More Than Self Care: Therapy for Parents in St. Louis! (Part 2)
Last week, we checked in with Erin Kirkpatrick, MA, ATR, LPC, about how to cope with your child’s meltdowns.
Erin Kirkpatrick, MA, ATR, LPC
And as she reminded us, “always keeping a level head and responding to our children calmly 100% of the time isn’t realistic.” Sometimes though, you might have the feeling that you could be a little calmer if you just had some more support or a more robust toolbox.
Parent coach Erin Kirkpatrick offers supportive coaching and strategizing, along with a space for parents to debrief and process. It’s basically like therapy for parents. Read below for her helpful advice and suggestions for parents who are feeling a little bit at the end of their rope:
Understand your own temper tantrum triggers.
It can be really helpful to start paying closer attention to your own emotional triggers when a child is having a difficult moment (or day!). We tend to find a pattern when it comes to stress responses - for kids, but also just for us.
Think about what really bothers you or puts you over the edge while your child is in the midst of a meltdown. For some, whining may sound like nails on a chalkboard. For others, physical aggression may be the main trigger. Sometimes our responses can be affected by the time of day (responding to a tantrum after getting home from a long day of work, for example).
By identifying these triggers, we can begin to redirect those knee-jerk reactions to a child’s behavior and respond in a calmer, more rational way.
Find coping skills that help.
After you have identified your personal triggers and patterns of responses to your child’s meltdowns, developing strategies and skills to cope with these triggers is key to responding to your child more calmly when they occur. Try different approaches and see what works best for you!
Coping skills can include:
Taking five deep belly breaths before responding
“Counting yourself calm” by counting backwards from 20
Step (safely) away from the situation
(Read More: Our Favorite Relaxation and Regulation Strategies)
Your child can learn coping skills.
Healthy coping skills last a lifetime and our child therapists specialize in helping anxious and angry children learn to use them.
Be transparent with your child about your feelings.
It can be very helpful to discuss your feelings and responses with your child: “Okay, I see that you are feeling very upset right now, and that’s making me feel upset. I’m going to sit down and take some deep breaths so I can feel a little calmer. Do you want to sit with me?.” This can help the child not only feel more understood by the parent, but it also helps to model healthier coping skills.
Helping our kids to understand and identify big, scary feelings can also be very helpful with easing stress and lessening meltdowns.
Regularly talking about feelings, reading books, making artwork together, and even acting out different feelings can help you and your child create your own social-emotional language and vocabulary. This language can help lessen meltdowns and make them feel much more manageable for everyone involved!
My favorite children’s books about anger and anxiety include:
–Sometimes I’m Bombaloo
–When Sophie Gets Angry
–Mad Isn’t Bad
We also recommend trying out this body scan emotional identification activity - we use it during child therapy sessions, and it can be a great activity for you and your child to complete together!
Take care of yourself!
Finding time for self-care can be a challenge, but it is so very important to battle stress and assist us in co-regulation with our kids. Just as you thought about your triggers and patterns of stress, think about things that make you feel consistently better throughout the day and do them!
Maybe it’s a mid-day walk, a 20 minute workout on YouTube, a massage, or a phone call to a friend or family member– carving out time for ourselves not only helps us to proactively battle stress, but it again sets an example of healthy behavior for our kids! Keep the conversation going (even during moments of calm).
Feeling like you need more than self care?
Our parent coaching program is like therapy for parents, helping you come up with a plan for how to co-regulate during a child’s meltdowns, or just extra support to help you help your child.
Erin Kirkpatrick, MA, ATR, LPC, is a mother of three and a Clinical Therapist at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis. She recently developed our parent-coaching program with Compassionate Counseling St. Louis owner/founder Kelsey Torgerson-Dunn.
Compassionate Counseling St. Louis provides specialized anxiety and anger management therapy for kids, teens, and college students. We also provide therapeutic parent support. We work in Clayton, MO and serve kids, teens, and college students throughout St. Louis City, St. Louis County, Ladue, University City, Town and Country, Webster Groves, Creve Coeur, Kirkwood, Richmond Heights, and Brentwood.