What we learnt in foster care training that every parent should know!
We have just completed our 12 hour training for foster care this past weekend. I went into it with the mentality of ticking a box to be able to move into what we want to do, caring for children. I just love it when you're pleasantly surprised! This was one such occasion.Maybe it was the content covered, maybe it was the way it was explained? I think it was a combination of them both. Gavin and I both looked at each other half way through and said we wished we had done training on this BEFORE our own kids, never mind foster care training!
We arrived to the inner-city location to a bunch of lovely social workers and trainers who greeted us upon arrival. Couples with optimistic eyes climbed the four flights of stairs to the floor that held the Foster Care training course. There were around 12 of us altogether. I couldn't help but notice the bar graph in the corner, plastered on the wall. "New Foster Families for 2017", the bar graph went up to 50, the red marker showed they had acquired 20. The room was a common area with windowed offices surrounding it. Toys, fun posters and little colourful characters sat on desks, hung on walls or squeezed on shelves next to books with much more serious topics. It dawns on us as we begin to hear the stories, that these are real little lives that pass through this place. Real children. Just like mine. Children who go to sleep in their own beds one night and find themselves in the homes of strangers the next. Children with secrets and stories, children who's eyes have seen more and hearts have broken more than anyone should experience. The social workers light-hearted banter has an undertone of solemness. We realise every excuse we've given, not to do this, is irrelevant.
We went on to hear what I would describe as gems and tools that would equip not just foster parents dealing with kids with trauma but ANY parents raising ANY kids! And so, this blog post is dedicated to relaying some of those gems so that maybe somewhere, someone may get as much out of what we learnt, as we did!
The course was a trauma based module and focused on brain development. Our brains are incredible!
- Our whole brain is shaped and can be altered by positive or negative repetitive experiences
- The brain develops and organises from the bottom up and inside out. The experiences of early childhood have the most powerful and enduring effects on brain organization and functioning
- \During the first 4 years of a child's life, the brain is more 'plastic'(brain pathways can be changed easier) than any time after that in a child/ person's life!
- it is the frontal cortex that is used in regulating or calming the rest of teh brain/ body. For it rto function well, the child has to feel safe and calm.
- the brain is designed to remember negative input 200 times more than positive experience
Wow, right? We really are fearfully and wonderfully made! And so are those little people who test our patience on a daily bases ;)
I was challenged and inspired on many levels and equipped with some tools to deal with situations that occur everyday.
I am not going to try summarise 12 hours of content into one blog post, that's for sure! But I thought I could throw out some interesting things that we picked up along the way.
- The Brain
Our brains as broken down into sections, all of which add another layer of emotion, intellect and reasoning. Without going into too much detail, when a child is throwing a tantrum, that child has gone down to using the most basic area of the brain, the brain stem. This is the classic example of the exasperated mother trying to 'reason' with a screaming, kicking, 'hangry' toddler and of course, there are no winners in that scenario. At times when our child's behaviour shifts from 0 - 100 in seconds, this is an automatic response - not a planned response. As a person comes out of that state, they 'climb' back up the brainstem' to the cortex which is the part of the brain we engage to establish a sense of calm, also the part of the brain where we think, rationalise and learn. Basically, this is such a great reason for why a simple 'telling off' with kids of any age can end in World War 3. When a child, or ourselves for that matter, feel anger rising, they (or ourselves) will slowly start retreating to the fight or flight, brain stem where actions are without logic or reason. This is where parents may say, their kids were a totally different child, and statements like that. That is where people act out of character. The best thing to do, age appropriate of course, is to leave whoever it is to settle down and as they recover, go back and try a relational approach to bringing correction and discipline.For a toddler that may look like picking them up and putting them in their cot for a time out until they've calmed themselves down. Or if you are out, like I used to be when tantrums would usually occur, I would strap my 2 year old in a pram and let them scream and put on a lovely display for all the passing, concerned parents (this of course only works if they can't get out of the pram...otherwise scrap that idea).
For a slightly older child that may mean calmly telling them you'll come back and chat once they're calmed down and making them sit in their room (perhaps with an activity like a reading book or an instrument they play) to come back down to a level where you are able to engage in reasonable dialogue.
I have to put a disclaimer in here and say I am NOT advocating ignoring bad behaviour by any means. You may have to sit in the lounge listening to screaming and kicking and shouting of all things unholy until they have calmed, and THEN you go in, chat about the behaviour that wasn't appropriate and bring an appropriate consequence.
This may be common practise in your home, if it is, good for your! This was a total revelation to me with my parenting philosophy being, you deal with bad behaviour there and then. We would, more often than I'd like to admit, end up with huge screaming matches where of course the child in question ends up with a year of no TV, a month of no desserts and all kinds of other unreasonable consequences you can never stick to. It was advice given to me a while back by a Pastor as well as someone who is a trained councilor to leave a child to finish a tantrum in a safe, solitary place (like a bedroom) and then to go in later with a good 'chat'.
This was all just confirmed when I saw the brain model and saw firsthand how this all works when someone is getting heated.
- Co-Regulating
This is something fascinating that you can apparently try when a child is getting heated. Apparently we match our children's voice and tone in many situations. If they come up to us excitedly telling us about something great that happened at Kindy, we will no doubt respond with an excited pitch to show we are connecting with what they are saying. If a child comes to us hurt we may lower our tone of voice and have a sad tone of voice to display empathy and that we are sad they got hurt. This technique is one we can use when times get heated with children, so they say (and I'm looking forward to trying it)!
