Understanding how to deal with a meltdown (aka Big Feeling Cycle) in the moment is a really valuable skill, but it doesn't end there. Ultimately, we want to use connected parenting and coaching conversations to prevent meltdowns in the long term.

You’ll Learn:

• The skill your kid might be lacking if they’re having a lot of meltdowns
• What a coaching conversation is and why to have them
• The 3 steps of a coaching conversation

Listen as I walk you through how to use coaching conversations in parenting to teach your child how to align their behavior with your family's values and manage the way they think, feel, and act.

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Kids aren't born knowing about time, money, manners, or managing their emotions. Over the course of parenting and raising them, you're teaching them how the world works, how feelings work, how their bodies work, how time works, how money works. This is parenting. And our goal is to do it in a thoughtful, respectful way.

What is a Coaching Conversation?

Basically, a coaching conversation is a teaching conversation that coaches your kids toward new skills, new values, and new concepts for understanding how things work in the world.

One way to think of it is that a coaching conversation replaces a lecture. It's more collaborative. You're not talking at them, you're talking with them.

To be clear, you are still the leader of your family. You still get to set the boundaries and expectations. We're not outsourcing that leadership to the child.

In a traditional parenting model, the parent might respond to misbehavior by saying, "Hey, listen kid, that doesn't work. You've got to cut it out or else there's gonna be a consequence." Or they might moralize or lecture, going on and on about all the reasons that that behavior is bad and what it means.

I'm sure you've responded this way yourself at times. The truth is that this is how many of us were raised. This is the only model we've had to follow. Today, I want to show you a different way.

Preventing Meltdowns in the Long Term

If your child is having a lot of meltdowns, it is likely that they are lacking the SKILL of self-regulation, the skill of coping with negative emotion.

How much better does it feel to know that the problem isn't that something is wrong with your kid - they're simply lacking a skill that you can help them learn and practice?

In order to create long-term emotional health, we need to teach our kids the coping strategies that they need to regulate their nervous system and calm themselves down.

That's where coaching conversations come in.

How To Have a Coaching Conversation

There are 3 parts to any coaching or teaching conversation:

1. Reflect on the behavior
2. Teach a new skill, tool, or coping strategy
3. Practice what to do instead

Before we dive in, remember that in order for these conversations to work, you must be as calm and neutral as possible. If you need to take a CALM break or wait until another time for the conversation, do that.

Step 1: Reflect on the behavior. Use the Connection Tool to validate your child's emotions while also talking about the impact of their behavior. Help them to understand that the way they are processing their feelings is causing problems for others.

As you make guesses about how your child might be feeling, phrase it as a question. This makes it more of a conversation.

You can also explain to them different ways that big feelings show up for people. Some people want to run away and hide. Some people want to fight. Which way do they feel?

I love using the image of feelings as a big wave that gets bigger and bigger until it crashes. Or like a race car with no brakes. This can put it into terms that your child can visualize and understand.

Step 2: Teach a new skill. This is where you set the boundary and talk about what is okay and what you expect. And show them a better way to cope.

Let your child know that big feelings are normal, but how they are handling those big feelings isn't safe. So you have to come up with new ways for them to manage their big feelings.

You want to really slow down the conversation in this stage. Ask lots of questions and try to get a little buy-in.

Then, teach them a new skill. The skill I want you to teach your kids in order to prevent meltdowns is (can you guess?) the CALM Break. Yep, the same tool that you use to regulate yourself.

As a reminder, the CALM Break is:

Catch yourself.

Ask for help.

Label your feelings.

Move your body.

Step 3: Practice the new skill. Practice the CALM Break together. Ask your child to imagine a scenario where they have a big feeling in their body. You can even use an example of something that actually happened. Then, go through the steps of a CALM Break together.

These conversations proactively teach your kid how to regulate their nervous system.

Here's an example of what a coaching conversation looks like in real life.

Let's say that your child is having big feelings and hits their sibling...

Reflect

Hey, sometimes when you're upset and you don't talk about it, your feelings will build inside of you like a huge wave that washes over you. And it might make you say or do things that you don't want to do, like hit your brother.

Think about the ocean or think about a big wave and it's just going to build, build, build, build, build, build, build, and then crash. Have you ever felt that way before where you have a big feeling in your body, and all of a sudden you're hitting?

