Children grow up with the right brain dominant. They live in the moment and ignore everything else. The child’s emotional world becomes a desert if only the left brain is utilized. Parents can help their children recognize their emotional state by listening, paying attention and sharing experiences. This will allow them to balance the strong emotions and logic of the right with the logic of left brain. They can be happier once they are able to manage their emotions properly.
Thomas’s 4-year old daughter Katie loves school so much that she doesn’t cry when her father takes her to school to say goodbye. Katie was fine until one day, when she became sick at school. Thomas called Thomas and picked Katie up.
Katie began crying the day she went to school, but it was normal. For the next few days, it will be the same. Even though Thomas tried to get Katie to go to school, she refused.
Katie will feel more abnormal after getting out of her car in the school’s parking lot. She would exhibit a “non violent, uncooperative” behavior near the school building. She is as strong as gold and clings to her father.
Thomas was forced to drag her step by step to the classroom because of her resistance. Thomas was held tightly by Katie once she arrived in the classroom. Katie finally made a “hands off” and put all of Thomas’s weight on her leg. Thomas was finally freed from Katie’s “devil’s grip” and was about leaving the classroom when he heard his daughter’s hoarse voice: “I will die, if you go!”
This is a common sign of separation anxiety in young children. Although school can sometimes be a difficult place for children, Thomas finds it fascinating: “Katie always looks forwards to going to school before getting sick. She enjoys school activities, making friends with her classmates, telling stories and admiring it. She loves her teacher.
What went wrong? What caused Katie to have such unreasonable and extreme fears after her illness? What should Thomas do? He must first find a way to allow Katie to attend school. This is his “survival” goal. He also hopes to use this experience to help Katie overcome her current issues and promote her future growth. This is his “developmental learning”.
We will later return to Thomas’s problem and show how he uses basic brain knowledge to transform the “survival moment” that meets minimum requirements into a “development time” that allows children to develop unlimited potential. The simple principle of left-right brain work is what he knows.
1. Right brain and left brain
You may already know that the brain can be divided into left and right parts. These two sections are not only anatomically distinct, but also have very different functions. Some believe that each brain has its own personality and that they have different functions. However, the scientific community suggests that there are two brain patterns. We will be discussing the left and right brains in layman terms.
The left brain is obsessed with order and wants it to be logical, real, rational, verbal, and linear. The right brain is both comprehensive and nonverbal. It is responsible to send and receive signals in order to achieve communication’s purpose. These signals include facial expressions and eye contact, tone, voice, body posture, gestures, and tone of voice. The right brain doesn’t care about order and details, but rather the whole scene. It is concerned with the meaning and emotions of the experience. Images, emotions, and personal memories are all that matter to it. The right brain is responsible for “intuition” and “feeling from your heart”.
People believe that the right brain is more perceptive and intuitive than the left. Professionals believe that the right brain has more direct connections to the body and bottom of the brain. It is responsible for processing emotional information and receiving it. The left brain is rational, verbal and realistic. The right brain, on the other hand, is emotional, nonverbal and empirical.
It can be viewed this way: The left brain cares about legal provisions. As children get older, their left brains will improve. I just gently pushed her.” The right brain is concerned with the spirit of law and the emotions and experiences in interpersonal relationships. . The context is what the right brain sees. The text is interpreted by the left brain. Katie shouted to her father, “I will die” from the non-logical and emotional right brain.
The right brain is the dominant part of the child’s growth, especially in the early years. Children are still learning to live in the moment and not rely on logic or words to express themselves. This explains why children will sit on the sidewalk and watch ladybirds crawling or not feel guilty if they are late to class. They do not yet have logic, responsibility, or the concept of time. However, if a toddler asks “why”, it is a sign that his left brain has begun to work. This is because it wants to understand the linear causal relationship of everything in the universe and to express logic using words.
2. Connect the right and left brains
The coordinated functioning of the left brain and right brains is crucial for harmonious and meaningful life. This is why the brain structure was designed this way. Let’s take the corpus callosum for an example. It’s a bundle made up of fibers that connects the left and right brains at the brain center. The fiber bundles allow the left and right brains to communicate, thereby functioning together as one. This is what we hope to see happen for children. We want the brains of children to be horizontally integrated so that both the left and right brains can work together. This will allow children to face their logic and emotions simultaneously, help them balance the two and ultimately make sense of the world.
Because each function is unique, the brain can be divided into left and right parts. This allows us to achieve greater complexity and accomplish more difficult tasks. When the brain is not integrated, or only one side of it can cause problems. It is like using only one arm to swim with the right or left brain. Even though one arm can swim, it is easier to get to the target with both arms.
