Ep #26: What Your Child Needs at Different Developmental Stages with Alta Schwab

What are the different phases of your child’s brain development and how does that relate to our hierarchy of needs as human beings? Today I am talking with Alta Schwab and she shared really interesting information on kind of correlating the different age groups, different development age groups like ages zero to two, two to five, five to seven, seven to ten. And how that relates to the different levels of our hierarchy of needs. It was a fascinating conversation, keep in mind that children develop slightly different paces. And so this is kind of giving you a general outline. There is room I think for flexibility here.

I always believe in room for flexibility so keep that in mind as you’re listening. But I think it’s an interesting and helpful guide as you’re kind of looking at where your child is right now and maybe where their brain development is based on what their needs are as a human being. I hope you enjoy the episode, it’s coming up right after this.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

Amy: Hi, Alta, welcome to the show. We’re so happy to have you on today.

Alta: Hi. I’m so happy to be here, Amy, thanks for having me.

Amy: Of course. So tell me a little bit about your background and how you got here and working with children and development?

Alta: So I actually came about this in a way because I had a lot of anxiety and stress and things like that when I was a child. So I throughout my adulthood had been trying to figure out what was going on back there because my parents couldn’t figure it out and then other people they took me to see for dealing with the anxiety could figure it out. And so I’ve been doing a lot of study in childhood brain development and things like that pretty much since I was in high school.

And then when I got sick when I was about 20, I had Lyme disease and so I ended up having to do a ton of study in brain development to try to understand what was happening with the severe brain fog and the different things like that. And the anxiety, that was through the roof and the fatigue and all the different things. So I was trying to understand the brain and the body and trying to figure out how to make myself feel better. So then I came to neuro somatic therapy which is where I really learned a lot more about how the brain and the nervous system are connected.

And after I learned that my nephew was born and so I just got to be very, very interested in how he was handling things. Because I was watching my brother and my nephew just kind of butt heads over things. And what I knew about the brain and the development was that my nephew at age one or something like that and he and my brother were having these faceoffs about things that I finally had to pull my brother aside and be like, “Adam, Dave doesn’t understand this. I know that you’re getting frustrated with him but his brain isn’t capable at this point of understanding where this is coming from.”

So it’s really come from my personal health journey and just my love of children and all my cousins and my nephew and the people that I’ve interacted with and all the kids that I love in my life as well as my own childhood journey.

Amy: That is so interesting. Isn’t it funny how we get to where we are because of a need sometimes or a passion or different things and leads us to where we are. I love it. So let’s talk about the stages of development in children and how their brains develop. And then how that’s tied in with their hierarchy of needs. And maybe talk a little bit about the hierarchy of needs. And let’s start talking about the hierarchy of needs first and kind of just let everybody know what that is. And then we can kind of talk about that in relationship to the stages of brain development.

Alta: Okay, perfect. So the hierarchy of needs, if any of you have ever heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, this is a theory in psychology and it’s based on a pyramid. So at the base of the pyramid is your safety and security needs. So everything is built on your safety and security needs. So if you don’t have shelter, if you don’t have food, if you don’t have water and if you don’t have health, nothing can be built on top of it. So you will always be focusing and honing back on safety and security. So if that first level is unstable, nothing else going forward matters.

So then the next level is needing to have an emotional state of security, so that’s just being comfortable and taking care of, knowing that you’re allowed to express yourself and that is a safe way to do it, that you’re not going to for example, be kicked out of the tribe and out on your own. We’re very instinctual at our cores. So there’s a lot of us that even though we’re not in that tribal environment anymore, at our core our bodies still are. So there’s got to be a sense of security that your emotional state isn’t going to get you ostracized. Because there were many times in history where ostracism resulted in death.

So you had to make sure that that was secure. And next comes the needing to have the sense of confidence and esteem and purpose and things like that. And just needing to know where you fit in. So the first level is just your emotional ability to interact with people. The second one is knowing where you fit in. So it’s like if I act this way then I don’t fit in and therefore I’m at risk for being kicked out. Do you know what I mean?

Amy: Yes.

