“I love your posts, but my husband is afraid that if we allow our kids to get upset as you suggest, they’ll never learn to control their emotions. Don’t we need to just say No sometimes?” —Rachel

All of us worry about our kids learning to control their emotions. After all, it’s emotions that so often get us off track and into trouble. And of course we need to just say No sometimes. Kids can’t run into the street, throw their food at each other, or pee on their baby brother. But setting limits on children’s behavior doesn’t mean we need to set limits on what they feel.

In fact, you can’t actually keep your child from getting upset, whether you “allow” it or not. Sending your child to his room to calm down won’t keep him from being upset; it will just give him the message that he’s all alone with those big, scary emotions, and he’d better try to stuff them. Unfortunately, when humans repress emotion, those emotions are no longer under conscious control. So they pop out unregulated, when your child lashes out or acts out.

It’s that dysregulation that scares us, when our child seems completely out of control. But kids don’t get dysregulated because we “allow” their emotions. They get dysregulated when they need to express an emotion but can’t. So, instead, they “act (it) out.”

So denying emotion or making ourselves wrong for having emotions doesn’t help us control them. Here’s how a child actually learns to control his emotions:

1. We model healthy emotional self- management by resisting our own little “tantrums” such as yelling. Instead, we take a parent time-out to calm ourselves down. If our child is too young for us to leave the room, we do as much processing at other times as we can, so we can stay more calm while we’re with our kids. After all, children learn from us. When we yell, they learn to yell. When we speak respectfully, they learn to speak respectfully. Every time you model in front of your child how to stop yourself from acting when you’re angry, your child is learning emotional regulation . (Most of us are still working on this!)

2. We prioritize a deep nurturing connection. Babies learn to soothe their upsets by being soothed by their parents. But even older children need to feel connected to us or they can’t regulate themselves emotionally. When we notice our child getting dysregulated, the most important thing we can do is try to reconnect. When kids feel that we’re delighted with them, they WANT to cooperate — so that happy, fun connection eliminates most “misbehavior.”

3. We accept our child’s feelings, even when they’re inconvenient (as feelings often are). (“Oh, Sweetie, I know that’s disappointing….I’m so sorry things didn’t work out the way you wanted.) When empathy becomes our “go to” response, our child learns that emotions may not feel good, but they’re not dangerous, so she accepts and processes them as they come up, instead of stuffing them, where they get uglier. She knows someone understands, which makes her feel just a bit better, so she’s more likely to cooperate. She doesn’t have to yell to be heard. And when our support helps her learn that she can live through bad feelings and the sun comes out the next day, she begins to develop resilience .

4. We guide behavior but resist the urge to punish. Spankings, time outs, consequences, and shaming don’t give kids the help they need with their emotions. In fact, the message kids get is that the emotions that drove them to “misbehave” are bad. So kids try to repress those emotions, and their emotional backpack gets even more full. That’s one of the reasons that punishment actually leads to more misbehavior — those feelings keep bubbling up out of the emotional backpack looking for healing, and your child lashes out because the emotions feel so scary. Instead of punishing, help your child stay on track with positive guidance, help processing emotion, and scaffolding (which just means that we help them to learn the skills until they can do it themselves.)

5. We help our child feel safe enough to feel his emotions, even while we limit his actions (“You can be as mad as you want, but I won’t let you hit.”) Your angry child is not a bad person, but a hurting, very young human. When kids aren’t controlling their emotions, it’s because they can’t, at that moment. If you can stay compassionate, your child will feel safe enough to surface, feel and express the tears and fears that are driving his anger and acting out. If you can help him cry, those feelings will evaporate — and the anger and acting out will vanish, too.

Is it important to teach kids words for their emotions? Sure. But don’t insist that your child talk about feelings, which takes her out of heart and into her head and makes it harder to work through the feelings. Instead, focus on accepting your child’s emotions. That will teach her that:

• Emotions aren’t bad, they’re just part of the richness of being human.
• We don’t usually have a choice about what we feel, but we always have a choice about how we choose to act.
• When you’re comfortable with your feelings, you feel them deeply, and then they dissipate. That gives you more control.

Kids who are parented this way learn to “control” their emotions because they have a healthy emotional life, not because they’ve been told not to feel, punished, or shamed for their feelings.

If you’re still working on “controlling” your own “tantrums,” you’ll be glad to hear that your kids will almost certainly be better at managing their emotions than you are. Why? You’re doing the hard work now to help them learn how!

