Quotes About Connection

When we spend money on others, for example, we feel more content than when we spend money on ourselves. This is a kind of well-being rooted in meaning, connection, and equanimity—called eudaimonia by the ancient Greeks and in modern times perhaps called "inner" or "true" happiness.

The key here is that when your child is drowning in a right-brain emotional flood, you'll do yourself (and your child) a big favor if you connect before you redirect.

Engage, don't enrage.

behavior is communication.

Reduce words Embrace emotions Describe, don't preach Involve your child in the discipline Reframe a no into a conditional yes Emphasize the positive Creatively approach the situation Teach mindsight tools

When your children are feeling upset, a loving touch can calm things down and help you connect, even during moments of high stress.

While group collaboration can certainly be a source of collective intelligence, it can also get you to jump off a cliff or drive too fast. And that's probably why some form of continued connection to the adults and their adult perspectives still exists in traditional cultures, and even in our animal cousins. Without adults around, young adolescents can literally go wild.

Everything they see, hear, feel, touch, or even smell impacts their brain and thus influences the way they view and interact with their world—including their family, neighbors, strangers, friends, classmates, and even themselves.

Feelings are not a side component of a life well lived; they are essential ways we live as a whole, embodied being.

For example, one of the most powerful ways we connect with our children is simply by physically touching them.

Remember, there are plenty of ways to spoil children—by giving them too many things, by rescuing them from every challenge, by never allowing them to deal with defeat and disappointment—but we can never spoil them by giving them too much of our love and attention. That's what the connection

An important take-home message is that it is vital to keep the lines of connection and communication open and to remember that we all—adolescents and adults—need to be members of a connected community.

With an increased need to connect, missed moments of joining can quickly turn from misunderstandings to painful withdrawal into a shame state. While this is possible for anyone, those of us with difficult early histories filled with shame may be at highest risk of feeling the pain of missed connection and amplifying our reactions.

noticing not just their words but also their nonverbal patterns of energy and information flow. These signals are the familiar primarily right-hemisphere sent and received elements of eye contact, facial expression, and tone of voice, posture, gesture, and the timing and intensity of response. The

Attunement requires presence but is a process of focused attention and clear perception. We

That might mean giving a warning five minutes before having to leave the park, or enforcing a consistent bedtime so your kids don't get too tired and grumpy.

connection calms the nervous system, soothing children's reactivity in the moment and moving them toward a place where they can hear us, learn, and even make their own Whole-Brain decisions. When the emotional gauge gets turned up, connection is the modulator that keeps the feelings from getting too high. Without connection, emotions can continue to spiral out of control.

when a child is upset, logic often won't work until we have responded to the right brain's emotional needs.

Connection is about walking through the hard times with our children and being there for them when they're emotionally suffering, just like we would if they scraped their knee and were physically suffering.

The healthy move to adulthood is toward interdependence, not complete "do-it-yourself" isolation.

To state this more succinctly, awareness of the body's state influences how we organize our lives. Knowing your body strengthens your mind.

Children are much more apt to share and talk while building something, playing cards, or riding in the car than when you sit down and look them right in the face and ask them to open up.

And our disciplinary decisions go a long way toward determining how strong those connections are. The way we interact with our kids when they're upset significantly affects how their brains develop, and therefore what kind of people they are, both today and in the years to come.

Instead of just reacting to the external actions, you are focusing your attention on what her inner world may be like—red, green, or blue—and communicating to that internal state of your child.