Scott Schimmel 0:20
So what do you do when you are in a bit of a crisis moment with your kids? Now, you might not call it a crisis, let's call it a challenge. Because not everything is a crisis. But sometimes it feels that way.
Your kid gets into a situation you have a big reaction. How do you handle it? And have you ever had a moment where you wanted to go back in time, and redo it all over again. Welcome to another episode of The YouSchool podcast. I'm Scott Schimmel. And today we're digging into what we call the parent challenge. It's this gauntlet moment that we get into his parents, I would dare say a
day doesn't go by when there's not some moment where a kid presents a unique challenge to us, that requires us to flip through the manual, flip through the handbook and see an empty page for the particular situation that we find ourselves in. A couple of quick examples- We have a daughter who's off on a school trip on the East Coast for spring break. And we get the text message that she forgot her dress back in the hotel that she needs to wear to go see Hamilton. What do you do? What do you do? Do you rescue? Do you send? Can we Amazon Prime address? Do we let her just figure it out? What do you do? There's no There's no page in the manual for that. You get a text from one of your teenagers who says "Wait a sec, why did you change all my screen time? Where is TikTok?" Where's the manual for that? You find out that one of your kids is being excluded from a group of friends just being maybe not totally bullied, but there's a there's kind of an element of concern that's growing, that you're not quite sure how to handle it. You don't really know what to do- this is, this is the parent challenge. And the subtext for this episode is "In case of emergency..." What do you do? Protocol, process. That's what I want. That's what I believe that we need as parents. How are we going to go about resolving the issue, particularly for these uncharted moments that we find ourselves in. We can't go back to our memories for our parents and how they dealt with us because well, our perspective is skewed and two the the challenges we face as parents today are drastically different than our parents faced, when we were the same age as our kids. Here is a step by step process that you can follow. And I would love to see this like an app on the phone, like a timeout before you proceed. In case of emergency break this glass. Okay. If, I don't know if you like acronyms, I'm not the biggest acronym guy, but this works in an acronym. You've got your situation, you find yourself in a moment- your kid is late, and they're yelling at you. You your kid asked to go to a sleepover birthday party, and you don't know any of the kids or the parents and they're gonna feel left out. It's these kinds of moments. What classes should I take next quarter? I it's it's due, it's late, and I need help right now! It's all these kinds of situations. So first, before going to overreaction before just going specifically to solve the problem, before going to blame. Why didn't you tell me that earlier? You know what we say about that. Like, whatever the typical normal reaction that you have, this is the process to walk through so that you don't overreact. You don't create bigger problems, or separate problems. And you actually think wisely to help your kid, guide your kid through these situations. And to do it with calm and with wisdom. That's, that's what we're looking at. Acronym is "Coach" C.O.A.C.H. And the first one I see is Check. Check in with yourself. If you see yourself in an emergency crisis moment, a challenging moment with your kid, check in with yourself. And here's what's super helpful. Check to see how you're feeling- physically, physically, within a split second. When we feel like we are in danger, something that's important to us feels threatened. It is so, so quick. We are so quick. It happens in a split second, where we go immediately to reaction mode. We stop thinking, so in order to come back to our senses, we have to do a little bit of orienting, checking in with ourselves. And even to notice where in which we're like all of a sudden, is this the pit of the stomach? Is this clenched back? Is this furrowed brow? Like where... Check in with yourself. What are you feeling physically? What are you feeling emotionally and what feels threatened to you? Is it reputation? Is it safety? Is it of a future worst case scenario? Is it one of your values? What feels threatened to you in this moment? You're probably going into protection mode. That's what many parents we do, as a default reaction. So to... and that rarely helps us to really think clearly or wisely. Sometimes, of course, situations of crisis, we got to protect them. But most of the time, it's not an urgent crisis. It just feels like it is. Our kids are presenting it to us like it's an emergency. Or there's some time orientation- we got to figure this out pretty soon, pretty quickly. But before you do anything, check in with yourself. That's number one. The