– Nancy L.Weaver

As neuroscience becomes increasingly actionable, new evidence-based strategies are spilling into parenting and educational programs. Research offers some useful guideposts for parents and caregivers to change adult ways to foster healthy child development

A friend offhandedly told me recently, “It’s so easy to get my daughter to behave after her birthday — there are so many new toys to take away when she’s bad!”

While there is certainly an appeal to such a powerful parenting hack, the truth is that there’s a pretty big downside to parenting with punishment.

For the past two decades, scientists have been discovering more and more about the growing brain. This exploration of neurobiology has led to new types of trauma treatments, deeper understanding of the nervous system and greater awareness of how environmental and genetic factors interact to shape children’s behavior.

As the science has become increasingly actionable, more evidence-based strategies are spilling into parenting and educational programs. Research offers some useful guideposts for parents and caregivers to change adult ways to foster healthy child development.

It turns out that many old-school parenting and educational strategies based on outdated behavioral models are not effective. Nor are they best-practice, particularly for most vulnerable children.

Why old-school methods fall short

I don’t come to this conclusion lightly. I’m a behavioral scientist and a professor of public health with degrees in mathematics and biostatistics. When my children were little, I read all the parenting books and applied a somewhat academic strategy to my job of parenting. I firmly endorsed conventional recommendations from authors and pediatricians: I dutifully sent my children to their rooms to think about their choices and dug in my heels to enforce consequences.

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It wasn’t until my children reached middle school and high school ages that I began to see what my approach to discipline was costing us.

Parents and educators have long espoused principles gleaned from experiments by the 20th-century researcher B.F. Skinner, a behavioral psychologist who studied how rewards and punishments could change the behavior of rats, resulting in the classic carrot and stick, reward and discipline strategies. Simply put, rats that behaved the way the researchers wanted — by pressing a lever — were given a treat, and rats that did not were given a light electric shock.

These midcentury, rat-based experiments shaped a parenting style that caught on in American culture and quickly became dogma. Generations of parents learned to use rewards such as sticker charts, trinkets or toys, or an extra bedtime story to reinforce behavior they hoped to see more of, and to use negative reinforcement such as timeouts and loss of privileges to reduce unwanted conduct.

But beginning in the early 2000s, many high-profile authors began to theorize that these strategies were not only ineffective, but also harmful.

The neuroscience of child behavior

We all have a built-in nervous system response that prepares us for “fight or flight” when we feel our safety is threatened. When we sense danger for whatever reason, our hearts beat faster, our palms sweat and our focus narrows. In these situations, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the human brain that drives rational decision-making and reasoning — is decommissioned while the body prepares to fend off the threat. It’s not until the threat response subsides that we can begin to think more clearly with our prefrontal cortex. This is particularly true of children.

Unlike adults who have usually acquired some ability to regulate their nervous system, children have an immature nervous system and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. A child may hit his friend with a toy truck because he’s unable to manage the scary feelings of being left out of the kickball game. He likely knows better, but in the face of this threat his survival brain responds with a ‘fight’ response, and reasoning shuts down as his prefrontal cortex takes a while to get ‘back online.’ Because he is not yet able to verbalize his needs, caregivers need to interpret those needs by observing his behavior.

After co-regulating with a calm adult — essentially syncing their nervous systems — children are able to return to a calm state and then process any learning. Efforts to change a child’s behavior in a moment of stress, through punishments and timeouts, miss an opportunity for developing emotional regulation skills and often prolong her distress.

The fact is behaviorist models don’t work very well for children. Growing understanding of children’s developing brains makes clear that punishing a child for a temper tantrum, for ‘misbehaving’ by grabbing a toy from a classmate makes no more sense than lecturing a man in cardiac arrest about eating less sugar.

Curiosity is key to connection

Scientists and parenting experts have come a long way toward understanding how brain science can inform child-raising.

While all researchers may not agree on the most effective parenting style, there is general agreement that showing curiosity about kids’ feelings, behavior, reactions and choices can help to guide parents’ reaction during stressful times. Understanding more about why a child didn’t complete her math sheet, or why a toddler threw sand at her cousin, can support real learning.

Attuning with our children by understanding their nervous system responses helps children experience a sense of safety, which then allows them to absorb feedback. Children who feel this connection and build these skills are much less likely to throw trucks.

For instance, when your child insists upon candy in the checkout line at a grocery store, instead of cancelling the afternoon trip to the park, try this instead:

• Stay grounded. A deep breath and a pause signals to your own nervous system to be calmer, which allows you to co-regulate with a fussing child.
• Be available. Staying close gives your child the support she needs to weather the difficult emotion. Validating a child’s experience can go a long way toward helping her reset to a more regulated state.
• Hold a boundary. By not giving in to the candy purchase, you help your child practice how to handle the emotion of anger and disappointment – called ‘distress tolerance’ — with your support.
• Reflect on the circumstances. After everyone is calmer, you can talk about that experience and also notice the circumstances. Was your child hungry or tired, or perhaps upset about something from her day?

Parenting with understanding of a child’s developing brain is much more effective in shaping children’s behavior and paves the way for the emotional growth of all while enabling stronger parent-child relationships, which are enormously protective.

And that definitely feels better than taking away birthday presents.

(Nancy L. Weaver is professor of behavioral science, Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA)

(This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license)