Episode #165

How To Calm Your Child Using CBT

Whether you’re a parent or not, we’ve all either had or seen a child throwing a tantrum or unable to calm themselves down.

What CBT tools can you use to help calm your child in the moment?

How can you train them to be able to self-soothe in the future or when you’re not around?

The ability to calm ourselves is a vital life skill that none of us is born with - it must be learned.

Join me, Dr Julie, as I share practical CBT tools that can help you calm your child (and yourself!).

Click to listen now!

 
 

Full Episode Transcript

Hi, it's Dr. Julie. Welcome to My CBT Podcast. I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I'm here to help you bring the power of CBT into your own life.

Thanks for being with me. I hope everybody's doing well. I wanted to start off as I normally do with a really great email that I received from one of my listeners.

It says,

“A huge thank you and request. Hello, Dr. Julie. I like to start by saying thank you. I'm a 49-year-old male who's always thought he was alone in his thought patterns and anxiety until I started to listen to your podcast. I've been listening for a few months now, and the pods have resonated with me more than I could ever imagine. My brain constantly has been flooded my entire life with previously undiagnosed hot thoughts that have led me to addiction, disease, and toxic relationships. I never thought someone could explain the thoughts I deal with better than my own self. As you've shared, I also had my mother basically abandon me when she left me and my father when I was only five years old.

“I then had an emotional abandonment by my father in my teen years, which led me to cope any way I could. I don't mean to be long-winded, but the shared experience, as you mentioned resonate tremendously. I would like to take my work on growing to the next level, and that is part of why I decided to reach out to you. You mentioned that you will sometimes work with listeners one-on-one, or if not, recommend someone who has a similar therapy style. It seems surreal that you may even read this being what a strong influence you've had on my thoughts in life already. Thank you again. I just want to let you know you're helping people like me more than you probably could ever imagine. Thank you. Thank you.”

That was a great email, and Just to share regarding asking about taking his work to the next level, I do work with clients, and I'm licensed in some different states here in the United States. But if I'm not able to work with you or you don't live here, you can go on to feelinggoodinstitute.com. That's my referral for everybody. Everyone on there, as myself, are all highly trained CBT therapists, and it'll say, Find a therapist, and then you put in your information of where you're at.

And then therapists that can work with you will come up. So there's no information for them to contact you. It's just you looking for them. So it's a great website, and there's people literally, literally all over the world that are on that website. So I know other listeners have found therapists through the website after hearing me put that out there. So I'm really glad it's been helpful. And again, thank you to the listener that sent me this beautiful email and shared all that. And I'm so glad that the podcast have resonated with him and started making a difference in his life because that is the goal. So I want to talk today about how to achieve calm. And the focus is helping children But it definitely relates to all of us. And I thought I would talk about this because literally a few days ago, I was with my really good friend, Tony, who's also a therapist, and we like to hang out every few months. We go down to Laguna Beach here in California. That's just beautiful. And we walk and walk and talk, and we just always have such a great time together.

And we were walking up from the beach, and there was a dad with his daughter. She must have been maybe four or five years old, very young. And she is just having a meltdown. She is crying and crying, and she's like, I can't walk. I can't walk anymore. And it was a pretty steep incline up to the street. First of all, being at the beach all day is beyond exhausting. You're swimming, you're in the sun. We all get really tired after a day at the beach, and she is just exhausted. And the dad is totally calm. I give him credit. But he is trying to be rational with her and saying, Okay, I'm just going to stand here until you can stop crying. And she just keeps crying. And she just keeps saying the same thing, I can't walk anymore. I can't walk anymore. And then the mom's at the top of the hill, and she's saying to the husband, I'm going to leave this stuff here. I have to go over to the car. And he's just standing there. And I give him kudos because he stayed calm. He was not yelling at her.

