Brain-Body Parenting

How to Stop Managing Behavior and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids

By: Mona Delahooke

Narrated by: Emily Ellet

Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

From a leading child psychologist comes this groundbreaking new understanding of children’s behavior, offering insight and strategies to support both parents and children.

Over her decades as a clinical psychologist, Dr. Mona Delahooke has routinely counseled distraught parents who struggle to manage their children’s challenging, sometimes oppositional behaviors. These families are understandably focused on correcting or improving a child’s lack of compliance, emotional outbursts, tantrums, and other “out of control” behavior. But, as she has shared with these families, a perspective shift is needed. Behavior, no matter how challenging, is not the problem but a symptom; a clue about what is happening in a child’s unique physiologic makeup.

In Brain-Body Parenting, Dr. Delahooke offers a radical new approach to parenting based on her clinical experience as well as the most recent research in neuroscience and child psychology. Instead of a “top-down” approach to behavior that focuses on the thinking 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.

When we begin to understand the biology beneath the behavior, suggests Dr. Delahooke, we give our children the resources they need to grow and thrive—and we give ourselves the gift of a happier, more connected relationship with them. Brain-Body Parenting empowers parents with tools to help their children develop self-regulation skills while also encouraging 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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Mona Delahooke (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Everyone who works with children and teens should read this!

I have 5 awesome kids. They have had each had their unique challenges and struggles from Autism to Tourette and more and I just wish that I had this when they were younger. However, my oldest 3 are in college and my younger two are in middle school and I find that this book is still very much relevant in my interactions with them now. I love that Dr Delahooke strips down the labels, tears down the behavior charts, and gives a much needed new and refreshing look at how the brain and body connect. She explains how behaviors should be looked at as clues into your child’s (and your own) nervous system and she gives clear examples to help readers understand how to change. This is not giving permission to let your children willfully misbehave but rather gives a better picture of what is a choice and what is a reaction to an overwhelmed nervous system and how to use connecting with your child to overcome these challenges. I honestly believe this is useful for people of all ages and should definitely spark some introspection within your own self as well. I know it did for me. She does this in a nonjudgmental way which I’m glad because about every time I thought oh wow- I should have done this differently she reminds the reader that the purpose isn’t to judge and that it’s never to late to make a change and a difference. Thank you Dr Mona Delahooke for making a difference for my family and I!

An Amazing book

Love - it. What a unique and educational book ! Thank you so much ! I learned a lot !

A superb guide for both therapists and parents

I can recommend this book without reservation. the author and the reader both create an experience for the reader that adds new knowledge and realistically, distinctions in practice that can be learned by the mind and felt in the body. I mostly work with adults in my practice, but at home I work with children, and the distinctions about polyvagal Theory and its application in practice have been enhancing for both worlds in my case. anyone who loved reading the work of Van der Kolk on how the body keeps the score with trauma, the works of Levine on trauma and memory, or the works of D. Siegel on the broader side of interpersonal neurobiology will find this book both enlightening and enjoyable while being practical. The examples in case studies are excellent. Even for a person who has not looked into polyvagal theory or neurodynamics will likely find this to be a simple, conversational, and practical way to get their feet wet. She uses a few simple concepts related to neural platform and some other things that can be applied immediately and how we assess and view our situation with the kids and realistically, with adults, when it comes to how we decide how to help, connect, or work out problems. I found the context and framework she creates to be very useful here.

well written, well read.

great book. I will certainly be sharing this with my clients with little ones and parent friends.

Very helpful information, annoying narrator

I’m only a few chapters in, but already I’ve found some things that help me understand my children better, and why they may each need different parenting. But the narrator reads as though the listener is a moron, a bit of an annoying challenge to have to fight through. Barring incredibly monotonous voices, why Audible doesn’t just consistently have authors read their own work is beyond me.

Amazing book on emotional regulation and its importance in parenting.

A fantastic expansion on the research found in her previous book with lots of practical implementation.

The reader however was a distraction from the impact of this important book. She read in an inauthentic voice often laughing while reading and overlaying her own emotional interpretation over the text. It comes across as condescending and at times cringy when she fakes male voices. I wish the reader for the author's previous book had been used instead.

It's a fantastic book nonetheless and everyone should read it, especially those trying to understand how to work with neurodivergent children.

