Episode 257: The Role Stress Plays in Children’s Challenging Behavior
In this Winey Palooza Parenting & Marriage Summit episode, host Rebecca Greene interviews parenting coach and former early‑childhood educator Alana Robinson. Alana explains that stress is fundamentally energy expenditure: every demand on a child’s nervous system drains a finite “energy tank.” She uses the triune‑brain model (neocortex = blue, limbic = red, brainstem = gray) to show how low energy forces the brain to shut down higher‑order reasoning (blue) and rely on emotion‑driven (red) or survival‑only (gray) responses, which manifest as meltdowns, aggression, or shutdowns. To prevent these stress‑driven behaviors, Alana advocates three inter‑related practices: 1) Consistency – establishing routines that keep energy demands predictable; 2) Predictability – warning children before changes using tools like social stories, visual schedules, timers, and pre‑exposure to sensory inputs; 3) Tank Refills – regularly providing individualized regulation activities (e.g., running, Lego, swinging) that restore energy. She stresses the importance of observing each child’s natural stress responses, documenting them, and tailoring refill plans accordingly. Throughout, she shares concrete examples (e.g., a child who needed a “car‑key” break, using visual timers, creating a visual checklist for dressing) and emphasizes empathy, safety, and partnership with parents. The episode concludes with resources (her website, social media, and a group program called Parentability).
Chapters
Hello everyone, this is Rebecca Green for the first Winey Palooza Parenting and Marriage Summit, and I'm very excited to bring you our next wonderful presenter, Alana Robinson. Thank you so much for being here today.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Um, Alana's going to talk about the role stress plays in children's challenging behavior, and she is a parenting coach and CEO of Common Sense Parenting, as well as a registered early childhood educator, mom of 2, and military wife. Alana supports parents of toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergartners in understanding why their children are misbehaving and how to fix it without yelling, shaming, or timeouts. Her mission is to empower parents as the expert on their own child and create an inclusive a world full of calm, competent, confident kids. How amazing does that sound? Well, thank you so much. This sounds like something we all need, so take it away.
Awesome. All right, let me just share my slides here, y'all. So thank you so much for having me today. I'm super excited to be here. So our workshop today is going to be focused mainly on the reduction of stress. So I'm excited to dive into this with you today because if I had to pick like one single topic that has had the largest impact on most of my clients and my own children, this would be it. So before we get going, I just want to take a quick second to introduce myself. My name is Alana Robinson and day to day I now operate as a parenting coach, but before I started focusing on parents, I was a registered early childhood educator, early interventionist, and developmental specialist for children with special needs for approximately 10 years. I got cut off at the end of I was there by my first pregnancy. During my early intervention career, I was lucky enough to work with every stripe of child from completely typical all the way up to— one of my clients is one of 3 kids in North America with their specific diagnosis and everything in between. So I've spent my fair share of time with children who have needs that aren't what they first appear. And there's nothing that I love more than figuring out what makes any given child tick. It truly is my passion to crawl inside their minds and figure out what it is that's going on under the hood, so to speak. And now I get to do that every day with children from all over the world, and I teach their parents to do it too. And what we're going to be discussing today is probably the strongest tool in my toolbox. These concepts that we're going to be discussing today have allowed me to forge and maintain really strong relationships with children, that many people have struggled to. Often the children that I worked with in early intervention were described as high needs, violent, manipulative, aggressive, intense. And many of my clients now come to me using very similar language about their own kids. So it should go without saying that this is one of my favorite subjects to teach on because once you see it, you can't unsee it. It makes us more empathetic. Not just towards children, but towards absolutely everybody around us. And especially with everything going on in the world right now, empathy is paramount to our ability to connect and support each other. So let's dive into it. Hold on, I'm just going to move the pictures here because they're blocking my view of my slides. Okay. So what is stress? I use the Shankar definition of stress, and that's that stress equals energy expenditure. Anything that you spend energy on is stress. So that's literally everything, right? Adults tend to conflate stress and worry because we spend a lot of energy on worrying. But anything can be a stressor. This workshop is a stressor. You're all having to listen and learn and sit still, and you probably have a