Summary of The Yes Brain Child by Siegel and Payne
I’m enthralled by Daniel Siegel’s work, partially because his work has touched on all ages: infant to adult. In his writing on childhood development, you can feel his deep knowledge of the human lifespan and what is foundational in childhood for fulfilled adults. In The Yes Brain Child, Siegel and Payne Bryson outline fundamentals for cultivating courage, curiosity, and resilience in children.
This summary covers the conceptual framework for YBC as well as what we can do as parents to support yes brains: balance, resilience, insight, and empathy.
Siegel details an exercise he uses during speaking engagements. He gets up on the podium and says “no, no, nooooooooooooooo, noo, NO, NO, NOOOOOO” for two minutes. It feels like ten minutes. After this, the audience reports how they feel: shut-down, defensive, upset, tense, angry. Cue the recurring dream of me showing up to my college final naked with a mouth full of broken glass.
Then he switches to “yes, yessss, YAAAZZZ” in a calm, soothing voice. The audience reports feeling open, clear, light, relaxed mussels & vocal cords with a demonstrated drop in breathing and heart rate. Cue the recurring dream of me winning the Great British Baking Show.
This is what Siegel and Bryson mean by a “no” and “yes” brain.
A “yes brain” is flexible, curious, resilient, imaginative, willing to try new things, and make mistakes. It’s open to the world and relationships. It’s primed for learning, has an internal locus of control, and is open to compromise. Sounds like Captain America.
By contrast, the “no brain” is reactive, fearful, rigid, shut down. It’s filled with worry about making a mistake. It’s a mind that focuses on external achievements, gold stars, and people-pleasing for self-worth rather than internal joy. Sounds like the bad guy in every 80s movie filmed at a ski resort.
Our behavior, interaction, and connection with our children can foster yes brains. The short-term benefit of cultivating a “yes brain” is easier parenting (ore Mai Tais for me! And heck, throw a little umbrella in that sippy cup). Kids are happier, more flexible, and interested in the world around them. With the accompanying decrease in childhood stress and more demonstrable grit, the long-term benefits have been demonstrated several times: better mental health, longer life span, and higher lifetime earnings.
Siegel and Payne Bryson introduce the concept of ‘green zone.’ This is when a child (or any person for that matter) can handle what comes at them; they’re able to handle adversity, fear, or anger with calm, confident, clarity. Barista got your coffee order wrong? It’s okay. You know that you can calmly ask them to re-make it for you.
Then there is the ‘red zone,’ when internal feelings become overwhelming. One might feel fear, panic, embarrassment. The autonomic nervous system goes into overdrive, a fight or flight stress response is initiated. You yell at the barista while throwing your drink in the trash, “THIS IS THE LAST TIME I COME HERE!” All I can think of is George Costanza.
On the ice cold side of things, there is the ‘blue-zone,’ which is also a stress response driven by the autonomic nervous system, but driven by faint-or-freeze. In the blue zone, one withdrawals, can become limp, stops making eye contact and engaging, and in extreme cases experience dissociation. Children enter into the blue zone when it seems impossible to escape a scary or difficult situation. The coffee’s wrong. We grumble our way out of the cafe. We never come back. The cafe loses a customer and we lose the best cheese danish in the Northern Hemisphere.
Children don’t choose the red or blue zone. Instead, it is a learned behavior based on what has been a successful strategy in the past. When kids are in the red or blue zone, they are incapable of learning. You can tell them all day long to brush their teeth or there will be no more Great British Baking Show today, but they will be incapable of hearing you. Our goal as parents is to get them back into the green zone before lecturing them on the benefits of oral hygiene (naturally followed by tons of sugary TV).
So, in summary:
There is a green zone. I think of this as the “swing easy” zone (she says after hitting exactly two golf balls further than 50 yards).
Kids (okay, adults too) get outside of their green zone when they feel like they need to protect themselves from something (real or imagined). Then, they head into the red zone; the fight or flight modus operandi.
