Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome to the Co-Parent Academy podcast episode number 142. If you're just listening on Spotify or Apple or whatever it is, please know that this is the first episode that we are going to be video recording as well and putting it on YouTube. So if you want to check out that, to see as well as hear the conversation, then please head over to YouTube and check it out. I am not a technical wizard, so I'm also not great at doing this YouTube thing yet, so I anticipate on improving how I'm doing it. I anticipate adding more graphic information, some additional content that may be helpful. In the meantime, though, we're going to try this out and hopefully it goes well. Hopefully you find it additive. So this episode number 142 is the first substantive episode in our series on raising emotionally resilient children, and today we're going to focus on an overview of how children's emotional brains develop and sort of touch a little bit on attachment as well. This episode is focused on the work of Dr Alan Shore. Dr Shore is an expert in this field of how the emotional brain develops, the psychobiology as he'd refer to it. He talks about attachment and all of that.

Speaker 1: 1:23

This is rather dense material, and so I have copious notes to which I'll be referring as we go through. I don't have a script that I'm reading from. I don't anticipate being perfect. I've sort of given up this year on my failed attempts in the past at some approximation of perfection in what I'm doing in these podcasts, and so instead, as we go through this year, I'm just going to try to have conversations with you based on notes that I have in front of me and adding some insight, hopefully, that you find useful. So we want to start off with the understanding that a child's emotional brain develops early.

Speaker 1: 2:02

If we think about lateralization of the brain, you know you think about left brain and right brain people. Like I would definitely say that I'm a left brain person, something that I'm actually trying to compensate a little bit to get a little less left brain, more emotionally brained. Left brain people tend to be, you know, we think of them as analytical, logical minded, maybe not too in touch with their emotions, sometimes Right-brained people we think of as more artistic, more creative, more emotional, and that is not just some misnomer. I mean, there are left-brained and right-brained and our right brain is what's in charge of our emotions, the unconscious. The left brain is the logical center. That's where the higher level speech comes into play, although there is speech in the right brain as well, especially related to more emotional situations.

Speaker 1: 2:49

This lateralization of the brain occurs right away, right as the brain develops. It's got these hemispheres, and something I had no clue about is that the right brain develops first. So the brain, the hemispheres of the brain, develop at different times, but they each have growth spurts. In a sense, the right brain growth spurt begins in the last trimester of pregnancy, and this is really important. Lots of times we see folks who maybe never were a couple and they're trying to navigate this idea of having a pregnancy and a child when they never were a couple in the first place, and it can lead to a lot of stress and conflict as the child approaches. Sometimes we have married couples who are separating right in the midst of a pregnancy, and there are higher levels of stress that occur in this last trimester as well. Something that I guess is kind of common sense but I never really thought about is that these increased levels of stress in the last trimester of pregnancy can have serious and long-lasting implications for the development of a child's emotional brain, for their ability to attach, for their ability to have great relationships in the future. If a child is subject to stress in this case we're currently talking about the last trimester of pregnancy If the mother is subjected to long periods of stress, like unresolved stress, you may hear from time to time we have a cat and I'm not keeping our cat Lemon penned up.

Speaker 1: 4:21

So if you hear a cat, that is who that is that is Lemon. Hopefully the sounds are only good cat sounds. Who that is that is lemon. Hopefully the sounds are only good cat sounds. Sometimes there are some not great cat sounds that come out of lemon as well. So just know that lemon has allergies and if you hear sounds that sound horrific, it may just be lemon coughing and sneezing.

Speaker 1: 4:37

So if a mother is subjected to a lot of stress in the last trimester you know unresolved conflict, conflict that's ongoing then the hormones released to try to combat that unresolved stress can pass through the placenta into the child. So, for example, cortisol can be passed through the placenta to the child's developing right brain and that creates neural pathways. You know those neural pathways begin to develop even in that last trimester and that can affect the child's stress response, just like the mother's, even though the child hasn't even been born. Yet when the child is born, their emotional brain is just ready to go. They're in the midst of that growth spurt that lasts from about the last trimester of birth up until years two or three, and their brain is just developing at a phenomenal rate, developing new neural pathways, and it becomes really, really important how the mother is able to connect with her child during this time period. Now, obviously, you know, in the last trimester it's the mother who's connecting to the child and very often, especially if a mother is breastfeeding, it's the mother who is doing this sort of connection with the child after birth as well.

Speaker 1: 5:40

It is absolutely the case that other family members, including, most importantly from our perspective here, the father, can provide a great basis of connection and regulation and attachment as well. In fact, there are some studies showing that when men really focus in on caring for a newborn, that their testosterone levels decrease, that there are other changes as well for them. That show that it's a two-way street even for fathers and infants. Caring for an infant can help regulate the father differently than not. But for the purpose of just simplicity here acknowledging and I myself am a father, so I get that fathers want to be included, but for the simplicity here we're going to just focus on mothers and infants. So after birth this child's emotional brain is growing and the neuroplasticity is high.