to-do list running through the back of your mind of all the stuff that you have to do today and over the weekend and All those things take energy, and there are some activities that actually give us more energy than they take to do. Whatever your hobby is, that likely falls into the category of rejuvenating things. These things feel good. They put us into that state where time doesn't really exist. We enjoy them, and those things are different for each and every person. The things I find draining are going to be different from what my husband finds draining, and it's going to be different from what my kids find draining. And this applies to absolutely everything. Everything we do drains some people and it refills others. But we tend to think of energy like this, like we all wake up fresh as daisies, ready to seize the day, full of energy, and that gradually throughout the day we just slowly expend energy at an even pace until by noon we're feeling kind of done, and by bedtime we basically just pass out, right? Which I'm not gonna lie, actually sounds amazing, but it's just not reality. Some people are morning people and others, myself included, not so much. Sure, some people just wake up and they jump out of bed ready to seize the day, but that's certainly not all of us, right? And even day to day, we don't always wake up with the same amount of energy. Some days I wake up feeling like I have cotton candy in my head and others Thankfully, lately, most of them, I wake up feeling absolutely fine. Rarely, but it has happened, am I fresh as a daisy. So think of it like everybody has a gas tank. And depending on if you're worrying about anything, how you slept, if you're hungry, if you need to eliminate, if you're sick or hurt, if you feel loved, if you feel safe, you might be waking up with a full tank of gas. Or you may not. So we're going to be generous here. And for the sake of argument, we're gonna say that you're waking up feeling fantastic. You slept well, you feel safe, secure, loved. You've got a full stomach and an empty bladder and not a care in the world. You are waking up fresh as a daisy and you have a full tank of energy. Now, as adults, we naturally infuse breaks into our day. We do a series of things that take a little bit of energy that are routine, like, you know, brushing your teeth, you take a shower, you get dressed. And then we take a little break. Maybe we get a cup of coffee or we read an article about something that interests us. We have our breakfast and that gives us a little bit of a boost. And then we move on to something else that we find draining. For parents, we probably get our kids up and we get them dressed and fed. And then we take another little break. We put on some music that we enjoy in the car and we dance in our seat on the way to daycare, or we stay at home with our kids and we might take them for a walk. See how we naturally do things, often a series of things that suck energy out of our tank, and then we alternate them with these little breaks that give us more energy than they actually take to do. Energy expenditure should look like a wave with ebbs and flows. But what often happens with children is that we put too many demands on them one right after the other. We drain their tank and we don't give them frequent enough breaks. Or they don't know how to give themselves a break. Kids do well if they can. If they want to do something, they will. But it's our job to figure out what is draining all of this energy and how we can get them back up the hill, so to speak. Because if we don't fill them back up, what happens the next time we put a demand on them? They crash. And that usually looks like a meltdown, hitting, screaming, "I hate you." I can't do it, right? They become emotional and irrational. And then they seem to calm down because that's the function of a meltdown, to keep us safe, to remove the stressor, and to regulate our nervous system. But we rarely give them a full break. And then we put another demand on them and they crash again. Kids often get stuck down here with very little energy. And these are the kids that have chronic behavior struggles. Now, to understand why this happens, we have to know a little bit about how brains work and develop. So I'm going to get a little science-y here with y'all. So here we have a brain, and this is called the triune brain model. So it's not to the exclusion of other models of the brains by any means, but it's the model that I find most useful for our purposes here today. So as you can see, there's 3 parts: blue, red, and gray. I know my gray looks a little brown, but I'm not entirely sure why. So we're going from the top down. So that top blue layer is our neocortex. It's responsible for learning, language, and our executive functioning skills. And most importantly, our ability to reason. This area is where all the things that make us civilized human beings live. But we have a small problem in that our neocortex doesn't actually come out of the womb working. The gray matter for it is there, but it's not all wired up and ready to go because we have to fit our very big heads out of a relatively small hole, something that I'm sure many of you are intimately familiar with. And this is why babies have soft spots, right? So their head will squish. But if that top layer of their brain was already working, it would