Unveiling Infant Development Myths

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs register@allceus.com counselortoolbox. Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on Child Development 101, the infant stage. Now, you may be wondering, you know, most of us are clinicians who work with adolescents, adults, maybe some of y' all also work with children. But why are we talking about the infant stage? Well, for a couple of reasons. If you've been to any of the other classes leading up to this, we've talked a lot about how some of the schemas that are unhelpful to people in adulthood are often formed when they are much, much younger in the resolution of some of their developmental crises. So we're going to kind of talk about that and how we can a help parents help children successfully resolve these crises. But also, you know, if you're dealing with an adult who developed an unhelpful schema back then, that is, well, it probably was helpful back then, but it's unhelpful now. We can work on helping the adult figure out how to address that schema and figure out kind of where it's coming from and how to fix it. The other reason is because a lot of us do deal with people who have small children at home, infants, toddlers, middle schoolers, and they're struggling with, okay, you know, back in my day, we used to handle things this way. Now I hear we're supposed to handle things this way. My child is acting like this. I don't know what to do. So we want to help parents be able to feel empowered to provide the best growth experience, if you will, for their children as possible, which starts with the infant stage. In this presentation, we're going to explore the developmental tasks and needs of the infant stage. And this is broad, zero to two years old. And obviously we don't generally talk about an 18 month old as an infant. But when we're talking about cognitive development and some other things, they, they're still in that sort of same range. So we're going to kind of lump them all together. Today we're going to look at Maslow's theory, the biological and safety needs. I refer to Maslow's pyramid a lot. Now, little kids are not so much worried about self esteem and self actualization. An infant is worried about whether it's cold, whether it's hot, whether it's hungry, whether it's belly hurts, whether it's getting its biological and safety needs methods those lower two levels on the Maslow pyramid. Erikson proposed our levels of psychosocial development, which for infants is trust versus mistrust. And bells should be going off in your head right now that a lot of the things that we work with our clients on have to do with them either not trusting other people or not trusting themselves. They never learn to understand, identify and interpret their own internal signals. Or maybe they did and they figured out that that wasn't safe back then or at another time, so they've quit listening to their internal, I call them spidey senses that say, you know, that's probably not the best idea. Then we'll talk a little bit more about Bolby. The only time we're really going to talk about Bolby in this series is with infants, because a lot of what we're talking about with infants is attachment. And are they secur attached, insecurely attached or avoidant? And we'll move on to Piaget for cognition and schema formation. Now, you may think of these as four separate theories, but they really kind of all lump in together because the child, the infant, has biological and safety needs that if they don't get met, lead to feelings of mistrust and if they do lead to feelings of trust. And this feeling of trust of other people that their caregiver is going to be there allows them to start learning how to form attachments with other people. All of this input is categorized into schemas. And you know, yes, infants have schemas. They may not be able to articulate them because they're not verbal yet, but you take an infant into a certain situation that has had a negative consequence before and you can see a definite reaction where the kid's going, I remember this. This was not cool the last time. And you can feel their anxiety going up. So all of those really overlap. And we need to consider not only what does the child need, what does the child need to learn psychosocially, but in what way do we need to present it so cognitively they can understand it in a way that's meaningful to them. Then we're going to discuss how failure to get these needs met can result in later mental health issues, discuss how failure to resolve trust versus mistrust crisis may cause later mental health issues, I.e. future patients, and discuss how infants primitive cognitive abilities develop dysfunctional schemas for later in life. When they're little, they're thinking all or nothing. And that works when you're an infant. You know, you're either cold or you're not. You're not looking at the gray area like, well, I'm a little uncomfortable, but I can tolerate it. I don't really think infants think that way. And that's fine for a small child. Once you start getting older and develop the cognitive abilities to look at alternate solutions, look at the middle ground, look at alternate explanations, then it may be time to look at those prior schemas, those younger schemas, and go, hmm, maybe I need to adjust those a little bit. Piaget talked about assimilation and accommodation. We're not going to go into that today, but if you're interested in how schemas change over time, you know, just Google Piaget and assimilation and accommodation. It's actually pretty interesting. So baslow what infants need biological needs. When they're hungry, they need food. Now, I've worked with a lot of patients, and one of the units I used to run was a pregnancy and postpartum unit. And these women would come in, hopefully, ideally when they were still pregnant, because they were, above all, they were dealing with some sort of drug addiction issue. Most of them also had concurrent mental health. But anyhow, so we get them in there and they have this child and the child cries and they're just like, I don't know what to do with it. It needs to stop. I'm overwhelmed. And a lot of times any cries were met with food. It was just like, pop something in the kid's mouth to get it to shut up. And so we want to help the child and the parent learn to identify when the child is hungry and provide food when the child is hungry. And, you know, sometimes kids go through a growth spurt and they're hungry all the time. I've got a teenager at home right now. The child never stops eating, but, you know, that is normal for his age and development and all that other stuff. Shelter and physical comfort. If a child is too hot, especially an infant, they can't take off their coat, they can't put on a coat, they can't do something, so they start to cry. So it's up to us, the adult, to interpret their cues. And we're going to talk in a few minutes about how to do that. They need protection from overstimulation. If you've been around infants, you know that at a certain point, I mean, everything is new. Imagine going somewhere for the first time. Maybe you've never been overseas, and you get out and you're walking through you know, downtown London and, you know, you're just, you're looking at everything and taking in everything, and it's exhausting by the end of the day because there was just so much to see and learn. Well, infants, that's how every day is. Even just around your house, you know, it looks different to them. So they can easily get overstimulated, which can cause their bellies to get upset. It can make it hard for them to sleep. So what do they do when they're overstimulated? A lot of times they'll either go to sleep or they'll start to cry, which takes us to sleep. When sleepy, we need to make sure we help them learn. Okay, when you start feeling this way, it's time to go to bed. As children start to learn their own cues, then when they get older and they can articulate their needs, they'll have a better idea of, okay, you know, I start feeling this way. You know, children pull their ears a lot and suck their thumb or do something else. When they start to get sleepy, most of us see these universal signals and they're like, somebody's ready for a nap. And children need contact. The lack of contact, the lack of bonding can have some issues for the child in terms of feeling comforted with. When there's contact between the child and a caregiver, not necessarily the primary caregiver, but a caregiver. Oxytocin's released, they have their bonding chemicals kind of going, and they feel comforted when there isn't that contact. When they have to self soothe without that contact, it can become very challenging for them, which doesn't teach them that contact is good. That doesn't teach them that other people are good and they're going to help you calm down. They need safety, a consistent presence. Remembering that infants don't have object permanence. If you walk out of their sight, in their mind, you're gone. So when they cry, if you come back, they're like, okay, I got it. And you walk out again and they cry and you come back and it's like, they're like, okay, you're gonna come back. I got it. Which is why, you know, we can put babies to bed and when they wake up in the middle of the night or in the morning, when we go in and we pick them up and we soothe them and there's no big deal. But imagine that same infant was put into a bed and, you know, mom or dad went out to the grocery store for two hours or all night or whatever, and that child started to cry and cried and cried and nobody came. Well, the child can't say, well, mom or dad will be back in the morning. Or you know, they'll be here eventually. In that child's mind, mom or dad left, caregiver left. And remember that for a child that's been alive for six months, an hour is a really long percentage of their life, comparative to somebody who's like 45. An hour flies by in half a second. They also need comfort from things that startle them. Loud noises and pain. Children have this basic instinct to self protect, but they're not aware yet of what to protect against. So the world can be kind of scary, which is why, you know, when something loud startles the child and the parent picks them up, there's contact and the parent goes, it's okay. The child learns, okay, you know, that thing was kind of unpleasant, but it's not the end of the world. And they start being able to form these little piles of really scary, unpleasant but not so scary and no big deal at all. Like when the dog barks or the vacuum cleaner goes Erickson. When a child, when the infant is starting to develop this trust or mistrust, the child is learning to develop a belief that or an association with whatever they're feeling and getting their needs met. They can't say I'm hungry. Or if somebody gives them a bottle, they can't necessarily say, I'm not hungry. But there will be times when the child refuses the bottle. They're crying and you try to give them a bottle and they bat it away or they throw it down. That's kind of them saying, no, that's not what I need right now. A lot of parents get so frustrated that they don't know what the child needs. So what we want is for the child to learn to interpret, trust and act on their own feelings. So we don't try to keep shoving that bottle in their mouth. We say, okay, you're not hungry, what else is going on? Let's check your diaper, let's see if you're warm enough. Go through the checklist. And as parents, we start to learn what our children need and can generally guess within two or three tries what's going on with them. We want them to believe that others will help fulfill their needs. This gives them hope, this gives them a trust in other people that, you know, when I'm