But my girlfriend said, Oh, man, parents just don't get it when they've lost the argument and that their kids can't emotionally regulate themselves as well as they can. I know we've all been taught, stay calm and talk it through, Which is good. I might say not to do that. That is a good thing to do. But you also have to understand where the person's at, especially a child. Now, let me say, I don't work with children. I work with people 15 years old and up. It's not my specialty, but I do know some things about children. I raise some kids. I learned what worked, what didn't work. But these are some ways to help a child calm down that I thought would be really helpful because I know lots of you that listen to me have your own children. And one thing to start off saying, I really recommend to all parents is educate yourself more about where your child is developmentally. So a great little resource, if you Google Eric Erichson developmental stages. He has written out in a really easy format, developmentally, where your kids are. So what are they capable of doing?

What can they comprehend? Problem solved. Where are they with all that? Because it's pretty common that I find when parents are sharing with me, clients are sharing like, I'm struggling with my kid with this or that, that a lot of times their expectations are much bigger than where their child is developmentally, and that's why they have this big fight. So they expect your child to be able to do so many things, and they're three years old. I'm like, They don't get that. They need more of your help. You can't just tell them, Go do this, and they're going to do it. So there's the frustration. So the more you can understand your child, the more you can understand the people in your life, You're going to have an easier time talking to them, helping them through difficult times, also helping yourself calm down. So I wanted to share this. So first, I always give credit where credit is due. There There's an article I read by Dr. Erin Leyba, L-E-Y-B-A, talking about how to talk your kids down so that they can find more calm in their lives when they're upset. So again, when I saw this little girl, I don't know what happened.

We just kept walking and the dad was still trying and waiting for her to stop crying. My guess would it be that it never probably happened. And although he gave it a good try, but if he had some of these tools, I think he might have been able to help his daughter get past this and be able to maybe finish walking, or maybe he would just had a carrier the rest of the way. I don't know. But we want to teach our children also how to calm themselves, right? But we need to be the ones to take the first step in doing that. I want to start off by sharing a little bit of what Dr. Labler shared, and she was saying that when children are confronted with anxiety, they feel it intensely because they haven't developed the means to calm themselves yet, right? And although as a parent, you may feel at a loss to help your kids who become too anxious to walk through the door at a classmate's birthday party, refuse to exit the car when it pulls up to their soccer game, become nauseated before performing on stage, or taking a test, or are terrified that they will be injured by an oncoming storm.

These are all great examples. That's why I wanted to really read what she said, because I love when she says, They don't want to get out of the car when you pull up to the soccer game. Oh, yeah. Then they're done that. Getting up to perform. Yeah, going to a party, being the only one, being a new kid. Those are all things that are going to trigger anxiety for your kids. When kids are anxious, they often experience what they call an acute stress response, known as that fight, flight, or freeze. Which you've probably all heard of those terms. That's when your body's sympathetic nervous system releases adrenaline, which increases your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your breathing rate. That's what happens to all of us. We start feeling like, Oh, my God, my body's in overload. My heart's pounding out of my chest. Even as adults, we either have that fight, flight, or freeze that comes over us. Kids respond to these perceived crises in different ways than adults. So some will scream, some will shake, some will just run away, others may get quiet, some might act silly, they might be more clingy to you, or they'll have a tantrum.

So some adults may do all those as well, But you really see kids do it because they're not thinking about what others are thinking about them so much. Some are, like I said, when they get quiet, but just have a tantrum in public or start screaming or just running away is obviously going to bring a lot of attention. But that is how overloaded they are, that they just can't handle how they're feeling. When you try to reason with your kids in these moments, or you try to convince them that it's not logical to feel this way, it's going to fail, and it's even going to make it worse. And then the parents get agitated or angry at themselves. And then this doctor was talking about how you can create an intergenerational anxiety loop of increasing intensity. So now the parents are angry or agitated, which then makes the kid feel that way, and nobody knows how to manage their emotions. So the neuroscience suggests that children are unlikely to regain control of their behavior until they can step out of that fight, flight, or freeze mode. That's what I'm going to talk about, you guys, about some recommendations that she offered in the article and some tools that I use with CBT that can be really helpful.

