Book Review: The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

This book helps parents to understand their child’s developing brain in order to manage emotional and behavioral challenges and help influence their brain development.  The book encourages us to guide our children away from either of the extremes of rigidity or chaos through horizontal and vertical integration of the brain.  The left brain is our source of language and logic, while the right brain is our emotional hub.  When a child is upset, we first need to attend to the emotional needs of the right brain through attunement and then “horizontally integrate” by re-directing to the left brain with planning and decision-making.  The lower regions of the brain are the primitive parts of the brain that includes the “fight or flight” response and stronger emotions like anger and fear.  The upper front of the brain is responsible for higher level thinking, such as decision making, planning, empathy, moral reasoning, conscious control of the body and emotions.  The book helps the parent learn to “vertically integrate” or help the upper and lower regions to work together.  However, the upper region of the brain is not very developed in young children and becomes fully developed when we are in our mid-20’s.  Big emotional responses block our ability to use the higher level- thinking.  Parents can support children by helping them to calm down first through nurturing and comforting, then help them with higher level, upper brain thinking.  Authors note that there are also times that kids are engaging in behavior without the big emotional responses and, thus, should be expected to access the higher-level thinking and reasoning.  In these situations, parents should practice setting boundaries and having rational discussions on acceptable behavior.  The book also outlines a number of ways that we can promote upper brain and higher-level thinking, such as talking about a conflict, and asking them to come up with their own ideas for how to solve-problems and make decisions that incorporate perspective taking and empathy.

Our team’s take-away from reading this book is that all parents would benefit from reading it, including those of us on the team with kids of our own.  This book gave brain-based research to the strategies we use in therapy with of our clients.  It is an easy read with very practical suggestions for realistic and challenging situations.