uncomfortable, that caregiver comes and, you know, helps me out here. And they may not really understand the cause and effect, but they know when Caregiver shows up, whatever's bothering them seems to go away and they feel better. They start to develop self reliance. Obviously this is when they're getting a little bit older, but they start to develop the ability to knock away the bottle and go, that's not what I need. Or crawl up in somebody's lap in order to get comfort or grab a blanket and cover themselves up with it. They start to be comfortable with attention because they're used to it and they know that generally, you know, we're hoping that it's always positive, you know, appropriate attention. But attention is comforting and when they, they get attention, they, it may be somebody playing with them, which is happy. It may be somebody holding them or rocking them to sleep, which is comforting. So any kind of attention right now is positive. They also develop this ability to be alone. Like I said, you know, we may not get to the crib within 15 seconds of when the infant starts to cry. Most of us, you know, just don't. And sometimes it's not really what you need to do. You know, sometimes you need to finish getting out of the shower first. You speed it up, but you don't necessarily just jump out dripping wet and run into their room and it's okay. Giving them the ability to learn that mommy or daddy will show up, but in time that is reasonable to that child. Like I said before, to an infant, an hour is a really long time. When we start talking about toddlers and we talk about timeout, generally timeout is the same proportion level in minutes as is the years of age. So if they're three years old, timeout is three minutes. If they're two years old, timeout is two minutes. Two minute timeout is really a long time for a two year old. So putting that into perspective for an infant, you know, how long do we let them cry before we reassure them, before we provide some sort of comfort? And I know there are certain issues when we come into trying to help the infant learn to sleep at night and how long do you let them cry? And you know, ideally you've developed a good solid level of trust with the infant before you're trying to get them to go to sleep alone by themselves all night long. So it's a matter of judging it based on the individual infant's needs and trying to help them learn how to be self reliant and self sufficient, but also be reassured that you're going to be there. If they don't meet this trust mistrust, then they develop mistrust of their own Instincts, urges and feelings. They think, you know, well, I'm safe, I'm with my caregiver. But maybe not because, you know, I remember that one time that she didn't show up for hours. They develop a reliance on others to tell them what they need. Because the infant has so many times maybe wanted to go to sleep or wanted to be held, and instead they got a bottle or they got changed or something that didn't meet their needs, they start going, okay, well maybe that is what I needed because I'm not getting these other needs met. And eventually those other needs tend to usually fall to the background. Inability to trust others will be supportive. If the child needs something and the needs are not met, then it's a scary world. Discomfort and craving of attention at the same time. So these children, if they had any experiences at all, may have been wrought with stress and anxiety and just discontent. So it wasn't a positive experience. So they couldn't trust that when their caregiver picked them up, everything was going to be okay. You know, sometimes it was really, really stressful. Infants are very perceptive. Children are very perceptive. So if mom or dad is having a difficult time calming down, dealing with their own stress, the child is likely going to pick up on this. So it may be uncomfortable to be held by mom or dad or caregiver. But at the same time they have this natural craving for attention, which is really confusing. They're like, I really want a good hu, but I am really afraid of every human being, you know, kind of scary. Which produces irritability and anxiety because they don't know how to self soothe. Most toddlers and middle school children have difficulty self soothing. Of course, an infant isn't going to know how to self soothe very well. Most of them rely on the sucking mechanism to help them calm down a little bit, which is why bottles often work, even if that's not what the child needed. But it's also why children will like pop in a pacifier or suck on their thumb. You know, even if you try to get them not to do it, they're gonna find something to suck on because that is one of their self soothing mechanisms at that age. We're gonna get to the solutions in a minute. Cognitive development in this sensory motor period, children, children don't have object permanence and they don't have much of a frame of reference. So they rely on parental feedback. They go into a new situation. Like I said, if thunderclaps, you know, sometimes thunder can be really loud. And if the parent Freaks out, then the child's gonna go, oh, okay. Stress alarm system. If the parent, you know, kind of throws open the curtains and says, ooh, it's a thunderstorm. I love watching thunderstorms, then the child is going to get a much different vibe. You will. They don't understand the words, but they understand, for lack of a better term, the vibes that are being put off by the parent. Schemas formed during this time rely heavily on were their needs adequately met. If so, they'll feel empowered. When I have this need, a caregiver will meet it, or I can meet it somehow. If the needs weren't met, then they start to feel powerless and dependent because they don't know how to self soothe. And it also relies on parental reaction. So if the parent is always freaking out about something, then the child is going