De-escalation in the Heat of the Moment - Weekend Wisdom

Question: How do I respond in the moment when my child is melting down, including physical or verbal aggression? 

Resources:

• Practical Tips to Help Your Kids Manage Stress
• The Ideal Response: How to Maintain Connection When Correcting Your Child
• How to Maintain Connection When Your Child Struggles with Anger

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Hello and welcome to Weekend Wisdom. I'm Tracy Whitney. I'm the content manager for
Creating a Family .org. I've been with this organization for nine years now, writing
articles and creating content for our online education and our interactive support
group curriculum. I've also led a variety of online support groups,
including one that I'm leading now for supporting relative caregivers. I moderate the
online Facebook community, and I'd love it if you would join us there at facebook
.com /groups /creatingafamily. I'm also the mom to six great kids ages 30 down to 13,
and our adoption journey is what led me to creating a family. I was an avid user
of their resources long before I started working with the organization. So I'm
excited to join the Weekend Wisdom team and have the opportunity to answer your
questions. After all, that's what weekend wisdom is all about. You send us your
questions about adoption, foster care or kinship care and we dig through our
resources to find an answer that will strengthen your family. Today we're tackling a
combination of several questions that we hear frequently in our community and we've
combined them all into one question. The question is how do I respond in the moment
when my child is melting down, including instances of physical or verbal aggression.
And we can all resonate with this one. We've all been there with a young child
pitching a fit, as my grandmother used to call it in the grocery store, or with
your teenager, raging, slamming doors, rolling eyes, kicking walls, all the things
that make for very stressful moments for both the parents, caregivers,
and for the children. It's a stressful moment for everyone, and we're all on high
alert in those times. So how do we intervene in those moments of raw, heated anger
or pain or frustration? The first thing is to prioritize everyone's safety.
You need to make sure that everyone, including yourself, is safe physically. And if
that means that you need to clear the room of other siblings or other people, or
even of objects that you fear could become a weapon, do it. Do it quickly, do it
quietly, and calmly, and very matter -of -factly, but ensure safety for everyone is
the first priority. The second thing to do is narrate your actions. Again, in a
very calm, matter -of -fact tone, say what you're doing. Okay, I can tell that you
are feeling very out of control right now. I want to keep keep you and your
brother safe. So I'm gonna send him to his room and I'm gonna move the plates off
the table so we can talk safely.
The third thing is to reassure the other children. If there are other children in
the vicinity, you need to let them know that they are safe and that you will keep
them safe. Let them know that you'll come back to them as soon as you've settled
this child and that you'll work on helping them calm down and re -regulate also. The
fourth thing to consider is to be present with this dysregulated child or teenager.
This child needs to know that you're going to stick with them through this moment
of high intensity, that you're going to be present, that you hear them, that you
see them. They need that empathy of your constant presence. So you could say
something to them like, "I'm sorry that you feel so angry right now. I don't know
what you want to do about it, but I'd like to sit with you and we can breathe
together for a few minutes while we figure it out. If you ask them too many
questions or talk to them too much in these moments of dysregulation, it's just not
going to help anybody calm down anytime soon. Their brains are just too hot to
handle more input and so sitting and breathing quietly just putting your hand on
their back if they'll let you, those kinds of things will communicate that you are
with them and that you choose to be present with them even when they're just
regulated. Hopefully you've had some previous experiences of success when helping your
child or your teenager re -regulate. And so when you sense that everything is
starting to kind of calm down and that heat of the moment is no longer quite so
intense, you can try one of those familiar strategies. For some kids,
it's deep breathing. Other kids, it's chewing on ice. Some kids, our kids like to
walk the dog and kind of get it all out of their system. Some kids really like a
firm hug that just makes them feel kind of bound in. I know families that do
jumping jacks or they stretch out on the grass and look up at the sky and just
name some clouds or shapes of clouds that they see. Those are some things that you
can try. If you've already had success with those things, they're good to kind of
circle back to the familiar, that familiar method will again, bring another level of
calm to the situation. But there are a couple of other really effective strategies
that you can try if you're looking for new ones. The first is the five, four,
three, to one method. This is a re -grounding method that helps your child just be
present in the moment with the senses that they are feeling right now and it helps
them just kind of slow their role, so to speak. So you would do five things you
can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can
smell, one thing you can taste. The Order in which you do these five senses isn't
as important as the fact that you're doing them slowly and methodically and carefully
one by one to help your child come down to just one moment in time where they can
breathe slowly and think more clearly. So you would start by saying, tell me five
