, certain patterns of thought, particularly those associated with stress, are difficult to reroute. Children who are raised by parents who don’t self-regulate when things go wrong will have strong negative emotional associations with stress and will have to work twice as hard to rewire those responses later.
Recall that one of the very first things that happens in the stimulus-response process is incoming signals are combined in the midbrain with the memories and feelings associated with similar past experiences. When we self-regulate, we begin to create more positive associations with what could have been very stressful stimuli for ourselves and for our children. When our kids throw a tantrum and we remain calm, our brains will no longer automatically respond with anger or fear because those will no longer be the only responses we associate with tantrums. Likewise, our kids’ brains also will begin to associate our loving, calm response with the things that cause them stress, and they will start to learn to address stress in a calmer way.
Here’s an example: Some kids are not developmentally ready to attend preschool. Even those who are ready, though, may be anxious about preschool at first. Preschool teachers generally report that drop-off anxiety tends to be far more pronounced when the parent has anxiety or guilt around sending the child to preschool. Calm parents generally drop off calm kids, while anxious parents drop off anxious kids.
It’s easy to see, then, why self-regulation is a skill best learned in real time, through role-modeling, rather than later in life. The earlier we show children how to calm themselves, the more likely they will be to naturally calm themselves as adults. This process of finding ways to avoid and manage extreme emotions triggered by false threats is what we call self-regulation.
Getting Parents Back in the Zone
Recently, in the cabinet section of an IKEA, we noticed a dad shopping with his four-year-old daughter—or, rather, trying to shop. He was clearly having a hard time keeping the girl from wandering away. (It might surprise you to learn that the BILLY bookcase holds little appeal for the average preschooler.)
After a few minutes of trying to corral his daughter with increasing frustration, the father snapped. He brought the girl close to him and said in a harsh voice, “You’re starting to make me mad.” Soon the little girl was in tears.
Because we’re not idiots who go around picking fights in Swedish furniture marts, we didn’t tell that dad what we wanted to tell him. But we will share it with you:
He was mistaken.
First, by losing his cool, he had pushed his child into survival brain. And, second, he was blaming a preschooler for his loss of control.
Nothing, in and of itself, has the ability to “make us mad”—or disappointed or jealous or irritated. Just as nothing has the ability to make us happy. Our own bodies and brains and hormones create our emotional states. Anger and joy are inside jobs. It’s why a joke can make one person laugh and another person scowl. The joke itself doesn’t cause one particular emotion; the joke is just a catalyst. It can cause any number of emotions, or no emotions at all, depending on the brain that’s hearing it.
It’s a strange concept, but one that is really important when it comes to children.
When we tell children that they are “making us mad,” as IKEA Dad did, we send the completely inaccurate message that they are somehow responsible for how we feel—a message that may, if reinforced over time, lead to resentfulness, rebellion, or other negative behaviors.
In reality, children simply don’t wield that kind of power over us; no one does.
Now, in IKEA Dad’s case, he had two main issues. Number one, he needed a bookcase. (Those parenting books weren’t going to shelve themselves.) Number two, he needed to make sure his daughter was safe. (Wandering away put her at risk of getting lost or hurt.)
But Dad was not innocent in this situation. His expectations were not in line with reality. He brought a four-year-old to an IKEA store and expected her to stay still, for crying out loud.
Look, many of us have been in situations just like this. The point isn’t to beat up on IKEA Dad. (Having to assemble that bookcase is punishment enough.) It’s to use him as an example of how awareness of the brain’s stress response can better equip us to handle tough situations in a heart-centered way.
To be sure, some things throw us out of the zone no matter how much we wish they wouldn’t. And the irony is that the people we most need to stay in the zone for, our children, are the same people who often throw us out. Parents are often triggered by children’s innocent acts and then perceive those triggers as real threats. Our two-year-old smears yogurt on the brand-new couch cushions, for example, or our nine-year-old slams her bedroom door, or our fifteen-year-old blames us for everything bad thing that happens in her life.
But if we can keep our heads about us—and we all can—we give our children, and ourselves, a wonderful gift.
“The child is the stimulus, not the cause of your anger; he is not responsible for your emotions.”
