Ep #62: Serve and Return: 5 Steps in Building the Structure of Your Child’s Brain

What if the next time someone asks you what you do, you responded, “I’m a brain architect.” Well, guess what, you probably are even if you didn’t realize it. And today we’re going to be talking about how and why, we’re going to be talking about the idea of Serve and Return. And discussing an article from Harvard that talks about how important this is and how to do it well and five steps to just making it happen for your children and how to help be an architect for your child’s brain. It’s amazing and it’s kind of crazy how easy it is to do some of these things and you’re probably already doing some of them.

And so it’s just something that you can be more aware of and add more to in your life to help your child’s brain develop even stronger connections. It is 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.

Brain architect, that sounds like a fancy job title, doesn’t it? And yet that’s what we’re doing every day when we work with kids. So whether you’re a parent or a care provider of some kind, a teacher, we are doing some brain building, some Brain Architecture. So let’s talk about that. What does that look like? And the information I’m getting today comes from Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child. And so we’re going to talk about a concept called Serve and Return and these five key things we’re helping to build structure and be a brain architect for your child.

So, Serve and Return is this idea of how we’re helping children build emotional and cognitive skills. It starts when they’re really, really young. In fact, this starts with brand new babies, so this is pretty cool, but it kind of grows with them, and there’s ways we keep developing that as they grow. So in a young child or a baby, they babble, they gesture, they cry. So that’s the serve. If you’re thinking of a game of tennis or anyone into pickleball? I love pickleball, it’s so much fun. Ping pong, anything like that.

So the baby serves, they babble, they point, they cry. And then the return is when an adult responds with appropriate eye contact, words, a hug, something like that. They’re responding in a supportive way that’s going to help encourage a child’s curiosity. And what happens when we’re doing this is we’re building and strengthening neural connections in a child’s brain, all of those pathways, those synapses we’re helping build. And so the more sensitive and responsive we are to a child’s serve or the signals, the needs that they’re expressing, the signals they’re giving off, the more we can provide a rich environment of returns.

And this is going to help increase and then strengthen those neural pathways in their brain. So we’re literally being architects. How cool is that? Amazing. So in this article that they posted, and they have a really great video. We’ll do a link for you so you can go check it out. But they kind of cover five different things that we can do in this process of this Serve and Return process that helps build our children’s brains. Are you ready for this? Five things, pretty simple, but just knowing them helps us pay attention so that we do it better.

And I love knowing how to pay better attention, it’s so good, not that there’s perfection expected or anything, but my gosh I can do a little better at least if I know what I’m looking for. Okay, so number one is share focus. So what this means is when you’re noticing your child is focusing on. So if your baby or your child starts looking at something or gesturing towards something, or they’re kind of, you can tell what they’re looking at, you also focus on that thing. So if they’re pointing or making sounds, sometimes their eyes are focusing on something, depending on their age. If they’re babies, their hands and their feet might be moving. And by noticing that serve, this is what we would call the serve, the child is noticing a thing. They’re putting their focus on something.

That’s the serve in our pickleball match. And so by noticing the serve, you are helping already build their curiosity and strengthening your relationship at the same time, which is so cool. You’re building that relationship. They know they’re safe with you and that you’re paying attention, that their needs are being met. So you’re not only building their brain and expanding their curiosity, which is going to help them for the rest of their lives, but you’re also building your relationship with them. How cool is this? Win, win, win, guys.

Alright, so then number two is support and encourage, so if a child is gesturing something, if they pick something up, you’re playing toys and your child picks up a car. And then we respond with, “Oh, look at that, you picked up a car.” We’re adding words to the thing that we are sharing focus with them on. They focused by picking up the car. We are now focused on the car, sharing focus and then we support and encourage it. So it can be with words, facial expressions, we can pick it up.

So if we notice that a baby is looking at something or a toddler’s looking at something and maybe they can’t reach it or whatever and we pick it up and bring it closer to them. So we’re supporting their curiosity. We’re like, “Oh, I notice you’re looking at this thing, let’s get closer to it.” Sometimes I think if we’re carrying a child through a museum or in the grocery store and they are interested in something and we go closer, “Well, let’s go look at that.” Or something fun at the park that they’ve never seen before or a puppy and we go closer. Okay, so number one, share focus, number two, support and encourage.