get damaged when it gets squished. So it's there, but it isn't quite working yet. And then when we're born, we get a nice little rush of hormones and that turns it on. But it takes until we're about 25 years old to finish developing. So for a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-year-old, they are very much still working on constructing that top layer of their brain. And if you think about it, babies don't do any of these things, right? They don't reason. They don't have language, though they're beginning to learn it quickly. They don't have executive functioning skills. So young kids don't have full use of this part of their brain because it's heavily under construction. Also, because it's not necessary for us to live. It's the first region of the brain to lose access to anything other than minimum power when we sense that we're in danger. Our brain goes, okay, all this like metacognition, language, cerebral skills, those are awesome. But if we're in danger, they suck a lot of energy that we can't afford to lose on thinking. We need that energy to sense what's going on around us and either run away or fight. So when we're tired, when we're upset, when we're low on energy, our brain basically pulls the plug on this region of the brain. It goes minimum power and it reroutes the majority of our energy to our red brain. So. Next, we have our red brain. This is also called our limbic system. The limbic system is responsible for most of our automatic bodily functions: breathing, chewing, blinking, eliminating, all that fun stuff. But what we're mostly worried about for our purposes is that it's responsible for our emotions. It contains our security system that determines if we're safe or if there's a threat, and it controls our autonomic nervous system and holds our memories. So this part of our brain is functioning right out of the box. Again, think about a baby. What do they do? They communicate with emotions. They cry or smile. They reference their caregivers to determine if they're safe and cry or smile. And they remember the emotions that they feel. If someone scared them before, they aren't gonna go to that person, right? If someone made them smile and made them feel safe, they will laugh and easily go to that person. But the limbic system has no reason. You cannot reason with a child who is using their red brain, because notice that it has no language. This is probably responsible for most of the meltdowns that I see, where adults keep trying to reason with a child who is low on energy, and that tips them over into that gray brain because they cannot access their blue brain. It just has intuition. It feels a certain way about something. That gut feeling you get when something is off, that's your limbic system going, "Mm, something non-cognitive is at play here, and I want you to be careful about it." It's a feeling, a vibe, versus a knowing. The limbic system is necessary for life. We cannot live without it, which means that when you're low on energy, This is the part that gets prioritized. Your brain literally goes, "Shoot, we don't have enough energy to do all of that blue brain stuff. We can't keep the body running and keep all that cerebral learning crap going at the same time." Also, while we're here, a special note about 4-year-olds. Around the age of 4, a small little bean-shaped part of the limbic system goes through a massive growth spurt. That's our amygdala, and it's like the security system for our brain. It scans our environment constantly for danger. And when it detects danger, it ups our arousal level and prepares us to fight, run away, or hide. And just like when you install like a real security system, you have to calibrate it, right? Anybody here ever installed a security camera? And, you know, when you first install it, It's going off for every time a leaf falls on your lawn or a stray cat goes through your yard, and you have to calibrate it so that it alerts you for things you actually care about and not every time your oak tree sheds a leaf. Well, the calibration that we use as infants doesn't really work once you move into childhood, so it needs to be recalibrated. So around 4, that tiny little area literally triples in volume. Which means it's very active and very sensitive. And that's why 4-year-olds tend to be extremely emotional and irrational. Their amygdala is sucking up a ton of energy. So all this to say, 4-year-olds spend a lot of time and energy on their limbic system, and it can obscure a lot of their learning because the neocortex is getting deprived of resources. So finally, we have that gray brain that I just talked about. Often also known as the lizard brain or reptile brain. This is the oldest version of our brain evolution-wise. And as a result, it's also the most primitive area of our brain. It's our brainstem. It also has no reason. It has no emotions. It has no cognitive function at all. Its only function is survival, which is why it often gets called the lizard brain. Think of a crocodile. Like if you poke a crocodile with a stick, it doesn't stop to see if it's a stick or if it's own tail. It just snaps on instinct. And that's all the gray brain has is that survival instinct. When a child is melting down and nothing you say or do reaches them, they're in gray brain. The brain has now gone, we're in real danger here, I need to get away