The Yes Brain

How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity, and Resilience in Your Child

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.

Synopsis

In their book, The Yes Brain, Siegel and Payne use neuroscience to explain how parents can assist their children’s emotional regulation through the development of four fundamentals: empathy, resilience, balance and insight. Co-regulation and modeling aid in helping children expanding their tolerance to negative experiences, or as Siegal coined, expands their “window of tolerance”.  For example, when a parent responds in frustration or is dismissive and minimizes a child’s distress, the child becomes increasingly distressed and frustrated, leading to shut down, reactivity, and more likely to engage in a power struggle, developing a “no brain”.  When a parent uses co-regulation, approaching their child with a calm, accepting, and open approach the child is likely to experience reduced distress and frustration, forming a “yes brain”. Siegel and Payne call this linkage. Linkage is about balance, too much and a child does not trust self to make their own autonomous choices and ability to regulate themselves. Too little linkage and the child experiences detachment and lacks a safe, secure base to navigate their experiences and emotions. How much linkage a child needs depends on temperament and needs of each individual child.

Balance is promoted when parents take into consideration how children use their time. To develop a Yes Brain Siegel and Payne created a “Healthy Mind Platter” that include seven important nutrients: sleep time, physical time, focus time, play time, connecting time, down time and time in. Children benefit from structured activities but equally they need time to themselves to get curious and creative, to relate and to rest.

Fostering a resilient brain requires parents to become detectives, to seek to understand negative behavior, not just extinguish it. An example of this may look like your eight-year-old punching his brother and while instinct tells you to yell “stop it, go to your room”; a yes brain mindset will validate that it is ok to be angry, and you will help your child find a more appropriate response to that anger.  This is where the window of tolerance comes in with its three zones, red, green and blue. The green zone indicates your child is fully in control of their emotions, feeling calm and safe. The red zone indicates a rise in stress and produces the large melt downs when things don’t go as expected. The blue zone is also a stress response though your child may shut down, disengage, and avoid. Parents can help their child expand their tolerance for stress by showering their children with the four S’s: Safe, Seen, Soothed, and Secure.

Parents can teach their kids about insight by offering perspective such as the example given above. Helping children identify the stimulus, the brother taking a toy, the reaction, hitting, and the resulting meltdown. In contrast parents can offer alternatives while validating the emerging emotion so that next time the child can experience the stimulus and use sound decision making by choosing an alternative way to express anger, resulting in an expanded window of tolerance.

Finally, a Yes Brain involves empathy building skills. This is demonstrated through the Empathy Diamond and the faucets of empathetic joy, cognitive empathy, perspective taking, emotional resonance, and compassionate empathy. The skill SNAG is used to Stimulate Neural Activation and Growth. Ways to “SNAG” your child’s brain involves noticing statements such as “look at your brother’s face. Can you tell what he is feeling? Why do you think he looks sad?” Approaching others with curiosity versus judgement can help children shift their language from “what wrong with him?” to “I wonder why he responded like that?” Siegel and Payne emphasize teaching kids that “blaming and criticizing causes more problems than speaking from the ‘I’ and giving advice isn’t as powerful as listening and being present.”

The Yes Brain is recommended for parents of children preschool to elementary age. I recommend pairing this book with Siegel’s other books, No Drama Discipline and The Whole Brain Child. The strategies in these books aid in building strong attachment between parent and child while giving children a strong start in emotional intelligence, resilience and relationships built on empathy and mutual respect.

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