Foundations of Neurodevelopment 6
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Lisa Pedersen: [00:00:00] Okay, we are moving on from primitive reflexes and postural reflexes into nervous system regulation and emotional development, which is also an incredibly important area of neurological development for our children. Babies are not born. Knowing how to calm down, that is obvious to anyone who has ever had a baby.
And if there is one area of parenting that makes even the most confident of adults, , question themselves, it is. Working through this period of development with young children, , big emotions, explosive emotions, confusing emotions, uh, they landed right on my head out of nowhere emotions. And [00:01:00] I want to start by telling you something really important, and that is that your child is never trying to give you a hard time.
Your child is having a hard time, and the reason for that is because we build the tools for emotional regulation through experience over time. It's not something we are automatically born knowing how to do, and we have to. Build the tools in the nervous system, build maturity in the nervous system in order to be able to work through something that looks like little kids going through big emotions into.
How it looks for, for most adults when they're going through big emotions. This is something that we have to practice. We have to see it modeled, and we have to practice it over time. [00:02:00] It's not an automatic thing that we're born knowing how to do. So when we talk about emotional regulation, we're not talking about behavior control.
We're talking about the nervous system's ability to move between states from. A lot of excitement into a calm state or from a lot of frustration into a state of connection or from a lot of stress back into a feeling of safety and. Babies are born with a nervous system that is in sympathetic dominance, which means , their nervous system is in more of what we would categorize as a fight or flight kind of response.
And they borrow from our nervous system the, , a safe. Adult, they co-regulate or [00:03:00] borrow from our nervous systems in order to train or to teach their own nervous system how to move into a state of more, , calm regulation. So let's talk for just a minute about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are. Brain cells that we all have that activate both when you yourself perform an action and also when you see someone else perform the same or similar action.
And this forms the neural, , basis for being able to understand. Other people's actions, other people's intentions, other people's emotions, and it's really crucial when it comes to learning, empathy and learning social cues and social skills. So. Mirror neurons help us to understand what another person is doing without conscious thought.
They help us understand feeling. [00:04:00] They help us understand the intention behind other people's actions. They help us form empathy, and they are the foundation for, , observational learning, which helps us to learn new things by watching someone else do it. So when a child is in a state of. A high sympathetic state or a state of dysregulation, that is not the time when we can use our logic to explain to a child who's having a meltdown.
. Why they should understand that this is not a reasonable thing to be doing. We can't, we can't, this is not the time to be looking, you know, giving the full explanation of why this doesn't make sense what they're doing, and it's not the time for, , trying to incorporate consequences of whatever's happening.
The logical brain, when a child is having a meltdown [00:05:00] is offline. So. What we need to think about , the most important thing for children from birth until about five years of age is. Being aware of the fact that they're building their ability to regulate their emotions during this time, and we need to, first of all, be able to be a good example of what a regulated, calm, nervous system looks like for children that age.
They need us to be present and they need us to help them to co-regulate. And this is not something we do a few times. This is something that we do over many years of helping to teach a child's nervous system what it feels like to move from a state of high sympathetic or high [00:06:00] stress, or dysregulation into a state of calm and a state of safety and a state of connection.
We spend years doing this and we're never finished doing it. Adults do it hopefully quicker than children, but we still have to practice the skill of moving from. A stress nervous system state or a state of dysregulation back into a state of calm. And you know, the quicker or the more efficient we as adults are able to do it is highly based on how much we've practiced being able to do that as children.
So what helps our children to learn? To regulate their own nervous system and to develop their emotional, , regulation is our, again, our presence, our nervous system, being in a state of calm [00:07:00] regulation and being able to be present with our children and. Help them feel safe and calm in their bodies. And then depending on their age, we can talk about, , explain how we could have done something different in a situation or talk about, the consequences of what happened, but we can't do it.
Right in the situation that is causing them to be, to have stress or to feel unsafe or to be dysregulated. So how do we, what do we actually do to facilitate co-regulation? We stay calm. We think about our tone of voice. We think about the cadence of our, how quickly we speak or, how it feels, and the tone of our voice and , the rhythm.
We think about our facial expressions. You know, little kids are, it doesn't matter how little they are, they can read our facial expressions and tell whether what's coming out of our mouth is in accordance with the look on our face or [00:08:00] not. , We feel safe, our body feels safe and feels calm and feels connected for the child you are.
Using your nervous system as a reference point for your child's nervous system, so they are able to borrow that feeling or to use that feeling of safety and calm and connection that we have is teaching them that it's safe to do the same. So. Co-regulation is something that we repeat over time, many years, and it teaches.
The children's nervous system, teaches the child's nervous system the capacity or the ability to feel big emotions and return to calm. And if this feels hard with a 3-year-old or a 2-year-old or a 5-year-old, it's because it is [00:09:00] hard. You can't help your child co-regulate if your own nervous system is overwhelmed.
And a lot of times in those situations when you have a 4-year-old who is laying on the floor of the grocery store freaking out because they couldn't. Eat the banana in the store until you've paid for it. It is very challenging as a parent to keep yourself calm and regulated and to not just wanna lay down beside them on the floor and cry over the situation, but that's not helping anybody.
So the goal is not to try to eliminate. Your child's emotions. It's to teach them through that experience that we survive big emotions. We remain [00:10:00] connected. I am here no matter what. I am a safe place for you no matter what. And we are going through this together, and I'm here and I'm stable and I'm not.
, You're not rocking me from this point of being here and being in balance, and you're not in this alone and. This doesn't happen perfectly for any parent ever. So let me just be really clear about that. Every single one of us has been in a situation where this is just, you know, a really bad time and we are stressed out ourselves and we don't handle the situation of.
Working for co-regulation in the way that we wish we would've handled it. Luckily, again, you can get yourself a long way by being good at saying sorry and explaining what you wish you would've done differently and what you're going [00:11:00] to do differently. Not in the moment when everybody's freaking out, but later on when you're able to communicate and just work on.
Being able to do it differently and do it better the next time. So it doesn't have to be perfect every single time. In order for your child to learn to regulate their nervous system and to develop , their emotional capabilities, um, we just, we need to understand that looking at emotional development through the lens of the nervous system.
We, we maybe stop thinking to ourselves as parents, how do we stop this behavior? And we start thinking, what does this little brain and nervous system need right now in order to feel safe? And this question changes everything because it.
It helps us to look at it differently instead of looking at it [00:12:00] through a lens of needing our children to behave in a way that we think is appropriate for the situation. It helps us to look at it through the lens of, this is an opportunity where, for whatever reason, my child is in a state of needing help, getting themselves to a place of feeling.
Safe and calm, and what is it that I can do to help them to facilitate that? And again, it doesn't have to be perfect every single time. None of us does it perfectly every single time, but it helps for all of us to know what it is that we're looking at. We're not looking at. Bad behavior from a child who's trying to ruin our day.
We're looking at a nervous system that is reacting and responding to the situation from whatever capability they have right here, right now. Those things can be caused by everything from. Something [00:13:00] in the actual situation that's hard. It can be, you know, blood sugar dysregulation. It can be having had too little sleep.
It can be a million different things that makes it so that our nervous system is having a hard time regulating and finding a, a, a feeling of safety. And all of those things are important to think about and look at. After the fact, but in the moment, being able to feel like a calm, stable, connected, safe landing space for your child is what will teach them how to have that feeling in their body by borrowing it from our body.
And that will help them to regulate into more of that, um, connected. Nons sympathetic, more parasympathetic or, or restful and able to think and communicate and respond and [00:14:00] react, , space.