What do I do when my kid is in this state? All right, get out your pen and pencil. I got some good stuff to share with you guys, and you can always listen to this again, but if you got a pen and pencil and some paper, of course, it might be helpful. So the first one, which is really interesting, is you want to stimulate the vagus nerve. A lot of you guys may have heard of what is the vagus nerve. When you stimulate this, just to share, it's located on both sides of your voice box, and it can interrupt that fight, flight, or freeze mode and send the brain a signal that it is not under attack. So some ideas is you can have your child chew some gum, sing or hum, breathing slowly in their nose, out of their mouth, or even eat a piece of dark chocolate could help them achieve calm. And on a side note, that's what helps me the most, dark chocolate. So these are some things just to get that vagus nerve stimulated, and the vagus nerve helps you calm down. So your vagus nerve, just let you know, is in your brain, and it goes down, it passes a little past your heart.

And this is one of the... Speaking of the breathing techniques I want to add in here, which I've shared with you on other podcasts, the one I really like is called the 4-7-8 breathing, and it really talks about how it stimulates the vagus nerve pretty quickly. It's the one that my clients tend to like the best. If you go on YouTube and just look up 4, 7, 8 breathing, you'll see a little five, six minute video on it that can be helpful to walk you through it. But it really does work quickly. So it's always a great tool to teach your kids how can you calm yourself down. And doing the breathing is something that they can always do in that moment. Because they might be in class. They can't go get a piece of gum. They don't have any chocolate. They can't sing or hum, right? But they can breathe that doesn't interrupt anybody, but can it interrupt this fight, flight, or freeze feeling that they're having? Because the breathing is always important, right? So anxious kids, like adults, tend to take rapid, shallow breathing from their chest. So you want to get that breathing to be slower and deeper and get down to your diaphragm.

Now, if you think about this, when a baby breathes, you can see their belly expand and go down, because babies know how to breathe down to their diaphragm. They know how to take those full deep breaths. As we get older and if we tend to be anxious and nervous, as a child, as a teen, as an adult, we tend to breathe where it just stops at our chest and it doesn't get a full breath. So it's something to practice. If you inhale through your nose and see your belly expand, then you know you're getting your breath all the way down there. It's something to practice and practice. I really encourage my clients to practice not when they just need it, but when they don't feel like they really need to do the deep breathing, so it becomes a little bit more of a muscle memory. So when you're in that place in that moment, you're going to be able to do the breathing that's really going to help you. Regarding children, specifically, the author to help teach them how to do some more breathing is blowing bubbles. You have to take a deep breath and you blow out, blowing into a pinwheel, blowing our finger tip like with a candle.

If you're in that moment, you can say, Here, blow up the candle here and hold your finger up. Whistling, again, breathing in for a count of three, holding for three, breathing out for three, can help breathing And again, through the nose and out through your mouth, it will just help. It's also a distraction as you're helping them do the breathing like, Okay, let's breathe in, let's breathe out. Just doing that is a distraction that can help your child calm down and not just focus on what they're upset about or continue to cry. It's also really good to push their bodies. So by activating your muscles, your joints, any activities that push or pull against the body can increase their focus and attention and help the kid get centered. So push-ups against the wall, you can have them do that. Running a vacuum cleaner, which would be two-fold, be helping you out, right? And also they may enjoy doing that. It's a good... They're pushing their body and doing something different. If you're at the park, climbing in a jungle gym or even having your kids pull the wagon can help them calm down and regulate how they're feeling because they're pushing and pulling with their the body.

Doing jumping jacks is always a great one, especially when you're anxious, believe it or not. That's a great distraction, especially for adults. So doing anything where you're pushing the body. Maybe the dad could have said, Come on, I'll run with you up the hill. Let's try to make something fun out of it, or let's just run in place. Kids love when you're running and you can pretend like you're behind them and they're winning. They like that. There's a good distraction. There could have been different things that he could have tried in that moment that might have helped that child at the beach get out of that. I think she was in the freeze. Her body was in freeze. I can't move anymore. I'm overwhelmed, and I'm just going to stand here and cry until you do something for me. Any of those activities where you're having your child push their body, doing something physical, can really help, again, get their body moving and have their mind calm down. Another one, which I definitely used a lot, and I see people do all the time, which works great, is just distracting with humor. Lafter can really decrease someone's anxiety.

