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Your child's brain reads your body before it processes your words.

Reactivity is not defiance wearing a louder costume. It's a stimulus-surge-behavior sequence.

A single differently-handled moment can change a pattern that's been running for months.

Sitting in my office, Janice recounted the following scene. It was 6:40pm on a Tuesday. She was feeling frustrated that dinner was getting cold. She repeated, seemingly gently, the same thing she said the prior Tuesday to her nine-year-old son, Ejijah, without incident. "Five more minutes, then we eat," but this time, Elijah erupted. Janice kept running the tape repeatedly back, until I gently stopped her. You see, she was looking for what she said was "wrong". But she was looking in the wrong place.

Focusing On The Tail End Blinds You To Where Reactivity Begins

After 35 years sitting across from families, I've come to think most of us watch the wrong end of the process. What you see when a child "loses it"—the yelling, the slammed door, the sudden stillness—is the tail end of a sequence: a small stimulus, an invisible surge inside a nervous system that just went offline, then the........

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