ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY HUMANIST FAMILY BRAIN STUDY SECTION 6 OF THE INTRODUCTION SECTION 6 HOW CAN HUMANIST PARENTS TEACH CHILDREN TO LOVE THEIR BRAINS? This website is designed to help parents develop a balanced approach to making sure that their children learn healthy brain habits. For example, children need to: exercise regularly, eat nutritious foods, get enough sleep, and challenge their brains on a daily basis to solve difficult problems by using modern critical thinking and reading skills. You can use this website to provide practical reliable brain knowledge for dealing with family life issues since it includes brain information related to good parenting practices. To be humanistic is to be able to use your intelligence, or power of reason, to create a fulfilling personal and family philosophy of life based upon scientific principles. As a humanist parent (or individual responsible for teaching children), you need to create both balance and challenge in your own life, so both you and your children can create more cognitive reserve for emergencies and for innovative thinking. Cognitive reserve means that you can increase the variety and density of the neural connections throughout your brain and nervous system by doing a variety of interesting and challenging activities on a daily basis to encourage your own curiosity as well as the curiosity of the children who depend upon you. Your evolutionary brain is designed to provide you with extra energy and habits to get away from dangerous threats or to collaborate and socialize for mutual satisfaction and protection. The new brain research provides empirical evidence that sustaining optimal brain functions depends upon staying curious and continuously learning new healthy skills of perception and memory. Thus it follows that as a humanist parent, you are responsible for teaching your children the same healthy habits of critical thinking and reading that you need to know in order to function well in a complex global consumer civilization. Therefore, the fundamental Humanist Parenting Principle is that parents need to deliberately give children the head start or boost they need to keep their brains and bodies healthy for a lifetime of challenges and changes. To achieve this important objective, the new brain ideas need to be discussed at all ages within the family context of growth and development by all family members. When you teach your children to appreciate the new brain vocabulary, and you demonstrate for them the best way that they can learn the new brain knowledge, they will become brain savvy and take the time to make better decisions. By using science-based thought experiments to teach your children how they can control their feelings, you will also have a reliable way to evaluate the results of your parenting practices. Your children can learn how to imagine the consequences of their decisions before they act out to dangerous extremes and they can also learn how to manage their free time better for more effective study and play times. As both you and your children learn the new brain ideas in a rational humanistic philosophical context, the new scientific insights about brain functions will become more useful in everyday decision making and problem solving situations. For example, you can teach children not to be distracted by the thousands of advertisements and unlimited shopping choices their brains are exposed to every day on TV, movies, radio, social media, music, electronic games, computers, and hand held mobile devices. Today, your success in life depends more than ever before upon the ability to think independently as you determine the benefits and risks of your daily decisions and teach your children how to do the same. Unfortunately, our hyper-connected consumer society can itself be a source of brain damage, due to the constant interruptive influences by the ubiquitous mass media. Therefore, it is important for humanist parents to teach their children how to cope with those kinds of overwhelming distractions. Critical thinking and reading skills are required in order to deal with the enormous distress that can be caused by the mindless triggering of unnecessary false emotions by the mass media and by the excessive screen time some children devote to hand-held mobile devices. The Humanist Solution is for parents to take charge of the functional adaptations of their own brains, known as synaptic plasticity (change in neural connections and pathways) and neurogenesis (growth of new neurons) by brain scientists. Now it is possible for you to teach your children, with the new brain vocabulary, that these essential physiological processes can cause positive intellectual changes (both psychological and philosophical), if you continuously discuss the desired behavior and model it for them in your daily activities with your children. WHY THIS MATTERS: This website can help humanist parents understand how to use the results of the new brain research to teach children how to integrate the new brain facts into their personalities so they can learn to express rational humanistic values. INSTANTLY GO TO: SECTION 7 OF THE INTRODUCTION OR RETURN TO: INDEX TO THE SEVEN SECTIONS OF THE INTRODUCTION OR RETURN TO: ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY WEBSITE INDEX