Understanding how a child’s brain development impacts behaviors and emotions.
A BCA Holistic approach is a new and innovative mental health therapy that looks at brain functioning and personal development related to mental health issues.
BCA stand for Behavior, Cognition and Affect. Behavior is pretty straight forward and is about how we act. Cognition is another word for thinking, reasoning or thoughts. Affect is another word for feelings or emotions.
The biggest difference between BCA Holistic and other mental health appoaches is that emotions are defined as power, while thoughts are defined as direction. This shift in perspective, away from emotional intelligence and to emotional power, (which is explained in detail in other web posts), significantly changes our view and understanding of brian development. The BCA Holistic model is also closely aligned to neurological development of our brain as it is currently understood.
At birth, our brain is largely a blank slate and under various stages of development with the exception of the amygdala, the emotional center of our brain, which is fully developed. The BCA approach defines emotions as power, such as electrical impulses and urges, and hormone chemical reactions and neurotransmitters. So, the amygdala provides the emotional power from which our brain develops.
While babies are born with a fully mature emotional power center, they are unable to express that power because essentially they are stuck in their head. That is their nerves work too slowly because they are unmyelinated. Myelination is the fatty coating on nerves that allows the electrical impulses to travel 100-300x faster, than unmyelinated nerves. The reason a baby’s brain and body isn’t fully myelinated at birth is that they would weight over 25 lbs, which is way too big to be born. Ouch.
So, after birth, a baby’s brain starts the process of myelinating the nerves starting from the emotional center and working outward. The process of myelinating the brain takes about two years. Then at about 2 years old, the baby is now finally able to express the emotional power that has been stuck in their head. This explains how an infant transforms into the terrible twos. Or, the transitional twos, since this transformation is a normal developmental milestone of growing up.
One of the next significant brain developments is improved memory and being able to consciously remember and recall memories. This ability starts around the age of 5-7 and is located in the limbic system. The improved memory abilities are essential in learning language and gaining knowledge. One way to think about this, is that it is this age tha most people can recall their earliest childhood memory. The next notable brain development milestones occur during puberty, which is the time when a child transitions into becoming an adult, but the focus of this article was just looking at childhood brain development. The human brain is considered to be fully developed at age 25, however due to the brain’s plasticity or ability to change our brain never really stops developing and evolving.
