An Adeona Family Podcast: An Early Childhood Journey
Episode 02:
Understanding Childhood Brain Development: How Your Child’s Brain Works
(Emotional Health Part 2 of 3)
On this episode of the Adeona podcast, we’re delving deeper into the mechanics of emotional learning – the physical and biochemical development that supports, and is crucial to, emotional development. What’s actually happening in the brain, how much does it develop in the early years and why is it important to understand.
Through understanding how the brain works and how the different parts of our brains are wired and connected, particularly in our child’s first 1000 days, we can better help our children form important and vital foundations of the brain that promotes good brain integration, which is vital in becoming functional adults later in life.
The synapses in the brain, which are the connecting wires to your brain cells, become thicker with repetition. These early connections can be wired positively for resilience, emotional health, emotional regulation and love, or wired negatively, which can make those connections significantly more difficult to break or alter.
A child’s brain is use-dependent. The brain organises and shapes in response to the environment that it’s in or exposed to. Likewise, a child’s emotional needs being met can physically impact the size of the brain when they are forming vital synapses.
Dr. Dan Siegel explaining the hand model of the brain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm9CIJ74Oxw
The Central Nervous System
The function of the brain is associated with the central nervous system, which plays a significant role in child development.
By allowing children as much freedom of movement as possible, simple things like the sensory input they receive from the floor can give them information that informs their body how to move. This helps with brain integration, particularly the left-right connections, which informs coordination and balance.
Research also shows that, up until the age of 9 and older, engaging in physical activity before studying or having to sit down in a learning environment, by spinning for 30 seconds, can help increase attention span and their ability to engage with the group.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
The books we mentioned in this episode:
The podcast with Dr. Tina: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/310/?fbclid=IwAR3vgCtF9FbIAL8k5urMJBPtaotGC-OQ0deEmAzLL3xxbOvSHQ5nwnlcRf4
Thank You
We’d love to hear from you! If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions about anything we discussed in this episode, please feel free to reach out – zoe@adeona.com.au.
Our Early Childhood Education Centres
Coorparoo | Mitchelton | Noosaville | Mackay
Podcast Transcription
Zoe (00:11):
Hello and welcome back to our second Adeona Families Podcast. We are very excited to be back today. And as you know, we have started these podcasts so that you as our families have the opportunity to access information in your own time and in your own space.
We were doing nights where you could come too, but we understand that everyone has absolutely busy lives, and so we’re hoping that you can enjoy this and gain some information. Once again, I’m joined by my professional associate, Tracy. And myself, Zoe.
And we are going to be delving a little deeper into some of the information that we touched on last week. And so I’m just going to hand over to Tracy to do a little bit of a recap on what we discussed last time.
Tracy (00:55):
Sure. Just before I start, I’d just like to reiterate that Zoe and I are early childhood professionals that have had the absolute privilege to be able to spend time exploring these topics, but we do not claim to be parenting experts or, doctors or anything of that caliber.
This is more just information that we share with you, and it definitely comes through an edu-caring and Adeona philosophy type of lens, but it is all based on the latest science and research that is out there.
Zoe (01:24):
Yeah, and we definitely have people that we refer to quite a bit. And our educators also have that knowledge of who those people are. So quite often we refer to Dan Siegel or Tina Payne Bryson and occasionally Bruce Perry as well. But we will discuss it a little further as we go along when we’re talking about specifics that they talk about.
Tracy (01:43):
Absolutely. And all of their material is very easy to understand and to read if parents do want to delve into it further based on the information they learn today. So last time at our last podcast, we spoke about emotional health and I guess the what is it and why is it important aspects of it.
Today we are hoping to delve a little deeper into the mechanics of that. So what’s actually happening in the brain? How much the brain develops in the early years? What’s important. We may touch a little bit on how we can support that, but don’t worry, we will be doing a deep dive on that in our next podcast.
It’s such a big topic, and there’s so much information that we really felt we sort of had to make it a three-parter. But so today is probably about the more of the physical and the biochemistry development that’s happening that supports, that’s crucial for that emotional development.
Zoe (02:39):
Yeah. And just touching base on some of the stuff we discussed last time. I guess part of the reason why emotional regulation is so important is because it affects people for their entire life. It really speaks to their mental health and outcomes for their future.
A lot of that brain development happens in those first 3 or 4 years. I think I was reading in Bruce Perry’s one of his papers this morning that it’s like 90, actually 90% of the brain is developed, but by the time children are four, which is very much in the pocket of the age group that we deal with on a day to day basis.
Tracy (03:15):
I know at the moment there’s a lot of research and I just, you know, when I namedrop Nathan Wallace here, I know that he’s a big proponent of it and he’s a neuroscientist on the first thousand days.
