How to Handle Aggression

0:01 So in order to rectify the situation, in order to give our children a better chance of thinking under difficult situations, what we want to do is move in and connect. That the solution is not punishment. It's not a lecture. It's not reminding your child that we don't hit people. Um it's not, you know, talking until you're blue in the face. And it's certainly not punishment. All of those things are designed to to have an effect on a thinking mind. But at this moment, your child's mind is not thinking. So what does have an effect on your child's mind, which is in suspension at this point, is for you to move in. You bring the limit, you add eye contact, and you add a willingness to listen. And when you can do this successfully, all kinds of feelings will pour out. the hurt that lay underneath that hitting behavior will pop up and it will pour out in crying, in tantrums or in fighting and struggling um to get away from your look, to get away from you. Um basically what happens is that children pin the fears that they carry that drive the hitting behavior on the person who has arrived to help. So when you move in with a limit and you move in with uh I can't let you do that and a good amount of quiet so the child can notice what's going on inside of him or her. What they do is they reach down and they notice that they feel so scared and antsy and they want to get away and they don't want they don't want to look at you and uh they pin all of their feelings on you.

1:45 You're the standin for whatever it was that scared them. You're the thing to be feared. You're the thing to be hated. You're the thing to fight, you know, and they use you kind of as a foil so that they can have a battle that they didn't get to have when they were young and vulnerable when they needed to fight for themselves, but they had no strength and and no idea how to do that or what to do to stand up for themselves.

2:10 So, your power lies in your ability to get there, keep things safe, add eye contact, and your ability to listen. And as you listen, the troubles that cause that behavior will bubble up to the surface, and you'll have lots to listen to. So, really quick anecdote. Um, when I was first, I think in my second or third class that we taught at Handinhand way back 23 years ago, there was a mom in the class whose child was four years old. He'd been kicked out of three preschools and he was about to be kicked out of his fourth because he was unrelentingly aggressive. He was a very difficult child.

2:56 And you know, the very first thing we did was to listen to the mom. sort of not trying to give her any advice at all, but just, you know, tell us what has happened. You know, tell us about you as a mom. And her story was that she had, you know, was a single mom. She'd had this baby. It hadn't been a baby that she had um planned for. She was a nurse. She had no um no other means of supporting herself. So, she decided um sadly to go back to work when her baby was two weeks old because she didn't have pay coming in and she had to support the two of them somehow.

3:34 She didn't have the capacity to reach out for help. So, she worked a night shift. She left her infant, her two week old infant alone all night long while she worked. Came back, you know, nursed him, did the best she could, but had to sleep during the day. So his whole first you know four, five, six months of life were as a neglected child. Now this is the kind of thing where when you find it's happening you would report this but it had happened four years ago and she was in a little bit better shape now.

4:06 She wasn't leaving him alone. Um but he had been really damaged by this neglect and and couldn't stand to be with other children without hurting them. So, we gave her listening time so she could work on her feelings of guilt and sadness and oh my gosh, what do I do? She was still an overwhelmed mother. And after about 3 weeks and we talked about bringing the limit and stay listening, which I'm going to go into further in the next few um segments here, but we indicated that you bring the limit and then you stay with your child however upset your child gets. and she had no idea how to do this. But one day she gathered up her courage and he was throwing things around on the deck outside just throwing stuff and he was angry. I don't know, he didn't want to have lunch or some small pretext to bring up really big feelings. And what she did was she just moved in. She put her arm around his waist and she pulled him over onto her lap and he kicked and screamed and fought just he was all over the place. Huge amount of reaction. and she just decided, you know, I don't know what to do with him, but we're in trouble and I'm gonna stay with him. And then she realized that she had the, you know, reaching for your angry child booklet right there next to her. So, she picked it up and she said that she was hanging on to him and he's like flailing and kicking and um just beside himself with upset, screaming, "Let me go. Let me go. Don't hold on to me. You're hurting me. You know, mommy, I hate you." And just all kinds of things are coming out of his mouth. and she's sort of flipping through the booklet over here to figure out what in the heck to say. So, this wasn't sort of an elegant stay listening in any way, shape, or form. But she, you know, said, "Oh, I'm going to stay with you. I can't let you trash the trash the deck. Cry, cry, cry, cry, cry." And she looks some more and she says, "You know, this won't take forever. It's not going to last forever." Cry, cry, cry, cry, cry. And she looks, what else to say? You know, I really want to be here with you while it's hard. cry, cry, cry, fight, fight, fight. She hung in there for about 40 minutes until he was able to sit on her lap and not be fighting. And at that point, she turned him around and they looked at each other and he had softened immensely. And he was just looking at her and looking around kind of very contemplative like h looks like a different world now.

6:36 And then he said the most remarkable thing. He said, "Mommy, I don't know why I hit the children at school. I don't want to hit them. I want to be their friend. I don't know why I do that, but I don't want to." And she said she just was her heart just kind of almost came out of her chest with him saying that he was out of out of control, that he didn't want to be that way. And um she was just really moved by his analysis of the situation.

7:12 And then um the next day she very um with great trepidation took him to a birthday party. He had never been to a child's birthday party where it hadn't turned into a disaster. You know, he would grab a toy or grab a present, you know, or or not like the cake and ice cream and throw the plate, you know, down on the floor. It's just like he would always get into trouble at people's birthday parties. She said he went to that birthday party. He had a good time. He played. He laughed. Not one hint of trouble the next day. And so this is sort of a just a little example of what you know, one mother's allout effort to do stay listening resulted in.

7:54 Now that boy needed a lot more listening before he really had the world figured out in a better way. It's like that neglect really went deep and caused a lot of distortion of of the safety of reality for him. Um, but the signs were that that first day listening session was really really effective. So that's just a little story to encourage