Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behavior and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids

From a leading child psychologist comes this groundbreaking guide to understanding the origins of children's challenging behaviors as well as practical advice to support both the children and their parents.

Over her decades as a clinical psychologist, Dr. Mona Delahooke has routinely encountered distraught parents who struggle to understand and manage their children’s seemingly oppositional behaviors. But the way to improve children’s lives, Dr. Delahooke says, is to look beyond behaviors, investigating the deep-rooted sources of children’s most basic feelings and emotions.

In Brain-Body Parenting, Dr. Delahooke offers a fresh approach to childrearing that focuses on a child’s unique perceptions of the world through their unique body and brain. Drawing on her extensive clinical experience and the latest neuroscience research, she shifts the focus from solving troublesome behavioral challenges to understanding the factors underlying that behavior. Instead of a “top-down” approach focusing on the brain, she calls for a “bottom-up” approach that considers the essential role of the entire nervous system, which produces children’s feelings and behaviors.

Dr. Delahooke offers parents tools to help their children develop self-regulation skills and encourages parental self-care, which is crucial for parents to have the capacity to provide the essential “co-regulation” children need. When parents shift from trying to secure compliance to supporting connection and balance in the body and mind, they unlock a deeper understanding of their child, encouraging calmer behavior, more harmonious family dynamics, and increased resilience.