from it. And that's when fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fib show up. There is nothing you can do when a child is in gray brain other than make them feel safe. And this doesn't mean that they don't have to deal with the consequences of their actions or that they get away with it. It just means that safety is priority number one and discipline has to go down to priority number two. So there's this hierarchy of energy consumption. When we're calm, we're regulated, we feel safe, secure, and loved, information flows in both directions. When we don't, information only flows upwards. So I like to think of it like this. When we're calm, we're in balance, and our red brain might think something is dangerous, but the blue brain can also submit some information. The red brain might go, "Oh no, Mom gave me strawberry milk instead of chocolate milk. We're going to die." And our blue brain goes, "Okay, yeah, but we also like strawberry milk, and remember how she said that we're out of chocolate? How about we just drink it?" Versus when we aren't calm, it's more like this. The blue brain gets cut off from the conversation. He's up there stranded and unable to help. And this is what is happening when a child knows something is wrong or know that they shouldn't do something, but then they do it anyways. Because it doesn't matter that they've learned that it's wrong, it's meeting their need, which is either safety or regulation. So they do it anyways because it's the best option that they can think of in that moment, and their blue brain isn't able to submit anything else. So when we're teaching young kids how to behave, we need to be aware of that because children will naturally feel safe with people who are predictable, consistent, and make them feel secure. In other words, people who demand very little energy from them and who keep their tank full. So how do we stay consistent, predictable, and keep their tank full? So let's first talk about what it means to be consistent. Okay, consistency means the same, right? We want to keep things the same as much as possible, and we can do this in a variety of ways. Routine is probably the easiest and most obvious way. Establishing a routine or order of events. Consistency makes them feel safe. This is the reason most preschools and playgroups all start with a welcome song and end with a goodbye song. It's consistent. There's no surprises. It makes it easy for them to budget their energy. Every single one of us unconsciously plans our energy expenditure. This isn't something that we generally think about constantly. We're not sitting down with our schedule and going, okay, how much energy I'm gonna give this, that, or the other thing. We plan our schedule, but you know just by looking at your schedule if you're going to be exhausted afterwards or if you need to do something on your lunch break to get a refill. You know that that meeting that you're not looking forward to is going to drain your tank versus seeing your best friend in the afternoon is going to give you a refill. If you have a pretty easy morning planned and suddenly something drops into your inbox with a big messy emergency, Well, there goes your energy budget, and you'll probably really struggle to make it through the morning. You'll be short-tempered, irritable, et cetera, because you didn't plan on using this much energy. It's the same thing when your toddler has a tantrum with something that they've done 42,000 times without problem before, right? You weren't planning to have to put that much energy into that situation, and then when something throws a wrench into it, Suddenly you have to do a really quick re-budgeting of your energy, and that generally makes us not in the best mood. The same thing applies when we spring things on kids. If they aren't expecting a new song, or they weren't expecting to learn a new concept today, or they were expecting to play with a certain toy and it's not available anymore, well, that requires an output of energy that they weren't expecting. They have to readjust their energy budget. They have to figure out when they'll get a break now. None of this is conscious thought, but we all do it and it's all very draining. By keeping as much as we can consistent, we keep the energy output nice and low. But this doesn't mean that we can't do new things or change things up. And that's where predictability comes in. So predictability means expected. Right? It's consistency's cousin. When we make things predictable, we're warning kids before it happens, before there's a demand on their energy. It gives them a buffer to rebudget their energy. It helps them to mentally prepare for this new thing. It builds trust because you warn them before you do something new. And when we spring things on kids, we become the danger. Remember how I said kids try really hard to find something to label as the danger? Like, they will often fixate on something where they're like, okay, this thing is the danger. And this is why kids had such a hard time during COVID because all of the adults around them were on high alert for an unseen danger, and there was nothing that they could be like, this thing, this is the danger. There was nothing they could put a pin in. So if you're the one that keeps springing things on them, you keep doing unexpected things with no prior warning, you, you're