Quotes About Development

other words, on top of our basic brain architecture and our inborn temperament, parents have much they can do to provide the kinds of experiences that will help develop a resilient, well-integrated brain.

What molds our brain? Experience. Even into old age, our experiences actually change the physical structure of the brain.

hours of screen time—playing video games, watching television, texting—will wire the brain in certain ways. Educational activities, sports, and music will wire it in other ways. Spending time with family and friends and learning about relationships, especially with face-to-face interactions, will wire it in yet other ways. Everything that happens to us affects the way the brain develops.

Explained most simply, mindsight is the ability to see our own mind, as well as the mind of another. It allows us to develop meaningful relationships while also maintaining a healthy and independent sense of self. When we ask our children to consider their own feelings (using personal insight) while also imagining how someone else might experience a particular situation (using empathy), we are helping them develop mindsight.

It's easy to see when our kids aren't integrated—they become overwhelmed by their emotions, confused and chaotic. They can't respond calmly and capably to the situation at hand. Tantrums, meltdowns, aggression, and most of the other challenging experiences of parenting—and life—are a result of a loss of integration, also known as dis-integration.

Yet when adults lose the four distinguishing features of adolescence, when they stop cultivating the power of novelty seeking, social engagement, emotional intensity, and creative exploration, life can become boring, isolating, dull, and routinized.

The rate of brain maturation is largely influenced by the genes we inherit.

the behaviors and skills we want and expect our kids to demonstrate, like sound decision making, control of their emotions and bodies, empathy, self-understanding, and morality—are dependent on a part of their brain that hasn't fully developed yet.

Our children need repeated experiences that allow them to develop wiring in their brain that helps them delay gratification, contain urges to react aggressively toward others, and flexibly deal with not getting their way.

descubrimiento de que el cerebro en realidad es «dúctil», o moldeable. Eso significa que el cerebro cambia físicamente a lo largo de toda nuestra vida, y no sólo en la infancia, como antes suponíamos.

Think back about the functions of the upstairs brain: good decision making, control over emotions and body, flexibility, empathy, self-understanding, and morality. These are the aspects of our kids' character we want to develop, right? As we put it in The Whole-Brain Child, we want to engage the upstairs brain, rather than enraging the downstairs brain. Engage, don't enrage.

music we hear, the people we love, the books we read, the kind of discipline we receive, the emotions we feel—profoundly affects the way our brain develops.

What's even more exciting is what happens after we appeal to the upstairs brain. When it gets engaged repeatedly, it becomes strong. Neurons that fire together wire together.

Simply by drawing your child's attention to other people's emotions during everyday encounters, you can open up whole new levels of compassion within them and exercise their upstairs brain. Scientists are beginning more and more to think

we parent, and especially when we discipline, we need to work hard to understand our children's points of view, their developmental stage, and what they are ultimately capable of.

when kids learn even the fundamentals of playing piano, their brains develop differently from the brains of kids who don't, so they can more fully understand their own bodies in relationship to the objects around them.

La mente en desarrollo: cómo interactúan las relaciones y el cerebro para modelar nuestro ser.

Kids whose parents talk to them about their feelings also develop a more robust emotional intelligence and can therefore be better at noticing and understanding their own and other people's feelings. Neurons that fire together wire together, changing the changeable brain.

When we give a child the opportunity to decide how he should act, rather than simply telling him what he should do, he becomes a better decision maker. And that's one of the ultimate goals of parenting, isn't it?

La mente en desarrollo: cómo interactúan las relaciones y el cerebro para modelar nuestro ser. Va

parenting matters, even to the extent of influencing our inborn and genetically shaped temperament.

Our kids don't usually lash out at us because they're simply rude, or because we're failures as parents. They usually lash out because they don't yet have the capacity to regulate their emotional states and control their impulses.

when your seven-year-old becomes defiant and calls you "Fart-face Jones" after you tell him it's time to leave his playdate, he's actually saying, "I need skill building when it comes to handling myself well and communicating my disappointment respectfully when I don't get my way." By misbehaving, kids actually communicate to us what they need to be working on—what has not yet been developed or what specific skills they need practice with.

Pero los hallazgos en distintas áreas de la psicología del desarrollo sugieren que todo lo que nos sucede –la música que oímos, las personas a las que queremos, los libros que leemos, la clase de disciplina que recibimos, las emociones que sentimos– tiene una gran influencia en el desarrollo de nuestro cerebro.