For many years the most common approach to parenting used by psychologists has been the behavioural method. This approach focuses on shaping and improving your child's behaviour through the use of rewards and punishments. It emphasizes the importance of clear rules, consistent discipline, and consequences, to encourage the behaviours you want in your child and discourage undesirable behaviour. There is value in this approach but it often emphasises obedience and compliance. It can produce immediate changes in your child's behaviour but it doesn't take into account their underlying emotional needs, or the reasons for their behaviour. Nor, most importantly, does it acknowledge how significant the quality of your relationship is with your child, in determining their development, or provide you with guidance on how to nurture this.

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the brain and nervous system, and the neuroscience of parenting is a distinctly different approach from the behavioural approach, both in its understanding of children, and its strategies for parenting them. It is developmental i.e it is based on the latest research we have from neuroscience on the way children’s brains grow, develop, and change, and on what your child is capable of at different ages.

The neuroscience approach to parenting has provided us with scientific evidence of the biological basis of what many parents and psychologists have understood for a long time; that the relationship and attachment you have with your child and the experiences they have in their earliest years, are the most important influences on their growth and development.

The neuroscience of parenting focuses on:

• Ways to make sure the bond with your child is strong, because the parent-child bond forms the foundation for a child's healthy development in all areas of their life. You can do this through spending quality time with your child, by actively listening to them, and sharing experiences together. If you build a secure attachment with your child, they will develop a sense of trust in you, build self-esteem and develop the ability to control their own emotions.

• Providing you with an understanding of the brain-body connection and the essential role of your child’s entire nervous system, which produces their thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and body sensations, and which promotes their optimal growth and overall development.

• Helping you to support your child's emotional development by explaining how important it is to manage stress and emotions in both yourself and your child. This is because excessive stress can damage your child's brain development and their overall health. A safe, supportive upbringing helps your child to become emotionally resilient, so they can be strong and overcome the emotional setbacks in their life. It builds their social skills, so they understand how to make good relationships, and it builds their self-awareness which is the key to understanding themselves and to ultimately being able to become the person they want to be.

• Providing you with the means to create a nurturing i.e. caring and protective environment that supports your child's physical health and wellbeing, and contributes to their cognitive development, emotional resilience, and ability to use their brain to the best of its capacity.

• Helping you with the ways that you can increase cognitive growth or brain development in your child, by providing them with diverse learning experiences and activities that stimulate their curiosity, critical thinking, decision making and imagination.

To sum up: a developmental, neuroscience approach to parenting encourages you as a parent to prioritize meeting your child's emotional needs, and to create a secure attachment bond where the focus is on building trust, empathy, understanding, connection and attunement with your child. And it gives you the skills to do this.

Being able to achieve this requires what we call responsive parenting, which means that parents must understand what their child's needs are as they grow and develop, and know how to sensitively and consistently meet these needs for care, nurturance, comfort, and emotional support at different ages. It recognises that your relationship with your child is the foundation for the way your child will develop socially, emotionally and cognitively.

You may be thinking ‘how does this approach help me change my child’s problem behaviours?

Aren’t we supposed to teach our children to behave, and know right from wrong? Don’t they sometimes just need a bit of tough love?’ Well, yes and no. Here’s what the research tells us about some of the expected outcomes if you parent from a developmental, neuroscience approach: 

• When parents are given the right tools to build a secure, safe relationship with their child, and have a clear understanding of the connections between the brain and the body, their child is more able to develop safety and trust in them as parents (and in other people too). This reduces a child's need to be attention seeking. Much of what we call problem behaviour in children is in fact a need to be noticed by their parents. Children don't always know the right way to get the positive attention they want such as praise, affection, reassurance or approval, and they may act out their hurt feelings of being ignored or rejected through unacceptable behaviour, which often causes even more rejection.

• Where parents focus on setting clear boundaries with compassion and understanding, and on explaining why those boundaries are needed, rather than trying to make their child comply with what they want, or setting no boundaries, their child develops a sense of security. Boundaries create predictability and allow children to feel safe. Young children's brains, especially, are not developed enough to make the right decisions for themselves, and they need adults to make those decisions for them and to explain the reasons for the limits they set. Boundaries not only help children to feel secure but help them to be more patient and to cope with disappointments, and allows them to set their own boundaries, and reach their goals later in life. Compassionate and understandable boundaries result in children cooperating more with their parents.

• When parents know how to help their child develop the self-regulation skills they need to control their own behaviour and feelings, children learn to express their emotions, needs and frustrations in a healthy way; no longer having to do this in ways that present problems for themselves or their parents.

And that’s just the beginning…