the danger. Now I have to protect myself from you. And this is why kids will often freak out when the parent that doesn't usually pick them up from daycare shows up at pickup time, or they freak out about a remix of a song. Often with really young kids, they'll flip if you wear glasses when you usually wear contacts, or if you give them the pink cup instead of the blue cup, or you swap snack time and playtime because you took a field trip and figured the kids would be hungry earlier. None of these things are actually dangerous, but they're unexpected. They suck up a lot of energy. So we want to keep things consistent, the same, as much as possible. But when we can't keep them the same, we want to make them predictable or expected. We can use lots of different techniques for this. There's literally just telling them about it, right? There's social stories, which are incredibly effective. Social stories are like little instruction manuals. I have one here. This one's all about— for kids who like to play rough and wrestle, it's all about getting consent before you actually start to beat each other up. Right? And it goes through things like, when I get a— when I start playing rough with a friend, I need to get consent. And then it defines consent, and then it walks them through all the different steps. First, I need to ask, do you want to play fight? And you can write these super easily because it's literally just walking them step by step through what you want them to do or what's going to happen in any given situation. I have social stories for my kids because I have a 104-year-old grandfather, and obviously they can't be roughhousing and rowdying around him because he's fragile and super, super old. So we have a social story about when we go to visit Grandpa and what's acceptable to do, what's unacceptable to do, how they can interact with him, when— how they can ask to go to the bathroom, like all the different things that they need to know in order to function in that environment. There's using visuals, okay, using like a I've got one right here actually. It's like, this is a copy of the visual that I have for my kids in their bedroom. And it literally just has the 4 things that they need to put on their body before I can let them leave my house so that I don't get arrested. And so this again makes it very nice and predictable for them. When I say get dressed, they don't have to use a bunch of energy remembering all the different things they need to put on their body. There's one of these posted in their room. That tells them you need underwear, pants, shirt, and socks. I don't care if they match, I just care that they're on your body. So this reduces the stress of a task that uses a lot of skills. Timers, especially visual timers. I have one here behind me. I have more of them. This one's unfortunately broken 'cause my husband dumped it in the pool this summer. But this shows children how long they have to wait for something. So I have to manually manipulate it because as I said, No longer working. But the way this works, this is a 2-hour timer. Can you guys see that? There's glare, sorry. So for instance, if I want to set this for 30 minutes, the color comes out so that they can see it, and then as the time goes away, the color disappears, which makes time passage really predictable for kids. Time is a very abstract concept for little kids, And so when you say 5 minutes, if they're really enjoying what they're doing, we've all had that where it's like, okay, you have to wait for 5 minutes and it feels like the 5 minutes goes like that versus other times when you're not enjoying what you're doing, waiting for 5 minutes feels like it takes forever, right? So this helps to make the passage of time really nice and predictable for kids so that they can see how long they have to wait. And since little kids naturally conflate size and quantity, they think bigger is more and smaller is less all the time. This works with that. Smaller is less, bigger is more. Pre-exposure. We usually use this with sensory input like loud noises or slimy textures, giving children a chance to gradually enter those situations or gradually explore those situations where they can opt out before they have to actually engage with them in a group setting. Basically, we practice in a low-pressure environment before whatever the event is, is actually happening. I'm always shocked at how well educators, parents, and staff can get so creative with ways to provide predictability once they're aware of how important it is. And this goes for expectations too, making what they're expected to do predictable. I worked with a little guy many, many years ago. I'm sure he's in his late teens now. Who would absolutely freak out if he got mad in public, like total nuclear meltdown, screaming, kicking, crying, hitting, biting, you name it. He went like straight into fight. And he was one of those kids who came on my caseload with a big red bingo dabber stamp on his folder, which at the agency that I worked for meant, for lack of a better word, difficult. He'd been through 12 developmental specialists visits before he got to me. 12, and he was only 5 years old. And the tone of his case that when it was handed to me was, okay, good luck. Nobody can connect with this kid, which of course made me absolutely determined to connect with this