Tag Archives: Parenting

Preventing Parental Meltdowns

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calmThis is part 2 of this week’s series on Parental Anger

Every parent will have bad days – times when we’re overwhelmed and stressed, and find ourselves yelling at our kids. We want to do what we can to reduce these meltdowns. Regular readers of my blog may notice that some of these tips relate quite closely to my Tips for Taming Toddler Meltdowns, because we’re human beings just like our kids are, and we need some of the same basic stuff to be happy…

  • Eat, Sleep, and Be Well: Just as a toddler is more likely to melt down when hungry, tired, or sick, so are we. As much as possible, take care of your body.
  • Reduce Stress / Make Lifestyle Choices that Make it Easier to Be Happy: The more generalized stress we’re living with, the more likely we are to get upset easily and have a hard time calming ourselves down. Here are some ways to reduce stress
    • Make a list of people and situations you find stressful. Can you reduce your exposure to them? Can you make a plan for managing them? Can you ask someone to support you in dealing with those situations?
    • Take deep breaths, meditate, or visualize yourself in a peaceful place.
    • Move, dance, exercise, or go for a walk outdoors.
    • Make time for self care and for doing things that you enjoy.
  • Get support from others. Talking to others (especially other parents) can help!
  • Figure out your triggers: what are things that are likely to trigger your anger? What can you do to reduce your chance of encountering them? When one of your triggers is happening, it can even help to say to yourself “this is the kind of thing that really makes me mad… how can I manage my feelings in the next few minutes?”
  • Look for consistent patterns: If you’re yelling at the kids every morning before school, think about what you could change in the routine to help mornings go better. If you’re battling with your child over the same issue over and over, maybe it’s worth looking at it in detail when you’re calm, and deciding exactly what the rules are and what the consequences are for breaking them.
  • Heal your past: If you have unresolved issues in your emotional / family history, get support with processing them, so you don’t take that historical anger out on your kids.
  • Acknowledge present stresses: “Mommy is really overloaded with work right now and really worried about how she’ll get it all done. So, she may be acting angry more than usual. But it’s not your fault.” Or “I’m really in pain today, so I’m having a hard time being patient.”

Sometimes, despite your best efforts and intentions, you will melt down. You will get angry. Read on for tips on handling your anger in the moment.

photo credit: 湯河原町, 日本. Yugiwara Japan via photopin (license)

Parental Anger

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angryParents often ask: “Is it OK to be angry in front of my kids?” “Is it OK to be angry at my kids, or does that make me a bad parent?” “What if my partner and I get in a fight when the kids are in the room?” The reality is that there will be times you’re angry in your child’s presence, there will be times you’re angry at your child, and there will be times you fight with a family member when your child is around. Anger is a very basic human emotion, and we all feel it sometimes. (Click here for a post on your child’s anger and how to respond.)

When teaching your child emotional intelligence, I recommend that you say to them clearly that “Your emotions are always OK. Sometimes your behavior is not OK, so I will set limits on that when I need to. But I still love you even when you’re having big emotions and even when your behavior is bad.” We can set the same standards for ourselves as parents – all emotions are OK, but we want to handle them as maturely as we can in the moment, and repair things later when we don’t handle them well. Rather than trying to hold yourself up to an impossible standard of never getting angry, instead, accept that it will happen and make a plan for how you will manage the situation.

If our children see us get angry and then calm ourselves down, they learn many things: it’s normal to get angry, being angry doesn’t make you a bad person, being angry doesn’t have to mean losing control, and it is possible to calm yourself down from a big emotional meltdown.

This week, I’ll be doing a full series on parental anger. Tune in for

(If you’re a parent educator, who would like a one page printable handout on this topic, click here: Parental Anger.)

photo credit: Yelling Man via photopin (license)

Great New Resource for Kids Songs

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Let’s Play Music is a phenomenal resource!
http://www.letsplaykidsmusic.com/free-kids-songs-directory/

The site is developed by Sara Mullett, who has 15 years of experience teaching kid’s music classes. There are over 150 songs on the site, and for each, she includes lyrics, sheet music, videos of her playing the tune on a xylophone, circle time ideas including puppets, movement games, etc.

You can also follow her page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/personalisedlullaby, where she shares her own posts and also puts links to other helpful resources on the web.

For my other favorite resources for kids songs, look here, and for links to lyrics for, and videos of, my favorite kids songs, look here.

How Much is Enough? How Much is Too Much?

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Although there are plenty of families in America who struggle with the basic necessities of life like putting food on the table, many other parents have access to a huge array of options. Toys to buy, media to watch, vacations to go on, and activities to enroll in. The job of marketers is to convince us these things are ‘necessities’ and things “you can’t afford to pass up”. Sometimes they play to our fears of the future: “Playing with this toy will help your child get into college.” Sometimes they play on parental guilt: “Help your kid have a great Christmas – show them that they’re loved.” Sometimes they sell joy: “You work so hard – you deserve to have FUN!”