Explains the reasons for positive parenting

I’ve read probably a dozen books on positive parenting. They’ve all had pros and cons, and have led me to parent our fiery child in a more gentle and loving approach than I was raised in. But nothing really stuck. This book, however, seems to resonate the best with the strategies we need for our extremely smart, active, and strong-willed child. I understand now after reading this book why the strategies I was trying to help our child learn to manage her own emotions haven’t been working. I know now that I need to ensure that her body is regulated and work from a body up approach before trying to help her problem-solve or manage her emotions. This book also takes into account the status of a parents, body, which is something that I found lacking in any other parenting books. I’m excited to see where this will take us and our child.
As a classroom teacher, I would love to see the author write a book based in using these strategies in the classroom. There seems to not be time to implement most of these strategies on a daily basis with many children, so I would like to see what her recommendations are for that.

Great writing and information, not great narration

I’ve heard Dr. Delahooke on podcasts and wish she had read her own book! I much prefer her voice to the narrator’s. The narrator sometimes added in unnecessary flare like little chuckles or huffs. It seemed kind of weird and like she was trying too hard to connect to the material, but then would speak pretty flatly the rest of the time.

I want to share this book with other people, but I might tell them to buy a hard copy instead.

Some good advice

I liked that as she talked about the things that where maybe not so good responses she also gave examples of what words to use. Very carefully worded “Not attacking but very well corrected”.

bodies and brains related

I have sat with Brain-Body Parenting for over a week, trying to put my thoughts into words. My short review is that it is one of the best books I have read on parenting, and it is written with a tone of grace and encouragement. The chapter on self-care as a parent is excellent, and the ideas should be in most parenting books. And the broader message of the book that parenting is in large part helping children learn to regulate their emotions and responses, not to repress emotions or feelings but to express them well and appropriately is a great message. And naturally, if we as adults are going to help children regulate themselves, we need to work to address our own dysregulation. This is the central message of Raising White Kids and many other parenting or spiritual formation books.

All of that is good, but I still had a reaction to the book that was not entirely positive. I remember reading The Whole-Brain Child nearly a decade ago and being overwhelmed with how much work it felt like it was always to be taking into account everything all the time. NYT’s article titled Welcome to the Era of Very Earnest Parenting a few days ago captures a part of my concern. The article takes seriously how seriously many Millennials are taking parenting. They want to get it right, in part because they think that their parents did not get it right. They felt misunderstood and wanted to understand their children.

But I am not a millennial. I am solidly Gen-X, even if my kids are still young. And I am concerned about the era of very earnest parenting, even if I support both the goals and the methods. There is nothing in Brain-Body parenting that I significantly object to. Taking children’s developmental stages into account is essential. Helping them to name and regulate their emotions is important. Helping children process emotions properly to internalize change is better than fear-based punishment. All of that I want to support.

But as much as I am supportive and want to incorporate all of these things into my parenting and my dealing with others (children or adults), there is still a nagging sense that we have fallen into a technocratic ditch. Jacques Ellul raised concern about how modern society relies on technique or technology to solve problems. The goal of problems being solved is good. But the use of technique and technology to solve every problem and become ever more efficient and autonomous can make us less human. Ellul was concerned that instead of humans using tools to adapt the world around us to humanity, the tools would instead shape us to their ends. There is some anthropomorphizing there, but we can see it happening if we look at our smartphones. We are literally changing our bodies in response to our desire to use them as a tool.

Part of why this is coming up is my work in spiritual direction and formation. I believe in spiritual disciplines and the use of them to grow closer to God. We should be working internally on being formed to be like Christ. I think rightly done, “Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.”

But at the same time, we often do not rightly do spiritual formation. Instead, we fall into the dangers of spiritual formation and attempt to manipulate God into blessing us in the ways we want to be blessed. We can use spiritual formation as a type of magic or enchantment to make God do our bidding instead of being formed to be more like Christ.

Our push toward being more efficient and “good at” everything can have the unintended result of making us less human when what it should do is make us more like Christ, the model of humanity.

I want to affirm again, this is an excellent book on parenting. I want to become a better parent because I want to help my children be better people. But I want to do it in the right way that doesn’t make them into less human people. Humanity, by its very nature, is a limiting reality. There are no perfect people because humans are limited. James KA Smith’s book The Fall of Interpretation helped affirm that while we are limited by sin, our limitation is a part of our created reality, not just a part of our fallen reality. If there were no sin in the world, we still would be limited. That means that if there were no sin in the world, we still would not have the capacity to be perfect parents because we cannot be all things to all people at all times. We have limitations.

I really want to help raise “joyful, resilient kids.” But in doing that and doing my best, I also need to accept that I will never be perfect at it. And that message really does come through in Mona Delahooke’s writing. She writes with so much grace toward parents that are trying their best. But even as she writes on the page that you can only do what you can do as imperfect people, we have to actually internalize that part of the message, not just the “you can do better” part.