What is brain integration?
why is this important, and what's the effect of it on our children?
As parents, on a day-to-day basis, we come across many different challenges while trying to communicate with our children. These challenges can be considered opportunities to help our children grow mentally and emotionally and reach their true potential.
We don’t need to wait for that special moment to help our children thrive; we should look at each interaction as an opportunity to help them be the responsible, caring, and capable people that they can be.
Parents need to understand their essential role in shaping their children's brains. With every experience you offer them, you actively participate in forming their brains.
To have a stronger and more resilient child in the future, we should be more knowledgeable and use our top skills and handle this responsibility in the best way possible. After all, the main thing that moulds our brain is our experiences.
As we know our brain is made of two sides, the left, and the right side. The left hemisphere is responsible for logical thoughts and the right side helps us experience emotions.
The primary key to thriving is to have these two sides work well together; they need to become unified. Helping our children learn how to integrate between these two sides of their brain will get them closer to succeeding in different aspects of their lives.
I mean by integration is to actively work towards harmony between different sides of the brain to make a well-functioning whole.
An integrated brain can achieve a balanced, meaningful, and creative life.
It could be chaotic for any individual if they are too focused on the right side, where we could end up living in an emotional flood, or left side, where there would be too much control leading to a lack of flexibility. If any of the two sides are more dominant, it can mentally and emotionally cause an unhealthy life. An unintegrated brain causes our children to sometimes react harshly and become defensive when you joke around with them. They won't be able to connect with you emotionally, and they only hear and focus on the words that come out of your mouth so that they would miss your tone of voice and its playfulness. As much as the emotions denial is dangerous, becoming too literal can cause some difficulties for our children.
Brain maturation and its rate for each individual is different as it is influenced by the genes that we inherit. But we can always work actively on the level of integration in our children as it is something that, as parents, we influence directly.
Researchers have confirmed that 30% of our personality traits will be shaped in the first three years of our lives.
Our children are constantly monitoring, recording, and observing what goes around them, what we do, and what we say, so it's essential to be mindful as parents or caregivers while we interact with them. Also, we need to understand that the dominant hemisphere is the right side which is specialized in emotions, personal memories, images, and overall nonverbal cues, during the early years.
Right when our child starts to ask the question "why" for any strange things or events that they see around them, is when their left brain is kicking in.
In the next edition, I’ll discuss how we can help our children achieve brain integration and develop skills to have a well-balanced life.
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Thanks for giving my work a slice of your attention!
This is great. Parents need to know what’s going on in our brains so we can intentionally help our kids development. 🙏🏻 I just discovered Dr. Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and philosopher who talks about the integration of both sides of the brain. Super interesting stuff, you should check him out if you haven’t already!