When Children Refuse to Breathe and Use Tools for Big Feelings

Has your child ever refused to breathe in a difficult moment? Flat out lost their cool to the next level when you mirror their feelings or try to narrate what’s happening?

In this episode I cover 3 reasons why kids might refuse to use tools for their big feelings and how The Adventures of Team Brain can support you with making important connections in skill building.

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The music for this podcast is written and produced by Jazlyn B with the guidance of Sabine Ndalamba

Note: This podcast is created for educational purposes only. Any references links, resources or content are not intended as a substitute for medical or professional mental health advice.

Transcript

Note: The transcript below may not be exactly the same as the podcast, it has been edited for readability and context.

Refusing to Breathe or Use Other Tools for Emotional Regulation

Has your child ever refused to breathe in a difficult moment? Flat out lost their cool to the next level when you mirror their feelings or try to narrate what’s happening?

So, not gonna beat around the bush on this one. Practicing tools for emotional regulation can feel pointless and being told to use them in tricky moments can send your already dysregulated child over the edge.

Although the idea is a solid one grounded in research and science, the execution can look something quite different. I’ve been asked this question more times than I can remember.

How come when I label my child’s feelings it makes everything worse? When they are angry I reflect that, oh you look angry or when they are sad I comment that they are sad and so on.

So something I learned when I owned a preschool is that emotional regulation is anything but a cookie cutter and well-meaning parents who have read all the things are getting super frustrated when the strategies fall flat or when they work for a bit and suddenly stop. I think my favourite word at the moment in nuance and you’ve heard me say this many times, there are layers and those layers aren’t the ones covered by the parenting books or posts because they require a different type of understanding. They don’t follow the script formula. Say this magical thing and everything will work.

Layer One:

One layer, is that there seems to be a bit of window where most children will accept their caring adults labelling their feelings and then it flips to the exact opposite. That window typically falls in line with a few other significant changes in behaviour patterns between age 3-5.

Layer Two:

Another layer, when it comes to labelling other people’s feelings, is that we are just making educated or experienced guesses. The only person whoever truly knows how they are feeling is the person experiencing the feeling themselves and even some science suggests that we don’t always identify our own feelings correctly. More on this part in a second.

At the moment I’m also scratching my head because I read a stat about this but of course I can’t find it. It was the percentage that we inaccurately predict our children’s emotions correctly. As a side note, this happens to me a lot. I read a lot of things from reputable sources, but I don’t have an effective way for saving them or don’t realize at the time I might need them so when it comes to recalling the exact source, I can’t find it and I have been known to spend hours looking for them, but I can’t do that today because I’m already behind schedule. So, I not going to throw a random number out because I can’t find the source, but it was significant.

Not Correctly Guesstimating Your Child’s Feelings in No Way Makes You a Bad Parent

For this particular point it actually doesn’t really matter which is why I’m not going to stress it too much, because what I want to say is, that not correctly guesstimating your child’s feelings in no way makes you a bad parent. You child is a unique person and although we sometimes see ourselves in our children, the reality is, they are not us. This makes a lot of parents uncomfortable and sometimes get a little defensive. We’ve all heard ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ or maybe thought ‘they are so like me.’ The part less talked about is what I hear more often. The focus of these conversations is on the pieces of your personality you like the least or wish you had better tools for. In other words over-emphasizing your weaknesses because you want to give your child a better outcome trajectory. The point in all of this, we don’t always guess how others are feeling and it can land us in hot water when we don’t.

One of my favourite examples. If you’re in a heated discussion or argument with someone, like a partner or good friend, and they say to you “wow you sound angry” or “you really need to calm down” - in no way do those things work effectively to make you less upset or to calm down, more likely they cue resentment, frustration and tend to escalate things.

The same thing happens to our children, we just don’t expect it to because we see our relationship with them differently. We are the guide, we are the strong leader, we are the authority, they should trust and listen to us, we believe ‘hey I’m your parent, I understand, I’m here for you’ but that’s a level of logic that isn’t at play when your child is in Dino brain and feeling all their big feelings. They don’t want to be controlled or told what to do and the logic of you making it better isn’t logic they understand in that moment. They just hear… you are trying to control me and tell me what to do and I’m not in a headspace to do those things. 

As a note, Dino brain is the term I use in my picture book The Adventures of Team Brain to describe when our brain flips and emotions brain takes over and activates the 3 F’s: flight, fight or freeze. The most important element of this is that when we flip to Dino Brain we cannot learn, aren’t great at listening and can only use tools that are second nature.

Layer Three: 

This brings me to the next layer, we can’t learn things when we are in Dino Brain and this is a time when we often try to teach ourselves and our children about feelings.

Do You Ever Ask Your Child to Breathe Outside of Tricky Moments?

Something I say that quite often brings on an ‘aha moment’ for parents: do you ever ask your child to breathe outside of tricky moments? Have you ever talked about feelings when things are going pretty well? How are you building an emotional vocabulary in calm and connection.

In order to use tools for emotional regulation we have to practice them in calm and connection and when that tricky moments starts, we don’t ask permission to regulate, we model.

 Remember that Dino Brain, it makes decision making really difficult, or even impossible so asking our child which tool they want to use or if they want to use a tool is a big ask, especially if those tools aren’t second nature. You might even find this to be the case for yourself until you practice it and practice it quite a bit. Check out Episode 36: Answering Your Questions About Independent Play & Trying New Parenting Approaches on how long it takes to change behaviour.

Now for the other stuff I know happens that is super frustrating, especially when you are doing your best to support making space for some feelings.

I know a lot of kids don’t like to practice tools for emotional regulation.

I know that practicing breathing is ‘stupid’ ‘boring’ ‘pointless’… I know because I’ve asked a lot kids from preschool right up to adults. I talked a bit about why this is the case in episode 38 on emotional regulation, but today I want to talk about a tool that can help you with this.

The reason I wrote The Adventures of Team Brain is because none of us like doing things that aren’t fun, seem pointless and make no sense. When I was working with kids I learned making breathing fun is a game changer and developing other fun tools in calm and connection helps make some positive associations to use during tricky moments.

From there, the outcome often comes down to adults being the confident guide in the moment until children get better at calling on the tools they need.

When I started working with kids and families on social emotional skill development I learned that kids who were introduced to the science of emotional regulation in a fun and engaging way and were able to identify what was happening to them, started to get on board with why practicing tools mattered.

As a bit of a picture book nerd I pieced together that the sometimes the kids who needed to make these types of connections weren’t gravitating to the types of books available, that a comic book illustration format was going to be a game changer. It has been.

So The Adventures of Team Brain is a comic style picture book with a playful take on brain science that guides children and caring adults through the process of what happens when emotions brain takes over and start to evolve into dino brain. How different types of problems and the daily stress storms of life can flip us into flight, fight and freeze and one of our jobs as the super hero in our emotional regulation story is to Stop, Breathe, Think and Act. Part of this process is a fun action sequence, but it’s also learning box breathing, understanding that we have to stop when we have big feelings and use a tool like breathing to de-evolve our dino brain so that we can think about a different course of action or plan and then move through that.

As I mentioned in Episode 38: What do tantrums, yelling, whining and losing your cool all have in common this process is a lot like learning to swim. When children are smaller they need lots of adult support and as they get better at their skills they need less and less, but they will always need a lifeguard looking on for safety.

If you are ready for a deeper dive into this topic and some practical strategies for using The Adventures of Team Brain in your parenting you might want to check out my latest workshop, Building An Emotional Regulation Toolbox at taragratto.ca/workshop. I’ll also include the details in the show notes.