The Whole-Brain Child
Brain-science strategies to help children integrate emotion and logic.
A masterful, reader-friendly guide to helping children grow emotional intelligence.
Siegel and Bryson set out a working model of the child's developing brain and translate it into twelve strategies caregivers can use during moments of distress. The organising idea is integration: linking the emotional right hemisphere with the verbal left, and the reactive lower brain with the regulating cortex that stays under construction into the mid-twenties. A tantrum, a refusal, or a silent sulk becomes an occasion to help those regions work together rather than a behaviour to be shut down.
For a clinician, the value sits in the bridge from interpersonal neurobiology to the kitchen table. The techniques rest on familiar ground: naming affect to lower arousal, telling and retelling a frightening event so implicit memory can be worked through, attunement before problem-solving. Siegel anchors these in the wider account of mind he built across his professional writing.
First published in 2011, the book gives therapists a shared vocabulary and concrete psychoeducation to hand to the parents they work alongside.
About the authors
Daniel Siegel
Daniel J. Siegel is an American physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Trained in pediatrics and in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry, he founded the approach he calls interpersonal neurobiology and serves as director of education at the Mindsight Institute. He is founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology and the author of many books, among them The Developing Mind, Mindsight, Brainstorm, and Aware. He was a founding co-director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.
Tina Payne Bryson
Tina Payne Bryson is an American psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker (LCSW). She founded and directs the Center for Connection, a mental health clinic in Pasadena, California. A graduate of Baylor University, she earned her PhD at the University of Southern California, where her research addressed attachment, childrearing and interpersonal neurobiology. With Daniel J. Siegel she co-wrote The Whole-Brain Child, No-Drama Discipline and The Yes Brain, works that apply brain science to parenting and child development.
Details
- 2011
- Delacorte Press
- Delacorte Press
- 192
- 9780553386691