A Parental Stress Line caller says “I told him for the second time not to pull on the shades. My son just glared back at me and said ‘No!’ All I could feel was anger. How dare he defy me!”

Sometimes all the parenting knowledge and education doesn’t stop that flash of anger a parent can feel when raising their children. The programs at Parents Helping Parents specifically address these daily kinds of parenting struggles. The Parental Stress Line helps by being available immediately during those moments on a 24-hour basis. The Parent Support Groups help by being available on a year-round basis; allowing for the gradual process of self-awareness that helps parents. Why isn’t parenting education alone enough? The work of Daniel Goleman on “Emotional Intelligence;” originally published in 1995, can give us one insight.

According to Goleman, the information we take in through our five senses goes to our brain and usually gets handled in the following way: First this information reaches our thalamus which interprets and organizes the signals and sends them to another part of our brain for processing. From the thalamus, the information travels to the neocortex, the thinking part of our brain. The neocortex comprehends and puts together the appropriate response.

Scientists have found that when something makes us feel frightened or angry, the thalamus doesn’t send the information to the neocortex, but sends it straight to the amygdala; the brain’s specialist for emotional matters. The amygdala doesn’t ‘think’ about what is happening. Instead it quickly puts our body into “fight or flight” mode – accelerating the heart rate and blood flow, increasing hormones, and releasing energy for action. Daniel Goleman calls this short, quick path to the amygdale ‘emotional hijacking.’

As we all know, this sequence is a powerful force. The good news is that we can train ourselves to re-engage the thinking part of our brains by increasing our self-awareness. Parents Helping Parents programs give parents the time and space to raise their self-awareness of their emotional triggers and practice responding in the ways they would like to.