—NAOMI ALDORT
from Harsh Reactor to Thoughtful Responder
Under the old-paradigm model, parents were reactors. A stimulus hit their senses, and they reacted hastily, and usually harshly, to that stimulus. This was parenting from the gut, not the heart.
OLD PARADIGM: STIMULUS
HARSH REACTION
New-paradigm parenting, which emphasizes frontal-lobe activity, requires that we hesitate after the stimulus, thus creating an opportunity for a more thoughtful, measured response. Everyone can train themselves to become responders, rather than reactors. It’s not nearly as hard as we make it out to be. In fact, it’s even easier when we divide that hesitation into three distinct steps. We call the three steps “Pause-Breathe-Ask,” and, together, they make one of the most useful tools a parent can possess.
NEW PARADIGM: STIMULUS
PAUSE-BREATHE-ASK
THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE
Step #1: Pause
When you are faced with an emotional stimulus and feel yourself slipping out of the zone, the first thing to do is slow . . . things . . . down. Consciously press your internal “pause” button. Freeze the scene. Just stop. Don’t say the first words (or even the second words!) that come to your mind. Don’t do anything. Take a nice, long pause.
Again, it’s okay to be frustrated, irritated, or angry. Better to acknowledge our feelings than to shame ourselves or deny our hostility. But nothing is gained from speaking—or acting—in that headspace. Certainly, there are some situations that will trigger an immediate and strong emotional reaction. When Junior is running full speed with a pair of scissors in one hand and his baby sister in the other, you’re probably going to shout. We’re not talking about these (hopefully rare) circumstances. We are talking about all the rest.
Whenever possible, give yourself a few seconds to just pause and collect yourself.
Step #2: Breathe
While you are paused, take a few deep breaths. Breathe in. Hold it. And out. Again. The more breaths you take and the deeper the breaths, the calmer your body will become. Remember, you are dealing with an automatic, survival-brain response here. Your brainstem just released a bunch of hormones into your bloodstream and literally restricted blood supply to your frontal lobe. By taking a few deep breaths, you are bringing oxygen to the neocortex and making in-the-zone thinking possible. Depending on how angry or scared you are feeling, it may take you up to an hour to truly get back into your “right mind.” But even a few deep breaths can take the edge off long enough for you to move on to step three.
Step #3: Ask, “What Does My Child Need in This Moment?”
You paused. You didn’t react recklessly. You took some deep breaths and allowed your body to reset. Now you are ready to respond to the situation in a measured way. To decide how to respond, you ask yourself, “What does my child need in this moment?” Remember, your intention is not to control or to manipulate your child into behaving a certain way. Your intention is not to stop their flow of feelings. Your intention is to be a loving role model who responds to challenges in ways that deepen the parent-child relationship and enhance your child’s self-esteem.
By asking what your child needs, you start to practice empathy because you are shifting the focus away from yourself and to the child. You might feel like yelling. You might need a good scream. But that is not going to be what your child needs.
By asking what your child needs in this moment, you bring your focus to the here and now. If your child threw a puzzle piece at you in the midst of a tantrum, you might be stuck thinking your child needs to learn to be respectful or to not hurt people. And you are right. But that is not what the child needs in this moment. If your child is tantruming, she is out of the zone. Full stop. She can’t learn the bigger lesson yet. What she needs first is a loving parent who models self-regulating behavior.
“Honey, I see that we are both really angry right now,” you might say. “I’m going to go get myself a glass of water, so I can calm down. Would you like a glass of water, too?”
Pause-Breathe-Ask is designed to get you, the parent, back in the zone and ready to respond to your child in a heart-centered way. By pausing, you interrupt the fight-or-flight survival response and create new associations. By breathing, you allow your body the time and oxygen it needs to recover physically from the innate stress response. And by asking yourself what your child needs in this moment, you force yourself up into higher frontal-lobe brain functions.
