Has anyone ever heard the term “flipping your lid?”
When a child goes into meltdown, their brain stops communicating with their frontal lobes and it literally becomes disconnected.
So you sit there and your child’s losing it, and you’re going, “Just calm down!”
They actually can’t even hear you.
You’re trying to negotiate with someone that can’t think or process anything.
The only thing you need to do in that moment is create an environment of safety, where they feel safe to express a big loud emotion because they’re losing their sh*t, because for whatever reason they feel unsafe.
So if, as your child is losing their sh*t because they feel unsafe, and you come back at them screaming, all you’re doing is enforcing that they’re not safe. This pattern creates insecure children that don’t feel safe, and that don’t learn how to regulate. These kids ultimately learn to regulate through substance or through other, in some cases, not necessarily helpful behaviors.
The parent with the highest consciousness will understand as their child is in complete meltdown, this is not about me, this child just doesn’t feel safe in this moment.
So if we want to parent at the highest level we have to learn how to suffer in those moments, stay calm ourselves, and just be present and hold the child.
Staying calm and holding them reassures them that they actually are okay and everything is okay.
The message they may get then is, “Mum and dad are calm, I’m okay. It’s okay, I’m safe.
I am a huge lover of Kerwin Rae's theories on Parenting, this is one of my favorites. Simply Powerful. What do you think, is it our jobs as parents to check ourselves, and create environments conducive to our children's emotion?
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