This happens, especially when you're young. You're not sure how to handle those big feelings. That's okay.

Teach

In this family, it's my job to keep everyone safe. So when someone fights their feelings by hitting, the other people in our house don't feel safe.

I understand that your body is out of control when you're upset. But from now on, I'm going to make sure everyone and everything is safe in our house. When it comes to big feelings, it's your job to figure out how to deal with your feelings without hurting others.

Do you think it's good for Mommy to keep everyone safe? Do you feel sometimes it's not safe when you hit your brother or sister or Mommy yells at you? It's kinda hard when someone keeps hitting other people in the family, right? That doesn't feel good, does it?

The next time you feel mad and want to hit, I want you to take a CALM Break. Here's how we do it...

(Walk them through the steps of the CALM Break)

Practice

Let's practice taking a CALM Break together.

Let's think about the time that I gave your brother his ice cream first, and you felt jealous and mad, and you wanted to hit him.

What do we do first? What does the letter C stand for? Right, catch yourself. Notice that you are having big feelings or showing your feelings through your body.

Then, what's A? Ask for help. All you have to say is, "Mommy, I need help."

Next, L - label your feeling. Say "I'm mad." Some other feelings you might notice are sad, disappointed, or overwhelmed.

Last, for M, we're going to figure out what to DO with your mad feelings. What are some ideas? If you want to hit, maybe you can hit a pillow, or push against the wall, or clap your hands really loud.

(As you practice, actually do the movements together.)

A Few Things to Remember

The first time you have this conversation, you're introducing the concept of feelings drive behavior. You're introducing the concept that when we have big feelings, we can't just do whatever we want to do, especially if it hurts others. Instead, we have to find new ways to cope with our big feelings.

Your kid won't catch every part of this the first time around. You'll need to have this conversation multiple times.

This is not foolproof. We're all human, and our feelings will sometimes get the best of us. The way you teach true emotional health and regulation is over time. They'll need to learn and practice it over and over again.

Teach the process in advance, when they're calm, so that you can then call on it when big feelings come up, saying, "Oh, remember - CALM Break." "Remember that you can ask for help." "Oh, remember to tell me what you're feeling." "Remember, you're supposed to be moving your body."

If your kid is resistant to this conversation, it can mean 1 of 2 things:

One is that they don't feel seen or validated enough. In this case, go back to the Connection Tool. Talk about why they're behaving the way they're behaving, what their feelings are and how feelings come out, and that feelings are okay and feelings make sense.

The other reason is that they might be stuck in fear that you'll be mad at them. Or maybe they are embarrassed and uncomfortable. You can gauge how much to push in those moments. If you want to, you can revisit the conversation at a different time.

If the resistance continues, say, "I know you don't want to have this conversation, but we are going to have it. You're not in trouble, but it is my job to teach you some new things. And so I want you to sit and we're going to talk about this."

My hope for you and for your family is that you take the time to have these coaching conversations and teach your child why they're misbehaving, that their feelings make sense, letting them know why that behavior doesn't work, and then helping them learn how to do a new skill.

The really amazing thing is that as you teach this, you'll get better at it yourself. And the more time you spend investing in your own self-regulation, the better you'll be at teaching it to your kid.

You're a great teacher, Mama. You were put here for your child. You're meant to be their parent. You can do this.

Related Episodes:

• Episode 2.12: The CALM Break
• Episode 2.16: The Connection Tool
• Episode 2.19: How To Help Your Kid Calm Down

Free Resources:

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✨ A simple tool to stop yelling once you’ve started (This one thing will get you calm.)

✨ 40 things to do instead of yelling. (You only need to pick one!)

✨ Exactly why you yell. (And how to stop yourself from starting.)

✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet here

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Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlyn Childress. I'm a

life and parenting coach. And over the last couple weeks we've been talking a

lot about emotionally coaching your kid and teaching them

how to self regulate, how to do that in a

calm and compassionate way, and using the

connection tool and also giving them some skills around

self regulation. On this episode, I want to

talk about how to prevent meltdowns in the

long term using a coaching conversation.

