Figure 2.1 Adapted from Neufeld Intensive I: Making Sense of Kids course
I could well envy you
Because you have no inkling of these troubles:
The happiest life consists in ignorance,
Before you learn to grieve and to rejoice.
SOPHOCLES1
YOUNG CHILDREN DON’T multitask, think twice, or say things like “Part of me feels like throwing a train at your head, while the other side of me thinks I should use my words instead.” They don’t contemplate their feelings; they embody their feelings, and are moved to attack or react impulsively. They are anything but predictable, with hurricane-force winds hurling them from one emotion, thought, or behaviour to the next. They experience the world in a singular fashion—one thought or feeling at a time—so everything is a big deal to them. They will be on or off, up or down, hot or cold, good or bad, this or that, but never in between. Young children aren’t known for being moderate, fair, reasonable, considerate, thoughtful, or attentive. They know much better than they behave, and their good intentions seem to be short-lived.
Young children lack the capacity to consider more than one point of view at a time because their brains are still under development. They are either Beauty or Beast, which doesn’t bother them because they lack internal conflict and a developed conscience. Young children have an unparalleled capacity to defy logic and baffle their caretakers, as the following conversation with a parent of a preschooler exemplifies:
Mother: My three-year-old son just had a meltdown, screaming at the top of his lungs, crying, throwing, stomping, and pushing us away. He was really scaring his baby sister—and us too. I have never seen anything like this before! We tried to comfort him, but nothing worked. My husband got his blanket, and as soon as he gave it to him, he snuggled into it, started singing, and was happy! My husband and I are worried. Do you think he has a mental health problem? What is going on with him?
Deborah: Your son operates out of a preschooler personality, which is natural given he is three years old. He can only do one emotion or thought at a time, so when you gave him the blanket, his frustration was eclipsed by joy. He doesn’t have a mental health problem. Your son is just immature. In fact, if you wanted to study human emotions, young children are the best subjects, as they experience them in such a pure form, untempered by any other experience.
Mother: What am I supposed to do then? How am I supposed to grow him out of this?
Deborah: Love, patience, time, good caretaking by you and your husband. Even in the face of these emotional expressions, you need to preserve your relationship and help him express and name his feelings whenever you can. Eventually, hits and stomps should become words of frustration, and he should naturally show signs of tempering, self-control, and consideration between the ages of 5 and 7 if all is unfolding well.
Mother: (Gasps) Seriously? We have to wait that long? Why didn’t anyone tell us this? What am I going to tell my husband?
Deborah: That your one-year-old has the same thing, and there is nothing like the force of an immature child to test the maturity level in a parent.
THE PRESCHOOLER PERSONALITY stems from brain immaturity and is characterized by behaviour that is obsessive, endearing, impulsive, anxious, delightful, unreflective, generous, unstable, aggressive, resistant, compulsive, and anything but predictable.2 Young children experience a barrage of thoughts, feelings, impulses, and preferences but can’t hold them together to form a clear picture. The “disorder” in the preschooler is not intentional but developmental. The role of adults is to create the conditions that will allow the brain to mature naturally and not to battle against symptoms of the preschooler personality.
Advances in neuroscience continue to map out how brain development unfolds in young children and how immature young children really are.3 The brain is the most undifferentiated part of the body at birth, meaning its cells lack specific functioning and are open to being shaped by the environment, and development relies on contact and closeness with attachment figures to grow.4 The first three years of life boast the most neural activity.5 According to Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist, neural pathways will grow rapidly, allowing neurons to communicate with each other with increasing speed, efficiency, and sophistication. Engagement with people and experiences will create, activate, or strengthen neural pathways. The brain is a living system, and the most sophisticated of any natural or artificial structure on Earth. It possesses the inherent capacity to reshape itself and adapt according to its environment.6
Young children’s brains require, on average, five to seven years of healthy development to fully integrate; that is, for the parts of the brain to establish communication with each other. Brain integration is a global event that connects multiple layers of neural circuitry both vertically, starting at the base of the brain and working upwards, as well as bilaterally, with the left and right hemispheres connecting to each other over time.7 The integration of right and left hemispheres in the prefrontal cortex is critical to the development of executive functions but takes longer than in other parts of the brain.8 Executive functions include the capacity for judgement, flexible thinking, planning, organization, and self-control. They underpin the capacity for insight, imagination, creativity, problem solving, communication, empathy, morality, and wisdom. Until the prefrontal cortex is sufficiently integrated, a young child will remain impulsive and untempered.9 Brain development continues into adolescence but changes significantly between 5 and 7 years of age.10
At the root of the preschooler personality is an immature brain that cannot make sense of all of the sensory input and signals it receives. Left and right hemispheres develop separately before they can communicate effectively with one another. As a result, a young child can attend to only one set of signals at a time. The brain purposely places a moratorium on contending with competing signals to allow the child to fully make sense of one thing at a time.
