Children have big feelings. It’s almost a universal truth.
When your child is experiencing big feelings, chances are that YOU are experiencing them too.
You might feel a lot of rage when your child is crying, screaming or angry. If you have been working on gentle parenting techniques, you might be trying to take a moment to calm yourself down before you deal with your child.
As the advice goes: Walking away to calm yourself down is better than staying and yelling. True, but what do you do when walking away from your child makes things worse?
why walking away doesn’t work
If you are on the verge of rage and you walk away from your child, who is already upset and crying, chances are pretty good that your child will escalate. They scream louder, follow you, bang on the door.
When a child is already in the emotional side of their brain; in fight, flight or freeze, their thinking brain can’t be accessed. Dr. Dan Siegel calls this flipping your lid.
This can actually be quite frightening for children. Their big emotions are scary for them. They don’t know how to handle them. They don’t even know if the feeling will ever go away. Some kids may feel that they’ll be sad or mad forever and it’s quite scary.
If we can’t handle our child’s huge emotions, how can we expect them to?
When we walk away, even with great intentions of calming ourselves down so we don’t explode, our child feel abandoned in their feelings. They subconsciously think “If mom can’t even handle my feelings, how can I possibly do it?” Being left alone with their big feelings is terrifying.
They truly need us in order to regulate their emotions.
Imagine if you saw a burning building and a fire truck screeches up. If the fire fighters are calm, swift and take charge, you are likely going to feel scared but relieved that someone who know their stuff is in charge.
Now imagine how would you feel if the fire truck pulled up and the firefighters got out and one of them yelled “This is out of control!! We can’t stop this!! Everyone get out of here!”
You’d be terrified!
That is how your child might feel when they see you walking away. The person who is “in control” is not in control!
the calm second chicken
Lawrence Cohen, in his book The Opposite of Worry, describes an experiment with 2 chickens. In the experiment, they began by pinning down or frightening both chickens momentarily and then released them. When both chickens had been scared, they both stayed down paralyzed for a long time afterwards, expecting the worst.
They repeated the experiment and only pinned down and frightened one of the chickens. The other chicken was totally fine and acted normally. When they released the frightened chicken, he would see his counterpart acting normally and he too would get up and resume activities.
The chickens look to each other to say, hey, is there danger here? If the second chicken is calm and unbothered, the first chicken detects this environment as safe.
Calm is contagious
When we as parents are calm, our children read the environment as safe and they can much more quickly relax.
Our children look to us to find out of their emotions are an emergency or not. If they see you, the calm second chicken, who is not afraid of their big feelings, they will soon learn that they can feel their big feelings and move past them and be better for it.
co-regulation
Children learn to regulate their emotions only by doing it along side someone else. The act of regulating their feelings with us is called Co-regulation. Our nervous systems literally speak to each other and your children can feed off of your energy.
Your child likely needs your physical presence to regulate their emotions.
create a calming space
Perhaps you’ve heard me talk about it before, but one thing that really helps is a calming space or Calm Down corner. This space can be anywhere in the home that everyone can access. Ideally, large enough for everyone to fit into it at one time. That way, when everyone is upset, you all have a place to go.
Fill the calm down space with pillows, blankets, stuffed animals, bubbles, paper, books, music, squishy toys, mantras on the wall, etc. Any items that you have discovered will help. We had a baby mobile in ours for awhile since my daughter loved the music.
A calm down space is never a punishment or place we send our child to calm down on their own.
The calm space is particularly helpful when you have multiple kids who are upset at once. Maybe you have a baby who is crying and a toddler who is mad and having a tantrum. You can put your body in between them in the calm space and you can all sit there together.
model calm
When you are upset by your child’s big feelings, you can use this phrase “This is really hard. We are both feeling so upset. Let’s go to the calm corner together.”
Proceed to the calm corner and sit with your child. You can use deep breathing, mantras, drinking water, popping bubbles, listening to music, etc. Try multiple things and see what resonates for you and your child.
This doesn’t have to look pretty. It often looks like big messy tantrums, kicking, yelling and tears.
Going to the calm space won’t necessarily end a tantrum.
Our goal should not be to end the tantrum. The tantrum is a healthy release of emotions for your child. The goal is to regulate ourselves so we can hold space for our storming child.
Start by being the calm second chicken.
Free Parenting Resources
Parenting Playbook: over 30 play based ideas to get Cooperation through Connection
The Sibling No Sharing Rulebook: 4 Sharing Rules to guide sharing amongst siblings