Yes. Because that is such a crucial period for brain development and establishing these emotional bonds and emotional health. But there’s a real focus at the moment on the first thousand days of a child’s life.
Zoe (03:39):
Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
Tracy (03:41):
So as I said, we’re already so keen to get into it. We’re already —. So I guess probably where development starts is antenatal. So maternal health obviously plays a part in this. And in terms of how the child is physically developing in, in utero. And so, you know, that sort of I guess where the first thing comes.
So if there’s risk factors there, that just would be something to be aware of. But I think probably where the really important thing happens is that, and the bit that we can have the biggest impact over, is when the child is born comes into this world. And for that child, it is such an influx of information.
All the senses are engaged and it’s just information overload sometimes for them. And so from day one, children are developing in their brain synapsis. So what synapsis are, I like to visualize them as, like, little wires that join all the different parts of the brain together. We’ll explain a little bit further why that’s important, but they are, being formed.
And what is really interesting, and the people who have been along to one of the parent information nights, and I’ll try and put this image up on the website, is that there is a picture of a typically developing three year old brain that has received love and care and attention. And then a child who, I want to say that it’s from a Budapest orphanage and, you know, in the 30s or something where the child’s physical needs were met, but their emotional needs were not.
And the brain would honestly be about half the size of a typically developing three year old. So it physically impacts the size of the brain when we are forming these synapses. The other really interesting thing about synapsis is they get the little wires that join up, get thicker with repetition.
So whether that is a positive connection or a negative connection, however that is formed, they get thicker and thicker and thicker in those first 3 to 5 years of life. And so then it becomes hardwired. Yeah. You know, and it helps with the integration with everything in their brain. So I guess with that principle that things get thicker is that it becomes harder to break as you get older.
So if those wires have been wired for positive resilience, emotional health, regulation, love connection, then that’s great. That child will have that for life hopefully. Where it is tricky is that if there hasn’t been that positive or things have negatively been wired, I guess that it’s certainly not impossible to break, but certainly harder because it’s been coated and coated and coated over and over.
Zoe (06:28):
Yeah. The brain in children is, well, actually in everyone, to be honest, but because it’s so malleable in those younger years, it’s use-dependent is the succinct way of saying – explaining what Tracey is talking about there.
So it’s use-dependent. The brain organizes in response to the environment that it’s in. And genetics play a role in that. But genetics are influenced and shaped by the environment that the child is exposed to.
Tracy (06:54):
Absolutely. I guess a really great way that I like to think about how the brain forms and how these synapses sort of connect everything is looking at Doctor Dan Segal’s I’ll say, I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that right. Hand model of the brain.
If you have a moment, I’d really recommend just having just googling that hand model of the brain or Doctor Dan Segal on YouTube, because he explains it quite succinctly on there, which is great.
Zoe (07:23):
Which is why he’s a doctor.
Tracy (07:24):
Which is right. And it’s actually a great thing to share with your children, too. I use it as, a tool with my children to help them explain and talk about emotional regulation. So I have a three and a six year old, and it’s perfectly understandable for them now. And we have a bit of a short, a short cut now where we just say, you know, flip ya lid, we’re flipping our lid, okay, we know what that means. And so it’s quite a useful tool.
Zoe (07:50):
And Tracy, I think that’s a really important point. As much as we as adults, it’s really important for us to understand what’s going on in a child’s brain. It’s also important for them to understand to some extent what’s happening as well.
Tracy (08:01):
Yeah, absolutely. The more you understand something, the more you have control over it, like saying it or the less it’s scary, less it feels overwhelming. And that’s true in anything in life. Yeah.
So I want you all as you’re sitting there listening to this podcast to, you know, raise a hand and sort of make a fist with it because it’s going to help you visualize what I’m saying. And I’m doing here as I’m talking to you now. So basically, your wrist coming up into the palm of your hand is your is your brain stem or your spine.
This is probably that little bit of the brain right down the bottom. So the bottom of your palm is our oldest part of the brain. It is called the limbic region. And it is the oldest part, I think, referred to as the reptilian part of the brain. And this is basically the part of the brain where it is our flight fight freeze response.
And it’s the bit that we where we do all of our subconscious think. So it’s breathing, it’s keeping our muscles moving. It’s making all of those functions happening. And it is the part of our brain that is constantly on the lookout for danger and responding to that.
Zoe (09:12):
Yeah, it reacts if someone throws a ball at you or something along those lines.
Tracy (09:18):
Yeah. And you know from prehistoric, is the bit that, you know, was looking for the saber toothed tiger that was going to chase us. Yeah. Or whatever. And then would decide how we respond to that.
So it’s the bit that keeps us alive essentially. Yeah. So you know, when we’re born that bit’s there, it’s functioning, it’s keeping us going along. Then if you move up the hand up into the top bit of our fingers is the cortex. So this is the bit. Oh sorry. Can I just jumping back to the limbic system. Sorry.