It is a distraction, again. It relaxes your muscles, it releases endorphins. They can help decrease your stress. Now that we all have phones, maybe if you put on a YouTube a favorite video that makes your kid start to crack up, keeping favorite jokes in your mind or silly family memories fresh in your mind can help ease your child out of an anxious state. When you say, Oh, remember when we did this last time? Remember when that happened? Or maybe a funny story about your pets at home or just getting your kid to laugh. I would say for me, probably that was the number one thing that worked. I could come up with an easy distraction, bring up something funny, and all of a sudden they're laughing and they're past what it was ever going on. So that's a really good thing. Also, I would say adding with distracting with humor is also music. Definitely, if you're in the car, turn on some... We used to listen to the Disney channel back in the day, and we'd have songs we would just sing and sing and sing over and over again. My kids saw through the movies, and we would all sing together.

That's a great distraction. There's lots of different things you can do. You just have to know your child and know what's going to help for them. But usually humor is definitely a really good go-to to help out. Another one is to narrow their focus. When children are able to narrow their focus or attention, they can get calm or quickly. So you got to have a little preparation for this one. So when they're not agitated, help them imagine feeling calm. So maybe they could think of a place they like to go, maybe at the beach. I don't know if it was for this child, but the beach or the playground, a favorite place they go to to play with their friends, a favorite place of a family vacation maybe you've had that you went to together or something they saw in a movie they think would be really cool to go to. Memories that create calmness, happiness, feeling content. So then later on, when an anxiety does come up for your kid, you can steer to that discussion, to those scenes. So this is just a good reminder that we don't want to just go into helping our kid when they're in that moment.

It's like, and this is a great one for us as adults, What are some places that bring me calm, right? Where do I love to be so that when I do feel anxious and I can say, Okay, all right, Julie, take some breaths. Imagine yourself at your favorite beach, hear the sounds, the smells, the waves. I'm not having to be like, Oh, my God, where would I go? What would I think about? It's like, Oh, yeah, I know where my place is, and that's where I'm going to go to when I'm anxious and worried. So we all want to prepare situations that we know will help. We all want to prepare what are the breathing techniques that are really What's the best for me? Where's a place I can go to that calms me down? If we wait till the moment, it is really hard to come up with stuff. So preparing and narrowing your focus on what's something I can focus on also when I'm anxious. Or you can share with your kids. Your kids love when you can relate to them. Hey, when mom feels anxious, I think about that favorite beach we went to on our trip to Hawaii, and that really makes me feel calm.

I think about this, I think about I see you swimming in the ocean. That brings me joy. They're like, Oh, you do that, too? Okay, I can do that. So I can say, What's your favorite place? So they don't feel alone. They feel like, Oh, my mom and dad feel like I do sometimes. That's okay. What can I do to help myself? So relating to them is really important. Another thing you can do is helping your kids identify what their feelings are. So when they're in that fight, flight, or freeze mode, and their emotions are just all over the place, and at 100%, they may feel like they've lost touch with their minds, like they just can't think. There's a lot of research that suggests that the strategy of name it to tame it, they call it, could help. Telling the story about what's upsetting them, and Especially naming the feelings they're experiencing, can help kids get closer to a feeling of control, and eventually they can calm themselves down. They also may need to engage their bodies before they're able to think clearly enough to talk the things out. And through the situation. So that goes talking about they might have to engage their bodies first, as the research talks about, is that I tell people, too, that you can change your behavior quicker than a thought.