to perceive the world as pretty scary and stressful because, you know, mom's always on, you know, hyper alert, so it must be a pretty scary place. If the parents are attentive to the child, then their schemas around parental responsiveness and other people being there will be very different than if the parent is emotionally or physically unavailable for one reason or another. And consistency with children, it is really important to be consistent. If it is, you know, scary one time and you want the child to be conscious of it or cognizant of it, like cars going down the road really fast, then you want to consistently, you know, admonish the child to be concerned about that. But if it's something that is not to be worried about, like at our house, when I turn on the vacuum cleaner, my kids are much older now, but for the dogs, whenever I'm getting ready to turn on the vacuum cleaner, I announce loud noise. And a lot of that comes from when I had children that were very, very young and that would tell them, okay, there's going to be a loud noise, but it's okay. And then I do my vacuuming. But the dogs have kind of gotten conditioned that way too, because now if I don't tell them ahead of time, they bark and try to eat the vacuum cleaner bulbie. So we take all this and say, okay, how does this affect children's ability to form attachments with other people? Because ultimately when we get into later life, a lot of the things that people are presenting for in counseling and they're depressed about and they're stressed out about have to do with the ability to self soothe, their self efficacy and their ability to form successful attachments with others. So securely attached infants are easily soothed by the attachment figure when upset. And the caregiver is sensitive to their signals and responds appropriately to their needs. So this is the storybook parent. Not, I don't think there's any parent. I'm not going to say none, but I don't think there are many, if there are any that respond to a child's signals every single time and they're 100% correct every single time. That's the nice thing about kids. They give us a little bit of wiggle room. We try to be consistent, we try to be there for them, but we don't have to get it right the first time every single time for them to develop normally. So that's the ideal situation. But in the case of parents with anxiety or depression, they may be so emotionally distraught that they can't focus, they can't interpret what's going on with their child. Also, they're putting off all of those stress vibes and that anxiety and or depressive vibes. And the child is not able to interpret those. It's not comforting. They know that, but they don't really know what it is. So the child is not probably getting their needs met and they're not learning to identify their own needs because, you know, they don't know what they are. If the parent has an addiction, again, we're looking at someone who is just doing what they can to survive right now, which means when they're not using, this can be behavioral or chemical. They are in a lot of pain. Mental, emotional, physical. They're in a lot of pain, which makes it a lot harder to be attentive and eagerly responsive to a child's needs, especially an infant. And then there are parents with skill deficits. There are some parents that are not addicts. They're not particularly depressed or anxious, but they. They're either too young, they're very, very young, and they don't know how to be a grown up, let alone be a parent. Or they came up from a family where the parenting skills left a little bit to be desired. So they don't know how to be an attentive parent. An example of this, on that unit, I had several parents that, you know, they gave birth to their children and, you know, it was great. And they came back to the unit and their idea of how you were supposed to deal with an infant was to get it up in the morning, feed it, put it in one of the little swings in front of the TV and pretty much not touch it again until it started to scream for Something, change it, feed it and put it back there, or put it to bed. There was no interaction for the first month after I took over the unit. I never once saw a parent put a blanket down on the floor and try to play with their child or interact in any way, or hold them while they watch tv. Even if the parent was sitting on the sofa watching tv, the child was still in the swing. So we want to look at what effect does that have on the child and the child's ability to bond and communicate needs and the parent's ability to be in tune with the child. So it's not that the parent was trying to be a bad parent, but that's what their parent did and their parents parent did. So they didn't have the ability or the skills to know that there was something else that might be needed. So we had lots of discussions about why it was important for the child to be able to actually get down on the floor and play. Why it was important for the parent to hold the child periodically and interact in certain ways during this stage of development. So if these things don't happen, then you may develop an insecure or avoidant infant. This child is very independent of the attachment figure, both physically and emotionally. As they start to grow up, you'll see that they'll go off and get their own drink. They will. They're pretty self sufficient because they've learned that they can't count on their caregiver to be responsive. So if they want something, they got to get it themselves. They often don't seek contact with the attachment figure when they're distressed because in the past, if they have, they either didn't get their needs met or worse yet, they were punished. And the parent was like, go away, I can't deal with you. Or the child was needy, the parent couldn't deal with it. So they took the child, put them in a crib or in a swing, which I kind of call