What should I do when my child won't calm down | Connected Families Podcast Episode #1

0:04 Welcome to the Connected Families podcast. Your listening guide to parenting with peace and connection. I'm Stacy Bellward here with co founder of Connected Families, Jim Jackson. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Connected Families podcast. We're so happy you found us. Hey, Jim. Welcome to the microphone.

0:23 Well, thank you, Stacey. It's good to be here with you. We get to co host this 10 part series, don't we?

0:27 We do. This is going to be a blast. Well, I know that you're at a lot of microph.

0:32 A lot of our microphones are our telephone. We do podcasts for other people. But we just thought it was time to give a whirl at our own because of the demand that we were getting from our audience. So.

0:41 That's right. Connected Families does a lot.

0:43 Connected Families is quite a team of people who do a lot of cool things in terms of offering our blog posts and getting content out into the world through the Facebook and the Instagrams and all of the different things. But we're going to hone in on this podcast and go after those questions. Parents to want answered.

0:59 That's right. And this is going to be fun. We are starting with a series called what should I do when what should

1:07 I do when my child won't tie his shoe the way I taught him.

1:09 That's right. What should I do when my child won't bring the dish from the table

1:12 to the sink, Won't eat the food that they were served? Oh, what should I do when they don't go to bed on time when

1:19 they won't stay in bed for the fourth time? Right. So we're gonna launch into a 10 part series, a 10 episode series on what should I do when covering all sorts of different topics. And we're going to bring in our

1:31 own staff, Chad and Lynn particularly, who are going to join us a lot. They're with parents most days, dealing with the issues parents face as coaches and working hard to sort of customize the things we generally talk about at Connected Families in specific ways for families. And the families tell us it's really helpful. So why not bring them onto the podcast to go after this? What should I do when questions.

1:52 That's right. They have a lot of really practical tips and that's what we want to bring to this podcast. We want those folks listening. Maybe they're in their car. We want to give them a tip right now that they can use with their children and then maybe dive into it a little bit.

2:07 I'm getting really excited. What's the question today?

2:10 The question for Today is what should I do when my child won't calm down? And we're bringing in.

2:17 Wait, kids calm down. I see it happen all over the place. They sleep.

2:22 They sleep. That's right. That's right.

2:24 That's about it.

2:25 Well, today the guest that we want to bring in is someone special to you.

2:29 Very special to me, Lynn.

2:31 Hi, Lynn. Welcome.

2:32 Thanks.

2:33 The wife.

2:33 Good to be here.

2:35 Yeah, it's good to be here with you. Sharing a microphone again.

2:39 No, I have my own.

2:40 Well, that's true.

2:41 You have your own microphone. Will, today we're talking about what should I do when my child won't calm down. This is something that parents deal with a lot, isn't it, Lynn?

2:50 Oh, my gosh, yes. Many, many coaching clients are. They come to me because this is their issue. Their child is having meltdowns, outbursts, really not under control at all.

3:02 Yeah. And they don't know what to do.

3:04 Yeah.

3:05 Right.

3:05 So, Lynn, if you run into that parent in an elevator and they recognize you because of the blog or a workshop that you've been at, that they've been at, and they say, you know, I got to run here soon, but my child just won't calm down. Do you have a quick answer that you can give? What kind of things do you say when parents do that? Because I know that happens.

3:23 Right, right. And the quick answer is have a long term view. Really? That's the essence of it. Stay calm with a heart to truly help your child. And that seems like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on to the really practical stuff. But that's the place where parents get stuck.

3:39 Well, but it is, I think it is practical to say stay calm and, and remember your long term view.

3:46 Yep.

3:47 Right.

3:47 Cause you can't remember the long term view, can you, if you yourself aren't calm.

3:51 Right. If your child is in fight or flight, they are in the moment survival mode. And if you go in there with them, you're gonna have opposite goals. You're gonna escalate the conflict. It's gonna go nowhere fast. So stay calm with a heart to truly help your child, not control them. And then empower them with feelings, words, and sensory strategies sort of in the short run, but also in the long haul as well. And really empowering kids to just be able to have the skills they need not to keep melting down.

