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Siegel and Payne Bryson (SPB), authors of No-Drama Discipline, ask us to redefine discipline for ourselves. Importantly, discipline DOES NOT mean punishments, consequences, or chalkboard time and these things aren’t the point of parenting or why any of us signed up (usually and hopefully). SPB points out that the word discipline comes from the root word: disciplina, which means “to teach,” you know disciples and all that…

So as you read this and go back to banana peel-throwing kids, remember: Teach. Teach. Teach. Teach. That. Is. Your. Goal.

The end goal isn’t punishment and consequences. It is something along the lines of happy, successful, self-disciplined, respectful, kind, cooperative, responsible kids and future adults. Right? If you say ‘heck yeah,’ then by all means, read on. If not…well, unsubscribe below.

Oh, one more thing as we define discipline—it does not mean no boundaries and total permissiveness. Nope. Discipline means teaching your kids what boundaries exist in your family and communities and giving them tools to stay within the boundaries (as developmentally appropriate).

You might remember from SPB’s Yes Brain Child, they’re big fans of understanding how the brain works. We’ll cover this foundation this week, followed by the structure of No-Drama Discipline next week.

The brain is really complicated (breaking news), but here’s a simplified and helpful model. Let’s picture a two-story house:

Downstairs brain: This is the first part of the brain that comes online (like the first story of a house - get it?). It’s around at infancy and is responsible for instinctual things like protecting your young, breathing, sleep and wake cycles, digestion, and filling up diapers with all sorts of nasty things. This is sometimes called the reptilian brain because that’s sort of how evolution works.

Upstairs brain: This is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for a bunch of higher-level thinking like: Inhibiting impulses, managing big feelings, considering the impact of actions on other people, self-control, empathy, decision making, planning, flexibility, adaptability, self-reflation, relational, morality, ethical, kindness, meaning, respect, considering their impact on others, and—occasionally—making it to the bathroom on time. (That’s the end of the low-brow potty humor for the week.)

The stairs: Have you heard the phrase, “neurons that fire together wire together?” While this is a nice phrase in that it rhymes, it is a little opaque. What it is trying to get at is how the brain learns. If neurons are triggered together or in sequence, then the brain learns. We talked about this a bit in How Emotions are Made and Anti-Racist Kiddo. In a simple example, when our kid hears raindrops on the roof, goes outside and feels and sees rain, and an adult says, ‘it’s raining,’ we begin to learn all about rain.

These stairs are the wiring of neurons between the downstairs and upstairs brain. If the downstairs brain is instinctual and is usually in charge when our kid is not behaving as we’d like. What we’re trying to do as parents is build a pathway from reactionary to the upstairs thinking brain. Thus, helping control the impulses of the downstairs brain.

Have you ever snapped at your kid or your spouse and not been proud? You were not intentionally choosing to be a bad parent or partner. You might have had a rough day at work, or you were tired or hungry. The power to your upstairs brain was cut. Your kids experience something similar, but their connections to their upstairs brain is more unstable. Your kids aren’t choosing to handle something without grace. They are likely incapable of it.

Here are three things, which conveniently all start with C, to keep in mind when your kid is losing their sh*t (I refuse to count this word as potty humor).

1. Changing – The brain is constantly changing. This is particularly true for kids. The prefrontal cortex (the upstairs brain) isn’t fully formed until the mid-20s (to torture our metaphor, that’s a long remodel!). The functionality of that second story will be slowly coming online. It may even be unavailable from time to time. Part of what you're doing with No-Drama Discipline is helping to architect, design, and build the upstairs brain.

The upstairs brain is likely to be less accessible if someone is tired, hungry, or overwhelmed. SPB suggest that when our kids don’t have access to their upstairs brains…if they are dysregulated, ruffled, losing it, temper tantrum…it’s our job as parents to step in and help them calm down and establish the boundary (i.e., I can’t let you hurt yourself, I can’t let you hurt the cat, we don’t call names in this family, etc.).

2. Changeable – this should be a ray of light for us all. The brain is changeable at any age. The technical term is neuroplasticity (but you knew that already, didn’t you?). There are some remarkable examples of this: taxi cab drivers having a larger hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory (among other things), meditators showing reduced size of amygdala (accountable for stressing us out) and increases in the size of the hippocampus. On the negative side of neuroplasticity, we’ve talked about how toxic stress in childhood reduces hippocampus size and is correlated with a whole range of mental health challenges.

As we’ve discussed before, this doesn’t mean that you want to give your child a white-picket-fence existence. Au contraire! A certain amount of child-sized adversity helps develop their brains, build resilience and deal with stress and failure. So, go ahead, sign your kid up for Jeopardy! before they’re ready.

3. Complex – the brain is a complex structure, and is multifaceted. And the different parts of the brain can work together with practice. Let’s call this integration (or the stairs - can we be done with the metaphor yet?)

Next week, we'll talk about how to strengthen the upstairs and downstairs connections as we discipline and in ways that make disciplining easier in the future.

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Admin Deets:

Happy Volcanoes is going to go to a more irregular cadence, because kids, work, warming weather, and plant-sitting.

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