Where you place your attention is the biggest lever you have as a parent.

‍In a hard parenting moment, the lever is where your attention goes.  If you can move it deliberately, you can change what happens next.

We believe that the ability to choose where you place your attention is one of the most important super powers you can develop as a parent. We believe this because the neuroscience supports it. If you can notice what's happening within you, you can choose how you want to respond and not react on autopilot. Many of our micro tools are built on this premise.

‍If your attention is on rapidly looping thoughts – ‘this is too much’, ‘this is an unreasonable ask’, ‘I am about to boil over’  then the body follows: heart rate elevates, breath shallows, your creativity (very helpful in parenting) drops to zero. In this state your awareness narrows so that all you can hear is the noise, the whine.  Or perhaps all you can see is a tricky behaviour or perhaps a conflict between siblings. 

‍If you can move your attention out of your looping thoughts, to some sensation - your feet on the floor, the warmth of your hand on your chest, the wind on your face - then the loop can quieten and your nervous system can read the inputs differently. A wider, more flexible version of you becomes possible.

‍Your creativity is back. You can choose again.

Willpower applied to feelings rarely works in real time, especially when you're depleted. This is different — you're interrupting the loop with something else, to start with something physical.  

‍If you can move your attention, you can move your state.

‍Your State Affects Your Child: Biobehavioural Synchrony

‍A side benefit of choosing where you place your attention and so regulating your state is that your children pick up your state.

‍The technical name is biobehavioural synchrony. Parents and children couple physiologically — heart rate, breath, autonomic state — and the work of Ruth Feldman and colleagues has tracked these coordinated rhythms in caregiver-infant pairs over time. The coordination predicts a child's self-regulation, empathy, and language outcomes years later. Other work has shown that infants register their parents's stress response within minutes of it happening, even when they haven't said or done anything visible.

What's worth remembering is that this coupling is asymmetric. Young children don't yet have the regulatory machinery to bring a dysregulated adult back to baseline. Their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles self-regulation, is still being built across the first two decades of life. The parent's nervous system has more developed regulatory capacity, even when it doesn't feel that way in the moment. In a hard interaction, the parent is the one with the mechanical capacity to interrupt the spiral. The biology runs in that direction.

‍So when you shift your own state — hand on chest, breath, a different vantage point — you're not only changing what happens for you. You're changing the signal your child is reading.

‍Not perfectly, and not every time. But enough, repeated over a childhood, to matter.

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How do you actually practice this?

‍Attention is trainable. The work is small, frequent, and repeated. Four examples of what this looks like in practice:

‍Warmth. Put one hand on your chest. Feel the warmth of your hand on your chest, the warmth of your chest on your hand. Attention has moved from the loop to sensation. The state begins to shift.

‍Owl Eyes. Imagine looking down at yourself from above, the way an owl might watch the forest below. What does the person down there look like? What are they doing? Attention has moved from inside the moment to a vantage point outside it. From there, choice becomes possible.

‍Holding Two Things. Listen to the sounds furthest away from you, then the sounds closest to you. Then try to hold both at once. Attention is being deliberately stretched. The mental space available widens.

‍SIPS. Take a breath in, then a small extra sip at the top, then a long slow exhale. Five times. Attention is on the breath. The body reads the signal.

‍Each is a small move. None requires perfect conditions. All can be done in a minute or two, in real life, in real mess.

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What Repeated Practice Builds: Neuroplasticity in Daily Life

‍Practiced once, these tools do something modest. They open a small bit of space in a hard moment.

‍Practiced repeatedly, something else happens. The pathway becomes familiar. The move from loop to sensation, from caught up to a step back, becomes more available without thinking about it. The voice on the audio becomes internal. The pause between provocation and response widens.

‍This is what the research on neuroplasticity describes. What you practise becomes more available. Attention, repeatedly directed, becomes easier to direct. You’ve rehearsed the move enough times that your nervous system knows the path.

‍For parents of young children, this matters. The work of the early years is repetitive, intense, and long. Small improvements in the parent’s ability to find a moment of space, repeated thousands of times over a childhood, compound.

‍A parent who ends up ten percent more steady, ten percent more able to choose, ten percent more often — that is significant. Over years, it is more than significant.

How to start?

The starting point is wherever you are. A hand on the chest, this evening. A breath, in the kitchen. A glance at yourself from above, in the car.

The aim is to move your attention. And to do it again tomorrow.

Over time, with repeated practice, you'll start to notice a shift in your ability to control your attention. That will make all the difference.

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