Or this might lead to the blue zone. Que freeze or faint.
Moving on. Siegel and Payne Bryson cover four building blocks for spending more time in the green zone: 1. balance (how to stay in the green more) 2. resilience (expanding the green zone aka giving our kids longer fuses), 3. empathy and 4. Insight (both help get kids back into their green zone quicker).
Cultivating balance is key to a yes brain. Not balance beam balance–albeit fantastic–but the emotional stability and regulation between the brain and body. Siegel and Payne Bryson put balance first and spend a lot of time on it. Balance is the building block for the other three pillars. When kids are out of balance and unregulated, they are unable to learn. ”Learn” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I’m talking about learning they can rely on their adults, learning what behaviors have consequences, learning language, learning how to learn, etc.
When a human baby is born, their reptilian brain – the downstairs brain – is fully developed. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for our breathing, sucking, farting.
The upstairs brain is still being developed and will not fully develop until said baby is well into his mid-twenties (might this explains parachute pants in the 80s, cargo shorts in the 90s and the return of acid wash jeans?). The upstairs brain is responsible for cognitive skills, emotional, relational, complex reasoning, planning, considering consequences, and other perspectives. Until this upstairs brain starts to come online, the human youngster will be incapable of controlling his emotions and body completely. He is operating from a downstairs brain only. And so, with this grave sentence, the parent must serve as the child’s external upstairs brain. We help him regulate and let him know what’s safe and what’s dangerous. To promote balance, we teach our children how to modulate their feelings, letting them know they are safe and soothing them back into the green zone.
Children misbehave because they can’t appropriately control their actions, not because they don’t wanna. Kids don’t like feeling out of control – it is scary for them. Without our help, they’re forced to deal with this dysregulated scary state on their own.
Siegel and Payne Bryson place a “healthy mind platter” (I’m not sure that eating was the best metaphor, but, hey, I’ll roll with it) at the center of maintaining balance. They found it critical for children to have some of the following things in their day: sleep, physical movement, focus, time in (aka time reflecting on their internal state), downtime, connecting, and playtime. They put double emphasis on sleep (sleep is important for parents too!).
Lack of balance and frequent reactivity can stem from sources like developmental age, temperament, sleep, trauma, sensory processing challenges, medical issues, learning and cognitive disabilities, parental responses, and mental health disorders. The results, however, are easily recognized: emotional chaos, explosive anger, yelling, disrespectful intense anxiety, withdrawal depression, self-isolation (yes, I know this is a terrible paragraph).
While balance is about spending more time in the green zone. The second pillar, resilience, is about expanding the green zone. A fellow parent just asked me, “yeah, yeah, I get being emotionally supportive of my kid, but I wasn’t coddled, and I know grit is important, so, how do I balance being supportive of the emotions resulting from the Elsa dress getting yogurt on it with the need for my child to learn that cloths get dirty?” This is where resilience comes in.
Resilience is a state of resourcefulness that helps us move through challenges with strength and clarity. When our kid is out of their green zone, they are telling us that they need to learn something; think of ‘outside the green zone’ as the equivalent of pointing for learning language. For example, every time our kid throws a tantrum about not sharing the vintage LV luggage, they’re telling us that they need help building their sharing skills.
It is wildly important to reiterate that kids cannot learn when they’re out of their green zone. So, get them to calm down before imparting your wisdom. Siegel and Payne Bryson suggest showering kids with four S: safe, seen, soothed, and secure to make sure kids are in the right headspace to learn and test their bounds.
An excellent word that Siegel and Payne Bryson introduce is “yet.” “You aren’t able to muster the courage to order for yourself, YET.” (That is, until they reply “but mom, I want the lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and with a fried egg on top… and spam!”) “Yet” signals to our children that it is okay that they don’t know this skill, but with work, they will - it reminds us and them of a growth mindset.
