Change Your Brain Every Day - How Can You Prevent Mental Issues in Your Children?

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

This past week of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast has explored the concept of daddy issues, with Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen describing the many ways that it can affect a child. In the final episode of the series, the Amens give you tips for preventing these issues from developing in your own children.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back to Daddy Issues Week. And we thought we would spend the last podcast of this week talking about how to prevent daddy issues in your children.

So what is our question for today? Let's ask them a question that they can be thinking about and pondering. So what's the one thing I can do to prevent daddy issues in my- To break the cycle. Daughter or my son. And please don't use the one that one of my daughter's friends used, which is, I'm going to give my dad daughter issues because I don't want daddy issues. Let's not do that. Okay. So let me read this review. Everybody should hear this by brain warrior Rachel. Love that. A fantastic podcast of bite-sized insights into the immensely important work of Dr. Daniel

Amen and his wife, Tana. I've been a student for about 20 years when I bought my first copy of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. and it is still a hugely important reference tool for me today. Can't believe that 20 years later, psychiatrists are still not looking at the organ they are supposed to be treating. Dr. Amon's work should be part of the curriculum, not just for psychiatrists, but at all schools. Understanding how our brains work and its impact on our every thought, decision, and action, it is life-changing. Thank you both for continuing to share this

hugely valuable information. That's awesome. So I have something to say really quick about that. So I worked for Medtronic. I'm a neurosurgical ICU nurse, trauma nurse, and then I worked for Medtronic for a while, which was part of why we had such a great first date. We were talking about the brain so much. One of my therapies when I worked for Medtronic was deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease and also for depression. Okay. So here's my question. It makes no sense that if we know, so what we would do is go into the operating room, the patient's awake, has to be awake, and they're putting this little probe down into the brain. And the reason the patient's awake is because they have to find the right spot. So someone with a massive tremor who can't be still,

if you get the right spot, all of a sudden they're completely still and they can write their name. Okay. Same thing with depression. You hit the right spot, the depression goes away. Now, if that is true, and something like that affects, if you're touching the brain in certain places and it affects a person's life that much, then how on earth can you say that you shouldn't be looking at the brain to figure out what's going on? Well, that's the whole concept behind the end of mental illness

is these are not mental illnesses. They're brain illnesses. But do you see what I'm saying? It's obvious. Yeah. For like 30 years, I see what you're saying. But to me, it was just like so clear. Yeah. No, it's insane. Because I dealt with it in the operating room. Look at the brain. But the question for this podcast is how do you prevent daddy issues in your child? And I'm going to give you the answer that has worked for me. Not that I'm going to have to talk to my kids on whether or not they have daddy issues. Everybody's got some sort of daddy issue.

But it's being a good listener. It's not over speaking them. Not, you know, they say something and you just talk too much. It's learning about active listening that we've talked about over and over again. And it's time. It's actual physical time. And so when I was a child psychiatry fellow, so I'm learning to be a child psychiatrist,

so I realized nobody really listened to me at home. And as great as my mom was, there were seven of us. So my most special times, maybe once a week or once every other week, I would read to her for 20 minutes. And that was gold for me. And it's why I've loved my grandfather so much, because I actually got that alone time with him. And it's a problem in our society because we have two parent working families. Now, I don't want anybody to feel guilty about it. It's what you need to, you know, 90% of mothers in California work outside the home

because it's expensive to live here. It doesn't need to be a lot of time, but it needs to be consistent time. If you can find 20 minutes, 10 minutes a day to just be with your child, do something they want to do, no commands, no questions, no directions, just be in their space and listen to them. That's going to go a long way to preventing mommy issues or daddy issues. So really critically important for parents. I have this one story. So Carl, he was my first entertainment attorney a long time ago, like 30 years ago. He had a daughter when he was older and he's like, she never wants to spend any time with me. And I'm like, it's because you're ignoring her. And he said, what do you mean I'm ignoring her? I'm like, you're ignoring her. Don't lie about it.

Well, and don't lawyers have a tendency to put their family on the stand when they get home? They just have this tendency. You have to be careful not to do that with kids. And he said, that's a girl thing, right? Girls want their moms. I'm like, no, girls want their daddies too. And so I basically said, do this, 20 minutes a day. And she was like, two.

Sit on the floor and play with her. And don't do anything else. Don't look at your phone. Don't respond. Don't do anything else. Just be with her. And he's like, oh, it's not going to work. I'm like, oh, great. You represent an idiot. I'm telling you what to do. And so he's, all right, I'll do it. And he did it. And three weeks later, he calls me up. She won't leave me alone. As soon as I walk in the door, all she wants to do is be with me. Yeah. Because if you start to go in- It's time and a willingness to listen. Just be in their space. Don't use so many words. And that's actually why children listen to their dads more than their

moms because moms talk too much. Not my child. My child listens to me, but I think it's because I'm bonded to her. So I think the bonding really goes a long way. So I want to touch on one thing. I love what you said about bonding though, because I think it's hugely important. You know how you always say that you can make your child a Republican and Democrat or anything you want. It's by the relationship. Right. It's the relationship. It's bonding. But I want to touch on something because we're talking about how you can break the cycle. And I started out by talking about working with Medtronic, seeing how doing certain things to the brain affected the brain, which means that if you have brain issues, it's going to affect your, how you're

behaving. It's going to affect whether you have depression. So I think one of the things that's really important to start with is make sure that your brain is healthy. Make sure you are optimizing yourself, that you're your best self as a parent. Um, I know it really helped me to, to see that. And because I really have this belief, it's just a strong belief of mine, that you have a choice, but you only have that choice, that free will, if you're coming from a place of having all your tools, having your hardware work right. So if you get your brain, if you start from a place of having a healthy brain, even just go online and take our brain health assessment, it'll really give you an idea of where you're at. That's free. Just go to

amenclinics.com. Start there. Go to brainhealthassessment.com. You can find it from amenclinics.com, but it's complicated. So brainhealthassessment.com, you'll say which of the 16 brain types you have and also how healthy or not your brain might be. So it's a good place to start. Because once you balance your brain, you get your brain optimized from where you are, it increases your choices. It increases your choice to do better, your ability to take responsibility. So I really think that's a place to start. So brain health for the parents, brain health for the parents brain health for the child because sometimes people have daddy issues and your dad was fine you were the problem

right and I I love the quote um insanity is hereditary you get it from your children right um and those of you that have more than one, you know they come out different. My two girls, Brianne and Caitlin, Brianne came out more reserved, a bit more anxious, quieter. She's an introvert. Where Caitlin came out waving at at you taking off across the parking lot hi my name is caitlin and haven oh my god oh she's now 10 months old is so cute but she's just very much like caitlin and she's waving right and was was wiggly uh when when she was young so they come out differently and often it's the fit between the parent's temperament and the child's temperament that determines the relationship. So optimize your

brain, optimize your child's brain, spend as much time as you can on bonding time and a willingness to listen. And your child is less likely to have daddy issues. I love that. So we started off with a question and let's end with, we told them what they could do. So if you wouldn't mind posting something you learned, we would love to hear it. We love to read our testimonials. We love to read things that you tell us. So post what you've learned, post something you're doing, anything, any comment from the podcast, and also use hashtag brainwarriorsway on any social media site and share this if you've enjoyed it. So the question just to review is what are the things you can do to prevent daddy issues in your child? Again, hashtag Brain Warriors Way. Thanks so much.

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