Ep 160: How can understanding a child's brain help us parent better? With Dan Siegel MD

Episode 160 (a continuation from last weeks episode) with Dr Dan Siegel explores how a child's brain is different from the adult brain, and how by understanding a child's brain, we may parent from a place of empathy.  

Daniel J. Siegel received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry.  He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative.

Dr. Siegel’s book, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (Bantam, 2010), offers the general reader an in-depth exploration of the power of the mind to integrate the brain and promote well-being. He has written six parenting books, including the three New York Times bestsellers Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain (Tarcher/Penguin, 2014); The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind (Random House, 2011) and No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind (Bantam, 2014), both with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired (Ballantine Books 2020), The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity, and Resilience in Your Child (Bantam, 2018) also with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., and Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Child

Dr Jessica Hochman is a board certified pediatrician, mom to three children, and she is very passionate about the health and well being of children. Most of her educational videos are targeted towards general pediatric topics and presented in an easy to understand manner.

For more content from Dr Jessica Hochman:
Instagram: @AskDrJessica
YouTube channel: Ask Dr Jessica
Website: www.askdrjessicamd.com

-For a plant-based, USDA Organic certified vitamin supplement, check out : Llama Naturals Vitamin and use discount code: DRJESSICA20

-To test your child's microbiome and get recommendations, check out:
Tiny Health using code: DRJESSICA

Do you have a future topic you'd like Dr Jessica Hochman to discuss? Email Dr Jessica Hochman askdrjessicamd@gmail.com.

The information presented in Ask Dr Jessica is for general educational purposes only. She does not diagnose medical conditions or formulate treatment plans for specific individuals. If you have a concern about your child's health, be sure to call your child's health care provider.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Hi everybody. I'm Dr Jessica Hochman, pediatrician and mom of three. On this podcast, I like to talk about various pediatric health topics, sharing my knowledge, not only as a doctor, but also as a parent. Ultimately, my hope is that when it comes to your children's health, you feel more confident, worry less and enjoy your parenting experience as much as possible. Hi everybody. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Dr Dan Siegel. It's truly an honor to have Dr Siegel as a guest, and today we'll dive deeper into his incredible book, the whole brain child, which has now sold over 1 million copies in print. Yes, you heard that right? 1 million copies in print. In our last episode, we talked about how attachment can deepen emotional connections with our kids. Today, we will review some of Dr Siegel's practical strategies to help kids manage their big emotions. I really appreciate his insights and practical tips. I find they really help parents understand a child's mind, which can ultimately help us support them as they grow up to be more empathetic and self aware human beings. Thank you so much for listening. If you have a moment, I would truly appreciate it. If you could subscribe to ask Dr Jessica, leave a five star review and share it with a friend or three or five. Your support really helps spread the word about the podcast. Now, back to Dr Siegel. I'd love to ask you more about the book the whole brain child. Yeah, what I really liked about this book, to be honest, is kids act in ways that can be really difficult for parents, right? I mean, they have tantrums, they can act out, they can misbehave, they can be wild. And what I enjoyed so much about the neuroscience behind learning about children's brains, I feel like by understanding the way their brains work a little bit more, it's making me forgive those behaviors and be more sympathetic to how to why they're behaving the way they're behaving. So first, I just want to say thank you so much for writing a book with more neuroscience behind the brain of the child, because it helps me a lot when I think about my own kids. Oh, great, great. Well, you know, you always want to be careful. You're not just putting on to you know other people, readers or students or patients or whatever you know, just because you're interested in you know. So thank you. That's very helpful. And I you know, I think the fact that knowing about the brain of your child and knowing about your own brain actually can give you very practical avenues to making parenting interventions that you wouldn't otherwise think of, you know. And so what Tina and I did with whole brain child was basically take these nine domains of integration that I talk about in the developing mind, and then give 1000s of scientific