Once upon a time I’d have thought that a heartbeat that remains steady and unvarying is a sign of strength. But to my surprise, cardiac consistency is the hobgoblin of weaker minds and bodies. “The stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind,” the martial artist Bruce Lee said. So it is with the heart, which you want to bend to the ever-changing circumstances of the nervous system rather than pump on robotically, oblivious of the state of body and mind.

You want a heartbeat to be variable.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of irregularity in the intervals between beats. If you’re curious about how resilient you and your kid are, at least physiologically (which in the end can’t be separated from “cognitively”), you could do worse than to strap on a cheap, noninvasive heart monitor and download an app to measure your HRV. The subtle speed-up-slow-down between successive beats reveals more about resilience than does heart rate, which only counts the number of beats per minute. If the child has a heart rate of 120 beats per minutes she’s stressed or excited—that’s a no-brainer. With HRV, you also get a sense of how well she can respond to whatever’s going on and how well she’ll recover.

A high HRV measurement is generally a sign of resilience: the ability to adapt to and bounce back from stresses. In that context, it’s not much of a stretch to see how HRV is also linked with sociability, decision making , creativity , and problem solving.

The better the Buddha breath, the more Buddha-like the breather. We’re not all equals when it comes to deep abdominal exhales or any vagal-tone-boosting activity. A research group at the Max Planck Institute in Germany hypothesized that the people who do it easily and instinctively are friendlier and more generous than the norm. After all, virtuous traits require self-regulation , and anyone who automatically controls his or her breathing and heart rate variability under pressure has what it takes.

To test their idea, the researchers challenged a group of volunteers to a biofeedback task in which they had to reach a desired mind-body state to raise a ball on a screen. If a person exceeded an HRV threshold, the red spinning ball would rise. No one told the volunteers to use their Buddha breath, observation of the body, or any other technique to raise their HRV. Some did it naturally, as if they’d been controlling their hearts all their lives, and this group fascinated the researchers. Were these the people, they wondered, who’d put a coin in a beggar’s hat or stop the elevator door from closing to let in one more rider?

To find out, all the volunteers were given hypothetical scenarios in which they had money and could spend it, or not. Would they give it away charitably? Or would they maximize individual gain over group gain? How much did they favor an even distribution of wealth versus payouts only to people close to them? Were they purely generous, or did they only part with money when they expected something in return or when paying back those who helped them?

A pattern emerged, and with it a confirmation of the researchers’ hypothesis. The people who were good at raising their HRV on demand were indeed the same ones who gave away a fair amount of their money, and not merely out of social norms like reciprocity or punishment . Their generosity was motivated by altruism. You could say it came from the heart.

Other studies have found that you can predict compassion by looking at people’s heart rate variability. People who have an HRV upsurge when they see, for instance, suffering kittens or homeless people are more altruistic and willing to donate their money to a charity for the cause. People who maintain a higher-than-average HRV when hearing about sick children are more willing to share resources with them. In these cases, a high HRV is a sure sign of emotional responsiveness.

Think for a moment about why this might be. We know that high HRV is a triumph of the parasympathetic, the branch of the nervous system that increases a sense of calm. The vagus nerve is stimulated, which has the knock-on effect of a slower heart rate and respiration. This in turn redirects energy to other processes like social awareness and flexibility. (A faster heart rate, in contrast, activates the amygdala, which further primes the fear and anger response.) The vagus nerve also influences the release of oxytocin , the so-called calm-and-connect hormone .

Kids generally have much better vagal tone than adults, but there’s still a very wide spectrum.

Psychologists at the University of California, Davis wondered if preschoolers who have strong vagal tone would turn out to be more caring and empathetic years later than those with weaker tone. They launched a long-run experiment that began with a pool of three- and four-year-olds, each of whom was tested for vagal tone (using an HRV marker called respiratory sinus arrhythmia).

In the first stage of the experiment the kids witnessed an accident: an adult dropping everything in her arms as she fell and hurt herself. Which kids said, “Oh no!”? Which ones asked if she was OK? Which ones turned away, unmoved and expressionless, and went back to their toys? Behind-the-scenes experimenters rated each preschooler’s level of empathic concern. Can you guess which kids scored highest?

The children with strong vagal tone and high HRV, just as the researchers hypothesized. These kids noticed distress in others and empathized without being overwhelmed or threatened. They also perceived themselves as having more supportive friends. They had fewer adjustment problems, while those with poor vagal tone tended to be inhibited in new social situations and dislike novelty. Other studies show that the very act of giving and bonding strengthens vagal tone, which perpetuates a virtuous cycle.