kid. So one of his goals was to be able to go out in public without having a tear-down, drag-out brawl with his parents. And we made a lot of progress with predictability, but he was still losing his mind if he got frustrated or his parents denied a request, even if he knew that they would deny the request request because we had already prepped him for the fact that no, we aren't going to be buying a toy at Costco today, or no, we aren't going to get a milkshake after we eat our dinner at McDonald's. And while I was auditing my strategies one night, I realized one thing I hadn't made predictable for him was what he should do when he got upset. We prepped him 8 ways to Sunday for about every other aspect of his outings. What to do when he got out of the car, how to ask for something in the store, how to ask for something he wanted, how to wait in line. The sounds that he would hear. I'd even prepped him for what happens if there was a fire alarm while we were out. But I never helped him figure out what to do when, despite all of our best efforts, he felt anger, shame, frustration, or disappointment in public. This, by the way, is why having an outside perspective like a parenting coach to help you audit what you're currently doing is so valuable, because often we're just too close to the problem to see it clearly, and that outside set of fresh eyes makes all the difference. So we sat down and we talked about each emotion. We explored what those quote unquote negative emotions mean. And we came up with what he could do if he felt that way in public. And we decided that he could ask for car keys and he could go freak out in the car. And he never melted down in public again. He had a few bangers in the backseat of my car, But even those were pretty few and far between because he'd ask for keys, he'd go get in the car and he'd wait there and he knew that he was safe. Nobody was watching him, the pressure was off. So most of the time he'd just have a little cry and then when an adult caught up with him, he was ready for a hug. 12 specialists found him so unmanageable that they gave up on him completely. And deep down, he was freaking out because he felt so ashamed about just feeling anything other than happy. The very fact that he felt mad meant failure to him. And then he felt trapped, and that made him feel unsafe, and then he'd start fighting for his life. And this whole process would happen in a matter of seconds. If I wasn't aware that his behavior was a gray brain response, I wouldn't have been looking for why he felt unsafe. And I wouldn't have ever figured out that the reason he felt unsafe was because he didn't know what to do when he got upset. If I continued to treat his behavior as the manipulation tactics of a kid who was trying to get his way, he never would have trusted me and we never would have built a bond that allowed us to achieve goals he'd been stuck on since he was 3 with zero progress. And we did it in about 6 months. If I hadn't taught his parents how to recognize that same response for what it was, I highly doubt that he'd have entered middle school not requiring any accommodations other than a safe space to go and calm down when he's dysregulated, which his mother shared with me via email many years after we parted ways. So you can see how predictability can lead us to a lot of solutions. A heads up goes a really, really long way. So consistency and predictability are kind of cousins. They go together hand in hand, and they make us really trust-worthy adults that children feel safe with and therefore are more apt to collaborate with. Kids do well if they can, not if they want to. So the safer they feel with us, the better their behavior is going to be. Now, the final piece of this puzzle is making sure that they get regular tank refills so that they aren't running on fumes down there at the bottom of the hill. Instead of a roller coaster like this, we want it to be an e— more of an even keel like this. This is more energy expenditure, and refilling of energy means there's fewer danger zones, so to speak, right? Instead of this where we're in the danger zone constantly, here we're at like the tippy top of the danger zone, which means in turn that if something unexpected does happen, 'cause you know, as much as we would all love it, life isn't 100% predictable, they have far more energy to rebudget. It's hard to rebudget your energy when you're already running on fumes. This regulation cycle is a learning experience. It's something children have to experience over and over in order to eventually be able to recognize their own stress indicators and initiate their own regulation cycle. So the first step to helping a child establish a regulation cycle is observing how a child naturally processes their emotions. We're looking for things they already do and try to regulate so that we can expand on them. Some kids are hitters, some are biters, some are screamers, some are runners, some get really quiet and have more of a freeze response, some fawn, they start people pleasing. How every child expresses and processes their stress is going to look different. So I always recommend just stepping back and watching what a child naturally does when they're upset, document it, and then start brainstorming ways that you can make it acceptable or manageable, that you can facilitate it. So for