So if you're overwhelmed and you just can't, I can't sit down and do a thought record right now, I just can't really figure it out. Go take a walk. Engage your body. Go do something. If you can take a swim, go do your exercise, and then you can come back to it. You don't have to address it right here in the moment. But then to be able to name it, to tame it, it's like, What am I feeling? So then you can get to your thoughts. What am I feeling? I have a feeling Great book in Mind Over Mood. There's mood lists. There's so many moods we have. Moods, feelings are the same thing. There's hundreds. So I give my clients these lists and they're like, Oh, yeah, I was feeling that, and this and that. I wouldn't have thought, Oh, that's a good one. Because we tend to get caught up in feeling depressed or anxious, depressed or anxious. But there's so many other moods underlying that. If we can really figure out what we're feeling, that's going to help us figure out what we're thinking that's causing that feeling. Be like, Oh, yeah, that really resonates.

Instead of just always, I say always, but, Oh, I'm anxious, I'm anxious. What else is with anxious? Feeling insecure, feeling fatigued, feeling burned out, feeling overwhelmed. There's lots of other moods connected to anxiety that make it more specific for you. So also you could have, maybe you've seen, too, there's a sheet for kids where it's not just the names of the feelings, but faces that are basically describing the moods. I used to have this on my fridge for my kids, and I'd be like, Okay, let's point to how you're feeling when they were really little, and it was hard to say what their feeling was other than sad, maybe. So they look, Oh, that's how I'm feeling. Okay, let's deal with that. Those are charts, too. I know you can get on the internet of just feeling charts with faces on them that maybe you could put up on your fridge or have with you in your purse or in the car. And when your kid's not feeling great and they can't describe what's going on, ask them to point to the face that they relate to. So that's another good tool as well. Having a plan is always important.

I talk about action plans. Action plan is a tool where you have a plan prior to going into a situation. If you talk in advance with your kid about an action plan on how they can calm themselves when they're starting to feel anxious before the event could really help. Say they're afraid to go to this birthday party because all they know is the birthday kid, and they don't know all their friends for whatever reason. Maybe they met them somewhere else, but all their friends are going to be from their school, and they don't go there. Let's talk that through and say, How are we going to handle this when you start feeling anxious about getting out of the car and going What is it that can calm you down? Can you maybe do some breathing? Do you want to do an activity before you go? Sometimes just coloring with the kid can help. Some people like having those fidget spinners or a squeeze stress ball. Maybe you can have that in the car and, Hey, you can use this. We can play with this before you get to the party. We can talk about how are you going to go in, how are you going to meet other kids at the party, what can you say, how can you introduce yourself?

So you come up with an action plan, and you want more than one action. If this doesn't work, you can try this. That thing. So when you come up with an action plan, I mean, I use this all the time. I teach my clients. It really helps decrease the anxiety because you're not just going in hoping things will go well. I have a plan, and I'm going to do some things even before I go to help relax myself. So whatever your child likes to do, any activity that seems to calm them down. If you have time, maybe you could play a game together at home before you go. Whatever it is, it's going to help your kid get into a good place. And one last one is having a ritual. So the author talks about there's a reason My athletes and musicians go through a set array of actions before they perform. You see some... I've seen on TV where they had their headphones on, they're listening to music. Some are working out, all different things. And rituals can be anchors for disability and can help an anxious kid approach that anxiety-provoking situation with more confidence and having a sense of control.

That's important that we all feel this sense of control over ourselves in our lives, because if we don't, we're definitely going to feel anxious. For a kid, maybe they could read a favorite comic book before a doctor's appointment. Again, playing the same music in the car on the way to every birthday party you go to. This is what we listen to when we're going to birthday parties. As I mentioned before, doing jumping jacks before they go to play one of their sports. Doing some stretching, going for a run with their dog, playing with your pet at home. That always makes kids laugh and bring them joy and comfort, especially your pet might be their therapy dog, as they say, or cat, or whatever pet you have that, Hey, let's give the dog a bath, or let's brush your dog, or again, play, or even taking a little nap and just petting the animal, whatever it is that relaxes them, you want to use that. So it's a really positive connection they have with feeling confident, feeling calm. And a physical ritual may be more reliable because it's something you can always depend on doing to be able to be like, Okay, we're going to do those jumping jacks, or we're going to run a little bit, or let's just relax for a minute.

