Toddler Brain Habits Ruin the Best of Intentions
The autonomy struggle of toddlers is evident during a brief developmental stage when they impulsively hit, kick, scratch, bite, pull hair, or otherwise act aggressively. For most children, this behavioral tendency is short-lived, devoid of ill will or cruelty. Although troubling to many parents, this aggressive stage is normal and, managed properly, passes without harm.
The explanation for toddler aggression when I was in doctoral training was that humans are basically uncivilized, so toddlers must be trained in social rules to curtail aggressive impulses. Thankfully, better research since then offers a more informed take on toddler aggression. (In fairness to previous researchers, discerning the motivations of toddlers is difficult, as they aren’t terribly verbal.) It turns out that when toddlers are aggressive, they’re often trying, however awkwardly and vainly, to balance their competing drives for autonomy and connection. They try, with violent assertions of their autonomy, to get others to see their hurt, disappointment, sadness, or frustration. If the parent or sibling who is the object of the aggression understands that the toddler is hurt, disappointed, sad, or frustrated, the connection will become more secure. As a result, most toddlers want affection soon after a temper tantrum that might include violence. It’s not so much training in social rules that alters aggressive behavior as learning through experience that such behavior is unlikely to garner the compassionate response they really want.
Adults who get stuck in their Toddler brains under stress still act as if they can achieve a stronger connection by being aggressive or critical or vindictive. They inevitably hurt each other when they really want compassion, demand submission when they really want cooperation, and insist on “validation” when they really want connection.
Sometimes adults are aware of the hidden benign intention of Toddler brain aggression:
But most of the time, there is no intention to hurt when adults in the Toddler brain use criticism or shaming behavior to elicit compassion. Toddler brain shame-invoking statements like, “How can you live with yourself, treating me like you have?” are intended to draw out caring behavior that will strengthen the connection. Like toddlers, they attribute the negative response to their criticism and shaming as proof that others don’t “get them.” Instead of using Adult brain activities—reflecting on their behavior and reconceptualizing—they feel justified in continuing to use verbal coercion to get cooperation and to make others feel bad in the vain hope that their own pain will then gain sympathy and connection. Feeling justified makes them continue to do it even though they are smart enough to realize that it won’t work.
The motivation to seek compassion, cooperation, and validation is so important that we’ll consider how each is distorted in the Toddler brain.
Compassion in the Toddler Brain
Compassion literally means “to suffer with.” It includes sympathy for the pain, discomfort, or hardship of another, with a strong motivation to help. Toddlers are able to experience the biological substratum of compassion as they attune their emotions to those of family members—when you feel bad, they feel bad. But they don’t know what makes you feel bad or how to help. They want to give comfort, but worse than not knowing how, they see the urge to give comfort as a challenge to their autonomy. If they get too close to the hurt parent or sibling, they’ll lose control of their own feelings. Without the Adult brain boundaries of personal identity, they become easily overwhelmed by the distress of others.
Adults in the Toddler brain have the same dread of compassion. They often see the pain and distress of others as a bottomless pit that will suck them in if they get too close. Just as bad, they see compassion as a threat to their autonomy; if they feel it, they’ll have to submit. Yet they have no chance of balancing the drives for autonomy and connection without experiencing compassion for others.
Compassion vs. Submission
The Toddler brain struggle for autonomy makes it hard to distinguish compassion from submission. Experiencing someone else’s discomfort feels like giving up the self. They won’t know who they are if they let themselves feel what you feel. (“I can’t be me if I’m feeling you.”) Or if they let themselves feel the distress of others, they will have to do something they don’t want to do. (For example, if I recognize that my coworker is not well, I might have to do his work. If your teenager acknowledges that you’re exhausted, he might have to do the dishes for you.) Compassion feels like submission in the Toddler brain, because toddlers cannot appreciate the inherent rewards of cooperation.
Cooperation is willingly doing something to accomplish mutual or group goals or promote relationship harmony. Examples are doing your fair share on a rush project at work, helping the kids with their homework, or keeping the home a little neater than you might do if you lived by yourself, just because the neater home increases the harmony of the household. While humans hate to submit, we have a built-in reward for cooperation. This derives from a genetically transmitted trait that is even more important to survival in a highly complex social structure than it was in the dramatic struggles of early human history. Without cooperation, the meaning of our lives today would be reduced to trying not to get run over while crossing the street.
In the Toddler brain, the chances of effectively cooperating or gaining the cooperation of others are remote. Confined to a prison of self-obsession, adults in the Toddler brain interact with others from a position of implicit entitlement and coercion: “I have a right to get you to do what I want, and you will do it or else.” Who wants to associate, much less cooperate, with that attitude?
In the Adult brain, we know intuitively that people are likely to cooperate when they feel valued and resist when they feel devalued. If you want cooperation, you must show value. If you want resistance, all you have to do is devalue—criticize, demand, act morally superior, or otherwise show ill will, as adults in their Toddler brains are wont to do. But don’t think about showing value; that can smell of manipulation, even if you do it in the Adult brain. Focus instead on feeling value for other people. That means caring when someone is in pain or distress—showing compassion—and looking for something of value in the person, the interaction, or the relationship.
Adults in the Toddler Brain Use “Compassion” to Manipulate
I get many e-mails from people complaining that they were compassionate in their relationships, as I advocate, but that “it didn’t work.” What they mean is that, after showing compassion, they still didn’t get what they wanted. Being kind or compassionate to someone so they’ll behave the way you want or do something for you in return is an investment, not compassion. Like all investments, it’s risky.
The use of compassion to cajole someone into changing is especially tragic in abusive relationships, when abused partners are desperate to bring about change. Their desperation is misconstrued by abusers as pure manipulation, to which they respond angrily and often abusively. Compassion is a healing emotion for the person who behaves compassionately because it engages Adult brain power to access our deepest humane values. But it’s helpful to recipients only when they are in the Adult brain. The Toddler brain does not receive compassion positively. If you’re in an abusive relationship, you must understand that your compassion will change you by putting you more in touch with your humanity, but it will not change your partner. Only your partner’s compassion for you will change him or her.
Adult Brain Compassion vs. Toddler Brain Guilt
Adults in the Toddler brain are capable of guilt and remorse about hurtful or offending behavior. But those painful emotions lead to corrective behavior only in the short run. Guilt and remorse eventually produce resentment, anger, or abuse, as they are inevitably blamed, in the Toddler brain, on those stimulating the guilt and remorse. This happens when the discomfort of the emotions keeps us focused on how bad we feel rather than helping the people we offended feel better. The toddler who pulls his sister’s hair resents her for crying because it makes him feel bad. Having inflicted abuse, adults in the Toddler brain are likely to rush their victims into fully trusting and forgiving them: “Get over it, so I can feel better.”
To understand how unregulated guilt virtually guarantees recidivism, think of one of the most common types of guilt people feel in America today—not spending enough time with their kids. (Parents now spend an average of just thirteen minutes a day in task-free interactions with their children.) Does the guilt that most parents feel motivate them to be sweeter and more loving to their children, or does it make them more tense and irritable? Do they spend what little time they have striving for quality interactions with their kids or trying to control them? Feeling overwhelmed by their guilt, do parents back off emotionally and let their children do whatever they want?
Adult Brain Compassion vs. Toddler Brain Validation
Another major inhibitor of compassion is the Toddler brain’s perceived need for validation. Emotional validation is understanding and expressing acceptance of another person’s emotional experience. Young children certainly need parents to validate their experience, as the emerging sense of self is fragile and unable to reconcile thoughts and feelings with what is happening around them. But in most interactions between adults, validation is more complicated than what parents need to give to their toddlers. In adult interactions, validation must be mutual and respectful of differences in perspective.
In my long practice, I have never seen an adult who was resentful about not feeling validated by others, who was in the least interested in validating anyone’s experience that differed from his or her own perspective. In fact, adults in the Toddler brain are more likely to invalidate—reject, ignore, or judge—other people’s experience when they decide that it differs from their own. (In reality, people always have different experiences, as we’ll see later. But adults in the Toddler brain often fool themselves by projecting their experience onto others.)
Adults in the Toddler brain are especially prone to confusing the desire for emotional validation with a drive to be perceived as right, even if it means making others wrong. This is a terrible curse in close relationships, because it drains them of compassion: “I don’t care that you’re hurt because you’re wrong.” Having to be seen as “right” justifies criticism, disrespect, and contempt in their eyes. It also requires an illusion of certainty. They have to be certain to prove that they’re right.
Feeling certain is Nirvana to the Toddler brain in its struggle for autonomy. Adults who get stuck in the Toddler brain always opt for a simplistic emotional state that drowns out nuanced and often ambiguous intellectual analyses. (The Toddler brain simply cannot tolerate ambiguity.) But the emotional state of certainty is really a kind of intellectual illusion. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, increasing its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain we feel, the more we’re probably oversimplifying. The more certain we feel, the more likely we’re wrong in some respect.
High-adrenaline emotions, particularly anger and fear, create the profoundest illusions of certainty due to their amphetamine effects. Amphetamines create a temporary sense of confidence, making you feel like you can do anything. But they achieve exalted feelings of confidence by narrowing mental focus and eliminating most variables from consideration. That’s why you feel more confident after a cup of coffee (a mild amphetamine effect) than before it. It’s why you’re certain of danger when you’re afraid, that you’re a failure or defective when you’re ashamed, and that you’re right—and everyone else is wrong—when you’re angry.
Perhaps the most self-defeating of Toddler brain burdens is seeking to be validated without seeking to validate, which usually translates into needing to be right while making different perspectives wrong. Ironically, feeling validated brings only a brief sense of well-being, unless we’re able to respond compassionately in return. If you feel a need to be validated, it’s wise to ask yourself the following questions:
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, it’s time to shift your focus from Toddler brain validation to Adult brain empowerment and growth.
Habits of the Toddler Brain Ruin the Best Adult Intentions
It’s understandable why toddlers impulsively hurt their parents to try to get compassion and improve connection. But why do adults, with a powerful prefrontal cortex, continually repeat the same mistake? The answer is simple. They fall prey to habits that were formed in real toddlerhood and reinforced over a lifetime, which is remarkably easy to do. The brain is exquisite when it comes to forming habits. You might say it’s a habit-forming machine. Hopefully, the following discussion explains why habits dominate adult behavior.
A primary function of the human brain is managing and conserving energy. Habits—behaviors we do without thinking—occupy so prominent a place in human and animal behavior because they are metabolically cheap, that is, they consume relatively little conscious energy. The difference in mental exertion between a habit and a consciously decided behavior is hundreds of millions of multifiring neurons. In familiar environments, most of what we do is on autopilot, activating strings of habits that consume far less energy than consciously decided behavior. Each time we repeat the autopilot behavior, we strengthen the neural connections that activate it.
Highly reinforced neural connections—what we experience as habits—are really a series of smaller conditioned responses. (If the brain loves habits, it adores conditioned responses.) A conditioned response forms through the repeated association of two things, for example, “A” and “B.” After several repetitions, the occurrence of “A” automatically triggers the occurrence of “B.” Russian researcher Ivan Pavlov gained fame in the early twentieth century by conditioning dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. He simply rang the bell before feeding them. After a few repetitions of getting fed immediately after the ringing of the bell, the dogs got the idea. Of course they didn’t think, Oh, the bell has rung, we are going to be fed! They reacted automatically, on a visceral level, to the sound of the bell, which their central nervous systems had associated with getting fed. Pavlov called this phenomenon classical conditioning.
