AN SRQ MAGAZINE PUBLICATION WINTER 2021
SARASOTA | MANATEE FAMILIES, KIDS, EDUCATION AND INNOVATION
TM
AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR DR. TINA PAYNE BRYSON
THE POWEROFSHOWINGUP FEATURED PRIVATESCHOOL BRADENTON CHRISTIAN SCHOOL
HAPPY& HEALTHY CREATIVITY IN MUSIC CODING CAMPS A GIFT OF DANCE GOING WILD GETTING YOUR SMILE ON
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 121
11/7/21 5:21 PM
Learn Coding With a Coach and Your Peers Welcome to theCoderSchool, a place where kids learn to code all year round (and, due to social distancing, kids are learningremote too) Rather than using static onesize-fits-all curriculums, our core program uses an immersion and mentoring approach in a super-small student to teacher ratio (typically 2:1). This allows our Code Coaches® to personalize and customize based on the students, making for a much more engaging experience. Instead of linear learning of concepts from a curriculum, we immerse the kids in coding by building stuff and then building more stuff. —The Coder School of Sarasota thecoderschool.com/locations/sarasota
Creativity in Music Celebrating 30 years of music education in Sarasota, the Suzuki Institute offers a full program of music instruction with highly qualified teachers all year-round, with flexible hours. Lessons are available for all ages and skill levels, from beginner to adult, for violin, drums/percussion, guitar, piano, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet and flute. Registration is now open for lessons taught by expert and experienced teachers. —Suzuki Institute School of Music Sarasotasuzuki.org/camp
Getting Your Smile On Freeman Orthodontics is committed to providing you and your family with exceptional orthodontic care in a welcoming, attentive and professional environment. Dr. David Freeman (a Board Certified Orthodontist) and his team are trusted and well known throughout the community for their quality care, treatment results and community involvement for over 16 years. —Freeman Orthodontics FreemanOrthodontics.com
Join The Sarasota Ballet School Community We are delighted to be back in the studio again. We offer continuous registration, so it’s never too late to register your child to take lessons in person or virtually via ZOOM. The Sarasota Ballet School provides professional instruction for students of all ages. We offer the very best in training in beautiful new studios at our Rosemary Square location in the heart of downtown Sarasota. Our programs offer students ages three and above the opportunity to discover the joy of dance. Each class is fun, engaging and builds confidence, technique and develops lifelong skills. Be part of our friendly family community with many students and parents developing new friendships through their love of dance. —The Sarasota Ballet School sarasotaballet.org/sarasota-ballet-school
Go Wild With Sarasota Jungle Gardens
CULTIVATING SARASOTA | MANATEE FAMILIES, KIDS, EDUCATION AND INNOVATION
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 122
We are a family-owned and operated attraction beloved by generations. We educate and delight children, and those young at heart, with the less hurried, non-manufactured, up close and personal interactions with nature. In fact, we are one of the oldest continuously operated attractions in Florida established in 1939. We are rich in history and look to preserve memories of ‘Old Florida’ days gone by while remaining current and exciting for today’s families, locals and tourists alike. —Sarasota Jungle Gardens sarasotajunglegardens.com
WINTER 2021 | A SPECIAL SECTION TO SRQ MAGAZINE PUBLICATION
11/8/21 12:27 PM
EXPLORE THE SCHOOL THAT’S RIGHT FOR YOU | SPECIAL MARKETING SECTION TO ROCKET KIDS ANNUAL | WINTER 2021
BRADENTON CHRISTIAN SCHOOL
BRADENTON CHRISTIAN SCHOOL, Manatee
County’s largest, fully accredited private Christian school, has been preparing the hearts and minds of Gods’ children for over 60 years. “By providing a solid academic foundation based on God’s word, BCS shapes young lives to be prepared to take on higher education,” Superintendent Dan Vande Pol says. “Students are poured into by caring Christian teachers while building lifelong friendships from PK3 thru 12th grade.” The college preparatory institution includes many honors-level and advanced placement classes, including the AP Capstone Program. An award-winning fine arts program is available for middle and high school students. The
campus rests on 24 acres with separate elementary, middle, and high school buildings. The McClure Center for Fine Arts & Technology houses the art and music departments, two computer labs, and a library. The year-old Pentecost Athletic Center includes a 60,000 square foot two-story state-ofthe-art gymnasium with new artificial turf football, soccer, baseball, softball, and lacrosse fields. Interscholastic sports are available at middle and high school levels with many championship-caliber teams. The BCS Preschool offers classes for both three and four-year-olds and accepts the VPK voucher provided by Manatee County.
School’s Mission BRADENTON CHRISTIAN SCHOOL 3304 43RD ST. WEST BRADENTON, FL 34209 941-792-5454 | BCSPANTHERS.ORG
Bradenton Christian School is Christ-centered, with over 920 students enrolled for the 2021-2022 school year. Students from Christian families with different backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures attend BCS for a rigorous academic program while attending weekly chapel with their fellow students and teachers. BCS’s focus has always been on a solid Christian education for families in Manatee County and the surrounding area since opening its doors in 1960.
PK-12TH GRADE
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 123
11/7/21 5:24 PM
I
nterview with the Forty Carrots Community Speaker Dr. Tina Payne Bryson
Showing Up
DR. TINA PAYNE BRYSON is the author of the Bottom Line for Baby and co-author (with Dan
Siegel) of two New York Times Best Sellers—The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline— each of which has been translated into over 50 languages, as well as The Yes Brain and The Power of Showing Up. She is the Founder and Executive Director of The Center for Connection, a multidisciplinary clinical practice in Southern California. Dr. Bryson conducts workshops for parents, educators and clinicians all over the world, and she frequently consults with schools, businesses and other organizations. The most important part of her bio, she says, is that she’s a mom to her three boys. Dr. Bryson shares with our readers her thoughts on parenting in today’s chaotic world.
SRQ: Tell us a little about yourself and your current book. Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Most importantly, I’m a mom to three boys who range in age from 15 to 21. I’ve got two away at college and one still at home. I had never planned on writing books. I had never planned on being a licensed clinical social worker or running an interdisciplinary clinical practice for mental health, speech and language, assessment and occupational therapy. My plan was to be a high school English teacher. I was always a very curious person and in grad school, I was really frustrated and my professors, I’m sure, were frustrated with me because I kept asking questions they couldn’t give me satisfactory answers for. One day, I went to a conference and Dan Siegel was the keynote speaker. He talked about the framework of interpersonal neurobiology and about the nervous system and relationships. So basically the mind, brain and relationships and how they all interact to shape who we are. And immediately, I told my mom, I have a professional crush and I have to follow this guy. I have to learn. So as I was working on my PhD, I also started studying with Dan. I was really trying to pull all that together. And then I learned more and more about interpersonal neurobiology and about how understanding our brains and our nervous systems could change how we understood ourselves, how we understood our children’s behaviors and then how we could respond in more effective ways. And so that’s really how it came about. It was me chasing the passion of this science and its applicability that made me really want to share it with people. And so that’s how “The Whole-Brain Child” came about. I was thinking about these ideas of interpersonal neurobiology, applying them in the parenting trenches and teaching my kids about their brains. And I told Dan, I want to write a book about this with you. And everybody wanted to write a book with Dan at this point, but he loved the idea and that’s how it came to be. So we guess we’ve written these four books together and I’m still floored by how much impact they’ve had in the world. We’re so honored to have done that.
I had a similar conversation with Dan in 2017 on this topic. As an outsider, it feels to me like there’s a simplistic way to say it’s nature versus nurture, but there’s less and less openness to tackle issues of where people come from or where they start from. Well, it’s really important that we’re all humble about what we know and what the science is. I absolutely trust science. I’m guided by good science and all science is not equal. The brain
124 | srq magazine_ DEC21 live local | special RocketKids winter 2021 special section
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 124
11/8/21 12:27 PM
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 125
11/7/21 5:25 PM
Interview with Dr. Tina Payne Bryson
(continued)
is the most complex thing in the known universe. So what we think we know and understand, we can come to understand differently. Also, we really need to make sure that we’re listening to experts who are trained in the field. And a lot of times when people get push back, it’s because they’ve been listening to people who actually aren’t trained in these fields and they’re misinformed. A lot of what I think is the crucial work that Dan and I are doing, is to change the whole culture around how we see and understand kids’ behaviors and how we respond.
How is that culture or the danger of that canceling opportunity affecting, developing young people? For everyone, and particularly for teenagers, being kicked out of your tribe is akin to potential death and demise. Because if you think historically about the evolution of the brain, if we got kicked out of our tribe, we were more vulnerable to getting eaten by the lion. So having social ostracization is really one of the most threatening things that can happen. And so I think as we progress to think about having higher levels of accountability for what we do and say, there are definitely benefits to that. And it does make us more prone to having our nervous systems be in higher states of threat.
In today’s climate, people are hyper antagonistic and aggressive about certain topics. Our kids see it. Is there a better way for us to model? That’s a great question. And add to that the constant input and stimuli through our televisions, radios and devices. We’re constantly being bombarded with these very things. As parents, we are meaning makers for our children. The research is showing that the kids who have done well or haven’t done as well in the last 18 months, given all the circumstances, the biggest determinant was how their parents were doing. Just like when our kids would fall, but wouldn’t get that hurt. They would look at our faces and if we looked upset, they would cry. But if they looked at our faces and we were calm, they might not cry. So they really still, even throughout their young adult years, look to us as to determine, to create, to construct their own meaning based on how we’re responding to things.
How can those parents who are so fused with anxiety recognize what they’re doing and then reduce what they’re passing along to their kids? When you really think about what anxiety is, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not necessarily pathology. The problem is when either the threat doesn’t go away and you’re staying in that kind of chronic reactivity, or when the actual threat is not appropriate for our reaction. We have to differentiate between anxiety that’s appropriate and healthy and anxiety that is not so healthy or appropriate. If we can move ourselves into that place of curiosity and understand that anxiety really is a nervous system that is dialed up too far, then the intervention is what we do to soothe and settle our nervous systems. Neuroception is your nervous system determining whether something is threatening or whether it’s safe. There are ways we can cultivate neuroception of safety and one of the best ways, and I have a short video of this on my website, is to use safety based messaging instead of threat based messaging. This is super simple. It’s just changing your words. So for example, instead of saying, “Wash your hands, I don’t want you to get sick, you’ve got germs all over your hands,” we say, “Wash your hands and you can be safe and healthy.” Or, instead of saying, “Wear a mask so you don’t get sick,” say, “we’re going to wear a mask so we stay healthy.” We just really are switching the terms. We’re holding the same boundaries, we’re having the same expectations, but we’re reinforcing safety-based messaging. When I say to my kid, “Hey, wash your hands, so your hands are clean and we stay healthy” I’m also communicating implicitly to them, I’m in charge here. I’ve got you. If we’re out of control, how are kids supposed to trust us to be in charge and to make sure that they’re safe. Now the best part about that, which I always have to say as a follow-up is when we become unpredictable and we lose it and we yell at our kids and we act in ways that are unpredictable, as long as we make the repair with our children, then it becomes predictable for them that they know, oh yeah, we’re having conflict here, but she’s gonna come make it right. RK For more information on parenting for parents, grandparents and educators, Forty Carrots’ Parenting Program is a wonderful local resource. To request an appointment, email parenting@fortycarrots.com. Look for details for the 2022 Forty Carrots Community Speaker Program this summer.
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 126
11/7/21 5:27 PM
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 127
11/7/21 5:28 PM
RocketKids-Winter2021.indd 128
11/7/21 5:28 PM
Ads-DEC21 V2.indd 3
11/7/21 1:29 PM
Ads-DEC21 V2.indd 4
11/7/21 1:29 PM