Because those things can help Because if you don't... Say you need a specific object to help them relax, and all of a sudden you don't have it, it could really increase the kid's stress. I know when your kids are super little, their binkies missing or their favorite blanket, and they're having a meltdown and you can't find it, that's really hard. So you want to be able to have... Music is usually something you can go to, or a song you guys can sing together, even if you don't have the CD or CD even sounds old. They're just putting on the music, but I guess you could pull it up on your phone now because we all have that. What are some go-tos I can always have with my kid that I can rely on? So in case I don't have that thing that comes them down or we can't find their favorite stuffed animal or our pet isn't with us, right? Then what are some things we can do that I know work? So these are all different opportunities to help your kid not just calm down, but to teach them. We want to teach our kids that resilience and ways to manage their own emotions because we're not always with them.

They can have a meltdown in school. And although the teacher may do their best, they might not really know what's going to work best for your kid. And so you wanted to teach your kid, Hey, when you're feeling overwhelmed, Okay, we've done these breathing techniques. You can do this without me or dad being there. You can do this for yourself. You can help calm yourself down. You can think about that favorite place we like to go. If it's during school and it's recess, just go walk around the playground or do some jumping jacks or go on the swing. What are some things you can do even if I'm not there? And if I am there, I'm going to help walk you through them. But it's really teaching ways for your kid to feel more self-confident that, yeah, some things make me anxious, but I can handle it because I have tools. It's all about the tools, right? It's all about the CBT tools. So I hope this was helpful. I just think it's always great, and I always appreciate it when my kids were younger, people giving me ideas like, Oh, that's a good one.

I didn't think of it. Because I think we can get really stuck and worried about our kids and like, Oh, what's the one thing that's going to help them? And sometimes it's hard to step back because we care for our kids so much. We love our kids so much. We just want to be able to fix it. But we also have to not get caught up in that and be able to teach them ways to relax and be a good role model. That, yes, sometimes mom gets worried or anxious, too, and this is what I do that helps me. Do you want to try that or let's figure out what works for you? And it's going to be a win-win. And whenever your kid has anxiety, it's an opportunity for you guys to figure things out together, to come up with new ideas. As your kid gets older, some things may not work anymore. Say something may be better, whatever that is. Another idea, too, is just it's not always has to be on you. I know some kids are super tight with their grandparents, an aunt, someone else in the family. Hey, let's give them a call.

And that person isn't wrapped up in your kid's behavior or the frustrations maybe of that child that would have finished walking up the hill from the beach. Somebody else can come in that isn't so emotionally connected and can really help walk your kid through it. So use all your resources, use all the support you have in your life. It doesn't just have to be on you to help your kid calm down. I've heard a story, at least, where a kid's having a tantrum in a supermarket, and everybody's just... You can see the mom's frustrated, just wants to get the shopping done, and the kid's having a meltdown, and they won't keep walking or get in the car or they're climbing out of the car, and a stranger comes up and just says, Hi. A lot of times to the mom as well like, Wow, you must be having a hard day. It's a lot to deal with. And just that parent will calm down from somebody acknowledging them, or you can help distract the kid or make a funny face, or do something silly that the kid just gets you get the kid's attention, they start laughing.

So that's someone that's not so emotionally connected can help calm down. So if it's not that particular situation, like Like I said, if there's someone else in the family that kid seems to really enjoy or they're really a fun person, say, Hey, let's call aunt so and so, and let's talk to them. Maybe they can help. So that's another idea as well. Whatever works, works. But you don't want to get frustrated or yelled at your kids when they're having a meltdown because they are stuck, and they really need you then more than ever to be able to show love and compassion and walk them through it. So I hope this was helpful. As always, please share this with anyone that may benefit.

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