Welcome back to the Simplicity Parenting Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Gosh, so glad you could make it again today. Quick little announcement before we begin, we're in the sort of a run up to our Simplicity Parenting Discipline and Guidance Care Professional Seminar.
That's coming up in three or four weeks and we run these one time, this Discipline and Guidance every year, rolls around, where we gather together as groups of care professionals focusing on how to help develop support for children and particularly support parents to support children who are behaviorally struggling. Anyway, more to come on that. That's just a little early announcement that that's coming up soon.
Registrations aren't open yet, but there is an interest list and you can see that on the Simplicity Parenting website. But right into the theme today, and that is restraint collapse. This is a term that has been known for a while by child psychologists, particularly school counselors, but it's becoming more widely known now.
Now, restraint collapse describes when a child holds it together, particularly at school, they hold it together, hold it together, and then they collapse at home. They cut loose with their behavior. Everything becomes difficult.
They become explosive, implosive, and it generally is very, very hard to manage. Occasionally, it goes the other way, where a child will be very, very held at home and the restraints will collapse at school. In my experience, that's quite a bit less prevalent.
It's more collapsing at home. Now, what can we do about that? How can we understand it? What's happening there? Generally, what's going on is that the child's, the tween, the teen is struggling with a pretty hectic day. When you think about a school day, it's quite hectic, really, a lot going on for any kid to manage.
And they go into almost like a holding pattern where it's almost like a body and emotional clench and they get through. They don't want to be embarrassed by having an outburst in front of, usually, it's the other classmates they're worried about. Maybe it's the authority of the school, the school director, principal, teacher, that comes into it as well.
But most kids I've spoken to don't want to be embarrassed in front of their friends. So they hold it together. They sort of put up, they mask it a little bit.
They're still able to look perfectly or not perfectly, but quite normal. If you get to know a child well, you can often see they're faking it, but they're masking and they put on this mask and they'll laugh. Even they will play a little bit, but a little bit cautiously, but they'll play or a little bit dominantly sometimes, but it's more often cautiously.
They will hold it together in the classroom, they will try to go along with the flow, they will look attentive, but meanwhile, they're absorbing very little because their stress levels are really high. The sympathetic nervous system is on high alert, but they're holding it together. They are anxious, moderate to high anxiety over a long period of time.
And when the sympathetic nervous system is in full swing like that, their learning is really inhibited. They still might be able to be doing sort of okay-ish, but the overwhelm of a school day will inhibit that. And we've kind of lost track of how overwhelming all the transitions in a school day can be, all the complexities of a school day because schools have been around for a long time and we're sort of normalizing what it is the drawdown on a child's nervous system for just getting through.
There's not a lot of time for decompression during the school day. You're moving from one activity to another, to another, a new teacher comes in and off they go with their content. And they're prepared and understandably they feel connected to that, but the previous teacher was connected to her content, the previous teacher was connected to their content.
And it's almost like stuffing that content into a child's container or turning on that tap so hard that there's just spillage and they're holding it and they're holding it and they're holding it. There's little time for decompression, as I mentioned, and you might think, well, there's recess. A lot of public schools are cutting out recess now, but even if kids do have recess, that can actually be quite complex as well for kids to navigate.
We think, well, that's their chance to blow off steam. And for some kids it genuinely is, but for a bunch of kids it's not. If they're already on high alert because of what's holding it together in the classroom and the overwhelm of content that they're being given, it's just not realistic to think that they can just turn that off on a switch and say, okay, now my parasympathetic, I'm soothing, I'm calming, I'm all good at recess.
It's just not like that. That's just not the way adrenaline and cortisol works. They carry that right on out into the playground.
Many, many, many kids do. Some kids find soothing moments just organically. They'll just do it themselves.
But a bunch of kids don't. Okay, so this is what students, many of them are facing at school. And then they get in the car or they get off the bus, they come into home and they, as I mentioned, implode, just do not want to be talked about, do not talk to rather, or about, I guess, do not want to engage.
They just go into a cave. Other kids come home and they're explosive. They'll explode at siblings, at parents, and they just lose all restraint, hence the term.
Now, what to do about this? Because it really doesn't seem fair on siblings, doesn't seem fair on us as parents either. There's that kind of feeling of, this is just not okay, you know, this is not fair. But expressing that to a child is just going to increase their feeling of overwhelm, maybe guilt, shame, but certainly defensiveness.
And it'll force them to be explode more or implode more. So the answer, if we've got, if we back it up a bit and we've got a good relationship with the school and with the teacher, and if they're open to more of a whole child, whole life view, and we trust them enough to explain what's going on at home, it's that the kids, their restraint is collapsing at home. Then what you can engage in, in a good conversation, hopefully, is giving decompression points through the day at school.