When young children become engrossed in something, they will become oblivious to the rest of the world. This is the brain’s unique capacity to tune out competing stimuli in order to tune in on something. One day I watched a young child become entranced by a seashell at the beach. His brain worked hard to cut out conflicting stimuli in order to zero in on the shape, size, texture, and sound of the seashell. He was surprised and upset when he got splashed by a wave, as if it had snuck up on him. His lack of attention to his surroundings was not a mistake or sign of an attention problem but a strategic and purposeful design. Like blinders on a horse, his brain tuned out extraneous stimuli so that he could function, attend, and learn about a seashell in the midst of so much distraction.
When a child can sufficiently differentiate the signals from one another, the brain will integrate the signals in the prefrontal cortex with help from the corpus callosum.11 In other words, the blinders come off and reveal the world in two dimensions because the cognitive apparatus is in place to make sense of conflicting signals.
Figure 2.1 Adapted from Neufeld Intensive I: Making Sense of Kids course
When the right and left hemispheres are sufficiently developed, the prefrontal cortex will transform into a mixing bowl for conflicting feelings, thoughts, and impulses. This typically occurs between the ages of 5 and 7. A child will begin to experience inner dissonance and conscience will be born. For example, as a child goes to throw something in frustration, there may be a conflicting or competing impulse that says, “Don’t throw, as you could hurt someone.” Instead of their day being “good” or “bad,” they might tell you it was both. They may report that they wanted to take something that wasn’t theirs but stopped because they knew it was wrong. As a child enters the 5-to-7 shift, they are able to consider two aspects of a phenomenon at the same time and coordinate two different thoughts.12
It is the mixing of feelings and thoughts in the prefrontal cortex that ultimately puts the brakes on untempered acts and delivers self-control. Strong emotions and impulses find their antidote in competing strong emotions and impulses—they are meant to have a paralyzing effect when brought together. The internal conflict that is created by discordant feelings and thoughts brings emotional energy to a standstill. For example, the answer to fear is desire, which gives rise to courage. The answer to frustration is caring, which gives rise to patience. When feelings and thoughts are given enough space and encouraged to conflict, a wrestling match will ensue. The goal is to weave emotions and thoughts together, leading to a more mature temperament.
Figure 2.2 Taken from Neufeld Intensive I: Making Sense of Kids course
When the prefrontal cortex matures with hemispheric integration, the young child will transform as an individual and the preschooler days will come to a close. The importance of the 5-to-7 shift as a developmental milestone cannot be overstated. It is the ultimate answer to the preschooler personality and the birthplace of both personal and social integration.
With personal integration, the young child will be able to work towards achieving a goal, think before speaking, and restrain themselves when frustrated. They will appear more rational and reasonable, with more complex logical thinking. A coherent narrative can now form and provide the child with a consistent representation of self.13 A more coherent self will allow the child to be together with others without losing a sense of who they are. The child will leap ahead developmentally, with the appearance of self-awareness, control, and focused attention.14 Their impulsivity should subside and give rise to a more moderate, less impulsive being. Parents should rejoice at the signs of self-control in their child—one of the most critical developmental milestones in early childhood.
