Fallyn Smith is featured in the new documentary, The Overly Emotional Child
This new documentary helps parents gain a deeper understanding of why children may have BIG Emotions.
Learn how you can help your child:
- Eliminate tantrums
- Stop shutting down
- prevent overreacting
Like a complete course to help parents and children gain emotional intelligence together.
Get more info on the documentary at
www.learningsuccesssystem.com/documentary/emotional
Strong Emotions Cause a Child's Thinking Brain to Shut Down
Liz Weaver (00:00):
In today's video, we have Fallyn Smith. Fallyn coaches, families to navigate challenges and create solutions. So life can be less stressful and more peaceful. She believes that every family has the capability to learn and develop their social and emotional skills and intelligence. And this video Fallon talks about one of our favorite subjects, neuroscience of emotions let's watch.
Fallyn Smith (00:26):
Hi there. My name is Fallon Smith with mindful kids coaching. I am a family coach that helps children and parents manage their emotions. And I'm here to explain the importance of why managing your emotions can really help you and your family. I want to start by explaining a little bit how the brain works with emotions. And this comes from Dan Siegel. Who's a wonderful neuroscientist as well as an author. So I suggest you checking out his books. He has some great parenting books. So let's get started. This is called the Palm brain model. So this is your brain lovely brain, right? This is your brainstem. This part is where your eyes blink and your heartbeats and all those automatic functions happening that we don't really have control over it. They just kind of happen. And then right here, you will see this as our limbic system.
Fallyn Smith (01:15):
This is where our emotions are stored. This is also known as our lizard brain or animal brain. And then over the Olympic system is our core texts. All of this here. This is our thinking brain and right here in the front where our fingernails are, that is our prefrontal cortex. This doesn't get fully developed until we're 25 years old. So parents keep that in mind. And this right here is where we have the ability to problem-solve to be flexible, to be empathetic. So this is still developing until 25. And when we experience a strong emotion, boom thinking brain is gone. We are acting from our limbic system, also known as our animal brain. And this is where a fight, flight or freeze happens. So that's why it is so important to know that when your child is here, they are not able to problem-solve.
Fallyn Smith (02:09):
And the number one thing to do is calm down. And when you are here, you are not able to problem-solve. So what you have to do is also calmed down, which is really important. Another key thing to know is that when you are here or somebody else's here, humans have this really cool thing called mirror neurons. And we take on how somebody else is feeling. So if someone comes in a room with a really bad attitude or angry, you can, it kind of sets you off to maybe if your child comes home and they're having a really hard time, you can feel yourself kind of going like this. So yeah, so we mirror neurons. Strong Emotions Cause a Child's Thinking Brain to Shut Down So that's why it's so important.
Fallyn Smith (02:50):
If your child is here, excuse me, then you need to stay here because that will help your child calm down here. If you're both here, this is not good for anybody. So it's really important to remember that if they're here, you need to be here. And how do we get here? When we feel like we're going here, that's really important. So we do need to calm down and we need those strategies to help us because sometimes we just go there. So it's really important first to recognize when you're going here and our body gives us clues, whether it's a tightness in our chest, we're getting really hot. It is us raising our voice. Okay. That's a clue that we're getting here and we're going to have to calm down. So how do we calm down? There are lots of different ways to calm down, but my number one suggestion is taking big belly breaths, deep belly breaths.
Your Child's Mirror Neurons
Fallyn Smith (03:45):
The reason why we do this is because when we're here or your child's here, we're in fight, flight or freeze. Our whole body thinks we're being chased by a bear. All of the blood is rushing to our limbs. Our digestion stops working. So we need to help our body realize we're safe and we need to go back to rest and digest. So how do we do that? We take belly breaths because what it does is it stimulates our vagus nerve, which is a nerve that goes from our brainstem all the way down. And it hits all of our organs. And when we stimulate that vagus nerve with our deep belly breaths, that is telling every single organ in our body, we are safe. We can calm down. We are not being chased by a bear or whatever that is triggering us, right? So that's a really important practice.
Fallyn Smith (04:31):
And the reason why I say practice is because you can't just do it when you're angry, it's not going to work that way. It takes practice because when we're here, we're not thinking clearly. So every night I suggest parents with their children practice taking belly breaths, I'd say around five really important to practice. Cause kids are not going to be able to access it. And you aren't either. If you don't practice and bring that into your every day. So parents, if you have any questions, you can always feel free to reach out to me. My website is mindful kids, coaching.com, just remember, know your triggers, know what they feel like. So if it's weather a tightness in your chest, you know, if you feel like you're getting here model for your children, because they're sponges and they're watching your every move, take a belly breath, take a break. Nothing has to be solved right away. Just wait until you're here to have a conversation because when you're here or your child's here, problem solving can happen. And that's what we want. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and thank you so much and have a wonderful evening. Bye-Bye.
Make sure to watch the full documentary on childhood emotions. You'll learn how to help your child manage their own emotions. You'll learn about your own emotions and how they affect your child. And you'll learn simple ways of helping children improve behavior.
Get more info at
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