What’s surprising to note is that the children in the study with the strongest empathic response had strong vagal tone, but not the strongest. There was a threshold over which kids with the highest HRV were less sympathetic than average. Why? At a certain point, people may be able to control their emotions so well that they’re capable of inhibiting feelings of personal distress or empathy for others.

Now, fast-forward five years, and the preschoolers in the UC Davis study are in third and fourth grades. The researchers could finally address their burning questions. Did the toddlers with the fairly strong vagal tone became more caring and sociable eight-year-olds compared to those with low vagal tone?  Is heart rate variability in early childhood predictive of later behavior?

The answer is… yes. Generally speaking, the preschoolers with strong vagal tone were more likely to become grade-schoolers whose moms and teachers gave them high marks for comforting others in pain or volunteering to help. On the whole they were more sensitive to others in class and likelier compliment their peers than were kids with low vagal tone. They were likelier to stick up for a kid who was being bullied. Other studies show that children with strong vagal tone are less defensive when confronted by a frenemy or a dilemma or an intrusive albeit well-intended parent or, later, a romantic partner—all because their sympathetic fight-or-flight reflexes aren’t trigger-ready. They can control their own distress or anxiety more easily, which allows them to turn their attention outward.

On study found that people with high HRV even look more generous and approachable, as if you could pick them out in a crowd. (The vagus regulates muscles in the face and head, which is why you can tell from voice or expression if a person is stressed.) Or maybe they’ll pick you. An Australian study found that people with a high resting HRV are likelier to affiliate and favor others in a group more strongly than those with a low HRV even if that group is just a clutch of strangers who share a preference for the same art.

HRV is a sign of not just physiological adaptability but social adaptability.

Excerpted from Wits Guts Grit: All-Natural Biohacks for Raising Smart, Resilient Kids

What would a Ken Burns documentary be without its measured, authoritative narration? In The West , The National Parks , Prohibition , The Dust Bowl , The Roosevelts , The Vietnam War , The Mayo Clinic , and now Country Music , actor Peter Coyote delivers hours of often dense, complex text — full of facts, figures, quotes, and grand unifying ideas — in a manner that Burns refers to as “God’s stenographer.” His calm, cowboy-around-a-campfire timbre is basically the voice of America, at least within the orbit of PBS.

Generations of kids first met Coyote as the embodiment of authority — he played Keys, the head scientist in E.T. the Extra Terrestrial — but the man himself has lived a Zelig-like life. Growing up as a secular Jew with communist relatives during the McCarthy era, Coyote was an early convert to political activism and the counterculture. “I saw grown-ups weeping in my living room,” he says. “Men and women who were broken by lies the government was telling.” As a young man, he was invited into Kennedy’s White House after staging a protest against nuclear testing during the Cuban missile crisis, threw himself headlong into a decade of drugs, Hell’s Angels, and commune living , narrowly escaped being drafted to Vietnam by pretending to be a cold-blooded marauder, helped run the California State Arts Council for eight years, and then decided to become an actor. These days, he’s also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest.

Coyote has lent his voice to a plethora of ads and documentaries over the decades, but his decades-long relationship with Burns is something special. Vulture spoke with both men about Coyote’s unequaled voice, their unique recording process, and how they handle political disagreements.

Peter, how did you get into the narration game? Peter Coyote : I was broke after ten years in the counterculture and I needed a way to make some money. I wasn’t an actor at that time, so I made a comedic CD of myself talking in about 15 different accents, telling people how unreliable and unhirable this guy Peter Coyote was. I walked it around to every ad agency in San Francisco and I started getting work for ads. I got my first Screen Actors Guild card in 1979, and by 1980 I was making five-digit money. After E.T. and Jagged Edge and Outrageous Fortune , I did a lot of ads — General Motors, Chevy, Cadillac, Tylenol, New York Life. Then I did a great movie for Alex Gibney, comparing American labor practices to Japanese labor practices. That may have been one of the first documentaries that really synced totally with my politics and my ideas. I don’t know in what year it was that I did The West [ Editor’s note: It was 1996 ], but that began my relationship with Ken.

Ken, is it project-specific when you choose to use Peter? Ken Burns : Yes it is. I would ask him for every project except those that are subject-wise African-American. There’s a process: We would prefer that Peter not see the script and he prefers not to see the script. And we do not run the film while we’re recording. We get about 95 percent of the way through editing, and then we say, “Time for Peter.” An episode might run an hour and 50 minutes. Peter reads it cold. And more often than you could possibly believe, that first take is often terrific. It’s usually two, three takes. I’m sure it now drives him insane. I always say, “Perfect. One more for the insurance company.”

