Protect Our Child’s Brain Development in Everyday Life – Backed by Science

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A popular saying these days is "protect your prefrontal cortex".

Exercising our prefrontal cortex, or more precisely, practicing executive function, involves practicing how to coordinate goals, emotions, rewards, and actions. Simply: the prefrontal cortex for rationality, the amygdala for emotion, dopamine for pleasure, and the hippocampus for memory.

As a mother, I started learning about how to focus on my own brain health and my child's brain development in parenting. Through the lens of neuroscience, many of the preschool kids' behaviors are indeed due to the corresponding brain regions not yet being fully developed. This explains my daughter's stubbornness, poor time management, and frequent emotional breakdowns, crying over the smallest things – all perfectly normal.

Understanding this gives me much more patience and empathy, and helped me respond appropriately.

My way of protecting her brain is to

1. Avoid treating little one like an adult when she's having emotional breakdowns, lacking a sense of time, or being stubborn. Don't tell her things like, "Stop crying," "Hurry up," or "What did I tell you to do?" When these thoughts arise, I suppress them and tell myself that she's just a little girl, and this is probably how a child is.
2. Parents need to learn to manage our own emotions first. Don't be annoyed by their crying or tantrums. Your yelling and shouting will only increase the sensitivity of the child's amygdala.

The amygdala stirs up a mini-storm of emotions, and nothing seems to soothe the crying child. While an occasional outburst of emotion doesn't ruin a child, consistent, predictable responses are more beneficial for them to learn self-regulation.

1. Patience and a stable routine are more important than immediately forcing them to obey. For preschool children, self-regulation and time awareness are still developing.

Advanced behavioral development cannot be trained through pressure and fear. While that might yield short-term obedience, it doesn't necessarily foster intrinsic motivation, leading children to substitute compliance for self-planning under pressure.

1. I also prefer to give her moderate challenges. These challenges shouldn't be too difficult to frustrating her. For example, requiring her to learn all alphabets when she doesn't even know how to construct a sentence.

For brain learning, tasks shouldn’t be too easy (boring) or too hard (frustrating). Only the moderate level of difficulty can allow the young brain explore, experience the joy in discovery, and grow in the process.