When our kids display big fight/flight responses it can be exceptionally triggering for us as parents.
Parents say to me, “Surely this type of behaviour can’t go unpunished?”
This might be unconventional, but my belief is that kids shouldn’t be punished for what is an autonomic nervous system response. It is not under their conscious control.
If we take it to the extreme, it is like punishing someone who has allergies for sneezing.
Kids do well if they can.
Our kid’s behaviour is communicating to us that they aren’t coping with the demands and expectations being placed on them.
Yelling, threats, consequences, trying to rationalise are all going to escalate the situation further and perhaps also lead to deep feelings of shame and disconnect.
So what can we do…
Instead of thinking, “How can I get my child to stop hitting/throwing things/the verbal attacks”, we can switch to, “How can I make my child feel more safe. How can I help to regulate their nervous system.”
Felt safety is what our kids need to get back into their ventral vagal pathway of their nervous system. That is where they need to be to think clearly.
Our kids know right from wrong. They have to be regulated enough to access their rational thought, their judgement, their problem solving, their ability to wait and be flexible.
Long term, we want our kids to increase their awareness and have ownership over managing their energy levels, however, to begin with it starts with us.
- We as the adults can reflect on the situation and make proactive changes to better support our kids to mitigate the triggers.
- We can notice the early signs that communicate to us that we need to stop everything and help with regulating.
- We can model how to repair, how to make apologies, how to make plans so that our bodies and brains stay in control.
- We can comment about what activities help ‘fill our cup’ or ‘recharge our body battery’.
- We can share stories of times when we have felt overwhelmed and what we noticed, how it felt, what we did.
- We can debrief by talking out loud about challenging situations and how we might support them better next time.
- We can reflect on previous instances together and collaboratively problem solve plans ahead of time.
- We can provide information about how our brains work.
Our kids are watching and learning from us.
We are re-wiring their nervous systems. When our kids are constantly in fight/flight/freeze responses, those neural pathways get reinforced over and over again. They become more dominant. The escalations appear rapid.
Our kids need us to help them break out of the cycle. We can start to help them reinforce more adaptive pathways. We start to create more time between a trigger and the reaction.
This is the hardest and most important work we will ever do.
