Having busy kids often happens because you want the best for them: more opportunities to learn and play, more friends, more fun!

But when more becomes too much, you might want to rethink your schedule and try to “un-busy” your kids a bit. I sure am happy I did!

How I Got My Son Busy Without Even Realizing It

I am a stay-at-home mom, and I spent the first year with my son literally staying-at-home.

He was not sleeping at night. He was not napping during the day. Going out was just too difficult for my exhausted self, and anyway, I had nowhere to go! I was new in a town that was not big on playgroups, and I knew nobody. We were definitely not busy, and it was quite a long year, if you ask me.

But by the second year, I had found a toy library with a play area where other toddlers were going. Sure, it was 30 minutes away — and we needed to take the tramway and then walk to get there — but we were finally out of the house and meeting people!

My son usually had terrible tantrums around the clock, but it seemed to magically stop when we were at that toy library. The fact that it was much worse afterwards didn’t seem relevant.

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Not too long ago I realized that I had to do something differently when dealing with my child’s limit breaking. After one particularly intense “episode,” I could no longer ignore the fact that I was in a pattern of caving to my daughter’s demands, simply as a means of avoiding the full-blown tantrum.

These behavior episodes would occur every time I tried to enforce limits. If I attempted to follow through with the limit that had been set, the entire family would pay for hours. What had begun with the occasional rule breaking had quickly spun out of control and become a repeated, every day occurrence.

All children break limits occasionally; after all, testing limits is a way to experiment with independence. And while frustrating, it can actually be healthy for children to test boundaries, as the brain develops and a child begins to recognize the cause and effect their actions can have on the world around them.

It is when our children argue with everything we say or break the same limit repeatedly (such as with my daughter), that we can really begin to question what we could do differently. We may begin to feel like our children are making intentional, irresponsible choices, especially when they ignore our guidance over and over again. While we can celebrate their independence in decision making, we also want them to make the “right” choices!

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“No.”

I locked eyes with the deep blue irises of my son as he glared at me through his long lashes. While his eyes remained stubborn, I could see the small upward turn of his mouth. He was trying to hide it but the dimple on his cheek gave him away; he knew he was going to get me with that one word. 

“No.”

We’ve been down this road before. Setting up the day with lots of praise when I catch him doing something positive and a reinforcement system that involves his coveted iPad will often work beautifully. 

But…

After a week of long days at school (where he has to work harder than most to dial in his impulses), sports activities, and just not as much time for the direct attention from his mama that he reaped during the year and a half of quarantine, these moments seem unavoidable at times. 

My usually sweet and affectionate blonde-haired babe will suddenly reenact a Jekyll and Hyde performance that will leave my mind spinning long after he’s over it and moved on. It’ll usually begin small enough: a pouting face or a tear, easy enough to handle. But if the usual tactics don’t work, I’ll suddenly find myself in a face-off with a 35 pound bulldog. In those moments, it won’t matter if I’m asking him to recite the Declaration of Independence or eat an ice cream cone; the answer will always be a vehement “NO.” 

These moments leave me feeling like the sole purpose of his life is to get under my skin. I’m quite certain he knows what he needs to do, may even want to do it–yet refuses because he knows it is what I want him to do…and if he’s annoyed, he sure as heck wants to make sure I am too. 

I can feel my blood pressure rise, my hands start to sweat, and I have the sudden urge to yell. As a behavior specialist by profession, the editor of a positive parenting site by passion and a mom constantly working on personal growth, I can keep it together a lot of the time. But that “no” is my Achilles heel. In those moments, “no,” is a parenting trigger that I struggle with.

A trigger, according to psychologist, parenting expert, and author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids, Dr. Laura Markham, is “anything you experience in the present moment that activates a feeling from the past.” Triggers are dangerous because they can elicit a feeling that in turn causes us to react in a way that’s not keeping with the present. [Read more…]

Five months into becoming parents, my husband and I had our first experience with a meltdown. As our daughter first started crying, we moved through the list of typical physical needs: is she hungry? Cold? Does she need a nappy change?

As we went through those motions, our daughter’s frustration and discomfort only increased to a complete state of emotional dysregulation. After we exhausted all normal parenting tricks, we resorted to random actions such as turning off the lights, turning on the lights, singing, rocking and bouncing. None of it worked. 

We felt like there was no way we could help her, and it was gut-wrenching. I found myself wanting to cry along with my daughter. We were two new parents feeling very helpless, alone and desperate.

After an hour of screaming, our daughter was so exhausted that she fell asleep. My husband and I were also exhausted, but too strung out to sleep. As we began to research what we may have been doing wrong, we made the surprising realization that the suggestions from sources that aligned with our attachment parenting style seemed to be the complete opposite of what we had done.

But how are we to do things differently if we don’t know any different? Many of us had parents who tried their absolute best to make us ‘feel better’ during a meltdown, or perhaps even walked away and left us alone. I have some such memories myself. 

I couldn’t blame myself or my husband for handling our daughter’s emotional dysregulation in the manner that we did, nor did I harbor any resentment against my parents for how they may have acted during my own childhood meltdowns. It seemed that the real issue was actually the misunderstanding of how to keep our children safe. [Read more…]

“I work all day to put a roof over your head, and you can’t even wash a few dishes?”

“I really thought you were more mature than that.”

“When you do that, you make me sad and disappointed. Do you really want to hurt my feelings?”

“Come ON. Don’t you know better than that?”

Do any of these sound familiar? How often do you intentionally (or unintentionally) say something like this to your kids?

A few weeks ago I told my daughter to get ready for soccer. While she is only seven, she is typically very responsive to directions and by far the most laid-back of my children. This particular day, however, she must have been bitten by the distraction bug as I found myself repeating the direction numerous times…with her still not dressed for soccer. I finally said, “Come on…I’m really disappointed that you are ignoring me and I expected more from you.”

She quickly disappeared in her room and emerged a few minutes later with her soccer uniform on… and tears in her eyes. Complete and total mom fail!

In reflecting on that moment, I realized that while my statement had the intention of jump-starting my daughter into following the direction and gaining quick compliance, it may have come with a cost. And while my intention was most certainly not to cause harm, I began to question if there could be long-term effects of using guilt-tripping as a normal method of obtaining compliance from children.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if this could potentially be one of the most used and unintentionally harmful methods of convincing our children to do something. [Read more…]