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Autism Parenting Secrets
Dysregulation Drives EVERYTHING
00:42:08
Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge joins the show to explain why so many emotional, behavioral, and learning struggles are actually rooted in nervous system dysregulation. She shares practical insights for helping both parents and children become calmer, more regulated, and less reactive. The secret this week is… Dysregulation Drives EVERYTHING
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- [00:00]
A
We are the anchors for our kids. And you don't have to be a perfect parent, but you have to be 80% awesome. And you have to if you want your kid to regulate. You know, you can't yell at them to calm down. You can show them what calm looks like, but once your kid's in the red, I call it in a dysregulated state. Those frontal lobes are offline. They're not capable of reasoning. Don't try to have a conversation with them. You're just gonna make yourself angry, and you're gonna make them more dysregulated.
- [00:30]
B
If you're a parent of a child with. You are being called to rise with love, courage, and clarity. This journey isn't easy, and most parents aren't equipped, but you can be. This podcast is your invitation to rise higher because how you navigate matters. I'm Len, and this is Autism Parenting Secrets, where you become the parent your child needs now. Hello and welcome. Many parents are working incredibly hard to help their child, yet things can still feel reactive, exhausting, and chaotic. And often what gets labeled as bad behavior or anxiety may actually be rooted in a dysregulated nervous system. Dr. Roseanne Kapana Hodge joins us today to discuss why dysregulation, what it really is, why it affects so much of a child's behavior and emotional health, and why traditional parenting approaches often fail with overwhelmed kids. Dr. Roseanne is a licensed therapist and school psychologist, founder of Regulation First Parenting, host of the Dysregulated Kids podcast, and author of the upcoming book the Dysregulated Kid. The secret this week is dysregulation drives everything. Welcome, Dr. Verzan.
- [01:49]
A
Well, I'm so excited for this conversation because as we were talking in advance, it seems like everybody's talking about dysregulation in the nervous system. And I'm glad it's taken a while
- [02:00]
B
for a lot of the talk to really converge here. And it's amazing how many great minds, great thinkers, whether it's practitioners, scientists, this is a fundamental root cause of what might be going on. That with focus here on this particular underlying driver, so much becomes possible for our. For our kids that we're trying as parents to make great decisions for. So I think this is a really important topic, and I love that you have a book that's coming up, and I know you've been at this for a while and have lots of resources for parents. So, again, if someone's listening and maybe just they understand the concept, but like, again, if you could help them deepen their understanding of what dysregulation is and how it's manifesting. What would you say?
- [02:47]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know, it is a concept that everybody's hearing, and they absolutely might not understand what it means. And so to really make it very simple, when we talk about dysregulation, we're talking about the nervous system. We talk about emotional dysregulation, behavioral dysregulation, and all the different facets. And yes, our neurodivergent population is more susceptible to dysregulation, and we'll get into that. But what dysregulation is, is that there are things and are everyday life that fill up our stress cup, whether they're perceived stressors or they're sensory irritations, and they cause our nervous system to activate. And once we're in an activated state, we become more reactive to things. And so you might see emotional signs or behavioral signs or even physical signs. And so dysregulation is something that affects all of us. And we don't have an un unlimited capacity in our nervous system for stress. We have to take some of those stressors out.
- [03:48]
B
Right. And as you alluded to, this applies to both the child and the parent, because, again, it's impossible to bring your best self to anything with a dysregulated nervous system. And so then that leads to the question, okay, well, if that's what's happening, what are the drivers? What's behind? Is it environmental? Is it physical?
