Next in the brain-based SCARF model is Certainty.

Our brains love certainty - we spend a good deal of our time predicting what will happen next based on our experience. Uncertainty gives us a sense of discomfort, anxiety or even fear. When the situation is uncertain, and it then resolves, we often feel relief or even happiness.

This is used to great effect in many movies. We are given a situation that has an acceptable level of certainty, followed by some significant uncertainty. Romcoms and other feel-good movies do this all the time. Then, as the script moves into the resolution phase, certainty returns and the audience feels good - the neurotransmitters of reward flood the brain. Interestingly, and as mentioned previously, animals respond to the certainty dimension too. YouTube has plenty of memes of animals experiencing the blanket drop, where certainty (my human is there) being replaced with high uncertainty (my human is gone). Monkeys and dogs responding to magic illustrate the same point.

Uncertainty can take many forms, from losing your wallet (where is it, who might be using it?) to not knowing how to plan a complex travel arrangement (well, maybe not at present) to the current COVID-19 world (when will this all finish?). Uncertainty also robs us of the ability to stick at a difficult task.

Kids tend to thrive on certainty, especially younger children. When children are uncertain about rules, and what they can get away with, they push until they find certainty. When you respond to behaviours with a variety of emotions or consequences, you have a high chance of triggering uncertainty. When you treat different siblings in different ways to the same issue, you trigger threats in certainty and fairness, increasing the threat response.

For families, first discussing ‘ways of working’, then agreeing on expectations lays down the bedrock for strong certainty. Then, parents behaving consistently with this agreement deepens the certainty for kids, allowing them to predict outcomes based on good or poor choices they make. Young kids respond really well to the clear-cut certainty of rules, but as you’ll see with the next post, this comes at the expense of autonomy. Once kids are well into the teenage years, principles, rather than concrete rules, may work better. Principles provide space for autonomy, a critical social need that teenagers develop.

As a parent leading kids in difficulty times, where certainty is scarce, you need to give as much of this social resource as you can. With the outside world now having almost no certainty, it is super important that parents provide as much certainty in the home as they can.