A short instructional video by Mary Kostka (Day 2) offering parenting guidance for handling children's meltdowns. Main advice: get physically lower than the child, remain quiet and model calm breathing, avoid verbal bombardment, and consider changing the environment to reduce triggers.
Foreign heroes. Welcome to day two. This is all about when your child is having a meltdown. They're out of control or they're really upset or they're shutting down. You want to get low and quiet now. You don't want to put yourself in danger if they're, if they're kicking. Obviously you don't want to like, get kicked in the face or something. But in general, if you can get yourself lower than them, the nervous system will automatically, automatically start to relax a little bit. And it's really hard, but you got to just be quiet, just be quiet for a little bit. So a typical thing, like a child is losing control and the parent is up here and they're like, take a deep breath, calm down. What's wrong? Ah, you know, and, and, and it really just makes it worse. So it's very counterintuitive. But you want to just model getting really calm and you taking deep breaths and just be quiet with them for a little bit. Okay. So it's just really, really important to not verbally bombard them and you can move them to a quieter space if they're, if, if you're thinking, okay, this is a meltdown, they got triggered by something. This isn't just like, if I give them what they want, they're going to stop. You have to start thinking about, like, well, what's triggering them. And oftentimes if you can change the environment somehow, that will make a big difference. And we'll talk about that more later. But part of changing the environment is your own presence. If you can just get yourself lower than them, that will help a lot. I, I had a very, very, very tall OT aid that. It was just really interesting watching the kids with him because they loved him. But if they were at all disre, that height really made a difference. And I would tell him, you know, you need to kneel down. And he was still like, he was so tall kneeling, he's still higher than them. So a lot of times I'd have him like, get down on his elbows and, and just get a little lower than them and they would start to calm down. So that is just a little trick. Hope you find it helpful. And I will see you on day three. And be sure to do your homework. Go aloha.