4:22 Okay, so, so hold on a second. Because if I'm a parent and I'm hearing that, that doesn't sound like a quick answer to me. I need the quick. I need the quick. The, the Thing that you can tell me in 10 seconds that I'm going to remember, take with me and try today.

4:36 Mm. So calm down. Take whatever you do, whatever you need to do to get to a calm place. Take your breaths. One mom did that by. She was prepared for a meltdown with her kids because it happened every day during homeschool. So she put on her jogging outfit that day instead of her normal clothes. And when the. When the craziness happened, she started. And this was this like beefy, muscly mom who said, breathing doesn't do it for me.

5:03 Oh, okay. So she knew what did it for her, and she started leaping to touch the ceiling 10 times. And her kids, you know, who had just been in the middle of this brewha, were looking at her and going, what is mom doing? Says, I'm working to calm down. She gets to the end of 10, she says, I need to do some more. She does 10 more. Then she looks at him and goes, okay, let's solve this problem now.

5:24 So she was modeling it for herself in front of the kids on purpose.

5:28 Right. So they were starting to freak out, and she did what she needed to do to calm down so that she could keep her frontal lobe online. And another coaching mom who just said, I. When I just shifted my goal not to control my child, but to control myself and to stay calm, things really began to change.

5:48 Yeah. You know, the thing that I loved about that workout story was is that she prepared in advance for her self calming.

5:54 Yeah.

5:54 So it's almost like you remember the Heath brothers scripting the critical move.

5:58 Yeah.

5:58 She scripted a critical move, which was to put on the right clothes for her to calm down before the blood blowout ever happened.

6:05 Right.

6:05 So she prepared for it to happen in a proactive way. It engaged her brain in reacting differently to calm down than it usually would, and it set her on a new course.

6:14 Right. Same with a mom who kept a trial hand lotion bottle in her pocket to rub it into her hands before she engaged.

6:20 So there's no one right way. You need to know you. How do you. What is your way of calming and how can you sort of think through doing it as a practice, like as a rehearsal? Not when the heat is on, but practice it when the heat is off in your mind and then be ready to do it when the heat is on.

6:38 Right. That's good. You know, there's one thing that you said at the very beginning was that you said when your child is in fight or flight, and that just, you know, raises this whole thing so you said the quick answer is that the mom needs to have a long term vision, but speak about that fight or flight moment when the child won't calm down. What does she need to know there?

7:01 When a child is in fight or flight, they act really controlling of others. Mommy, you need to give me the red cup, not the blue cup or whatever it is. And when a child is being that controlling, it's because they feel internally out of control. So if we come in with this big intimidating, you need to calm down, then we're a threat to them and we'll drive them further into fight or flight. That's why, you know, the quick answer is there's no quick answer.

7:33 And that parents, when they have the goal to come in as a calming, helping presence, that is actually the quick answer. Because when a child is in fight or flight, it means their frontal lobe gets shut down and ceases to essentially be available to them because their whole goal is about survival in the moment. So the blood goes to the big muscles. That's where the kicking and screaming and even aggression comes from. And any sort of defensive or aggressive response gets activated.

8:02 So if we come in with that same emotional energy or brain with our

8:07 own fight or flight, with our own fighter flight, right?

8:10 That's when it gets really crazy.

8:11 So hold on, because I can hear a mom in her car, right? And she's actually hearing her like toddlers in the back screaming because they're so angry about the Cheerios. Right? So, so I'm trying to like connect this fight or flight, it's survival, with I need my Cheerios right now or I want the red cup, not the blue cup. So is that really fight or flight, like, you know, like survival?

8:36 Kids can't verbalize. I'm really in distress right now. The noise of the traffic and my sibling next to me and the lurching of the car is driving me absolutely insane. I'm up high anxiety state and I need that to stop. They can't figure that out. They have no idea that's going on. So what they do then is I just need more Cheerios or I need the red cup. They lock in on one thing that helps them to feel like they might have a semblance of control.