- [04:10]
A
It's everything, right? So, like, when we think of. You can visualize a cup, right? And then, you know, we walk through our day. Today was a very exciting day for me and that I did a bunch of things that are helping me on my book tour. And so I am booked something where literally is going to be tens of thousands of people at this event. What happened to me? I got off that call and I literally jumped into the air. So. So my nervous system activates. We think to ourselves, well, that's not bad stress, Roseanne, but your nervous system doesn't know the difference. So all day long, whether, you know, now you and I have lights on us, Len. Right? Your kid's sitting in a classroom and maybe there's blinking lights. It starts adding to your stress cup. Maybe they didn't eat well, maybe they didn't sleep well, whether it's you or them. And it starts filling up over hours, days, weeks. And until we pull something out, right? Whether. How do we reduce that stress within our nervous system for Maybe it's for our kids. We're doing sensory activities. Maybe it's for you. You're getting up 10 minutes early, so you could journal or you could pray or you can do some yoga exercises. We have to lower that stress cup. But we all face stress, and that is a part of our life. I think the other side of this is we're accepting just constant levels of chronic stress because we think, especially for those of us with uniquely wired kids, we think we can just get through it and we're just gonna push ourselves through it. And that's not to say there's never big hurdles where you gotta push yourself through things. When you're living every day and you're just pushing yourself through it, there's a price to pay. It's going to show up on the emotional side, maybe the spiritual side, maybe the physical side. You know, it there is. You can't just keep taking, you know, withdrawals out of your bank. You have to put some money back in.
- [06:10]
B
Right. No, it's a powerful message. And, you know, we do tend, as parents, to normalize it. Right. There's this normalized level of stress. And of course, it's very predictable where this leads if you don't do something about it. Right. So as a parent, if you don't find a way to alleviate or reduce that load. So it's basically total load theory only specifically related to this level of stress, or what I would like to call the weight that we carry. And there's a lot that you can do to shed weight to get more grounded. And again, that may mean, as a parent, focusing on yourself, which is a hard thing for parents to take in as they're focused on their child, but shifting to the child for a second if they do are in a state of dysregulation. And parents may see that as manifesting as just, let's say, bad or problematic behaviors, whatever the case may be. There's some element where parents are thinking kind of how I was conditioned with the parenting playbook my parents gave me that, oh, those behaviors, that's my child defying me, or intentionally, you know, with malice doing something that they're not supposed to do. And while, sure, there may be some element of that, the vast majority of what's behind those behaviors we're not wanting has nothing to do with a child's intent. Right. It's basically how they're reacting to these stressors.
- [07:39]
A
Absolutely. You know, I always say, you know, it's not defiance, it's dysregulation, and we often think that kids are doing things on purpose to, you know, irritate us or, you know, try to avoid things. And that's not to say that never happens. But what I think most people don't realize is once you move into this chronic stress state, especially for kids, right, they're incredibly activated. Maybe they have a mental health issue. Maybe they have, you know, a physical problem. Right. You know, I work a lot with kids with pans and pandas and OCD and really complex layered issues. Right. Or I should say, I used to work in a clinic with that because by the time this comes out, I will no longer be doing one to one work. And so over these three decades, I've worked with thousands of people. And, you know, what happens is, and from a biological perspective, once your nervous system moves from a relaxed parasympathetic state that was ever in a parasympathetic state, I like to call that the hot tub state lens. But once it moves into what's called sympathetic dominance, that is biologically, that's the state where you have to either fight, flight, freeze or fawn and your frontal lobes go offline so that you stop thinking and you can only to act. You're not even. And you're acting from a point of threat and fear. Right. So once that happens, we've lost our logical abilities, right. What are we going to do? So your kid is so super activated because they have a sensory processing issue. And I like to talk about sensory processing issues because I think that affects so many adults and kids, right. You don't have to be neurodivergent to feel very affected by. I always talk about it night. I turn off all the lights in my house, Lynn, because it really sets me off. Like I'm like, what it. Let's turn this down. It really affects how I sleep. So if I have a lot of lights at night, Roseanne ain't sleeping. And I don't like that. So I know, as everybody should know, sleep is important. So. And I'm not a great sleeper, so I have to take extra care to make sure that it happens. So as you're super activated and back to that kid, right? So that kid, his