🔥Embers from Ash🌻

232 viewsAsh, 13:15

This is what I was writing about yesterday! There have been many studies done showing our brain goes from dominant Theta band oscillations to Alpha between 7-8 years old and between 4-8 are the primary ages when a child learns behavior, identity, how to get what they want etc. By age 8 we have developed major components to our personality, our identity. Having known about this when my oldest was 4 and seeing the transformation take place first hand, I see how he went from "mom and dad know everything" to "I am my own person and I don't agree with everything you say or do".

This is such an important thing to know and realize as a parent bc we all learn through observation first. Kolbs learning styles and experiential learning styles shows us that we first have a concrete experience, then we reflect and compare the new data with the old, we come up with a conclusion or lesson from that information and then we experiment with what we've learned.

By age 8, we've soaked in everything from our parents and their choices, their behavior, how they show up for us or how they don't, how they treat friends and strangers - to what we see on the TV or these days YouTube - to what our friends tell us and what they do. We've created assumptions and conclusions about how all of that information forms our inter-personal reality, and we begin to truly act on it. To experiment. To test out the cause and effect of everything we have learned so far.

It's a key milestone in what shapes our future identity and life choices in my opinion.

To take a lesson out of my dysfunctional family of origin- when I told my mom about these brainwave shifts last year, her first response was "you better nip that in the bud". I immediately was put off. "Ummmmm no. What?! No. This is how his personality is forming. This is when he needs a safe space with healthy boundaries, healthy consequences, to understand when he takes it too far and he also needs to be encouraged to figure out who, exactly he wants to be in this life. If he can't figure that out at home, in the safety of his parents unconditional love, he will still be testing these limits when he enters the world and still won't know who he is or how to drive positive results in a healthy way"

No wonder it has felt like a lifelong battle to figure out who I am. My personality was "nipped in the bud" most of my childhood.

I share because children are naturally going to go through this process whether we as parents like it or not. And truthfully, it's not about us. We don't own our children. They are not property. And we may have a responsibility to bring them earthside and nurture them - but we did not give them their "life". That goes above and beyond us.

Knowing when these mental, internal shifts take place allows us to support them in their development and encourage a healthy world identity where they understand that what they do affects what happens next. It allows us to point it out in a way that their brain is learning to recognize already. "See when you did X to Z....he didn't want to be friends anymore. That is what we call a natural consequence. Would you like it if Z did that to you?"

And also "See how when we started baseball, you could only catch 1 out of every 5 or 6 balls. Now you're catching almost every ball. That is because you've practiced. And the only real secret to success is repetition. This applies in every aspect of life. If you practice, getting better is a guarantee"

We are our children's first teachers. Sheltering them, feeding them - that's the bare minimum of our responsibilities. We are here to be so much more to them and if we want a better world, it starts with what we teach our children. And how we support them to be the best versions of themselves through these milestones and opportunities to learn.

@EmbersfromAsh

234 viewsAsh, 13:16