9:06 So I was talking to a mom and this, I wanted to share this story in this podcast because it was so great. I was talking to her just earlier this week about her son's meltdowns. And up until two years old, between one and like two and a half, he would have 10 to 15 meltdowns per day. He was highly sensory sensitive, highly anxious. And then. And when he transitioned to a three year old, it was reduced to like about three of them, but they were an hour long, screaming meltdowns for three hours a day.

9:40 She really engaged with him with a heart to help. And that was, was really amazing. I said, so on a 0 to 10, 0 is I just want these meltdowns to stop. And 10 is I just want to figure out how to help my child. Where were you? And she went, oh, we just wanted to help him. And you can hear that in her voice. So as she entered in a continuous, you know, just a regularly calming way of I just want to help my child.

10:05 Over time, there was some amazing results with that.

10:07 Yeah. Wow, that's good. So it's her heart, it's where she's at to stay calm and really be looking out for the benefit of the child. And what does the child need?

10:18 Yeah. A helpful phrase that Ann Lane, a PhD that works with children with anxiety, has said is it helps to look at each outburst as this is an opportunity for a neurological intervention. An opportunity to build.

10:33 Oh, unpack that for us. Yeah.

10:35 Well, it's about building the calming ladder between your child's fight or flight center, which gets triggered their amygdala and the frontal lobe. So when we can keep our frontal lobe engaged and you know, and connect with our child and empathize and empower them with some calming strategies, then it's like it just starts to make a pathway where there hasn't been one. It's like they're borrowing our frontal lobe and it begins to make a little pathway and it's irregular and it's unpredictable and there'll be days that it seems like, oh my gosh, we haven't gotten anywhere.

11:07 But that's the process. And so it actually reshapes the child's brain when we can go in with a calming approach and tools for them to solve their problem.

11:19 And that's an easier thing for me to remember. I can reshape my child's brain here. What was that other thing you said?

11:25 Neurological intervention. That sounds really powerful though, doesn't it? I'm doing neurosurgery on my child's brain.

11:32 Too many four syllable words for me. I need them to be three syllables or shorter to remember that. So reshape my child's brain. This is an opportunity to reshape my child's brain. And it's an opportunity to reshape mine too, isn't it?

11:44 Absolutely.

11:45 What I Think I hear you saying is that's the starting place. Like how do we reshape our brains as parents so that when our kids do fight or flight, we don't.

11:55 That's good.

11:56 We put on gym clothes, we use hand lotion, we take breaths. What are some other things parents do to start reshaping their own brain to calm down so that they can come to their struggling child who won't calm down more calmly?

12:10 Well, the next principle is called name it to tame it. And that was coined by Dan Siegel, who's another amazing child psychologist, brain expert guy, and he talks about the power of empathy where empathy engages the left language, logic side of the brain and it names the feeling that's happening and that automatically sends signals back down to the, to the fight or flight centers to just tell them to relax. Don't worry, we've figured it out now we know.

12:40 I'm just really overwhelmed right now or whatever it is.

12:43 I want to take some more time to talk about this and empathy idea. But before we do, I want to let listeners know that Lynn and I have written a couple of books and the book Discipline that Connects is a book that the whole first fourth of the book really is about helping parents learn to calm down, isn't it? And what are some strategies and what are some stories and what are some ways? And empathy is in the book as well.

13:06 But we would invite you to look at our website to look at the show notes and check out this book. Stacey, you've read the book.

13:12 I have. It's excellent. Lots of tools, lots of ways that you can apply, get information that you need right now.

13:21 In a word, what did you love about this book in light of all the different resources there are for you out there?

13:27 One word, Jim.

13:29 One word.

13:29 Okay, one word is practical. But what I really love about it is that it's biblical. So it's the combination of the two that's really good. But you know, all of you who are listening, go to our website, connectedfamilies.org we have lots of resources. The book is there free shipping and lots of free resources for you too. So we hope you'll stop in there and take a look.

