One of my favorite ways to relax is to do a progressive muscle relaxation. To do a progressive muscle relaxation, you go through each body part, tense it, and then feel the difference as you relax it. So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to teach kids how to do a progressive muscle relaxation. Here are my thoughts.
Welcome to Little Elf Family Services! I’m Lara Elfstrand. I am a parent coach, and I am here to help parents to feel connected, rested, and thriving. I have a master’s degree in early childhood special education (and a clear teaching credential), and I am endorsed as an infant family advanced transdisciplinary mental health practitioner.
I became a parent in 2007, and it changed me and my life completely. I realized just how much a person changes when they become a parent. It changed my values, my priorities, and my marriage! The things I learned cannot be summarized in one blog post or even in one blog. But here are just a few things that I would start with:
Nesting parties ask us to re-think the way that we celebrate new parents and challenge us to focus on what the expecting parents need. It’s really less of a party and more of an opportunity to provide the family help.
Unlike baby showers, “Nesting parties shift the focus from stuff to support to help families prepare their homes and hearts for life with a new baby,” explains Lara Elfstrand, the pediatric sleep practitioner of Little Elf Family Services.
Our goal this month is to improve our skills at asking open ended questions, so that we can get to know one another over time. This week we are getting to know each other's daily experience in the present. Here are some questions to get you started:
Is our child like anyone in your family? Who?
How do you think we could have more fun in our life?
Our goal this month is to improve our skills at asking open ended questions, so that we can get to know one another over time. This week we are getting to know each other's past. Here are some questions to get you started:
How would you compare yourself as a mother/father to your own mother/father?
How have you changed in the last year?
When we need something, it is easy to look at our partner as the enemy instead of as a teammate. How can we work together as one team fighting against the issues that come up this week? How can we give our partner the benefit of the doubt? How can we look for ways to find compromise when our needs are in conflict? How can we use conflict as an opportunity to better understand who we are and what we need? Are there ways that we can take responsibility for our part of the problem?
According to the Gottmans' research, the way a conversation starts is likely the way that it will end. So if we start with criticism or contempt, we are likely to end with defensiveness or stonewalling. But if we start gently, we are more likely to have a productive conversation. Some keys to a gentle start-up include: expressing appreciation; making statements that start with "I", such as "I'm upset" or "I'm angry"; describing the facts of the situation; and clearly describing what we need. Check out this video from Julie Gottman to hear more.
According to Dr. Gottman’s research, the masters of relationship had 20 times more positive interactions than negative interactions during everyday interactions, and five times more positive than negative interactions during times of conflict. Our ratio of positive to negative interactions is strong when our relationships are full of fondness, affection, gratitude and humor. When we create rituals that build gratitude and affection for one another, we are putting our relationship in what Dr. Gottman calls “the positive perspective”.
I wanted to start our expressing needs challenge with a quick reminder that it’s really hard to think clearly or have empathy for our families when we are physically upset (Dr. Gottman calls it “flooded”). If we notice that our heart rates are high and our bodies are tense, we may need to start off by taking a good break. What is the nature of a good break? It is at least 20 minutes long. It is thinking about something else besides the argument. By the time the break is over, our bodies are physically relaxed, and our hearts and minds are calm.
The August "Expressing Needs Clearly & Respectfully" Challenge: https://mailchi.mp/3768881f81c2/aug-2018-expressing-needs-clearly-and-respectfully-challenge
As adults, many conflicts begin when our needs go unmet. Maybe we express our need when our partner is busy doing something else. Or perhaps we feel scared that our partner won't be willing or able to meet our need, so we don't express it or we use hints to "test the waters." A key strategy of the Gottman Bringing Baby Home program is to express our needs clearly and regularly so that they don't build up or escape our mouths as criticism or contempt. (Dr. Gottman calls this a negative bid - expressing our bid, or request, in a negative way).
This month we are exploring how to build our family’s emotional bank account by responding to each other’s needs. We are working to become more aware of how we each express our needs (bids). This week we are exploring the ways that infants and toddlers express their needs. We know that in the early stages of language development, parents have to be the detective to figure out what the cries, sounds, and movements mean. Over time, babies figure out that they can use their cries, sounds, and movements to have an impact on the people in their world.
As we work together to read each other‘s words and body language to figure out each other‘s needs, it can be useful to think about what Dr. John Medina calls the empathy reflex. In his book Brain Rules for Baby, he describes what he calls the empathy reflex. The empathy reflex is a habit that we can build to identify how the other person feels and make a guess about why they might feel that way. This can help us to bridge the gap between the behaviors that we can see in the other person and the intentions that we can’t see.
The next step in this challenge is to slow down, breathe, recognize bids, and RESPOND MINDFULLY.
In the Bringing Baby Home class, Dr. Gottman talks about the importance of recognizing bids and responding to them intentionally. The motto of the workshop is "small things often."
When we notice that our partner or our child is making a bid for connection, we have several ways that we can respond.
1. We can turn towards. This means that we respond to their request for connection by connecting with them.
The first step in this challenge is to slow down, breathe, and then RECOGNIZE BIDS.
As I mentioned in this month's newsletter, a bid is defined as the way that a person expresses what they need at the moment.
Some examples of bids that our partner might make include:
- A bid for our attention, such as calling our name or saying "Look at this"
Let's take a look at different ways that we can slow down with our kids to savor the moment together.
I recently discovered a book called "Breathe Like a Bear" by Kira Willey. It is full of ideas for ways to teach little ones to breathe! Kira is also a songwriter. Check out her music on your favorite music player! I've been enjoying "Bunny Breath" and others! A few of her strategies include:
Pretending that we are drinking hot chocolate, taking sips and saying a long "mmmm" or slowly blowing it to cool it down.
When we do manage to slow down and have dedicated time to just breathe and observe our children, we may find that we can be intentional to think about what we enjoy, we can savor the moments as children grow so quickly, and we might even learn something new about the way that our children grow.
For example: once upon a time there was a baby who was struggling to sleep. His mama was so tired and frustrated, because no matter what she did, he woke up after just a 30-40 minute nap.
One of my favorite quotes is from John Ortberg and Dallas Willard, "Ruthlessly eliminate hurry." But how realistic is that? Check out this blog post as we join other parents who struggle with this challenge with us.
As I mentioned in my newsletter this week, the challenge this month is to slow down and breathe.
If you watch the Gottman Institute's "What's Baby Saying?" video, Dr. Gottman explains that "it is important to realize that babies operate on a much, much slower time scale than adults. You may remember when you were a child, a summer seemed to last forever. Now as you get older, summers go by very, very quickly. Because the world is so much slower for children, it takes time for a baby to react to things.
As May comes to an end, we wrap up our series on recognizing the "Four Horsemen" that Gottman has found predict divorce, and to use their antidotes. I'm hoping that these last four months have helped you to be aware of the behaviors that predict divorce, and to know how you can make different choices to build your positive, playful parenting team!
When is it appropriate to fight in front of the kids? In John Medina's book Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded), he talks about "One of the greatest predictors of performance in school turns out to be the emotional stability of the home... Given that stress can powerfully affect learning, one might predict that children living in high-anxiety households would not perform as well academically as kids living in more nurturing households. That is exactly what studies show. Marital stress at home can negatively affect academic performance in almost every way measurable, and at nearly any age...
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©Lara Elfstrand, MA ECSE, IF-ATMHP, CPSI - Little Elf Family Services, 101 S. Santa Fe Ave. #188, Fountain, CO 80817
