Child therapy 101

To go along with Rylie's behavioral therapy I am now taking a parenting class every Thursday afternoon. I am so hungry for any and all help with her. I would like to document the things a learn in this class so I can not only remember them, but also anybody who reads this can maybe pick up some pointers. So I showed up to this class and there are like 7 women in there. We get to go around and introduce ourselves and explain why we are there and what is going on with our kids. There were some grandmothers in there who are raising their grandchildren because their parents are crack heads and molested the children and so now they are being raised by grandparents who have absolutely no idea who to deal with such intense problems. I was so heartbroken, but glad that they were there getting the help they needed. So when it was my turn to talk I felt a little silly explaining my problems sitting next to these amazing women. It was a good dose of perspective. Anyway, we learned to "focus on the donut, not the hole". Meaning that we need to look at our children as people in stead of always seeing the problem. They told us that we needed to be thermostats and not thermometers. Meaning that we need to see the problem and do what we can to respond (not react) to the situation as opposed to just stating and whining about the problem. Our homework this week is to notice one physical attribute about our child that we have never noticed before. And to practice giving "30 second bursts of attention" such as if we are on the phone and they need our attention, stopping the conversation and giving them 30 seconds of undivided attention. They also talked about "be with" attitudes, meaning thinking "I am here, I hear you, I understand, I am listening" Letting them know that we are here to tell them that we care rather that always trying to fix the problem right away. They gave the example of a child coming home from school and telling his mom that he doesn't have any friends and that he's lonely and sad. The mother tried to fix the problem right away instead of listening by saying "of course you have friends, I'm your friend dad is your friend..etc" when all the boy wanted to hear was "You seem really lonely, it seems like you've had a hard day." Simply stating your child's emotions does wonders for their self esteem, and shows them that you are observing and caring about how they feel. Most children act out because they can't verbally say how they are feeling. I started doing that with Rylie and it works incredibly well. When she shows any type of emotion, I simply state what it is. Like when she is frustrated with something I just say "I see that you're frustrated" Eventually they will start to recognize what they are feeling before you even say anything. Now when she's angry she will say "Mom I'm really angry about..." When she felt like I cared about how she was feeling she was able to vocalize how she felt and then was able to fix the problem on her own. It really does work! Most of the time they don't really want you to solve the problem for them, they just want their feelings to be noticed. So that's what we learned this week. They told us that at the the end of the course we will know as much as a grad school child psych major. So that's pretty exciting. I don't pretend to know the first thing about child psychology, but I'm getting better. Even if this just gives me a couple more good days with her in my life, I'm a happy mom.