baby jail, in order to just put them somewhere because they couldn't deal with it at that point. These caregivers are insensitive and rejecting of the child's needs and are often available during times of emotional distress. Now, I want to emphasize, for the most part, and you know, there's probably some exceptions out there again, but for the most part, these parents do not do this intentionally to be mean to the child. They are doing the best they can to just survive as they are at that point in time. Whether it's because of mental health issues, addiction issues, or just skill deficits and not knowing what to do with this little life before them. They are completely overwhelmed. So a lot of times, they are doing the best they can. So I don't ever want to come off to a parent. Like I'm saying, well, you're just ignoring the child. We want to look at. Why is this important, and what can you do to help the child? And if it feels overwhelming, let's talk about how we can help it feel less overwhelming to you, because it sounds like, you know, you're struggling right now. Parents with mothers with postpartum depression Are very. I don't know what the word is. Can have this problem because the postpartum depression kicks in. And not only do they have all the depression symptoms, but then there's the guilt that goes along with it, because they're like, you know, I have this little child, and I love this little child, But I don't want anything to do with this little child Because I'm just so overwhelmed, and I need to sleep. And so, as clinicians, we need to help them identify that they're doing the best that they can at this point in time. Figure out how to help mom so she can have the energy and the ability to focus and all of the neurochemicals needed to be happy and content and attentive to the child. Insecure and ambivalent children exhibit clingy and dependent behavior. But are rejecting of the attachment figure when they engage in interaction. A lot of times, these insecure, ambivalent children have parents that tend to be more anxious. And so they feel very, very anxious all the time. They cling to the parent. They cling to the caregiver because they're hoping for protection. But then when the caregiver wants to engage with them, the caregiver is often so distraught with their own stuff. That it's overpowering to the child. And the child's like, no, you know, never mind, never mind. I got it. The child fails to develop any feelings of security from the attachment figure because there's so much anxiety. Or the person is so unpredictably available, as in the case of addiction, they exhibit difficulty moving away from the attachment figure to explore novel surroundings. The world is a really scary place to this child. Because they perceive so much palpable anxiety and angst all the time. That it seems like it's just devastating out there. If kind of put yourself in the infant's position. If your caregiver, the one who was supposed to tell you it's okay, Always seemed to feel like the world was getting Ready to crumble. It would be pretty scary, especially if you didn't have the tools to do anything about it yourself. When distressed, they're difficult to soothe and are not comforted by interaction with the attachment flow. A lot of times, again, this is because the attachment figure is so overwhelmed with their own stuff that they're not getting that soothing. They're not getting the oxytocin release. They're not getting the soothing, calming sensation. When you hold a child and you're stressed, the child picks up on it. If you're stressed, the child tends to cry louder. My son had colic really bad when he was little, and we would take turns. When I would start to feel myself getting frustrated, I would hand him off to his father and I'd be like, your turn. Can't do it anymore. And we were able to calm him down a lot easier that way than if one of us would have just kind of tried to push through even when we were like, oh, my gosh, it's been three hours and this child still hasn't stopped crying. So it's important to understand what impact you're having, you, the parent, caregiver having, and what alternatives are out there. If you can't calm yourself down right now, what else can you do to help that child calm down? Maybe you need to call in a different caregiver. Grandma, auntie, you know, big sister, somebody to help you out. Behavior results from an inconsistent level of response to their needs from the primary caregiver. Again, most of the time it's not because the caregiver is trying to be malicious. It's because the caregiver is struggling to either be a parent or to survive themselves right now. So as clinicians, we can really work with their caregiver at this point. So mindful parenting, how do we deal with this? Be attentive to the baby's cries and cues before they become hysterical. If you Google primary baby cries, depending on which site you go to, there's five or six different cries. But you've got to get to it before the child becomes hysterical. The beginnings of the distress sound different and you can identify hungry, uncomfortable, you know, a variety of things. Once they get hysterical, it pretty much sounds the same. They are unhappy and it needs to stop right now. Accept baby's needs as they are. Create a validating environment. Kind of throwing ourselves back to Marsha Linehan and dbt. Some infants are more emotional, more reactive, need more soothing than other infants. So we need to pay attention to what does Junior need? You know, Junior One of my children was very independent. You know, I could sit there and read a book in the same room, and he would sit there and play, and, you know, we'd play together sometimes, and then he'd kind of go off on his little. Own little world and play, and he was perfectly happy with that. My daughter, on the other hand, required a lot more interaction and attention from