next one would be to zoom out, O. C. O-outward, go outward, go to like the bigger picture. So checking in with yourself is a movement inwards. Now we're going to kind of like zoom out. Look out at what's going on. And one thing you might want to look out on is your kid's state. Maybe you've heard this acronym, H.A.L.T. It was an acronym that I was much more familiar with when I had kids who were toddlers. If your kid is having a tantrum before you go to like, let's say, disciplining them go through H.A.L.T. Are they hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? Are they hungry? Give them a snack. Are they angry? Pacify them. Are they lonely? Connect with them, play with them? Are they tired? Give them a nap. So many of the problems that our kids present to us kind of sit in that realm- in their version of survival mode. So zooming out is kind of like- wait a second, before we check in with myself. I'm feeling triggered. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling like I'm in a crisis. But let me zoom out. How are you doing? And maybe we'll just come back to this after after dinner. Let's get a snack, first. Let's run and get a smoothie. Let's let's go get ice cream real fast. And then we'll figure out what to do. Zoom out. Zooming out also means we're looking at the bigger picture. What shift do you see your kid is in? There are these big shifts, and we'll cover this probably in the next week's episode, these big life shifts from childhood to adulthood that kids often find themselves in, and there's turmoil in the midst of that, and they're not only going through their own shifts, but we as parents are shifting with them. And a lot of times there's friction in the middle of those like kind of threshold moments, that space in between one stage to the next. So zooming out to help see where are they? What, what developmentally are we talking about for where they're at? We're going to check in with ourselves, we're going to zoom outward, then we're going to Assess- what's the real problem we're trying to solve here? Is there a decision to be made? Is there a deadline? Is there somebody else that we need to include? Like, let's actually figure out what the issue is? Do we need to buy a dress? Or can you borrow one? Do we need to check in with the parents who were going to be at that sleepover? Or is it a definite no, because we got bad vibes. Let's actually assess what the problem is and assess what our options are. Looking at options, we can buy the dress, we can send you a dress, you can borrow a dress, we can send you money, we can figure this out, we can go and have a playdate with that kid before the sleepover to see if it's good fit, we can do other things before we get there. Before we make the decision. Again, this is so different than overreacting and having a big fight. And if you're assessing the problem, you're coming up with some version of a solution or to a couple paths that we can take. And they might have seen significant consequences. It might mean that your kid gets madder at you, might mean that you have to make a hard call that they're not gonna like. It might require more of your time and your energy your money. And that's where Confirming... confirm with someone else, spouse, another friend, a parent, maybe your therapist, if you got them, by text. Here's what I'm thinking about doing. Does this make sense? C.O.A.C.H... Have a go at it. How'd you like that? Check in with yourself. Zoom out, look out. What's the bigger picture? Where's your kid out? What are our family's values? Assess what the real problem is? What our options are? Check and confirm with somebody else. Is this making sense? Does this sound like a good course of action? And then have a go. Which is so much, isn't that what parenting is? That phrase it's "have a, let's have a go at it". Let's see if this works. Let's test this. But if you go through these steps, as I've been testing this in my own life, I feel infinitely calmer, clearer. And I feel like I'm actually poised with my kid to learn through this situation, and not just regret this moment.
I'm not creating a bigger significant crisis based on my big reaction. I want to do this, I want to learn how to do this step by step through really every big serious moment with my kids. And big can be big to them or big to me or big in the scheme of things.
I want to be able to walk through this until it becomes natural and normal. Where what's normal to me and maybe what's even normal to you, as we get into these challenging moments, is to coach ourselves through this process, so that we and our kids watch us and experience us calm, clear, headed, wise, deliberate, strategic. And we're able to learn as we have a go at things with our lives. So hopefully, that's helpful. The parent challenge, welcome. I know you're in it, because I'm in it, too. We're all in it. But I think there's a better way to handle these crisis moments. So I'd love to hear how this works for you.
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai
