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Children Behaving Badly & How Brain Science Helps Us Give The Best Teaching Ever!
Aired: 11-04-2012

Children Behaving Badly & How Brain Science Helps Us Give The Best Teaching Ever!

We can do as we've always done and get what we've always got!  That's OK if the results of what we've always done have been good but what if we are banging our heads against a brick wall and feel we are getting nowhere?  Brain Science can help...

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Video Transcript

We can do as we've always done and get what we've always got!  That's OK if the results of what we've always done have been good but what if we are banging our heads against a brick wall and feel we are getting nowhere?  Brain Science can help...

Behaviour is essentially the interaction between one individual and others and between the individual in different situations.  Behaviour itself isn’t the issue, behaviour just ‘is’.  The problems come when the individual – child or adult – uses the inappropriate type of behaviour for the interaction.  At the heart of being able to meet these interactions successfully is self-control and underpinning that is self-awareness.

This all sounds like the old story about the ‘House that Jack Built’!  Build the house foundations right and we are ‘more likely’ to be able to weather storms, come through unscathed ourselves and be able to provide the best kind of sheltering for the most important people in our lives.  Get them wrong and it turns into a Shakespearean tragedy like Richard III where “…for want of a nail” in the horse’s shoe the battle was lost!  It is often not the huge things in life that count it is the attention to detail – to following through on what we believe is right, in consistency that means that appropriate behaviour is ‘more likely’ to be in our control and that of our children!

You’ll note I often use the phrase ‘more likely’ – it is important to do our best but there are no guarantees in this world.  We are not perfect and children can learn a lot, and more safely, from our self-awareness of our own mistakes as the can from making mistakes themselves! All we can do is to keep tipping the balance, day by day, more in favour of our children gaining the self-awareness and the self-control that will protect them as they grow!

To do this ‘good enough’ parenting we need all the help we can get!  The thrust of this series of podcasts is that knowledge of how our brains work can make such a difference for us and also for our children.  As we understand more about how the brain develops we can use our understanding of how best they can learn – and how best we can teach them.

When I set out to plan this series this chapter wasn’t there at all.  I felt it would be impossible to do justice to what I teach in an on-going way over a three to five day course in a fifteen minute podcast so I know I am going to fail.  Hopefully it will be an honourable failure and in doing so I will at least give you some helpful insights as I scratch the surface of the most fascinating exploration mankind has ever undertaken – the exploration of how our brains can work for us.

In Part 1 we established that it is vital to learn how to bring the best of ourselves to our children, we need to understand just how to get as close as we can to being the best we can for as much of the time as possible.  Being the best we can means understanding how our brains work – not just when everything is going right but also when we are tired, overwhelmed and downright stressed and using that knowledge as much as we can in our lives but, vitally, using it in our parenting.

So with considerable trepidation I am going to share with you a way that I hope may help increase understanding how our own brain works.  This is the first step to offering our children the finest models of how behaviour works best, ourselves.

We know more in the last few years about the workings of the brain than in all recorded time.

Every culture has explored this – Greek and Roman philosophers, Native American Tribes, the Aboriginal Dream Time, Shakespeare, Sartre; the list goes on and on.

It is in our nature to be driven to understand, to try to make sense of our world and our place in it.  And as you will see from this podcast this deep urge is centred in our brains!

There are still more questions than answers but developments in Neuroscience, with fMRI scans, with the application of Psychology and Sociology to what we can see is happening in the brain, we are beginning to have this greater knowledge within our grasp.

The essence of what makes me me and what makes you you.  The magic of strong healthy relationships is powered by the information that can help me have greater self-awareness of myself and of the way that you may be feeling.  Empathy helps me to help my children to find their own better selves and the impact of this is huge!  What I can offer others and especially the children I care foe, spreads goodwill like ripples across lake of life that are beyond comprehension!

We aren’t talking rocket science.  Much of what we do with children we do because our culture, our own personal history has informed it and so our brains repeat it - it works well.  Customs, social niceties and common sense are there because life works better for everyone if we agree to stick to a code.  We agree in England that we should all drive on the left hand side of the road; this agreement makes it safer for all of us.  We agree that stopping and taking our turn at roundabouts means the traffic flow is fairer for all – when someone doesn’t stick to this code it is dangerous not just for that individual but for everyone in the vicinity.

It is the same with behaviour, how we treat each other, treat ourselves, is crucial to our relationship safety.  What is staggering – for me – is the understanding that we are starting to be able to see this learning happening in the brain.  We can chart, like in the maps of early explorers, how the brain processes information, checks things out, confirms or discards learning.  We are starting to put together the jigsaw of cause and effect of relationships, the greatest of all questions of why!

I could talk to you of the wonders of the amygdala, the extraordinary hippocampus, the seahorse of memory and so much more but you’ll have to come to one of my courses, or join a webinar for that!  It is beyond the scope of fifteen minutes in a podcast!

Today we are going to share a flavour, an outline tour of what how our brains can work for us.  This is not a lesson in neuroscience but a chance to illustrate how we can work with our brains – almost a metaphor of this is the Triune Brain which is a model that originates from 60’s and is the work of Paul MacLean.  Paul MacLean admitted that his Triune Brain Model was a simplistic view of how the brain functions and we know that the reality of the brain is that it doesn’t have three separate parts in each hemisphere but that it works as a whole, not only in each hemisphere but even across the hemisphere divide!  When one part is damaged often another can adapt and take over its functions.  This may be a model but Neuroscientist Andrew Curran shows us that this model does have value in mapping brain function and development.  For a really good introduction to how this works see Andrew Curran’s book The Little Book of Big Stuff About the Brain. Dr Becky Bailey uses this model to great effect in her Conscious Discipline program for families and schools.

 

Right here goes…

Make a fist with your left hand and with your left thumb in front hold it about a foot away from your face.

Use your right hand and feel behind your left wrist to the small knobbly bone at the side of your wrist.

We are using your left hand to represent one half of your brain – one hemisphere. That little bone is equivalent to your brain stem – also known as your reptilian brain as it shares many characteristics with the brain of reptiles – take a lizard for example. The brain stem is brilliant, it coordinate our movement, our bodily functions, it means that we can do more than one thing at the time as we don’t have to plan every breath we take or every movement we make.  It also provides us with a primitive kind of safety.  When danger appears, it shuts down every function we don’t need so that we can react in the best way and deal with it – we can fight it, flee from it, freeze into immobility as we try to be invisible, we can flock together with others in the hope that that there is safety in numbers or at least it will keep us from being the first target or lastly we can fool – lie deceive manipulate.  “ I didn’t eat the jam” It may be all over my face but I can truly almost convince myself that “It wasn’t me – I didn’t eat the jam!”

As fool becomes moves more towards manipulation we are starting to engage and use the next part of our brains the limbic system or our mammalian brain but I am jumping ahead of myself!

So to recap our brain stem helps us every day – the phenomenal organisation and synchronisation of different unconscious and conscious actions are like an orchestra of thousands, no millions of musicians who still manage to play the most complex of Handel’s works!  But that is not all - in an emergency, it is the brain stem can save the day.  We don’t have time to go into a debate with ourselves when faced with a runaway lorry, there isn’t time, we need to be able to react and our brain stem helps us do things we would never have thought we could do.

The trouble is that if we engage our brain stem to react when we aren’t truly in that sabre-tooth tiger moment of peril, using the skills that would be far better kept safely tucked away!  Our brain misreads the situation as DANGER and charges in with an inappropriate set of strategies and boy oh boy can we make matters worse!  If we are being kind to ourselves we call that over-reacting!

Going back to our hand model, your left hand fist with your thumb tucked in represents the limbic system, the so-called mammalian brain.  Again a wonderful set of skills at the ready – here is seated our ability to engage, savour and react in situations to the max. Awe and wonder feature, the emotions, the excitement, the sheer joy of what life can bring but also the emotions of frustration, fury, despair and anguish.  In the limbic sits a large chunk of our memory of the responses we’ve made and these are repeated and become our habits. Often we don’t even consciously decide what we are going to do we just instinctively respond in the ways that the brain believes are safest for us.  These ways are based on the neural pathways that have been most revisited and as far as the brain is concerned this is the most efficient to help us act in similar sets of circumstances.  These generally are the safer ones if our early learning of behaviour has been supportive but even in the most nurturing of families these strategies can’t be fully relied upon.  They need practice and routine to embed them and turn those fragile little neural pathways into six lane neon lit highways!  This allows our children to do to ‘right thing’ without even thinking about it.

Where unhelpful habits become established it is like the old saying “Do what you’ve always done and you’ll get what you always get”.  Some of our habits are not the most appropriate but our brains have learned that at least on some basic level they work!  Have you been in the situation when afterwards you have said to yourself “I can’t believe it - it has happened again” or “Why does this always happen to me?” Knowing what is going on in our brains helps us to rewrite those neural pathways and find a better way.

Back to our triune brain model: take your open right hand now and putting the insides of your wrists together layer your fingers over the top of your left fist. This layering represents our wonderful cortex.  Using your right thumb stroke your left forefinger, this is where your brilliant management and synchronising skills are located.  Here is where we can make the decisions to respond appropriately, to enjoy the wonders that the limbic provides and harness the knowledge of our experiences in emergencies in the stem so that we fine-tunes these strategies and use them to our great advantage at other times!

Here is a simple example to reinforce why it is so important that we learn how our brains work and how to make them work for us.

You and your children are out in the forest on a snowy day.  In a clearing you see virgin snow and the two of you cannot resist making snow angels as you roll in the snow.  It is glorious fun and the two of you revel in the moment – it is a moment to savour and one that you know you will remember and treasure as you do so.  Your limbic brain is fully charged and wow what a wonderful time you are having!  As you get up you receive a snowball in the face and before you know it you are in the middle of a joyous snowball fight. Intent on keeping your side up the battle takes over and just as you are about to launch your best shot yet, you see that your son, still apparently enjoying himself, has blue lips and is shivering!

Your wonderful frontal lobes of your cortex take over and rather than launch that winning shot, you call a halt, declare a truce and to a chorus of “Aw, Mum c’mon, I’m not cold! I want to play some more!”  You take the executive parenting decision that enough is enough and get the kids jumping around, swinging their arms to get warm and announce that you are all heading back to the car and where there is a hot drink and cookies waiting.

As you are making your way back along the path your very impulsive daughter sees a short cut and decided to run across the snow instead of following the curve of the path.  Disaster strikes as she disappears from view though what is obviously the thin snow covered layer of ice covering a woodland pool.

Speedily your brain downshifts through the limbic induced panic images of drowning and death, down down down to your brain stem as you race towards where she vanished.  The frontal lobes of your cortex stops you as you are about to launch yourself across to her while the wonderful filing cabinet of your brain shuffles through image after image selecting the safest way to rescue someone who has gone through the ice. You stop, you breathe and in seconds you process that lying flat and inching your ways forward is the most efficient course of action.  Your cortex has overruled the panic urge of both limbic and stem and using the surge of the cocktail of natural chemicals that your brain stem has sent racing around your body you shout to your son to stay put and you shuffle forward to reach out and save the day!

This is an extreme example but I use it to show that it is that ability to harness and use the best of every element of what our brain is capable of in different situations is what is so important. Our brains learn learn from experience and apply this knowledge to new situations and relationships. Parenting is about doing our best to ensure that our children learn the most successful strategies not the worst ones.  If in teaching our children we can bring all of our brain states to operate in their most effective way, we can use all our own knowledge, skills, understanding of what works best and empathy to give them brilliant consistent learning!  This is what we mean by being able to work with our brains so as to bring the best of ourselves to situations and so help our children learn to do the same.

This teaching is surely one of the greatest gifts we can offer in our parenting.  If we can give our children informed, sensitive and timely teaching so they develop self-awareness and self-control, we can help them establish those positive habits of behaviour, instil in them the ability to read situations accurately and so bring the best of themselves to what life dishes out to them.  Wherever they go, whatever they face, in the small things in life as well as in the great emergencies they will be armed with great skills and they will be prepared.  Then we will truly have given them the strongest foundations to have positive relationships with others, to more than survive the day to day frustrations of school life, the squabbles of friendships and later the challenges of the workplace and long term relationships.  They will see life as full of opportunities and so be fulfilled and more likely to be successful in all they aspire to do.

In the next parts of this series I shall be referring back to this Triune Brain model.  In Part 3 it is the turn of our limbic brains to take the greatest starring role.  We’ll explore why seductive as Reward Systems may be in the short-term and indeed highly successful in some limited situations, to apply then indiscriminately can be counter-productive and can even go against the most effective behaviour strategies we can teach.  We will explore a powerful brain-friendly alternative that is far more likely to have long term positive results!

Using this brain model in Part 4 the limelight goes to our frontal lobes of the cortex!  We will explore logical and informed alternatives to Punishments and Sanctions that help our children learn from the consequences of what they have done so as to establish those helpful neural pathways and habits that will lead them make more appropriate behaviour decisions in future.

Be aware of and celebrate all your successes, the fact that you care enough to listen to podcasts such as this and read articles means that you are already a good parent!  We all have times of self-doubt and times that are really tough in our parenting!  Part 5 is all about using our knowledge of the Triune Brain so we know what to do when, in spite of all our best efforts, our child turns round and refuses to do as we ask and probably caps it all by telling us that he or she hates us!

Hang on in there, remember to breathe and let your wonderful brain help you turn behaviour conflicts into a teaching time!  Your child is worth it and so are you!

 

Your Turn…

I hope you have found this podcast useful and that, even though it is only scratching the surface of all that we could share, you have been given some food for thought!

These podcasts cannot provide you with definitive answers; they are offered to give you more information to empower you so that you can manage your brain states more effectively so that you can come to your own informed solutions.  You can then respond with the best of your experience, your knowledge to situations and not react and later regret what you have said or done!  Your wonderful frontal lobes of the neo-cortex already have the solutions that are right for you and for your children – work with your brain and there is no limit to your brilliant parenting!

Please share your thoughts in the comments below and let us know how you are making a difference for your children.

 

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