How Can I Stay Grounded When My Child is Falling Apart After School? (Listener Question)

Debbie:

Hey there, I’m Debbie Reber. This is Full Tilt Parenting, a podcast for parents raising neurodivergent kids in a strength-based, neurodiversity-affirming way. And this is a parent lean-in edition. That means I answer a listener question, often with the help of one of my parent coaches from the Differently Wired Club community, which is what I’m doing today. So if you have a question for a future parent lean-in episode, you can go to tiltparenting.com\leanin. Today I have Margaret Webb joining me. Margaret is the author of the wonderful book, A Hero’s Journey in Parenting, Parenting the Child You Didn’t Expect When You Were Expecting. Margaret has been on the show just to talk about that book. So the link is in the show notes. Definitely check that out if you haven’t heard it yet or you’re not familiar with that book. Also, Margaret is the lead parent coach in my Differently Wired Club. She supports the parents in that community just so beautifully, and I’m so grateful that you’re a part of that. So thank you for being here today, Margaret.

Margaret:

I am grateful to be here today.

Debbie:

Awesome. Well, let’s get to today’s question. So the listener writes in, my six year old son has been having frequent episodes of pretty intense dysregulation since going back to school. Typically in the evening when he’s tired, overstimulated and overwhelmed from the day, he might jump on furniture, run around, make loud noises or do inappropriate things with his body. It feels impossible to reach him during these episodes, which can be disruptive and distressing to the rest of the family. What advice do you have for dealing with this type of behavior? And I have a feeling that, well, I know I have some advice, but I know you’ve got some really good advice. So again, this is a listener question is about a six year old who is highly dysregulated, usually in the evening when he’s tired and the parent is really struggling to figure out what to do because this behavior has been really disruptive and stressful for the whole family. So Margaret, I’m gonna ask you to kick us off today with this one.

Margaret:

So the first thing that I always like to think about when there’s something that is disruptive or is concerning as a parent is what is actually going on. Because quite often what we think is going, you we’re just looking at the surface behaviors and that can cause us to have certain emotions and feelings and thoughts about how our kids should be doing and what we should be doing as parents. But reframing it from the perspective of what is actually going on with my child during these quote unquote episodes can really help to reframe how we’re looking at our child and the situation. And so when I read this, the first thing is understanding where it’s coming up from. And it seems like there’s a lot of releasing of stored up energy and having, you know, energy and emotions from being in school. And it also sounds like this is a child who needs more intense and physical ways to release their energy. And that’s really good to know because then you can, you know, try to introduce different activities, different things to help them to release them. I do have a question of whether or not they’re working with an OT because if not, that might be something to look into because they might be able to provide ways to support releasing that energy. If not, what?

Debbie:

What kind of things, what kind of things might, and I’m just curious about kind of things, what an OT or might an OT recommend to help release that.

Margaret:

Yeah, so like a lot of heavy, kind of heavy physical work, you know, and I say work, but it’s like, you know, having to, know, our OT was amazing at, you know, creating fun ways to like carry really heavy things, like a medicine ball and taking it from one place to another, but it was like, this is a dinosaur egg and we need to get the dinosaur egg back into the nest and, and do that and then doing that like you know a number of times. It can be helpful if it’s not coming from parents, but if you’re not working with an OT you can still get creative with it. Some ideas that you know that I’ve seen and we’ve used are like either having a mini trampoline, some people have trampolines, we had an indoor bounce house for a while that we would blow up I mean, it was, it fit inside of a bedroom. And so it wasn’t this huge bounce house, but it was, it had walls. And so our son would go in there and just bounce around and flop. And it gave him that pressure that he needed. If your kiddo is a swimmer, finding ways to get them to swim, sometimes bath time, shower time can be helpful to regulate. Right, would do like a tight frog swing. And so we had a swing for a while where he would just like, like twist himself up and then like untwist himself. Like it was just this like, he would just get so, yes. The spinning, our son, like he would just, he would swing.

Debbie:

That was a favorite for us too. Yes. The spinning. Yes.

Margaret:

Army crawling through tunnels, know, like making, you know, having missions of like, yeah, I need you to like set the table, but like here, like you need to crawl through this. Not that setting the table is part of the activity, but like foam pad crashing, having a boxing bag to hit or kick or, you know, take like plastic bats. If you have other kids that they might use those bats against, you might want to think about who your kiddo is before you introduce that. But you could also have it and then take them away. providing these opportunities to release, if you have a partner who is okay with getting physical, like roughhousing and like doing that kind of like rough play can be helpful, but like knowing it’s not coming from a place where they’re trying to be disruptive, it’s almost like they’re not even almost like they are releasing their emotional and like just hold it together energy. And when you say like, how do I disrupt it or how do I, you know, like it feels impossible to reach him during these episodes. And I’ve said this on other, you know, in other sessions, but it’s almost like, you know, if you can imagine yourself PMSing and having very strong emotional hormonal energy flowing through your body and having your partner come and be like, you know, hey, just like snap out of it or like what’s going on, you know, it’s like, no, like I’m gonna you know, here, give me that bat and we’ll talk. And so knowing like, okay, once we’ve tipped over into that, it’s best like, we just need to ride it out. That’s not the time to problem solve. It’s the before, kind of recognizing patterns of when this is happening and how long it’s lasting and what can we do to kind of interrupt it before we get to that tipping point. So just a few thoughts.

