In Episode 97, I’m chatting with Signe Whitson. We talk about her book, Parenting The Challenging Child: The Four-Step Way To Turn Problem Situations Into Learning Opportunities, which is based on her work at the Life Space Crisis Intervention, an organization dedicated to training teachers, counselors, and parents on how to appropriately respond to challenging behaviors from kids. The program helps us to better understand the conflict cycle that we can get into with kids when they are exhibiting bad behaviors and how we can help break that cycle.
Previously, in episode 66, I spoke to Signe about her research and article about distinguishing between rude, mean, and bullying behaviors in children.
After Signe’s visit to my camp this summer to do training with our counselors, we now call each other by our camp names, Sunshine and Ginger.
Big Ideas

* One of the most important tools that kids have for calming down is deep breathing.
* Another important tool that kids have for calming down is movement.
* It’s important for parents to be aware that their own kids trigger an emotional response in them that brings about quicker frustration or exhaustion than when they are with someone else’s child.
* LSCI is an approach to working with young people that examines how a child’s thoughts, perceptions, and feelings contribute to their behavior. While it has been used for 30 years to train professionals who work with kids, this book relates the concepts and strategies to help parents learn to help kids:

* to calm their emotional brain during stressful situations and
* to re-engage their thinking brain and problem-solve.

* The Conflict Cycle teaches us that before bad behavior ever occurs with a child, there is a set of thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and reactions from other people that grows within the child and leads to the behavior.
* With problem behavior with kids, we look at the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex of the brain. In stressful situations, the emotional part of the brain loses the ability to connect and communicate with the rational part of the brain and the children’s emotions become dominant.
* Helping kids learn how to regulate their brain is a skill that we can and should be teaching them.
* Kids need adults to role model how to take a breath and handle things rationally and calmly, rather than acting on the emotions of the moment.

Quotes
Ginger: “I hope that this book is very practical for parents in terms of what is the garbage, nonsense behavior that we don’t need to address right away, in the heat of the moment, versus, what needs to be done in a problem situation, and how to do that in a way that actually turns that problem into an opportunity for the relationship to get a little better, for the child to feel heard and understood, for the child to learn how to calm down.”
Ginger: “What the conflict cycle shows is that by the time a problem situation happens, let’s say between a parent and child, the problem itself is all we’re focusing on–the misbehavior, the talking back, the rolled eyes, the thrown bottle–whatever it is. What the conflict cycle teaches us is that before that behavior ever occurred, there was this whole set of thoughts, perceptions, feelings, reactions from other people that grew, and grew, and grew, and led to that behavior.”
Ginger: “If, as adults, we just go in and punish behavior or react to it, what we’re missing is everything inside the child that is importan...