Your Child’s Neuro-platform

Our last blog (Is it willful misbehavior) covered step 1 in determining if a child’s misbehavior is willful or a signal of our child’s vulnerability and need for support. While step 1 was accessing where you are, step 2 is all about accessing where your child is and which platform are they performing in.

If your child is on the green pathway, we are free to interact with the child and figure out things together. This usually works well if your child is able to use words to communicate what they are experiencing.

Assessing your child’s pathway

But what do we do if they are in the red pathway (yelling, hitting, out of control), or the blue pathway (disconnected, not responding to your words, not engaged). Maybe they are a combination of the two (whiney, pleading, seeming anxious). All of these point to your child being vulnerable and in need of building back their platform, not in need of teaching or consequences.

After we have accessed where we are, and if our assessment of our child’s behavior indicates he or she is in the blue or red pathway we now need to proceed to step 3.

Crafting our Response

In step 3 we choose our response based on our child’s pathway in order to get back to the green pathway. Our first response is to affirm the problem without judgement, this is an important first step because we all feel better when we do not feel alone in our problems. Sometimes the next step will be:

• Reasoning with the child if they are ready or
  • Soothing the child in order to calm the behavior or
  • Holding a firm line because you believe they can handle the challenge.

This is the central tenet to the Brain-Body parenting technique – we access the child’s platform instead of only addressing the child’s behavior.

Example

Consider a child, exhausted and throwing a fit at school pick up and a mom who is tired herself and just wants to go home. Understanding the child’s neuro-platform is very helpful. If the child is in the red zone correction will only heighten distress. After the parent has checked her own pathway she can check in with the child. She might take a brief walk with the child on the school grounds. Once both start to calm she can say “That was a really stressful day. Mommy was really tired. How about you”. She is letting her system regulate the child and joining with her in her distress. At this point the child might express some feelings of anger about her day in which some girls refused to play with her. Parent can reassure her child that she understands the stress of being excluded and give her some ideas for solving the problem. In this situation the child did not purposely plan to defy her parent but was elevated in her nervous system by the stresses at school and unable to regulate herself. The parent helped her with regulation and came up with some answers for dealing with peer groups.

Future Blogs

Future blogs will expand on ways to help children move from the red or blue pathway to the green pathway.