Girls on the Brink by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Author:Donna Jackson Nakazawa [Nakazawa, Donna Jackson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Antidote 6

Don’t Solve All Her Problems for Her—Leave Room for “a Little Wobble”

I want to be really clear here: Establishing psychological safety and family connection shouldn’t be confused with overprotecting children and teens. Tracy Bale, Ph.D., neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, puts it this way: “Wobble is good, but falling down is not.” Understanding this difference between wobbling and falling down is crucial to building resilience in girls. “There are developmental windows during which children have to learn certain lessons about how to get through bumps in their friendships, or in meeting small challenges in their life, and see that they can manage a little kid-size failure, not fall apart, grow from it, and move on,” Bale says. In response to child-size adversities, the brain develops certain structures “or matrixes, that are a really important part of the architecture of the brain,” she explains. “This wiring is really complex and intricate. It results from not only the good stuff you learn from healthy connection; it’s also formed from all of the bad stuff you learn from your screw-ups.” Bale draws upon her earlier analogy for adolescent brain remodeling, likening it to a house under renovation. The creation of these healthy and necessary brain matrixes is like “putting very strong, resilient plumbing in your house during a renovation, before you put up the walls. If you don’t allow this to happen as children are growing up, it’s going to be a lot, lot harder to go back later at age twenty or twenty-five and try to help the brain build this neural structure.”

At the Yale University’s Child Study Center, known as SPACE (for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions), researchers are examining the way American adults approach parenting to glean insight into what goes wrong when this wiring up of healthy, protective matrixes fails to occur. One of SPACE’s streams of research centers on reexamining what researchers call “accommodating behaviors,” in which a parent tries to reduce a child’s anxiety by accommodating them in small but constant ways. Studies show that nearly 95 percent of parents of anxious children engage in such accommodating behaviors, and higher degrees of accommodation are linked to more severe anxiety symptoms. For example, repeatedly retying your child’s shoes for her because she complains they are too tight or uncomfortable; coaching your daughter through the rest of her history assignment after she dissolves into anxious tears; driving her to school because the bus is too noisy for her; double-checking her homework every morning as you pack her backpack for her; and so on. As a mother who raised an anxious daughter, I know of what I speak: When she was a toddler, I would find myself searching the house in a panic looking for her “bunny,” a five-inch-high stuffed rabbit I’d given to her one Easter and without which she would not leave the house.

This kind of overaccommodating behavior is more likely to happen when parents are busy and tired and overwhelmed. It’s easier to retie

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