both her father and I. So creating an environment that's validating to that child, but being understanding that each child is different. So just because a child doesn't crave constant attention doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with your relationship. Be consistent when you're parenting the child, and this goes with what you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do, and routines. And we're going to get to that in a minute. You know, my son. Well, when children go to different environments, they want to make sure that the rules are still the same. Children love structure because then they know what they can and can't do. And we went to my grandmother's house, and, you know, he knew he wasn't supposed to touch the tv, but, you know, it was different. He'd never been there before. So he walks up to the TV, he was about 18 months old, and he looks at the TV and he goes, no touch. I said, you're right, no touch. Looks at me, looks at the tv, touches it, looks at me, says, timeout. I said, yep, timeout. So he walked back into the back hallway and kind of sat against the wall for a second. And, you know, when the two minutes was over, I went over and talked to him. You know, it was just fine. He just wanted to make sure the same rules applied. And they're little scientists that way. But we need to be consistent and let them know that the rules still apply and we will still enforce them. Because sometimes kids will act out just to get our attention. If they feel like they need that comfort, they feel like they need that attention. Sometimes negative attention better than no attention. So help the child learn how to calm themselves. Be consistent with your rules. Calm yourself. A stressed parent produces a stressed baby. A calm parent produces a calme. Bull baby. Babies aren't going to be calm all the time, but if you as the parent, are mindful of where you are and can calm yourself down and go, okay, this is going to be a struggle, but we can get through it. The baby will be able to be calmed down a lot easier than if you start getting all upset because you can't figure out what's wrong with the child and you really want to make it stop. And you start getting stressed out and then beating yourself up saying, I stink as a parent and da, da, da. You know where these thoughts go. So encourage parents to try to be conscious of where they are. Stay as calm as possible. Keep a routine to help set babies circadian rhythms for feeding and sleeping. It'll be easier for you to know when they're hungry. It'll be easier to know when they're sleepy. So you can kind of arrange your schedule around them because lucky little them, they get to sleep all the time. But you also know what your child needs. So you can identify when your child's rhythms may be off, which can help you predict when they might be more irritable. Getting ready to get sick, all of those things. View the world from the baby's eyes if you can't understand what's going on, or if the baby just seems to be overwhelmed and colicky and stuff all the time. And this came from my son's occupational therapist. He was supreme, and he would get overstimulated a lot, and she's like, view the world from his eyes. Lay down on your belly, start looking around and look at everything like you'd never seen it before. And I'm like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff in here. And cobwebs. And she's like, yeah, that's my point. There's so much to take in. And, you know, sometimes he needs a break. So we worked out a situation where one of his walls in his. In his bedroom was plain white. And when he would start to get overstimulated, we would go in there and, you know, sit down. And he could look at the white wall if that's what he needed to do. But he could escape from the stimulation. It wasn't quite as busy with the cats and the dogs and the sister and this and that. If this doesn't happen when the child is an infant, which sometimes it doesn't, okay, that's fine. That doesn't mean the person is irreparably damaged. We can reparent ourselves. We need to learn to be attentive to our emotional and physical cues before we become over or underwhelmed. What do I mean by that? Well, mindfulness. When you get the first sense that you're feeling sick, tired, angry, stressed, address it, figure out what's causing it, and take some action. But if you're feeling bored or sad or something else, then you can also do something to kind of amp up what's going on so you can feel happy. Be mindful in your approach to self response to learn to trust your feelings, intuitions and urges. So identify how you feel. And when I say feel, I mean I want to know what your emotion is, what your physical sensations are, what your urges are. Identify what's causing those feelings. Right now, you know, yeah, there's probably schemas and stuff from the past. That's not what we're dealing with when we're being mindful right now we're saying what is causing these feelings in the moment, then we want to address the issue. So if you're stressed because you've got a meeting coming up or you're hungry or whatever it is, address the issue and then evaluate the outcome. If someone hasn't paid attention to their own cues for 30 years, they're not always going to guess right. Just like the parent doesn't always guess right, they're not always going to guess right. You know, maybe they think they're hungry and then they go in and they eat and they're like, you know, I don't feel any better, maybe I wasn't hungry after all. That's okay. Interestingly, hunger, sleep and anger are very, very similar in their biochemical nature as far as producing cues in our brain. So is actually hard for. Not that we're rats, but it is hard for rats to differentiate between the three of those people actually done studies, believe it or not. So we want to help people give themselves a break. If you think