ļ»æEpisode 245
Title: The Neuroscience Of Comforting Vs Asking Questions With Kids
Host: Dr. Nick Carruthers & Dr. Nicole Rivera
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Transcription:
Dr. Nicole (00:00.929)
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Integrative You Radio. So we're gonna be talking about this idea of comfort versus questions. And this is something that we really came to light by one, a conversation with a client and two, our experience now with having a toddler who...
who definitely could throw you for a loop at times and having his moments where he is just throwing his fit and it is natural to want to comfort. But when is the appropriate time to use comforting versus using questions to create more clarity for them and also for ourselves?
So I'm gonna let Dr. Nick dive in and talk a little bit more about this.
Dr. Nick (01:01.262)
So, I mean, the first thing I want to say is that the, reason I started doing this is based off of my studies on neuroscience and how the brain develops and the mind develops within the first seven years of, of growing up. And.
And also the study of human behavior, uh, compounded on that. And it's, it's really what I found, um, led, well, what was showcased first with that client was that you know, he, they have a son. So his son is seven. He is an amazing golfer. Um, literally travels all around the nation competing in, um, like the, I'm not a golfer like us kids open whatever.
Dr. Nicole (01:51.713)
tournaments. Tournaments!
Dr. Nick (01:53.71)
Yeah. The tournaments on Sunday. Um, but they just started having him, uh, also play baseball and he was tagged getting out, not injured, just tagged. And he was out and he lost it. Started crying and, um, you know, the dad was saying how he went, tried to comfort him and tell him it was okay, blah, blah, blah. So I'm having a conversation with him. Like he wasn't physically hurt, right? Nope.
It's just an emotional reaction from being tagged out. And I go, and you just tried to stop him from crying. Correct. He goes, yeah. And I go, well, he, he never learned. Really why he was crying? You know, he never had that opportunity to figure out why he was crying. Was it a good reaction? Was the bad reaction? He just learned to stop crying. I go, so that cycle is still going. I go, we learned by asking questions, and like that is on the neuroscience side of things.
When you ask a question, you drive the center of the brain that becomes reactive, the emotional center, the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive center, non-reactive. And so if you were to ask questions of, you know, did you feel like you let the team down because in golf you mess up, you're only letting yourself down. So maybe it's just that you're holding on to this more responsibility than you've been involved or process before.
Um, like you could just go through and ask all these different questions to be able to help his son, you know, figure out what really created that emotional, uh, reaction, but then to break that down and seeing like, okay, yeah, I mean, you did let the team down. You got out, but at the same time, that's not that big a deal because we have how many innings we have, how many chances, um, you know, the best baseball players.
Literally in the world have a 300 batting average, which means they strike out most of the time. They get out most of the time. Nobody's, you know, especially in baseball, it's like, nobody's stealing every single base. Like you're getting tagged out that times using that to then ask questions. How could you maybe do that again without getting tagged out, you know, so they can learn from it? So you don't want to decrease the responsibility. The responsibility is true. Yeah. If you didn't get tagged out, it would have been better for the team.
Dr. Nick (04:19.694)
Acknowledge that, but then acknowledge that it really wasn't that big of a deal, and then go through and ask questions of how I can learn from it and grow from it. And this takes me like what I do with Q all the time and understanding the growth and development of the brain is that they're a sponge up to age six, seven, they're a sponge. They're taking in everything and that creates the programs for them to use the rest of their life. Unfortunately, a lot of the work that I do right now with adults is.
to undo all the bullshit programs that they learned during those seven years. So if we can actually start working with kids more intelligently and more consciously throughout the first seven years and install really good programs for them, they're going to be so much more empowered the rest of their lives. And I didn't think about it initially when doing it, it was just kind of like part of my process with working with adults and even with kids, but Q is freaking out.
for a little while in restaurants and I would just grab them, you know, not reactive, staying calm, grounded, walk through the restaurant. He'd be losing his shit. I'd go outside and literally, the first thing I do is we just have a candid conversation with him. I'm like, Hey bud, um, we're outside right now. I know you want to go inside and you're crying to go back inside, but I go, guess what? Nobody wants to hang out with you right now.
Dr. Nicole (05:44.883)
Ha!
