When our children are angry, dysregulated and upset, it can be difficult to know what to say to diffuse things. I’ve been struggling with this a lot lately. If things are worrying or upsetting our youngest daughter, that comes out in her anger. And it can be extremely fiery and difficult to manage. I know I often say things that don’t help and even make things worse and I’ve been keen to find out if there’s a different way of handling those situations.
Cue, completely at the right time, a post from Ali Fanshawe about the book she’s just written about this very thing. So, I ordered the book and asked Ali if she’d like to write an article about why she wrote the book and how it can help us manage fiery and fizzy situations with our kids.
Ali is mum to two fizzy kids who have emotional and learning difficulties.
Fizzy Kids: Learning a new parenting language
We adopted our kids aged 20 months and eight months respectively. The first four years of our lives together were a bit bonkers, but somehow manageable. The training we had been given as prospective adoptees got lost and forgotten in changing nappies, bouncing toddlers on knees to nursery rhymes, dealing with standard childhood illnesses and coordinating busy work/childcare schedules between me and my husband.
The kids were funny, chatty, cheeky, noisy, boisterous and intense. But then that’s what all under 5s are like right? Sure, we had the odd call from nursery, but for all intents and purposes, our family life seemed much like any other family we met along the way.
And then our kids started school. And then it became apparent they were both neurodiverse. And then we had to move house for work purposes. And then there was a challenging ENT operation for one of them. And that’s when the wheels started to fall off.
It didn’t happen overnight. It was like one of those slow-mo scenes from an action movie. And suddenly, what had been working, stopped working. Actually, that’s not true. It didn’t stop working, it dramatically changed. The kids went into survival mode, and we got caught up in the violent, lashing change of tide that threatened to sweep us out to sea and destroy our little family unit.
I’m honest about this because it’s these circumstances that led me to write this book. As ‘survival mode’ and ‘trauma mode’ took hold, everything that had been working as a parent, stopped working. I didn’t change my parenting strategies and approach out of choice but out of necessity.
Getting help
We found an amazing therapeutic social worker and sensory-integration-trained occupational therapist, fortunately, both funded through the Adoption Support Fund. It was the help I started to receive from these wonderful women that gave me the strength to try a new way. They introduced me to therapeutic parenting and the incredible PACE ideas from Dan Hughes*.
But it took a while for the penny to drop – after all, what did being a therapeutic parent mean in practice? How could I therapeutically parent a child who wanted to physically kill me?! How could I stop myself from feeling wound up and getting shouty? How could I prevent my own well-being and energy levels from being destroyed? How could I avoid becoming traumatised too? Because as we all know, trauma eats mental health for breakfast….
I’m solution-focused at heart, so having regretfully handed in my notice at work (I was lucky enough to be given 6 months parental leave before I had to make that decision) and after a weekend away to rest and think things through, I engaged my analytical brain and bought all the books and went on all the courses and spoke to all the professionals I could get my hands on.
What started to become really clear was that therapeutic parenting is about finding a different way to communicate and interact with our fizzy kids (my fond term for kids who show us their emotions in all kinds of ways!).
Learning a new parenting language
I started with a few phrases – instead of saying “Stop jumping up and down on the sofa!” I’d say “Wow, you have a lot of energy! Shall we go play football in the garden?”. Or as one of them would be winding up for a fight as I’d said no to the 14th chocolate biscuit I’d say, “I’m sorry it was hard for you to hear ‘no’. You love chocolate biscuits I know.” It was as if I’d taken the angst out of the situation; the wind out of their sails. I hadn’t given their anger or frustration any fuel to feed on. It was like I had learnt a new parenting language and was suddenly speaking to them and their emotions in a way that they responded to.
After a few months, I grew in confidence and started to find more therapeutic ways of dealing with the big, challenging behaviours and moments too. I’m not going to sugarcoat this – there have been levels of aggression and violence in our house which I never thought I would have to deal with. But remaining consistent in my approach to communicating with my fizzy kids during these times and taking the time to repair and recover therapeutically too have been key to bringing some degree of balance and regulation in our home and family unit.
We still have blow-ups; huge ones. But they tend to be every few months rather than every few days. And we understand the triggers for them so much better because we have spent hours and hours focusing on helping the kids to understand how they’re feeling and what it is that’s driving those emotions. I certainly don’t get it right all the time, but I know I have to keep working on myself if I am to become the parent that my kids need me to be.
Understanding how to manage emotions
I have come to realise that we can give our kids our love, a home, a room, a family unit, an education, and interests in sports or music. But the thing they really need most from us is an understanding of how to manage their emotions, both as a child and, more importantly, as they become adults. There are traumas from their childhood that we may not be able to unpick when they are children. But if they can accept that part of themselves and understand what lies behind their big feelings, I feel hopeful that we will have prepared them as best as we can for the big wide world.
I wrote How to Stop Telling Your Kids to Calm Down (and why it doesn’t work anyway)* for me and for you. For all the parents out there just trying to get through and make it to the end of the day a little less frazzled. Adoptive and special needs parenting requires a strength that no one else can really fathom. But we can give ourselves more strength by finding new ways to communicate with our kids that preserve a little of our energy and give them the skills they need to thrive in life.
You can find out more about Ali and her work from her website and Instagram. How to Stop Telling Your Kids to Calm Down (and why it doesn’t work anyway)* is available to buy from Amazon.
Head to the parenting section to read more tips and advice.
*This is an affiliate link which means I am paid a fee from Amazon if you click on it and buy the book.
