The 2016 Brooklyn Child Development Seminar educated parents to raise their children using practical tools and helpful information from the latest researches on brain health and development. It covered a full range of topics including brain anatomy and mental health.
Establishing Attachment With Your Child
The pre-frontal cortex of the brain gives your child the ability to be emotionally balanced, self-aware, reactive, intentional, and empathic. Secure attachment towards other people, particularly the parents, strengthens it.
To do this, parents need to see through their children and understand the motivation behind their behaviors. Parents’ responses to their child’s actions should not frighten or hurt them; instead, they should soothe them and help them deal with difficult situations for their age. They have to feel secure and develop an internal sense of well-being.
To achieve this, parents should open up about their upbringing before and not let this box how they would nurture the next generation.
Achieving Integration For Better Mental Health
Mental health is like a flowing river wherein one side is rigid while the other is chaotic. The gentle flow in the middle is the ideal state of psychological integration which is balanced, with no side overpowering the other.
To achieve this, parents can do a “connect and redirect” approach. This involves recognizing which part of the brain is at work in a situation. If the emotion-dominated right brain is at work, we cannot address the problem through the left brain, which appeals to reason. Connecting properly at the outset allows parents to redirect children towards better solutions.
Kindness and compassion are two ways by which integration becomes apparent. This translates to parents having better and deeper connections with their children.
Let us not be a hindrance to our children’s growth and success by understanding brain development. It is the key to ensuring that parenting methods will be beneficial regarding building up a child into what he or she wants to become eventually.