The Whole-Brain Child

sadness, and so on. They can identify tension in their body when
they’re nervous, then learn to relax their shoulders and take deep
breaths to calm themselves. Simply recognizing diʃerent sensations
like hunger, tiredness, excitement, and grumpiness can give
children a great deal of understanding and ultimately inɻuence
over their feelings.
In addition to sensations, we need to teach our kids to SIFT for
images that are aʃecting the way they look at and interact with the
world. Some images remain from the past, like the memory of a
parent on a hospital gurney, or an embarrassing moment at school.
Others might be fabricated from their imaginations or even
nightmares they’ve had. A child who worries about being left out
and isolated at recess might, for example, picture herself on a
lonely swing by herself. Or another child might struggle with
nighttime fears as a result of the images he remembers from a
scary dream. When a child becomes aware of the images that are
active in his mind, he can use his mindsight to take control of those
images and greatly diminish the power they have over him.
Kids can also be taught to SIFT for feelings and emotions they are
experiencing. Take time to ask kids how they feel, and help them
be speciɹc, so they can go from vague emotional descriptors like
“ɹne” and “bad” to more precise ones, like “disappointed,”
“anxious,” “jealous,” and “excited.” One reason kids often don’t
express the complexity of a particular emotion is that they haven’t
yet learned to think about their feelings in a sophisticated way that
recognizes the variety and richness within them. As a result, they
don’t use a full spectrum of emotions in their responses, and
instead paint their emotional pictures primarily in black and white.
Ideally, we want our kids to recognize that there’s a colorful
rainbow of rich emotions within them, and to pay attention to
these different possibilities.
Without mindsight into what’s going on in their whole brain,