When a child is flipping their lid and having a good scream at you because they're frustrated, you can match their tone and intensity, even match the rhythm of stress in communication to start off with but important that you don't match their emotion. So raise your voice and tone in reply without the anger or frustration. As you engage in dialogue you can actually start to lower your voice a bit each time and your child should mirror or copy your intensity as you continue to engage. In doing this, you should in theory be able to bring the level of the conversation down a few levels by just being aware of what you're doing with your voice and tone and purposefully bringing them back to baseline. This is definitely one I'm trying soon, I'll let you know how we get on ;)Self-regulating
One of the biggest gifts of learning we can help our child with is self regulating. If a child learns
HOW to calm themselves down without an adult punishing or threatening. This is something even adults have to work on, or is this only me? When a situation gets us all flustered and frustrated, we can either flip out or self regulate. I want my kids to learn to bring themselves back to baseline!
Here are some great self-regulating activities we can have on hand to get kids to calm down, maybe even in a sneaky way that they won't even realise it's what you're trying to achieve...
1. Rhythmic exercises where kids are experiencing patterns of breathing or beats. Ideas of this are to get the chalk out and draw hop scotch that they can play with. The repetition of the jumping will help kids self regulate. Another good one for repetition is bubbles! Haul out the bubbles; the breathing that's involved in blowing bubbles, helps kids to self regulate and there's something therapeutic about bubble blowing anyway, isn't there!
Other examples we were given were stick songs, clapping songs (the ones that somehow everyone around the world has learnt to play at school) and some cultural songs with repetition.
Sour things (sour lollies is what we were told works so well). Something that you experience that is out of the ordinary, it is apparently great for concentration too and helping you calm down.
3. Play dough and sensory touch activities. One they gave us to do there was a box filled with lentils and rice. The social worker had thrown in a few little toys like an action figure, a dice, a small toy animal etc. She sent the box around the room and we could find a toy from the list. The feel of the rice and lentils was surprisingly therapeutic. We all sat running our fingers through the box for ages! So easy and simple to make and such a great thing to keep on hand for times when kids need a sensory activity.
- The story we tell ourselves
This was also a powerful thought! When a moment arises when our children have messed up, what is the internal dialogue that we use that sets the tone for our approach? Here are some of the ones that are common;
"I don't have time for this right now!"
"I've had it with this."
Obviously these aren't our go-to responses as parents and when we do have these moments , they are not our finest, lets be honest. I had one of these moments today. Cooking dinner at 4.30pm which I try to avoid like the plague. Three 'helpful'kids all chopping and cutting to try and help me. Mr. 2 disappears and this should have been a warning as he was on day 2 of potty training. He emerges five minutes later with poo EVERYWHERE... I had to take a (split) second to calm myself down and take him calmly to the bathroom to clean him up. I wanted to get mad because I had asked him five minutes earlier (five minutes earlier!!!) whether he needed to go to the toilet. But he is learning and we will get through this. And yes dinner went on hold while we cleaned him...and the carpet...and the couch... and the bathroom floor... But we got through without him feeling embarrassed and learning that I was there to help him.
How powerful is it to examine our internal dialogue about the situation before we engage in a conversation about working together to fix whatever is wrong? It could be something as simple as a child has knocked over their breakfast bowl and our lovely, freshly mopped floor is now covered in milk (yes, this was me last week)... my immediate thought was frustration, "When is this day going to end?" "What else can go wrong?" It was on a day where a few other 'accidents' had happened but I could so see, in hindsight that the internal dialogue or the story I told myself before interacting with the child who made the mess, caused me to enter the situation frustrated and irritable. It could have been a learning moment of reiterating that mistakes are OK and this is how we deal with it, we get a cloth and wipe it up.
The story we tell ourselves is so important and if we can catch ourselves before flying into action after something has happened, we will have quite a different story play out in the learning of our kids.
- Empathetic tools
This was huge because so often we find ourselves frustrated as parents because we simply cannot solve all our kids problems, and we definitely shouldn't solve all our kids problems!
How often have we seen out kids starting to get worked up and yelled over, "don't get frustrated with that' or "just calm down". All of which we know would drive us nuts if someone said that to us when we were frustrated by something (guilty!)
A few things that diffuse conversations with frustrated kids are
1. Empathy
"You seem really stressed with your homework,.."
2. Define the problem
"So the teacher didn't explain what you have to do and you have so much to finish? That sounds stressful!"
3. Invitation
"What about...Would it help if...should we shoot some hoops while we think of a solution... could I help you with this after dinner..."
I know I have often gone in all guns blazing with some very unhelpful lines, in hindsight it would be a much more useful approach to simply mirror how they are feeling, acknowledge they feel sad, overwhelmed or stressed and then ask how you can help. This empowers kids to put words to how they're feeling and helps them learn to find solutions.
After that mind dump, I really hope you are as inspired as I was to go at those situations again with a few more tools in my hand. Somehow we study, we train, we become apprentices and understudies in every other profession and then when we have a child to raise we think we will figure it out along the way. I think my biggest mind shift as a parent was that the more I learnt, the more I realised there is to learn!
Although, as I said, this was training in how to help foster children dealing with trauma, I feel there is so much to learn for our own kids and how to train them to be self governing children who learn to master their emotions and live out of a place of victory! Parenting really is the hardest job in the world and the most rewarding. The Bible says if anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask for it! I certainly am ALWAYS searching and asking for keys and wisdom to do this thing and to do it well. I just love that sometimes those keys come from places we least expect.
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Love it B!
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