Reactors versus Responders
In this book you will find many references to responding and reacting. We don’t use these words interchangeably. When we say “response,” we are talking about replying to children in a thoughtful and measured way. When we say “reaction,” we are talking about replies that are hasty and reckless.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
—VIKTOR E. FRANKL
Table It
If you have been legitimately triggered and need to address the child’s behavior—as is sometimes the case!—one solution is to table the discussion until you are firmly back in the zone. Keep in mind, if you are only barely back in the zone, you are likely to slip back out at the slightest provocation. Write a note to yourself or add an item to the agenda for your next family meeting, and then go do something that makes you feel good. When you and your child are both in a better place, feeling calm and rational, revisit the issue. Nothing will be lost.
True Story!
A father and his young daughter were enjoying lunch one day when, suddenly, the girl became angry. She tossed her cup of milk across the room and threw her burger to the floor. “Normally,” the father told us, “before taking Parenting from the Heart classes, I would have become angry. I would have reacted by raising my voice at my daughter while insisting she clean up the mess, and then I’d take her to her room to experience a timeout. Instead, I used my new skills. After she tossed her food on the floor, I put myself on ‘pause’ and thought, ‘What does she need?’” He realized his daughter must be overly tired, so he gently picked up the girl and said, “You look tired.” She nodded. “Let’s go lie down,” he told her. He carried her into her bed and, while reading a book, she snuggled up to his chest and fell asleep.
ParentShift Assignment: Create a “Pause” Button
In Parenting from the Heart classes, each parent is asked to make a physical “pause” button. It could be anything. We’ve seen parents glue a button to a magnet, whittle a wooden button for a keychain, and just stick a picture of a big red dot on the refrigerator—anything. Making the pause button gives parents something physical to reach out and touch, or keep in their pocket, to remind them to practice the pause. If you have a tendency to be triggered on a regular basis, or have trouble keeping your anger at bay, you might consider something similar.
The Power of Our Senses
Sensory experiences are stress-relieving activities involving one or more of our senses: physical movement, vision, hearing, smell, taste, or touch. They vary greatly from parent to parent and from child to child. When you touch your child or offer him a high-five, you probably are giving him a sensory experience; if your child hugs you or holds your hand, he probably is giving one to you.
Sensory Experiences
The sensory experience is not just a concept, but a tool. When used daily, sensory experiences have the power to keep us from being sent out of the zone, and they can help us feel better after we’ve been thrown out.
There are no shortages of sensory experiences. The trick is to find the ones that work for you—and for your child. We are providing some examples of sensory experiences that participants in Parenting from the Heart classes have used successfully, but this list is just to get you started and give you some ideas. You will need to find the experiences that work for you and identify the ones that work for your child.
Physical:
•Dancing
•Deep breathing (Deep breathing is the ultimate physical sensory experience. There are lots of different breathing exercises, but the most basic is this: Take a deep breath in, hold it for a few seconds, and then slowly let it out. Repeat.)
•Exercising
•Hiking
•Running, skipping
•Stretching
•Swimming
•Walking
Vision:
•Holding a memento
•Looking at a beautiful picture or painting
•Looking through a photo album
•Sitting in nature
•Visualizing something calm or happy
•Watching the sun rise or set
Hearing:
•Experiencing the empathy of another person
•Focusing on the sounds of nature—birds, waterfalls, ocean sounds
•Listening to an inspirational speaker
•Listening to poetry/nursery rhymes
•Listening to wind chimes
•Playing music
Smell:
•Bath bombs
•Candles
•Flowers
•Food being cooked
•Freshly baked cookies
•Incense or oils
•Lotions
•Nature
Taste:
•Drinking a cup of hot tea or a cold glass of water
•Eating a snack
•Sucking on pacifiers, thumbs
Touch:
•Feeling a soft blanket
•Hugging, fist-bumping, giving high fives
•Petting an animal. (Studies have shown that when people have access to an animal before and after surgery they need two-thirds less sedatives. Part of the reason? Animals are all love and no talk.)
•Squeezing a stress ball
•Taking a shower or bath
•Wearing fuzzy slippers
Modeling Self-Regulation Is Vulnerable Work
It’s tempting as a parent to want to shield our children from the harms of the world, and we certainly don’t want to burden them with our problems. But unless we open up to them—in appropriate ways—and share with them how we are feeling, we deprive them of true understanding. To model effective techniques for dealing with stress for kids, we must let our children see when we are stressed.
