#parenting-strategies

#parenting-strategies

You pick up your child from school, ready to hear about their day, and within minutes, there are tears, meltdowns, or angry outbursts. Or maybe it looks different in your house: Your child gets silly, wild, and harder to settle. Welcome to the wonderful world of after-school restraint collapse. All day at school, kids work hard to manage themselves. They follow rules, use polite words, sit still, and keep their emotions in check. They are exercising enormous self-control, and their brains and bodies get depleted.

What exactly constitutes a meltdown? As Lorain Moorehead, an individual and family therapist, explains, a meltdown is, on some level, a child's expression of their opinion or preference. "Their body is dysregulated either because of their real or perceived need not being met, and they are communicating it with the tools they have available in the moment, which in the case of a meltdown might be tears, volume, or other means to return to a state of control," she says.

I see in my clients how childhood messages both negative and positive shape who they become. Being shouted at can alter a child's brain.

We're not meeting our kids where they are. Adversity and trauma narrow horizons; connection expands them.

We make small moments count with our oldest child every day, whether it was reading his favorite book or playing a quick game, to reassure him.