In terms of social integration, the capacity for impulse control will help a young child fit into social settings where turn taking, perspective, and consideration are required. They will be able to mix better with others and read cues for social interaction. Historically, the 5-to-7 shift has been used in most educational systems to determine when a child is ready for schoolwork.15 Furthermore, studies of global cultural practices show that children at this age group are given more household responsibilities.16
Brain development is spontaneous but not inevitable. Healthy development rests on the availability of human attachment figures and how those figures become caretakers for the child’s emotional system.17 Brain maturation provides an organic solution to the preschooler personality but cannot be forced, practised, or pushed. Children grow when adults create the relational gardens for them to play and flourish in.
APPROXIMATELY ONE IN five children stands out as being more affected or stirred up than their peers by their environment.18 They seem to be more easily overwhelmed, alarmed, intense, sensitive, and prickly in their responses, and passionate in temperament. Sensitive children have been called “orchid-like,” compared with kids who grow with ease like dandelions.
Sensitive kids show greater receptivity and an enhanced capacity to take in their environment through the senses. It is like they have radio antennas that are tuned to maximum receptivity so as to avoid missing any signals. Although the type and level of receptivity differs from child to child, they will show heightened sensory responses in visual, auditory, touch, taste, smell, kinesthetic/proprioceptor (related to physical tension or chemical conditions within the body), and emotional/perceptual areas. The combinations are endless, and each child will present on a continuum of receptivity with each sense.
Sensitive children may complain that tags in their clothes are too itchy, sounds are too loud, smells are too strong, or some foods taste really bad. It can be difficult to get their attention because they are bombarded by sensory information and are overwhelmed. They also seem to possess a natural brightness in comparison to other children because of their enhanced receptivity to information and stimulation. Adults might see them as being overly dramatic or reactive, but they are only being true to the enormous world that exists inside them. A mother of a five-year-old sensitive boy was surprised by his reaction to a change in location for his music lesson and shared the following:
Jacob loved his music teacher so much that when she had to change locations for her classes, we followed her from the sunlit classroom near our home to the dark basement music academy where she was teaching. In the first class, Jacob couldn’t settle in and kept running out the door. During the second class, he became so agitated he jumped up and down and landed on the teacher. A day later, when calm, I asked him if there was something about the new space that he didn’t like. “The lights buzz,” he explained. “I can’t hear anything because of the lights.”
Orchid children are more sensitive to child-rearing practices—they will either wither or thrive, depending on their environment.19 When they are raised in stressful environments, they are more affected than their easygoing “dandelion” counterparts. They are more likely to suffer from mental health issues, addictions, and delinquency as a result of such conditions.20 However, when sensitive children are raised under ideal conditions with the presence of caring adults, their development can surpass that of their dandelion counterparts: “An orchid child becomes a flower of unusual delicacy and beauty.”21 It is their relational environment that makes the developmental difference for them.
The sensitive child’s heightened receptivity to their environment can lengthen brain integration by up to two years. Instead of the 5-to-7 shift, they may need one to two more years to mature depending on their sensitivity levels and environment. The additional time is used to create and integrate additional neural pathways to accommodate their increased sensory receptivity.22 The goals are to provide conditions such that orchid children can rest in the care of their adults, to provide them enough room to play, and to preserve their emotional vulnerability in the face of distress.
One of the common mistakes made with sensitive children is to give them more sensory information because of their natural brightness. More is not better, and can trigger defences to shut out sensory information. They need time and space, with a lot of room to play, to process all the stimulation they experience.
ALTHOUGH WE UNDERSTAND that young children have brains that are still under development, this doesn’t prevent us from setting expectations for behaviour that are out of sync with their capacity. Their Beauty-and-Beast-like nature shows up regularly and creates implications for how we care for them. The following are six themes arising from a young child’s lack of personal and social integration.
Young children are unable to appreciate context or consider more than one element in solving a problem. They see the world one part at a time, making them blind to many cues and pieces of contextual information that adults take for granted. They can’t read context because they can’t hold on to all the different perspectives at the same time. For example, a pregnant mother took her three-and-a-half-year-old to an ultrasound appointment to “get a look” at his sibling for the first time. He started to cry uncontrollably as he watched his sibling move across the screen. As his mother comforted him with “It’s okay, the baby is all right, don’t worry,” the boy cried out, “No, Mommy, no! Why did you eat the baby?!” Parents and young children don’t often share the same worldview, which can lead to many misunderstandings.
