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The topic of spanking has been at hand of late. In my mind, spanking children is like going to war. When, according to a report issued by the Zero-t0-Three organization, 61% of American’s have attack strategies in their arsenal and poor impulse control that impels their use, this is a recipe for big trouble in my opinion. One reason is, it often ends up stopping us short of doing a much more difficult work. What kind of work? Perhaps work like examining our own behavior and addressing our own fears and anxieties, and then searching for and coming up with more effective, creative solutions for teaching children what is acceptable behavior and what is not.
Practicing Aikido Consciousness
In my mind, one thing children show up in our lives with great power to help us with is our own growth and development. And when we look at a martial arts metaphor like aikido – which primarily trains practitioners in non-attack – what we discover are many possible creative alternatives to spanking children. When I’m feeling like attacking other people – in this case, children – what I’m generally NOT doing, is looking at how my actions might be co-creating the conditions that seem to warrant war-like responses. The inability to do this kind of discernment often indicates impaired prefrontal-limbic connectivity and integration. An unfortunate result of having been spanked as children ourselves?
Be the Discipline You Want to Instill
That’s one issue. Another is that when spanking is on the table as a discipline option, some people use it in ways that unfortunately, and often unwittingly, end up doing serious damage to neural development, especially in girls. I would say that spanking children in response to our own limbic system having been hijacked is again, more often than not, a signal that it is we who have some work to do. Why would we treat our children any differently than we would treat our spouse or our best friend or our pastor or spiritual teacher? Especially when research shows that kids not only don’t learn the lessons spanking is attempting to teach, but that it mostly makes them feel resentful, humiliated and helpless. The brain is an associative organ and kids powerfully learn what they have painfully modeled for them. Is a model that says it’s all right to assault other human beings who are smaller and less powerful, or when I can’t control myself, something we should feel comfortable presenting? I wonder how many of us who do so, can’t not spank our kids. In other words, we can’t really help ourselves. We get hi-jacked in the moment and lose the ability to control ourselves.
Obviously we want our children to be safe and well-cared for, but is threatening them, or physically hitting them the best way to provide them with a feeling of safety? Considerable research suggests not, and in my experience a Command Voice, or physically holding or leading children in the direction we desire, is often more than enough to control most kids. Physically assaulting our kids, in my opinion, turns parents into caregivers who can no longer be fully trusted. Is that good or bad? I think it’s certainly sub-optimal from a neuro-developmental point of view. And as C. S. Lewis observed, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims, may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I Turned Out Okay
Oftentimes parents will rationalize and defend their actions (a sign of their own discomfort?) by saying things like “If you spare the rod, you spoil the child” (This phrase, by the way, is not from the Bible but from Samuel Butler’s “Hudibras”, a 17th Century satirical poem. The poem, like his novel, The Way of All Flesh, was written to expose and denounce violence against children) or, “I was spanked as a child and I turned out all right.” To these rationalizations I generally respond, “Compared to what?” What we know about networks is that when you have a collection of nodal points (discrete neurons), and they begin connecting up, at some point, one final connection will connect every single node, setting the whole network ablaze. It’s like finding the faulty bulb in the Christmas tree lights that suddenly lights up the whole string. When that happens we have a lot more processing power available to us. Suppose those spankings we got as kids were the one thing that has prevented massive numbers of neurons in our own brain from fully connecting and thickening our cerebral cortex to the point of brilliance? How unfortunate is that? What might we be like with twice or ten times the energy and more multiple intelligences than we now have? The point is that we really don’t know what damage spanking might do. If that’s true, with respect to spanking wouldn’t we be much better off making Pascal’s Wager?
Finally, one last thing to consider is Alice Walker’s wise template as a parenting guideline – Is spanking really best for the children?
As an undergraduate student at SUNY New Paltz years ago, I once got a personal letter from B.F. Skinner. It came from his office at Harvard and I suspect it was part of his protocol to positively reinforce anyone who seemed to subscribe even minimally to his behaviorist perspective. From a brain development point of view, it turns out that Skinner and John Watson and Ivan Pavlov were correct: the neurons that we most repeatedly use are the ones that, through repetition and reinforcement, grow fastest and make the strongest connections. And they’re the ones we keep the longest. The reverse is also true – those brain cells we use the least make the weakest connections and are destined to be cleared out of the network in the periodic neural cleansings that regularly take place in our brains. This well-documented programmed cell death is called apoptosis. It’s responsible for the deaths of 50-70 billion of our cells every day.