cup, her cup has been filling these hours, days and weeks. And so what happens when you're in fight, flight or freeze, right? You are not capable of rational thought. You're not capable of thinking things through. And connection is going to be really hard. So you're going to have a real hard time connecting. And don't worry, we can walk you out of this. This is not a permanent state. Even though some kids get in there more or you get in there more. Right. But we do have to realize that a lot of kids are carrying this load and we have to pull back before we can say, hey, you're being disrespectful on purpose. We why are they acting like that? Is it because they're just so activated they're avoiding something? Something's irritated? And we often think that, you know, kids have skills and they're, they are connected, but they are different sets of skills. So you might have a kid with 127 IQ who still doesn't flush the toilet and you're really annoyed by that. But that's a different set of skills. Matt taps into executive functioning, that taps into social awareness. So we have all these different skills and IQ can only get you so far because many of our neurodivergent kids, you know, kids with adhd, kids with dyslexia, have a typically on average, a higher IQ than normal. So there creates this irritation from the parent side. Now remember, all skills can be learned. Don't think they can't be. But when you're activated, we have to pull back. We have to raise regulate first yourself and your child. Right. There's a reason why in an airplane they tell you to put an oxygen mask on first because you need to be calm, you need to be breathing before you put it on your kid when the plane's going down. And so, you know, it's a lot to think about. But it's really hard to avoid personalizing kids behavior when you carrying those old narratives, those own scripts. But more importantly, you're activated too.
- [11:52]
B
Yeah, no, it all comes down to the parent and what we're believing in that moment. Which is why the power of this concept that dysregulation is what your child may be experiencing, then that gives you the space to not be annoyed, to not be aggravated. Because again, what our children may be exhibiting, it might be befuddling, like wtf? You're trying to make sense of it and it may not make any sense based on where they are. So again, if you want as a parent to respond to your child to meet their needs, you can't do that if you're judging their behavior in a negative way or if you're taking it personally, what they're doing, where it may have nothing to do with you as a parent. And just again, where they happen to uniquely be, which is where your, the energy you have can best be directed to meeting Them where they are. And if there is something that's contributing to this dysregulated state, there's always something you can do about it.
- [12:57]
A
Absolutely. And even just to think, if you look at it from the lens of the nervous system, right, and you say, oh, it's their nervous system reacting. Oh, they're not giving me a hard time. They're having a hard time. And you really start going, what are the clues? And I think that lens really makes it where you're not so activated when you start seeing it in that way and you become. I often talk about being a parent detective. You start going, what are the signs of under and overstimulation? Because either sign from the nervous system could lead to an emotional eruption or no motivation or total. Remember, it's fight, flight, freeze or fawn. And those fawn kids are the kids that do everything 100% right. But inside, hot mess. And they're these kids crash and burn. These are kids that are more likely like where people go, I, I didn't know that was happening. And the next thing you know, they're using drugs or they refuse, they get school refusal. You start seeing the extreme. But this. They then look backwards. As Steve Jobs always says, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. And. And then they start making sense of the clues. And that's the conversation that we're having. What are those clues? What do we do about it? And because we again, can remove stress from our stress cup safely, easily. Kids, parents. But parents really need to be regulated enough. Not perfectly regulated. Wouldn't it be nice if we were perfectly regulated?
- [14:30]
B
Lens, Right.
- [14:34]
A
And you know, Len used to live in the Northeast. I live in the Northeast. Like, it's fast paced around here, you know, like people are honking at you. And people are. Can be really nice too. But there's an intensity here that isn't in this, in. In certain areas of the country. But those things can really, for me, they feel very triggering sometimes. Like, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna breathe. I'm going into Costco. I need to do some deep breathing before I go there, you know?
- [15:02]
B
Right, yeah. And then even something like deep breathing, it's simple. But again, there's lots of tricks or lots of tools at your disposal if you're prioritizing the idea of getting more regulated. So again, applies to parents, applies to kids. I'd love to go back though, because I'm always learning on recording these discussions. So in terms of the fourth element that you mentioned, the fawn piece of it that's new for me. And when you were talking about it, I immediately said, okay, well that must be the category of kids who like mask, right? Who kind of.
