Margaret River Montessori Playgroup

While both new and new show activation in regions linked with empathy and understanding their child’s emotional state and behavioural intentions after parenthood, a 2012 study by at Bar-Ilan University in Israel suggested that the parts of the brain that light up the most are startlingly different for each parent.

For mothers, regions closer to the core of the brain — which enable them to care, nurture and detect risk — were most active. But for fathers, the parts that shone most brightly were located on the outer surface of the brain, where higher, more conscious cognitive functions sit, such as thought, goal orientation, planning and problem solving.

The differing areas of brain activation may reflect a difference in role, and different but equally strong attachments, between mothers and fathers. It is a cliché that children run to mum for a hug when they’re hurt, while dad is the “fun” parent. But evidence suggests that mothers and fathers get different neurochemical “rewards” after certain parenting behaviours—

Dr. Ruth Feldman, Ph.D., a social neuroscientist based in Israel, published a study of 112 mothers and fathers in 2010 which found that peaks in (and by association, ) occurred for women when they nurtured their children. In contrast, the peak for men occurred when they took part in rough-and-tumble play. Because young children’s brains seem to mimic the same oxytocin levels as their parents’ — meaning they’ll get a similar blast of feel-good oxytocin when playing with dad and when being nurtured by mum — they’ll be more likely to engage in that behaviour over and over again specifically with that parent, which is critical to their development. Rough-and-tumble not only cements bonds between father and child, but also plays crucial roles in a child’s social development.

Parenting roles are changing every generation, however these brain study results may explain why mother/father stereotypes sometimes (although not always) seem true across many generations, family environments and cultures.

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“To connect with a child, we must try to understand them and meet them where they are.”

Source: Visible Child

"Children don't learn independence.
They grow independent.
And they do it naturally in their own time, just like they learn to crawl and walk and talk in their own time.
The simplest and most effective approach to growing independence is, ironically, to meet children's attachment needs.
It is trust that frees children to grow, explore, and develop, not forced independence or broken attachments."
—L. R. Knost

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When Our Child is Hurt by Another - Janet Lansbury Nothing ignites our protective instincts more intensely than when our children are hurt, whether physically or emotionally. If their distress has been caused intentionally by another child, we experience a brew of emotions that can be almost impossible to control. But to be of genuine help to our ch...

There is a difference between ‘self-regulation' and ‘self-control'. Despite so many parents seeing references to self-control on their 's report cards, one is often mistakenly confused with the other. And because a child needs self-regulation before they can exhibit self-control, it can be for a child when the latter is demanded in lieu of the former being developed.

Did you know there are 447 different uses of “self-regulation” in scientific literature from which 446 variations are about -control (Burman, Green, & Shanker, 2015). The two terms are somewhat convoluted, even throughout child development literature.

As Jeremy Burman, author of self-regulation research alongside renowned Dr Stuart Shanker, says, “When there are thousands of partially-conflicting studies, with new ones being published every day, you can't just 'read more.' You need to approach the subject in a different way." Recent research into self-regulation follows this line of reasoning, showing that the cognitive and physiological mechanisms involved in developing, experiencing and dealing with self-regulation issues are separate from those involving self-control.

🍬 SELF
Self-control became a focus in psychological research largely due to the “delay of gratification” studies that began to appear in the late 1960s (Mischel, 2014; Mischel, Ebbesen, & Raskoff Zeiss, 1972). These studies showed that problems in self-control could be detected in children as young as four, and that these problems were associated with challenges in emotion-regulation and executive functions (Eisenberg et al., 1995; Blair & Razza, 2007; Diamond & Lee, 2011).

The self-control paradigm became dominant because of the longitudinal studies showing that the children identified at a young age as having poor self-control fared worse over the long run, both physically and academically, and had significantly higher rates of internalizing and externalizing disorders as young adults (Moffitt et al. 2011; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989). This research led many to conclude that children should be taught in primary school how to control their impulses (Schlam, Wilson, Shoda, Mischel, & Ayduk, 2013; Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, & Munro, 2007).

🤱🏾 SELF
In 1865, the father of modern physiology, Claude Bernard, inaugurated the scientific study of what came to be known as self-regulation. Bernard was interested in the mechanisms that enabled an organism to maintain a stable internal state in response to both internal and external “perturbations,” what Walter Bradford Cannon (1932) later defined as “stressors.” In its original psychophysiological sense, self-regulation refers to the way one recovers from the expenditure of energy required to deal with stressors.

In psychophysiology terms, self-regulation is a prerequisite for exercising self-control. An unstable internal state can lead to a limbic response— fight-or-flight, or freeze (a primitive neural response to threat easily misconstrued as compliance)— and impinge on the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain governing self-control (Porges, 2011; McEwen, 2007).

The more an individual is chronically hypo- or hyper-aroused because of excessive stress, the more readily that person goes into fight-or-flight, or freeze (Lillas & Turnbull, 2008). These fight, flight, and freeze limbic states suppress, and at times “brake,” the necessary mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex for the practice of self-control.

Learning 'self-regulation' involves:
🧠 Learning how to monitor and manage your internal states;
🧠 Understanding what it feels like to be calm and alert; and
🧠 Learning to recognize when certain activities help you to return yourself to those states most easily, as well as what pulls you out of them.

As you can see, self-regulation is not self-control. In fact, self-regulation is what makes self-control possible.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/self-reg/201607/self-regulation-vs-self-control

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So often when we think of consent, we jump ahead to sexual consent, but it’s so much more than that. We start to build a culture of consent from infancy.

With infants this might look like

✨ Bringing them into caretaking activities and letting them know exactly what will happen and when.

✨ Helping other children read the baby's cues so they can interact in a way that is respectful for both the child and the baby.

✨ Reading a baby's body language and responding accordingly.

Infants are incredible communicators when we can tune into them. What have you noticed your baby communicating?

Read about time-ins here: https://reachformontessori.com/2021/01/10/time-in-vs-time-out-what-is-a-time-in/

Read more about helping your child with their emotional intelligence here: http://reachformontessori.com/2019/12/18/how-emotional-intelligence-can-be-improved-in-children/

Montessori Toddler: When everything is "NO" Montessori parenting tips for toddlers that only respond "no" to activities and ideas throughout their day.

Children are not meant to make all the decisions on their own… but they do thrive when they feel they are a part of the process 🌟😊💕

There is always order and concentration in the world of the toddler if we look for it. 🌈