Massive Cell-icide
This massive neural cell-icide has tremendous implications for mothers-to-be. In many ways the life trajectory of a child is determined to a great extent in the womb. This is how it happens. If a pregnant woman undergoes a lot of stress during her pregnancy, her body will generate stress chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine. This internal stressful environment in mom gets conveyed to the baby in utero. As the embryonic brain is developing, it is recording this stress in the limbic centers, putting the necessary available neural resources into operation to deal with this stressful in utero environment. But this comes at a price. Because the stress centers are being actively and repeatedly triggered, connections in other parts of the developing brain are not being made in large numbers or strengthened in ways that they might be, such as in prefrontal development where self-control and command central are located, for example. This leads to a variety of ongoing problems, including literal brain cell disconnection which makes us more vulnerable to stress, and impairs the ability to form and maintain the human relationships critical for success and happiness, often all through our lifespan!
Shortly before birth, a sweeping apoptosis takes place, one that literally reduces the about-to-be-born baby’s brain by half! Guess which cells are killed off and removed and which ones are then allowed to remain? Right. In a stressful pre-birth environment, the brain cells most needed to deal with the stressful circumstances are the ones that are retained, and others with weak or malformed connections are programmed for an early death.
Plastic Fantastic
Because the brain is amazingly plastic, however, we are continually afforded an opportunity to right this unfortunate condition. It’s what allows child neuro-psychiatrist, Bruce Perry to demonstrate his work with kids like The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog – children who can barely talk, and who have missed other important developmental milestones – and end up having them graduate from college as happy, productive human beings. Here’s some of what Bruce recently had to say on Oprah:
“As you grow, the brain is essentially like a sponge. It’s absorbing all kinds of experiences. So if a child is not held, touched, talked to, interacted with, loved, literally neurons do not make those connections, and many of them actually will die.”
“Big, big ventricular spaces (show up in stressed out kids), which will impact sleep, regulation of anxiety, regulation of mood, whether or not you’re very happy or sad.”
“Simple things like eye contact, touch, rocking and humming can make all the difference to a baby. It makes neurons grow, it makes them make connections. Then, it makes the brain more functional.”
Building the Best Brains Possible
It’s really exciting to me to realize that there are a whole host of good things that happen when neural development and integration are optimized from the start. And that we are discovering what can actually work to accomplish that. Many are things we’ve long known – providing a safe, stimulating environment where stress is kept manageable and motivating, where apoptosis takes out those cells which serve us and our children least, all the while retaining those which serve us best. It reminds me of something mentioned in the recent presidential inaugural address: “Know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.” Whether we like it or not, from a brain-building perspective, I think we judge ourselves as parents for very much the same thing.
Right now I’m reading Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer’s book, On Becoming an Artist. In it, she lovingly seduces me into really allowing myself to be drawn into the possibility of my own personal renaissance. Her basic premise is that to live the life of an artist, we must do our best to continually live mindfully…as opposed to mindlessly on auto-pilot. Just as you can’t emergency-land a jetliner safely in the Hudson River on auto-pilot, neither can we facilitate or create an artist’s life and brain for ourselves or our children on auto-pilot.
Tyranny, Myth and Mindlessness
Many of Langer’s chapters speak deeply to me. Just by reading them, I can feel the neurons blooming and buzzing upon encountering chapters with titles like: “The Tyranny of Evaluation,” “The Myth of Talent,” and “The Mindlessness of Social Comparison.” I’m guilty of each and all of those bits of mindlessness many times throughout any day, especially in my role as a parent, as my daughter currently tries to navigate a significant life transition. What’s captivating about those chapter titles though is something similar to what Gregory Berns described in his book, Iconoclast – they inspire and encourage a certain kind of unfettered creative freedom. They grant me permission to do and think and be as close to who I authentically am in any moment as I can possibly be. Even if friends, family and colleagues become upset by whom I authentically am, sometimes that’s the price to be paid. Ruby E. is an example of such an authentic artist willing to pay that price. She lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where she was encouraged to take up painting. When she did, she clearly took to it. And when she died in 1998, she had sold more than $500,000 worth of paintings.
Waking Up
In the sense that mindfulness suggests greater awareness and ability to see, hear, think, feel and express things from a uniquely personal perspective, I think most of us would want our children to grow up and become artists. (The self-sufficient kind, like Ruby E. of course). There’s a wonderful Rumi poem that my friend Susan O’Connell uses as her email signature that speaks to this greater awareness:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the
doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
I’m convinced that being able to hear the secrets in the breeze at dawn and not go back to sleep takes a certain increasing level of neural integration and development. We have to get our head together – literally. We need to have sufficient capacity to be comfortable with silence and stillness, to be alone with ourselves and feel easy in that aloneness. We also need to feel easy, but engaged and connected with others’ discomfort, to be able to feel fully alive, for example, in The Unforgiving Minute. Can this engagement and connection be cultivated in us and in our children? I believe it can, and I think the current widespread application of secular mindfulness-based practices that can be found in programs like Inner Kids or the A.R.T. Programs (Awareness and Relaxation Training) springing up at leading universities and in various hospitals around the country indicate this.