So next time you feel angry, hurt, scared, or just plain beaten down by stress, let your kid in. Tell them that Daddy or Mommy is having a hard time and feeling pretty angry at some people at work. Share with them that when that crazy driver cut you off, it scared you. And then let them know what you are doing about it. Share your self-regulating activities. Tell them that you need to take a few deep breaths to help you calm down. Tell them you are mad and need to listen to some music to get back in the zone.
ParentShift Assignment: What Helps Keep You in the Zone?
Name some healthy sensory experiences that you think might help keep you in the zone, and then name those that might help you return to the zone. Try them this week and see if you notice an immediate difference.
Use this toolkit when you’ve been emotionally triggered and feel compelled to react angrily rather than respond thoughtfully. For example, your child treats you with disdain, screams “No!” at you for the billionth time, refuses to do as you have asked, breaks a limit, ignores you, hits you, embarrasses you, leaves messes throughout the house, mocks you with sarcasm, or just generally pushes your buttons.
•PAUSE, BREATHE, and ASK, “What does my child need in this moment?”
•Be a RESPONDER, not a reactor.
•TABLE IT.
•Give yourself a SENSORY EXPERIENCE.
•Be a ROLE MODEL for self-regulation.
What Throws Kids Out of the Zone?
Just as in adults, stress responses can be triggered in children for any number of reasons in any number of situations. Indeed, what causes a child stress, and how she responds to that stress, depends on any number of factors—developmental, temperamental, and biological.
Children under age seven, for instance, are highly vulnerable to tantrums due to their underdeveloped frontal lobes. Temperamentally cautious children have lower thresholds for fear than naturally adventurous ones. Children who are slow to transition are more likely to feel stressed by change. Likewise, a child’s physical condition—whether she’s tired, hungry, sick, or overstimulated—plays a large part in pushing kids out of the zone.
But punishments are among the few things within our control that cause children stress. We have already discussed how the ParentShift model is intended to help parents move beyond the punishments. But we want to spend some time focusing on a couple of forms of punishment that many consider more benign or acceptable, and delve into their relationship with childhood stress: timeouts and logical consequences.
Time’s Up for the Timeout
On the surface, forced isolation as a form of discipline may seem like a harmless alternative to physical punishment. Parents often use timeouts because they want to give kids time to cool down or to think about what they’ve done. Many parents think that timeouts teach kids that actions have consequences, and many parents believe timeouts work.
But it’s time to put the timeout in a permanent timeout. Here’s why.
Timeout: Forced isolation of a child for a period of time in reaction to a parent’s perception of unacceptable behavior.
First, the effects of timeout resemble physical pain on brain scans. Just as inflicting physical pain on children by hitting or spanking does nothing to calm kids down, the emotional hurt caused by forced isolation also fails in the calming department. In fact, from a neurological perspective, the difference between physical and emotional hurt is minor.
As the Mindset Institute’s Dr. Daniel Siegel reported on his website, “Brain imaging shows that the experience of relational pain—like that caused by rejection—looks very similar to the experience of physical pain in terms of brain activity.” That’s because timeouts make it seem like parents are only interested in being with their child when the child has it all together. That can be just as painful as a smack.
In this way, timeouts act as a serious stressor in children’s brains, and they do what all stressors do: they push children into emotional distress and out of the zone. Sure, kids will eventually calm down after a timeout. They are resilient. They heal. But just as bruises fade over time, the healing happens despite the punishment—not because of it.
“When we discipline with threats—whether explicitly through our words or implicitly through scary nonverbals like our tone, posture, and facial expressions—we activate the defensive circuits of our child’s reactive reptilian downstairs brain,” wrote Siegel and Bryson in a 2014 Time magazine article. “We call this ‘poking the lizard,’ and we don’t recommend it.”
Second, kids don’t learn any positive life lessons in timeout. They can’t. When they are punished, children get pushed toward survival brain and have limited or no access to their frontal lobes, where all higher learning takes place. Yelling at a child and then demanding he apologize, or putting a child in timeout and then hoping he’ll think “long and hard” about what he’s done—these are actions with zero percent chance of success, neurologically speaking. This is not to say kids don’t learn anything from timeouts. They learn lots of things, just not the lessons we want to teach.