Young children don’t stop to consider all the details before proceeding. They are notorious for filling in the blanks whenever they need to. For example, when a mother asked her five-year-old son, Alex, how babies were made, after his kindergarten sex education class, she was shocked to hear, “Daddy puts a chicken inside of Mommy and it lays eggs.” Young children are not bothered by their own ignorance because they can’t see the gaps in their understanding. A father of a three-year-old boy said, “Stop biting your nails or all of the dirty bugs will go inside your mouth and make you sick.” The child replied, “It’s okay, Dad, I just spit out the bugs when I chew my fingers.” Young children are literal and straightforward in translating the world around them, which is often as refreshing as it is amusing. As one child told her mother, “When I was little I thought ‘jersey cows’ wore hockey jerseys. I was really surprised when I found out they didn’t.”
Young children are untempered in expression and experience, with no self-control. They don’t pause to think before they act; they just move according to instinct and emotion. Political or social correctness doesn’t exist in their mindset, and they will share their ideas freely. A kindergartner was asked to draw a picture of his biggest accomplishment for his teacher. She asked him to explain, and he said, “This is me surviving my birth. This is my mom’s ‘bagina’ and my head coming out.” Young children are renowned for revealing family details, such as “Grandma, you have short legs,” or “I have to take a nap so Mommy can have sanity time.” Even with houseguests, young children don’t think twice about yelling, “Wipe my bum!” or telling visitors, “I don’t like your present.” The honesty of the young child is as heartening as it is embarrassing. One child asked her mother after taking one look at the dinner she had prepared, “Why do you always cook us food we won’t like?”
The challenge is to preserve young children’s integrity and not overreact or shame them for being true to themselves. If we are to invite our children to make sense of their world, we need to foster their tendency to report on it. With ideal development, young children will eventually think twice before speaking. Until this point, they need room to make sense of the world as it arises for them, though we can encourage this to be done in privacy with us.
Young children are not good at keeping secrets. This stems from their inability to attend to more than one thought at a time. Despite good intentions to keep something private, they “forget” in the moment because of overriding excitement. Similarly, young children are not able to tell a true lie, as they cannot hold on to truth and falsehood at the same time. With no back of the mind or internal conflict, they honestly believe what they tell you. A mother of a three-year-old said, “One day, I asked Eva if she knew how the fingerprint in my freshly cooked brownies had got there. With an innocent expression she said, ‘I don’t know?’ despite the fact there were only two of us home. I waited five minutes and then asked, ‘How did the brownies taste?’ Eva looked at me and said, ‘Oh, Mommy, they were delicious!’” It is ironic that lying represents a step towards maturity, but there is sophistication in being able to deflect people away from what you don’t want them to see. It requires a capacity to think twice, to have perspective, and to consider context.
Young children can’t help but act impulsively based on their instincts and feelings. They promise they will never hit again only to repeat the same offence within minutes. Young children see their impulses and actions as not being under their control or as separate from themselves. They can be just as surprised when their arms have hits or when their teeth want to bite. Matthias, a four-year-old boy, said to his mother, “How can my arms have hits for someone I love?” They often end up in altercations with other young children, with foul eruptions over turf and possessions. Their frustration often arises based on their own, personal form of expression, with good intentions eclipsed by strong emotions. Young children don’t think; they react, are moved to attack, and are impulsive—this is the young child in action. The capacity for only one thought or feeling at a time underlies outbursts of frustration and aggression.
Young children’s lack of internal conflict contributes not only to eruptions of frustration but to the escalation of fun as well. If a little splash was fun, then a bigger splash must be “funner.” Unadulterated joy is the reason why the hugs of young children possess healing properties and their giggles are so infectious. Whoever captures their hearts is truly adored, as their delight contains no hidden agendas or unfinished business. Their hearts carry no bitterness, no unmet expectations, and no resentments. Their love is pure in its expression. One mother said, “Near the end of Great-Grandpa’s life, he became quite frustrated with his failing body and trips to the hospital. One of his last true joys was spending time with his youngest great-grandchildren. Their innocent way of being in the world was the medicine he needed. Their hugs had a magical quality to them and improved his vital signs.” Young children’s experience of happiness is unfettered by the potential of loss. Ignorance can truly be blissful.
