How is driving on the opposite side of the road like your kid hitting their sibling?
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My family recently moved to a new country. Now I’m driving on the right side of the car and the left side of the road, instead of the left side of the car and the right side of the road.
I have a fair bit of experience with this, as we lived in England for four years and I reversed sides of the road then, too. I didn’t have any trouble picking the driving back up.
What surprised me was the levers for windshield wipers and blinkers/turn signal. I kept squirting windshield cleaner on my car every time I tried to signal a turn!
Turn signaling comes up quite frequently while driving. Maybe 10-15 times even on a short drive if I move over a lane, make a turn to get somewhere, turn at a light…so there I was, squirting my windshield over and over and over as I just tried to let the guy behind me know I was going left.
Finally my brain started to remember and rewrite the motor pattern. “Okay, you’re not going to do this with your left hand. It’s your right hand now. Use your right hand to gently lift the lever to indicate. There! Success!”
I’d say after about two weeks I got it.
More time went by. Then it rained.
I drove out in the rain, and I went to put my windshield wipers on…and I turned on my turn signal!
What? But that doesn’t make any logical sense! I already retrained my brain to know that the turn signal is the right lever now. So what else could the windshield wipers be, but the left lever? It’s not the same lever, certainly. So it’s very illogical of me that my brain could be fully prepared to use my right hand to signal turns, and not just deduce that obviously my left hand does the wiper blades now, right?
Well— that’s because my motor plan didn’t run through the “logic center” of my brain!
My motor plan (sometimes I call it an action plan) is how my brain thinks it can carry out a movement, or cause an action. It’s a series of neurons in my brain that have built the same path over and over by doing the same thing over and over again.
At the beginning of constructing the action plan, I probably needed a lot of logic. When I was younger and learning to drive, my brain had to actively search for the answer. “I’m about to turn on the wipers, what do I do? Oh yeah, there’s a lever about that. Which one is it? Oh yeah, I see the wiper symbol on this one—it’s this one. There we go.”
But after time went by, I didn’t have to keep accessing logical thought in order to do it every time. The action plan, the motor plan, became stronger and stronger and stronger. It’s like making a path. At first I was walking through tall grasses, figuring out my way. Then I trod it so many times it became a dirt path. Eventually it became like a paved highway. No thoughts needed. I could just follow the path easily.
So, through work and practice, I retrained my brain from its original motor plan (left hand = blinker) to a new one (right hand = blinker) because I was practicing turn signaling over and over every time I drove.
But. It hadn’t rained yet. So I hadn’t practiced that one.
When the circumstances demanded it, my body and brain went to their old action plan — because I hadn’t retrained or practiced it.
Even though logic dictated that I should swap hands, logic wasn’t controlling my motor plan!
Okay, so what does this have to do with your kid hitting their sibling?
It’s extremely common for someone to ask in a parenting group, “what do I do about my kid hitting their sibling” — or other types of settings, too, like a kid hitting other kids at daycare, etc — and for lots of the advice to be things like:
Read books to them about how hands aren’t for hitting.
Explain to them that hitting hurts.
Show them what they can do with their hands instead.
Tell them they can ask an adult for help.
And here’s the problem: reading, explaining, showing, telling— these things all target the logic centers of the brain.
The next time the kid is in the triggering situation, they are not going to run their action through the logic centers of their brain. They are going to do the motor plan, the action plan, that their brain has already established. It’s a huge, heavily paved highway by now.
It’s the easiest thing to reach for. It’s an automatic response. It’s not a choice at all. It’s an impulse.
I wasn’t choosing, “how about I do my blinker now instead of my wipers? Heh heh heh, that will probably get me some attention!” But people think that children doing automatic action plans are actually doing malicious, defiant, *chosen* “behaviors”, like, all the time. (And especially for “attention”.)
They’re not. They’re doing an automatic action plan that has worked in the past, or at least has worked “fine enough” to get their need met.
So what can you do instead of targeting the logic center of the brain?
You have to disrupt the action plan. One way an action plan is disrupted is if it straight-up doesn’t work — like me turning on the turn signal when I wanted a wiped windshield. But your kid hitting their sibling to communicate their frustration probably *does* “work” in the sense that they’ve successfully communicated. So you have to disrupt it a different way, such as by blocking it from happening.
If I had instead gotten a car with no levers at all, but buttons to press for blinkers and wipers, my action plan would’ve already been disrupted from day one. I would maybe have flicked my hand through empty space in search of a lever a couple of times, which would’ve activated my logic brain to kick in, which would’ve made me remember the buttons existed and press a button.
If your kid goes to hit another kid, and their hand is blocked by a kind and steady adult, who’s there to help remind them of other strategies and practice them in action, it activates their logic brain to kick in…
…assuming, that is, that the adult stays kind and steady. If the adult begins to make them feel threatened and defensive, then they STILL can’t access logic, because now their brain is in defense mode! So the adult has helped slightly, in that the adult has blocked the hit. But the child still can’t learn anything or use logic to figure out other problem-solving strategies if they are panicking and trying to defend themselves.
“But I don’t have time to block my kid literally the entire day.” That’s fine too. There are other ways to “block” hits from happening.
For example, if two kids are in separate rooms and cannot reach each other, they are incapable of hitting one another. If both kids are occupied with different highly engaging activities, they’re unlikely to hit one another. If you’re playing with one kid, verbally or physically, even while you do something else, you can often position your body in the room such that no one is capable of approaching and hitting or being hit. And so on, and so forth.
Does it take intensive work to break the established action plan? Yes, especially at first. It might take a few days or a week of dedicatedly paying attention and blocking. It took me two weeks to remember that I needed to use the other lever, and I was trying my best to participate in the new action plan!
Can logic still help with learning a new action plan? Sure, talking about stuff or reading about it can sometimes help for some kids, though I think it’s much less helpful than our culture would have it seem (where there are extremely didactic children’s books about literally everything). For many kids, also, playing helps build these connections *much* stronger and quicker than reading or talking. Role playing, or pretending to be the kid and letting the kid pretend to be an adult, or having stuffed animals act things out, etc.
These things help build the new, alternate action plan. But it’s only when you combine that with blocking the old action plan that you can successfully make a change. Imagine there’s a main road you take every single day, and it’s the only way to get somewhere. But construction takes place and builds a new, parallel road. For many people, they wouldn’t switch to driving down the new, unfamiliar road unless there was a reason to do so: a detour on their usual route, a better outcome at the end of the unfamiliar road, or so on.
Logic is building the new road. Blocking is putting up the detour signs.
Can you take this information and apply it to other things than just hitting? You absolutely can. This is only on its face a post about hitting. It’s also a post about quite a lot of things that get classed as “behaviors”.
[Image description: A picture of a windshield with rain on it, and a windshield wiper, taken from the stock photo website Unsplash. It’s taken at night, and the streetlights and lights of opposing cars are faded to soft bokeh against an overall orangey glow and a dark car interior. The photographer’s name is Ravi Sharma. End description.]
