39 pages • 1-hour read
The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
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Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Two Brains Are Better Than One: Integrating the Left and the Right”
To illuminate the concept of the left and right brain functions, Siegel and Bryson offer a framing story. Four-year-old Katie had always loved school, until she got sick one day and had to be taken home. After the illness, she developed serious separation anxiety related to getting dropped off at school.
They define the hemispheres of the brain as the left side dealing with logic, language, and order, while the right brain deals more with emotion, intuition, and creativity. Children develop right-brain thinking first. In the first three years of life, children are primarily interacting with their right brain. When the “why” stage begins at roughly four years old, the left brain is starting to develop more fully.
Living either entirely in the left or right brain leads to significant problems. A person who relies primarily on the left brain is disconnected from their emotions and can feel flat or numb, whereas a person relying on the right brain is likely to be regularly overwhelmed by their sensations. Siegel and Bryson advocate an integration between the hemispheres, offering some examples to illustrate how to accomplish this integration.
Siegel and Bryson describe two concrete strategies to integrate left- and right-brain thinking in children. The first is what they frame as the “connect and redirect” (22) strategy based on an anecdote from Bryson’s parenting experience. When her seven-year-old son burst into the living room after bedtime and unloaded a score of grievances, she recognized he was primarily in his right brain. She soothed him, reassuring him that she loved him. In response, he calmed down, and she was able to appeal to the logical left brain to employ problem-solving strategies. The key element to this strategy is to connect first to allow the right brain to calm down, before then trying to redirect behavior with the left brain.
The next strategy is the “name it to tame it” (27) strategy, using narrative to work through emotions. When a child is struggling with an emotion like fear, especially when connected to a specific event, telling the story of what happened repeatedly can help activate the left brain. The authors assert that this process helps the child make sense of both the experience and the emotions attached to it. Beyond talking about the experience, journaling or simply naming the emotion are equally useful, depending on the circumstances.
As the left brain develops, helping a child learn to narrate their experiences changes. A baby or toddler may need the parent to tell and re-tell the story of a given event, whereas an older child may only need some pieces of the story filled in. A much older child or teen may only need to be given the opportunity to tell the story themselves.
The chapter closes with more practical applications, one for children and one for parents. For children, there is a comic about how the two hemispheres work and how to get them to work together. For parents, there is an anecdote about a mother who was parenting largely from the left brain problem-solving approach. When she learned about connecting with the right brain, she began to discover a closer, happier relationship with her children.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Building the Staircase of the Mind: Integrating the Upstairs and Downstairs Brain”
The two hemispheres of the brain ideally work together to contextualize experiences and emotional reactions. Similarly, the top and bottom structures of the brain have to be integrated to allow the primitive emotional lower brain to inform and warn the pre-frontal and middle pre-frontal cortices to make sound decisions and temper impulses. To better visualize this vertical relationship, Siegel and Bryson offer another metaphor: A house with an upstairs and downstairs that needs a staircase to connect them.
They emphasize that the upstairs part of the brain isn’t fully developed until a person is in their mid-twenties. As a result, children often struggle with empathy, self-awareness, and impulse control even into their teen years. Siegel and Bryson caution parents to temper their expectations with this knowledge in mind. Additionally, the amygdala’s purpose is to sense and respond instantly to danger. As a result, the amygdala can block the upstairs brain from responding rationally to a situation that feels dangerous, pushing the individual to act before thinking. As the authors point out, that can be life-saving, but is often undesirable in day-to-day life.
Even so, perhaps especially because higher-order thinking is still developing, it’s still necessary to teach kids appropriate behavior. They offer a primary example of a tantrum: An upstairs brain tantrum is a fit thrown intentionally to try to get a desired result, like a coveted toy, while a downstairs brain tantrum is a loss of control in response to an event or experience. The upstairs brain tantrum requires firm and quick boundaries, while the downstairs tantrum requires soothing and comforting, or space and protection, until the upstairs brain can be accessed again.
The third parenting strategy offered is the “engage, don’t enrage” (48) strategy. When a child shows signs of primarily using their downstairs brain, engaging them in problem-solving oriented thinking can start to engage and develop the upstairs brain. One example was of Bryson’s son acting rudely at a restaurant. Instead of giving him a command, possibly triggering further anger and a tantrum, she chose to ask what was wrong, validate the emotion, and encourage him to approach his problem from a new angle. The authors caveat this approach with the assertion that sometimes it’s necessary to command, and undesirable behavior should always be addressed, but they argue that many moments of downstairs thinking can be navigated by engaging rather than reacting.
Opportunities for developing the upstairs brain aren’t just found in moments of crisis or emotional upheaval. Additionally, parents can encourage children to make their own decisions and resist the urge to solve problems on their behalf. Parents can engage morality and empathy by asking questions and guiding children through rhetorical situations or likely future experiences.
Another important tactic is modeling the empathy, self-awareness, and sound decision-making parents want to see in their children. The downstairs brain is connected most directly to the body. As a result, engaging the body can help disengage the downstairs brain, allowing a calmer state of mind to use the upstairs brain. When a child, or an adult, finds themselves stuck in their downstairs brain, using exercise, stretching, or a change of environment can help activate the upstairs brain.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
The framing stories and anecdotal examples help to illustrate The Profound Value of Neural Integration, demonstrating how to apply the theoretical knowledge about the different hemispheres of the brain through practical strategies. In Chapter 2, the opening story of preschooler Katie’s fear of a formerly loved school demonstrates some of these strategies in action. By using different moments of Katie and her father Thomas working through these behavioral issues, the authors highlight how to use the right brain to connect emotionally with the child, before engaging the left brain to activate more concrete problem-solving.
The “upstairs” and “downstairs” brain discussion (See: Index of Terms) similarly uses a story, this time from author Tina Bryson’s own parenting experience. Siegel and Bryson follow the same structure as in the previous chapter, but adding the firsthand experience from one of the authors humanizes Bryson. In sharing her own parenting struggles, Bryson attempts to forge an emotional connection with readers, presenting herself as someone who often has to confront the same sort of parenting challenges as everyone else despite her professional expertise.
Throughout the book, the authors also use graphics and comics to literally illustrate the strategies, techniques, and concepts they’re describing. The use of pictorial examples reinforces their overarching point and their larger purpose. To give parents a literal picture of how to use the specific strategies appeals to the more visual center of the brain. Along with the emotional connection established in the real-life stories they share, these graphics appeal to the right brain. The written explanations, on the other hand, appeal to the language centers in the brain. Siegel and Bryson thus use the same techniques they advocate throughout the text, modeling the kind of thinking they’re encouraging parents to nurture and model.
The authors emphasize that parenting is hard and never perfect, invoking Meeting Parenting Challenges with Knowledge and Understanding. Rather than only focus on the behavioral problems that can come from a child’s dis-integrated brain, the authors include errors parents make as well and offer strategies for repair. This is yet another strategy to include parent readers in the discussion, with the authors presenting their content as relatable and validating. They invite parents to examine their own positive and negative actions, encouraging them to think about integration not just within their children, but also within themselves.
This section of the book focuses on vertical and horizontal integration in brain development, reinforcing The Profound Value of Neural Integration. These two chapters explain how the brain is split, and how connections can be concretely developed by active parenting choices. The authors start with the left brain and the right brain because it is the most fundamental division of the neural structure. By initially exploring how to integrate these two basic hemispheres, they lay a foundation for later discussions on integrating more amorphous areas of the brain.
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