The Whole-Brain Child

behavior. On the contrary, by understanding how your child’s brain
works, you can create cooperation much more quickly and often
with far less drama. In this case, because Tina understood what
was happening in her son’s brain, she saw that the most eʃective
response was to connect with his right brain. She listened to him
and comforted him, using her own right brain, and in less than ɹve
minutes he was back in bed. If, on the other hand, she had played
the heavy and come down hard on him for getting out of bed, using
left-brain logic and the letter of the law, they would have both
become increasingly upset—and it would have been a lot more
than five minutes before he calmed down enough to sleep.
More important, Tina’s was a more caring and nurturing
response. Even though her son’s issues seemed silly and perhaps
illogical to her, he genuinely felt that things weren’t fair and that
he had legitimate complaints. By connecting with him, right brain
to right brain, she was able to communicate that she was tuned in
to how he was feeling. Even if he was stalling, this right-brain
response was the most eʃective approach, since it let her not only
meet his need for connection, but also redirect him to bed more
quickly. Instead of ɹghting against the huge waves of his emotional
flood, Tina surfed them by responding to his right brain.
This story points out an important insight: when a child is upset,
logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s
emotional needs. We call this emotional connection “attunement,”
which is how we connect deeply with another person and allow
them to “feel felt.” When parent and child are tuned in to each
other, they experience a sense of joining together.
Tina’s approach with her son is one that we call the “connect and
redirect” method, and it begins with helping our kids “feel felt”
before we try to solve problems or address the situation logically.
Here’s how it works: