Why Does My Child Lose Control? Understanding the Brain’s Survival System

This article is the first in my Understanding Children’s Emotions and Behaviour series, exploring the brain’s survival system, fight, flight, freeze and fawn, shame, and co-regulation.

One of the things I often teach children and parents in therapy is what actually happens in our brain when we become scared, angry or overwhelmed. Once we understand why our brain reacts the way it does, some of our behaviour starts to make much more sense.

Our brain was built to keep us alive

There is a small part of our brain called the amygdala. It has a number of jobs, but one of the important ones is helping our brain notice and respond to things that might be threatening.

To understand why that’s important, we need to go back a very long way.

Imagine humans thousands of years ago, living in a world very different from ours today. There were no supermarkets or houses with locked doors. People needed to find food, protect themselves from predators and other dangers, and keep their families and communities safe.

Our survival depended on our brain being very good at recognising danger and responding to it fast.

Imagine you meet a tiger…

Let’s imagine you’ve gone out looking for food. You’re walking along and suddenly you see a tiger.

What would happen if your brain responded like this?

Interesting. That’s a tiger.

Let’s think carefully about my options.

Perhaps I should make a list.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of running?

Not particularly helpful. By the time you’ve finished thinking, you’ve probably become the tiger’s dinner.

Instead, our brains have incredibly fast pathways for responding to potential danger.

You see the tiger and your brain detects: DANGER!

Your survival system responds. Your heart starts beating faster and your breathing changes. Stress hormones such as adrenaline help prepare your body for action, your muscles tense and your attention narrows towards the threat.

Your body is getting ready to survive.

You don’t need to consciously tell it to do any of this. Your brain and body respond automatically. It’s an amazingly clever system, and one of the reasons humans have survived as a species.

Fight, flight or freeze

Once the survival response is activated, your brain and body prepare to respond to the danger. What happens next will depend on the situation, your previous experiences and what your nervous system has learned about responding to threat.

You might fight the tiger. Hopefully you’re very strong!

You might flee. Hopefully you’re very fast!

Or you might freeze, becoming very still and hoping the threat passes or doesn’t notice you.

Different situations can produce different responses, and you don’t want to spend ages carefully deciding which one to use. The whole point of the survival response is that it is fast.

So what happens to the thinking part of the brain?

This is where I often introduce children to the idea of the lizard brain and the wizard brain.

These aren’t scientific names for two separate parts of the brain. They’re a way of making a very complicated brain process easier to understand.

Your wizard brain helps with reasoning, planning, problem-solving, controlling impulses, thinking about consequences, finding the right words, doing a maths problem and understanding somebody else’s point of view.

These are important skills, but if there’s a tiger standing in front of you, they aren’t necessarily the skills you need most urgently.

You need your survival brain, which I often describe to children as the lizard brain. Its job isn’t to carefully consider every possibility. Its priority is to keep you alive.

When our alarm system becomes highly activated, our brain prioritises responding to the threat, while some of the higher-level thinking skills we usually rely on become harder to access.

I sometimes describe this to children as the Wi-Fi signal dropping out. Your wizard brain hasn’t disappeared; it’s still there, but the connection isn’t very good. You might struggle to find words, remember what you’re supposed to do or think about consequences. You might know the rule perfectly well when you’re calm but struggle to access that knowledge when your alarm system is blaring.

This is also where psychiatrist Dan Siegel’s “flipping your lid” model can be helpful. Using a hand as a simple model of the brain, we can show children how our thinking capacities become harder to access when our emotional and survival systems are highly activated.

Whether we describe it as flipping our lid, losing the Wi-Fi signal or the lizard brain taking over, we’re giving children different ways of understanding a complicated process: when our survival system is highly activated, thinking, reasoning and making considered choices become harder.

Today’s tigers look different

Our survival system is still incredibly useful. If you step onto a road and suddenly see a car coming towards you, you want your brain and body to recognise the danger and move you to safety before you’ve had time to consciously analyse what is happening.

But for most children today, the alarm isn’t being triggered by a predator or a tiger.

It might be:

·         a teacher raising their voice

·         a friend saying, “You’re not invited”

·         walking into a classroom where they don’t know anybody

·         being asked to do something they’re worried they’ll get wrong

·         someone laughing at them

·         feeling embarrassed

·         being separated from a parent

·         having everybody look at them

·         being corrected

·         thinking someone important is angry with them

None of these situations necessarily means the child is physically unsafe. But our brain doesn’t only respond to physical danger. We can also respond strongly to psychological, social and relational threat.

If a child’s brain interprets an experience as threatening, the same protective systems designed to respond to danger can become activated.

“But there’s nothing to be scared of”

From the adult’s perspective, the situation may seem completely safe:

It’s just a maths worksheet.

The teacher wasn’t angry.

You know these children.

You’ve done this before.

There’s nothing to worry about.

Objectively, we might be right. But our nervous system doesn’t respond only to objective danger. It also responds to perceived threat.

Experiences involving embarrassment, rejection, uncertainty, loss of control, disconnection or fear of getting something wrong can feel threatening, even when we are physically safe.

Telling a child some version of “you’re safe” when they feel inherently unsafe doesn’t necessarily switch the alarm off. We need to help their nervous system experience enough safety for the alarm to begin to settle.

“But they know what they’re supposed to do”

Another common frustration for adults is that the child often does know what they should have done. When they’re calm, they may be perfectly able to tell you that instead of hitting their brother they could have walked away, asked for help or used their words.

However, what we know when we’re calm and being able to access that knowledge when highly activated are two different things.

This is sometimes described as state-dependent functioning: what we are capable of accessing and doing can change depending on the state our brain and body are in.

Children often struggle to recognise their escalating stress and apply other responses when their survival system is activated. Their heart might beat faster, their muscles tighten, their breathing change or their thoughts speed up or disappear altogether. They may feel an increasing urge to yell, hit, run away or shut down.

The earlier children begin to recognise these signs - often with adult support and explicit coaching - the more opportunity they have to seek support or use strategies before they become completely overwhelmed.

Building emotional regulation

Emotional regulation isn’t about teaching children not to become angry, frightened, frustrated or overwhelmed. These emotions are normal, and our protective responses exist for a reason.

Instead, we’re gradually helping children understand their own brain and body: what activates their alarm system, what that activation feels like, how their nervous system tends to respond, and what helps them return to a state where thinking, communication and choice become easier.

For younger children, much of this develops through co-regulation - having an adult help them manage emotional and physiological states that they cannot yet reliably manage alone. Over time, with repeated experiences of recognising and moving through these states with support, children can gradually develop greater awareness of their own patterns and a greater capacity to regulate themselves.

Understanding the brain’s survival system gives us a different way of looking at behaviour. Instead of seeing only the yelling, hitting, running away, refusal or shutdown, we can begin to ask what is happening underneath it.

And that leads to the next part of the picture: what fight, flight, freeze and fawn can actually look like in children, and what those different protective responses might be communicating.