- [15:36]
A
They are the maskers.
- [15:37]
B
They are the maskers.
- [15:38]
A
Okay. They are the maskers. Even though you can kind of fall into all that. Fawn kids typically don't have, like there's a new term, you know, a newer concept called after school restraint collapse. So there are those kids that act perfectly at school and then after school they're just behaviorally a mess. Maybe they're withdrawn, maybe they're smashing things. Like often those are. The kids of the school are like, what are you talking about, Mrs. Smith? We don't see this with Bobby. You know, like they're not getting it. But, but fawn kids are in a hyper vigilant state that they must be. Be perfect. They tend to be in homes with a trauma background. So there might be a parent who, you know, let's face it, I work with people all over. I've had people with all kinds of degrees and different situations where they're letting their previous traumas play out in the current family home. And they're bringing, not genetics, they're bringing behaviors to the table, right? So, and I talk about my mom and dad, Tony and Philomena all the time. And Philomena's with, with Jesus. And I always say she's probably up there bossing him around, organizing him, you know, making him some good pasta fish, Joel. And. But, you know, they were not perfect parents. They were great parents. But you know, I repeat many of the things that Tony and Philomena taught me. And what I do try to do is share the good stuff. Right? But everything we learn about parenting, 90% of it comes from what you learned from your parents. And so sometimes we can inadvertently bring things, including trauma behaviors to the table. And so those hyper vigilant fawn kids, like my, one of my best friends, Cynthia Thurlow, she's a really well known anybody, everybody should check out her podcast, Everyday Wellness. But she came on my show and she did a very deeply personal interview about being a fawn kid. And you know, these are kids that people just don't know until they know are in these completely activated states. And again, often they, they mask until they hit a wall and then they fall. They, they really struggle psychologically at some point. And, and sometimes physically you might have kids with unresolved. I have had kids with like chronic gut issues. And, and this doesn't mean this happens to everybody. These are those kids that There really has to be some pretty significant and heavy stuff happening at home, right?
- [18:13]
B
Yeah. No, thank you for sharing all that. It was hard for me not to go to a particular client that I have now who is dealing with exactly that, where she does have a daughter who masks. And there's a lot of challenging situations, but the school doesn't see what the parent sees afterwards, which makes a challenging situation even more challenging. So interesting, that fourth category. Yeah, it's amazing.
- [18:40]
A
And for all those after school restraint collapse kids, I'm telling you, I think that is a huge portion of our neurodivergent population who does a really good job in the structure of the day, which is like, perplexing for parents because they're like, why are they holding it together all day? Well, they're going to school and their stress cup isn't full, and then they're hyper vigilant in the sense that in school they have the pressures of the peers. They have all the routines and structures. And so don't think your kid is doing it on purpose. Kids never want to act out. Don't let anybody ever tell you that that behavior is just a clue.
- [19:22]
B
Yeah, the kids are doing the best they can. They're trying to fit in. They're doing. But again, from a parent's perspective, because you're relying on the school to be able to support your child, you know, as they uniquely are. It's befuddling where if a school isn't seeing what the parent sees after school, it just makes a hard situation even harder. Which is why my heart goes out to parents who are, you know, all parents who have their own unique challenges. But something like that just makes it even harder because then you have people questioning, you know, you as the parent because they don't see your child the way you see them. So. So again, I'd say so true, Len.