“Parents may think that timeouts cause children to . . . reflect on their behavior,” Siegel and Bryson wrote in Time. “But instead, timeouts frequently make children angrier and more dysregulated, leaving them even less able to control themselves or think about what they’ve done, and more focused on how mean their parents are to have punished them.”
What children need in those moments of dysregulation, they say, are not lectures or lessons. They need help regulating. They need help getting back to center, back to the zone. As author Jane Nelsen said in her book, Positive Discipline, “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that we have to make children feel bad before they will do better?”
The single worst thing about the timeout, though, is that it dismisses all the child’s emotional needs at once. When kids are in timeout, there is no smiling, no power, no exploration, no connection, no feeling important, no attention, and no love. In fact, it sends the self-esteem killing message that our love is conditional and that our children are sometimes not worthy of our company.
As Alfie Kohn wrote in Unconditional Parenting, timeouts are really nothing more than “love withdrawal.” Behave, and you get our love. Misbehave, and you don’t.
Used over a period of time, we create patterns of dysfunctional communication that push our children away from us for years to come. It makes perfect sense. As time goes by and a child is routinely punished with timeouts (or any other technique or gimmick), the child becomes less and less able to effectively communicate with his parents. He hasn’t been taught to work through conflicts. He hasn’t been given an opportunity to try to make things right on his own.
Many children put in timeouts end up isolating themselves when they have problems. They stay in their rooms to keep themselves from talking with their parents. Friends become much more important. Friends become their sounding board and support systems.
Ty and Linda can recite case after case where parents they know bribed, rewarded, begged, and even demanded that their withdrawn teenagers come out of their rooms. The irony is that it was the parents’ own previous actions that taught the children to self-isolate in the first place.
The effects of forced isolation are evident long past the teenage years. Later in life, many adults find they have trouble communicating openly, honestly, and effectively with loved ones because they were never given the opportunity to hone their communication skills at times of great stress or tension as children.
“Time out [is] not new or innovative, but an updated version of the outdated practice of making a ‘naughty’ child stand in the corner.”
— ADELE FABER & ELAINE MAZLISH
Timeouts are still a highly popular method of discipline. But, like all forms of punishment, they fail us in so many ways. In addition to the reasons we’ve mentioned, timeouts also:
1. Push and/or keep children out of the zone. There is a biological reason so many parents report that timeouts seem to make things worse. The child who is being punished cannot and will not learn to self-regulate because his body is biologically responding to the stress that we’ve inflicted with the punishment.
2. Treat only the symptoms and not the causes. Using timeout is only a bandage for addressing the behavior. It does not allow the parent a chance to understand and solve the challenges that are causing the behaviors.
3. Act as a gateway to other punishments. When children outgrow timeouts, parents often feel pressured to “stay the course” by threatening other punishments instead. Timeouts often give way to revoking privileges, toys, or fun experiences.
4. Make children feel invisible. A parent sends the child to timeout so that the parent’s life can be happier. The child in timeout feels forgotten. And, in truth, sometimes parents do forget they’ve put the child in timeout.
5. Act as a manipulation tool. “That’s it, you’re in timeout!” or “If you don’t stop doing that, I’m putting you in timeout!” The child is being motivated and manipulated through fear, guilt, and punishment.
6. Model “revenge” behavior. The attitude of the parent is usually, “I’ll teach you a lesson!” This looks a lot like revenge, and, when modeled, children learn quickly to dole it out themselves.
7. Become a place only for children. As parents, we need to rethink the timeout process. After all, who really needs a timeout? When the parent is angry or frustrated at the child’s behavior, the parent is the one who really needs to take the break. Modeling self-regulation teaches a powerful lesson. It gives us the opportunity to cool down and to think of a healthy, respectful response to the child and his behavior.
8. Fundamentally disrespect children. Children do not like to be disrespected any more than we do. Yet we continually treat them with disrespect by punishing their behavior. They also are deprived of choices and learning opportunities, such as authentically expressing feelings and hearing others’ points of view, creating win-win agreements, and taking responsibility for their actions.
9. Kill children’s desire to cooperate willingly. Decades of research have shown that when punishments are used consistently over a period of time, they help teach children to become extrinsically motivated to avoid the punishment. That is, they have a hard time motivating themselves. It’s not enough to be good for the sake of goodness; they need to know that there’s something in it for them if they act the way you want.