Young children are prone to displaced or pendulum-like reactions, and swing from one experience and emotion to the next. There is no moderation or middle ground, and fairness is defined as having got what they wanted. They may act compliant one minute only to turn around and dig in their heels with resistance the next. Their worldviews are either black or white, with a clear absence of grey. Not only do young children swing from one emotion to the next, but they take their parents with them. In a study on parental life satisfaction, parents of young children had greater emotional swings from joy to frustration than their childless counterparts.23
As young children can experience only one emotion at a time, one feeling can displace another, creating confusion for their caretakers. For example, I watched a four-year-old boy who was upset with his mother when she told him he had to leave the beach. As his mother moved to comfort him, he hit her. She backed away and said, “No, Felix, you don’t hit.” Seeing the anger on his mother’s face and her retreat, his frustration was quickly displaced by fear. He cried out in alarm, “Mama, Mama, Mama!” When the mother saw Felix’s anguish, she rushed to his side again. As the reconnection was made, his alarm subsided only to be replaced by his residual frustration at having to leave the beach. He hit her again, and she backed away and said, “No, Felix! I told you not to hit. I am not going to help you if you keep hitting me!” As the threat of separation loomed before him once again, so did Felix’s alarm, and he cried out for his mother. While the mother moved in and picked him up, I held my breath, waiting for the inevitable. As Felix’s fears were soothed, out came his fists and he landed another punch on his mother. I watched them cycle through one feeling after the other as if stuck on a hamster wheel of displaced emotions. What Felix needed was help moving his frustration to sad tears, which is discussed in chapter 7.
Young children are unable to operate out of two reference points at a time, which is why magic and imagination come to life in a young child’s world. The absence of any logic behind how Santa can deliver presents to everyone, how tooth fairies exchange teeth for money, and how Easter bunnies lay chocolate eggs doesn’t bother them. They can’t see the big picture or any gaps in logic in magical stories. Their inability to coordinate two thoughts gives rise to innocence and to belief in whatever they are told. This magical period will come to a close when they are able to see two sides to every story. I remember my astonishment one year when I looked at Santa Claus and realized he was also my grandfather. I was struck by a kind of double vision I had never experienced before. Although the adults protested and denied the truth of my observation, I could not be shaken. Although I lost Santa Claus that night, and most things magical, by the age of 7 I had gained perspective, an appreciation of context, and the capacity to make sense of my world in a more complex way.
Young children struggle with orienting to more than one person at a time. They can openly profess their love for Daddy one moment only to turn around and declare, “I don’t like you anymore. I want Mommy.” Parents can feel rejected, but it typically has little to do with the parent and more with a young child’s lack of ability to attend to more than one person at a time. Picking them up from daycare or preschool while talking to the teacher may result in a child’s silliness or frustration. They don’t know which adult to orient to in the moment—it’s like playing musical people instead of musical chairs.
A young child’s inability to operate out of two reference points means that when engaged with one thing, they are usually inattentive to others in their environment—for example, being called for dinner when they are playing. Until the 5-to-7 shift (7-to-9 for sensitive children), their attention systems are still under development and they may appear to not listen when spoken to, make careless mistakes, lose attention on tasks that are no longer interesting, get sidetracked easily, struggle to organize activities, lose items, and appear forgetful.
