39 pages • 1 hour read
The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
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Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Two Brains Are Better Than One: Integrating the Left and the Right”
To illuminate the concept of the left and right brain functions, Siegel and Bryson offer a framing story. Four-year-old Katie had always loved school, until she got sick one day and had to be taken home. After the illness, she developed serious separation anxiety related to getting dropped off at school.
They define the hemispheres of the brain as the left side dealing with logic, language, and order, while the right brain deals more with emotion, intuition, and creativity. Children develop right-brain thinking first. In the first three years of life, children are primarily interacting with their right brain. When the “why” stage begins at roughly four years old, the left brain is starting to develop more fully.
Living either entirely in the left or right brain leads to significant problems. A person who relies primarily on the left brain is disconnected from their emotions and can feel flat or numb, whereas a person relying on the right brain is likely to be regularly overwhelmed by their sensations. Siegel and Bryson advocate an integration between the hemispheres, offering some examples to illustrate how to accomplish this integration.
Siegel and Bryson describe two concrete strategies to integrate left- and right-brain thinking in children. The first is what they frame as the “connect and redirect” (22) strategy based on an Unlock all 39 pages of this Study Guide Plus, gain access to 9,000+ more expert-written Study Guides. Including features:
