What is the Social-Brain-Body Relationship?

The Social-Brain-Body Relationship is a pragmatic social developmental framework that addresses problems of body organization, social interaction, and communication in the home setting as presented by children with significant challenges in learning, relating, and playing. 

The approach is a brain-body model because it deals with the manner in which children organize their behaviors, develop concepts of time and space, and problem solve with their brain-body duality (i.e., embodied cognition). It is a social model because it deals with the ability to shift from embodied action to representation of reality through various symbolic forms. Lastly, it's a relationship model because it views the social-brain-body relationship as a whole as essential to the entire array of child performance and family flourishing. 

The goal of the Social-Brain-Body Relationship 

The first strategy of the social-brain-body relationship is to repair developmental lags and restore developmental progression. The second strategy is having the therapist narrate what the parent or child is doing or not doing. We find that such narration helps children and parents relate their own actions to story. As this happens, they seem to become more aware of themselves and begin to develop the inner dialogue so important in communicating both with themselves and with others. 

1. Assess the child’s capacity to interact with people, objects, adapt to change and learn from experience. 
2. Build the child’s awareness of his or her own body as it relates to objects and people. 
3. Guide children and parents from closed, disconnected, or scattered ways of the social-brain-body relationship into functional, social, and communicative exchanges. 
4. Provide the necessary technique and insight to transition from abstract symbolic functioning to concrete skills.

Defining Central Concepts

The social-brain-body relationship is composed of organized, coherent behavior patterns that are initially quite repetitive. They involve the child and parent acting on an object, event, or person in a predictable manner. The social-brain-body relationship begins with a one-component system to a more complex, multi-step system leading to an integrative goal (i.e., appetitive state) in the family. The social-brain-body relationship is referred to as the integration model.

 The hallmark of an integrative social-brain-body relationship is the investment the child and parent have in maintaining and continuing the relationship. This investment becomes apparent when a particular aspect is interrupted. In a digital age, more families are experiencing social-brain-body deviation or disorders that interfere with child performance, development and family flourishing. 

For example, the social-brain-body relationship tends to become over-involved with objects, actions, events, or people that they are unable to detach from. Thus, contributing to perseveration, compulsion or fixating tendencies. Alternatively, the social-brain-body relationship may be uninvolved or disconnected from objects, actions, events or people around them that there is little basis for building or sustaining relationships. This means that before children or parents can progress, careful attention must be given to the social-brain-body relationship.

Steps in the early formation, maintenance and expansion of the social-brain-body relationship

For children to develop, it is important that the social-brain-body relationship forms, expands and increasingly, comes under their control. There is progression in the manner in which the social-brain-body relationship is formed. At first, formation is driven by external properties of objects, events and people, with the child reactive to the process. Later the formation, expansion and combination of the social-brain-body relationship come increasingly under the child’s active control as the child uses the previously developed social-brain-body relationship to respond to various ends. 

The following sections outline the progressive steps of forming, maintaining and expanding the social-brain-body relationship. 

• Orienting

The social-brain-body relationship begins to form as a salient sound, motion, event, a particular person or object induces the child to “turn toward” or orient toward the source of stimuli. Orienting has shown to make the stimulus that the child is turning toward more salient for the reacting child.

• Engagement

Once the child orients toward the salient stimulus, the next step is character structure and its formation. It entails the child moving toward and becoming physically, and emotionally involved or engaged with the stimulus (objective values) properties of the object, event or person in the immediate surroundings. 

• The Enabling Principle 

The enabling principle states whenever the child is engaged by a stimulating object, person or event, he or she is concurrently stimulated by the background aspect of the situation. The background aspect soon becomes part of the total, the social-brain-body relationship which emerges. Enabling principles are largely dependent on external events driving the behavior. Early in life, such externally driven expansions are the primary mode by which the social-brain-body relationship is expanded. Gradually, the reflexive behavior is accompanied by a new mode where the child deliberately forms new combinations based on an inner plan. Enabling principles are mediated by bottom-up processes (limbic centric).

• The Selecting Principle

The Selecting Principle is only possible when children have developed sufficient awareness of their bodies to self-consciously direct them in different ways. When this occurs, they find that they have the ability to choose enabling or selecting behavior patterns to alter the structure or combine previously developed social-brain-body relationships in a new way. Selecting principles are mediated by top-down processes (cortical centric).

Disorder of Social-Brain-Body Relationship 

• Closed-social-brain-body relationship

The closed-social-brain-body relationship refers to those children, who become so involved with one or two action-object systems that they are unable to notice or respond to stimuli unrelated to the social-brain-body relationship with which they are engaged. These are children that are unable to scan their environment and tend to “live” closed in their social-brain-body relationship. Not surprisingly, these children prohibit others from entering their social-brain-body relationship.

• Social-brain-body relationship Forming disorder 

Children with social-brain-body relationship forming disorder have great difficulty forming any relationships. These children are repeatedly driven to orient toward stimuli from objects, events or people but fail to engage them physically and meaningfully. This disorder stems from poor sensory-motor coordination. Such a child may orient toward or act on a particular salient object, event or person but have difficulty relating his body to that object, event or person in a way that forms multi-step integrative systems.