152. How to See Beneath Your Child's Behavior When They Melt Down

When your child's behavior feels confusing, the fix usually isn't a tougher consequence. It's a clearer read on what's happening underneath. In this episode we look into why a meltdown, an eye roll, or a kid who suddenly can't get out the door is almost always the tip of something bigger, and I walk you through a simple piece of brain science that makes it click. Then I hand you the two jobs of parenting, love and connection first, teaching second, and show you how to use them in real moments with a toddler at the park, a fourth grader stuck on homework, and a teenager who snaps the second they walk in the door. You'll leave knowing how to lead with connection without giving up your leadership.

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Transcript

Behavior Is Not The Whole Story

Speaker 0:00

When your child just seems to be falling apart, the behavior you're looking at is almost never the whole story. Today I'm going to show you how to read what's underneath it and the two simple jobs that get you through any hard moment. This is Leadership Parenting, seeing beneath the behavior. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.

Why Meltdowns Feel So Sudden

Speaker 0:52

Hi friends, and welcome back to Leadership Parenting. So glad to be with you again today and to talk about something that I think is so important for us as parents as we look at the behavior that we're watching and experiencing with our kids. Because I want you to think about a time, whether it's a young child you have or an older child, where your child seems to be melting down out of nowhere. And you're left standing there thinking, what is happening? And maybe it's because you said no to something small or you asked for a simple thing from them, and suddenly you find that you're in the middle of a storm that you didn't see coming. And you can see the behavior, the yelling or the stalling or the attitude, but I don't think we can always see the reason underneath it. And when you can't see the reason, everything that we're trying to do as a parent can feel like we're guessing. And I want to make that less of a guess today, because the behavior you're looking at is almost never the whole story. It's the tip of something. And once you can see what's underneath it, I think you'll know better how to respond because you, the truth is you already have what you need for this. You just need a simple way to get to that parenting wisdom.

The Park Meltdown And Transitions

Speaker 2:03

Let me tell you about a mom I've worked with. Her three-year-old turned every single trip to the park or to someplace they were playing, something positive, turned it into like a really dramatic scene when it was time to go home. They'd have a wonderful time. And then as soon as she said it was time to go, he would go like kind of writhing on the ground, screaming like she deeply wronged him in some way. And she tried the five-minute warning, she tried bribes, she tried scooping him up and marching to the car while he wailed and half the playground was watching. And she was starting to dread the very thing that they were supposed to be enjoying, any outing that they had together. So this is what she brought to our time together. And we slowed it down and started to kind of take it apart, look underneath it. And once we were able to do that, what we found wasn't really the defiance that it felt like it was. At age three, the part of the brain that shifts gears, that stops one thing and starts another, it that part of the brain is really barely built. Transitions are not a small ask for a brain that is that young. They're genuinely hard. And this little guy's body, when he was playing, was doing something he loved. It was something good. And he couldn't find the off switch. And that came out as a meltdown. When we're starting to look underneath things, we're able to see this as not this child being difficult. It's actually a very normal three-year-old brain doing exactly what three-year-old brains do.

The Iceberg Under Behavior

Speaker 3:33

So looking at behavior like the tip of an iceberg, what you see above the water, the meltdown, or maybe it's a teenager's eye roll, the dawdling. It's real, very real. It's happening, but it's small compared to everything that might be sitting underneath it. And underneath, there's always something. Sometimes it's a stage of development, like that three-year-old whose brain can't shift gears yet. Sometimes it's that your child is dealing with something that's really hard, like a hard day, and maybe you don't even know about it. Sometimes they're not even aware of how the balance of their day has kind of gotten tipped because it's been hard for them. Sometimes their body is simply flooded where they're not having the amount of resource that they normally have, like it's running unempty. And the behavior that you're seeing is the overflow of that imbalance.

Upstairs Brain Versus Downstairs Brain

Speaker 4:25

There's a simple piece of brain science that really helps this settle in our minds as parents. And I want to share it with you. It's from Dan Siegel's work in understanding children's brains and their development. And the way he puts it is that your child has an upstairs brain, the part that reasons and calms down and makes good choices. And that part of your child's brain is still under construction well into their mid-20s. And they also have a downstairs brain. That's the fast survival part of their brain that runs their big feelings. So when a child is getting flooded, it's the downstairs brain that's taking over. And the upstairs brain is going briefly offline. So when we say to a child who is flooded, meaning they're stuck in their downstairs brain that they need to calm down, or we say to them, use your words, think about what you're doing. We're asking for something that they genuinely can't achieve in that moment. So, what do you actually do with a child who's in that stuck place?