The immaturity of young children’s attention systems and their inability to attend to more than one thing at a time is an important consideration when it comes to diagnosing attention problems. Young children naturally appear to be inattentive, impulsive, and hyperactive, meeting many of the diagnostic criteria used to assess attention problems. The diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) skyrocketed in children by 500 percent from 1980 to 2000,24 making it the most commonly diagnosed childhood psychiatric disorder.25 In Canada, prescriptions for Ritalin, a common stimulant used to treat ADHD, increased by 55 percent for kids under the age of 17 over just four years.26 The American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines for diagnosing ADHD allow children as young as 4 to be considered,27 despite the typical age of brain integration occurring between 5 and 7, or 7 and 9 for sensitive children. As a result, there is now a greater chance for attention problems to be diagnosed in children who have immature attention systems rather than “disordered” brains.28 Misdiagnosis of young children as attention disordered rather than immature is real, as concluded in a number of studies involving kindergarten children in Canada and the United States. Sixty percent of the kindergarten children most likely to be diagnosed with ADHD shared the youngest birthdays in their class.29
Young children are unable to get the concept of work or to exhibit goal-directed behaviour where sacrifice is required. This tends to worry many parents who view perseverance and sacrifice to be at the heart of success in life, from sports and hobbies to school and work. They are exasperated at their young child’s shortsightedness and perceived lack of motivation, their tendency to give up too easily when something becomes too difficult. The concept of work is lost on young children, because without mixed feelings and thoughts, they are unable to delay gratification. In order to work, you need to forgo gratification and push through frustration that may arise.
A father of a four-year-old shared the following:
I took my son golfing. He was having fun until he got frustrated when the ball didn’t go where he wanted it. I told him to be patient, but he just got mad and threw down his club and said he quit. I told him to keep trying and to work at it, but he started to yell and scream. What am I supposed to do when he is like this? Is he lazy? He doesn’t work at anything and just gives up when it’s too hard. That’s not what I want for him.
As the father realized his son was unable to persevere or work towards a goal, he softened in his expectations of him.
The best way to help young children persevere with a task is through play—the antithesis of work. Agendas that push work on them too early will backfire and can stir up frustration and resistance.
Young children only do one person at a time, and it is usually them. Their attention will be on either themselves or another person, making them appear highly egocentric or an avid follower of other people. With room for only one person in mind, they cannot do togetherness without a loss of being a separate person. Young children don’t move from “me” to “we”; they move from “me” to “you.”
A young child begins to have a clear sense of self by age 2, but before this they do not see the world as being separate from themselves.30 One of the goals of early childhood is to cultivate this emerging self and solidify it. Children will require space, time, and support to understand who they are instead of being preempted by the needs or desires of others. Preschooler integrity and selfhood are the prerequisites for participation as a community member in adulthood.
Young children will sometimes appear “inconsiderate” when they act in accordance with their own needs. They think nothing of telling someone, “Pick me up,” despite that person’s arms being full of groceries or other children. They can display deep concern for others too, giving away their possessions only to later demand, “I want them back!” The current emphasis in early childhood on getting along and considering the needs of others eclipses the more important developmental goal. Young children first need to understand who they are. Personal integration and the cultivation of selfhood come before social integration and interdependence.
THE NATURE OF the young child is part Beauty and part Beast, leaving parents to long for the development of self-control, patience, and consideration. Although brain development cannot be hurried, there are a number of strategies for dealing with immaturity that will support growth and buy time until maturity provides the ultimate answer to impulsive, inconsiderate, and egocentric behaviour.
Adults can compensate for young children’s immaturity by assuming responsibility for keeping them out of trouble through anticipating problems before they occur. Assuming a caretaking stance instead of a punitive one is key to managing immaturity. Young children don’t do well on unsupervised playdates, sharing favourite toys, or figuring out park rules for themselves. They need adult supervision and direction when interacting with each other. The more parents make sense of young children, the more those parents will be able to predict when children are likely to get into trouble and get there first.
When trouble ensues, among the first questions to ask are whether the child was placed in a situation that was too much for them developmentally and whether expectations for behaviour were realistic. As parents reflect upon incidents, a child can reveal themselves in a new way, as one mother shared: “I took my child to an indoor play centre, but he started to melt down after an hour. In hindsight, I think it was actually too much for him. A half hour would have been better.”
Structure and routine can compensate for a young child’s lack of organizational and social abilities. When young children get used to a routine, less explicit directions are required and little room is left for improvisation. Structure and routine provide guidelines for behaviour and expectations, which help a young child appear more mature than they actually are. Given that young children lack perspective and operate with incomplete information, structure and routine will help compensate for their gaps in understanding. Routines can be part of everyday events, such as waking up, eating, and bedtime. Routines can help make things smoother, as the child knows what to predict at the same time each day, and routines also provide them with a sense of security. As one child care provider said, “We usually eat lunch in my kitchen, but for a change one day, I took the kids for a picnic in the backyard. When we came back inside, they all sat down at the kitchen table waiting to eat their lunch. It was like they couldn’t move on with their day without going through all of our regular routine.”