That’s also the bit that and we’ll delve into this a little bit further. But that’s also the bit that released in children strives to make connection. Because obviously when babies are born they don’t have the ability to survive on their own.
So that part of the brain is really functioning to try and make a bond with another human being, because that’s what they need to stay alive without making somebody look at them, and love them, and feed them and carry them, you know, they’re in real trouble. So that’s also operating.
And I think Doctor Dan, how I refer to him now, and Doctor Tina, you know, sort of referred to that as the connection part of the brain because it’s really seeking connection.
Zoe (10:33):
Yeah, we’re born as big brain mammals and part of that trade off in evolution is that we are really highly dependent on our, the people around us, our family, our primary carers. And so we are quite, as we are born, we are quite dominant. Our brain is relationally based. So we seek those connections at very, very early age.
Tracy (10:56):
Yeah, absolutely. Because it was a matter of survival.
Zoe (10:59):
That’s right.
Tracy (11:00):
So then as we move up, we move into the cortex area of the brain. So that’s the that’s sort of where your knuckles and fingers sort of fold over the top of your palm. And that’s sort of how you imagine it sitting in your head.
Zoe’s laughing at me because I’m miming it as I’m doing this, it sort of is in there. And that’s the bit that allows higher thinking. Essentially, it’s the bit of our brain that uses reason and logic and can think things through.
It can be when, you know, a fight flight freeze response is issued, the top of our brain can go, oh, actually, no, that’s not something chasing me. It’s just a tree. It’s that bit to be able to reason out of things.
Zoe (11:38):
Just a ball. I’ll catch it. Yeah.
Tracy (11:41):
Or I can duck or whatever it’s going to be. And it’s also the bit of our brain that we use to do things like academic learning or, to develop skills and interests as we grow older.
Zoe (11:54):
Yeah. And that develops all the way into the 20s. So that part of the brain takes a considerable amount of time and probably more time than people realize. Mid-Twenties is normally when it’s fully developed.
Tracy (12:05):
Yeah. And to say, the bit that sort of your knuckle to your nail – your first knuckle to your nail on your hand, that’s the prefrontal cortex. And that’s not, as you said, developed until 25-ish. Some people maybe never… and that’s the bit that makes us be able to make really sound decisions.
Zoe (12:26):
And control our emotions and develop that empathy and morality and all those kind of higher order thinking things as well.
Tracy (12:33):
So absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess why that’s important is because Doctor Dan and Doctor Tina referred to that as the upstairs, downstairs brain. And in order to become a functioning human being with healthy emotional regulation, the upstairs and the downstairs brain need to have connections through them.
And that’s where the synapsis is, because otherwise, if there isn’t, those connections aren’t formed or they’re not formed in, positive way a person is always going to be operating from a flight, fight or freeze response, which is an exhausting and traumatic way to go through life and so we really want to be able to put inside that connection and that higher order thinking, to be able to support people through their lives.
Zoe (13:22):
Yeah, they refer to it as integration quite often, and it’s top and bottom, left and right. And to have really good integration means that you are extremely functional at all, basically.
Tracy (13:32):
Yeah, absolutely. And all of that, as I said, not impossible to change, but it’s a lot easier if we can start getting that integration happening in the first thousand days.
Zoe (13:42):
Yes, yes. Yeah. Once again, that 90% of the brain is developed in that time. So yeah. Fairly significant.
Tracy (13:48):
Absolutely. Yeah.
Zoe (13:50):
And of course all of this is all associated with the central nervous system, which plays a really big role in child development. Do you like to touch base a little bit more on how that works Tracy?
Tracy (14:02):
Sure. It’s a really, really important part of child development is that that notion of freedom of movement. There’s actually been a lot of research done, and if anybody wants to look at it further,
I’d recommend having a look at the Pickler Institute research about how if we allow children as much freedom of movement as possible, how even just simple things like the, the sensory input they get from the floor gives them information which then informs their body how to move.
And it helps with the brain integration, especially with the left right connections, you know, things like coordination, all that sort of thing, but actually needs to happen for connections to be made but helps with balance.
There’s actually research out there that shows that children up until the age of nine and older, you know, who are doing physical activity before doing something like studying or having to sit down in a learning environment by spinning for 30s before joining the group can actually help their increase their attention span and their ability to engage with the group.
And because it’s activating certain things within the brain. So movement, within the body is really, really important. Then even with the movement, sorry, it releases certain hormones and chemicals within the body that helps us focus and pay attention and opens up the muscles in the ears and all of this sort of thing, which is really, really important.
Zoe (15:28):
Yeah. I think sometimes we get into the habit of almost thinking like the brain is something separate to our body, but it’s all integrated.
