This is a really hard one for parents/carers of children who struggle to regulate their emotions or manage their behaviour in safe and socially acceptable ways. Just this week I’ve met with parents/carers who feel broken by their child’s behaviour - rude, mean, cruel, nasty, disarming, bullying - that’s how it can feel on the receiving end.
When things are calm, children can often explain good and bad behaviour choices, kind and unkind actions, and they can tell you what they would do next time. And at other times, when there's nothing challenging to manage, they can be fun, funny, sensitive, empathic, kind.
So when it all happens again next time, exactly the same pattern playing out, it just looks like a bad choice made by a well-functioning child - rather than a child in a different nervous system state, with limited options, not really able to think things through at that point in time.
Where we can see there’s an element of choice, because sometimes there is, it’s a choice based on faulty narratives - a perception of self as bad, a perception of the world as unsafe, and a perception of adults as useless or cruel.
In NVR we try to avoid blaming and shaming children, instead getting alongside and helping them to understand what they’re up against (a nervous system in survival mode through no fault of their own) and insisting they find safer and more respectful ways of managing - with our compassion and with our full support and the support of helpful adults in all of their environments.
And we afford ourselves and other adults the same compassion and grace when they’re overwhelmed too - believing they’re doing their best with what resources they have available to them at the time.
Comentarios