Is it more than just an easy paycheck? Peter Coyote : Nobody does a documentary to get rich. They do it because they really care about it. There are a number of them I do for free, because I want to help the idea get currency. There are some of them I do because it’s like a master’s degree in a subject. And then Ken’s really stand above and apart like a Ph.D. in the subject. The challenge of taking the reader through complex sentences, with lots of clauses and subclauses, is something I have an idiot savant’s talent to be able to do. I have a very wide peripheral vision. I can see when a comma is coming, I can see when a period is coming and I have to dismount. I understand what I’m reading — fully. Very often, we’ll stop and have discussions about something in the text, or I’ll tell him some little historical piece of relevance that I’ve uncovered.

Ken Burns : He feels like Zelig. There’s rarely been a project that, when we’re taking a break or between sessions, he doesn’t regale us with stories of the people that our film is about, or experiences that he had in a national park, or stuff that he did during the Vietnam War. I mean, he’s the intersection of the second half of the 20th century and American culture and life.

When you work with Peter, are you just looking for his natural speaking voice, or do you ask him for a certain tone? Ken Burns : We want him to be “God’s stenographer,” as [late NBC Nightly News anchor] John Chancellor told me after I’d spent an hour or so breaking his very understandable broadcast [habits]. He was our narrator of Baseball back in the early ’90s. After a while he said, “Oh, you want me to God’s stenographer?” I cracked up and I said, “Yes, John, that’s exactly it.” It’s not soft-spoken. It’s not damped-down. It has all the meaning. All of the import, none of the ego.

How much of voice-over work is performance? Is it more than simply reading in a compelling way? Peter Coyote : No, I don’t think it is. As a matter of fact, the only area where Ken and I have any kind of instinctive difference is my people are Jews and we’re minor key people. Ken is not. He wants zero performance. But, of course, he also wants me to reflect the gravity of the text when it’s grave, or catch an ironic note when it’s there. I don’t feel like I’m doing a performance. I always do them cold. I never read the scripts in advance.

I can see the value in getting a gut reaction. Peter Coyote : It’s like Allen Ginsberg said, “First thought, best thought.” The first time I read the text, I have the most vivid images. Those images actually control my voice. I’m not manipulating. It’s not my ego or my small mind. It’s fealty to the images.

Your narration is gentle but authoritative, which is really interesting, since this is your first encounter with the script. Peter Coyote : It’s because I’m completely assured about what’s going on in my mental and emotional life. I’m not reading the text and consciously translating it and saying, “How can I reflect this in my tonality and my emotion?” As I’m reading, each sentence is just creating an image. I’m not trying for an effect. My voice is automatically responding to the images in my brain or in my body.

Do you ever get emotional? Peter Coyote : Sometimes. I grew up in a family with a lot of socialists and some communists and people who dedicated their lives to the common good, so when I was reading Roosevelt and watching the New Deal come into place, I was quite moved. But when I got to Vietnam , which was something I was intimately engaged with, it was very hard not to let rage or disgust creep out. When you read, “Five presidents knew the war was unwinnable and couldn’t find a way to get out and save face, and so they let 50,000 [U.S. soldiers] die and 3 million Asians die …” I mean, those are words I would like to spit. But if I do that, then I’m putting my foot in the small of your back and I’m taking your reaction away from you. My discipline is to harness my own feelings, so that you have free rein to yours.

You’re attempting to be as dispassionate as possible? Peter Coyote : I’m attempting to be as transparent as possible. I don’t want you to pay attention to the beautiful quality of my voice, or my articulation, or anything like that. I want to just be there to serve that film. Really, man, I’m a Jew with an animal name who reads good. These guys have been out there for years working, fact-checking, thinking. And there are many ways in which I’m far to the left of Ken. The Vietnam series began by saying: “The war was begun by good people for good motives and went bad.” My leftie friends went ballistic. “Good people? They’re fascist bastards! How can you do that?” And my rejoinder was: “There are about six or seven truly radical analyses of Vietnam in documentary film, and both people who saw them loved them. But Ken Burns got the entire country to sit around and learn that five presidents lied to them, that generals lied to them, we invaded a sovereign country, and we killed 3 million people.” If I had come in with “The fascist bastards started their war …” the majority would have changed the channel. I’d like [Ken] to hit harder sometimes. But he’s the master. And in fairness, he gets the Koch brothers to pay for it.

