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Promoting Healing and Resilience: Trauma-Informed Parenting Strategies for Self-Regulation in Children

Trauma-informed parenting is an approach to parenting that considers the impact of trauma on a child’s emotional and psychological well-being. It recognizes that children who have experienced trauma, abuse, or neglect may struggle to regulate their emotions, form positive relationships, and cope with stress.

Trauma-informed parenting involves creating a safe, stable, and supportive environment for children who have experienced trauma. It emphasizes the importance of safety and predictability while promoting healing and resilience.

Trauma-informed parenting also emphasizes the importance of understanding a child’s trauma history and its impact on their behavior and emotions. This involves being aware of triggers that may re-traumatize a child and learning to respond in a supportive and validating way.

Trauma-informed parenting uses positive discipline strategies that teach appropriate behavior and promote self-regulation rather than punishment or harsh discipline. It also emphasizes the importance of helping children build positive relationships and promoting their sense of self-worth.

Overall, trauma-informed parenting is an approach that emphasizes understanding and responding to a child’s needs in a way that promotes healing, resilience, and positive development.

Promoting self-regulation in a traumatized child can be a challenging but essential aspect of trauma-informed parenting. Self-regulation involves a child’s ability to manage their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in response to internal and external stressors.

Here are some strategies parents can use to promote self-regulation in their traumatized child:

  1. Model self-regulation: Children learn through observation, so parents must model healthy self-regulation strategies, such as deep breathing, mindfulness, or other coping techniques.
  2. Provide a predictable routine: A consistent and predictable pattern can provide a sense of safety and security for a traumatized child, which can help promote self-regulation.
  3. Create a calming environment: Creating a calm and soothing environment can help a child feel more relaxed and in control, which can help promote self-regulation. This may involve using soft lighting, calming music, or other sensory tools.
  4. Teach coping skills: Teach your child healthy coping skills, such as deep breathing, mindfulness, or other relaxation techniques, to help them manage their emotions and calm their body.
  5. Use positive reinforcement: Praise your child when they demonstrate self-regulation skills and reinforce positive behavior with rewards or incentives.
  6. Encourage physical activity: Physical activity can help a child release pent-up energy and emotions, which can help promote self-regulation. Encourage your child to participate in sports, dance, or yoga activities.

Parents can use these strategies to help their traumatized child develop healthy self-regulation skills, promoting healing, resilience, and positive development.

Self-Regulation

Promoting self-regulation in a traumatized child can be a challenging but essential aspect of trauma-informed parenting. Self-regulation involves a child’s ability to manage their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in response to internal and external stressors.

Here are some strategies parents can use to promote self-regulation in their traumatized child:

  1. Model self-regulation: Children learn through observation, so parents must model healthy self-regulation strategies, such as deep breathing, mindfulness, or other coping techniques.
  2. Provide a predictable routine: A consistent and predictable pattern can provide a sense of safety and security for a traumatized child, which can help promote self-regulation.
  3. Create a calming environment: Creating a calm and soothing environment can help a child feel more relaxed and in control, which can help promote self-regulation. This may involve using soft lighting, calming music, or other sensory tools.
  4. Teach coping skills: Teach your child healthy coping skills, such as deep breathing, mindfulness, or other relaxation techniques, to help them manage their emotions and calm their body.
  5. Use positive reinforcement: Praise your child when they demonstrate self-regulation skills and reinforce positive behavior with rewards or incentives.
  6. Encourage physical activity: Physical activity can help a child release pent-up energy and emotions, which can help promote self-regulation. Encourage your child to participate in sports, dance, or yoga activities.

Parents can use these strategies to help their traumatized child develop healthy self-regulation skills, promoting healing, resilience, and positive development.

Let Ron Huxley help you and your family find a pathway to healing. Schedule a session today by clicking here!

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How’s your engine today?

An occupational therapist friend of mine likes to ask her kids, when she greets them, how’s your engine today? What she is referring to is are they feeling/behaving fast or slow? Are they a little on the hyper side or sluggish? Manic or depressed? You get the idea…

It is a simple gauge of where she needs to go in treatment. If they say it is running fast then she engages them in activities to bring that engine down to a more resting baseline where she can do more introverted or detailed work. Every try to get a child to sit still and concentrate when thy are hyper? That’s a good way for everyone to be frustrated.

