Brain-Based Parenting : The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment

Parenting is a brain thing. Books and resources abound that teach us how to be more patient, compassionate, and effective caregivers, but at the heart of it, parenting is a state of mind. In order to better understand the parent-child rapport and strengthen the bonds of attachment with our kids, we must understand what's going on inside our brains.

In this groundbreaking book, renowned attachment specialist Daniel Hughes and clinical psychologist Jonathan Baylin team up to examine parenting dynamics as never before. By exploring the inner-workings of the parental brain, they reveal what happens neurochemically when caregiving skills are strongleading to healthy attachmentand when they're impaired, or blocked, potentially leading to a host of behavioral and emotional problems in kids. In doing so, they provide parentsand the family therapists and clinicians who may work with thema roadmap for a more in-depth, meaningful, and stronger parent-child connection.

Even the most caring parents can sometimes lose their cool or succumb to caregiver fatigue. What does this mean in brain terms? As Hughes and Baylin show, it means we go limbic, or react from the deep emotional core of our brains, while our normally robust self-regulating capacities are briefly out of commission. When parents get stuck in these defensive states, nurturing and timely repair of misattunement with their children suffer.

Walking readers through the core brain systems involved in caregiving and the various types of blocked care that can occur (chronic, acute, child-specific, and age-specific), readers learn how to harness their brain chemistry to master emotional regulation, strengthen reflective capacities, expand attunement, and remain mindful. A truly one-of-a-kind look at how, by drawing on an understanding of intersubjectivity, somatic processing, and the mind-body connection, we can achieve a closer, more attuned connection with our children.