you're hungry, you go eat and you don't feel any better, then you need to evaluate it and go, okay, well that wasn't it. What does this feeling mean for me right now? And reevaluate and take steps again. They need to learn self soothing skills. So when you're feeling stressed out or when you start to feel stressed out, what makes you, the individual, feel better and helping them learn that Just because Sally in the next cubicle over isn't stressed out about this meeting doesn't mean that you shouldn't be. You are what you are. It's a matter of identifying how you feel, accepting it and figuring out what to do about it. Encourage them to identify supportive others. If people in their past have not been consistent, have not been predictable, have not been secure attachments, then we need to look at what would it look like to have a secure attachment? What would it look like to be able to actually trust someone and how do you do that? We want to help them identify those things or situations they perceive as anxiety provoking. Evaluate them through an adult lens. What was anxiety provoking when they were little? You know, mom walked out of the room. Obviously at 40 is not going to be as anxiety provoking because you have object permanence. And you know, mom's going to come back now, whether you want mom to come back or not. You know, those are other issues that may need to be dealt with. But the child needs to say, what am I afraid of in this situation? What is causing my anxiety right now? You know, maybe I had difficulty when I was younger trusting other people. Why am I afraid to trust other people right now? What is the probability that something bad will happen? There's probable and improbable. Most anything's possible. But what is probable? How have I or others successfully handled things like this before? So if they're getting ready to do something anxiety provoking, they can say, how have I handled something like this before successfully? And if I haven't, who do I know? Who has and what did they do? Because we can learn from others, Encourage the person to keep a routine, to set their circadian rhythms for feeding and sleeping. It's easier to know when you're hungry, if your body knows when it's hungry, if your circadian rhythms are, you know, pretty consistent. When we're not getting enough sleep, our body doesn't have time to repair, our brain doesn't have time to rebalance. And a lot of people just don't do well on insufficient sleep. So we want to encourage people to pay attention to their sleeping because that's one of your biggest vulnerabilities to anxiety, depression, and anger kind of going haywire when you're, when you're exhausted, because when you're exhausted, everything seems to take so much more effort. So infants have very little frame of reference and absolutely no object permanence. We want to remember this. So, like I said, a vacuum cleaner. I don't think twice about a vacuum cleaner because, you know, I run one every day. But for an infant, it can be very startling. My son, when he was first born, he spent five weeks in the nicu. And interestingly, when he came home, it was more disturbing to him to have a quiet environment. He was much more restless when there was no noise in the house, as opposed to when people were going about their normal daily activities, because he had gotten so used to all the beeping and buzzing and intercom calls and everything else in the NICU for those five weeks. So pay attention to the infant's frame of reference, but remember that, you know, they can learn that this is a safe environment, but it may take some time and they may need to be reassured. Same thing with an adult. If you've never trusted your own intuition, never trusted your own instincts before, you can learn what's scary and what's not and what's, you know, the right thing for you to do and what's going to work against your personal goals. And you can learn to trust those. But it takes time. Because if you haven't developed those skills of self efficacy over the developmental process, you know, it's not a switch you can just turn on and go, okay, I got this. I don't need anybody else's help. Every experience is filed as an initial schema. So think of it in terms of you get a new computer and you start out, and I usually start out really well or the beginning of a semester, and I had a notebook for every single class and I would file my syllabus in each one of them. And as the semester would go on, I would start filing more detailed notes as I started learning more about that particular topic. That's what our schemas are. But as an infant, basically the infant period, they're just getting their binders together. They don't even have the syllabus yet. They're just getting their binders going, okay, basic needs, safety. I don't know what else comes after that. Infants are learning how to get their basic biological and safety needs met. They can't say, I'm hungry, but eventually they learn that when they feel a certain way, caregiver provides a bottle or food or whatever, they feel better. So they start to associate some sort of oral activity with this feeling that they will later end up labeling hunger. They start to do the same thing with sleepy when they start pulling their ear and the caregiver goes, oh, you're sleepy, let's see, you know, it's about nap time, they hear this. They don't understand our language right away, but they do understand that when they start pulling their ear, their caregiver puts them to bed, and then they feel better. It's miraculous. As they get older, they'll start making the connections between, okay, this means I'm sleepy. When I'm sleepy, I need to go to sleep. Failure of the caregiver to consistently respond may cause the child to not trust themselves, not trust their intuition about who's safe, who's not, what they need, what they don't need. They may not be able to articulate