Young children can’t read all the social cues or fully grasp what is expected of them in many situations. In scripting a young child, an adult purposively gives them cues, directions, or bearings in a situation where they might be confused or need to look “mature.” For example, a parent can script a child’s interactions for greeting someone: “A hug is a good idea, but not a kiss on the mouth.” You can tell them ahead of time, “Preschool will involve sitting in a circle and putting up your hand to speak.” If adults can anticipate and consider what new situations mean for a young child, they are better able to give them directions in advance for appropriate behaviour. If children are not attached to the adult giving the directions, they are unlikely to follow scripting instructions. Only strong relationships will activate a young child’s desire to follow directions.
When a young child’s emotions erupt or they behave immaturely, adults need to step in to manage the situation from their caretaking position. This is the case on the playground as much as it is in the home with sibling conflict. It is important in these situations to keep your relationship intact and not to displace one emotion in the young child for another. For example, when a young child is frustrated and lashes out, an adult may alarm them by yelling or threatening them to make them stop. The child’s frustration may be replaced by fear, which can fan their emotional upset. Furthermore, when a parent displaces the child’s original emotion, the moment is lost to help them understand what stirred the child up in the first place.
Most of children’s problematic behaviour is driven by frustration or alarm, and to teach children words to replace hits, kicks, shoves, and yells, we need opportunities to connect impulses with “feeling” words. We can do this by acknowledging and reflecting children’s feelings while giving words to their impulses. When we alarm a child in order to get compliance, we will probably thwart any understanding of what emotion they were experiencing before that. Displaced emotions can be unleashed on other children, pets, or toys. Chapter 6 addresses children’s emotions, and chapter 7 focuses specifically on frustration and aggression.
Adults can model for a young child how the brain will naturally integrate conflicting feelings and thoughts with phrases such as “Part of me feels this way, part of me wants to do something else,” or “On the other hand...,” or “I feel very mixed about this.” When adults convey that it is okay to express internal conflict and dissonance, a child will start to get the message that there is merit in considering multiple perspectives and feelings in decision making.
PARENTS ROUTINELY ASK when they can expect to see signs of integration in feelings and thoughts, and what it looks like. Although the timing differs from child to child, there are a number of common signs that can start to appear as young as age 4 and increase in frequency as they near 5, with ideal development.
Reflection is one of the first signs that a young child’s prefrontal cortex is transforming into a mixing bowl for conflicting thoughts or feelings. I asked a father if he saw any signs of contemplation in his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Maeve, and he said, “It’s funny you ask this because I remember the other night when the waitress asked Maeve if she was done her dinner, Maeve looked up at her and paused and said, ‘Maybe.’ Maeve’s eyes then looked sideways as if searching for an answer in her head. She then turned back to the waitress and said, ‘Yes, my tummy says it is all done.’” Signs of reflection can appear subtly like this—a pause before proceeding, or a moment of silence before speaking. Spontaneous contemplation can start to occur around the age of 4, quickly appearing and disappearing. Adults can start to prime a child at this age by asking them what they think, but it shouldn’t be forced, contrived, or made into a work project. Parents can just take comfort that there are signs of maturity appearing.
As the prefrontal cortex evolves into a mixing bowl, conflicting thoughts will appear before mixed feelings. Emotions are intense signals, making them more challenging to mix. As thoughts start to mix, a young child may make statements such as “Part of me wants to go to the park, but part of me wants to stay home.” These contradictory statements indicate that the child can hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time. They may start to show amusement at hearing knock-knock jokes or puns, as one boy did: “Hey, Mommy, know what the cat says? It’s purrrrrfect!”
A parent of a kindergartner told the following story, demonstrating the unfolding of mixed feelings:
Mother: (Driving kids to school) “What are you going to tell the kids about your dream catcher for show and tell?”
Tabitha: “I am not going to show them.”
Mother: “But at home you were so excited to tell the kids about your dream catcher. Are you scared? Is there one side of you excited to show it, but the other side is scared?”
