Lending Your Calm to Your Children in Challenging Times; A Self-Reg Lens

Do you ever have those moments where you find yourself saying out loud, “They know I’m having a bad day so why do they insist on making harder?” I bet we all have; we are only human.  Often, it can seem as though the more stressed or tense we feel, the more our children seem to morph into creatures that don’t seem to resemble our children at all!  This can lead to a seemingly never-ending cycle of less than calm exchanges between parent and child and can be exhausting to all.

So, here we are, on day 42 of quarantine at home all day, every day with our little ones.  Maybe we are also trying to balance working from home, navigating a whole new world of online learning with our school-aged children or even job loss.  We miss our extended families, our friends and we miss being able to get out of the house with our little ones.  We are living in stressful times that are full of uncertainties and emotional ups and downs.  Now, put yourself in your child’s shoes and think about all the stresses you are coping with and then pause to think about how hard stresses can be on them.

Fostering strong relationships with our children is vital to their well-being.  They look to us to see how we are responding to stressors and often take cues from us around how they in turn will respond when they face stressors.  “The well-being of children is inseparable from the well-being of all the critical adults in their lives”, Dr. Stuart Shanker.  Calm begets calm and our heightened tension levels will often times result in heightened tension levels in our children.

Let’s go back to what I mentioned earlier; that seemingly innate ability that our children seem to have to sense when we are stressed.  You’re not just making things up; this is actually happening.  Our children do in fact sense our tension.  Our brains are actually communicating with our children’s brains in such a way that even when we are not talking, our children are picking up on our whether our tension and energy is heightened or calm and they in turn respond to what they are sensing from us.

Who has every paced the floor with a crying baby for hours only to have someone offer to take a turn holding the baby and within seconds the baby is calming down? Our children sense our tension levels and we can’t fake it!  We may try to put on a good front but if we are stressed, they will sense it.  It is the power of our Inter-Brain connections.

So, how do we move from having a small bit of knowledge around this unspoken communication between our brains and our children’s brains to using it?  There isn’t a one size fits all explanation but one key commonality is figuring out what helps us to be calm. It could be reading alone for a little while, exercise, being outdoors, calling a good friend, looking through photos, baking, having a kitchen dance party, developing a practice of restorative breathing exercises; the options are endless.   When we discover ways to calm the tension levels in ourselves and therefore decrease the amount of energy being used up by those stressors, we can then begin to support our children in recognizing when they are feeling calm and what things help them move into that state. We can also lend our children our own calm when they are having a hard time.  First though, we need to be calm in order to lend calm.

Next time your little one is having a difficult time, remember this: when we begin to reframe what we have in the past thought of as misbehaviours from our children and instead see them as stress responses, we begin to look at our children through softer eyes and stop taking what they may be doing or not doing so personally.  “There is no such thing as a bad child”, Dr. Stuart Shanker.

There is so much more information available around Self-Reg and I would encourage anyone to continue their own learning.  My colleagues and I are currently taking an online Self-Reg course through The Mehrit Centre, www.self-reg.ca and will be sharing more information as we move forward.

If you are looking for further resources or activities to do at the moment, please visit us at https://www.facebook.com/millbrookfamilycentre/  Be well.

By Nancy Hurley

Centre Administrator, The Old Millbrook School EarlyON Child and Family Centre

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