The brain is the same. Emotions are essential if we want to make our lives more meaningful. However, we don’t want to live in complete control of our emotions. If the logic of our left brain is ignored, and we become enslaved by emotions and imagination, then we risk becoming submerged in an emotional tsunami. We don’t want to use the left brain only to distinguish logic and language from personal experience. This will leave us feeling trapped in an emotional desert.
We want to avoid emotional desert or emotional tsunami. We believe that emotions, such as autobiographical memories and irrational images can have a role. However, we also hope they can be integrated with order or structure. Katie’s right brain controlled her behavior when she yelled at school. Thomas witnessed Katie’s emotional right brain not coordinating with her logic left brain. Thomas thus witnessed an emotional tsunami.
Important point: Emotional tsunamis can lead to problems. However, ignoring or denouncing emotional deserts can also lead to problems. This problem is more common in older children. This is the story of a 12-year old girl. Many people have experienced this.
Amanda got into an argument with her best friend. Her mother revealed to us that the dispute was very difficult for her at the time. She shrugged and stared out the window as she said, “I don’t really care. But we won’t speak anymore, because she annoys us.”
Although her expression was calm and cold, I could sense her nonverbal signals coming from her right brain. This is a sign of some kind of pain. Amanda uses her left brain to deal with fragile emotions. It is a barren desert like environment, but it is predictable and manageable.
Amanda needs to understand that, even though it is painful to recall the conflict with her friends, she must still pay attention to and respect what occurred in her right brain. Because the right brain is closely linked to the body’s sensations and information released by the underlying mind, I have to help her. They create emotions. All images, emotions, and autobiographical memory from the right brain contain emotion. We tend to withdraw from the perceptive, unpredictable right brain when we feel sad and instead retreat to the predictable and controllable.
The left brain will make us feel more secure.
Amanda’s true feelings are what I need to help her. I didn’t point out her secrets or how she was living her life. I also did not point out her hurt feelings towards people. I tried to get her right brain to talk to my left brain. Let her know by my facial expressions and gestures that I want her to feel her emotions and to help her “feel her feelings” empathically. Once we have established a connection, our language will be more natural and I can enter her heart to see what happens.
Amanda shared the story of her dispute with her best friend. I listened to Amanda’s subtle emotional changes and noticed her pauses. This helped me to bring Amanda back to her true emotions. I used this method to help her connect with her right brain’s sensations, body sensations, and images, as well her language and linear narrative ability. Understanding the mechanisms of the left brain and right brains will help us understand how integrating them will change the outcome of interaction.
While we don’t want to see our children hurt, we hope they can also overcome the challenges and learn from them. Amanda turned to her left brain to escape the pain in her right brain. She was unable to accept some of her most important self-reviews.
3. Stereotyped left brain
Our over-reliance upon the left brain can lead to the possibility of denying emotions. Because this is the specialty and strength of the right brain, it can lead to rigidity, inability to discern different opinions and a lack of ability to interpret events in context. Sometimes, a gentle joke that you tell an 8-year old child can cause him to become defensive and angry. Remember that the right brain interprets non-verbal information. This is especially true when the child feels tired or is in a bad mood. He may not notice your jokes and funny expressions, but the literal meaning. .
Tina was recently involved in an interesting incident which showed what happens to the left brain when it is completely controlled by the stereotypical left brain.
Tina bought a cake at the grocery store for her one-year-old son. Tina wants a “cake made from cupcakes”, which means to combine many cupcakes with frosting so it looks like one big cake. She instructed the cake master to add her son’s name, “JP”, on the cupcakes when she placed the order. She got the cake shown in the photo above, before the party began, and it stated: JP is on the muffin.
Our goal is to teach children to use both the left and right brains simultaneously, which is to say to integrate the left with the right. It’s like a river full of happiness. Both the banks are both chaotic and straight. It is important to keep your mental health in check by staying in the middle between the two banks of the river. Children will be able to connect their left and right brains by helping them avoid chaos and stereotypical river banks. They can live in a happy, healthy river that is constantly flowing.
Children will be able to distinguish between the right and left brains by integrating them. The right brain will drift to the river bank of chaos like Katie if it isn’t able to combine the logic and emotion of the left brain. We must help children to get ideas from their left brains and deal with emotions. He will end up like Amanda if he doesn’t feel emotions and keeps his mind in his left brain. We must help children to invite their right brains to be more involved so they can take in new information and experience.
