If you’re just joining us, here’s a mini review of Mina, our case study for this month.
Mina is 3 years old and does great when she’s in control and everything in her environment and days are scheduled and run exactly how she likes it. Easy peasy, right? 😅
Mina’s parents wanted help making morning routines smoother, which we talked about last week. This week, we’re zooming into Mina’s meltdowns and helping her parents add on to their meltdown support plan.
Mina’s Meltdowns
Mina’s meltdowns lasted anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour where she would be inconsolable and consisted of:
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Hitting
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Kicking
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Irrational requests (e.g. asks to sit on lap, but then doesn’t want to be touched.)
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Loud screaming
Her parents have a pretty solid support plan in place:
“We just take her into a safe room and sit in the room with her. Reminding her that we will not leave and that we love her.”
I think being able to sit with your child while they’re having a meltdown is great! But, what isn’t great is sitting with your child and allowing them to hit and kick you and/or hit or kick themselves during the meltdown.
It feels like you shouldn’t stay and allow them to keep harming you, and it also feels unsafe to leave them alone in this state.
Read more about handling aggressive meltdowns in a previous case study, which you can find [here]. But the highlights are that you need to enforce physical boundaries to keep your child safe. Sometimes that means giving them a tight bear hug to stop them from causing damage. It doesn’t feel great while you do this, but it’s still necessary to keep everyone safe, in some scenarios.
Then later, after the meltdown, you can repair by acknowledging their feelings and explaining safety boundaries. Ask them:
"What are Mommy and Daddy's main jobs? It's to keep you safe—how do we do that? We do that by letting you bike only if you have a helmet on, making sure you always have a seat belt—but it also means having to hug you so tight even when you don't like it because your body is out of control and unsafe. We want you to be safe."
The Unreasonable Request Clue
Right before Mina went into full-blown meltdown, she’d start making unreasonable requests.
“Like last night (at bedtime), the timer went off, and she got upset that I was going to leave the room. And she said, 'No, lay down.' And I said, 'Okay, I'll give you two more minutes. Let me lay down.' And because she was laying perpendicular across the bed, I said, 'if you want me to lay down, you need to move your feet.' She goes, 'No, I don't want to.' And then I'd say, 'Okay, I'm going to leave the room now.' And she’d go, ‘No, lay down.’ It's like, I want you to lay down, but I'm not gonna move for you to lay down.
I don't want to keep going back and forth. It's irrational, it's a lose-lose situation.”