So a coaching conversation is that part of

parenting where you teach your child a

new skill or you talk about a value that you

have as a family and how maybe their behavior isn't

aligning with that value, or you teach

them how mindset works and how to manage

the way they think. So really this coaching

conversations is managing how a child thinks,

how they feel and how they act. And I want to give

you a set of tools around this

coaching conversation so you feel more confident as a

parent and you know what to do. Now here's

how it typically goes. In a kind of a traditional

parenting model, say your kid is acting out

and like they lie, they steal, they sneaky screen,

they hit their brother, they jack in the box at night, something

like that, right? Any sort of off track behavior. In a traditional

parenting model, the parent would say, hey, listen kid, that doesn't work,

you got to cut it out or else there's gonna be a consequence. Right?

They kind of just say, don't do that, it's bad, stop.

Sometimes a parent might moralize or lecture, then go

on and on about all the reasons that that behavior is bad

and what it means and kind of go into that like lecture

mode, which I'm sure you've done. I've done especially

because we, a lot of us don't have skills how to

teach our kids the things that we need them to understand

about the world. And we don't have models

of how we're supposed to like go about these conversations.

So this episode is my best attempt to help

you feel more comfortable and confident in having these

teaching conversations with your kids. Coaching them

towards new skills, coaching them towards new

values, coaching them towards new concepts of

understanding of how things work in the world. Remember, our kids

come and they don't really know much, right? They don't know about time, they

don't know about money, they don't know about manners, they don't know about managing

their emotion, they don't know about mindset, they don't know a

bunch of stuff. Right. They come like babies

and then over the course of parenting and raising them,

you're teaching them how the world works, how feelings work,

how their bodies work, how time works, how much money works. And

that's like, basically what parenting is. And we all want

to do it well, and we want to do it in a thoughtful, respectful way.

We don't want to just bulldoze and, you know, send

commands to our kids and tell them all the ways that they're wrong and tell

them that what they have to do instead. I'm sure anyone listening to this

podcast wants that conversation to be more collaborative, to have

more mutual respect built in, to be a conversation

that helps their child learn something about themselves and grow

in understanding of how things are. And that's

my goal for you today. So, in general, a

coaching conversation is to replace lectures, if you want to think of it

that way. The place where you would normally kind of tell talk

at your kid. This is the conversation where you are

talking with your kid. Now, you're the leader.

You're the guide. You know what the boundaries are. You know how things work,

and you know what the behavioral expectations are. So it's not a

collaborative conversation in terms of let's determine the boundaries in

this family. I don't want you to feel like your children

are, you know, you're going to outsource leadership to

your kids. You know what the boundaries are. Is it okay to hit?

Is it okay to sneak sweets? Is it okay to steal money? Is. Is it

okay to jump out of bed over and over and over again?

All the things that you want, the rules you want, the things that are important

to your family, the skills you want to teach, and the process of

teaching those skills, you are in charge of. You are the person

who is in charge of your family, you and your partner,

not the child. And so we don't want to outsource leadership to

children because actually, that's really scary to kids. They find

that they know deep down that they're not the parent, that they're not the

adult, and they really do rely on you to be in charge. It

makes them feel safe. So what happens in parenting is we

oftentimes end up talking to

our kids at our kids instead of with our kids. So a

coaching conversation is a conversation that you have with your children

where you reflect on a behavior,

you teach them why that behavior doesn't work and what they need to do instead,

and then you practice how to do the new thing.

So there. Those are the three parts of any sort of

coaching or teaching conversation. You want to talk about where they

are now. So you're reflecting on the behavior.

You see, we validate the feelings that are driving

that behavior. The connection principle is always

at play in these conversations. It's very

warm and validating. Like, we understand you're young. We

understand your feelings are, you know,

intense. We understand that you have emotion

or that you are immature. So you validate them as a person

and their reality. And you, then you talk about

the external part of. But your

behavior or the way that you're showing up,

you know, doesn't work because it causes problems for others.

The way that you're thinking, the way you're processing your feelings, the way that

you're acting, you know, all of those that we want to explain

how that doesn't work. And then we're going to practice by telling them

what they're going to do instead, like

how to do the new behavior.

So this is a little bit different in just saying, hey, kid, don't do

that anymore. This is a lot more like, here's why you're doing what you're doing

makes perfect sense, but here's why it doesn't work, and here's what to do

instead. And then you give them a tool or something to

practice so that they then grow in that skill.

