Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Again, just well done for making the time to tune into this little podcast. This week I wanted to sort of extend the theme that we began last time of meltdowns.
It's such a big theme, you know, it's maybe worth a little bit of a follow-up from last week. But today I wanted to look through the lens of meltdowns being caused by an imagination gone wrong. What I mean by that is that I've watched kids, you know, very often have meltdowns in all kinds of situations and tantrums.
And it's often caused by something that they expect. There's like an imagined outcome. They've got this expectation of how they want things to go.
It's like a play scenario. They're playing with other kids and they've got this imagination of how the whole play scene is going to go and who's going to do what and how it's going to turn out. And then, of course, other kids start to have their imagination too.
And for very deeply imaginative kids that can be challenging. It can really be challenging because it's not turning out the way they imagined it. Likewise with projects, you know, a child might take on a project of some sort and they've got this amazing idea of how it's going to look.
And they've really developed this whole way of how it's going to be and how it's going to work. And then it doesn't. And they get very frustrated and they'll throw the scissors and smash down on the cardboard box and, you know, scream and on the floor and flail.
You know, this is when it gets dramatic. It might not get as dramatic as that, but it's certainly, you know, a big outburst of emotions. Or I saw a child once just screw up the page.
He was trying to draw a horse and the horse looked like a cow. And even when the teacher was in a school, tried to help him have it look a little bit more like a horse. He got very angry and no and covered up his work and put his head down on the desk and wouldn't talk and have ended up running out the classroom.
It's sort of, I don't know if this sounds a kind of counterintuitive to you, but I've noticed meltdowns often come from children with really big imaginations. And it's an imagination gone wrong. Now that's not to say that other children don't have imaginations who don't have meltdowns.
It's more that some kids have imaginations and of how an expected outcome, like I said, of how something's going to go. And it gets a bit fixed. It gets a bit kind of rigid and that's the way it has to be.
So I've got two ideas here. If you're experiencing this, you might not be, but if you are experiencing this, as a child is about to settle into a project, about to settle into a drawing, for example, come alongside them and get in there a little bit before they actually get their idea too fixed and say to them, like if it's a play scenario and they're starting to really get an idea of how they want that game to go, how they want that play to go, get in there before the idea gets too fixed and actually take part in it a little bit and say, oh, you know, this is a younger child, maybe five, six years old. Oh, you know what? I think that when the fireman comes, then maybe there can be other people who help put the fire out.
Because you know how children's script play, they say, I'll be like the fireman and you, you kind of be like the people who are watching and I'll, and it's beautiful, isn't it? And when they're in that, like they're rehearsing it and they're going through it, get in there and give them some alternate scenarios. Likewise, if they're settling down to do a drawing, and let's just go back to the horse and the cow, just say, you know, it's really, really hard to draw a horse. It's really hard.
Let's make sure there's trees there and grass. What about we put all that and if the horse doesn't look exactly right, that's also okay, because there can be some grass and we can make that longer and it won't look like it's not and or whatever it is, you know, but get in there and just be with them a little. That's one idea of coming alongside.
Now another way we can come alongside is that let's say the meltdown has happened. It's important when a child's feeling again really disoriented and it's just not working out, to talk to them in a way with that meet and move principle I spoke about last week of meeting them with that tone and then dropping it down. But in this sort of version of it, using it in this way, you might say something to a child like, it's so hard when things don't work out.
Oh my goodness, it's really hard. Let's see. When we have a little bit of calm down, we can come right on back to this and we can figure out how to have that horse look more like a horse.
We'll see what we can do, but let's just have a little calm down first. You see, in that way you're really recognizing it's so hard when things don't work out or it's so hard when things don't look the way you want or a game doesn't go the way it's meant to go. You can recognize that and when I've said that to kids in the past, their eyes just shoot right at you and they look and it's like, oh, I'm understood.
He understands me. That kind of feeling goes a long, long way. So rather than saying it's okay or even getting into it and saying to a child, look, that is unacceptable.
Things were going perfect. Look, it does, sweetheart, it does look like a horse and he's looking at it saying, are you, like what? You don't even understand. Rather than trying to say it's okay or it's not acceptable or it is fine, it does look like that or here, give it to me and I'll fix it.
That's another one to avoid. It's just to empathize with a child and that's not sort of saying the way you're talking is okay because you're going to have to circle back to that and work that out as well. But it isn't increasing the meltdown.
It's decreasing it by letting a child know that you really do understand that this is not working out and that we're going to circle on back and we're going to try and figure out how to make it work. And this can be voiced up into the teen years or voiced right the way down into the toddler years. The principle is pretty much the same, is that be careful about telling a child it's okay.
Because in their world, it's not and they need to be understood at that point. And if we tell them we get it, that it's not working out, then we become a point of orientation, actually. Okay, well, that's the second part in this little mini series of meltdowns.
And as always, I sure hope that's helpful. Okay, bye bye for now.