13:51 So let's dig in a little more here in the last few minutes to empathy, because empathy, honestly, and maybe dads struggle with this more than moms do, I don't know. But I'm not naturally an empath. Like I remember the Star Trek lady, what was her name? Who was the empath? And, and she was always, she always knew how Everybody felt, and then she dealt accordingly. And your mother, Lynn, is like that. Like, she just always had a sense for how people felt.

14:14 And there was such a comfort in that. As a dad, I really struggle with empathy because this kid should just get it through his head that this is how it's supposed to be. And I don't get needing to understand their feelings in order to help them, but it turns out, right, that understanding their feelings in order to help them really does help them well.

14:31 Right. So, you know, let's even go back to the example in the car. The child is raging about Cheerios when really the issue is he's overwhelmed. So when he feels overwhelmed, when mom can just say, you feel really overwhelmed right now, don't you? It's noisy. And that was a really quick rush out of the house, and that was really stressful, then the child feels understood and gets the message, parent, you are for me, not against me.

14:59 That's really calming of itself. So if we step into the shoes of being a child, feeling like a child when our kids are raging and a spouse comes home and says, you just really need to get a grip. You're the adult here. Just deal with this. How does that affect our anger? But when a spouse comes home and says, oh my gosh, you look like you've had such a tough day. It is so stressful with toddlers, teens, or whatever we have, you know, what can I do to help?

15:32 Think about what that does to our energy level. Just. And then our frontal lobe can go back online and think about it. So if we think about what we need when we're ready to lose it, our kids need the same thing.

15:44 Yeah, no, that's really good. And again, I'm thinking about myself. And even, you know, yesterday my 30 something son wanted to confront me about something. And I felt myself, I felt myself rising up. And even though he said, I want to do this in a way that is not too overpowering, but I have some things that might be hard for you to hear. But even as he's saying that, I'm like, you're preparing. Like he's gonna say something and what's my defense gonna be?

16:13 And if only he knew and if only he understood.

16:16 But fight or flight right there, huh?

16:18 I was doing my own fight or flight because I was feeling a little attacked, a little vulnerable. And then. And then, you know, to just kind of calm down and remember, you know, he's my son and he's got some things. And I literally took a breath while we were walking and said, you have some really important things to say and I want to do my best to hear them. And it's like that seems so normal to say to a 30 something year old.

16:44 But why can't we, at least in our spirits, if not with our words, do the same thing with our struggling little ones?

16:51 Yep, yep.

16:52 And that's what I hear you saying. Like, I want to understand you and your point of view and your frustration and your pain and your things right now. Because my assumptions about what you're struggling with might be totally wrong.

17:03 Right. And this mom that I talked to Jennifer about this, she said that so often the things her, her son's meltdowns would get triggered by things that just don't even, didn't even make sense. When something didn't go his way, a meltdown would get triggered. And then parents just kind of, it's so natural to think, oh, he just uses that to get what he wants. Well, that's kind of it. But what's really happening is they feel so internally out of control and stressed that they're locking onto this one thing to give them a sense of control.

17:35 Say that again. That's a really important idea.

17:37 When kids throw meltdowns, they're feeling so internally out of control that they lock onto one thing to give them a sense of order in their out of control, chaotic brain.

17:49 And if we can understand that and stay calm ourselves instead of judging it as out of control, you're a problem. This is going to happen again. I can't believe what's going. I can't let this happen anymore. I'm not going to allow this in my home anymore.

18:02 This is embarrassing. I'm in public.

18:05 All the things. If I could let go of all of that and go, what's it like to be my child? Take a breath, honey. How can I help you right now? This is really a struggle. Now. I know and you know that there's parents who will do that and their kids will still struggle. Like, this isn't a magic formula to get your kids to all of a sudden not struggle anymore. If anything, it's a magic formula to help you as a parent learn to be okay even when your kids are not.

18:31 Right.