10. Breed rebellion. Pulling away from parents is a normal developmental stage. And when teens begin asserting their independence, that can look like a little like rebellion. But serious rebellion—looking exclusively to peers instead of parents for guidance, shirking the family’s value system, and finding new ways to hurt or infuriate parents—is not normal teenage behavior. As Thomas Gordon, a world-renowned expert in conflict resolution who coined the term “win-win” and “win-lose” parenting, wrote in PET: Parent Effectiveness Training, “I am now convinced that adolescents do not rebel against parents. They only rebel against certain destructive methods of discipline almost universally employed by parents. Turmoil and dissension in families can be the exception, not the rule.”
ParentShift Assignment: Recalling a Time You Were Punished as a Child
Think about a time you were punished as a child. What happened? And why? On a piece of paper, first write about how your parent punished you and the thoughts in your head at that time. How did you feel? Then, after you’ve done that, rewrite the script on how your parents might have dealt with the situation if they had used heart-centered parenting skills. What could they have said or done instead? How could this have benefited your relationship with your parent? How might it have enhanced your self-esteem?
• How it happened . . .
• How it could have happened . . .
Logical Consequences—an Illogical Parenting Choice
Some of the experts whose work we have cited and celebrated in this book—including the great Rudolf Dreikurs—have, in their day, supported the use of an outdated method of discipline called the “logical consequence.” A logical consequence is an imposed penalty that has some sort of logical connection with the child’s behavior. For instance, an eight-year-old goes past her allotted screen time, and she is not allowed any screen time the next day. A four-year-old refuses to pick up her dolls, and so she is not allowed to play with the dolls the rest of the day. A seventeen-year-old gets home past curfew and is grounded from going out at night for two weeks.
Logical consequence: A penalty imposed by a parent or guardian that has some logical connection to the child’s behavior. Logical consequences are synonymous with punishment.
Some parents embrace logical consequences because they are, well, logical. They seem to make sense, and they make the parent feel responsive. Parents often believe kids must be shown that negative behavior is unacceptable, period, and therefore something must be done.
The problem is that logical consequences are just punishment in sheep’s clothing. They land on children the same way any other punishments do, and they bring about the same kinds of results. As Aha Parenting creator Laura Markham has pointed out, the newest research includes the use of logical consequences as a harmful tool in child-rearing. Just like other punishments, Markham says, logical consequences can “work”—but at a cost.
“‘Logical consequences’ is an example of what I call ‘punishment lite,’ a kinder, gentler way of doing things to children instead of working with them.”
— Alfie kohn
Unintended Consequences of Imposed Consequences
When a parent imposes a consequence, even a logical one, it may stop the offending behavior, but the feelings and behaviors it evokes in children are far from positive. Take a look at some of the unintended consequences of all punishment, including logical consequences.
• Anger
• Aggression
• Blaming
• Bossing
• Bullying
• Cheating
• Compliance
• Conformity
• Defiance
• Dominating
• Escaping
• Fantasizing about how a child can get revenge
• Fear of trying new things
• Fight-or-flight response
• Hiding feelings
• Hating to lose
• Hostility
• Lack of creativity
• Lower self-esteem
• Lying
• Negativism
• Obedience through fear
• Plotting against parents
• Rebellion
• Refusing to take responsibility
• Regression
• Resistance
• Retaliation
• Revenge
• Shutting down communication with parents
• Submission
• Tattling
• Withdrawing
And, as we have emphasized in this chapter, because punishment is a stressor, it’s most immediate impact is almost always to knock the child out of the zone.
What Does “Out of the Zone” Look Like in Kids?
The closer a child gets to survival brain, the more he is likely to exhibit fight-or flight-type behaviors. Some typical fight-type responses are associated with “bad kids,” while flight-type responses may be associated with “good kids.” Neither is healthy.
The Three Stages of a Tantrum—and What to Do about It
Temper tantrums are the result of extreme feelings in an undeveloped brain and begin around the age two and a half. Underlying reasons for tantrums include hunger, fatigue, illness, and, of course, parent-imposed limits on their behavior.