So today I want to talk about how to prevent meltdowns. And so what

is the skill that is missing if your child has a

lot of meltdowns? Right. It's the skill of self regulation.

It's the skill of coping with negative emotion.

That's where your child is. And what we

want them to do is know how to

process their emotion in more healthy ways, in ways that

work for others, in ways that bring more peace and joy and ease

in our family. Ways that don't hurt their siblings. Right?

So coaching is teaching your child the tools

and skills that they need. So it's one

thing to practice in the short term, like in that

connection tool in the middle of a meltdown, to go through the

connection tool and narrating what's going on for them and giving them some

validation and some regulation. But I want you to be able to

teach your kids long term how to manage their

feelings so that you don't have to do intervention all the time.

Right. We want to be able to teach our kids

the actual coping strategies that they need to

regulate their nervous system and calm themselves down. I'm going to walk you

through how to teach your kids, using a coaching conversation,

how to teach your kids emotional regulation, which is a

pretty high task. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to

model the parts of the coaching conversation, the

reflection part, the teaching part, and the practice part. And I'm going

to give you scripts, actual things to say and

processes to go through when you want to teach your kids

this skill set which every child needs to learn.

And it's every parent's responsibility to teach their children

how to emotionally regulate. And that's

what parenting really is. That's a big part of it. You may want

to jot down some stuff as you're listening to this episode. I know that

when you're listening to podcast, I am too. I'm like walking or I'm

driving or I'm, you know, wherever making dinner. So I'm not always,

like taking notes. But this episode, you may want to

go to the transcript in your show notes and like, look at

the transcript or, you know, take some notes because it will be really

helpful. Okay, so the first part is reflect,

right? That's the first part of any coaching conversation, reflecting

on their behavior and why they're acting

that way. So here's the script for talking about

big feeling cycles. When your child is

acting out their big feelings in ways that don't work.

Like, for example, they have big feelings and they hit their sibling. They have

big feelings and they break things in the house. They have big feelings and they

run away. They have big feelings and they spit. They have

big feelings and they name call. So your child may have a

strategy that they use when they

have a big feeling cycle that you would like to eliminate. Right?

That you would like to pivot towards a healthier

habit. So here's how you present it to your child.

First, reflect. You say to them, hey, sometimes when you're

upset and you don't talk about it, your feelings will build inside of

you like a huge wave that washes over you. And it

might make you say or do things that you don't want to do. Like you

have these big feelings in your body and they just like a big wave. Think

about the ocean or think about a big wave and it's just going to

build, build, build, build, build, build, build, and then crash.

So maybe that's happening to you. Have you ever felt that that way

before? The question

part of this process is a very important part

of making it. Not talking at your kid, but talking with

your kid. So you're asking them,

have you ever felt that way before where you have a big feeling in your

body and it just comes out of you all of a sudden?

You're yelling. All of a sudden you're hitting. All of a sudden you're

screaming at mommy, all of a sudden you're

running away. You're not listening to the teacher,

whatever it is. So you're saying to them, this

is what happens to people. Has that happened to be to you before?

And then they say yes. Most likely they say yes. Now, if your child

really does not like this conversation and is kind of resistant

towards it, that can mean one of two things.

One is that they don't feel seen or validated enough.

So we might need to go back to the connection tool and talk about

why they're behaving the way they're behaving, what their feelings are and how feelings come

out, and that feelings are okay and feelings make sense,

but you know that you want to validate what their experience is.

The other reason why sometimes kids are resistant is because they're just kind of stuck

in a little bit of fear that you're gonna be mad at

them, or they're a little bit embarrassed, they don't want to talk about it, they're

uncomfortable. And you can gauge

how much to push in those moments. Like, you can revisit the

conversation possibly at a different time. So if

you notice that everyone is, like, hungry, or you only have

three minutes, or they just told you that they wanted to go jump on the

trampoline, or that they were you excited to do something

and now you're having this conversation, it might not be the best timing.

So just be aware of that, that maybe you need to do it at a

different time. But in general, if you have a really. A kid who really

resists these conversations and they keep resisting, then it's important to just

say, listen, I know you don't want to have this conversation, but we are going

to have it, and you're not in trouble. But it is my job to teach

you some new things. And so I want you to sit and we're going to

talk about this. Okay? So you do have to sometimes

just say, this is happening. Okay? So you're doing that reflection.