Two Jobs: Connection And Teaching

Speaker 5:28

This is where I want to give you something very simple. And it's one of a very grounding ideas that I teach. As a parent, you really only have two jobs, not 10, just two. Your first job is love and connection. It's the part of you that says to your child, you matter, you're safe with me, I'm right here. And your second job is teaching and skill building. It's the part that says, I'm gonna guide you, I'm gonna help you learn how to do this. And every hard moment that your child is dealing with needs both components of these jobs. And here's why you need both always in your parenting. When there's a lot of teaching and correcting, but not much connection, kids start to feel managed instead of that kind of safe security of love. And that often creates more threat in their nervous system and resentment, even and kind of a pressure on your relationship. But when there's a lot of comfort and no leadership, so that would be the opposite, too much of one and not enough of the guidance or the teaching or the skill building, then kids can get kind of what we might say fragile, meaning that nobody's helping them build the muscles they need or dealing with some of the struggles that they're having because we save them from that and we try to excuse them from behavior or or hold off on our teaching the skills because they're struggling so much, because we love them so much. So those are the examples of the two jobs of parenting that kind of fall to the extremes. And what we really need is both warmth and structure. So you're not choosing between those two jobs, you're just paying attention to using them both strategically and knowing which one your child might need first and why you're choosing to respond to your child in the way you're choosing to respond to them. Because I think what most of us get tangled up in is that we reach for the skills building first, we reach for the teaching first, we correct, we explain, we hand out the consequence while our child is maybe still stuck in their lower downstairs brain, and they're not able to hear the things that we're teaching them because they're so dysregulated. So that's why we say things like connection first and then teaching or correcting, right? Connection before correction. That's because we need to help a child get regulated, and we do that with that first job of parenting, with that love and connection with them. So let me show you what that looks

Homework Blowups And Co-Regulation

Speaker 8:09

like. Picture your fourth grader halfway through a math worksheet, and out of nowhere, she throws her pencil and yells, This is stupid. I can't do it. Look at her body, look at the tears, the flushed face, the throwing of something. When you see that as an outsider, as not maybe as her parent who's busy just trying to get her done with her homework and help the family move on to dinner. And but when you're able to kind of step out of your own sense of overwhelm and watch what's happening, you can probably see she's flooded. So this isn't the moment for our lecture of you can do it if you just try, or why do you keep having a problem with this? Or I'm done with you throwing things and giving her a consequence. It's not really the time for teaching a skill first because her higher brain is offline, right? That's job number two, the teaching. And it's hard to do job number two when she's so dysregulated. So you start with job number one. And that's kind of the focus of this episode is can you take a step back and recognize my child is really dysregulated right now? What is going on underneath this? I love the concept of having a benevolent assumption. Could we just benevolently assume that your kiddo would do what you're asking them to do if they could? And that there's a reason. Maybe it's that they're tired. Maybe it's that their day has just felt so overwhelming to them. Maybe they're struggling so much with focus that their frustration is so high that they just kind of don't know how to manage all of that regulation. This is the parenting technique that we're talking about today. Can you step back and try to see what's under the tip of the iceberg? Because that's going to allow you to get lower in your body language and even in your stature, right? And soften your voice and get closer and take a slow breath out loud so that her body can see that you're calming down. And maybe that's the time that you connect with her and share your regulation with her. Not doing the work for her, not letting her off the hook, but just steadying her so that the thinking part of her brain can come back online. And then once she's calm, that's when job two finally has room to show up and actually work, right? That's when you say, You are so frustrated. I could tell. And throwing things is not going to fix it. Can you tell me what's going on so I can help you? Connection first, then the teaching.

Teen Attitude And Benevolent Assumptions

Speaker 10:48

Now let's talk about teenagers because this gets trickier as kids get older, and it's worth seeing it from a little older perspective. So picture a 14-year-old coming in the front door after school, and maybe you ask a completely normal thing, like, hey, did you unload the dishwasher like I asked you to? And your kid wheels around and snaps, oh my gosh, can't you just leave me alone for one second? Eyes rolling, then the bedroom door shuts, maybe a little harder than it needs to, like it slams, and everything in you wants to come right back at that tone, right? Like, because it's so disrespectful. It just feels so wrong. But here's what's easy to miss with a teenager, being flooded doesn't always look like a puddle of tears on the floor, which is a little bit more is easier to sympathize with, right? It looks like attitude, it looks like pushing back, and it can often feel super disrespectful. And I'm very big on kids being respectful to their parents. I just don't think we have a lot of room for us to have amounts of disrespect in our family. But I do think it's worth that benevolent assumption and making an assumption when you feel that attitude come back at you, that perhaps there's something underneath that that's causing your child to be that kind of disrespectful, snappy kid that you really that kind of bristles right inside of you that makes you feel so uncomfortable. I think it's so helpful to know that teenagers' brains have been remodeling themselves for a couple of years. And that upstairs brain is still very much under construction, especially when you have a kid coming home from seven hours of managing school and friendships and teachers and hallways full of like social considerations and sometimes landmines. When our kids walk through the door kind of running on empty, and our reasonable questions, like, have you unloaded the dishwasher, can really be something that tips them over the edge. And I don't always think our kids snapping at us is a conscious decision. It's kind of more of an overflow. And don't you notice that that happens with you sometimes when you feel like you've been holding it together and you've been doing really well all day, and then you just kind of reach your max and you find that you snap. It really is an overflow of kind of chaos or stress or overwhelm. It's like you've maxed out of your resources. I think that that happens to all of us. And when we can recognize that and show some self-compassion, go and repair that once we kind of take a breath and get resettled. We want to really give our kids the same benefit of the doubt with that and give them a place to be able to feel our connection with them, even when they have that disrespect come out. So I'm not saying that we should put up with disrespect all the time, but could we pause and just maybe benevolently assume that there's something underneath that that we could check out? And certainly if you've got long kind of chronic disrespect happening, then we might need a little bit of a different uh way to deal with that. But still, you guys were still looking underneath that behavior and figuring out why. Why do why is this darling, lovable, wonderful kid showing up with this behavior that's so painful and so much a problem for us in our relationship? We want to look underneath that. Most kids, when you give them that benefit of the doubt and you're still holding your boundary and saying, look, that behavior is just not okay with me. That's not how we talk to each other. Most kids, when you approach it that way, will soften and you're holding a boundary. You're just holding it and clarifying it once your child can actually listen to it instead of kind of jumping into the storm and escalating it. So that's using both jobs in the right order. So, do you see the pattern in those two things? Nothing about our teaching is going away. That child's math still, homework still had to get done. The boundary about respect and how a child talks to you still gets held. We don't go so soft that we hand over our leadership. We just do the benevolent assumption and the connection first so that our teaching, our skills training, actually get a chance to work.