- [20:03]
A
So true. And then parents start thinking like, I recently had this. You know, I have such great parents that I've worked with, like you, and I just adore them. And I worked with some of the most incredible cases. I would say that most of my kids that I worked with had already seen a dozen or more people by the time they got to me. My world record was I was the 55th person provider. And, yeah, so I never took. I was like, hey, we have nowhere to go but up. As long as I had parents who were willing to do the work right. Which means also holding a mirror to yourself because nobody's perfect. And sometimes, you know, I didn't get the kind of kids. I thought I was going to get. I thought I was going to get like the easiest kids known to man. My, my Max is the dysregulated kid and he forced me to rethink everything I thought because I thought behavior first. No, it's the nervous system first. And we have to do that because nothing ever will stick. No treatment, no method, no medication. It's not gonna work if you don't get that nervous system to regulate. And it's not as hard as we think. Whether it's for yourself, like I always say, I love going for my bi weekly massages, you know, yes, I have a PEMF device literally in my pocket. But there's so many little things that we can do to just kind of put a little deposit back in our bank. And so we have to start thinking differently because none of us can survive as humans, as people with this level of dysregulation that's out in the world. And call me optimistic, I mean, I just know that we can do things so much better and again, in such a simple, accessible way. And that's what I walked through, through people in this book. This isn't just another book. This is how do I do this? How do I do this so easily? And as I like to say, you're going to start doing these things like brushing your teeth. Why do you brush your teeth? To not have cavities. Do you see? Right. And so when we think about our after restraint, you know, our kids with the after school restraint collapse, right? Parents often think of like, you know, in the story of those great parents, they, they had a kid who was melting down the same exact time every day. So they kept going, what happened? What happened right there? And I was like, oh no, we're going to journal and go back. And what they realized was that there were so many things filling up and it wasn't one exact thing at school. But we were like, he's very sensitive. He's chemically sensitive. I was like, wait, the days they do this at school, this is what you're saying? And we actually had to really look out and figure out what we had to do. And nobody has the same tactical plan, but everyone does have the same tactical plan, is there are always contributors and it's not going to always be the immediate thing that just happened before, which I think is really surprising to people. Len.
- [23:04]
B
Yeah, it may be surprising to people, but it makes perfect sense to me, right? It's this cumulative load and there maybe becomes a tipping point that may happen at A certain time of the day. But again, it depends on what uniquely was being experienced. And I guess that leads me to the question I wanted to ask you. And I know it may be a hard one, but if you think about, okay, what are those stressors that contribute to dysregulation? I guess I'd ask you to throw out the major categories and what you think is the biggest one. But I'll throw out that at least for my son who is now 19. The biggest one is technology. Right. It's screen time. And that's something that he's doing phenomenally with reducing on his own. But that is quite the big dysregulator. But how else would you frame it? And I know it's in your book, but how else would you frame it in terms of those bigger stressors?
- [23:53]
A
Yeah, I actually trademarked the term device dysregulation. There is an entire chapter on it. Because I'd be foolish not to talk about it. I think there's so much wrapped around devices. It's, it's, it's overuse of it, it's what you're not doing. It's lack of boundaries around it. Like I walk people through like the biggest problem people have with their kids and it's such a reactivity point for families. Like everyone wants to talk to me about three things, Lynn. They want to talk to me about how do I manage this behavior. Like usually something that's happening, they can't stop. They want to talk to me about restrictive eating and they want to talk to me how do I get my damn kids off the device. And the reality is people think your kid should be self regulated on that device and they should be able to manage it on their own. That's baloney and cheese. Like how you know, even the difference between my 21 year old and my 15 year old, there has been a jump up in technology in that six year period. And you know, I have moms that I work with that have like a 20 year old and like a 5 year old and they're like, I don't even know how to parent. Every single kid is faced a new thing. So. So the devices in of themselves, I love devices. Like I'm not going to say that I don't. But the reality is, you know, how are we managing it? How are we being clear? And to think that your kid is going to be able to self regulate on a device when it is designed to give you dopamine hits that are like crack, literally like drugs. You are kidding yourself. Even Dr. Rose Kits. We had to have a wifi management system and we had to bud say, this is all you get. You are not allowed to negotiate with us. And we love to tell the story of how max, my now 21 year old, we have like, we're nerdy science people in. So like, and everyone's like an engineer and all that other stuff. So we would have like, we had this thing in our basement with like literally all of our 1990s and 2000s computers and they would just tinker with them. So to this day we still don't know this, but Max used those computers to bypass the technology and he was able to get on. And my husband said if I wasn't so darn proud of him, I'd be mad. But that's how addictive it is. And you know, so, you know, again, how are you managing that? You have to have clear boundaries. Kids need reminders, they need visuals. And honestly, I am a huge fan of technology that budgets it because it's the device dysregulating and it's the arguing with parents and kids, the. Between them. They're dysregulating both people. So. And you know, kids, like, we didn't, you know, I mentioned co regulation, but we are the anchors for our kids. And you don't have to be a perfect parent, but you have to be 80% awesome. And you have to, if you want your kid to regulate, you know, you can't yell at them to calm down. You can, you can show them what calm looks like. But, you know, once you're, once your kid's in a, in a red. In the red, I call it in a dysregulated state. Those frontal lobes are offline. They're not capable of reasoning. Don't try to have a conversation with them. You're just going to make yourself angry and you're going to make them more dysregulated.