Use this at home by talking about a train engine that can run really fast or very slow. Connect it to stimulating events (fuel) that goes into their engines (mind/body/emotions) or lack of stimulation that causes them to be bored or “tired” or sluggish. Plan some interventions to bring them back to a mid-line energy level. Don’t try to do homework if they aren’t in the “zone”. You will be glad you took the time to modify their energy.

Share your thoughts on this parenting tool by leaving a comment or posting on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/parentingtoolbox

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Children with strong vocabulary show boost in self-control

According to a study published in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly journal, three little words may help young children increase their self-control abilities. Those three little words aren’t what you think. Encouraging children to “use your words” builds their vocabulary, which helps children to regulate emotions and behavior. Researchers discovered that vocabulary development proved to be even more important in helping boys increase their self-control abilities.

Claire Vallotton, PhD, and Catherine Ayoub, PhD, followed children participating in the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation study from the time they were 1 year old up to 3 years old. They discovered that boys with a strong vocabulary showed a dramatic increase in their ability to self-regulate as compared to boys with vocabularies not as strong.

Research in Action: ABC Music & Me

ABC Music & Me supports the development of key school-readiness skills, such as listening, self-control, and turn-taking. Our weekly lessons also significantly boost language and literacy skills, including vocabulary development. Picture vocabulary cards support unit-by-unit vocabulary, comprehension, memory, and pre-literacy skills. We give teachers the tools they need to increase a child’s vocabulary knowledge and then actively begin “using their words” in the class.

Ron Huxley Regulates: I was drawn to this article at the work “regulation.” This has become a big word in children’s mental health and hopefully parenting education will follow suite. Attachment researcher Daniel Siegal defines regulations as “the way the mind organizes its own functioning…fundamentally related to the modulation of emotion…Emotion regulation is initially developed from within interpersonal experiences in a process that establishes self-organizational abilities.”

Stated in plain English, regulation is how children achieve self-control and manage impulses. Language, as the original blog post describes assists us in forming structure to our emotional energy and manage them. It is crucial in our brain development and connects to other important social constructs like moral behavior, abstract thinking/reasoning, planning, and judgement.

A question we could ponder is which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do we develop language and then achieve regulation or do we achieve regulation and then master language. I think they go together myself.

Share your thoughts…

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What’s Behind A Temper Tantrum? Scientists Deconstruct The Screams

Anatomy Of A Tantrum

Source: YouTube (by permission), iStockphoto.com

Credit: NPR

Children’s temper tantrums are widely seen as many things: the cause of profound helplessness among parents; a source of dread for airline passengers stuck next to a young family; a nightmare for teachers. But until recently, they had not been considered a legitimate subject for science.

Now research suggests that, beneath all the screams and kicking and shouting, lies a phenomenon that is entirely amenable to scientific dissection. Tantrums turn out to have a pattern and rhythm to them. Once understood, researchers say, this pattern can help parents, teachers and even hapless bystanders respond more effectively to temper tantrums — and help clinicians tell the difference between ordinary tantrums, which are a normal part of a child’s development, and those that may be warning signals of an underlying disorder.

The key to a new theory of tantrums lies in a detailed analysis of the sounds that toddlers make during tantrums. In a new paper published in the journal Emotion, scientists found that different toddler sounds – or “vocalizations” – emerge and fade in a definite rhythm in the course of a tantrum.

“We have the most quantitative theory of tantrums that has ever been developed in the history of humankind,” said study co-author Michael Potegal of the University of Minnesota, half in jest and half seriously.

 

The first challenge was to collect tantrum sounds, says co-author James A. Green of the University of Connecticut.

“We developed a onesie that toddlers can wear that has a high-quality wireless microphone sewn into it,” Green said. “Parents put this onesie on the child and press a go button.”

The wireless microphone fed into a recorder that ran for several hours. If the toddler had a meltdown during that period, the researchers obtained a high-quality audio recording. Over time, Green and Potegal said they collected more than a hundred tantrums in high-fidelity audio.