You're explaining, hey, people have. This is for teaching self regulation.

You know what? Sometimes people have big feelings in their bodies. They come on

really strong. They're like a big wave. We don't know what to do with them.

They just crash out of us. Has that ever happened to you before?

And then you can say, you know, some people, they run away and hide. Some

people, when they have big feelings, they want to fight. What type of person are

you Are you a runner or a fighter? What do you think?

So even a 2 year old, not 2, but 3 year old,

can you can have this conversation? I think, you know, they're like, I don't know.

And you're like, well, I see you fight. Sometimes you want to like hit mommy.

Or maybe they're a runner. And you're like, yeah, I noticed that

sometimes if I say, hey, you know, you need to stop doing that, that you'll

run away from me and hide. So that makes sense, right?

Makes sense. You might act that way when you have big feelings.

So again, we're reflecting, we're talking about it saying there's

nothing wrong with having big feelings. When that big wave comes

and your body takes over, your brain

isn't in charge, right? Your brain is like

a race car and your body does not have brakes and it

just happens. And it might be hard for you to stay

calm and it might be hard to think about what you're supposed to do. So

it makes sense that sometimes you would hit your brother or

you know, run away or spit or. Right? So

we're really talking about their behavior and we're talking about

why it's happening and reflecting and giving them a

chance to kind of have a conversation about that too.

And you're being as neutral as you can, just very normalizing. Like this

happens, especially when you're young, you're not sure how to handle this.

That's okay. So the teaching part is where you set the

boundary and you talk about what is okay and what

you expect. So you say, in this

family, it's my job to keep everyone safe and protect the items

in our house. So when someone fights their feelings by

hitting or kicking or biting or name calling, the other people in our house don't

feel safe. So I understand that your body is out of

control when you're upset, but from now on, I'm going to make sure

everyone and everything is safe in our house.

When it comes to big feelings, it's your job to figure

out how to deal with your feelings without hurting others. So you're really telling

your child you have big feelings, your big feelings are

normal, but how you are handling those big feelings

isn't safe. And it's my job to keep everyone

safe. So we have to come up with new ways for you to manage your

big feelings. And then you kind of like wait a little,

like slow down in this conversation, just really kind of help them understand.

Do you think it's good for mommy to keep everyone safe?

Do you feel sometimes it's not safe when you get hit

or when your brother or sister or mommy yells at you. And if they're a

little bit older and you're not using mommy, you can say it a little bit

different affect. You can say like it's kind of hard, right, when someone is

yelling or like somebody keeps kicking everybody in the family. Like, you

know, that doesn't feel good, does it? So you're getting a little

bit of buy in. You're getting a little bit of understanding that that behavior

doesn't work. Then you teach them a new skill.

This is the skill I'd like you to teach your kids in terms of preventing

meltdowns in the long term. And that is the calm break.

If you think about self regulation, what you've

been learning for yourself, you learned the calm break, right? Which is

catch yourself, have awareness, label your emotions, move

your body, move your mind. Your child can learn

the same skill set. Instead of awareness,

you're going to have your child ask for help. So we're thinking about

the acronym of CALM and you're teaching your

child. When you feel like you have big feelings in your

body, the first thing I want you to do is letter C, catch

yourself and stop. Letter A, ask for help, say I

need help. L, Label. Label

your feelings. Say I'm mad. M. Move your

body. You have to do something to move the big feelings through

your body. Do you can reinforce? Do you understand?

Okay. Do you want to draw it on a piece of paper? Do you want

to draw pictures of it? What would it look like? Really spend time

teaching this concept of teaching your child that the calm

break. C, catch yourself and stop.

A, ask for help. L. Label your feelings.

M. Move your body. If you could teach your

child and they can like grasp this concept, you would prevent

meltdowns long term for sure. Because your child is

building all that self awareness in that they understand they're

dysregulated, right? They catch themselves, they ask for help,

and then they say, my feelings, I'm very mad. And then they know to

move their body. That's emotional literacy. That's the basics of

emotional literacy. I know what I'm feeling, I know how to talk about it, I

know what to do with it. Giving your kids the calm break

is a really useful tool for them to learn how

to self regulate. They catch themselves, they ask for help,

they label their feeling, they move their body. So in this coaching

conversation, you're actually teaching them a set of

skills that will help them self regulate. Very

powerful. The last part of any Coaching,

conversation. Reflect is first, teach is second, and then the third

is practice. So you give them the concept of the calm

break and then you say, okay, let's practice that. Let's

imagine a scenario where you have a big feeling in your

body. Maybe you're try to use something that actually

happened. Like, let's think about something that happened. Maybe you

notice that I gave your brother or sister something

that you want it and I give it to them first and you feel jealous.

