“Becoming familiar with your amygdala and the kinds of things it reacts to in life is an important part of learning to regulate your own stress and manage your tendencies to approach and avoid things in your life, including your children.” ― Daniel A. Hughes, Brain-Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment
If you have been following along with our attachment series, you have built some awareness around the quality of attachment to yourself, strategies for helping your child feel safe, seen and soothed, and skills for building a secure foundation while delighting in your child’s unique journey. Part four of our attachment series focuses on neuroscience, and what brain research can tell us about parenting and attachment. While we are just at the beginning of using brain science to understand relationships, attachment, and parenting, some researchers and authors have started the conversation, including Robyn Gobbel (Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors) and Sarah McKay (Baby Brain). For this blog, we are drawing on the work of Dan Hughes and Jon Baylin, authors of Brain-Based Parenting- The Neuroscience of Caregiving for a Healthy Attachment.
Hughes and Baylin report that there are 5 brain-based systems (brain structures and neural pathways) that influence how we feel, respond and parent, and then affect our connection to our children.
The Parental Approach System - Also called the approach vs. avoid system. The authors describe the development of the two hemispheres of the brain as influencing how we parent. The left side of the brain is associated with approach behaviors - we either approach to interact with people or things because they feel good, or we approach to deal with them to get them out of our way. The right side of the brain, however, is associated with harm-avoidance - it is quick to detect a threat, and will work to protect us from harm. If our threat detection system is triggered by our children’s behaviors, we are likely to withdraw and disconnect.
This may show up in something like your morning routine. If you have had a couple of challenging days getting the kids out the door (kids are distracted, moving slow, or outright refusing, and you are losing patience), your right hemisphere is on alert the next morning, and as soon as it senses that behaviors may make getting out the door on time impossible, you may respond from a place of avoidance and disconnection rather than from a place of connection.
The Parental Reward System - this system is activated by dopamine, which floods the brain when we anticipate something pleasurable may happen. When interactions with our children are joyful and connected, we get a dopamine hit. If/when we approach our children and it is not rewarding, the dopamine system can crash and we can experience a defensive response, and feel blocked in our care of our children.
If your experiences of taking your child to the park or beach have been joyful, you are likely to feel that flood of dopamine just in anticipation of your next outing. These brain experiences and feelings make it more likely to continue these types of outings with your child.
The Parental Child Reading System - the temporal lobe of the brain plays a role in helping us read our child’s nonverbal cues. The child reading system is a process of the brain taking in all of the signals from our child, experiencing bodily reactions to these signals and then evaluating the signals to either keep in connection with our child or to have a defensive reaction. The limbic system also plays a role in parenting - as it picks up on emotions and information from the temporal lobe and if it detects threat, will likely lead to shut down and not being able to read signals well.
Think about a time you observed your child experiencing overwhelming emotions - you saw the tense face, the flailing limbs, and you heard the volume and aggressive tone- your brain may have interpreted this as a threat to you, leading to your own fight or flight reaction. Once in this state of flight or fight, it is even more difficult to read your child’s signals and respond with warmth and connection.
The Parental Meaning -Making system - The meaning we get from parenting, and the stories we tell ourselves about our children will depend on the state of our brain - are we working with a well-connected brain, or a stressed out brain? A well connected brain means we are working from the prefrontal cortex, feel calm and safe, and can understand the roots underneath our child’s behavior. A stressed out brain on the other hand, functions in a defensive way, our thinking becomes inflexible, we are more easily dysregulated, and the stories that we tell ourselves about our children may become more negative.
Imagine your child asking repeatedly for a snack while you are on the phone making appointments. In this state of distraction and stress, your brain may try to make sense of your child’s behavior by saying “my kid is being unreasonable” or “they are just trying to make me mad.” It is certainly challenging to respond with warmth and connection when these are the stories we tell ourselves.
The Parental Executive System - Our executive skills affect our ability to change our thinking and behavior in the light of new information, to control our impulses, to realize when we are stuck in a non-helpful behavior, and our ability to think before we react emotionally. If we experience chronic stress, we cannot access our executive system and our responses to our children become more reactive.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of trying to complete a big project for work or home, and you are generally feeling stressed and pressured. You are likely to see your child’s whiny behavior as annoying and may react by snapping at them. Once the project is completed, you can see these behaviors as bids for connections, and are able to respond in ways that meet your child’s needs.
Bottom line, when these brain based systems are functioning well, they can help foster secure attachment. Some questions for reflection:
Can you identify when your brain is in a stressed out state?
Do you have strategies to get yourself back to a well-connected brain?
Can you find the positives in your parenting experiences?
Are you aware of what triggers you, or acts as a threat to your brain and executive functioning?
Are you interested in finding out more about attachment, brain science, and parenting? Team with one of our certified parent coaches to reflect, learn and grow in your parenting skills!
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