things you can see in your environment around you. And they might say, I see
clouds, I see trees moving in the breeze, I see grass, I see you sitting next to
me, and I see the neighbor walking their dog. And then you just go through the
five senses, five, four, three, two, one, and it really slows their system down.
It just helps them reorient to what's going on right here and right now. Another de
-escalation strategy is called PACE. It was developed by Dr. Dan Hughes to reinforce
already existing trust between you and your young person. He's been a guest on our
long -form podcast in the past, and he's written many books about kids impacted by
trauma, and we just love hearing from him. You can learn more about this particular
strategy in the Creating a Family dot org article called How to Maintain Connection
When Your Child Struggles with Anger. But the basics are here in this podcast and
I'll run over them 'cause they're pretty easy to catch. The first one is P,
Standing for Playful. This is a tool to catch your kid's dysregulation low,
so maybe not in the heat of the moment, but before it escalates into a rage or a
meltdown. You can step in with a silly question or a lighthearted redirect that
wards off or shortens the experience of any dysregulation you might see coming down
the pike. For example, if your child is ramping up in anger about brushing their
teeth before bed, you can step in and ask them, "Oh, is all that toothpaste foam
coming out of your mouth? Is that actually lava?" Or you can start singing a silly
random made -up song about teeth. When our little one was getting agitated about
combing out the tangles in her hair, I would start singing the hairbrush song, "If
You Know, You Know." A stands for acceptance. Labeling and accepting what your child
is feeling helps them feel seen. It also gives them the message that all of our
emotions are normal, even hard ones. Acceptance for your child in this moment can
look as simple as I know buddy, you feel really angry, I get it. And then you can
move on to curious. Once you start to see their systems coming down a little bit,
you can use some wonder language that gives your child permission to be curious
about what's going on inside of them. Little ones up through teens might need help
labeling what's going on, but if they don't even feel safe to wonder about what's
going on, they may not try out that labeling for themselves. So you can start by
saying something like, hmm, I wonder what's going on inside of you right now? Or,
what do you think that was all about? And if you can ask that question and start
that journey of curiosity without judgment, you can open their doors to self
exploration of the emotions and feelings going on inside of them. I've found that
this tool works really well with my kids when we're sitting side by side rather
than facing each other. I think sometimes when we're facing each other, that
curiosity can be interpreted as judgment more easily because they're trying to read
our faces. If we're just sitting side by side, it goes much more nicely. E means
to offer empathy. So we've had P for playful, A for acceptance, C for curious,
and now we're on E for empathy. When you can offer your child empathy for what
they're feeling, it tells them that you're with them. So if you can say something
like, I know it's frightening to feel so much anger inside. I'm with you and I'm
gonna work it out with you. It helps them not feel so out of control because they
feel like there's a safe adult that can handle what's going on inside of them. And
it just makes them again feel seen and accepted and you're building on that trust
that already exists between you, especially if you've already had several instances of
successful re -regulation with them. No matter what intervention you choose,
you should always be working on how to adjust your language to suit your child's
age and understanding. And remember, when they are very dysregulated, they will need
simpler and fewer words until they've calmed down. When they're dysregulated,
they often will drop down an age or stage of understanding, kind of like a bit of
regression. And so it's important to just match them where they're at in that
moment. And then later when they've co -regulated with you, you can kind of bring
them back up to where their norm is. Before we go, I want to include a reminder
about self -care in this conversation. Whenever we're working through strategies to
help our kids come down from really big emotions, we've exerted a lot of hard work
and emotional energy ourselves. We've had to employ self -control, we've had to employ
self -regulation, and feeling our children's emotions with them, offers them a safe
space to validate those feelings that they're having, but it also takes a toll on
us. On top of all the other demands that we juggle all day long, take a few
moments to get back to your family's norms and then acknowledge your own emotions
and needs in that moment once everyone's kind of doing their own thing. If you were
overwhelmed and scared, but you successfully led your child back to calm, give
yourself kudos. If you lost your cool and had to retrace some steps to get
everybody back on track, give yourself forgiveness and grace. No matter how you
navigated this child's meltdown, be kind and gentle with yourself when it's over.
Take a well -deserved break for some self -care. That could be a bubble bath after
everybody goes to bed, yoga in your room, reading a book in bed with some chocolate
and some soothing music, whatever it takes to recharge yourself so that you are
ready to meet the demands of tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening to Weekend
Wisdom. We're so glad you joined us. If you found today's information helpful, please
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of this great information into the hands of other families who could use the
resources to strengthen their family. Have a great day!