And here’s the thing. Lots of those toys and media are fun! Lots of fun! And going on vacations as a family can lead to fabulous connecting moments and can be part of a child’s memories of belonging in a loving, happy family. And lots of those classes and activities really will help build your child’s knowledge and skills, and help them reach their potential.

So how do we decide which options to take? What is enough? What is too much? Every family has to make their own decisions, based on their child’s needs and their own goals and values.

What do kids need, in order to learn?

Often parents choose toys and classes as enrichment tools to help their child learn and grow. When we go back to the basics of brain development, we know that children learn through: novelty and repetition, guided play and free play, and down time to process it all.

New toys and media offer novelty – lots of interesting stimuli to take in. But if kids are continually bombarded with new things, and not given the chance to play with the same thing over and over, they don’t gain the benefit of repetition, which is mastery. If a child only has access to a few toys, he may complain of boredom, but he gets really creative with those toys!

Classes, camps, activities, and sports teams are all guided play and guided learning. They help your child gain new knowledge and learn new skills. But kids also benefit from free play – just having free time with friends or siblings to goof off and play any game they can think up. And they need rest and quiet solitude to absorb everything and make their own connections.

Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, talks about 4 keys to raising “happier, calmer, more secure kids”: the environment, rhythm and schedule, and unplugging. Let’s look at each.

Environment: De-cluttering to make space for creativity.

If there are too many toys, a child doesn’t focus on any of them. They flit from one to the next, never really settling down to play. Their little brains are overstimulated by all the choices. If you keep giving them more toys to “get them engaged” they will get even more distracted.

It is better to focus on having a small number of really excellent toys. Here are some things to think about and look for when choosing what toys to have in your home.

  • Think about toys that build diverse skills: if I had only a few toys, I’d want one in each of these areas: big motor skills (balls, bikes, tumbling mats), small motor skills (puzzles, shape sorters, craft supplies), imaginary play (dress-up clothes, toy kitchen), music toys, art supplies, a set of magnetic letters, some dice for math skills, something to nurture (doll, stuffed animal), and toys for playing outdoors (bucket and shovel).
  • Choose open-ended toys that can be played with in lots of ways and passive toys where the child has to be creative to use them. Things such as blocks, cardboard boxes and tape, puppets, measuring cups and containers. Minimize toys that can only be played with in one way, and active toys where you press the button and it does all the work.
  • Elizabeth Pantley recommends these criteria for choosing toys: long-term play value, durable, washable, solid simplicity, challenge (will teach but won’t frustrate), appropriate for your child’s current developmental abilities, stimulates creativity, engaging, versatile, fits your family values, novelty (different than what you already have), and fun.
  • Spend less time in stores, less time looking at catalogs and shopping online. When you shop, it’s easy to fall in love with toys and end up bringing more home than you need.
  • Try setting up a “toy rotation” system. Make bins of toys, where each bin has about ten toys in it. Keep one bin out to play with and store all the others in the garage or a closet. Whenever the whim strikes (once a week?), swap out the old bin for a new bin.
  • Let your child get bored of their toys…

Think of boredom as a ‘gift.’ Boredom is often the precursor to creativity. Think of a bridge between ‘doing nothing’ and deep creative play. The bridge is almost always paved with (the frustration of) boredom. “I’m bored!” Now *that* is when something interesting usually happens.  – Kim John Payne

Rhythm: Increase predictability by introducing rhythmic moments for connection and calm.

Read my handout on rituals and my post on daily routines. And here are some thoughts on making birthday parties more manageable.

Scheduling: Give kids the gift of unstructured time

You might have the option to enroll your child in anything from art classes to aikido, from piano lessons to pottery, ballet to baseball, soccer to Spanish, gymnastics to geo-caching, wilderness survival to web design. There are so many cool and exciting things to learn! (And, you can’t help but think… it’ll help someday when they fill out college applications…)

Plus there’s the things you have to do – doctor’s appointments, picking up the siblings from their activities, grocery shopping. And more things you want to do – movies, playdates, dinner out, outings to the playground, sporting events, farmer’s markets, hikes in the woods, vacations to the beach…

All of these are cool. And all of them are learning experiences. Just choose your activities wisely. And make sure you remember to make space in the schedule for down-time, and quiet contemplation, and spontaneous, creative play. And for self-care for them and for you: sleep, calm meals around a table, snuggling up with a book.