Speaker 1: 6:34

In this growth spurt it becomes really important that a mother is able to connect with her child. And Dr Shore talks about this in a couple of different ways, talks about it in terms of attunement and synchronizing. So they have. There are all sorts of studies and we're going to get into these in episode two where we dig into sort of the geeky science of it. They've taken all sorts of scans of the mother and the child and the mother is able to attune to the emotional needs of her child. She's able to synchronize.

Speaker 1: 7:05

Now, initially a child doesn't have the ability to talk right, can't communicate their needs in words. Mothers, especially in the first several months, have the job of attempting to pay attention to their child's emotional needs, to attune themselves to their child's emotional needs and then to regulate the child right. So it's the mother who's attuning, synchronizing and regulating the child in the early months. As the infant gets a little bit older, they start getting the capacity to self-regulate a little bit as well. They learn how to self-soothe, but that depends highly on what they've learned so far in this two-way communication. It's the mother's right brain communicating with the infant's right brain and helping the infant develop these underlying maps of how to regulate. So as the mother attunes and synchronizes with the infant, she develops the child's own ability to self-regulate, to have emotional connection, to have attachment. These things are learned very early on.

Speaker 1: 8:09

Now what's interesting about the right brain as well is that we think about the left brain taking over, like I said after about age four, and we always feel like the left brain is kind of in charge. You know, we're using words, sentences, we're communicating verbally with people, and that is kind of a left brain function for the most part. But what we've learned is that the right brain, the unconscious, is always going right. The unconscious is always filtering with the information, the data that's coming in for the left brain to use, and that's everything from understanding a person's tone of voice to understanding their facial expressions, their body language, even down to pheromone reception. All of that is governed, sort of filtered, through the unconscious brain.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Now this can be a good thing or a bad thing, right, if a child is securely attached, if a child has learned proper emotional regulation, if a child's right brain has developed in a healthy way because the mother was attuned, was able to synchronize, was able to help that child develop an unconscious map that was helpful. Develop an unconscious map that was helpful, then the child's going to be good to go. But if the mother was not able to do that, if the mother was not attuned to the child's needs, if the mother was not able to up or down regulate the child based on the situation, then the child could be just sort of stagnating in these unhelpful emotional situations, their own hyper stress responses. And it goes really does go both ways. You know the mother maps onto the child, the child maps onto the mom. You know they do synchronize their brainwaves and a mother has to have the ability to both up and down regulate their child. So if a child is crying, is in fear, is in pain, is hungry, and no one responds you know the mother doesn't respond, doesn't soothe then the child is not being properly down-regulated.

Speaker 1: 10:05

But a child has to be up-regulated too. You know smiles, play, laughter, those things that start to develop as a child gets a little bit older, those are important upregulations of emotion. The mother attunes and upregulates as well as downregulating. It's this broad band of emotion that a child learns first from their primary caregiver. In this case we're talking about a mother. So that is an extremely critical task. That happens even before the child is able to understand any sort of language. It's body language, it's facial expressions, it's tone of voice.

Speaker 1: 10:42

You know, you think about talking with a child and saying goo-goo-ga-ga, you know, or saying whatever you want. Having that kind of baby talk that parents do with children. That is an important aspect of helping a child regulate right, helping a child be sued. You can up-regulate or down-regulate a child without using any words whatsoever and the child is inherently looking for this kind of information. You think about it.

Speaker 1: 11:11

You know human babies are born completely without any sort of defense. You think about it. You know human babies are born completely without any sort of defense. It is wired into us genetically that we are going to be predisposed, if we're going to be successful offspring, to seek safety and shelter and comfort, right? So how can you do that? As an infant, you're paying critical attention to your caregiver. You're letting them know that you need assistance, right? You're connecting that bond with someone who can provide for you when you can't do anything for yourself. It makes total sense. So babies are wired for this and so are parents right, especially mothers, because they carried that child for the gestational period. So a secure attachment is absolutely critical for the healthy development of a child's right brain, their emotional brain. When a child has secure attachment then they're starting to learn lots of things. They're learning emotional regulation, they're learning trust, they're learning resilience in all sorts of different ways. If a child is insecurely attached, they're not learning those things.

Speaker 1: 12:11

So think about the context in which this could occur. You know you have a situation in which there's lots of interparental conflict after the birth of a child. You know, maybe mom's really mad at dad for some reason. Maybe mom's gatekeeping. We see that a lot where moms are determining the access that an estranged husband or a person with whom she's never had a relationship but now has a baby. You know the access that that person has. She's preferring others, sometimes her own mother, over the child's biological father. This unresolved stress that the mother feels is going to be transmitted to the child. She's not going to be able to attune as she might if she were not under such stress. Sometimes that's the dad's fault, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's coming from the mom herself. You know, if the mother is depressed after she's had the child and she's able to help down-regulate the child when the child's upset and crying but doesn't just have the emotional bandwidth at the moment to help up-regulate the child, that can be a problem as well. You have to have both that up and down regulation. It's also a difficulty because in our legal system, sooner than later, sooner than the mom wants that, dad is gonna have access to the child.

