Jun 16, 2011

Removing my emotion from the situation

It took me many years of parenting a spirited child to learn to remove my emotion from the situation.

When my son had a tantrum I would become really angry. He would yell at me and I would yell back. Things escalated. It was only when I sat down and thought about it that I realized I could control the situation more than he could, and although I was really mad, I didn’t need to show it.

It was really hard when he showed anger for me to reply back calmly, to comment on the situation but not argue with him. But as I learned to do that, he quieted down much sooner.

Years ago, when autism was first diagnosed, autistic children were thought to be the children of “refrigerator mothers”. Maybe it wasn’t so much that the mom was cold in the first place, but that she learned how to cope with her child’s emotions.

No comments:

Post a Comment