Posts Tagged ‘interpersonal neurobiology’
(Part 2 of my 5-part series at DrGreene.com) Yesterday I invited parents to relax about pushing academics for their wee ones, because their best preparation for true intelligence is play. But there is a very important area of your young child’s brain that does need active parental participation for optimally healthy development. It’s called the orbito-frontal cortex, or OFC for short.
The OFC is the seat of common sense thinking… the ability to read other people’s “signals” and recognize their intentions… to sense their emotions, and have empathy… to imbue intellectual thought with feeling, and vice versa — to moderate emotion with rational thought. In short, the OFC is the seat of social intelligence. It manages the skills of being truly human! {Read more at DrGreene.com}
Tags: attachment, brain development, interpersonal neurobiology, relationship, rhythm
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During my infrequent strolls through Costco, a persistent thought comes to me (besides yum, those pizza samples are good) — If I were an evil genius wanting to erode the nutritional wellbeing of a civilization, this would be a good first step: Induce mass consumer hypnosis via the big-box store. (Will return to this point in a bit.)
During my infrequent strolls down streets with actual pedestrians, a persistent question comes to me: How will it effect this generation’s social intelligence, that the world of relating has so radically morphed from person-to-person to person-to-screen?
In the half-decade between my son’s junior and my daughter’s freshman years in high school, I witnessed his late-night telephone confabs (on a landline, gasp, when conference calls were a cool innovation) give way to her disembodied “connectivity” with Facebook friends. This glaring (de?)evolution announced itself through our walls: where there was once the sound of my son’s human voice — expressing the dynamic range of emotions endemic to the adolescent — now there was… silence. Save for an occasional giggle or groan from my daughter as she digested the latest posts. {Read more of this at mothering.com}
NOTE: Mothering posts don’t allow video embeds, so here’s the 90-second video of a little boy trying to interact with Siri:
Tags: Facebook, Hands Free Mama, interpersonal neurobiology, Rachel Macy Stafford, Siri, social intelligence, social media
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I write a lot about the central role of healthy attachment for child wellbeing. But what IS attachment and how do you get it?? It can be easy for someone like me who is steeped daily in the topic to take it for granted that people know what we mean when we say “attachment.” And as developmental psychologist author Gordon Neufeld has pointed out, attachment is not an intuitive word — in other words a word whose meaning is naturally and easily understood.
Author of an excellent book on attachment, Hold On to Your Kids, Neufeld points out that the word attachment was invented as a way to have a term to unify a science around. (The scientific study of attachment began in the 1950s with John Bowlby’s landmark work.) To further complicate our popular understanding of the concept, the term “attachment parenting” was copyrighted by William Sears. “So,” notes Neufeld, “now people know it as associated with a particular organization and particular strategies.” (Neufeld avoids using the term.) (more…)
Tags: attachment, attachment neurobiology, attachment parenting, Gordon Neufeld, interpersonal neurobiology, Mary Ainsworth, relationship
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Parenting for Peace
Make no mistake: mothers can change the world. And now is the time for us to realize it. Through recognizing our true nature and innate power, together with the shaping impact of how we bring children to life and to maturity, we can wield timely and imperative healing change.
The Dalai Lama said at the Vancouver Peace Summit that the world will be saved be the western woman. In the midst of our global human, economic and environmental crises, we have been overlooking a powerful — perhaps the most powerful — means of changing the world toward more peace and prosperity: the consciousness with which we bring our children to life and shepherd them into adulthood. (more…)
Tags: brain development, imagination, intellegence, interpersonal neurobiology, parenting for peace, peace, self-regulation
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NAOMI STADLEN
This author of What Mothers Do — Especially When It Looks Like Nothing changed the tone from the statistical, socio-biological, and clinical bent of the morning session to the immediacy of direct experience and the narrative of mothers about the “special time” in the early months after baby’s arrival. She highlights the importance of a parent’s sense-making of the early months, marked by such themes as an “extraordinary mixture of chaos and love,” “…like being inside a bubble…” “…like having a thin skin enclosing themselves and their babies buffering them from the rest of the world…” (more…)
Tags: feminist movement, interpersonal neurobiology, mothering, parenting, postpartum
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The Power of Parental Example
[Even though I refer to the “mommy” mind meld, these principles apply to whomever are the two or three connected, nurturing adults in an infant’s life — father, grandmother, consistent (not rotating) caregiver.] 
Imitation is the young child’s primary form of learning, which is why one of my first bits of guidance to parents coming to me for counseling is (more…)
Tags: brain development, epigenetics, fetal brain development, interpersonal neurobiology, mindfulness, social intelligence, striving
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The subject of empathy — and whether it’s an endangered trait — has been on many people’s lips and pens in the wake of unspeakable events in the past several weeks, on US soil and US-occupied soil. As Steve Taylor wrote in Psychology Today,
To a large extent, all human brutality – all oppression, cruelty and most crime – is the result of a lack of empathy. It’s a lack of empathy which makes someone capable of attacking, (more…)
Tags: attachment, empathy, interpersonal neurobiology, violence
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“Building a strong foundation for healthy development in the early years of life is a prerequisite for individual well-being, economic productivity, and harmonious societies around the world.”
So reads the opening line of one of the most important articles published this year that you will most likely never read or even hear about. The article, entitled “An Integrated Scientific Framework for Child Survival and Early Childhood Development,” was published in a recent issue of Pediatrics, the prestigious journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Not exactly bedside table reading. Or what’s tops on your Kindle. (more…)
Tags: American Academy of Pediatrics, brain development, discipline, epigenetics, interpersonal neurobiology, nurturance, stress, toxic stress
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I was taken by the crucible called motherhood a quarter-century ago: my son Ian turns twenty-five today. The baby who was born smack on his auspicious due-date (seven-eleven!) arrived to find a mother in emotional disarray, to say the least. I have said it countless times, in keynote talks…classes for grad students…casual conversations…and even in my book: Motherhood brought me to my knees. Cracked me open. Excavated me. {