what they do and don't need because it's always been met with one thing like a bottle or nap time. You know, sometimes parents just, they don't know what to do with the child. They're just like, okay, must be overtired, go to sleep and. Or may feel hopeless and anxious in an unpredictable world. They have all these feelings of distress, but they don't know how to consistently make those feelings go away. If you know that when you have this one certain feeling, if you eat something, it makes that feeling go away, then that's empowering. If you know when you start having this other feeling that it means you're tired and you sleep and it makes that feeling go away, then that's pretty predictable and it's less of a scary environment. The same thing with loud noises and changes of scenery. As children are exposed to different things, they start learning that as long as I'm in the presence of my caregiver, things are generally going to be okay. Consistent mindful parenting can be disrupted by addiction, mental health issues, or skill deficits. It is really important that we educate parents, not only moms, but dads, grandmas, anybody who's a caregiver with an infant, about postpartum depression. A lot of women still feel very guilty and shameful when, if they start developing symptoms of postpartum depression. And it's important for us as clinicians to, to destigmatize that and let them know that it's really pretty common. And yeah, you may have some horrible thoughts. Let's talk about them. It doesn't mean you're going to act on them. So we can encourage them to get early help, early intervention, and do what they need to do so they can be there for their child. If something drastic changes in a person's life, he or she may revisit the trust mistrust task. So yeah, you may solve it when you're an infant, you know, zero to two. But if something drastic changes in your life, you know, they are a, they're a victim of a crime or, you know, some, something super tragic happens, then they may start questioning what is safe and what isn't. And, you know, should they really trust other people? So we're kind of back to the beginning. Can they trust their own intuition? Are they able to meet their own needs? Or, you know, can they exist in this world? So it's important to understand that, you know, somebody may have had a great childhood, they may have had a great infant development, but later in life, if something catastrophic happens, they may revisit that task and may have to kind of process It a little bit about what that crisis means to the person. Normal development involves small changes that build on prior learning. As children get older, we let them do a little bit more, we let them venture out a little further, we give them a few more privileges. If things start to go haywire, we rein them back in. But we always serve as a safe home base. So they develop self efficacy, they develop a sense of who they are. So when they move on and they graduate high school and they go on to college or trade school or their first job, yeah, that's a huge change. But it's not a major crisis because they've learned to trust themselves. They've developed a sense of identity. They've also learned that there is a safe space that they can go back to if they need to. Adults have the ability to learn to identify, interpret and meet their own needs. Increasing self esteem, independence, self efficacy and hopefulness. So we want to look at in general what's going on with this person right now. How much do they trust their own intuition and how much do they trust other people and how can we help them? When we're working with parents, obviously, you know, there are some very fundamental things we can do to help them help their child resolve those tasks and help them navigate some of those tricky spots like when the child is going to start sleeping alone, how long do you let them cry? Do you let them cry it out? Those sorts of questions that come up a lot. And there's a book I'm trying to remember the author right now. It's called solving your child's sleep problems. And it's been around for at least 20 years right now. Really good book. And it talks about different ways parents can help do that in a way that doesn't cause too much distress to the child or the parent. So that's a book that I would suggest people really look up in their local libraries or online. Like I said, it's been around for like 20 years. So I imagine it's a at a lot of libraries or on Kindle even. So when you're trying to navigate something like that, when you're trying to help parents navigate something like that, sometimes it's helpful for them to have sort of a go to guide. These are the two websites I was talking about for interpreting baby's cries. Gives you an idea about how different cries may sound different if you can attend to them early and you can try doing that in if the parent brings baby to session. Generally, you know, as a clinician I generally discourage that unless we're specifically working on parenting issues because as mom gets upset it tends to stress out baby. If we're talking about something other than parenting baby right there. But we can do mom can videotape child at home and try to armchair quarterback some of those cries that came up. Try to learn the child's rhythms and do some things like that in session instead of having baby kind of right there. Are there any questions? Alrighty, I will stick around for a few more minutes in case you come up with any questions that you have. Otherwise, I will see you all on Thursday. For Toddler. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing@Allce.com Counselortoolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by allce.com providing 24.7 multimedia continuing education and pre certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code counselortoolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month.