Alta: And then the next one is where we really start coming into truly interacting with and having a relationship with people and having satisfying relationships. Then the last one is what people call self-actualization where you kind of come together and honed in on, met your fullest purpose and fulfillment of emotional, relational, intellectual, all the things. [Crosstalk].

Amy: Love it. Okay, so if we’re talking about that then in relation to brain development because I think we kind of started, brains that are maybe a little less developed and are working our way into this. So talk to me about what that looks like then in these early ages of brain development.

Alta: So you can kind of almost line up each of these stages of the hierarchy of needs with an age in childhood. So in utero through about age two is that safety and security level. That is when they are developing all of their foundation that everything going forward in their life is going to be built on. So that is when it’s so important to make sure that they understand that they are safe, that they are secure. That’s why things like letting a baby cry it out and stuff like that and leaving them on their own, not picking them up when they need it, things like that.

All this advice that has been given in the past, that’s why that tends to result in very insecure unstable people over time, people who have a lot more anxiety. Anxiety I don’t think that anxiety is exactly more prevalent now than it was but it’s certainly more out in the open than it was. And I think there was a generation of us who were raised in that, just let them cry it out, they need to learn how to self-soothe right out of the gate. And here is the thing, they cannot self-soothe themselves until they’re at least two, they can’t. They need you in order to be grounded. They have to feel you because they can’t ground themselves at this point.

Amy: Interesting. Okay, so that first basic need level in the hierarchy is ages zero to two and then where do we go next from there?

Alta: So next is that aged from two to five where we’re talking about emotional understanding. This is where kids are learning, they’re starting to understand what enthusiasm is, what anger is, what excitement is, what joy and anger and all these different things are. They have no control over it whatsoever and that’s okay at this age because everything for them is so intense.

And they have learned at this point if they’ve been built on a steady foundation of safety and security, they’ve learned that it’s okay because mommy and daddy, if we do something that’s not okay, they’re going to pull us back but they’re not going to put us in danger. They’re not going to ignore us and they’re not going to hurt us. So that’s kind of the difference between a kid who knows that they can express themselves and then they might get reprimanded and pulled back and said, “No, that’s not okay.” But they’re still going to bounce back, they’ll recover quicker.

As opposed to a kid who knows that I have to repress everything because I am 100% always at risk of being abandoned, being rejected, being kicked out. And we’re dealing with this at a nervous system level. We have no logic at these points yet. There is no logic at this point. It is entirely nervous system instinct level. They don’t understand right and wrong really. They understand reactions of the parents but they themselves don’t truly understand right and wrong at this point.

Amy: Interesting. So they understand and they’re learning from our response if this is okay or not okay but they don’t necessarily have a developed sense of all of their morals yet, of right, wrong, they’re still working on that. Interesting, okay.

Alta: Yeah. So they have on concept of right and wrong. They are completely taking all of their cues based off of their family and the people around them by how they’re reacting. They learn this particular behavior elicits this response and that makes me unsafe. They don’t have any concept of this is hurtful to somebody else.

Amy: So are they learning then that, are they developing their sense of morals during this time then by noticing the reactions of people around them or not yet?

Alta: That is what their morals are built on but that’s not creating their morals yet. That’s the foundation that morals then get built on. And that comes a little bit more next in the next phase but it comes most in the following one.

Amy: Okay. So now we want to keep going. Let’s learn about the next phase. So what’s after this, ages two to five emotional, building their emotional understanding, where are we going next?

Alta: The next we go from the five to seven which is where they’re really understanding where they fit in, in this world. So it’s like, okay, this is my family, in some cases they have to grow up really fast. So it’s like I am responsible for soothing my mom so she doesn’t freak out. Or I’m responsible for behaving in this way so I don’t set my dad off or something like that. Or I’m the one who has to be responsible for my little brother or something along those lines. They learn at this point where they fit into different systems.

This is where they’ll start having an understanding of, like if they grew up in a Christian family or whatever, that this is how Christian families act and this is how we fit into the world. But again at this point they are still primarily acting on how other people respond to them and that being good and bad, not an innate sense of right and wrong. Everything at this point is purely based on how they are received or not received and how that affects their safety and security.