Tracy (15:35):
Everything impacts. Yeah. On everything.
Zoe (15:37):
Yeah, yeah. And like you said earlier, I think, you know, children come out ready to learn through their senses. And the central nervous system plays a key role in communicating that through the whole body.
Tracy (15:47):
Yeah. And once again, we’ll touch on this in our next podcast. But that’s where touch is really important. So what we allow children to touch but also how we touch children. You know, how our physical cuddles and helping them with our hands really has an impact on how they perceive themselves.
Zoe (16:04):
And they’re reading all of it all at once. So, you know, they don’t read little bits in isolation. They’re taking in all that information and then trying to make sense of it within themselves.
Tracy (16:14):
Absolutely. Yeah. So I guess at this point I’d like to say that, you know, all of this information that we’ve been talking about, you know, it is fairly recent because of the technology that we have available to us now with, you know, brain scans and all these things that they can do.
But it has always been known within the, I guess, psychology sort of side of things in the social sciences that, you know, the need for connection and belonging is really important. So as far back as 1943, Maslow came up with a model called the Hierarchy of Needs, which has largely been accepted and is still used and taught today.
And so basically, his model sort of indicates sort of three main areas of needs. So the first one being the basic needs. And so that’s our need for food, water, warmth, shelter, rest. And then the next level up, if you imagine a pyramid is our safety needs, so our need to be safe and secure.
And then after that becomes our psychological needs. And so the first step of that is our belonging and love needs. And so that is, you know, having intimate relationships, having friends, belonging in a family, belonging in a group, having a community. And the thing is, you can’t progress to the next level up on the pyramid if you haven’t had if one of those needs isn’t being met.
So that’s really, really important. And that was, as I said, established way back when. The next level up is esteem needs. So that’s feeling of accomplishment. Feeling like that you can do something that you matter that you’ll work matters, that you matter.
The next sort of set of needs, and then the top of the pyramid is your self-fulfillment needs. So that’s self-actualization and that’s achieving one’s full potential, including you know, creative and professional activities.
And I think that’s where we’d all like our children to get to. Absolutely. And that’s that’s the goal. Yeah. You know, so it’s really important that we can set the best foundation possible for those psychological needs to help them get to that self-actualization.
Zoe (18:19):
Yeah. And to do that, it’s through relationships.
Tracy (18:22):
Absolutely. So that’s definitely what we’re going to be talking about in our next podcast. So it’s still going to be about emotional health, but it’s going to be now that we’ve covered the the what, why, where sort of situation, we’re going to talk about the how.
So how can we as parents and caregivers support children in developing healthy emotional regulation to become lifelong, successful, resilient achievers?
Zoe (18:53):
Yeah, yeah, and be really good at that self-talk, which we touched based on in the previous podcast as well. So I think before we end today, we just wanted to give a shout out to some of the superstars that we’ve discussed today.
Tracy (19:05):
Sure, absolutely. So a lot of our material, because we are fangirling quite heavily on them at the moment, is Doctor Dan Sigel and Doctor Taylor Payne Bryson.
They have three books that are current release called No Drama Discipline, The Yes Brain and The Whole Brainchild. I’d recommend any of those books. It’s quite easy reading and I do know they’re releasing a new one in January.
Zoe (19:28):
There’s even cartoons in there. It’s fantastic.
Tracy (19:30):
Yeah. For the no drama discipline, there’s a workbook that you can purchase if you are interested in working through that. Yeah. Really, really great resource and already up on the Facebook page, but I’ll try and link it here.
There’s a podcast with Doctor Tina talking about some of this information. I’ll also put up the clip, the link. Sorry to the YouTube clip of Doctor Dan talking about the hand model, because as I said, he goes into a lot more detail than what I did here. I know also that Zoe, you really looked into Doctor Bruce Perry.
Zoe (20:02):
Yeah, he wrote the book The Boy Raised by Dogs. So his take on a lot of this is looks a little bit more at traumatic instances in childhood.
But by looking at that, then you can understand what needs to occur for a normal brain function to happen in children. So it’s probably a little darker his readings and not quite as easy to read, but, he is a world of knowledge as well.
Tracy (20:30):
Yeah. And we did also mention Nathan Wallace earlier in the podcast too. Once again put him into Google or YouTube, and there’ll be plenty of clips coming up. And he talks about brain development all the way from infancy through to teenagers.
So whatever stage you’re at, he’ll have something for you. I think that’s all for today. So once again, thank you for listening. If you do have any feedback or anything about these podcasts or information you like to hear, you know, please, if you see Zoe in the hallway, know.
If not, you can email zoe@adeona.com.au. And I will be back next time talking about what we can do to help our children. Thanks for listening and we’ll speak to you soon.