Remember when you first learned to ride your bike. Multiple different parts of your brain needed to work together: balance, feeling connected to the bike as an extension of yourself, distracted by the helmet on your head etc – they all needed to connect as one for you to get a grasp on riding without those training wheels.
The more you got on your bike, the more you created a strong, healthy pathway in your brain. This is the meaning of, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Every time you got back on your bike, the same neural pathways would light up like a Christmas tree. That part of your brain would get stronger and stronger. Your learn-to-ride-my-bike neurons got a strong coating of myelin. And it just got thicker and healthier with every scraped knee.
Messages travel well along neural pathways with that added myelin coating. The ability to ride your bike becomes a habit because of it. This is why new habits take time, patience and practise. It is all about your brain making those strong associations for the habit you are creating.
Now, if the first time your child was scared to ride their bike and you picked them up, and said “it’s okay, you don’t have to do this”, they would start to associate fear with riding their bike. And because you scooped them up and provided them with safety, your child would then see this as confirmation that, “see, this whole riding a bike thing is unsafe. I told you!”
This is how anxious behavior starts and how “I can’t keep myself safe but my parents can” habits and reliance start. When you afford your child the opportunity to build resilience on their own, they learn they can do scary things with your 100% support on the sidelines. But remember that this process takes time as you build new neural pathways! Your need to shift back to scooping them up will be immense. Their need to have you save the day for them will be immense. But if that happens, they have no opportunity to see that their own resources are enough for the challenge of riding their bike or (insert any new learning here).
It’s not going to feel comfortable when you build this new pathway in your brain – not for you or for them. And it will feel really safe and comfortable to go back to what you know. The brain loves what it knows well – familiarity is safe for the brain, even though it’s not always helpful in the long run. So it is going to feel scary and uncomfortable and like you want to just run away and stop the change you are making all together.
That overwhelming pull to go back to what you used to do will feel like an incredibly strong magnetic pull for you. When your child’s anxiety grows, so will their fear and frustration and you will desperately want to switch back in the face of name calling and tantrums, or silent tears. But we want to let go of that unhelpful ‘“always saving my child” pathway in the brain and let it wither away – which it will. And build their resiliency to knowing that they can be brave themselves too.
