One of the most interesting things that contemporary neuroscience has shown us is that the brain is fundamentally a prediction machine. The brain is constantly generating expectations about what is going to happen next, based on everything it has experienced before. It builds internal models from prior experience, learned associations, and the patterns it has learned across the life, and then checks incoming sensory information against these models. When external experiences match these prediction, the brain registers it unconsciously and things run relatively smoothly. When there is a mismatch, what is called a prediction error, the brain has to resolve it. There are really only two ways to do this:
- The brain can update its model of the world, which is essentially what learning is; or
- It can act on the situation or on the body to try and bring the world back into line with what it already expected. This second route is often where we see avoidance behaviours.
Let’s think about what this might look like in practice. A child has finished their day at school. They have managed the noise of the classroom, worked hard to follow instructions, and held themselves together through the day. On the way home, they start running through their playground plan out loud, because most afternoons on the way home they stop at the park. Their brain has clearly built a prediction based on routine and past experience: school finishes, and then the park comes next. When they are told that the park is not happening today because they need to go to the doctor, their prediction breaks. This leads them to become dysregulated, and they stay like this for a long time. What has happened here is a prediction error that the child’s brain cannot easily resolve. The expected thing did not happen, and their capacity to flexibly update their model in that moment, to go “OK, no park today, what else can I do,” is limited. This results in their nervous system becoming distressed.
Here is what is important to understand: our brains are doing the same thing at the same time. When we see the child become dysregulated, our own brains generate their own set of predictions. We might predict escalation. We might predict that this is going to ruin the rest of the afternoon. We might feel a spike of anxiety or frustration. Whatever we choose to do next is shaped by those predictions, whether we are aware of them or not.
UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS HAPPENING INSIDE
So we now know that the brain is a prediction machine. How do we use this understanding to work out what is going on for children, particularly when they might not be able to tell us?
To answer that, it helps to understand how we come to know our own internal states in the first place. Most of us learn through processes that occur thousands and thousands of times in early development. As a baby we get upset. We do not yet know what we are feeling. We just know something is wrong inside our body. Then a caregiver mirrors it back: making a big, exaggerated concerned face and says “Oh, you are really upset.” Through multiple repetitions of this kind of interaction, across things like hunger, tiredness, pain, fear and feelings, we start to build internal connections. We start to link together the physical sensations happening inside our body, a mental representation of what this means (an image, a word, a concept), and our behavioural responses. Those three things, the sensation, the meaning, and the response, are what allow us to recognise our own states and to act upon them in a way that makes sense.
For neurodivergent children, this mirroring process can be a challenge for both sides. A child whose brain takes in facial expressions, tone of voice, or the pace of language in its own way may be receiving only a portion of the signals an adult is sending. The adult, for their part, is usually offering mirroring in the form they themselves grew up with, and that form may not always match what this child can readily take in. What then develops more slowly is the internal model, the learned connection between what is happening in the body, what it means, and what to do about it. This is very often the situation for neurodivergent children. A child may not recognise when they are hungry, thirsty, angry, frustrated, or anxious, because the mirroring repetitions needed to build a reliable internal map have been fewer, misapplied, and/or have been harder to absorb.
FEAR, ANXIETY, AND ANXIETY REGULATION
With this in mind, we can then turn our attention to the role of anxiety and fear. While anxiety and fear can look similar from the outside, they require quite different responses from us.
When we experience something as threatening, it triggers the amygdala and hypothalamus. These engage the autonomic nervous system, producing threat-related symptoms throughout the body (i.e., the fight, flight, freeze response). It is only then that the amygdala communicates with the prefrontal cortex, making meaning by generating thoughts about the perceived threat. Important, this shows us that we feel fear and anxiety before we have thoughts about it.
What then differs fear from anxiety? Fear is a response to a present, identifiable, organic threat to the body, such as someone stepping into traffic. Fear is fast, tied to survival, and it resolves once the immediate threat is gone. Anxiety is a response to a predicted threat, something the brain anticipates might happen based on prior experience. It is often diffuse, and it can persist long after the triggering situation has passed, because the threat exists inside the brain’s model of the world, even when the external environment is calm. A great deal of what look like challenging behaviour can more often than not be a response to anxiety: the child’s brain is predicting danger or discomfort, and their body is responding to that prediction as if the threat were immediate and real.
The degree to which physiological anxiety is expressed in the body provides useful information about a child’s current capacity for reflective thought and engagement. Helping children identify and differentiate between these states can enhances their ability to monitor their anxiety levels and can build their capacity for emotional self-regulation and self-understanding.
Green Light Anxiety
Anxiety is more manageable when it the prefrontal cortex remains sufficiently online to support communication, reflection, and engagement with tasks or relationships. Here the nervous system is activated but still able to process information cognitively. It is appropriate to gently encourage continued engagement with an emotion or the task. Markers of Green Light anxiety include:
- Hand clenching, fidgeting
- Tension in the muscles of the chest (heavy sighing)
- Tension in the arms, shoulders, neck, legs, feet
- Jaw clenching, biting
- Tension headaches
- Shortness of breath, increased heart rate
- Dry mouth, “butterflies” in the stomach
Red Light Anxiety
When anxiety is overwhelming, the nervous system has become overwhelmed and executive functioning has been substantially compromised. At this level of anxiety, the capacity for reflective thought collapses, and attempts to engage cognitively or behaviourally are unlikely to be effective until the nervous system has been supported to return to a more regulated state. Markers of Red Light anxiety include:
- Bladder urgency and frequency
- GI issues, irritable bowel, nausea, vomiting
- Migraine, hypertension
- Asthma, difficulty breathing
- Jelly legs
- Confusion, losing track of thoughts, poor memory, fugue states
- Visual blurring, tunnel vision, blindness
- Anaesthesia (numbness, loss of sensation in the body)
- Fainting, dizziness
- Hearing issues, tinnitus
When anxiety is manageable, it is generally appropriate to continue engagement and to encourage your child to remain in contact with their bodily experience, essentially as a form of graded exposure. But when anxiety is overwhelming, you will need to slow down, regulate, and support the re-engagement of your child’s prefrontal cortex before proceeding.
RELATIONAL POSITIONING, MISATTUNEMENT AND OPTIMAL CONNECTION
But what do we do when we need to regulate a child? And what do we do when we need to help them push through?
The answer to these sorts of questions is often dictated by our relationships. The quality of any relationship can be understood in terms of two intersecting dimensions. The first is affiliation, which refers to the degree of emotional warmth, validation, and attunement we express toward our child. The second is dominance, which refers to the degree of structure, guidance, and directiveness we provide. Every interaction we have with our child sits somewhere on these two dimensions.
What we call attunement is the capacity to respond flexibly, matching our relational stance to what our child needs in any given moment. A child who is overwhelmed needs something different from a child who is exploring, and a child who is testing a limit needs something different again. Misattunement is then what happens when our own discomfort, anxiety, or unmet needs take over the response, and our child’s actual needs move out of focus. In these moments, the relationship moves away from what our child needs and toward what our own system is pushing for. Misattunement is an inevitable feature of all human relationships, and the challenge sits in recognising it when it happens and repairing it afterwards.
Misattunement: Drifting into Defensiveness
When our own anxiety is running the interaction, our responses can drift into one of four maladaptive patterns. These patterns often feel urgent or reflexive, and they tend to generate withdrawal, confusion, or escalation in the child.
- Interfering / Rescuing: Attempting to rescue the child or solve their problems too quickly, often due to our own discomfort with helplessness, sadness, or the slow pace of change.
- Disconnecting / Judging: Becoming cold, disengaged, or emotionally withdrawn, often in response to the child’s emotions, dependency, or perceived rejection.
- Dictating / Bullying: Becoming overly directive, impatient, or critical, usually when the child is not progressing or complying with our expected timelines or norms.
- Enabling / Pacifying: Colluding with avoidance or unhelpful patterns out of fear of rupture or conflict, often leading to passivity in the child and/or role confusion.
We take these maladaptive positions when our own nervous system responds to perceived threats, in precisely the same way that a child’s nervous system responds to its own perceived threats. We can often default to these positions under pressure, especially when a relationship echoes unresolved dynamics from our own histories, or when other demands (e.g., time pressure or competing priorities) pull us out of the moment and into a more reactive mode. Unmanaged, these responses risk replicating the very relational dynamics the child is already struggling to navigate. Managed, they become a valuable source of information about what is going on inside us.
