I love writing a parenting newsletter for Sesame Workshop. It’s one of my fun assignments, if only because I can document what’s going on in our household. I write about what the kids are doing, parenting challenges, what tactics we use to survive it all, etc. Since I don’t journal, it’s a way of preserving memories.
Only here’s the thing: After I write a newsletter, a “panel of experts” on the Sesame side reviews it, weighing in on whether I’ve just given good or bad parenting advice. Imagine having a panel of experts milling around your house, raising a red flag when you’ve just done a poor bit of parenting. That’s kinda how it feels.
Recently, for example, I wrote about helping my kids handle feelings of anger or frustration. As in, what do you do when your 6 year old and 4 year old are both yelling at each other like two drunks, and you figure that at any minute, Patrick Swayze is going to have to come over and ask them to leave the bar? What sorts of tactics can you use to help them channel their emotions so they can have a non-yelling conversation?
One tip (which I heard from a mom friend who has twins) was to let your kid hit a pillow. You’ve heard this advice before, right? It’s nothing new.
Here’s what the expert panel said:
The act of hitting, even when directing the action at an object like a pillow, can actually strengthen angry emotions and increase children’s (or adults’) angry feelings rather than dispel them. We recommend sticking with the other great ideas — taking a deep breath and counting to ten.
In other words, hitting a pillow makes you angrier. Even though this wasn’t technically my advice and I don’t use this one at home, I still felt a bit like one of those parents on “Supernanny” who’s just been caught on videotape doing something patently bad.
That’s all to say that you and your kids may want to steer clear of this anger-management tactic.
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February 28, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Addy
I don’t have any children, but I worked with Head Start for forever. The counting 10 and deep breathing are the BEST way, but those are lessons learned through practice. Hitting the pillow seems to me to be appropriate when one is in the moment with a child who hasn’t been introduced or practiced counting and deep breathing, especially when everybody is just about to knock each other cold!
Experts are all well in good, but they are not in the room when a parent is about to pull out his/her hair and that of both children involved!
Keep writing…I’ll bet you do LOVE writing a newsletter for “the Street”!
February 28, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Mom
Well now, isn’t *that* an interesting panel of experts. From my perspective, I cannot even imagine a better mom than you. I wonder sometimes how you know so much. I really do.
Their pillow reasoning sounds a bit suspect to me. One time a therapist suggested that I clobber a pillow because I could not rationally discuss my anger with someone who wasn’t there. Long story. But the upshot was that it was ultimately unsatisfying & didn’t work. Maybe that is what the panel of experts should have said.
Of all the terrible things that Supernanny could capture on video … or all the terrible things that the panel could censor from being widely published … getting distracted in some manner during the heat of conflict seems pretty innocuous.
March 2, 2009 at 4:00 pm
abumgarner
I definitely agree that hitting a pillow is not the worst thing a parent could advise! Besides, parenting generally seems to involve *knowing* what the experts advise but *doing* whatever works for you.
March 2, 2009 at 11:23 pm
carolynk
OK, I am the first one to admit that there are really no cookie-cutter solutions out there. But know a bunch of I kids with sensory issues (including one of my own) and don’t think that deep breathing will always do it (and we have worked with that.) Sometimes — especially in sense-seeking kids — they need to have extra sensory input — like safely punching a pillow — in order to re-center themselves. I’ve also had them draw how mad they are and the resistance of the crayon against the paper seems to help. (If any one is the market for color-heavy tornado drawings, we have a wide selection to choose from.) I wonder what an Occupational Therapist would say about Dr. Elmo’s advice. . . .