Seeds
Quilt
Haven
The WiFi gets shut off in the middle of a game. Within seconds, a child who seemed perfectly calm is yelling, throwing the controller, or slamming a door. The adult is left wondering what just happened. Two minutes ago, everything seemed fine. Now the whole evening has been derailed.
Our first instinct is often to see this as an overreaction. Maybe the child has had too much screen time. Maybe they need firmer limits or better self-control. But perhaps there’s a more useful question to ask.
As Stuart Shanker always reminds us, we need to be deeply curious: Why? Why now?
In Reframed 2.0: Self-Reg for a Just Society, Stuart draws on the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp to help answer that question. Panksepp identified what he called Primitive Emotion Circuits, ancient systems in the brain that shape motivation and emotion long before we have words to describe what we’re feeling.
One of those systems, SEEKING, relies heavily on dopamine. It creates that feeling of wanting to keep going, to see what’s next, or simply to finish what we’ve started. Video games are remarkably effective at engaging this system.
Stress Behaviour
I think many of us have experienced a version of this ourselves. Maybe not with a video game, but with a book we couldn’t put down, a project we were absorbed in, or a conversation that was interrupted just as it was getting interesting. Being pulled away unexpectedly can feel surprisingly jarring. Now imagine that experience in a nervous system that’s still developing.
When that momentum is interrupted abruptly, with no warning and no opportunity to finish, another system, RAGE, can activate just as quickly. Not anger in the everyday sense of the word, but an automatic biological response to sudden frustration or restraint.
That doesn’t mean every screen-time meltdown happens for this reason. Nor does it mean children don’t need boundaries around technology. What it does offer is another place to begin.
Instead of asking, What’s wrong with this child?, we might begin asking, What did that sudden stop feel like to this child’s system?
For me, this is where the science becomes genuinely useful. It doesn’t excuse behaviour, but it gives us somewhere more productive to begin. Behaviour often makes much more sense once we begin to understand what the nervous system may have been responding to.
The boundary may stay exactly the same. But when we better understand what the child’s nervous system may have been experiencing, we’re much more likely to respond in ways that help them recover rather than simply react.
A question to mull over
Can you think of a time when stopping something unexpectedly led to a much bigger reaction than you anticipated? Looking back, what do you think made that moment so difficult?
If this idea sparked your curiosity, our Gray Brain course explores these concepts in much greater depth. You’ll learn more about the effects of chronic stress on the brain and nervous system, including Jaak Panksepp’s seven Primitive Emotion Circuits, and how these insights can transform the way we understand behaviour. Learn more in the Self-Reg Shop.
References
Shanker, S. (2025). Reframed: A Self-Reg Revolution (Revised ed.). University of Toronto Press.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press.