Hold Boundaries Without Escalating

Speaker 15:14

So if you carry one thing out of today's episode, I want you to think of this. Before we correct, before we teach, before we try to fix something, let's take a breath and ask ourselves what's really underneath this behavior that we're working to deal with.

unknown 15:33

Okay.

Speaker 15:34

And then lead with your first job, which is connection first. And then use your second job to do the teaching. You are already doing both of these things, these jobs, every single day. We're just looking at using them strategically and also recognizing what order they need to come in so you can have the most effective response that you're looking for. And the teaching actually settles into the child's behavior and into what they can integrate into their bodies. You know, once we understand what's going on with our kids, like the mom at the park, once she understood that the leading itself was the hard part for her child, it wasn't that her son was the problem. She was able to see the meltdown, less of a battle of wills and more like a battle that he was undergoing in his own nervous system. And she could address it differently. She didn't take it personally. She was able to kind of get a little bit clearer on what was happening. The fun is ending, it feels really hard. And then she could maintain her connection to him. Like it's so much easier to have a benevolent assumption for your child, which protects your relationship when you don't take personally what they're doing, even though it's coming at you in a very personal way. I've even seen kids that, you know, say, I hate you, mom, or stinky mom, or it's your fault, and they're screaming. And I think what it's so easy to have our feelings hurt. But when we can recognize that, especially when our kids are younger, they just don't have a way to pull it together sometimes. And the less that we take that personal, the more regulated we're gonna be. And we can be firm. And I never want you to stay at the park because you don't want your child to be unhappy. You've got to be able to get him in the car and go home and do what you need to do because you're the grown-up and you're setting the schedule, but you're not gonna be taking it personally. So many times I would repeat the mantra in my mind, they're just having a hard time. They're just having a hard time. This isn't about me. And it allows you to give your child enough of that stability within yourself to build a little bridge so that your child is finding a way to get across this hard time instead of like at the precipice of a cliff where he knows that he's messing with your relationship. And kids just feel so panicky inside when they feel like they are pushing their parents away. And sometimes you'll see kids absolutely swing from being angry at their moms and then going to like really being clingy and almost begging their parents to not leave them. The more clear we are on what's going on with our children, the less threatening it will be to us. And it doesn't make it easy to deal with behavior, but it does make it easier. So if you're parenting a child who feels hard to reach right now, whether they're three or they're 13, the big message I want to share with you is that you're not failing. You're doing the most important demanding work that there is. You're helping your child figure out how to deal with their own nervous system, how to handle dysregulation, how to deal with that downstairs brain response when they really themselves probably want to be in their upstairs brain. They just don't know how to get there. This parenting stuff is just not as easy as it seems, right? I wish that we had an easy button to just make everything go smoothly, but I think knowing more about your child's nervous system, understanding more about your own nervous system, and being able to look at it from that perspective is going to be our easy button. Maybe it's it doesn't make everything smooth out, but what it does is it gives you at least a little bit of a different perspective so that you can feel like you are the leader in this relationship. And it's Rocky, I know, because we are raising little humans that are figuring out how to do things in their life and in their bodies, and it's such an important, valuable job that we are doing as

Closing Encouragement And Perspective

Speaker 19:59

mothers. So, uh short episode today. Just want to remind you look underneath behavior, regulate that nervous system yourself. You deserve to feel some calm in this little bit of a roller coaster of raising kids. I'm so grateful that we have this knowledge now that um honestly we didn't really have when I was raising kids. It just felt kind of like a free-for-all. And um, and the more that we know about nervous systems, the more that we understand why our kids are doing things, the better we can lead them through it and hopefully have more of a sense of calm and confidence as parents as we're doing it. I love you. I hope that you guys are enjoying your summer and feeling little bits of restoration and sweetness with your kids. Just know that you're not alone and you're doing a great, great work. I will talk to you all next week. Take care.

Podcast Disclaimer

Speaker 20:55

The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It's also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.