Building a Brain

When I was a new mom, I was learning about neural networks and how memory and learning work in a biomechanical sense. Did you know that every time a newborn has an experience that ‘works’ –they get milk, they get to be close to mom, they get clean, they get sleep—their brains are building synapses? Those are links between neurons that will eventually make neural pathways.

One of the fun pieces of brain development science that has been discovered is that the more you do a thing, the faster and more automatically your brain will replicate the thing. It’s not just ‘training your arm’ to throw a ball, it’s training your brain to build strong neural pathways so ‘throwing a ball’ becomes a high-speed highway of connections that make throwing a ball an act completed without confusion, thought, decisions or concentration.

For newborns, this means that if snuggling this way, and suckling this way results in a warm, fully belly, they are likely to do it again. And tomorrow, they’ll do it again and again and again. Every success strengthens the pathway. So, while the first time they tried it, it was pleasant… and a neural path was ‘walked’ through the grey matter… it’s the fifth or seventieth ‘walk’ down the same pathway that has made it visible as a track.

Initially, the synaptic ‘walk’ might be confusing and hard to retrace (poor little confused baby trying to figure out how to latch on again at 3 days old) but every single success makes the pathway stronger. Stronger pathways make for more-skilled brains…

Practice doesn’t make perfect… but it does make brains more complex.

How Not Yelling Makes for Peaceful Parenting

Long ago, I attended a La Leche League Canada Area Conference. It was a cooperative event, with all attendees asked to help run the show. I was involved in the registration --it was my assignment-- so I know that there were far more than 200 people in attendance, from 8:30 to 5:30 the first day, 8:30 am to 9pm the second day and from 8:30 to 4 the final day.

Beyond being a great deal of fun, there was something... odd about the experience. It took me nearly two days to figure out what it was.

Of course, it was a La Leche League conference on the West Coast, which lent it an odd air of super-granola in virtually every aspect, but I was used to the Islanders and their homemade soap lifestyles. The oddness was something else. Then I figured it out:

No one (seriously: no one!) was yelling at their kids

Virtually everyone attending had kids with them, with few exceptions of national office-level representatives, and one of the Founding Mothers who by that point had a handful of grandchildren and I'm sure wouldn't have thought of towing them to a conference.

Some of the kids were yelling. Some were melting down completely. 

But no adult in the whole building for the whole weekend yelled at any child anywhere I could see.




To say I was astonished is an understatement. I don't think the possibility of not yelling in life had ever occurred to me. While I certainly didn't make it to my kids' late teens without ever yelling at them, or about them, or near them... the conference opened up the possibility in my head that yelling was optional, not natural or necessary.

I'm sure lots of those parents who attended yelled at their kids at some point or other. Why not there?

I think there were two things: a basic premise that yelling wasn't going to help anything anyhow, coupled with a tremendously child-friendly, family-supportive atmosphere. There weren't spaces where kids were expected or encouraged to behave like mini adults (or like they don't exist at all). And that, to me, seems like the core of peaceful parenting.

There is something inherently violent in the premise that children should, or can, be 'little adults.' The very idea insults the core of who they really are: children. 

If they were adults, they'd have fully-formed adult bodies and fully-formed adult brains, they'd understand things the way adults do and would do things the way adults do. But they don't. 

They can't. 

Because they aren't. And they aren't going to just because we have a whole society convinced it's how it should be.

Believing that it is somehow aberrant to create an environment that acknowledges --even welcomes-- childhood's different needs, different pace, different lifestyle; that's just normal here these days. Encouraging violence, whether verbal or physical, is commonplace in the realm of 'how to raise children' advice and theory --even in clinical psychology.

How do we argue that it is possible to raise peaceful children through violence?

This is Why the Demand for Attention Must be Met

Editor's Note: This post contains affiliate links. Linda Clement only ever shares links to books she has read and believes are of value. No authors have been harmed in the sharing of these recommendations...




A great deal is written, and worried about, when it comes to attention-seeking behaviour in children. 

A lot of the concerns are a result of the very-disturbing adults we all know at least a handful of, who are examples of why attention-seeking behaviour run amok is so unattractive.


When parents (and onlookers) attribute that adult behaviour to children who successfully attained as much attention as they needed... there is a problem.

One thing that La Leche League taught me long ago was:  

a need met dissipates

a need unmet remains 

Children need attention. They don't want it or demand it or prefer it or brat it up because they're devious, selfish little hellions in need of a smack. They need it.

Like how they need food and shelter and protection from predators and fresh, clean water and shoes.

Well, maybe not the shoes. But attention, they need. 

In the absence of appropriate attention, children are unsafe both physically and psychologically. They instinctively know that they need attention, so when they are not getting it, they devise creative and astonishing methods of acquiring it. 

Often extremely effective creative and astonishing methods...




In the lovely, funny and pointed book about childrearing, Purrfect Parenting, Beverly Guhl points out that children prefer lovely fresh breakfast cereal that's crisp and flavourful, with fresh, chilled milk. When they are starving, they will eat stale old breakfast cereal that's dusty and served with warm, soured milk. 

What they want is the good kind, but they'll take any over none.



When they get none, they do the most remarkable things. Things I have known attention-starved children to do include (but is not a comprehensive list):

• throw an armchair through a (rental house) living room window (he was 5)
• stand on the train tracks to see if the train would kill him (he was 4)
• cut a flower girl dress to shreds with paper scissors the day before the wedding (9)
• gag herself in order to barf in a restaurant (she was 3)
• stand on a kitten (4)
• pick a stranger's baby up by the ears (6)
• sit and then stand on a baby's head (4 years old)
• light a basement curtain on fire (11)

Now, the thing about these amazing feats is that the children weren't angry --they were all acting with a deep concentration and hyper-vigilance about where the parent's eyes were. 

Every one of them smiled when they got caught --sending their freaked out parents right over the edge. But that smile was from the very heart of them: there, it worked.

Whew... relief --attention at last.

When these kids grow up, they'll have the most remarkable set of coping skills imaginable: like a train wreck their lives become the thing of legend --seriously unattractive, but so hard to look away. So hard not to talk about.

If, though, these attention-seeking adults had made eye contact with someone who took them seriously, and reflected their experience back to them and interpreted the extremely contradictory and confusing huge world for them with kindness, generosity and love, they wouldn't be the attention-seeking adults they have become. 


They would be able to co-exist with other equals from a position of being filled --not empty and starving and willing to do anything, sell anything, permit any kind of humiliation just to get looked at for one more moment. Just one more bowl of tooth-breaking cereal swamped with curdled milk in what amounts to a steady diet of it...

Humans need attention. They will get it, anyway they can. 

Linda Clement's WeBlog

Linda Clement's WeBlog

Linda Clement was born in 1966 at slightly under 22” and is remarkably taller today. She began her career as a parenting coach at 19 by stating ignorant and credulous but definite-sounding inaccuracies about many aspects of childrearing. This was followed, almost immediately, by more than two decades of increasing gratitude about the absence of recording devices around back then.

Over the past 27 years, Linda has learned the real deal about how to Thrive as a parent, based largely on personal experience with her two now-teenage daughter, 25 years as a La Leche League Leader and much more than half her lifetime of studying psychology and human relationship theory.