- [27:22]
B
Yep, very predictable. And I'm laughing as you're talking because literally two days ago, because I slipped into that where I was actually kind of raising my voice with my son. He was doing a final assignment for school and he was stressing about it. And again, I was, instead of being calm and helping him through that, I was annoyed that he was dysregulated. So again, I think we can know things as parents, but we're not going to be perfect. We're going to slip. The key is really being able to default back to what is going on with my child. How can I be useful? And a lot of times that comes down to a parent being okay in those moments, not getting what they want, right. Just kind of dropping down. Acceptance, curiosity. And again, if you can, in your mind, default to, hey, it's not like this is bad behavior. This is just my child experiencing dysregulation. And why would I ever want to meet my child with being annoyed or angry or frustrated? So, again, even I've been doing this for many years. Boy. And I do express a lot of it. But there's no question I go off the rails and need to go. Need to bring myself back at times.
- [28:39]
A
Yeah. I mean, I go off the rails, too. But what I try to do is if I identify a pattern, right? So my kids turn into teenagers. My youngest is, like, an easy kid. His name. His name is Giancarlo. And. And he. When he came out, I understood why some people have six kids. I was like, oh, there are some kids that are born easy, right? You know, and he's just like. He's calm. But he also benefited from my constant instruction that my other kid got. He just picked it up, right? Because he was regulated enough to absorb. That's important. Remember that. But, you know, when we are really thinking about what's happening, right? So I found myself getting really annoyed asking my kids to come down for dinner, right? Like, I was bubbling. I was getting pretty mad. You know, you don't want to make a New York Italian mad, right? And so my husband was like, I got it. Because we also think we're the funniest parents in the world, Len. So we pull out the karaoke machine, and he starts turning this into a funny thing. So he starts. We use a lot of humor for diffusion. And every time they ignore him, he gets on and he goes, dinner is being served in the promenade deck. Or he'll say, everybody to the nurse's office. And he says stuff. And, like, nobody can get mad, you know, so we were like, we're so mad. And, you know, it's a totally normal teenage behavior to ignore your parents. Like, so it was like, how could we reframe this without causing conflict? And, you know, I talk a lot about humor in everything that I do, but we. We do have to say, why is this happening? Right? But it becomes a lot easier when we talk about, you know, understanding this is just a nervous system activating. And what I talk about, I talk about something called the love pause. And the love pause is as much for yourself as it is for your kids. And it's stopping for three seconds, right? After five seconds, the brain comes down. But five seconds is too long when you're mad at your kids. But all, all it is is a three second pause. Don't say anything, just pull yourself back. Whether it's a mantra you have in your breath, your head, a breath, closing your eyes, you know, whatever religious thing that you need, but just to pull yourself back for three seconds. And you know, if you think right now that, or try it the next time you're, you're annoyed, you're frustrated, I don't even care if it's your kid, right? Maybe it's at the grocery store, at the bank or whatever, that annoying coworker, and you just pull back. That three seconds is a long time to be able to reroute, not respond, just be regulated enough. Because we often wanna come in and be the solution for our kid. And really the solution is regulating yourself. And that is not a joke. That is hard to do. Sometimes it feels easier to go in and rescue our child, but we have to lead by example. And it becomes so much easier to do that when we give ourselves that love pause, that little bit of time. And I really want people to know. It sounds so simple, but it is that powerful that we're forgetting getting the basics. Like, I always have a magic wand at my desk. And for those of you listening, I literally pulled out a magic wand. And we think there's something, a homeopathy, a pill, a technique, that is it, it is your power, because it will give you enough to recalibrate. And whether it's your nervous system or the words coming out of your mouth and the actions, it's all those things. And when we do that, we teach our kids without telling them we're showing them because we have to show our kids what we expect. That is what we have to do. And that is the hardest part of parenting. We don't talk about.
