My fanatical solid belief in the principles of
connected parenting continues to grow each time I witness them in action. Sometimes these days I suffer from short-term
memory loss and after a few “good days” forget the power of connected parenting
when a child is disregulated. Yesterday
I had a slap in the face refresher course!
My sweet AS (adopted son), age 8 and adopted at 6 years old,
was scheduled for a pre-op appointment with his ENT (ear, nose and throat
doctor). Everything was rolling along
perfectly… lulling me into not even thinking about what kind of trauma this
might cause for my kiddo. Mind you, this
is a child who has had multiple medical trauma in his short eight years not to
mention abandonment, institutionalized living in a 3rd world
orphanage and adoption into a family that looked, smelled, sounded, acted
different from anyone he had ever encountered before. AND I am a mom who has been a proponent of
TBRI© (Trust BasedRelational Intervention©) for the past year
and ½ and really should know better by now.
We drove to the appointment, walked into the office, checked in…
all without any sign of anything out of the ordinary (ordinary for a
neurotypical child, anyway). He started
to play alongside a little 3-year-old boy with a large wooden box that had several
tactile activities. He suddenly grasped
the top of one of the bars on the box and started shaking it roughly.
I leaned over to him and reminded him to be “gentle and kind”
especially when playing with other children and that shaking the box might
scare the other child or make it difficult for him to play. He took one look at me, turned back to the
box, reached out and shook the box even more vehemently.
At this point I wasn’t sure where we were going with this so I
pulled him up into the chair against me, leaned down and started doing some
digging… “Are you angry?”, “Is there something else you want to do?” as well as come boundary setting… “I can’t
let you play by the box when you aren’t being safe. Is there something else you’d like to
do?”
He got angrier and angrier… even to the point of starting to growl
at me. I started trying our regulation
tricks. “Sounds like your motor is
running pretty high right now. Want to
come out in the hallway with mom and jump around for a few minutes?” “I’ve got an idea! Let’s blow invisible bubbles!” Instead he stood and starting blowing
raspberries directly into my face.
I got down at eye level and told him I was going to have him sit
next to me while we talked about our rules.
Sometimes we can circumvent a melt down by talking about our three
rules:
o
Respect
o
Stick Together
o
No Hurts
He immediately started snarling the exact opposite of each
rule. Then he pulled his fist back as if
getting ready to punch me. By this time
everyone and their mothers had their eyes glued to our little corner of
the waiting room. I gently pulled his
hand down with mine and just held it. I
took a couple of deep breaths trying to figure out what to do next. In that brief moment, he pulled away and
smacked me in the face. I put my arms
around him, picked him up and started out the door as he screamed. I put him down and walked him to end of the
hallway which was somewhat secluded but visible to anyone walking in the
hall. I retried asking if he was angry,
repeating our rules, talking about being safe but clearly we were past that
point.
Suddenly a question popped into my head. Don’t ask me why I hadn’t thought of it but
I’m pretty sure it was a supernatural prompting because at this point I was
working to keep my own person from lashing out self regulated.
“Are you nervous?”
He just glared at me.
“Are you scared to see the doctor?”
“NO!”
I tried again.
“Are you maybe a little
nervous? Because, you know what? There aren’t any shots or blood or anything
today. The doctor is just going to make
sure you’re ready for surgery next week.
That’s all.”
He just tensed and glared.
The words just started coming out and I honestly do not know
where they came from. Maybe hours of
Karyn Purvis videos or chapter after chapter of Heather Forbes material or Facebook
post after Facebook post from other parents.
“Let me tell you a story.”
He did not look impressed.
“Once there was a little purple boy named Lilu (his Chinese
name and now his middle name) who lived in a castle in China.”
“That’s me.”
“It is? How do you
know?”
“Because I have purple eyes (this is a joke I use when I’m
trying to get eye contact from him)”.
“Hmmm… might be.
Well, Purple Lilu had a doctor appointment and he was very nervous. He thought there were going to be shots and
needles and didn’t want to go so his engine started running really high. His mommy thought maybe he was angry. But the good news was that Lilu’s mommy was
going to be next to him the whole time at the doctor. No matter what.”
Ok. I think I may
have started to lose him when I made up that last plot twist. Too soon?
Muscles still tense.
No glare.
“The horse ran right up to him and asked Lilu what grade he
was in. Lilu said, ‘2nd grade!’
very proudly. The green horse with the
yellow hair laughed and said, ‘I don’t believe that! You’re not a 2nd grader!’”
I’m glimpsing a tiny flicker of interest in this green
horse.
“NO! 10…9!!!”
I glanced up at him with a surprised look on my face.
“What? Really? Ok… you better help Lilu here.”
Together we started counting backward from 10 and with each
number I saw his body relax a little bit more until at 1 his engine was no
longer running high.
I continued, afraid to break the magic moment.
“’Oh yeah?” said the green horse. ‘Well, I’m in 2nd grade
too!!!’ Lilu looked at the horse and
then started laughing hysterically. ‘You
silly! Horses don’t go to school!”
My little guy bursts out laughing. This was it.
This was the break through moment.
We sat talking about stories for a minute and then I asked
him if he was ready to go back into the waiting room. We went back in and I pulled him up on my lap
and held him close and said I was sorry for not realizing that he was
nervous. He snuggled up to me until they
called his name at which point he jumped up and practically ran into the exam
room.
The doctor came in and the first thing he asked my son was
how he was doing.
My little looked right up at him and said, “Well, at first I
was really nervous. But now I’m ok.”
Connected Parenting
for the win!
*Epilogue: To avoid
the risk of sounding like a permissive parent I think it’s important to add
that once we left the office and were by ourselves we talked about how to tell
mommy he was nervous instead of using angry things and hurts to tell me and
then we walked through apologizing for hurting mommy and not showing respect to
me or the people in the waiting room and different words to say instead.
