ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY HUMANIST FAMILY BRAIN STUDY INTRODUCTION - SECTION 6 HOW CAN HUMANIST PARENTS TEACH CHILDREN TO LOVE THEIR BRAINS? November 14, 2018 This website is designed to help parents develop a balanced approach to making sure that their children learn healthy brain habits. The bonus is that what is good for children's brains is also good for children's hearts! Children need to exercise regularly, eat nutritious foods, get enough sleep, and challenge their brains on a daily basis to solve difficult problems by using modern critical thinking skills and critical reading strategies. This website teaches thinking skills that provide a modern humanistic philosophy of life. You can use this website to provide reliable brain knowledge for dealing with family life relationship issues. It includes brain information related to good parenting practices. To be a humanist parent is to be able to use your intellectual intelligence (IQ) and your emotional intelligence (EQ) to reason effectively for the purpose of creating a fulfilling philosophy of life for yourself and for your children based upon modern principles of critical thinking and critical reading within the context of a secular view of history. As a humanist parent, or someone responsible for teaching children, you need to create balance and challenge in your own life, so you and the children under your guidance can create more cognitive reserve (more resilience) and less cognitive dissonance (less confusion). This goal can prepare you for emergencies and also provide the basis for fulfilling family interactions. The idea of increasing cognitive reserve means that you can increase the variety and the density of the neuronal connections throughout your brain and nervous system by doing a variety of interesting and challenging new activities on a daily basis. Children must be trained to satisfy their own age-related developmental needs of physical, intellectual, and emotional growth through the predictable developmental stages and teachable moments of their young lives. The idea of reducing cognitive dissonance in your own life, and in the lives of your children, refers to conscientiously coping with the mind-numbing assault on the brains of children by the ubiquitous disruptive mass media and the addictive social media with their omnipresent advertisements and commercials. These attention demanding commercials compete with educational programs for the precious time that children would have to get actively engaged in educational pursuits. Kids could be more enthusiastic about gaining an understanding of science, history, politics, art, and even their own health if they were not constantly pressured to waste so much time on noisy commercials. Unfortunately, when children's brains are distracted so much of the time, childish traditional metaphorical beliefs can be reinforced. Such irrational beliefs can become simplistic habits in spite of the fact that children need to be developing an appreciation for the complexity of reality as they grow up. The fundamental Humanist Parenting Principle is that parents need to give their children the instruction and reinforcements they need to keep their brains, minds, and bodies healthy for a lifetime of challenges and changes. To achieve this important humanistic family objective, the new brain ideas need to be discussed within the family context at all ages. All family members can participate and contribute within the context of mindful growth through the sequence of predictable "ages and stages" concerning childhood growth factors. As both you and your children learn the new brain ideas in a rational humanistic context, the new scientific insights about the brain's structures and the mind's functions can become more useful in everyday decision-making and problem-solving situations. The new brain knowledge can help children learn to control their thoughts and feelings better by using the most important brain ideas ever discovered. Parents and teachers can teach children progressive mindfulness skills so their behavior and aspirations for the future will reflect the modern humanistic liberal values of respect for diversity, including gender, racial and ethnic inclusion. The book, 10 MINDFUL MINUTES, by Goldie Hawn and Wendy Holden, describes a wonderful way to introduce children at home or in the classroom to a sensible brain vocabulary and many skill-sets. They can empower children to enjoy more meaningful lives by teaching kids self-development skills and vocabularies that help them understand the deep humanistic history of humanity. The book publication data is shown in the following information box: 10 MINDFUL MINUTES: giving our children (and ourselves) the social and emotional skills to reduce stress and anxiety for healthier, happy lives by Goldie Hawn and Wendy Holden. A Perigee BookPenguin Group, 2011 (218 pages) The book suggests that parents and teachers can teach children to think of the two parts of their prefrontal cortex as if they were "Two Wise Owls" since they are the primary source of their conscious self-awareness. The two prefrontal cortices are located above each eye about an inch below the forehead. They are about the size of a penny in the front section of both the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The two wise owls, as shown in the following diagram, enable children (and adults) to make choices and be kind to each other once they are permanently stored in their long-term memories: A CHILD'S PREFRONTAL CORTICES CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS BEING LIKE TWO WISE OWLS THE TWO WISE OWLS ARE LOCATED AT THE FRONT OF THE BRAIN ON EACH HEMISPHERE The other essential part of the human brain that can be taught to children at home or in the classroom is the function of the amygdala. This vital brain function can help children regulate their emotions when they learn that their amygdala is like a "Guard Dog." The amygdala gland is divided, just like the prefrontal cortex, and the two parts are located in the front of the limbic system underneath and surrounded by both cerebral hemispheres. Children can use the idea of having an amygdala gland to control angry feelings. It is also involved in the expression of happy loving feelings. See the picture of the guard dog in the following diagram: A CHILD'S AMYGDALA CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS BEING LIKE A GUARD DOG THE TWO AMYGDALA GLANDS ARE LOCATED AT THE FRONT OF BOTH HEMISPHERES IN THE LIMBIC SYSTEM In this regard, teachers and therapists have been alarmed by the huge amount of screen time that most children devote to their hand-held devices (smartphones and tablets) instead of having face-to-face conversations with their parents, peers, and teachers. However, learning to be aware of the extreme importance of face-to-face contacts with other human beings within the family or classroom context is the best way for children to learn how to interpret and express proper healthy emotional responses to the common human experiences of growing up. The Humanist Solution is for parents to take advantage of the remarkable ability of their adult brains and, especially, the brains of their children, to adapt to almost anything. This phenomenon is known by many brain scientists as the neuroplasticity of the connectome. In other words, your conscious self-awareness requires a connected brain and body. This "whole brain thinking" process refers to the changes in the synapses, which connect neurons to each other inside the neuronal pathways of your body's connectome. This remarkable mental capacity can be guided by previously