Amy: So is it a problem then if children are not getting enough exposure to social situations where they get to kind of test out what responses are to them? Because it feels like that would be then important for them to be in situations maybe playing together and just being in different types of social situations where they can experiment with what people’s responses are to their behaviors and learn that.

Alta: This is the stage where that starts to come in because from the zero to five point it is entirely a family of origin thing. At this stage that is where their places start coming in. And the more varied they’re being exposed to and the more their parents are step-by-step guiding with the complete understanding that they have to talk to this person like they know nothing, because they do, they really, really do. I think a lot of times we tend to expect a lot out of kids. We expect them to be little adults and they’re really not, they truly are not at this point.

So yeah, when they’re guiding them in their interactions it’s like, okay, yeah, you see that person over there, they have this, this, this and this in a way that you don’t or they don’t have this in a way that you do and different things. And I have to teach them how that fits into the world and what my responsibility is in relation to that other person. Does that make sense?

Amy: Yeah. So let’s move on to the next one then, what would the next step be?

Alta: The next step is the relationship step. This is the final step of kind of starting to branch out into the world in the sense of starting to understand there are people outside of me. And how I interact with them also affects them, it doesn’t just affect me. So this is the point in which we start seeing, I hurt their feelings, it doesn’t come back to, I hurt their feelings and so they might get mad at me and threaten my safety and security. It’s about, they feel what I feel. They might feel what I feel. And this is the point where they can really start to understand that other people have some of the same experiences that they do.

So this is kind of the age from seven to ten ish, this is where they’re truly starting to understand the outside world and really relate to it, not just in a sense of this is my place in it but in a sense of this is how people are with each other. And this is where the exchange starts to happen. Does that make any sense?

Amy: Yes. So I think really starting to experience a lot of empathy and be able to really relate is what you’re saying, yeah, that’s fascinating.

Alta: This is where it starts to come in, yes, it’s not there, it’s not totally there yet but this is where that begins to happen.

Amy: That is so interesting. So if you are sharing this with parents as we are kind of wrapping up here, what would be the message that you would share with them to kind of take with them as they’re working with children at these different ages?

Alta: Is that everything you do in relation to a kid is going to come back to how this affects them. Every interaction that you have in their little heads is always going to come back to them. And it’s not because they’re bratty, it’s not because they’re selfish. It’s because they have to become completely solidified in all their opinions and understandings of themselves before they have even a chance of understanding the world. And so it’s really important to get them solidified in the most stable possible understanding of them and how they can be safe and how they handle themselves in terms of interacting with other people.

And just knowing that it’s all going to be selfish at this point and that doesn’t mean that they’re naughty, it just means that their brains don’t have any concept of how to have empathy and understand how other people are dealing with it at this point. And if they do, it’s usually because they’ve had to grow up to be quick in their unstable unsafe environments, it’s abusive. It just may mean that to them they interpret it as unsafe so if they see mom gets really upset when this happens that doesn’t mean that mom’s actually going to beat her kid. It just means that to that kid it feels unsafe, it feels like it threatens them.

And it may be it probably is even in fact totally illogical at this point, but just understanding that that’s under there, should affect how you interact with them, knowing that everything for them is going to come back to am I safe, am I secure, do I belong here well before they think anything of anybody else.

Amy: Yeah, interesting. Okay, well this has been very fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing this with us today. And if people want to come and learn more from you and find more about what you’re doing, what is the best place for people to come and find you online?

Alta: Right now the best place to find me online is on Facebook. You can follow me at alta.schwab. You can also find my business page which is 6-45 consulting, 6 hyphen 45 consulting. And you can get in contact with me there. The best way to get in contact with me is to send me a message on one of those places or you can shoot me an email at alta so A-L-T-A at 645 consulting with no hyphen .com.

Amy: Well, perfect, we’ll grab links for people too. So those will be in the show notes everyone and you can just go click on that, make that really easy. And we’ll get that all set up for you. Thank you so much for coming on today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Alta: Yeah, it’s been so much fun, thanks for having me.

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Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website, planningplaytime.com. See you next week.