Just a Phase?

The excitement of the holiday season is here, and that can mean big adjustments for both parents and children. Parents are getting ready to take on the holidays by planning for family coming into town or getting their own family ready to travel. For kids, school is coming to a break, and they get to relax. By this time, children have become more accustomed to the new routines of the school year and managing assignments and homework.

But the holidays can also be a turning point for parents and their children if adults discover their child is having more difficulty adjusting to the routine of school and the demands of schoolwork, which might lead to disruptive behaviors and poor school performance. This shift in their child can be difficult for families to understand and manage and can leave them wondering if this is typical.

For parents to tease out the difference between these behaviors as typical versus something more worrisome, two factors must be considered. The first is to pay attention to your child’s specific behavior during and after school. The second is to note when the disruptive behaviors began and how long they have lasted. These two factors can help clarify a typical reaction to the new school year or uncover something of greater concern that could affect your child into the future.

What I mean by “specific behaviors” are ones that are disruptive, hard to manage, and get in the way of a school routine. Here are a few questions to ask:
• Is your child continually having difficulty staying on task during schoolwork?
• Is your child’s teacher sending more notes home regarding classroom behavior?
• Does your child seem sadder or easily irritated?
• Are they refusing to follow instructions at home more than usual?
• If your child is younger, is he or she having more tantrums before and after school?
• Does your child complain about stomachaches or headaches more often, especially at
the end of the weekend?

If these behaviors began more recently and only have lasted a couple of weeks, then typically, your child’s problem is not clinical and is more of a phase. If they are lasting longer or began much later, this could be a greater indicator of a longstanding clinical issue that would need professional help from a child psychologist. For example, if your child begins to lose focus in school and has complained about stomach issues for a few weeks, it could be the beginnings of a depressive episode, as children tend to show signs of depression through complaints about body pain. Or if your child continues to struggle with disruptive behaviors in the classroom and at home, it could mean the start of an anxiety episode. This is because children sometimes have a tough time putting words to complex feelings of stress related to schoolwork and instead act out in disruptive ways.

Hopefully, this information can offer you more education to decide what is typical versus what could be a clinical issue. It may help you act more effectively to improve your child’s well-being and developmental process. In addition, having more clarity on the issue can help you and your children enjoy the holiday season even more.

As featured in L.A. Parent!

Part 3: Emotions and Parenting

In the second blog post, I clarified how curiosity can help parents better understand the causes of their children’s tough behaviors. Once parents become more curious about their children's minds, they will need to put words to their children's experiences. This is where emotional labeling becomes important. Emotional labeling is simply naming, with the child, what the parent believes their child is feeling in the moment. Additionally, children are not born with the ability or knowledge of how to label their emotions. This is why parents are vital; they have the most influence to help build their children's skill in emotional labeling. Without parents’ and other caregivers’ guidance, children would not know how to do this on their own.

Emotional labeling is crucial because emotion is the language of relationship. For children to relate to themselves and others, they need to know how to recognize their emotional experiences by labeling how they are feeling.1 As children hear more emotional labeling from their parents about their emotional experiences, they learn more about how to express their feelings in words, become more successful in building relationships, develop strong self-esteem, and calm themselves down more easily. If children do not learn to recognize these emotions, their emotional development can become stunted, which can lead to more tough behaviors. 

It is easy to label emotional experiences by remembing the five basic emotions: anger, sadness, fear, shame, and joy.2 These five basics emotions are foundational to every child's experience. Children experience these emotions every day to some degree or another. Thus, it is imperative for parents to begin to put words to their children's experiences whenever possible.

Practically, this means parents using statements with the five basic emotions in them. Here are some examples: 

"Oh, wow. I see how excited you are about going swimming!" 

"I know you’re sad because we have to leave now to go home." 

"It seems like you’re angry because your brother took your favorite toy without asking." 

"Oh, I bet it was embarrassing when your teacher called on you." 

"It must have been scary to be dropped off at school today by yourself." 

As emotional labeling becomes increasingly routine in parents’ conversations with their children, their children will become more emotionally developed, which will give them greater potential for healthy lives in the future.  