Unstructured time gives children the opportunity to explore their inner and outer worlds…  they learn to engage with themselves and the world, to imagine and invent and create.  Unstructured time also challenges children to explore their own passions. If we keep them busy with lessons and structured activity, or they “fill” their time with screen entertainment, they never learn to respond to the stirrings of their own hearts, which might lead them to study the bugs on the sidewalk, build a fort in the back yard, make a monster from clay, write a short story or song, or organize the neighborhood kids into making a movie.  These calls from our heart are what lead us to the passions that make life meaningful, and they are available to us… when we are given free rein to explore and pursue where our interests lead us.” (Dr. Laura Markham)

Unplugging: Reduce the influence of adult concerns, media and consumerism on children to increase resilience, social and emotional intelligence.

When allowing your child to use screens (TV, computers, smartphones, tablets, etc.) make conscious choices about the content and about how much, when, and where to use them.

Spend more time outdoors, relaxing, playing, and discovering together.

Allow for quality family time:

Families can benefit by doing things whose only purpose is the joy of spending time together, like playing Monopoly, shooting hoops (with no coaching), drawing pictures, or taking a walk. Being unproductive together tells the child that the parent likes the kid, as he or she is.  (Source)

Learn more:

Stranger Danger vs. Social Skills

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handshakeParents of adolescents and college age kids tell me that their kids have a hard time with the basic social interactions of life: ordering food in a restaurant, asking for help finding something in a store, making a phone call to register for a class, interviewing for college or for a job. They try to avoid those encounters whenever they can, and ask for parents’ help when it’s unavoidable. (And likely miss out on opportunities because of the anxiety related to this.) The parents wonder how to teach their kids to talk to people.

Here’s the problem… those same parents often spent their children’s early years teaching them not to do this. They spent years saying “don’t talk to strangers” and are now saying “would you please talk to that stranger??”

When we talk about stranger danger, what are parents afraid of? The “stereotypical” kidnapping where a stranger grabs a child and disappears with them. Does that happen? Yes, there are around 100 – 200 cases of that per year in the United States and yes, that’s a tragedy when it happens. But there are over 70 million children living in the United States! The chance that a stranger will kidnap your child is very VERY small. The chance that your child will grow up into an adult who needs to regularly interact with other people, some of whom will be strangers to them – well, pretty much guaranteed.

The chance that the stranger you encounter is a creepy, dangerous person? Pretty darn small. The chance that they are a perfectly lovely person who could have a pleasant neighborly conversation with you and your child? Pretty darn high.

So, I would encourage us to switch around our approach to assuming that most people are safe to talk to, teaching social skills for basic encounters, and, as they get older, teaching them safety limits.

  • When we have a baby or toddler, we can model smiling, chatting, waving hello with store clerks, waitresses, bus drivers, and people we pass on the street. Our children follow our social cues here and will do the same. However, if we’re waiting for a bus or walking through a “dodgier” neighborhood, we might not engage with anyone around us. Again, our kids will follow our cues. We don’t have to act fearful of the strangers or tell our child to be scared of them – we can just have a few more social barriers up.
  • When we have a preschooler, we can start talking about social skills and when/who to engage. For example:
    • it’s OK to talk to strangers when mom or dad are right there with you, but if your parents aren’t there, don’t talk to the stranger. (There may be exceptions to that rule, like “it’s OK to talk to all the grown-ups at preschool” or “it’s OK to talk to all the grown-ups at church, even if I’m not there with you.”)
    • It’s OK to talk to people who are working in places we go (the librarian, the lifeguard at the pool, and so on.) But, we should keep our conversations with them short, as they have work to do, and may not have time to hear all the details of our day.
    • If your parents aren’t talking with the people around them, probably you shouldn’t either. Later on, you can ask your parents to explain.
    • If an adult makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have to speak to them. Mama or Daddy can help you handle the situation.
  • When we have children who are old enough to be out and about without us nearby, then is the time we introduce the idea that all people are not safe, and we teach guidelines to help keep them safe.
    • Again, it’s OK to speak to adults who are working in a place, especially if you need help with something.
    • It’s OK to nod and say hello to people as you pass, but if a stranger tries to engage you in a conversation, move away from them, and to where there are safe adults.
    • If a strange adult says they need help (with directions, with finding a lost puppy, etc.) then go to a trusted adult and let them know.
    • Never go anywhere with a strange adult unless a trusted adult has explicitly explained this to you in advance.
    • Be sure your children know their full names, their parents’ phone numbers, and where the trusted adults are near their home.
  • Also, as kids get older, ask them to use their social skills. If they’re trying to find something in a store or library, teach them to ask for help. If there’s something they need to make a phone call to do, help coach them through it, rather than doing it for them. If they will be doing an interview for college or a job, role play it with them ahead of time.

For more info on teaching about ‘stranger danger’, click here.