Stuart Shanker > Quotes

“1. Read the signs and reframe the behavior. 2. Identify the stressors. 3. Reduce the stress. 4. Reflect. Become aware of when you’re overstressed. 5. Respond. Figure out what helps you calm, rest, and recover.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Usually a child who is having trouble in the cognitive domain is also stressed in the biological and emotion domains, and attention to those helps relieve additional stress, making more energy available for cognitive tasks.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Studies show that the greater the emotional, physical, or psychological stress, the harder it is for us to delay gratification.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“that disrupts homeostasis, the internal balance that an organism needs to deal with external challenges and to attend to its internal requirements, such as growth, reproduction, the immune system, and tissue repair.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Self-Reg is about becoming aware of and enhancing the internal processes of arousal regulation, not behavior management, about the critical role that an adult plays as an “external regulator” of a child’s arousal states until such time as the child is able to manage this on his or her own.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“the way he did. He could have acted differently, was even aware that he should have acted differently. But stress behavior is physiologically based. When this happens, the child is not deliberately choosing his actions or aware in a rational way of what he’s doing. He’s lashing out (with words if not physically) or bolting (emotionally if not physically) because his nervous system, triggered by a sense of threat, shifts to fight or flight.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The worst outcome of all is that the parents’ harsh behavior pushes the child past fight or flight into freeze, which is all too easily misconstrued as compliance.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The self-control paradigm represents a one-size-fits-all response to all challenges. In contrast, self-regulation creates an open, expansive system designed to channel our energy to help us function at our best under any circumstance.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Why the child did so takes us into the realm of self-regulation. That’s where the power lies for behavioral change and for lifetime strategies for resilience and thriving in a stressful world.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“idea behind self-control is that if you can develop the “muscle” (grit, determination, self-discipline) to win this war, this carries over to things like suppressing the impulse to give up when the going gets tough—with your child, your partner, your work.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The process needed to begin with a kind of energy audit—and then implement steps to help her burn less and store more throughout the day.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“that it is only by being regulated that a child develops the ability to self-regulate.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The greater our stress load, the more constrained this recovery process, and as a result, the fewer our resources to exercise self-control and the more intense our impulses become.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“By far the most interesting finding is that individuals’ performance can be manipulated by increasing the stress they’re under.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Stressors in the biological domain include inadequate nutrition, sleep, or exercise; motor and sensorimotor challenges (a child finds it hard to run or to go down a flight of stairs without holding on to a rail); noise, sights, touch, smells, and other kinds of stimuli; pollution, allergens, and extreme heat and cold.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“We need to help them disentangle all the different emotions (a process called emotional differentiation).”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Neuroception is the glue that binds together not just the two individuals but the species as a whole.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Excess stress drains their energy for the long, steep climb of the day.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The problem is that if the amygdala sounds the alarm too often, the hypothalamus is constantly pressing on the gas pedal, then the brakes, and the brake pads wear out: The recovery system loses its resilience.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The part of his brain that serves intentional behavior is precisely the part that shuts down when he becomes hyper”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Prosocial development rests first and foremost upon a child’s experience of empathy. Being loved, even when you’re behaving in a beastly fashion, is such an important point that it ranks as one of the governing principles of Self”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“But if we can tune out what he is saying and listen only to how he says it, what we hear are the sounds of a young child who is lashing out because he’s in distress. Our child—even our older teen—needs us to return to the role of external regulator in these moments.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The effects of impulsivity, poorly managed negative emotions, inattentiveness, and gaps in social intelligence all emerge center stage in the prosocial domain.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The autonomic nervous system (ANS) reacts to stress with metabolic processes that consume energy and then sets in motion compensating processes that promote recovery and growth.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Self-Reg starts by reframing a child’s behavior and, for that matter, our own. It means seeing the meaning of the child’s behavior, maybe for the first time.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“is by being regulated a child develops the ability to self-regulate. Regulating a child is not at all the same thing as controlling a child.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“He doesn’t actually know what he’s saying or doing: It’s just his way of letting me know that he’s in distress.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“Any stressor in any domain can trigger a stress cycle, but a child is most vulnerable when in a low-energy/high-tension state.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“They strive to dominate as a way of coping with the anxiety that they habitually feel in social situations.”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

“The problem is that if the amygdala sounds the alarm too often, the hypothalamus is constantly pressing on the gas pedal, then the brakes, and the brake pads wear out: The recovery system loses its resilience. When”
― Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life