- [32:48]
B
Yeah, no, everything you're talking about is the child feeding off the parent. The parent leads the way. The parent teaches by demonstrating what it looks like. And as simple of a concept as it is the concept of slowing down, pausing, having some silence, right as you regroup, breathe, whatever the case may be. Sounds so simple. But no, that could be really hard to do unless you shift your own sense of why that's important. Like if you firmly believe that it's okay, you give your permission to pause when something's going sideways and you want to react. You can always just pause, say, I need a minute. So it doesn't take much, but it does take yourself believing that it's useful believing that it's worth it. And yes, our kids would definitely witness that. We can regulate ourselves, we can slow things down. And what a great thing to teach your child, who's going to have lots of instances where it would be useful for them to be able to do that too.
- [33:48]
A
But you have to actually do it right and just to understand the nervous system and the subconscious mind. So I don't think people know that your subconscious brain is in charge. So 95 to 99.5% of the time we are not in conscious awareness. That's how much it's in charge. So when we do something right, like when you drive home for work, you don't have to think about it anymore. You don't put ways on. You have to do that with your nervous system. And that three seconds right will feel painful. You might even be mad at your kid in the inside, but you're not going to show it. You're going to be the wall of calm. But the more you do it, the more it becomes automatic. You will not have to think about it. You will do it. And the more your kid's nervous system will self regulate on its own. And you know, if your kid is a highly dysregulated kid, they, they have impairments of any kind or obstacles or whatever you want to call it. And you know it's going to take longer and that's okay. We all think there's like a magic bullet, like Your kid has 127 IQ and you just tell them and they're going to do it because they can do that in history. These are different skills and some skills
- [35:05]
B
need to be nurtured, no doubt about it. And a lot of it again comes down to showing up strong as a parent, letting go of any specific thing that you want to see. And so it's about just adopting a more open, less demanding. I guess the way I always like to describe it is it's great for you to have as a parent strong wants for your child, but the minute they become expectations, the whole energy shifts. And that can. Even though you may feel like no, it's okay to have expectations if you do and your child's feeling that again. I found it was inadvertently pushing my son away so I could go big on what I wanted for him, but then have more patience and be more relaxed that it doesn't have to happen immediately. And again, if I want faster progress for my child, me shifting how I am with him was the greatest thing I could do to kind of grease the Wheels for success.
- [36:04]
A
Amazing. And it's so true. And, you know, patience is hard. Like, I have a lot of great skills.
- [36:10]
B
Did your. Did your parents teach you patience? Mine didn't.
- [36:14]
A
You know, Tony and Philomena were pretty incredible parents. Like, I didn't know that a woman couldn't be super powerful until I went to college. And people tried to tell me, like, oh, you can't do that because you're a girl. And I was like, well, say what? Like, you know. But they taught me some pretty incredible things. They were definitely not perfect parents, but I didn't know there weren't limits to things. Would they. They were patient with a lot of things. I think about all the shenanigans I pulled in the 80s. Like, I would never let my kids get away with it, but. But they didn't have patience for, like, you know, un. Being unkind or doing, like, stupid things, like, meaning, like, lacking common sense. Right. That was never.
- [36:57]
B
Bad behaviors. Right?
