The Yes Brain

The Yes Brain offers parenting techniques that will give your kids an open attitude towards life, balance, resilience, insight, and empathy.

Sometimes young children are demanding little barbarians. Worse, it seems that we’re just stuck with them like that until some distant time when they magically decide to start behaving in a civilized manner. While the path to becoming self-disciplined is indeed a long one, it can be traveled in baby steps – beginning right now.

Sigel and Bryson suggest using a “zones” system for talking about emotions with children. In the “green zone,” the child is feeling pretty good. “Red zone” is for anger, anxiety, or fear. And the “blue zone” is for sadness and similar emotions.

When a child or even an adult finds herself in the red or blue zone, she can predict that her emotions are threatening to get the better of her. Young children can try basic mindfulness techniques like taking some deep breaths to get back into the green zone. Instead of becoming a victim of her swirling emotions, the child can choose whether to follow where they’re leading her.

Even if the child doesn’t prevent herself from blowing up or melting down, a kid’s sense of self-awareness still benefits from this kind of introspection. Over time, her capacities of self-control may expand more quickly than they otherwise would have.

Another path to developing insight involves simply imagining that you are someone else, like a neutral bystander. When we see things only from our own eyes, it’s too easy to neglect the interests and needs of others. But, by trying on the observer standpoint, we can begin to see that a situation may not involve clear-cut “right” and “wrong” after all.

The sooner kids figure out that the world doesn’t revolve around them, the better. Even when they are only a few years old, children need to get along with other kids to thrive.

This doesn’t have to be a harsh lesson, though! Plenty of time to socialize and freely play with others can give kids opportunities to learn it naturally, such as by anticipating the social consequences of their actions.

Learning to take another’s perspective may help kids treat themselves more kindly, too. Failure can feel terrible at the time, and developing the resilience to bounce back is hard. But, from the outside looking in, failure can appear to be just another step along the path to success.

It’s common to think of very young humans as incapable of perspective-taking. Yet, research suggests that the human capacity for empathy begins to emerge quite early, sometimes even before the age of 1 year. You might feel horrified or embarrassed when your child behaves extremely…