Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kem Jon Paine. Today I wanted to give some ideas around when kids are all worked up, they're all angry, they're elevated, emotions are high, and to be able to separate from all worked up from all worked out. That's really the theme.
Now let me explain what I mean by this. When kids are worked up, I think, you know, at best we can say to them, and if it's not, if they're not too worked up, we can say, you can tell me about what's bothering you. You can, you can tell me, okay? Okay, something's really gone wrong, and I know, I can tell, just tell me about it.
Okay, I know. And if you've got a couple of kids, you might want to separate them, and just have that be a part of family practice. I personally think when kids are quite worked up, they need to be separated, and you just take one child off quietly and say, oh, I think it's your turn to tell me first today.
You know, a couple of days ago, yeah, it was your turn. But now it's, a lot of studies do point to talking to kids individually first has a much higher success rate of working through something, as opposed to standing them right there, looking at each other, where they start to say things like, yeah, that's not true. You're such a liar.
Or if they're little, they say, oh, you know, or if there are teenagers that is roll their eyes, you're whatever. All that stuff. So one of my first recommendations is that when you're sorting stuff out with kids, and their siblings, or if you're a teacher there, you know, there are other kids around, try to do it quietly.
Okay. And in other podcasts, I've talked about this key sentence of, hey, nothing gets worked out when we're worked up. Nothing, nothing gets worked out when we're worked up.
But hey, come on over, sit with me for a minute, and tell me what's gone wrong. Not tell me what happened. Because that's another really bad question to ask a kid, tell me what happened.
Because it's not it's it's it's not what happened. You know, that's the truth, what you tell me is the truth. Just tell me about what went wrong for you, for you, what went wrong for you.
And then you can speak to another child and say, well, what went wrong for you? And then we're de-escalating just that question, what went wrong for you? Okay. And you're just listening. This is all you're doing.
So the first piece in this is, is you're, you're letting them explain what they're worked up about, but you're separating it. You're separating the what, what is working them up from working it out, because trying to work it out, right there on the spot, when adrenaline and cortisol is running high, is all I want to say never, but almost never works out. So separating, you know, you're worked up, listening to the story, listening to another story, if there's a couple of kids involved, or even more, two or three stories.
And just, okay, tell me, tell me what went wrong for you. Another question is, tell me how you see it? How did you see that? Okay, okay, so that was really hard. What because you weren't finished playing? Okay, so you weren't done with it.
Okay. Even though you didn't have it with you, you weren't done with it yet. Okay, so that's what happened.
And that's why you use that harsh, that those harsh words. All right, I get it. I get it.
And so you're just into reception mode, you're into receiving, and not so much talking, you're into convict, concave and not convex, you're into Venus and not into Mars, you're into listening rather than talking. And also, crucially, what you're doing in that moment, and this is the kind of foundation of it all is you're helping a kid to co-regulate. And we're not putting pressure on ourselves to come up with something fancy and clever to sort things out.
Honestly, that's too hard. When kids are elevated, we put ourselves on the spot. If we're trying to work things out, I'm going to suggest calm down time.
First, that's the first thing we do. Number one, and there's other episodes about that is just it's calm down time. In our family, we don't work things out when we're worked up, calm down, pause button, calm down.
And you can train kids up, you can coach them up to accept this, they just know it, they even start doing it themselves. Well, I just think we need to have some, some just calm down. I've heard countless number of kids say words to that effect when we do it over and over and over.
Okay, step one. Step two is just listen to their story. And again, we don't have to be wise.
No, we just got to listen to their story. Just listen to it. Okay, so how did you see it? That's it.
And it gives us a break. But again, crucially, it helps a young person co-regulate. It helps a child, a tweenager, a teenager.
Just because we're listening like that, and we're sitting quietly within our within our sort of own centeredness. It helps them and you can tell sometimes their story starts off being rapid speech, very elevated, very blamey, shamey. And after a few minutes of them telling you about their story, their voice changes.
They're a little bit different. They're coming back into themselves. And all that is, you know, we don't have to be clever.
We just have to listen, just listen to their story. That's it. Just listen.
And that listening will help them co-regulate. That's what's so important. In other podcast episodes, I've talked about the mirror neurons, check those out.
Because that's what's happening. The co-regulation is happening via the mirror neuron activity. They're mirroring your, I wouldn't say calm, maybe calm, but at least centered.
Yeah, at least being centered. Okay. And then comes the, okay, let's work it out.
Then comes the, okay, so what could we do to put this right? And put this right so we can just move on? All right, let's just let's see what we can figure out to put it right. And then we can just get back to things. But that comes third, not first.
First comes the nothing gets worked out when we're worked up. Pause. The second is just simply listening.
And then the third step to circle back saying, okay, so how can we work this out? Now at that point, you might bring the kids together. You might bring the siblings together or classmates together. You can bring them together then and say, okay, look, here's how Skylar saw it.
And Josiah, here's how Josiah saw it. And if it's siblings or classmates, and you just say, and you saw it a little bit differently. And you know what, in our family, in our class, that's okay.
It's really okay. And so you do a little bit of a, just like you see it this way, you see it that way. Here's where it's different.
Here's where it's the same. Simple. It's really simple because you've listened to it.
You've listened to the kids. It prevents them from trying to recruit you to get you on their side and telling bigger and more exaggerated stories. Because you're just listening to their story.
And they know that that's okay. They don't have to make it grandiose. It's because in our family, it's okay to see things and feel things differently.
It's really okay. And then bring them back together again. And okay, what can we do to sort this out? Because it's no fun when it goes like this.
None. Now, a lot of this is calling on our own, our own emotional self-regulation on our own centeredness. And I'm suggesting that we can, we've got a more of a chance of being centered.
If we know the drill, if we just do the same thing over again, wash, rinse, repeat. We're going to hit the pause button, nothing gets worked out when we're worked up. Number one, number two, tell me how you see it.
Number three, let's see how we can figure this out. Those three steps over and over and over and over. And the kids come to expect them.
They absolutely come to expect it. It's easier for us because we're not having to reinvent all this, you know, all this stuff and think up all this stuff and read all these books. It's just very, very simple.
But what it does for us is it takes the knowledge of what we're going to do in a sibling dispute or a classmate dispute, helps us be centered. And it helps our own emotional self-regulation. Now in the coming three or four episodes, we'll be talking more and more about emotional self-regulation.
This is going to be a little bit of a theme through this next month or so. So this is the first sort of step of dipping toe into the water of how is it we can be better regulated so our kids can co-regulate. And one of the key ways to do that is to separate the whole thing of separating being worked up and separate that from working out.
Worked up, nothing gets worked out when we're worked up. And these three steps are some of the, well, they're stepping stones really to knowing what to do so we can stay centered in that moment. Because the kids dispute, that's secondary.
Primary is how we're dealing with it and can we stay relatively centered within ourselves. Okay, I sure hope that's helpful. Bye-bye for now.