Debbie:

Yeah. Great thoughts. mean, yes. And I wanted to throw out this question too, which I probably learned from Dr. Mona De La Hook, but it is one after reading her book, Brain Body Parenting and talking with her for the show. This question of what does his nervous system need right now? So when you’re seeing your child really dysregulated, it’s especially if you’re feeling like some of that is being directed at you, it’s impacting you, right? And it feels unsafe or super discombobulating or any other word like that. Remembering this isn’t your son, your child, like consciously choosing to do something. As you said, it’s like literally he needs to discharge this. But if you can look at him and be like, gosh, I wonder what his nervous system needs right now. It really takes away the emotional charge of what’s happening and you can get really curious and just realizing that is what’s going on. This is a kid who’s offline right now. And as you said, there’s nothing, there’s no way to connect when a child is offline. So the thing I would really encourage this parent to do is focus on co-regulation, right? So just thinking about and again, hard to do when you are in the midst of someone who’s offline like that and who is whose energy is big and feels like it’s really disrupting everyone and it’s hard not to get infected, right? Our energy is always communicating with everybody else’s energy and our mirror neurons that elevate us to match our child. But what we want to do is use our superpower of staying calm and grounded and kind of help our child’s nervous system comes down. I just want to encourage if you’re listening to this and you’re dealing with this or specifically the person who wrote in this question, it can feel like we’re not doing much to sit quietly while our kid is kind of losing it and having a really hard time. But if we’re really using that time to breathe and to slow down and to really genuinely get to a place of calm, it is going to be the most effective thing at helping your kid get regulated more quickly. I really think it is the most powerful tool that we can have in our toolbox. So, and that is always going to be the goal in that moment is to get our kid back to calm. That’s it. There’s again, as we said, Margaret mentioned before, there’s no learning. There’s no kind of communication. The best thing that we can do is get our child to be regulated again. And then, yeah, go ahead.

Margaret:

And when being calm, like a lot of times, and this is a younger child, but I’ve experienced this with, throughout the years of when you don’t engage and like meet their energy where it’s at, it’s very disarming for them. And they might not like it at first and they might try to, they might escalate and they might try to get you to be engaged, but to remember like, no, like this is like, I’m not gonna engage, I’m going to take this slowing way down and almost being in slow motion so that you can really think of like, okay, I really wanna engage, but is that gonna be the best for the situation? And no.

Debbie:

And I just want to say too, not engaging doesn’t mean necessarily ignoring, right? It doesn’t mean, you know, I was talking with my friend Simone about this a couple of weeks ago, how I was advised probably when my kiddo was the same age as the listener’s child that during those really big moments to ignore, to like have a magazine or a book with me, pull it out and just read it and just completely ignore. So I’m not like, I don’t know why I don’t know why maybe it was just to help me be calm, but I feel really badly that I did that that I that was my stride. I there like two times in particular that I remember. Yeah, I’m gonna do this. I’m just gonna completely pretend it’s not happening and that might have helped me from losing it, but it certainly did not support my child at all. And so I think we can be a calm, non anxious presence, we can be calm and grounded and still be present because we don’t want our kids who are having a hard time to feel not seen or abandoned. can say, you know, we don’t want to talk a lot, probably we don’t want to. But we can just say you’re having a hard time. right here. And just leave it at that.

Margaret:

That’s where my mantra of like, I will help you when your body is calm. Like when we were really going through it and even if I was on the other side of the door, because he was having some strong emotions, it was just, I’m here, I will help you when your body is calm. But I’m so glad that you mentioned that. It’s not like not getting like not getting tangled up is different from just not being present. It’s just separating like I love the Venn diagram kind of image and it’s just separating our circles a little bit so that we can see like wow this is what’s actually going on he’s really having a hard time or they’re really having a hard time and like it’s not going to help me to put my circle on top of them and try to squash whatever it is that they’re feeling. And you’re also giving them the message of you’re allowed to have these feelings. But like, if I’m not feeding into it, those feelings and those emotions will die down faster over time. It might escalate at first if you start changing the pattern, but in the long term, like they’re not getting something, you’re not in there fueling the fire, so to speak. You’re there witnessing it. Yep, you’re witnessing the fire, but you’re not putting more stuff in it to make it bigger.

Debbie:

Right. Yes, not feeling the fire. And I just you know, I’ll close by saying that this is not going to last forever. I know when you’re in it can feel like it’s, you know, there’s no end in sight. And it’s, you know, easy to slip into like, my gosh, this is always going to be this way. Because when you’re in it, can feel intolerable. It can feel so, so difficult. And we may be trying all the things and not seeing shifts or feel like nothing is working here. But I just want to just say this, this will change. This is not going to last forever. And just using these as opportunities to continue building that muscle of being present, of checking yourself, of co-regulating. Those things really, they matter and they do work. There’s no quick switch to make this behavior change, but being able to show up as a calm person in the midst of the really hard stuff is really the most powerful thing we can do. So I’m gonna say thank you, first of all, to the listener for submitting this question. If you are listening to this and you have a question for us that you would like to hear from us on, you can submit it in writing or leave an audio message by going to tiltparenting.com/leanin. And Margaret, as always, it’s been a pleasure and I wanna thank you for joining me for this today.

Margaret:

Thank you so much.