Engagement and Connection
In her new book, Parenting is a Contact Sport, psychotherapist Joanne Stern underscores the artist brain requirement for parents to model and teach children about mindfulness, engagement and connection. The Afterword is written by her own two daughters, Carol and Andrea, who are living their own form of artistry in the world. Here’s what they have to say:
(Our mom) didn’t have to compromise being our parent…just to be our friend. She did have to be honest with us. She had to spend tons of time with us, do activities with us, and have real conversations with us. She had to earn our trust by treating us with fairness and respect….She sometimes had to put her pride aside and admit when she was wrong, or have the humility to learn from us, instead of thinking that we always had to learn from her….We believe that the relationship we have with our mother is the single greatest gift we have ever been given.
Any of us who have children willing to publicly proclaim similar sentiments can rest in the easy comfort that they have done everything possible to help paint in their children a true artist brain.
What is a ruptured relationship and why should we do anything about it? And if we are of a mind to, how can we do repair work, especially when we might not have sufficient neural real estate available for it in the face of our own emotional reactivity?
To my mind these are crucial questions underlying the most difficult challenge in one of the most demanding yogas of all – human relationships. 
Because ruptures often go unrecognized in relationships, the critical need for their repair seldom surfaces. When I think of all the people in my own personal history with whom I’ve had conflicts or breaks, most only ended up being “resolved” by each of us distancing and no longer speaking to one another – going our separate ways. If I take such non-recognition of relationship rupture and the inability to do required repair and extend it out into the world, what I see is extensive pain and suffering all across the face of the globe. It is much easier and less risky to sit in front of my computer screen and spend hours in mesmerized isolation playing Spider Solitaire or World of Warcraft, than it is to deliberately engage in the hard work of relationship repair.
Recognizing Ruptures
So how can I better recognize when a relationship is ruptured? The answer is pretty straightforward: any time I find myself upset with another person, there’s a good chance a rupture is in the making. Any time I’m upset with my children, partner, family member (or any person, place or thing for that matter), if I pay close attention to my experience, most often what I discover at the root of such upsets is anxiety rooted in fear. It’s often an undefined fear of one sort or another or a very clear concern: “My child is putting herself in danger,” “I’m a poopy parent,” “What will the neighbors think?” “She’s not behaving in ways I think she should and want her to,” “What will our own parents – siblings – colleagues – clergy think?”
Fear, anger, grief – no matter what the source – activates the limbic circuits in the brain. This circuitry floods the system with adrenaline, cortisol, glutamate and other glucocorticoids. Breathing becomes constricted, heart rate increases, digestion gets put on hold. In the midst of such a limbic frenzy, few of us do our best thinking. When the unconscious threat – say, for example, fear of being condemned for being a poor parent – passes, our neurophysiology attempts to restore the brain and body to normal functioning, unless, of course, it doesn’t pass. This stress reaction – generally referred to as an HPA axis activation (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis) – seems to be entwined with ruptured relationships the world over.
Stress reactions mostly only get triggered when the heart-brain-mind-body is confronted with more “energy and information” than it has the capacity to easily process. Under such circumstances we find ourselves emotionally reactive. Emotions are what results from not being able to handle life situations, or relationships we experience as difficult or overwhelming. These feelings seem to have their way with us, easily making us emotionally disturbed.
A Year to Live
Shortly after Stephen Levine published his book, A Year to Live, a colleague and I assembled a small group. We met together for a year, each of us exploring what we would change in our lives, imagining we had but a single year of life remaining. In the first month we each made a list of things we felt it important to address. Item Number One on the assembled lists was: “Finish unfinished business.” Likewise, in the various 12-Step Programs found around the world, Step 8 involves making a list of people we have harmed and offer to make amends to them – i.e. do our best to repair the relationships.
I think the impulse to repair and heal relationships has a neurological basis, not unlike the process by which cuts or broken bones have an impulse to heal. I think doing so, literally restores connections in the brain that became disconnected when the break or breech occurred. It is these disconnections 
in the brain that contribute to less-than-optimal functioning. Freud and others theorized that our brains unwittingly go on hyper-alert after an overwhelming experience, continually looking for similar people, places and things that cause us to compulsively repeat the same dynamics in relationships, presumably in an attempt to gain mastery. This reality hasn’t been lost on insurance companies, who promptly raise our rates after an accident. But I think this so-called repetition compulsion is more an attempt to restore our brains to good working order. But unless we bring some conscious intent and deliberation to it, we are doomed to fail, simply recreating the difficulties of the past and realizing little in the way of effective resolution.
How might we best begin to identify and resolve ruptured relationships? Here’s One Way.
