By EK Wills
This week was the first week of the school holidays and I also had a week of leave.
This is the usual modus operandi for holidays as I get time off, the kids have me instead of childcare and we all get to spend time together. In addition, I usually plan all the catch up appointments for that time like trips to the dentist.
This time the dynamic was different because I was recuperating from a procedure and my tolerance, patience and stamina were low. Plus, the kids are getting older and we now have teens in the household.
I remember discussing with my husband at the end of term about how to deal with the children’s moods and retorts in which they always claim to be right. I had made the comment that I tend to shut off my emotions in order to not escalate a situation and effectively ‘dissociate’.
Dissociation means ‘the action of disconnecting or separating or the state of being disconnected’.
In psych circles this can mean mild detachment from immediate surroundings or it can be meant for more severe circumstances. For me, it provides a method of not becoming overwhelmed by my frustration at trying to have a rational conversation with someone whose frontal lobe (and therefore executive functioning) is not yet developed.
But as the week progressed, I found myself less able to heed my own advice. I was trying to balance domestic tasks and organize kids to clean their rooms but by day 2 after when it was supposed to be done, I declared there was no pocket money this week and I found myself unable to refrain from expletives.
Then I came across an article by Lynn Margolies, PhD, on PsychCentral (which I also posted on my FB page MotherMind).
It states that ‘parents will fail if they approach teens in a way that reinforces defensiveness and exacerbates the reason they acted out in the first place...’
At that moment, I realised that I had intuitively hit on the safest way to deal with my teen girls by not engaging in the emotional battle, but I had started to lose ground by faltering from that stand.
The article goes on to say that parents need to hold their own by not retaliating or getting injured when faced with a teen’s negative mood as it makes it harder for the teen to get past their anger, even if they are just irritable with the parent.
More helpful is to contain the escalation, disengage and set limits.
Effective phrases such as
1. “I’m not going to respond to that” or
2. “I’m going to take a break from this conversation” can be used.
Delaying the discussion to when everyone is calmer and a clear strategy has been formulated helps everyone to feel more in control plus not to say things later regretted (like swearing).
So for the rest of this week, I’m going to take a deep breath, relax, not react to the red flag and stand firm…or at least delay to negotiate another day.
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