Number three is name it, kind of jumped to this one a little earlier when we were talking about support and encourage but name it. Naming it is so good because it helps build language and connections. It helps them understand that the things that they’re looking at and the way of engaging in the world, that everything that they’re looking at and focusing on has a name. It has language behind it. And so we’re teaching them the language, but also the concept that everything has language behind it.

So we’re teaching them how to communicate and helping them understand how to interact and engage with their world. So before they can even speak we can do this. And we’re just teaching them how language works. It’s so cool. Plus teaching them vocabulary which is so beneficial to them as they’re growing up and as they’re getting into reading and spelling and all those things. And being able to write and communicate and use language. The more language we can build in these kids, you guys, the easier they’re going to have a time learning to read and write.

And also of course being able to communicate and express their own feelings and emotions. We’re building their lexicon. It’s amazing. We’re getting to number four, are you ready?

So number four is taking turns. Now, I feel like taking turns, I kind of thought I knew what that looked like. I learned something as we talked about taking turns, as I was reading this article and watching their videos. And so pay attention because this is a little bit more than I thought it was. So obviously kids learning to take turns is important. It helps them build self-control, which is, I think, we all know, very important, and social skills, so those matter. But here’s the part I wasn’t expecting.

One of the things they pointed out was how important it is for adults to take turns. So I thought we were teaching kids to take turns. And in this taking turns part, they’re talking about adults taking turns and here’s why. There is a very, very important thing that we have to do, which is called waiting. So when we wait, we’re waiting to see what the kid does next. We’re letting them have a turn. We have to take a turn. We have to wait to see what they’re going to do. Waiting allows children to get creative.

When we always just have an idea in our head of how this game is supposed to go or what it’s supposed to look like or whatever. We’re such fixers, aren’t we as parents? And we want to just come in and fix it, but waiting allows them to use their creativity. How are they going to engage with that toy? How are they going to play with it? What are they going to do? So it allows them to get creative and develop independence. And developing independence matters.

Yes, we want them to just need us right as little babies and at the same time, we want them to have independence. We want them to be able to go and play on their own in the playground, and we want them to be able to put their own coat on. And later, when graduating high school, we want them to have the confidence that they can go to school on their own. And they can support themselves by getting a job. And they can drive a car and get where they need to go and all those things, so valuable.

And we start this when they’re babies and toddlers and preschoolers. We’re teaching them this by letting them have space by waiting, by us, the parents taking turns and not just jumping in to show them how or the right way, which is, what is the right way? Let them play, let them experiment. We’re not jumping in to fix it. So take turns. I love this one.

Alright, number five, number five is practice endings and beginnings. When we’re sharing focus, you can start to notice when they’re ready to move on to something else. And this is really, really valuable because you can start to pay attention to when they’re done. Have you ever noticed a kid and they’re playing with a toy and then they put it down and they start walking over to the bookshelf? Or they put a book down and they start walking over and they’re going to go pick up some other toy.

So we’re sharing focus when we’re paying attention. When we’re there with our kid and sharing focus, we can notice endings and beginnings. And we can talk about that, “So we’re done with this toy. What are we going to move on to next?” And we can learn how to practice those kinds of things.

So those are the five steps of Serve and Return and they’re really, really critical for building the architecture of a child’s brain. So those are the five steps of the Serve and Return concept that we’re working with on kids every day. And this, you guys, is how we help build our children’s brains. This is where you earn the title of brain architect because it’s you, it’s you doing this every day and it’s amazing.

And in our next episode, we’re going to be talking about helping children develop a sense of self. And it’s kind of interesting, first of all, oh, my gosh, it’s so good. You’re going to want to listen to it, so incredibly important and valuable. But what’s really cool and interesting is how a lot of these things we talked about today, the Serve and Return actually kind of fit into some of the five steps of helping children develop their sense of self. It’s really fascinating how they interrelate. And it’s so cool, because if we’re doing one, we’re helping do the other. So more bang for your buck on that one.

I hope this was really helpful. We’ll drop the links below for the article if you want to check it out yourself. And thank you for coming and hanging out with me today and listening and learning about how to help your kids have healthy, amazing brains. I will see you here next week.

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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.