references to support. This is what a healthy mind is all about. This is how it develops from birth onward. But what we wanted to do is say, Okay, what is a digestible way where a busy, tired parent can get these notions of how an attachment relationship, a parent, child relationship, can actually shape the development of a child's brain, because there's something called neuroplasticity, which basically means, how does the brain grow in response to experience? And if you learn that which we teach in all of our books, if you learn the basics of your actions as a parent, are going to mold the development of the child's brain, not to make you pressure. Because some people would say, oh, isn't that a lot of pressure on a parent that you're you're telling them what to do, because they think, well, the brain is going to develop whether you do it in an informed way or not. So so even if you're totally not aware of this, your interactions are still going to shape them. So sorry, that's just a fact. Why not actually do like Louis Pasteur has this great phrase, Chance favors the prepared mind. Why not prepare your mind? It's not saying, hey, because you're reading this book, whole brain child, you're now have the pressure that you're shaping your child's brain. No, you were shaping it anyway. So why not prepare your mind to shape it in a positive direction? I do. I think about that a lot, the line that neurons that fire together, wire together, because I think with my kids, okay, do I want them to spend their time when they're kids, spending a lot of time on the screens, watching TV? Because that's what their brains are gonna shape and mold to be accustomed to doing. So I try to with that in mind, thinking that the nerves that fire together wire together, try to emphasize what I think would be more helpful and beneficial to them as they grow older, exactly, exactly. So now I don't know if this sits with you well, but, you know, people would ask me, students of mine, who are, you know, therapists and stuff, you know. What does that really mean? You know this, Carla Schatz is the neuroscientist who paraphrased Donald had. To make that phrase, neurons are fired, either wired together, but what a parent can use in a little more refined way is this statement, where attention goes, neural firing flows and neural connection grows. So your real tool, because is about attention. Because if you just hear Carol Le chat says Hebbian synapse, paraphrase, you know, neurons that fire to the wire to it, it's true, but then a parent might ask, Well, how do I get those neurons to fire? So that's why I created this other phrase where attention goes neural firing flows, and that's the neural firing piece, and then neural connection grows. So why do we want to know about attention? Because attention is that process where you're directing energy and information flow, and if your kids are busy on a screen, like you're saying, it's that attention that gets those particular neurons to fire if they're with friends and they're paying attention to the friends, eye contact, facial expressions, tone of voice, their gestures, their posture, their timing and intensity response, the non verbal signals, research shows they will actually develop the circuitry in their own brains, be able to interpret non verbal signals and be able to be more tuned in to other people, so they'll develop emotional intelligence and social intelligence, but if they're busy just on screens that aren't teaching them to do that, attention is going somewhere else. I'm curious if you agree with this, but so many kids now because of the screens, and that's where their attention is going, I feel like they're not spending as much they are not spending as much time reading. I worry that that skill is going to be lost amongst future kids, because it's hard to put attention into reading when the screens are so alluring. Absolutely, that alluring quality is there. It's intentional. They want to catch eyeballs because that gets them money. It all comes down to basically, money grabbing, yeah, I mean, this is the reading thing. Is interesting because, I mean, I had an eye problem, I think I mentioned that. You know, no one diagnosed till I was 30, so it never became natural for me to read, and I really have to struggle to read for pleasure. I can read for if I'm, you know, preparing a science book, mostly I listen to it, but, you know, I'll read all my references. Auditorily, I'll listen to it, but if I need to. Now, I've taught myself to read, but just for pleasure, I don't get what friends of mine who are or Caroline, who's my wife, who's a great reader. You know this rich visual imagery by taking in words from a page, I unfortunately don't. Don't get that. I get it if I listen to a book. Dan, it's amazing that you are so accomplished as an author, as a speaker. You went to Harvard Medical School. Your resume is so impressive, and you were able to do so much of it with your eye. Situation, I know well, I got my eyes fixed with prisons. I mean, I'm basically not to make it a mystery, but no one picked up till I was 30 that one of my eyes looks down here, and one looks up here, and then