Empathy – unlike unicycling – is a skill that can be learned. Building empathy is the act of gaining awareness of how others feel. It can help you to understand others’ motivations and change your perspective from life happening to you to one of life happening for you. Developing empathy can help us operate from the point of receptivity rather than reactivity. It gives us control, or at least the illusion of control.
Ways to build empathy in kids:
Replace judgment with curiosity, rather than, “why does Colin smell?” try, “I wonder why he didn’t shower today?”
Question how the character in a book or movie is feeling. “How does The Dude feel when his rug is peed on?”
Point out how a friend might be feeling, “It looks like Spruce is feeling excited to eat his homemade gluten-free, dairy-free, free-range, sugar-free, packed-in a bees-wax-canvas snack.”
When your children are ready for it, broadening their circle of concern, look to empathize with natural disaster victims, the homeless, or the driver with road rage. For an added challenge, hang out at the return department of the nearest department store for 10 minutes.
Play “fact or opinion” (ask if something is a fact or an opinion). The sky is blue (fact). That tree is beautiful (opinion). Occasionally you’ll get a false fact: a triangle has four sides.
Teach kids (and partners?) that advice isn’t as powerful as listening, or at the very least, advice is more influential after listening.
If all else fails, try this.
Siegel and Payne Bryson don’t make the distinction between empathy and compassion. I think it is an important one to make. I like to imagine they would promote compassion over empathy. Empathy can elicit pain centers in our brain as we put ourselves in others’ shoes; their itchiness is our itchiness. Compassion is when we start with empathy and then decide to offer aid – I will scratch your back, etc., etc. – which triggers the reward centers of our brain.
Ways to build compassion in kids:
Practice the Mr. Rogers rule: in trying situations, point out the helpers.
Ask what might make someone feel better.
This book is a brilliant read with your kids - such an easy metaphor for kids to grasp.
OK, empathy is building an awareness of how others feel. Insight is building an understanding of how you feel. Like empathy, this can be taught, but – maybe more importantly – it HAS to be taught.
Internal feelings arise from our physiological state; you can think of it as a 2X2 matrix (see below) with excited <> relaxed on one axis and happy <> sad on the other. Emotions are learned by associating the internal physiological state (some combination of the 2X2) with external context and words. Think of it like teaching kids what farts are, er... the wind is, you cannot see it, but you can sense it, you see the leaves rustling, and it can startle the dog. We can help kids by helping them name their feelings - and they will start to associate them with their internal state.
Empathy and insight go hand in hand; they are both ways of starting to give our kids vocabulary to describe the unseen emotional world. By doing this, we can help them begin pattern recognition. They can learn that they can get worked up and that they will eventually feel calm. When they feel sad, it is not a permanent state. They can learn that before they blow their proverbial top. That they can take a pause and de-link their internal state from their desire to tear their brother’s artwork into smithereens. They start to learn how to make good decisions, which help them be in control of their lives.
Tactics for teaching insight:
Teach kids calm. Before bed, when they are relaxed (not having the dance party to delay sleeping), have them put one hand on their chest and one hand on their stomach, have them feel how calm their body feels. You can then use this when they are losing their sh*t – ask them to put one hand on heart and one hand on stomach to try and find calm.
As you see them getting worked up, ask them to pause before the explosion and try and calm down using breath or expansion of their visual field. Then, call it out for them when they’re able to be angry without seeing red.
Name their emotions for them, ask them to notice how the emotion feels in their body.
Get them involved in activities where they gain awareness of their bodies: martial arts, dance, yoga.
To teach our kids empathy and insight, we must have the right level of connection. Our kids need to know that we understand their inner world but are not overwhelmed by it, that she can feel dysregulated, and you will remain regulated to help her get back into the green zone.
Most of what Siegel and Payne Bryson talk about in The Yes Brain Child is just as helpful for adults seeking more creativity, ease, resilience, courage, and curiosity. And in many respects, we cannot support our kid’s yes brains unless we are ourselves in a yes-brain state of mind.
