On mirroring...

Dr. Bailey talks about how the brain reacts to stimulus throughout her books. One way the brain takes in information is through mirroring. Let me give you an example...

My husband comes home from work after a long stressful day and he snaps at me. I feed off that and am likely to get a bit snappy back, despite the fact that my day was awesome.

This happens all the time with negativity in the media, drivers with road rage, being impatient while waiting in line, and especially with our children.

So conscious discipline calls us to simply notice the triggers that make us get out of our calm state. Maybe it's your child having a meltdown... your blood pressure goes up, heart beats faster, and your volume goes up. 

In conscious discipline Dr. Becky suggests deep breathing before reacting so that we can reset our preprogrammed response and solve the problem. The reason is that our children will mirror our out of control state (it's not their fault, their brains are set up for it like ours) which will only escalate the situation. Breathing, by the way gets blood to our frontal lobes and helps us think!

So this is what I do:

I might say, "I am feeling frustrated because you are not listening to me right now! I want to yell at you and send you to time out, but I know that won't solve the problem. I will take a deep breath and try to think!" 

Then ask your child how you can help them or if they are in full melt down mode, take them in your lap and breath slowly and deeply. Don't comfort the child, calm yourself so they can mirror you! When everyone is calm you can actually talk through what happened... when everyone is yelling nothing gets resolved!!

It also helps to literally act like a mirror and say to your child, "Your arms are flapping around, your body is on the floor, and you are yelling. You must be angry." Because truly your child probably doesn't even realize how they are looking and awareness helps them to begin managing it better!

Read more about problem solving with little ones here!