The scientists then analyzed the audio. They found that different tantrum sounds had very distinct audio signatures. When the sounds were laid down on a graph, the researchers found that different sounds emerged and faded in a definite pattern. Unsurprisingly, sounds like yelling and screaming usually came together.

“Screaming and yelling and kicking often go together,” Potegal said. “Throwing things and pulling and pushing things tend to go together. Combinations of crying, whining, falling to the floor and seeking comfort — and these also hang together.”

But where one age-old theory of tantrums might suggest that meltdowns begin in anger (yells and screams) and end in sadness (cries and whimpers), Potegal found that the two emotions were more deeply intertwined.

“The impression that tantrums have two stages is incorrect,” Potegal said. “In fact, the anger and the sadness are more or less simultaneous.”

Understanding that tantrums have a rhythm can not only help parents know when to intervene, but also give them a sense of control.

Green and Potegal found that sad sounds tended to occur throughout tantrums. Superimposed on them were sharp peaks of yelling and screaming: anger.

The trick in getting a tantrum to end as soon as possible, Potegal said, was to get the child past the peaks of anger. Once the child was past being angry, what was left was sadness, and sad children reach out for comfort. The quickest way past the anger, the scientists said, was to do nothing. Of course, that isn’t easy for parents or caregivers to do.

“When I’m advising people about anger, I say, ‘There’s an anger trap,”’ Potegal said.

Even asking questions can prolong the anger — and the tantrum.

That’s what parents Noemi and David Doudna of Sunnyvale, Calif., found. Their daughter Katrina once had a meltdown at dinnertime because she wanted to sit at one corner of the dining table. Problem was, the table didn’t have any corners – it was round. When David Doudna asked Katrina where she wanted to sit, the tantrum only intensified.

“You know, when children are at the peak of anger and they’re screaming and they’re kicking, probably asking questions might prolong that period of anger,” said Green. “It’s difficult for them to process information. And to respond to a question that the parent is asking them may be just adding more information into the system than they can really cope with.”

In a video of the tantrum that Noemi Doudna posted on YouTube, Katrina’s tantrum intensified to screaming, followed by the child throwing herself to the floor and pushing a chair against a wall.

“Tantrums tend to often have this flow where the buildup is often quite quick to a peak of anger,” Green said.

Understanding that tantrums have a rhythm can not only help parents know when to intervene, but also give them a sense of control, Green said.

That’s because, when looked at scientifically, tantrums are no different than thunderstorms or other natural phenomena. Studying them as scientific subjects rather than experiencing them like parents can cause the tantrums to stop feeling traumatic and even become interesting.

“When we’re walking down the street or see a child having a tantrum, I comment on the child’s technique,” Potegal said. “[I] mutter to my family, ‘Good data,’ and they all laugh.”

Noemi Doudna said she now looks back on Katrina’s tantrums and sees the humor in them.

Katrina often demanded things that made no sense in the course of tantrums, Noemi Doudna said. She once said, “’I don’t want my feet. Take my feet off. I don’t want my feet. I don’t want my feet!’”

When nothing calmed the child down, Noemi Doudna added, “I once teased her — which turned out to be a big mistake — I once said, ‘Well, OK, let’s go get some scissors and take care of your feet.’”

Her daughter’s response, Noemi Doudna recalled, was a shriek: “Nooooo!!”

via npr.org

Ron Huxley’s Reaction: I enjoyed this story on several levels: 1. It helps parents normalize a very frustrating behavior problem and informs them that the best thing they can do is “nothing.” I would add that “nothing” doesn’t mean no empathy. Sit with the child and make sure they don’t hurt themselves accidently but don’t give them any extra attention either. This makes it worse. 2. It links the emotional connection between anger and sadness. Anger is a very irrational behavior that is pure emotional brain with no logic. Anger pushes others away. Sadness draws them closer and is usually what underlies the harsher, more energetic emotion of anger.

OK, one more point: 3. A child’s nervous system is literally trained by an empathic but non-attention getting response to a child’s tantrum. The cause of tantrums is an undeveloped nervous system that requires external input to develop regulation and self-control. That is the job of the parents. Have fun 🙂