How to de-stress before taking on your child's challenging behaviors

     

In between the wonderful moments with your children, there are many times that your role can feel frustrating, stressful and exhausting.  When you’re feeling flooded and your amygdala is keeping your thoughtful upstairs brain from functioning as it should, it can seem impossible to respond to your child’s major meltdowns and defiance with anything but exasperation.  It is easy to get stuck feeling annoyance with our child --over the whining, the back talk, the stalling and ignoring your requests, the grabbing, the hitting, the defiance, the refusal to participate in an activity - or to go to sleep. 

     But underneath all that irritating behavior, your child is trying to tell you something. That difficult behavior is his best attempt at asking for your help.  However, it doesn't mean you just settle in and let him run the roost. Not at all. It just means you've got to figure out how to decode the message, and then pull together a plan to help him.
     On Tuesday, September 10th, two Nederland school counselors -- Kristen Kron and MaryErin Mueller -- will help parents dig out the "why" of children's behavior, and then help us make a plan to address the challenging behaviors and irritating attitudes.   It's time to ReThink Discipline now that we know so much more about how children's brains develop.  

     Last month, during the first Mountain Strong Families presentation, local counselors Carrie Evans and Eileen Purdy helped us begin to examine our stress from parenting and learn nurturing ways to balance our nervous system before responding to our child’s behavior.
First, Evans asked us to notice where chronic stress is housed in our bodies -- zeroing in on where our muscles were constricted.  Stress causes our muscles to tighten up and this can create serious health problems if we are not moving that tension out of our bodies on a regular basis. We were then encouraged to consciously “open up” the constricted area (chest, head, jaw, stomach, shoulders) by focusing our thoughts and breathing into that spot until we felt more relaxed.  
      Too often in our culture,  we are paralyzed by the stress in our life and choose to numb ourselves with a little wine, weed, or endless wifi instead of moving the cortisol and tension out of our bodies.  Substance use that numbs us doesn’t actually remove the tension and stress hormones from our bodies.

As parents, we need a go-to list of tools that will move our brains from a reactive state to a more responsive one.  We were asked to think of numerous, quick self-care ideas we could perform for one minute here, one minute there, instead of bottling up our tension and waiting for a “spa day” to release it all. “Try shaking it off, going for a walk in nature, doing a vigorous workout” so that your body isn’t holding onto your stress hormones indefinitely, said Evans.   
   Other simple stress-reducers included bringing more laughter and lightness into our serious, anxious lives.  “Have family members share a funny joke at dinner time,” said Purdy. This can be a fun tradition that helps shift the focus temporarily away from a child who can't sit still,  won’t eat their vegetables, or who is drumming on the table to annoy his sister.   

Carrie Evans and Eileen Purdy

     Evans also showed parents a simple technique for using all our senses to lower stress levels.  Parents made a list of the pleasant things we like to touch, smell, see, taste, and listen to.  By taking a moment to merely access these images in our brain (think chocolate chip cookies and ocean breezes), our amygdala is soothed and we can respond to our children's behavior from a more relaxed state.

Purdy then encouraged parents to change their thinking and language when it comes to the stress in our lives.  Our brain’s default mode is for negative thinking. For instance, we might catch ourselves thinking - “My daughter always makes us late!”  instead of reframing that thought into- “Currently, she is having challenges getting ready on time.” We were encouraged to reframe thoughts like, “My son never helps with chores” into “Right now, Skylar prefers to hang with his peers instead of assisting the family.”  Or when we catch ourselves thinking “I’m a horrible parent,” can we change the conversation in our head to "I didn’t handle that situation very well yesterday"?  

     Stress is a natural result of hard things, but the language we use to narrate our situation can either increase or decrease our stress levels.  When we think about our child’s challenging behaviors, it helps to reframe it as temporary and specific instead of permanent and universal in nature.  We have some control over the intensity of our body’s stress response if we intentionally shift our thinking about our children, ourselves, and the situation.  

When we choose healthy ways to lower our stress, it gives us the creative capacity to actually work on and fix the problem at hand. Join us for the next four Mountain Strong Families presentations. They are a great chance to begin creating a conscious plan for addressing challenging behavior with our kids.