18:32 Right. And I'm not at all implying that then you just give them what they demand because that's when there can be just this association. That's the payoff of, oh, as soon as I have a meltdown, then I get the Cheerios. But if I get empathy and then I get problem solving about what the real issues were Underneath the surface, then that's how you can empower kids for change. If we quickly. Oh, you wanted the Cheerios? Okay, sure, I'll give you the Cheerios.

19:00 If we quickly do that, then we've fertilized that behavior. But if we help them with empathy and empowerment, equipping them to pay attention to their bodies and what's going on in them, and that's kind of almost a whole other topic.

19:15 Okay, Lynn. So as a parent, I'm hearing that my first sort of reaction needs to be to calm myself down, to make sure that I'm not going into fight or flight, that I'm keeping my frontal lobe and the wisdom that's there so that I can be calm for my child. And then I just heard you say, this doesn't mean that I immediately give my child what they want or the reason that they're having the meltdown. So connect those for me.

19:42 Then. What is the end goal? How do I deal with that final step of dealing with that meltdown?

19:48 Right. And it's interesting because you use the word the reason they have the meltdown. So if the reason they're. If we think of that in terms of the thing they're demanding, that's not really the reason they're having the meltdown. The reason they're having the meltdown is they're really stressed. The thing they're demanding is the superficial trigger. So we don't necessarily and usually don't give them that because then that fertilizes it. But we can problem solve. We can say, wow, you really want those Cheerios.

20:19 You're so overwhelmed right now. You're really having a hard time. I get that. And we can do that with some energy. We don't have to be like, in this zone of I'm really calm, so I don't ever raise my voice. It's a calm inside, and it can be a really strong outside. You're so mad right now. Riding in the car is so hard. It's frustrating for all of us. And then to just stay in that place.

20:44 And as they calm down, it's like, wow, you're doing such a good job calming down. Let's solve this Cheerio thing for the next time. That's the strategy that over time can then empower them to take responsibility for what they need will solve the. The stress and the chaos in your body in different ways of just introducing calming activities, calming ideas, so that you're moving towards solving the problem underneath the surface and then giving the child a voice.

21:13 Yeah, that's Good. That's good. So my mind is going straight to the mom in the kitchen, right. Once they calm, is it okay to give them the blue cup or the Cheerios or the this or the that? Would you say?

21:27 Yeah, well, how we usually did it with our kids. You really want that? If I give it to you now and we talked about this ahead of time. If I give you what you want when you're demanding or saying something in a rude and a disrespectful way, then I'm teaching you bad skills. So I'm going to give you a chance to practice waiting and then you can try asking again. And I bet it'll go much better.

21:50 So a little time. Put a little time in there and it's almost like they get to try again.

21:55 Kind of as a closing thought and maybe stepping out of my role as host a little bit and into the role of a co parent with Lynn, what we learned was, is that when we could calm our approach to this and offer options like that to our kids and invite some do overs, it also made us more open to what God was doing here instead of just our agenda. I think the Holy Spirit activates in our frontal lobe, not in our fight or flight mechanisms.

22:25 And that whole reshaping of the brain involved as well. The invitation to the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom for this. Because there is no quick answer, there is no easy answer, there is no fast fix to helping kids calm down except learning that I can be okay even when my kids are not and that God is present in. In the midst of it and available if. If I can draw on that wisdom.

22:50 Yeah, that's good.

22:52 I want to throw out one just practical script here that parents can just remember for their kids. I am sorry that you are so upset. When you're ready, I can give you a hug and we can talk about it. I'm sorry you're so upset. When you're ready, I can give you a hug and we can talk about it. So for somebody that needs a practical

23:12 nugget, I love that it makes me feel calm right now. Yeah, makes me feel calm. Well, Lynn, thank you so much for joining Jim and I here at the microphone.

23:21 We'll do it again.

23:22 We'll do it again.

23:23 Yeah.

23:25 Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Connected Families podcast. We hope you got tips that you can use in your parenting today. Please subscribe and leave us a positive review so other families can find us and learn how to parent with peace and connection.