you're in pediatrics, and I'll just tell you, my pediatrician thought it was the fluorescent lights flickering because everything was shaking. The optometrist missed it when I was like, 12 and 13, I would complain, everything shakes. Anyway. So I was reading by the time I was 30, and I was a fellow Research Fellow, and had all this reading due, and I just couldn't do it. So I went and got evaluated. They said, Oh, you read. You read like a first grader reads. You have comprehension of a first grader, you know. And after the first, you know, 60 seconds of reading, your comprehension goes from, you know, 95% to like, 10% I mean, I just, I was so exhausted. Anyway, the bottom line of all that, for every pediatrician, every parent, it's so simple to look for something called vertical for you, which means one eye looks above the other eye, an optometrist can check, but it's, it's super easy. You just put basically, you put up you block one eye, you have the kid look at a line. You move the block to the other eye, and it'll pop up, and they'll go, whoa. It jumped. You know, literally takes about 30 seconds to screen it. If someone just had done that for me when I was like 12, my life would have, I mean, I wouldn't have developed my auditory ability. But anyway, so Let's spare other cases. Absolutely. Yeah, you never know who's listening, who this will help. So thank you. Yeah. So I would love to talk about the differences between a child's brain and an adult brain. I find it so helpful when I hear people talk about how the brain doesn't fully mature until the mid 20s, because I look at my kids if they're doing something that I feel like they should know better by now, it really helps me to be reminded that their brains are still maturing, still developing. Oh, yeah. How old are your kids? My kids are almost 911, and almost 14. Oh, wow. Okay, what a beautiful age. Yeah, I was really helped when you described the difference between the left brain and the right brain and the upstairs brain and the downstairs brain. Just knowing that there's there's maturity that is yet to happen, that will happen. I found it to be a very helpful reminder, yeah, well, I mean, one thing just to think about is, you know, the brain has different parts to it. And the cool thing about having different parts is they communicate with each other. And in all the wonderful complexity that can come up when different parts can be different and then link, you get more functions. So one way to think about the overall goal of brain development is to balance this differentiation things being different and then becoming linked. So you know, in the womb, the deepest parts of the brain that we call the downstairs brain, sometimes known as the limbic area and the brain stem, they are forming in a big way during gestation, and then when you're born, essentially the highest part of the brain. So if you do the hand model, your fingers on top is the cortex. It's going to grow a lot, and it grows a lot in response to experience, but it's just, it's just sending out a lot of connections. So the first things to alleviate the pressure for parents is that, fundamentally, these neurons are going to grow in the cortex, and they're going to set up connections getting ready to hear sound or see light. That are going to happen anyway. You just need to make sure you have light and sound for your kid. You know now certain things your child will learn are not just going to happen, like riding a tricycle. They may have the ability to ride a trike, but you need to get them a tricycle to learn to ride that tricycle. So those are two different kinds of development, but the cortex is having both these go on throughout the lifespan now with a sense of trust that comes with secure attachment, children are open to learning, learning, learning. So basically, it's good to think about the brain in the first 12 years of life is like a sponge. It's just going to learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. And you know, it's going to be differentiating and linking, sure, but it's mostly just learning and accumulating more and more knowledge. And knowledge and skills get set up in the brain in the form of connections in the brain, right? So a kid who learns to write a tricycle has learned that skill, they know the word tricycle. That's a connection in the brain that allows them to know tricycle is a word, right? So that growth in the first 12 years is all about learning new things. And they don't have the social sophistication to know exactly how everything is fitting together in this complex of the web of humanity and the web of all of life, but they're eager just to soak it in. Is this why skills like learning a language, learning an instrument, are much easier if you start them when the child's younger, exactly right. That's exactly right, and ideally, before adolescence begins. You know, which is what we that was the kind of I won't say it's a lie, but we made up a family law that our son was very resistant to taking music lessons, but we knew he loved music, and so we said in our family, everyone before they're a teenager, must choose an instrument. Now he's this