Dr. Nick (05:45.518)
I don't really even want to hang out with you right now. Cause this is not fun. You're, you're kicking, you're screaming. This is just not fun energy. I go, you know, do you want to hang out with somebody that's kicking and screaming? No. I go, so like, let's figure out why you are kicking and screaming so that we can stop this and actually serve you. And I'll go through and I'll like, just start asking questions out loud. Like, what do you want to do, would you rather be running around? Would you rather be running around inside or outside? Would you rather be like,
the playground or are you hungry and just the food's not here? Do you want to snack before the food gets here? Is that going to help out? Like, are you thirsty? Do you, do you miss Nona? Do you miss Pappy and Booker? Like what's going on this little two-year-old brain? I'm just started asking all these different questions. And what's fun is I'm asking all these questions out loud, but he's learning how to process information and you process information by asking.
Dr. Nicole (06:40.033)
Yeah.
Dr. Nick (06:42.114)
quality questions, the quality of your life is dictated by the quality of the questions you ask. So I'm helping him to process and he can't, you know, physically articulate, but I see him processing as I'm going through and I see him making eye contact.
Dr. Nicole (06:57.857)
Because you were doing this prior to him, you know, too, he's talking a little bit now, but he you were doing this even prior to that. Because again, when you understand neurology, you understand that they have been neurologically influenced, you know, since being in the womb, let alone once they were born and in the environment. So, you know, this is not a silly concept of asking questions because.
You're not necessarily asking the questions looking for the response. You're asking the questions to help them think outside of the box and to process things differently. And.
Dr. Nick (07:39.79)
Yeah. I mean, in that moment, I'm just asking questions to get them out of the limbic system and to get the energy, you know, some people to argue that they don't have a developed prefrontal cortex. I'm like, well, how do you think a prefrontal cortex is going to develop? By starting to, starting to use it. Um, that's like the most comical thing about science is that, you know, science is just, it's a technique designed to help us try to understand life, but life always comes first. And then we have science trying to tell us.
Dr. Nicole (07:45.919)
Yes.
Dr. Nicole (07:54.217)
Yeah.
Dr. Nick (08:09.806)
Instead of just saying like, you know, things grow by giving it energy. So the concept of saying that prefrontal cortex is only developed, well, that's because they're looking at the masses and the masses. Haven't used their prefrontal cortex until they were older, um, because they weren't treated like they had a prefrontal cortex that could be used at an early age, which I think is slightly eager in thinking.
Dr. Nicole (08:11.393)
how it worked, yeah.
Dr. Nicole (08:38.561)
Well, that's what I find funny because, you know, there's that term you'll hear it over and over and over is correlation is not causation. But when you think about back in the day before science and research studies were done, people had to rely on correlation. They had to rely on observation. They had to rely on that information to make decisions and to help people develop, and thrive. So they were so much more tapped in intuitively.
based on their correlation, based on their observation. And now we pretty much have this system that will dictate right and wrong, good or bad, correct or incorrect, based off of studies that when you actually evaluate the studies, there are so many variables, there are so many opportunities for human error. And then you wanna get into the real nitty gritty of who funded that study. So, you know.
we really need to blend the two worlds of, okay, let's look at research, but let's also look at correlation because I sure as hell can speak to after close to 13 years in the world of integrative medicine that most of my clients and their experiences did not match the research studies that I was required to read about in school. And so,
When a lot of these practitioners come out of school, the reason why we keep furthering our education is because pretty much everything we've been taught, nobody matches that. Nobody matches that textbook. And that's getting more and more obvious because of all of the different variables that are happening when it comes to burdening our health, burdening our mind. We've just come out of a time where there has been this perpetuation of fear. So...
there's a lot of layers and we need to stop relying outside of ourselves, but also start looking at what's gonna serve us and serve our families. This idea of helping kids to process, I think is huge. Because I always like to give examples. I think about this idea of the good and bad with the immune system, let's say. So.
Dr. Nicole (10:58.625)
When you have a kid who has an experience, they don't, because that prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed, they're gonna have that limbic system, that emotional response, and then it's gonna get tagged like good or bad. And it's like if they got in trouble or they thought, they let the team down, they like tag it as bad. Same thing as like an organism comes into the body and the immune system can tag it good or bad.