We now know that it’s not just behaviors that become conditioned. Mental states—thoughts, perceptions, sensations, and feelings—condition other mental states. Feeling sad might make you feel lonely, become more sensitive to sound (like footsteps in the hallway), remember losing your puppy as a toddler, and so on. Feelings themselves can condition other feelings. In the Toddler brain, sadness might cause guilt, which might cause shame, which might cause anxiety, and that might cause anger, regardless of what is happening around us. It turns out that the vast majority of emotional experience is a series of conditioned responses. By the time we reach adulthood, everyone has accumulated standard, almost generic emotional responses to the environment that run pretty much on autopilot; we think, feel, and behave more or less the same in the same mental states and social contexts, over and over.
More recent research suggests that many, if not most, of our decisions are made prior to conscious awareness by invoking habits of decision making. That’s one of the reasons diets ultimately fail. Before you know you’re hungry, much less that you want a hot fudge sundae, you’re already motivated to consume one. What’s more, conscious control of habits is limited, because it requires the most easily exhaustible of mental resources: focused attention. As soon as we’re tired or distracted, willpower breaks down and habit or conditioned impulse predominates. As researchers Wendy Wood and Aimee Drolet put it, when resources are limited, people are unable to deliberatively choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating habits. Attempts at conscious control of habits are usually too little too late. After eating the whole cake (because you’ve associated sugar and fat with certain mental states), you’ll remember, “Oh, I should have had a V8!”
Most of the literature about changing habits centers on reducing the reward of the conditioned behavior or substituting another behavior for the reward. That approach is unlikely to work with most troublesome Toddler brain habits, which are really a matter of conditioned mental states that lead to other mental states. To appreciate the difference, consider the Toddler brain habit of lashing out when feeling devalued. One obvious reward of the behavior is a release of energy; when toddlers feel something, they need to do something. This has led many authors and therapists to substitute another behavior routine for the same reward. That misconception led to now widely discredited anger management techniques, such as striking a punching bag or a pillow when angry. Multiple studies have shown that such behaviors may produce some short-term relief by expending energy, but in the long run they make us angrier, as they reinforce the conditioned association of vulnerable feelings (e.g., guilt, shame, fear) with anger. Angry adults, those in the habit of retreating to the Toddler brain under stress, have conditioned numerous associations of various emotional states underlying anger, any one of which can start a string of conditioned associations that lead to the lashing-out behavior. For example, the shame of failure or inadequacy, the fear of harm or isolation, and a dread of powerlessness frequently become associated with a sense of being wronged and feeling justified in a retaliatory response. Domestic violence classes have been shown to be unsuccessful in reducing violence when they attempt to invoke guilt and remorse for abusive behavior. This accidentally reinforces the conditioned association of abusive behavior with remorse, with the remorse coming after the abusive behavior. That is, the remorse does not occur until after the abuse, just as memories of the healthier choice of food are not available until experiencing the shame for having eaten the whole cake.
Adult brain habits must change the association of the Toddler brain’s vulnerable states—mostly shame, fear, and powerlessness—that motivate the aggressive behavior, whether the hidden intention is to get a sympathetic response from others or to achieve temporary feelings of power.
All of this is to say that the habit of retreating to the Toddler brain under stress, forged by the high intensity of Toddler emotions when there was no self-regulation available in the underdeveloped PFC, will undermine the most benign intentions, the finest hopes to improve relationships, and the best strategies to be successful at work.
It’s important to understand that Toddler brain habits will not go away just by understanding how they work or through insight of how you developed them in the first place. Once a habit is entrenched, there is no evidence that it can be unlearned. Old rats put in a maze they have not seen since they were pups are able to negotiate its twists and turns, and they can actually do it more efficiently under stress, when they receive electric shocks from researchers. Habits probably never disappear, and they definitely rule under stress.
In the next chapter, we see how we let other people keep us stuck in the Toddler brain.