- [36:58]
A
Bad behaviors. You know what I mean? They were like, no, you know, and listen, I'm Italian, and I don't mean this to be triggering for anybod. Well, when Philomena pulled a wooden spoon out, which she never hit us with, she just needed to show us the wooden spoon. You better watch out, because she didn't do that too often. And it was this Italian sign, or the other Italian sign is you put your hand in your mouth and you bite it. Oh, shoe's about to blow. You know what I'm saying? But I think my mom's lacked patience, honestly, is in typical sibling conflict. She just hated that, you know? But. But when none of us, like, patience is hard. It is like, something and that you really have to work on, and you can't do it if you don't pause. That's what the love pause is. It's literally a pause so, like, you don't say something when you're irritated at your colleague, at your kid, you know, and you literally think it's not as strong as it is, but when you do it, boy, you're gonna feel so much better about yourself. Remember, you need to be the wall of calm. And, like, your kid who's like, you know, they may. They might continue to really get spun and dysregulated, but if you're the wall of calm, it's not as likely to happen. Okay? Eventually they'll just regulate. Like, and I think, Len, we always think about this with our little kids, like, when they're hung, you know, hangry and stuff like that. But as kids, get older. You said it. We have these unrealistic expectations. We think you're this old and you should be doing this. But guess what, There's a developmental range. You might have one kid, like my younger kid was like a, came out like a 57 year old Buddha, you know, but. And then, you know, and then this one can do this, you know, so, so we, we get a little hung up on things and you have to meet kids where you're at, but you can't do that from. You can't pour from an empty cup. You just can't, you know.
- [38:58]
B
Nope, nope. Not at all. Not at all.
- [38:59]
A
No.
- [39:00]
B
Well, I love some of the concepts you threw out there. I love the love pause. I'm a big fan of the pause, but I think love pause sounds like a much better term. And the wall of calm, again, there's a lot that you can do to, again just to really help your child to get to a more regulated state. I know so much of. Dr. Roseanne, what you've talked about builds also and expands on a lot of what Dr. Neal Nathan talked about when he was on the show about nine months ago. But I'll put that in the show notes. And I think One thing that Dr. Nathan and you would agree on, right. Which is that unless the nervous system is more regulated, forget about all that other perhaps expensive stuff that you're wanting to do that might help because this is kind of part of that foundation that really has to be at least moving in the right direction for that other stuff to work.
- [39:49]
A
And that's called psychoimmunology. Like, there's a whole study of the impact of the stress on the immune system. And that's how I really unfolded this work. And that's a whole other conversation. But the body cannot do what it's supposed to do in a stress state. That's just biology. So we have to regulate first. And it's much easier than you think. It's not a massage every day, even though I take a bath every day. Like, you know, there's lots of things that I know I need to do because I'm in the middle of, like, I have a book coming out this year. So there's just a lot of, like, extraordinary demands on my body and I can't pretend that it's not there. I, as a mother of a dysregulated kid, I didn't know that I was in a marathon. I thought I was in a sprint. And what did I do? I burnt myself out. And so I want to share that with people because it's not as hard as we think. We don't think brushing our teeth is very hard. I want you to start thinking about the nervous system in the same way. And I, you know, can't wait for people to get their hands on my book, the Dysregulated Kid. But if you buy it in advance, you're going to get immediate, accessible things that you can start using today to start bringing nervous system regulation, making it not this abstract concept, but things that actually you'll feel good about immediately from the first day.
- [41:11]
B
Fantastic. No, excited for that. Coming up, we'll include links in the show notes. But again, I really appreciate you taking the time to go deeper on this just super important concept. And once your book comes out, we'll have you back on because things I know are constantly shifting, but I really appreciate you sharing these really important concepts with our listeners. So thanks so much. Dr. Roseanne thank you.
- [41:34]
A
And you know, all you need to do is just take a few minutes to regulate yourself. And every single parent has that ability
- [41:41]
B
totally within your control if you choose to do it. And it would be well worth your time to do so. So thanks again. Your child needs you running on all cylinders now. And the fastest way to rise is with personalized one on one support. Get started today. Go to elevatehowyounavigate.com.