Today we’ll take a look at some of the real anxiety producing experiences kids face. Sometimes it’s hard for adults to relate to why these would be scary…like getting a haircut, for example. When anyone faces the unknown, their brain doesn’t like it and will quickly attempt to fill in those blanks from their catalog of experiences.
Sometimes I wish I had an indicator I could see that would give me a warning when I need to pause and recharge. As a parent, caregiver, teacher or whatever your role is with kids it can be easy to get burned out. I’d like to show you a tool I use for myself and the families I work with to help monitor this and to figure out what needs to happen to get back on track and those batteries fully charged again.
Have you ever been called in to your boss’s office? What about the principals office, when you were a kid? Or how about someone you care about saying the dreaded words “we need to talk”?
How does that feel? How much are you able to listen?
This is how your kids feel when you try to parent or discipline using intensity.
These games aren't merely "distractions" but are useful for helping the brain to reset and feel safe enough to get it's lid back. These are co-regulating, just like when you soothe a baby by using yourself to calm their overwhelmed nervous system. One important note- don't try these without understanding when to use them. If you haven't seen the previous videos in the "Flipping Your Lid" series, make sure to watch those first.
Have you ever seen those ads that say things like “If you do this ONE thing, you’ll get rid of all your debt” or “you’ll lose all your belly fat” or whatever other not likely scenario someone is peddling? Well, let me give you another one that sounds unlikely but actually works…having fun with your family can change everything about it! Research shows that it can:
Increase the resilience and resistance to stress (helps disarm the power of stressors and temptations to turn to harmful things)
Create relational safety and security (which makes everyone want to connect and share about their thoughts, feelings and needs)
Transmits the values you’re trying to establish
Teaches healthy boundaries and how to make relationship repairs
Helps process and heal the results of stress and trauma
However, it comes at a high price. You will not find the time to do this. If you want the reward, you’ll have to give up something to create the time. But I can’t imagine you’ll regret it. At the end of my life, there will be many extra work hours, meetings, seminars and events that I will never remember. I’ll bet I would trade almost any of them for an extra hour to play with my kids…
Check out my latest video on this and see where you can begin this journey!
When you label what your kids are after, you put a concrete definition on the next steps (implicitly or explicitly). “you really want my attention”, “you want him to hurt just like you do”, “you got mad when I said it’s time to stop the game”.
Maybe it seems kind of dumb to say this, because you think it. And you think they are thinking it. But what if they aren’t? What if it’s just a tangled ball of intensity and not much definition? By giving it some definition, you’re helping your kids make connections between how they feel and what they do, and THAT’S how you start to see behaviors change! This is literally the start of taking ownership.
In families, we build systems to help us survive. It’s like a kind of shorthand. If I yelled the word “SOCKS!”, everyone in my family knows that means someone left their socks in a place they shouldn’t. What happens next is that the kids prone to “pleasing” will come and find out if it’s their socks and the kids prone to independence will hide in hope that if no one sees them, they don’t exist at that moment. (guess whose socks it usually is!)