Ken, it’s not just the volume of words you give him, right? It’s the density and complexity and pronunciations. Ken Burns : We have phonetic guides for me, as a scratch narrator, and for him. More often than not, he knows in advance how to pronounce something. Sometimes we’ll decide how French you want to be in a pronunciation, how Spanish you want to be, how local you want to be. Are we going to say “hollos” or “hollers” in Country Music ? “Missoura” or “Missouri”? These are our big, huge questions. We’re often finding that one reading of his might be longer than mine. We’ll either open him up — that is to say, insert space between phrases and breaths — or we’ll cut the picture differently.

That reminds me of Steven Spielberg recutting the E.T. finale to fit John Williams’s music. Ken Burns : In the case of Williams, who’s such a gifted composer in his own right, the integrity of the original composition is so intense that you’re a fool, as a filmmaker, if you don’t surf that wave. Why would you have him adjust it when it’s the most beautiful wave? You’ve just got to get back on your surfboard. In Country Music , Merle Haggard said, “It’s like things that we believe in and can’t see, like dreams and songs and souls.” And later on, Wynton says, “Music is the only art form that’s invisible.” So why not take advantage of, in this case, the music of that narrator?

It seems like he’s the voice of America for you. Ken Burns : I’ve always looked for a voice — quite frankly, and there’s no ego involved in this — that’s close to my voice. Not in timbre, not in sound, but in meaning. And no one has come closer to my voice in meaning than Peter. No one.

Peter, you’re a pretty political person. What was the initial spark that made you that way? Peter Coyote : Growing up in the ’40s and the ’50s, my family were secular Jews. We couldn’t join the country club a block from our house. I never got over the fact that I’d be playing with my friends and they’d say, “Hey, let’s go swimming!” and I couldn’t go. No one ever said, “Wait, why don’t we do something that Pete can do?” So there’s a lesson in politics right there. Then, in the McCarthy period, my mother’s cousin was the first man fired from the New York City school system for being a communist. I saw grown-ups weeping in my living room, men and women who were broken by lies the government was telling. Then came the civil-rights movement, and here were these well-dressed, well-spoken African-Americans being set on by dogs and firehoses and white peckerwood mouth-breathers for trying to have a crappy sandwich at the Woolworth’s. When you looked at that, you had to take a side. If you didn’t take a side, you were taking a side. And then I was involved with a protest that went outside the White House, called the Grinnell 14 — first [protest] group in history that was ever invited in the White House. So I began to experience what a few people could do by making a commitment, by being well-mannered, well-spoken, knowing their song before they started singing. I’ve never wanted to disenfranchise myself since.

How has all of that shaped you as an actor, or as a storyteller? Peter Coyote : I think of myself as a writer who makes his living as an actor — or who made his living, because I’m sort of retired. By the time I started acting, I had a family and I had real economic pressures on me. I didn’t feel like I had the leeway to do what I would have liked to do, which would be to go to the London Academy of Dramatic Arts, which turns out the greatest English-speaking actors on Earth. My inability to get that training left me with certain insecurities. I was not always as bold as I should have been because of that, and I really didn’t seek out challenges because of that. I also had the idea, not to make an excuse, but I better make my offstage life my first priority. So I did, and I paid a tax on my career for that. I’m extremely grateful for having done 160 films and working with great directors like Polanski and Walter Hill and Steven Spielberg and Pedro Almodóvar. But it was never the source of my joy and fulfillment. That’s just the truth. One felt authentic, and one didn’t.

You’re also an ordained Buddhist priest. How does that affect the way you respond to the conditions of the world? Peter Coyote : It complicates it. The core truth of Buddhism is that everything is interdependent. There’s no “you” without sunlight, without oxygen, without water, without microbes in the soil that grow your food, without pollinating insects that help it, without birds to eat the pests. So the biggest thing that I learned — that served me first in politics with [California governor] Jerry Brown — was that I’m made of the same stuff as the people I abhor, or whose behavior I abhor. I’d like to think that I’m this pure, wonderful warrior with no negative human potentiality, but I’m made of the same stuff as Hitler and Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan. So when I speak to people, I have to do it without being judgmental. We’re the same animal. That, to me, is a very Buddhist way of looking at things: to strive for the fact that I have shadows, I have anger, I have jealousy, I have envy, I have greed. I have everything that my opponent does. My job as a priest, certainly, but as any Buddhist, is to monitor my internal life to make sure it doesn’t leak. When you do that, and when you fix your intention on compassion with the force of habit, then you can trust yourself to be spontaneous without worrying about what’s going to come out. I have a lot of trouble with people in my own political persuasions, because they like to pretend that they’re all good and all the evil is out there. They’re screaming at people for peace and they don’t see the contradiction.

This interview has been edited and condensed from separate conversations with Peter Coyote and Ken Burns.