learned habits or by conscious choices that are just as real as tables and chairs or cars and trees. In addition to the brain process of neuroplasticity, brains can change by neurogenesis. It is the growth of new neurons in your limbic system's olfactory glands, which is the part of your brain required to detect odors, and in your limbic system's hippocampus, which is the part of your brain that contains the "triggers" of your long-term memory systems. Awareness of one's self-identity depends upon the special interactive functions of the prefrontal cortex (intentional executive function) and the long-term memory system, which contains the autobiographic, episodic, semantic, and procedural (muscle memory) declarative memory functions. As children learn how to name and understand the parts of their brains, which cause particular functions, it is important that they learn the basis of their own conscious self-awareness and self-identities. This website makes clear that any confusion about the fundamental presupposition that your secular self or conscious self-awareness is a true fact and not an illusion is due to misguided traditional incorrect ways of thinking about human nature that are embedded in our American English language structure. It is important to know this scientific fact (basic provisional truth) since many false ideas have been added to the structure of the English Language since the King Jame's version of the Bible was published in the late 15th century (late 1400s) on the Guttenberg Press. The new scientific insights about true brain structures and true mental functions need to replace the old obsolete ideas about the so-called spiritual or mystic nature of human brains. Most of the more than seven billions of people alive today have wrong ideas about the value of their brains and their responsibility. It is now known that the human brain makes your enlightened consciousness possible. And when properly taught with a humanistic education, meaning a knowledge of science and secular history, children can grow up to be responsible adults with an expanded self-awareness and socially responsible humanistic values. It is time to replace the spiritual and mystical ideas about the "soul" with scientific ideas about the humanistic secular self in the developing vocabularies of children of all ages. Furthermore, based upon the most recent scientific evidence, this website explains how your brain's dynamic enlightened consciousness is produced by your mind's fine-tuned self-organized memories and the phenomenon of human neuroplasticity. You can choose to control your mind's ability to imagine, reason, and remember as thoughts, feelings, and memories are experienced because of your brain's neuroplasticity process. The interactive neuronal connections between the brain's dozens of organs and the tens of thousands of words in the English language are what give a child the ability to think and feel and predict the most probable outcomes that the child's reasoning ability can conceive and achieve. It is helpful to start by simplifying the explanation of the most complex three pounds of matter in the cosmos, which is a child's brain. After you have helped your child memorize the 15 brain ideas and learn to organize his or her long-term memory system in specific categories of subjects that you think are appropriate, your child will be able to change his or her mind any time it is necessary. The educational philosophy behind this new approach to explaining the importance of understanding the brain's structures and your mind's functions is called "whole brain thinking". By helping your children avoid useless social behaviors and dangerous addictive habits whenever possible, you will be able to optimize the functions of their brains by simply teaching them to relax more and stay focused on agreed upon goals and plans in spite of the omnipresent and nearly overwhelming comercial distractions that both children and adults encounter today. Now it is possible to teach your children the new brain vocabulary so they will learn about the essential brain functions required for healthy intellectual and emotional growth. To be effective, you must discuss the desired behaviors continuously and model them always in your daily activities with your children. When you teach your children to appreciate the new brain vocabulary, you will be demonstrating for them that you believe they can become brain savvy. You will be showing them that they can organize their time with the goal of making altruistic ethical decisions as they grow into adulthood. Your use of checklists can empower your children to keep track of their activities and responsibilities in the context of weekly family meetings where the achievements and plans and expectations of everyone in the family can be discussed in constructive ways. Then kids can learn to manage their free time better by doing more effective studying and playing. And they can learn to imagine the consequences of their decisions. This frame of reference can give you a reliable way to evaluate the results of your parenting practices. For example, you can teach children to not be distracted by the mass media and social media advertisements and online shopping choices, which their young brains are exposed to every day on television or radio or podcasts including music and games. Today, when children's success in life depends more than ever before on independent thinking skills and emotionally intelligent reasoning skills, it is vitally important to teach them how to determine the rational benefits and the possible risks of their decisions. It is the function of humanist parents to teach their children how to make fair choices based upon reasoning rather than blind obedience. Unfortunately, our hyper-connected consumption-driven society can itself be a source of brain damage due to the constant disruptive influences by the ubiquitous mass media. Since corporations want to commodify your experience of being a human being by selling you anything and everything, it is important that humanist parents teach their children how to cope with the overwhelming media distractions. This mindless triggering of unnecessary false emotions by the incessant marketing of the mass media and the social media both require that specific critical thinking skills and critical reading strategies and progressive mindfulness skills be taught to children so they will be resilient and know how to deal with the enormous distress caused by hyper-commercialism. As both you and your children learn the new brain ideas in a rational humanistic context, the new scientific insights about brain structures and mental functions can become more useful in everyday decision-making and problem-solving situations. Finally, to summarize: it is possible to teach your children the new brain vocabulary that describes the essential brain functions required for healthy intellectual and emotional growth. To be effective, you must discuss the desired behaviors continuously and model positive emotions with your children during daily activities. WHY THIS MATTERS: This website can help humanist parents teach their children the new whole brain thinking approach to the scientific understanding of brain structures and mental functions, which is the best way to integrate the new brain knowledge into humanist family living in order to produce responsible and resilient family members. Printable Form SECTION 6: HOW CAN HUMANIST PARENTS TEACH CHILDREN TO LOVE THEIR BRAINS? instantly go to: SECTION 7 WHAT ARE THE LASTING BENEFITS OF USING THIS WEBSITE? or instantly return to: INTRODUCTION produced by Infinite Interactive Ideas™