Tabitha: “Mama, no sides of me want to show those kids my dream catcher.”
Although the mother was disappointed that fear and desire could not mix, she was delighted to hear that Tabitha had more than one side to her. Fear and desire are some of the hardest feelings to mix because of their intensity. When fear and desire can be felt at the same time, they will result in courage, which drives the capacity to move forward towards one’s desire. Courage is not the absence of fear but, rather, fear balanced by desire.
As conflicting feelings and impulses start to mix, young children can spontaneously start to shake and shudder, grit their teeth, or show some other physical manifestations of conflict. One side may want to move away while the other side is moving towards; their inner tension is palpable. A mother of a five-and-a-half-year-old girl described this tension in her daughter: “The other day Amanda was frustrated and went to throw a train at her brother. I was shocked when she didn’t throw it but held on to it as she started swinging her arms above her head, back and forth, to and fro. It was like one hand wanted to throw the train, but the other hand didn’t. Sometimes she is able to stop herself, she is changing.”
Conflicting feelings that start to mix may appear with expressions such as “I half hate you right now!” or “I half love you right now” or “I want to hit you but I won’t.” A mother of a four-and-a-half-year-old said,
Last week we were at a playground and Zach was surrounded by toddlers. One toddler gave Zach a shove. I started hurrying over, but Zach didn’t move. He just looked at the toddler. That night, at bedtime, I started a conversation with him.
Mom: “I noticed a toddler pushed you today at the playground. You didn’t push back. What was happening for you?”
Zach: “When he pushed me, all I felt was my caring.”
Mom: “Your caring? Did you have any pushes in you?”
Zach: “No. No pushes. But I did have a hug in me for him.”
Mom: “A hug?! Where did the hug come from?”
Zach: “Oh, Mama! That little guy was having a hard time. He needed a cuddle.”
Mom: “Why didn’t you give him that hug?”
Zach: “I thought that if I went to hug him, he’d push me again.”
As the mother reflected on Zach’s behaviour, she added, “I don’t think I would have recognized how significant our conversation was without understanding mixed feelings. As well, I couldn’t at first make sense of his ‘paralysis’—why wasn’t he moving? But I think he was stuck in ‘hug him—don’t hug him.’ It’s a baby step, but it feels incredibly important to me.”
As young children’s cognitive and emotional systems become increasingly integrated, their pendulum-like swings in behaviour will start to diminish. They will start to see two sides to the story and become more civilized as they interact with others. Although parents may rejoice at the tempering this brings, a young child will never be so pure or alone in their thoughts or feelings again. As a mother of a five-and-a-half-year-old girl stated,
Anna was tormented by her mixed feelings and thoughts when they started to appear. She was trying to fall asleep one night and complained it wasn’t fair her younger sister seemed to have an easier time than her. In anger, Anna looked at me and said, “I just can’t sleep, my head just wants to think and think and think. How can I make it be quiet?” I managed to contain my excitement and told her that she was just getting a big-girl brain and it was just busier. Anna said in anger, “I don’t want a big-girl brain. I just want to go to sleep like my sister.”
In our eagerness to celebrate a young child’s more civilized form, we can miss what will be lost. Gone will be the purity and innocence that comes with experiencing the world one thought or feeling at a time. No longer will their lives feel unfettered, unrestrained, and uncomplicated by choice. Why would a child be overjoyed to learn they will have a conscience that speaks to them regularly and that will give rise to conflicting thoughts and feelings? When the prefrontal cortex evolves into a mixing bowl, the organic solution to immaturity spontaneously appears, but that child’s internal world will never be as peaceful or quiet again. However, there are important gains to be had from integration, as this father states: “I knew when my son no longer had a preschooler brain when he came to me with his hand in a fist and said proudly, ‘Look, Daddy, look what I just did! I held my fist over Sara’s head and wanted to thump her, but I didn’t.’ The look of pride on his face was amazing, like he was saying, ‘I can’t believe I can control this body of mine when I am frustrated.’” As the father relayed his story, it became clear how a child will experience such dignity in realizing their human potential as a tempered and self-controlled being.