Or I'm talking on the phone, I'm not paying attention to you.

Or you feel like sad. You had a hard day at school,

you are mad at your teacher and you get in the car and you want

to start hitting your brother or sister. Or it's

bedtime and mommy says it's time to go to bed and you start running around

the house screaming and screaming and screaming. Okay, so what

you're supposed to do, remember what's the first. What's the letter C? Catch

yourself. Right. So I want you to catch yourself.

Notice that you are

showing your feelings through your body. And then I want you to a.

What's A? Ask for help. Okay, so you say, I need help

and label your feeling. I'm mad. What are you feeling

when you are going to bed and you don't want to go to bed?

What's that feeling called? Yeah, it's called sad.

What's it called when you think that I'm not going to pay attention

to you? What's that called? Yeah, disappointed.

What about when you have had a really hard day and you have a lot

of big feelings? What's that called? It's called overwhelm. Okay?

Right. What are you going to do? You're going to say you're going to catch

yourself. You're going to notice that you have your big feelings or your behavior,

that you're not listening to mommy or that you're hurting someone

and say, I need help, I'm mad, I need help, I'm

overwhelmed, I need help, I'm sad. So you're going to ask for

help and you're going to label your feeling. And then what

can you do with sad feelings? What are some ideas?

This might be where you teach them the ideas that I talked about in last

week's episode of you can push your big feelings out. You can

pull in your feelings and take care of yourself, or you can

move your big feelings around. So if you want to

bite, what can you do instead? You can go

push something. You can go get snuggly. You can do A little

shaky dance. What if you want to scream at

mom, mom and dad? What if you want to yell? What if you want to

throw things? Okay, so you can go throw something heavy,

you know, not something safe with it, as long as it's safe. So you can

go, like throw a ball on the outside, or you can go jump on the

trampoline, or you can push against the wall, or you can take pillows. You

can throw them on the ground really hard, or you can go get

comfort. You can color, you can draw, you can turn on music. You can

go wash your hands. You can drink some water, or

you could just shake it out a little bit. This is the

time, parents, where you are teaching your children some of those

tools of the grounding stomp, right? I'm

mad. Letting them stomp their feet or doing

those push ups. Like, frustrated. I'm frustrated. And they're pushing

against the wall, or they're like,

I'm mad, I'm sad. And they're doing one of those little bear crawls, or

they're slithering or like a snake. So you're

giving them the calm break. And when you're teaching them about moving your body

and you're practicing, this is where you're actually practicing

how to do those things. So you can clap your hands together.

You can. Or you can be quiet if you have big feelings. Sometimes big

feelings need you to be quiet. We need to pull it in a little bit

so you can wrap yourself in a blanket. You can do that. Those butterfly hugs.

Let me show you what a butterfly hug is. And you teach them to cross

their arm, their hands across their chest, and

tap each shoulder alternately and squeeze their shoulders a little

bit and give themselves a big hug. Or you can teach them that

squeeze and release, Squeeze their hands, squeeze their jaw, squeeze their eyeballs,

squeeze their chest, squeeze their belly, squeeze their legs, right? And then

let it go. You can talk to them about how

these big feelings, these big waves come up in their body and that

they have to let those big feelings move through their body.

And that's their job, is when they notice that they're having big

feelings that they're not need to catch themselves. Letter C,

ask for help, label their feeling and then move their body.

You can also teach them how to move it around, shake it off. Sometimes big

feelings need to be shaken out. Sometimes big feelings need to be, you

know, danced. Sometimes we need to dance them out. Sometimes we need to

swing our arms together or we need to sing songs.

Sometimes we need to go hum really loud.

I want you to be proactively teaching your children

how to regulate their

nervous system by having this coaching conversation.