big, you know, guitarist, guitarist and keyboardist. But anyway, so yeah, he was exposed to that, and then that just became his language. And you know, our daughter was very into arts, and she would be doing art stuff early on, and also learn other languages too. I find it fascinating, just as a pediatrician, watching what kids can learn from such a young age, watching them pick up French, if their parent speaks French to them. Watching them pick up skiing, I've seen kids do such gymnastics tricks that blow my mind, or they're diving and doing, you know, doing mind boggling twists and turns off the diving board. It's really amazing what kids are capable of doing. And, you know, having the balance of them doing what they love, and not because you want them to do it, but also encouraging them to try things that maybe are out of their comfort zone, but something that they love. I mean, you know, so So, so their brains are sponges, which is amazing. They're soaking everything up. But why do they still tantrum for so long? How can what's happening in the brain? Yeah, the subcortical areas have some big drives that I talk about in this this personality business. But basically it's you have a drive for competency and agency that can lead to anger in a tantrum. You have a drive. For relational connection, you know, and acceptance, which can lead to separation, distress and sadness as a part of a tantrum. Or you have a sense of a need for predictability and certainty so that you can have a sense of safety that can lead to anxiety and fear. So, you know, when we take the work, when your question about tantrums, you can have three ways where these subcortical networks may be particularly sensitive in a kid, and when you're doing the scene, part of the 3s seen soothe and say, you know you're tuning into what was the motivation that was frustrated beneath this tantrum. Because what that's going to do is empower you as a parent to figure out, why are they so angry, why are they so sad, why are they so scared, right? And those are the big three to show to show up with empathy, to show up with empathy like, wow. You know you really wanted a connection with your friends, and they didn't show up to your birthday party. No wonder you're so distressed. So I have, if it's okay with you, I have a real life example. Actually, the last patient that I saw this morning, a mother came in very frustrated because she has two kids, one's in middle school, one's in elementary school, and the kids have a lot of behavioral issues. At home, they do well. At school, they have friends, but at home, they act out a lot. There's a lot of frustration, a lot of anxiety, and the mom can feel that she herself is responding negatively to it. She's also frustrated and anxious because of how her kids are acting at home. And as you the term you use, she flips her lid a lot. And so she came to me, and she was asking for advice and guidance on how to help herself and how to help her kids. How would you have talked to that mother? And I'll tell you what I said. I'll chime in. But what would you say to this mother? And by the way, I was, I was incredibly grateful that I just read the whole brain child before talking to her. So thank you so much. What did you say to her? And I'll come up. I'll tell you in a moment. So the first thing I said, for the piece that we can do, I really feel like as parents, the more that we stay calm, the better it is for everybody. The saying is our power is our calm. So if we can stay calm, that will really help set the tone for better energy at home, which can be hard to do in the moment. I mean, I struggle with that myself sometimes when my kids are really pushing my buttons, but just trying to stay calm, stay cool, stay collected. Being empathetic to our kids, I think, is really, really important, trying to see where they're coming from. And one piece too that I mentioned to her was trying to add some fun at home. I think it's really easy to get into it with our kids, to let their frustration affect our moods, affect the mood of the family home, and adding some silliness, adding some laughter, putting on some music, whatever you can do to lighten the mood, I think is a real advantage, because ultimately, who wants to live in a home that's really stressful, right? So that's some things that I said to start, yeah, well, I love that. I love that I would just build on that. And first of all, say, in general, for a parent who has kids come home and they're very emotionally expressive and distressing and stuff like that, what can you do? So there's a book I wrote called aware, which has examples, and one of the examples in it is about how to cultivate the calm. You're talking about is it talks about a parent that's exactly in this situation where she is like losing her mind. Her kids are so emotionally distressed when they get home at school, they're fine, all that kind of stuff. And so you'll see in that case, example, what I talk about is this practice called the wheel of awareness is like the secret weapon of every parrot that I work with. And you can go to my website, dr, Dan siegel.com, for free. You can learn to do the wheel. We