Speaker 1: 13:28

The child certainly needs to have a safe port in the store. The child needs to have a secure attachment with their primary caregiver and for pure biological reasons, such as breastfeeding, that from the beginning. Now it's something that is extremely important for the mother to be introducing the father to this child routinely. I mean, I can imagine a situation in which daily would be best to have short interactions where the child is learning to trust this person. And a lot of times when we have these visitations with parents who are separated with inference, the mother again tends to gatekeep, you know, says that father's not doing anything right, doesn't want him to be feeding, changing diapers, things like that. But these are critical activities, you know, for the father to be able to have that locked eye contact when feeding a baby, for the baby to be receiving that nourishment while being held by this person, by the father, to be able to smell the father and receive the nourishment, to cry and have the father come and provide the food or change the diaper. So those kinds of visits that are of sufficient duration and interaction so that the child is actually able to begin to have a secure attachment with this third party, with this father. That is extremely important and because we know the courts are going to sooner than later have the father having this visitation unsupervised, unless there's something that's wrong that is going to be helpful for the child.

Speaker 1: 14:56

Mothers often say, well, dad shouldn't have visitation because he hasn't yet bonded with the child. But she's interfered with the ability of the parties to bond. The court's not going to be real sympathetic to that and you could wind up having a situation in which the child is being sent with a parent with whom perhaps the child hasn't really bonded yet very well, that's not always on the dad, right, that's very often on the mom. So, unless we're dealing with a situation of domestic violence and then that's always a different category if it's just a normal situation where maybe parents aren't being nice to each other. Maybe there's a breach of trust. They hate each other at the moment.

Speaker 1: 15:33

You've got to put that aside because the child's emotional brain is developing rapidly in this infancy to two or three years span, two or three years span. During that time period, it's absolutely critical that both the mother and the father have the capacity and are given the opportunity to develop these emotional bonds with the child, to learn, each of them to attune, to synchronize themselves with the child, to have the child understand that their needs will be met with this person. Even if they can't verbalize it, they can still sense it. They know it because their needs will be met with this person. Even if they can't verbalize it, they can still sense it. They know it because their needs are being met by this person. So, when it comes to co-parenting, in this first conversation about the development of a child's emotional brain, the keys are that a child's emotional brain begins to develop very early, in the last trimester, up through years two and three. That the child's emotional brain is developed by this dance between the infant and a parent. They are communicating with each other without words, with facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, smell, all of the things that a baby is capable of doing before they're able to speak.

Speaker 1: 16:48

It is critically important that the infant be given the opportunity to have this sort of connection with both the mother and the father, if at all possible. Certainly there needs to be a primary caregiver. Certainly that often is the case that it's the mother because of things like breastfeeding. But mothers have to do a better job than they often do of keeping a father that they may not like very much but is not violent, is not unsafe. Keeping that person around the child on a routine, maybe even daily basis, if not every other day, to let them learn to attach and attune themselves to this child. To have the two-way street of attunement go back and forth. To help the father learn how to attach and attune themselves to this child. To have the two-way street of attunement go back and forth. To help the father learn how to up and down regulate. To have that situation, when the father's there with the child, not be one that's stressful, not because the child can sense that. The child can understand. Changes in the tone of voice, changes in body language, changes in facial expression. Changes in body language, changes in facial expression those are critical things. All right, enough speechifying for me.

Speaker 1: 17:53

So next week we're going to get into the nitty gritty details of how we know this is true. If you're like me, you're hearing all of this and you're like, oh, you know, that's interesting, but how do we know? How do we know that that's the case? So next week I'll be here white lab coat, beakers, bunsen burners all of the stuff that I can remember from high school chemistry and we will talk about how it is that they know that this is actually occurring. We'll talk about some imaging studies. We'll talk about the specific parts of the brain that are being affected. We'll get into some of that detail.

Speaker 1: 18:23

It's going to be a dense episode. I'm going to have tons of notes that I'm going to be referring to the whole time. I'm not going to pretend that I actually know this stuff right. I'm learning it as I go and I'm trying to convey it to you In the meantime. If you want to really hear about this, if you want to learn about this in depth from someone who really is a great communicator about it, please check out Dr Alan Shore. There are tons of YouTube videos. He's got a great book called the Development of the Unconscious Mind. He was just recently on the Andrew Huberman podcast, where they talk all about this stuff and more, so I'll put some links so that you can check that out. In the meantime, I hope you have a fantastic week and I'll see you next time. Bye.