The first time you have this conversation, you're

introducing the concept of feelings drive

behavior. You're introducing the concept that

when we have big feelings, we have to move our body.

That when we have big feelings, we can't just do whatever

we want to do. Like we can't just hit, scream, kick, punch, pull, run away.

We can't do those things because that doesn't help other people.

Instead, we have to find new ways to cope with our big feelings. That's

why moving our body, asking for help and moving our body,

then you're going to have this conversation multiple times

because your child isn't going to necessarily

catch everything the first time. This is kind of an error

in thinking that we have around our kids. Like, they should know this already.

Well, they either forgot or they couldn't have capacity to that

part of their brain or their big feelings were too much

for them, so they couldn't catch the feelings in time in order to

pivot their behavior. Your kid needs

more support when they have more dysregulation. They need

to be having these coaching conversations more often.

And you're gonna have to teach this multiple times. And then

when you teach it in advance, like preventatively, then when you're in

the middle of those big feeling cycles, you're able to say, oh, remember, calm

break. You're supposed to be moving your body. Oh,

remember, calm break. You're supposed to say what you're feeling.

Oh, remember, calm break. You need to ask for help.

So you can then cue your child by

referencing back what you taught them. Now, if you don't feel

comfortable using calm break, that's fine. However it feels to

you, my parents that I work with are always so creative. They come up with

so many different ways to teach concepts. I love it. This is my best

attempt. But if you come up with a better way to teach big feelings, wonderful.

My hope for you and for your family is that you do take the time

to have these coaching conversations and teach your child

what, why they're misbehaving, that their feelings make sense,

validating them, letting them know why that behavior doesn't work. It usually

hurts or bothers other people, and then that they have to

learn how to do a new skill. And

that's really what coaching conversations are all about, is

kind of reflecting on what's been happening, teaching why it doesn't work and what

they need to do instead. And then practicing and recognizing

you're going to have to do that multiple times throughout their

childhood and even in adolescence so that they

learn those skills. What's really amazing is as you teach this, you'll get

better at it for yourself. You just will. You'll be able

to coach yourself towards emotional

regulation because you are cognitively practicing

how to self regulate. You're like trying to teach your kids something

so you're becoming better at it so that you could teach it. Which

is why I'm very good at teaching it, right? Because I've taught it so many

times. And I'm very good at practicing it because I've taught it so many times.

Taught it to my kids, myself, my clients, Right? You guys on

the podcast. So the more you think about

self regulation, the more you think about strategies to cope with big

feelings, the more time you spend investing

in your own self regulation, the better you'll get at teaching your

kids and the better regulated they will be. Now, this is not

foolproof, right? We're preventing meltdowns in the long term.

So we are giving our kids skills over time

so that they grow up to be emotionally regulated.

I want, when I think about your kids, like, of course, I want to eliminate

hitting and kicking and punching and spitting and all those things when they're little,

but I also want to eliminate other maladaptive

strategies that they might get into when they get a little bit older, like

gossiping or talking back to the teacher or being

mean or giving up on homework or any

of those other behaviors, right? Then in adolescence, maybe there's

risky behaviors that they start to experiment with.

I want your children to grow up in a way that they don't

have to use maladaptive strategies to cope with negative emotion.

And the way that you teach that is over time, you teach them

about emotion, how it works in their body.

Then you teach them, teach them skills to cope with that emotion, to

process that emotion in healthier ways. And it takes

time. It does, because they're little. They need to learn it over and over and

over again. And you're a great teacher. You're their parent. You

were put here for them. For whatever reason, you

are bonded in some sort of soul contract, if you will.

And you're meant to be their parent, and so you are. And it's. You can

figure this out. You can figure out how to teach these skills to this particular

kid. And hopefully practicing

the coaching conversation is a framework for

you so that you can teach your child how to manage their

emotions long term so that you have fewer meltdowns.

Now and all the way through their childhood and

adolescence. Okay. I hope this was helpful. I'm sure it was.

Thank you. Please let me know if you enjoyed this episode. If you have

questions, you can reply to the email. If you're on my email list, or

you can DM me in Instagram. I'm not as good at

getting back on Instagram, but reach out and let me know your

thoughts. Or if you have questions or you find little obstacles,

I'd love to talk to you. All right. I

will talk to you next week. I hope you have a good one.