have a three day workshop you can do. You know, it's recorded. It's in the redwoods. It's kind of a calming by itself. There's a book called aware, and the the workbook called Becoming aware. So what happens when parents do that is, they're able to distinguish in the hub of this wheel, pure awareness, that is the experience of knowing from the rim, which are all things you can be aware of. And when the kids come home from school and they start flipping out, and because of a set of neurons called mirror neurons, we which should have been called sponge neurons, I think we sponge in their distress. Then we get distressed our kids mirror or sponge neurons, sponge in our distress. They're heightened in their distress. We get more distressed with their distress, and pretty soon it's off to the races and everyone's flipping their lids. That is like the most common parenting you know, feedback loop that exists. So what you do is you intervene in that by going. To the hub of your wheel, which you've been practicing when the kids are at school. I do it every morning, and by itself. I mean, forget whether you're a parent or not. It's like an amazing meditative practice that we've had lots and lots of people do, but there are reasons to do it for your own well being. But in terms of these, the secret sauce of parenting, well, what it does is your kids start doing that. You see your reaction to their flipping out on your rim. You quickly, because you've learned to do it even with a breath or two, go into your hub. The Hub, for many of us, is clear. It's calm, it is full of joy, love, hope, groundedness. And then you're in this hub, they're flipping out. They see you're not flipping out, they start to calm down, just because you're in the hub. And then pretty soon, the whole thing gets into this different place because you've used your superpower. Without the superpower, you're a human being. They're flipping out. You're flipping out. They're flipping out. Everyone blah. And pretty soon it's an incredibly stressful household. Everyone's in reactive mode. They're fighting, they're fleeing, they're freezing up, they're fainting, they're just trying to do all this stuff. So what we say is the brain has two states, a reactive state or receptive state. You cannot do effective parenting from a reactive state. You need to do parenting for it to be effective. In a receptive state, the hub of the wheel gets you that receptive state, focusing on your breath, get out there, putting a hand on your chest, hand on your chest, hand or having, we can get you there. There's lots of ways of getting there. But here's the important thing, if you try to do parenting moves from a reactive state of fighting, fleeing, freezing or fainting or even fawning, that's a fifth F discovered at UCLA in the psychology department. You know. You know, you you will not be an effective parent, and the whole thing's going to cycle out of control. So the first thing I teach parents is, you need to know, am I? Am I as the parent, reactive or receptive? If I'm reactive, I've got to do something to get myself to receptivity. Hopefully I'm learning to do the wheel of awareness practice every day or regularly, the hub gets me to receptivity. Okay, so now, however I get there, I say I'm reactive, I gotta get back to receptivity, even if I take say to my older kids, I gotta take a quick parenting break, because I'm getting reactive right now. I need to get receptive. I've said that to my kids. They go, okay, got it. We don't want to see God reactive. That's not pretty. I love that you've taught them the verbiage they sound like true children of a psychiatrist. Oh, my god, yeah, especially if I pull out the amygdala word, and I said, my amygdala is not very happy right now, I need to take a break, because I'm about to get very reactive, and I don't want to be reactive. So hold on, I'll be back in a minute. I'll go out, I'll get some fresh air, I'll drink some water, I'll stretch. And in reactivity, you rationalize your irrational parenting moves. I can see that you're not thinking clearly. When you're reactive, it really is. I really think the phrase resonates with me. I think it's really true when they say that your superpower is your calm. Totally, yeah, and that's why get that superpower. Try the wheel of awareness, practice. And what about the tip that you offer, name it, to tame it. Would that work in this situation? You know? Yeah, especially if you start with name it. I'm reactive, and I've actually changed that now to name it to frame it. So you're framing it in like a picture frame. So you say, Oh, now I see what the story is. So I actually like name it to frame it. Even better. It also rhymes, but now you're framing it with words. So it's like naming it to frame it. And now what you do is you see it. You go, I'm reactive. Yeah, my kids are reactive. They're kids. I'm the adult here, and I'm getting reactive. So I got to get myself back to receptivity. You do that. Go to the hub, if you're practicing the wheel, take a few deep breaths. Get some water. Make sure you know the difference between reactivity and receptivity, and then you'll be good. And then for Okay, that's really helpful. So just that's what we can do. That's what's that's what's in our control as the parent, is that we can own our own behavior and our own and set set a good tone for our cells and our and and own our own behavior, absolutely right. And then what reassurance for parents that are listening, that might have kids that tend to overreact or they have difficult behavior? Do you find that over time, as the brain matures, this all improves? This is a leading question, but I want to offer some hope for parents that are listening. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you the close I mean, certainly my patience is true, but I've got close friends with kids who are growing through this, and so we talk about this all the time, just as friends like extended family, basically. And you know, as the brain goes through adolescence, it is going to go through a process of pruning down things, and things can look worse initially, and then linking them up. So that balance of pruning down to make things specialized and then linking them up allows integration to occur. So the goal of adolescent brain remodeling, which is no longer like a sponge, it's this remodeling thing, is to create more integration, you're actually going to start losing connections with the pruning process. So some kids freak out about that, but what I say to them is, I said, you know, it's a use it or lose it story where attention goes, neural firing flows, neural connection grows. You're the one who determines your attention. You want to just have your little part of your brain that governs this on a on a mouse, on a computer, then go for it, or you can develop a much richer aspect of your brain, you know. So thank you so much. Now, these are really helpful tips. Are there any last suggestions to offer parents in terms of how they can improve their connection with their kids and how to think about the child brain? Anything that we've left out that you think would be worth mentioning for your own well being. I would urge you to do the book becoming aware it's like a little workbook, and it will teach you to how to access your superpower so that you know. Not to make a oversimplification, but I do think what you said, Jessica, is absolutely true, if you can hold on to your superpower of calm, but basically, with the gift of presence and becoming aware of what you get is you get the superpower. And it's not just like a word, oh, I want to become No, you actually learn this skill. We are in this brain changing game forever, you know. And these things actually optimize this kind of practice. The wheel awareness optimizes an enzyme called telomerase that will maintain and repair the ensue chromosomes, so it actually slows the aging process. What Alyssa Epple and Elizabeth Blackburn have shown and they told me, Alyssa Apple called me up and said, you've got to say that all the stuff in the wheel of awareness is going to slow the aging process. Amazing. It's not just random. I mean, you start doing a practice that trains your attention to be focused, opens up your awareness and allows your intention to be kind those three of the three pillars that lead to this improvement, it's a long race. Reduces inflammation, improves the immune response. It actually makes your cardiovascular system healthier, and it reduces the stress hormone, cortisol, those five things including the brain, process of making your brain more integrated, which is the best predictor of well being. That's what a three pillar practice that is all built into the wheel does. So yes, it's going to make your parenting more fun and more effective, for sure, and it's going to prove five measures of your medical health, and it's going to integrate your brain. So the biggest question is, why aren't you going to start it? Well, you had me on looking younger. You sold me. There you go. I'm telling you, this is not and it's looking but it's actually being younger. I mean, this is the thing. It's not just like, oh, it was a surface appearance. Your your health span will be made much longer when you do practices like this. That's amazing. It's amazing. And I I just have to thank you. You do such a good job of taking complicated, complex medical topics. I mean, I can't think of anything more complicated or hard to understand than neuroscience. I love how you describe the way you describe it. It becomes so easy to understand, easy to follow you. So many helpful mnemonics, so many helpful examples. I can't recommend your books enough to everybody listening. You won't regret it, especially if you're trying to figure out the best way to understand your children and parent them from a place that focuses on connection and understanding. So thank you so much for all that you do. Thank you. Thank you, Jessica. Great to see you. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Ask Dr Jessica. Also, if you could take a moment and leave a five star review, wherever it is you listen to podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. It really makes a difference to help this podcast grow. You can also follow me on Instagram at ask Dr Jessica, see you next Monday. You.