example, my own son has a real destructive streak and will start breaking and ripping things when he gets upset. So I stopped putting my Amazon boxes in the recycling bin, and when he gets upset, I hand him a box and I encourage him to tear it to confetti. Or my youngest screams So we have a screaming pillow for him. I also have a child-sized punching bag that came empty and is just stuffed with little clothes for them to hit. Usually if a child is naturally doing something, it's because they find it regulating. So observing how they instinctively respond to stress and modifying it can be really effective. And you'll notice that most of these examples have a very heavy sensory component to it because our nervous system uses our senses to up or down regulate us. So when in doubt, try a sensory activity. Another observation that's important is what do they gravitate to? When it's free play and they're calm, do they gravitate to Legos? Do they like a certain kind of sensory experience? Do they enjoy being outside? Do they like to be alone or do they thrive in groups? When it's free play and they're being guided, what do they gravitate towards? Or they're not being guided, what do they gravitate towards? That is likely a calming activity for them. My son liked to run. Running is a big calming thing for them. They like to dig in the dirt outside. My youngest likes to climb. I have found him on the roof of my garage more than once. Still not sure how he gets up there. But again, we're going to try and find safe ways to provide that. We have monkey bars and a climbing wall now to try and deter him from ending up on the roof. We taught them a specific route that they can run in our neighborhood and they— we lojack them with GPSs so they can go and do it without us. And now my children are older now, they're 9 and 6, but we started that process with an adult when they were much younger. The important thing is that after the activity is complete, they're calm, alert, and engaged. They aren't excited or dysregulated, they aren't lethargic, they're in that present, chill, and alert state where you can ask them a question or do something and they easily comply. Once we have an idea of what a child finds calming, then we're going to start providing it on a consistent basis and keeping track of how long each calming activity lasts. So for instance, I know that if my sons go for a 10-minute run around the block, I can expect 2 hours of calm. So around 1 hour and 50 minutes, I know that they need another refill and I can give them that. And depending what's on our schedule, Lego usually gets me an hour of calm. Playing in the dirt outside usually gets me about the same. Spinning on the swing though, that gets me 3 hours. So you can quickly get an idea of what a child finds regulating and how frequently you need to provide it. Often when I'm observing a child in a classroom, I start a notebook and I just jot down how long they engaged in each activity and how long they stay calm afterwards. And the red flag that they need a new refill is they start to become emotional and irrational because remember, red brain has no reason and it controls our emotions. So by doing this, we're ensuring that the information maintains its two-way flow, and again, this helps to support that consistency and predictability. If a child knows that you will not only recognize their stress indicators but give them a break and actively seek to regulate them while they're with you, they're going to trust you. They're not going to feel anxious or frustrated in your presence. They'll relax into your care. They'll feel validated, safe, and protected. That's it. I hope that this has helped given you an idea of some tools that you can put into your toolbox to help connect and maintain positive relationships with your kids and reduce everybody's stress. Where can we— where can our people find you? You can find me at alannarobinson.com. I don't think I have a slide with that on it, unfortunately, though. Or on Common Sense Parenting on Facebook. My Instagram handle is @parentingposse. And if you'd like more support implementing these concepts for your kids and your family, I'd love to invite you to join my group program, Parentability. Which is where I guide you through this process of figuring out what your child finds stressful, which skills are draining your child's tank, and building them up. And you can find more information about that at alannarobinson.com.
Oh, Alana, that was, um, that was amazing. I mean, I just—
I went a little over time. No, it's— I, I was texting my husband. I was like, don't you dare interrupt her. Good stuff. For the record, I had permission at 12:08.
At 12:08, I was like, nicely let her know what time it is.
I knew, I knew I was going over time, but I was like, I'm there, I'm almost there.
Well, and you, and you did, like, seriously, you gave us such concrete things. I think I never really put a name to the fact that it's— they're drained, that's why they're acting out. I never really put those I didn't put those two words together. Thank you for tuning in to the Winey Palooza podcast. If you like what you heard, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. While you are there, leave a review.
I love to hear your feedback.
Thank you so much for listening.
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