Some children may be especially susceptible to tantrums in response to seemingly mundane things.
Tantrum: A demonstration of rage or frustration; a meltdown. Tantrums often manifest in screaming, yelling, physical aggression, and irrational behavior. Both adults and children can throw tantrums, but they are only age-appropriate in children under seven.
In these situations, your job as a parent is quite simple: to remain calm and show compassion. Yes, these experiences can seem downright traumatic, but most of us have been there, and they are 100 percent normal.
According to a 2011 study published in the journal Emotion, tantrums have predictable patterns and rhythms. Researchers James A. Green from the University of Connecticut, and Michael Potegal, of the University of Minnesota, used wireless microphones sewn into the clothing of toddlers to record more than a hundred tantrums. They analyzed the sounds made by the toddlers and were able to define three specific phases of a tantrum.
Phase 1: Yelling and Screaming
During this phase, a child asserts her will mostly vocally. She will get more hysterical when a parent makes comments, gives explanations, uses logic, or asks questions. Even trying to talk through her feelings at this stage is ineffective.
• What can you do? It is helpful for you to stay nearby in the room. The child needs the safety of knowing you are present. Leaving the room can rile her up even more. Remain calm, neutral, available, and loving. See yourself as a compassionate witness and do not talk. In other words: Stop, Drop, Zero Talk. Just sit tight, providing the most loving energy you can muster.
Phase 2: Physical Action
During this phase a child may hit, kick, push furniture, or throw toys. If a parent tries to soothe a child by talking to her or touching her, she will typically become more physically aggressive.
• What can you do? Stay present! Your job is not to stop the tantrum, but to make sure the child does not feel abandoned and to ensure she does not harm anything or anyone. This may require changing locations or finding a safe location, somewhere neutral—such as a car or a bedroom—where your child can have the time she needs to self-regulate. (When you are in a public place, we suggest cutting your losses. Pay the check, leave the groceries, or politely excuse yourself from the party. Your child is your priority.) Whatever the case, you’ll want to say as little as possible and do as little as possible, while still making sure your child does not do anything to hurt herself, or a sibling, or you.
If the child tries to hurt you, you may need to take her in a bear hug, body facing out. But only do this if absolutely necessary. Stay calm; do not let the tantrum change your behavior. You may say, “I need to keep you safe, and I need to keep me safe.” As soon as the child’s limbs begin to slacken, release her. Always use the least restrictive way to keep your child and yourself safe.
It can be painful to be hit by a child. The fight-or-flight part of our brains may want to flee the pain. This is a mistake for two reasons. One, the child may feel abandoned, which will make the situation worse. Two, the child may become scared of her own strength. She may begin to believe she is “bad” or “mean” or “out of control”—which can either be internalized or used against you. (A child who believes she can scare you or intimidate you holds a powerful weapon. When in need of attention or power and unable to get those needs met, she may use this newfound power just to rile you up.) Better to brace yourself against the pain and stay calm.
Some kids hit more than others. But unless we are dealing with more severe, diagnosable problems, the phase always passes. The question is whether your relationship will have been weakened or strengthened by the experience.
Do Not Tell Kids to Hit a Pillow— Here’s Why
Your kid is hitting you. Should you give him a pillow or a punching bag to take out his frustrations? No. The reason is this: When you teach kids to hit when they are angry, you are creating a muscle memory—the physical desire to strike out when in survival brain. When I’m mad, the child’s subconscious thinks, my fists need to hit something. The feeling of anger becomes closely associated with the hitting. Better to brainstorm with kids to find other outlets for their anger so the message the brain tells itself is: When I’m mad, my body needs a chance to calm down.
Phase 3: The Sadness
After the physical stage plays itself out, the next phase begins. A child will feel sad or scared by what just happened. She may cry, whine, or fuss. She has lost her connection with her parent and now she wants to reconnect and be comforted. She is ready to return to the zone.
• What can you do? Look for the child to take a few deep breaths between crying. This may be indication that the surge of cortisol is dissipating. Remain physically and emotionally available. Your child could soon use a sensory experience—she may want a hug, or she may want to climb on your lap to cuddle and cry.
