Creating a Family is the national adoption & foster care education and support nonprofit. Their mission is to strengthen foster, adoptive, and kinship families and the professionals who support them by creating expert-based, trauma-informed resources, community support, and training. Their vision is that every adopted and foster child has a family who understands their unique strengths and challenges and is equipped to help them thrive.
In the most recent episode of the Creating A Family podcast Dr. Stuart Shanker addresses Helping Our Kids Regulate Big Emotions.
The Creating a Family Podcast Covers:
- 3 basic principles to self-regulation:
- There is no such thing as a bad or lazy kid.
- No matter how difficult, out of control, distracted, or exhausted a child might seem, there’s a way forward: self-regulation.
- All people can learn to self-regulate in ways that promote rather than constrict growth.
- There is no such thing as a “fixed outcome”: trajectories can always be changed, at any point in the lifespan, if only we have the right knowledge and tools.
- There is no such thing as a bad or lazy kid.
- How can parent help their children become more calm when we live in a stressful, frantic and over-stimulating world?
- How can parents calm themselves down in the hectic world?
- Five-step method for managing stress
- Reframe behavior by learning the difference between misbehavior and stress behavior and the signs of each. (Why and why now?)
- Recognize stressors.
- What are some typical stressors broken out by age.
- What are some “hidden stressors” that their children are struggling with: physiological as well as social and emotional.
- Reduce stress (deep breathing (pizza breath), exercise, touch, music, pets)
- Reflect on what it feels like to be calm and what it feels like to be overstressed.
- Restoration- energy, balance, and relationship.
- These steps are not a program for managing a child’s behavior. Rather, these are five steps to promote understanding a child’s behavior.
Listen to the podcast here.
