I began taking my seven year old daughter to therapy a year and a half ago, and she’s making great progress. Her therapist is very happy with how well she’s doing. A child in foster care is often afraid to express his authentic self out of fear that he won’t be accepted, so he supresses his real emotions in order to be the child he thinks you want.
She’s had everything locked inside of her, and is beginning to express anger about her early years in her sessions. That’s really good, because you want whatever emotions have been pushed down to come out.
That anger can’t be relegated to the therapy room once a week, though. It comes out at home. A lot.
This began to be pronounced a couple of months ago. Every morning started with her being upset about something – eyes flashing defiance, she refused to do whatever she was meant to do in that moment. It didn’t really matter what the specifics were; whatever she claimed the issue was, was really just the pretext for her to get upset.
We have a calm and predictable morning routine and there’s nothing to oppose except getting dressed and eating breakfast. So she refused to put on her clothes – maybe refusing to get dressed at all, or wearing this shirt, or wearing certain shoes.
One day it was insisting she was going to wear her Shabbos shoes to school. She refused to put on any other shoes and when I finally put her school shoes on her since it was time for go out for the school bus, she screamed and cried until her eyes were red and puffy. (Below I’ll explain why I didn’t let her wear something else.)
Heaven help any of the boys who look in her direction when she’s feeling unhappy, because she’ll scream at them for looking at her. It’s not easy to live with and my teens try to find humor in her screeching (commenting out of her earshot, “it’s amazing how loud one little girl can scream” or smiling wryly at me as I’m dealing with her). Both boys have enormous patience and tolerance, though they occasionally reach their limits and have asked how they’re supposed to respond when she is obnoxious towards them.
When the younger children were having breakfast one morning, I went out of the room for a few minutes and returned in time to see to see her walk over and kick my eight year old, unprovoked. My thirteen year old told me that she kicked him right before that.
While the screaming happens at all times of day, it’s far from all negative. She experiences and expresses a lot of genuine joy. Often I’ll hear her making up songs and singing about how happy she is. But there’s a lot of pain and confusion inside, and learning to navigate all of that emotion will take a lot of time.
There’s a impulse to react to a child’s anger with your own anger, but that will always exacerbate everything. The most important thing a parent can do when your child is dysregulated, is to stay calm. You are their external brain; their brains can’t modulate themselves in the moment without help from you. It’s only when you stay calm that they can calm down.
Your voice will naturally go up when you’re emotionally escalating, and the more your tone goes up, so will your negative emotion. One way to help keep yourself calm is to lower your voice and keep your tone level. Your outer actions will impact your own feelings, not just those of the child. My controlled tone calms me and keeps me from escalating my own emotions.
There’s also a tendency to want to avoid conflict when a child is so easily upset. That sometimes that means letting things go in the moment because of the heightened emotions. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do, but I’m very, very cautious about giving too much leeway because there’s risk that the child will begin to see himself as able to get his way by acting out, or to think he controls the dynamics of the family.
To have a feeling of safety and security, a child needs to know his parents are reliably in charge. It’s important that dd7 knows that she and her anger do not run this family. I do. Especially in the midst of strong emotion when it seems like the last thing she wants is to for me to stand my ground, she needs it.
In the midst of getting dressed one morning, she came out and defiantly announced she’s going to wear the white shirt she put on because she can’t find any of her uniform shirts. They’re allowed to wear a white shirt, so I didn’t have a problem with her wearing it.
But the disrespectful way she was speaking to me was an issue, and it was also an issue that she was telling me something that I knew wasn’t true (that she couldn’t find her uniform shirts).
I said, “Hmm, your shirts are in your closet.”
“Well, I didn’t see them.”
I could completely have let this go. It really didn’t matter to me what shirt she wore. But being truthful goes together with taking personal responsibility, and those are very important.
She was in the middle of putting on her tights, and I said, “Come with me now and let’s look in your closet together.” Her, yelling and refusing: “No, I’m putting on my tights.”
I didn’t say anything. I took her hand and we walked to her room together despite her reluctance. I opened the closet, and there were three uniform shirts hanging there. They were impossible not to see. “I see there are three shirts here.”
Her: “But I didn’t see them.”
Me: “You didn’t look for the shirts so you didn’t see them. It’s okay if you want to wear a white shirt. But it’s not okay to tell me you looked for them if you didn’t, because that’s telling me something that isn’t true. (That’s enough said about that issue. Now I’ll move on to addressing the next issue.) If you want to wear something different, you can ask me in a nice way. Now, do you want to ask me something?”
Her: “Mommy, please can I wear this shirt today?” (said with a pleasant tone)
Me: “Yes, you can wear this shirt. If you’re going to wear this shirt, you need to turn it around because it’s backward. Can you do that?”
She went back to her room and made the adjustments. She came out and wanted breakfast. I reminded her that everyone has to be ready for school before they eat, and asked her to bring a brush so I could fix her hair first. (This is the guideline for every single day so this wasn’t something new to her.)
She began screaming again. This time I didn’t say anything else. You have to recognize when you can talk and when a child can hear you. We already had the dialogue above, and more talking would have been too much.
I got the brush, gave her a hug, and calmly began brushing her hair. When I finished, unsurprisingly there wasn’t enough time for her to eat. (I told her earlier that it was getting late and that she needed to get ready then so she would have enough time to eat, which she ignored.) Understandably, she screamed more.
I picked her up and held her. At first she was rigid like a board, but then she softened and put her cheek against my cheek. I held her for a couple of minutes. It was time to go outside to wait for her school van, and she wanted me to carry her there (trying to dictate my actions again – she needs tremendous consistency in my responses), but I told her I would hold her when we got to where we wait for the bus. We walked outside hand in hand together; I picked her up when we got there and held her until it was time to go on the bus. She went to school calm and regulated.
Let me know in the comments if detailing this example of how I maintaining my boundaries with dd7 who was very dysregulated, while remaining firm and kind was helpful. Also let me know if you have questions about what I did or why.
Avivah
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