Toddlers: Really Just Little Cavemen November 9, 2009

There’s a new book out that discusses an interesting approach to dealing with toddler behavior. Since children’s left brains don’t grow to anything resembling maturity until as late as age 5, they are incapable of the rationale thought process that the left brain allows. However, their right brains, which are responsible for emotion, creativity and music among other things, are rather mature.

In essence, toddler’s brains are only about as developed as the brains of our ancestors the cavemen were. When adults throw tantrums, we refer to it as “going ape” for similar reasons. When adults lose our temper, the left side of our brains literally shut down and we revert to emotional and not logical beings.

However, toddlers are constantly going prehistoric on us as parents and we would be better off communicating with them in a way they can recognize and respond to. So instead of using a soothing voice to tell a toddler to calm down, researchers suggest we communicate to their right brains, their emotional caveman brains.

The way we do that is to repeat short phrases while slightly mirroring their emotional state. Now this gets really interesting because research and experience shows that adults instinctively do this already when children are happy.

For example, if a child is happy about learning a new word or doing something else good, adults often say something like, “Yes, yes, yes, wow, great job, great job,” in an excited tone of voice that mirrors the child’s mood. However, we usually do the opposite when children misbehave. We use soothing tones and give them reasons why they shouldn’t behave that way.

Researchers suggest we would receive much better outcomes if we communicated to children’s right brains when they’re misbehaving.

Researchers also point out that adults do this with other adults sometimes which makes sense because we too become cavemen when we’re angry because our left brain shuts down. If you’ve ever found yourself using a charged tone of voice to say something like, “sorry, sorry, sorry, I can explain myself, but I’m sorry,” that is effective communication with the right brain. It’s mirroring the other’s emotional state while repeating short phrases.

Try it sometime with your toddler and see if they don’t respond better.