In summing up this blog series, in my fist post, I explained that all behavior happens for a reason. In my second post, I showed that being curious helps parents more easily understand reasons for tough behavior. In this closing post of the series, I showed that when parents label the emotional experiences of their children, they help create healthy relational development in their children. Hopefully, knowing more about the ideas presented in this series can help you more clearly organize the wonderful and challenging journey of parenting.

1.Goldman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than iq. Bantam Books

2.Ekman, P. (1999). "Basic emotions," in Dalgleish, T; Power, M, Handbook of Cognition and Emotions (PDF), Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Son

Part 2: Curiosity and New Discoveries

In part one of this post, I explained that behavior happens for a reason. A child's behavior is motivated by his or her thoughts or emotions or events in the environment. When a child acts out in an unwanted manner, it is important for parents to remember that the behavior is being triggered by something happening in the child’s mind or environment (e.g., they were picked on at school or their stomach hurts).

An important skill parents can develop to discover motivations for their children's behavior is curiosity. In parenting, curiosity means taking the time to slow down, play detective, be open to any available new information, and momentarily suspend judgement. 

To reduce unwanted behavior, it is important that parents have a curious mindset, because this prevents them from jumping to conclusions or judging too quickly. A major factor in making unwanted behavior worse is assessing the problem too quickly and missing potential cues that could have calmed the child down and remedied the situation. Thus, being curious allows parents to have better insights into the puzzle of unwanted behavior. Curiosity allows parents to listen to the words of their child on a deeper level and to more fully observe their child's body movements, facial expressions, and behavior.1

In addition, parents can ask themselves a few easy questions that will help get them into a curious mindset: What’s going on in my child’s mind right now? What just happened around my child? What was I doing just now that could have impacted my child? Asking and answering these questions allows parents to create room in their minds to receive new information. With this new information, parents are better equipped to take the action necessary to meet their child's needs. 

It is helpful for parents to practice curiosity even when they are not with their child. They can do this by taking a few seconds to think about what their child might be thinking and feeling in the moment, wherever they might be. Try practicing right now to prime your mind into being curious. As you develop greater skill in being curious, you might be surprised at what you discover. You may even discover new, more wonderful sides of your child that you have never encountered before. That is the beauty of being curious!

In the last part of this post, I will explain a few ways to help you intervene in the moment to help your child choose wanted behaviors when they have a difficult time calming down. We will look at the five emotions and how labeling them for your child is helpful for avoiding unwanted behaviors. 

1. Ideas adapted from Winnicott's theory of parenting: Winnicott, D. (1960). The theory of the parent-child relationship, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41:585

Part 1: Unwanted Behavior, Curiosity, and the Five Emotions

Although parenting is a tremendously rewarding experience, it can be a tremendously challenging experience. Parents have to deal with the complexities of their children's tough behavior, from tantrums to failing grades to social problems, and list goes on. Parents come into my practice with statements like "I don't know how to begin" or "We need help because we don't know why this keeps happening." My work is to provide support while helping parents discover their own resolutions to their child's tough, unwanted behavior. 

Educating parents is crucial to helping them discover new ways to interact with their child. The most impactful statement I make to parents regarding their child's unwanted behavior is to know that all behavior happens for a reason. For example, there is always something happening underneath the surface of tantrums, hitting, or a failing grade in math. Knowing how behavior works is the key to getting an unwanted behavior to stop. 

Reasons for a child's behavior are rooted in their internal and external worlds. In their internal world, they have to cope with their emotions and thoughts. In their external world, they have to navigate social, family, and parental relationships. Moreover, their external world impacts their basic necessities of life, for example, having a safe place to live, access to healthy foods, and protection from violence and abuse. These necessities are critical for optimal development. In addition, both their inner and external worlds need to be in harmony. When there is disruption of the harmony in their internal and external worlds, this is not possible. It is these moments of disharmony when unwanted behaviors begin to appear. 

In part 2 on curiosity, I will show how curiosity towards your child can lead to combating internal and external dysregulation. I will teach some practical ways to develop curiosity. In part 3 on the five emotions, I will tie everything together to show how curiosity along with emotional labeling can dramatically reduce a child's dysregulated world. Stay tuned for part 2 on curiosity!