Family therapist Kathryn Snyder discusses toddler brain development and helps shed some like on how this informs their (ahem) behavior. Hint: It’s not you, it’s me.
—–
Imagine if you will, you are in a faraway land in the middle of a rainforest, sleeping on a platform tent high above the ground. You are in a sleeping bag and it is night. The tent is the only barrier between you and the outside world; all around you are trees and the life that lives in them. As the sun goes down, you begin to hear the symphony of new sounds, tweets, screeches, clicks and caws. Leaves rustle as the insects and animals move about in the night. Wind gently rushes with moist rain from the underside of the tent and you take in the smell of tropical flowers and plants that you have never smelled before, acrid jasmines and sweet orchids all waft in in swirling sensations that fill your head. And then, you hear the rustling of a larger animal moving about in the branches!
I paint this picture to give you an idea of what life is like for a young toddler beginning their journey in the world. Though they have been surrounded by many familiar things as they grew from their infancy into this stage, they are still in a state of dreamy unknowns with all of the excitement and anxiety that that brings. Every experience that they have is a new one and they have no point of reference to “know” what is happening or to predict what might happen. Their is no differentiation between what we call fantasy and reality for a young child. Their world is a sensory miasma that overloads their inner world with curiosity as well as trepidation. Though they are trying desperately to master these overwhelming feelings and sensations with bravery, their immature nervous systems can’t always take it and outbursts ensue. We see it as defiant behavior, and sometimes it is, of course. However, I believe that in order to guide our children into self-control and regulation, it is incumbent on us to explore the developmental systems at play and focus on this complex learning, rather than fight the battle of expectations that can’t be met in this immature, ego-centric and impulsive little person.
Development of Language, Memory and Logic
In order to really get a good understanding of this very young child (toddler age, perhaps of 2 or 3), we have to back up to the infant world to understand the emerging brain and ‘self’ of the infant who came before.
Infants are born with an enormous brain in the animal kingdom, and yet, it has such a long way to go to be in its fullness. An amazing amount of synaptic, electrical activity is happening in this first year as the baby learns to coordinate and regulate their body, signal their needs more effectively than mere crying, attend and focus on the “things” of the world (with their primary care givers being the first), and then share in the emotional delight of play and closeness. All of this early learning is what we call implicit memory: the memory of sorting out our emotions, perceiving things in the world, behaving in accordance with those perceptions and incorporating mental models about how the world works. Language is not much a part of the world yet, and so the baby can have no recall, explicitly, of what the world is about and how they think or feel about it – they work on automatic pilot.
So here is my proposition for this initial foray into understanding young children, their thoughts, feelings and behaviors. We need to help them develop the narration and language connections of their experiences so they can develop an internal vocabulary and “knowing” to make lasting references to their experiences that will carry over into their sense of security. It is our job to predict how they might perceive their environment and then talk them through what to expect and show them how to manage the discomfort of confronting the new and the unknown. To be clear though, it doesn’t mean that we need to be constantly talking at or to our little children-they can easily be flooded or overwhelmed by this, too. What I’m saying is if we want our young children to grow into reasonable beings, we have to provide that voice of reason to them as they are learning to navigate complex and overwhelmingly stimulating demands. We are the ego supports to their immature systems as they learn to control their impulses and replace aggressive strategies with internalizing resources of self-soothing, calming and rationalizing.
It is our job to help change the fantasy of goblins and ghouls into the reality of bravely facing dark corners where nothing but a dust bunny is likely to pop out!
Kathryn Snyder is a Board-Certified Art Psychotherapist & Licensed Professional Counselor dedicated to helping children & families survive & thrive in a challenging world. She has been in practice for over 12 years specializing in social & emotional problems of early childhood, adolescence, family lifecycle transitions and postpartum stress. Kathryn founded Parent to Child and Therapy Associates in 2007 to offer high quality, family and child-focused therapy in Center City.