Now, some schools won't, honestly, won't take that on board. They're all just about content, high stakes testing, and they're not into it. But other schools will, and other teachers will hear you out.
And if you can, talk to them about building in at least two or three decompression points through the school day. Ideas can be as simple as just emptying the recycling, taking it to the right recycling center. It might be having some quiet time in the library.
It might, there's myriad ideas. It might be a child going down into the kindergarten if the school has an early childhood center, and just helping out the little ones in the nursery. It might be going to the garden and having a little piece in the gardening area.
Or if there is a gardener, then maybe they can link up with it. All these different ideas are on the table, and essentially what you're looking for is where a child gets their shape back again. You know it as a parent, possibly more than a teacher, because a teacher knows the class constellation really well, but doesn't really know the child in the family constellation or in that individual all that well.
The teacher is relating to the child as a part of the whole. And so, respectfully, and there is another podcast, by the way, on how to build good collaboration with teachers in this series of podcasts. But respectfully say, look, what we find helpful at home when he, she, they are overwhelmed is, you know, spending time in the garden, is helping out, is, you know, they're good helpers, whatever you can do to set them up helping.
They really like that. Or whatever it might be, you kindle a child's competency, because where a child feels competent, they often feel safe. The two things are strongly related.
That's at school. And, and the decompression, honestly, if possible, it should be sort of 15 or 20 minutes. But look, even if it's five minutes, it's and it's three, four times of five minutes, that that will work somewhat as well.
And some teachers, particularly in public schools, where there's a lot of testing pressure, a lot of content, curriculum pressure, they might not be up for a 20 minute break, a half an hour break, but they might be up for a three to five minute break. But that then needs to be three, four times a day. Just give a movement breaks are okay.
But I find targeted, you know, meaningful work, even on a micro level, a little thing that they do, like I mentioned, like taking the compost out if there's a compost bin or the recycling out and just giving a child a break. That means that when they get home, they're going to be less flooded, there's going to be less behavioral spillage. The other thing you can do, whether the school cooperates or not, is when a child gets home, it's really important to to just have a little bit of structure, not so much structure that it's rigid, but get some rhythm in the after school time.
You know, when they get in the car, just have like, we do this and we do this, we do this. Getting in the car, mainly, it's, you know, we have a little snack, get blood sugar, back up, we sit quietly, because it's a really bad time to ask a child, you know, how was your day? That can come later. But if they're prone to restraint collapse, that is not a good question to ask.
In that moment, we just have quiet time. Turn the radio off, turn the music off. Some parents have said music does help, and I guess that's fine.
I'm a big fan of just natural noises, non-electronic noises. It's whatever works, you know. Some parents have said to me they put noise cancelling headphones, and a child brings those, and a child likes just to put those on and experience the quiet on the ride home.
Whatever works to calm and soothe. It might be if a child's not prone to carsickness, just looking at some pictures in their book. It might be doing a little bit of finger knitting, handwork, or just sitting quietly.
When they get home, have things set out. There's nothing like rhythm, so that a child, it's like pre-paving their entry into home. So have some things set out, just like they always are.
It might be on the counter, there's a little bit of food, a drink. It might be that the rhythm is they get time to lay with the dog, just play around with the dog. It might be that's their time to go to their room if they want to do that, and just lay on their bed and read a book.
Whatever it is, make it rhythmical and predictable. That's a really important one. If there are siblings involved, basically, again, get out ahead of this a little bit and just say, after school time, that's calm down time.
In our home, after school time is just taking a breath after a busy day, and that's what we do. So for kids who have restraint collapse, you'll be saying, for the most part, this is not universal, but for the most part, you'll be talking about just not engaging in play all that much. If a child does want to play, then parallel play, get in between the kids, and in general, don't ask them to play together in dynamic, socio-dramatic, let's pretend play, game play, rule play, because there's going to be trouble.
There definitely is going to be trouble with that. So if they want to play, that's fine, but they can just play side by side, not together. The other thing a lot of parents have spoken about is how a targeted activity like baking or the likes, when they get home, there's something nice to do that they enjoy to do.
It could be going to their crafting table and just doing some beading, doing some jewelry making, baking muffins. Again, that is the parasympathetic nervous system, but most of all, make it rhythmical, as rhythmical as you possibly can, because then a child really does know what to expect, and that in itself is really soothing and calming. Okay, well, that's a big theme, right? Restraint collapse.
I sure hope there were some ideas there, a little bit more of an understanding, but good ideas to consider.