Optimal Connection: The Attunement ‘Sweet Spot’
When we are attuned, the same four relational positions show up in their healthier form. We maintain an attuned stance that balances containment (dominance) and responsiveness (affiliation), and we move between these four positions as the situation calls for it:
- Guiding / Encouraging: Offering gentle structure, reinforcement, and clarity, without coercion or over-functioning.
- Observing / Exploring: Remaining curious, reflective, and open to meaning-making, while allowing space for the child’s experience to unfold.
- Compassionate Confronting / Limit Setting: Naming avoidant patterns, ruptures, or dynamics when needed, carrying warmth and an explicit intention to maintain connection.
- Soothing / Connecting: Providing validation, emotional safety, and co-regulation, especially when the child is overwhelmed, distressed, or ashamed.
When we are operating from these more adaptive positions, the relationship can become a vehicle for both emotional regulation and the updating of internal predictions. We remain relationally present even in moments of rupture or heightened emotions, with repair itself building secure connection over time.
Figure 1. Attunement (Optimal Connection) and Misattunment in Action
A Practical Conclusion
In any difficult moment with a child, two nervous systems are present. Everything described here is happening inside us at the same time it is happening inside children. Our brains are running predictions. Our nervous systems are moving between green light and red light anxiety. Our histories are shaping the responses that come up when things get hard. Before we respond to others, we have to know what is happening inside ourselves.
When something feels hard with children, the work thus begins by looking within ourselves. How am I feeling? What am I predicting? Is that prediction based on what is actually happening in front of me? This kind of internal check can often give us access to our full thinking capacity when we respond. From there, we can turn our attention outward: what is happening in the child’s body, what might their system be predicting, what do they need from us in this moment? Holding both sides of the interaction at once allows us to respond with intention and care.
None of this needs to be done perfectly. The aim is the development of enough self-awareness to notice when we have drifted, and enough flexibility to come back. The small, repeated experience of a caregiver who notices their child’s anxiety, stays with it, and helps bring it down, is what builds a child’s trust in their own internal signals and in the availability of connection when things are hard. This is the quiet foundation of secure attachment, and it is built one ordinary moment at a time.
If you would like to talk more about how we can support you and your child to understand and work with anxiety, please reach out to info@mindsandhearts.net or contact us through our contact form.
About the Author
Dr Wesley Turner is a Clinical Psychologist, Co-Director of Minds & Hearts, and an Honorary Fellow with the University of Queensland’s School of Psychology. He is a Board-Approved Supervisor and provides clinical supervision, consultation and training to allied health and medical professionals.
Wesley’s clinical work is grounded in psychodynamic theory and contemporary neurocognitive science, with particular emphasis on attachment theory and computational models of brain function, including predictive processing and active inference. His approach integrates psychodynamic frameworks such as Object Relations and Drive Theory with evidence-based therapies including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Compassion-Focused Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, and Schema Therapy.
He works with adolescents, adults, and couples, with a particular focus on complex and diagnostically unclear presentations involving overlapping neurodevelopmental, medical and genetic, trauma-related, attachment-based, cultural, and personality-related factors. His clinical interests centre on formulation and differential diagnosis, especially in cases where standard diagnostic pathways or prior treatment have provided limited clarity or benefit. His work emphasises reflective and reflexive functioning (mentalisation), supporting a developmental and psychodynamic understanding of emotional experience and relational patterns.
Wesley provides psychological assessment, treatment, supervision, and consultation across the lifespan. He has extensive experience working with individuals who present with co-occurring conditions, diagnostic uncertainty, or significant functional impairment across life domains. His clinical expertise includes neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia, tic disorders, and intellectual disability, alongside medical and genetic conditions, complex trauma, attachment disruption, and personality-related difficulties. He is trained in culturally informed psychology, with particular awareness of how culture shapes symptom expression, help-seeking behaviour, and engagement with treatment.
Please click here for Wesley’s full bio.
Wesley has limited availability for ongoing treatment.
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