But the downside of that good and bad tagging of the immune system now is now this perpetuation of autoimmune disease. And this is because the body is it processing properly. It's not actually knowing what to do with what's coming in. And so you look at this idea of, you instead of leaving it up to your child's undeveloped brain that is now relying more in that emotional center,
Instead of leaving it up to that undeveloped brain to say good or bad, it's helping them to process through asking questions, opening their mind to bigger possibilities. And I find this funny that we're talking about this because I've been listening to, I wish I knew his name, but he is the creator of the company called Viome and he is the creator of the company.
called Moon Travel. And so he literally created these companies that are like changing humanity. He literally is one of the first companies outside of the government to send satellites to the moon to gather data because they're trying to get and create the moon to be habitable by humans. Like, talk about like a talk about a mission way bigger.
than anything. And he did a whole speech about questions. And it's not even just about asking questions, but it's also about asking the right questions, not asking the same question that everybody else is asking. So you could say, why are you acting like this? Why are you throwing a tantrum? Same question that any parent might ask their kid who's throwing a tantrum. What other questions can you ask?
Dr. Nicole (13:23.265)
that can provoke better or different information.
Dr. Nick (13:30.798)
Sorry, my internet cut out, so I only heard the very last part of that.
Dr. Nicole (13:36.257)
talking about the quality of your questions. What's your phrase, Dr. Nick?
Dr. Nick (13:40.622)
Well, it's not my phrase, but the quality of your life is dictated by the quality of the questions you ask.
Dr. Nicole (13:42.209)
I know.
Yes. And it's the quality of our family's life as well. So essentially it comes down to just applying these principles. And honestly, you know, for all of us, it's a matter of when we as adults are having an emotional reaction, emotional response, sometimes it's taking that time for yourself to say, what is this? Why are you here? What feedback am I getting?
Dr. Nick (14:08.974)
So.
As we wrap this up, I want to say kind of like on that two-part stage of serving yourself as well as helping to serve others. When you serve yourself, yeah. And you have a reaction. Shit doesn't go as planned, et cetera. You know, you ask those quality questions, um, to figure it out. But at the same time, if you're so polarized that this event is only bad and you can't see any good, there's no benefits to it. Then.
You can't create the questions to help you actually see any benefits to see anything good that came from that. So you have to have somebody else, whether it's a really intelligent friend, a coach, a mentor, a doctor, somebody that's trained that can formulate questions.
to help you increase your conscious awareness to not be so polarized, to start seeing that there's actually both sides. There's good and bad, there's benefits and drawbacks. And as you do that, then your blinders kind of start opening up and you get back into a state of empowerment. You're not disempowered, you're not a victim to whatever just occurred. And that's the same literally process that we can do with children is because...
They're, they don't have that fully developed prefrontal cortex. So you just got to assume that they have blinders on. So it's our responsibility to start asking these questions to help increasing their awareness. As we do that, we're actually just helping them to grow and develop their prefrontal cortex, but to do it actually very intelligently and in a very short manner.
Dr. Nicole (15:56.129)
Yeah, and creating the balance between, you know, the emotional perception as well as, you know, the logical mind and creating that balance so we don't run too much in one or the other. It's okay to, you know, feel a certain way about a situation. But let's also bridge that gap, ask those questions to help also understand the bigger picture of it. You know,
That's the thing is like, we're not trying to suppress kids' emotions either and have them only work out of their logical analytical mind. But we're also not wanting, you know, kids or even ourselves to run our lives being emotionally triggered by everything around us because that is a massive detraction from a happy life or a good life. You know, if you're just constantly in a state of anger or fear or guilt or shame, resentment.
You know, you're barely functioning as a human, let alone able to show up as a good parent.
Dr. Nick (17:03.182)
Well, I mean, the only way to sustainably change an emotional feeling is to change the perception about it. So that's like, you're not trying to stop an emotion. You're trying to grow the conscious awareness, which is part of that analytical mind. But once the conscious awareness grows, well, then there's more data points. The perception is going to change, which changes the feeling.
So it's, yeah, you're the side effect is that the feeling changes. I'm not going outside with the intent that my goal is to make Q stop crying. My goal is to help Q process and by helping him process information. The side effect is that most of the time he stops crying.
Dr. Nicole (17:32.481)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Nicole (17:56.353)
All right, guys, well, we hope that this elicited some different ideas and when to know I should comfort versus ask questions. I know our natural tendency as parents is to go in and swoop in and make them feel better about something. And I think it's finding that beautiful blend of the two is be that loving, compassionate parent, but then also ask those questions so that they can help process.
their experience. All right, we'll see you on the next one.