Stop, Drop, Zero Talk
The very best “first” thing to do when your child is having a tantrum is to:
1. STOP whatever you are doing in that moment, especially if it may be contributing to the child’s stress.
2. DROP to, or below, the child’s level. It’s hard to be helped by someone who is looming over us, and this signals that you are not just present, but you are there for the child.
3. ZERO TALK —Talking to tantruming children does little or no good. In this state, our words, no matter how soothing we might think they are, are often just impediments.
Embrace the Tantrum
There is something to be said for embracing big shows of emotion; after all, sometimes kids just need to get that explosion of feeling out of their systems so everyone can move on. A child who is very tired, for example, will often appear to be on the cusp of a meltdown the closer you get to bedtime. If that’s the case, instead of jumping through hoops to prevent the meltdown, a parent might just allow it to happen. Take deep breaths. Stay in the zone. Treat the tantrum as a natural thing. When it passes, the child’s body will have released itself of its pent-up energy and will be ready to face bedtime in a peaceful way. And don’t worry. You aren’t encouraging or reinforcing tantrums by accepting them. Rather, you model for your child calm self-regulation in the face of stress and make tantrums easier for your child to handle and move past.
Guiding Kids Back to the Zone
Once a child has left the zone, words are pretty ineffective. Regardless of the child’s age, the best course of action is to remain calm, stay present, and keep your mouth firmly shut. You can’t necessarily make things better, but you can make them worse. Then, when the rush of fear and rage have begun to recede, you can offer a sensory experience or affirm the child’s feelings (which you will learn to do in the next chapter).
One way to introduce young children to sensory experiences is to create what we call a self-calming area—a special place chosen by the child where he can go to be alone and feel better. He may do anything he likes in his self-calming area: Hug a stuffed animal, read books, listen to music, eat a snack, or have a cry. He may go there alone, or may ask you to join him. (When you think about it, we all have self-calming areas—places we go to be alone and think. We are simply suggesting you introduce that idea to your child.)
Remember, a child will be more amenable to sensory experiences if he hasn’t yet left the zone or is returning to it—not when he’s out of it entirely. Timing is everything.
Here’s how the self-calming area works:
1. Choose a place together. It does not have to be in your child’s room. It could be in the kitchen or in the office. It could be under a table or a desk. Or your child could carry a special basket, with all his self-calming items in it, to a different place each time.
2. Assist your child in bringing some chosen items into his self-calming area. Tell your child that his special items may help make him feel better when he is sad or mad. You could even help him post a list (or pictures) of his favorite sensory experiences.
3. Tell your child that this is his special place. Let him know that he gets to choose to visit it when he feels like he wants to calm down and that he can stay there as little or as long as he decides. His place and the items in it will give him the opportunity to relax, to have fun, to work through his feelings, and to become centered again.
It’s important to know that you may need to “get away” sometimes, too. So be a role model. Let your child know where your self-calming area will be (your bedroom, a lounge chair, etc.) and that, when you are feeling overwhelmed by your emotions, you will go there to help yourself feel better.
Again, it’s fine for you to gently suggest that your child visit his self-calming area, but it’s not a requirement. He may want to select a different sensory experience, such as going outside to play. The self-calming area is not a punitive timeout and should not be treated as such.
ParentShift Assignment: What Helps Your Child GET in the Zone?
Tell your child about sensory experiences and invite her to name some of her favorites. Write them down. (This might also be a good time to give her a chance to create a self-calming area.) Then, the next time she is beginning to leave the zone, refer back to the list and see if she will choose one of her options to help guide her back to center, when the timing is right.
Use this toolkit when your child is out of the zone. For example, your child is exhibiting strongly negative emotions, particularly fear or anger. He may be throwing a temper tantrum; he may seem out of control—screaming, hitting, biting, kicking, or throwing objects—or he may be shutting down and refusing to talk.
•Use “STOP, DROP, ZERO TALK.”
•STAY CLOSE and KEEP EVERYONE SAFE FROM HARM.
•When appropriate, offer a SENSORY EXPERIENCE.
•Remember the THREE STAGES OF THE TANTRUM.
•EMBRACE THE TANTRUM.
•When appropriate, invite the child to use SELF-CALMING AREA.