Ever wish you could stop those meltdowns in their tracks without turning into the mean parent?

We kick off with a self-assessment related to your child’s behavior and your current level of confidence in handling it.

We’ll also guide you through creating realistic goals for our time together. For example: You may want to decrease your child’s tantrums from three to two tantrums a day in the next two months.

For our first week of this program, we will talk about how various internal and external factors or “variables” (hunger, tiredness, noise, clutter, learning challenges, etc.) affect your child’s behavior. 

You’ll learn how to identify the variables in your child’s immediate environment and safely experiment with them to understand the potential underlying causes of their meltdowns. This first week can be very eye-opening as you begin to identify and recognize patterns in your child’s behavior.

In the second week, we’ll focus on the causes of anger in the context of your child’s physical well-being and spatial environment. 

That is, we’ll go over:

• Where and when meltdowns occur
• Which basic biological or physical factors could be causing your child’s anger
• How specific medical issues could be at play (and without you knowing it).

This is an important topic to go over because your child’s anger is a sign that they are struggling or feeling very frustrated with circumstances that are out of their control. Many times, a child who is having a meltdown may appear to be angry or emotional about something that isn’t actually the real problem.

Our work this week will help you draw the line between what is developmentally appropriate (sometimes tantrums are normal) and what is a concern that requires medical attention.

We’ll dive into:

• What your gut instinct is telling you about your child’s behavior and how to use the DSM-5 categorization to confirm your instincts
• Who to contact when you think you need help or advice from a professional about their mental well-being
• Various social-emotional disorders that are seen in children who have frequent meltdowns

Inside the course, we have a resource to serve as a guide when speaking with the right type of professional so you can narrow down variables, and give them the information they need to help you best. 

This week, we will be discussing formal evaluation options and mapping out a plan so that you can begin to rule things out, get more clear on action steps you can take, and ways that you can take care of your child’s needs in the meantime.

We will go over:

• Different types of school testing and education evaluations

• The importance of rallying for support and finding outside help 
• Dealing with parental burnout and getting help for yourself

Teachers are not always trained to notice or identify learning disabilities or difficulties. You probably aren’t either, but you have your parental gut instincts as an asset. No one is more vigilant than you when it comes to your child. 

Your response can influence their ability to pick up communication techniques and healthy coping skills — the more they watch you, the more they learn from you! 

In this week’s session, we will uncover

• How you react to your child when they are having a meltdown and variables that might affect your response to their meltdowns
• What past experiences with anger have taught you or conditioned you to do
• Strategies you can implement to shift your default responses so you can learn to cope with your child’s meltdowns 

You love your child, and you desperately want to understand what they’re trying to communicate. The reality is that your emotional responses can become variables for your child’s anger, too.

Children have rich inner worlds but need your help to articulate what they’re going through and begin their healing journey. 

This week you will learn how to:

• Identify a set of coping skills that make sense for your child
• Identify gaps in your child’s communication skills and meet them where they are

When something bothers your child or when an event brings up certain emotions, anger is not their primary emotion. It might be the emotion that they first express, but it’s not the first emotion that they feel. We need to help our children understand what these other emotions are.

This week, I want to talk about people around you, such as caregivers who help you inside and outside the home (for example, your parents, friends of the family, or someone you pay to help). 

After this session, you’ll be able to:

• Identify where your child’s caregivers fall on the spectrum of Helping vs. Making it Worse
• Pinpoint what the caregivers are doing that is either helping/not helping
• Learn how to talk to them about what you need them to do instead and if needed, set healthy boundaries.

The idea of boundaries is that although people mean well and want to help you, your child’s needs should come first.  However, sometimes this is easier said than done.

This is our final week together, and we will:

• Recap action items from the previous seven weeks
• Refine your safety plan
• Evaluate your progress/Your child’s progress

You’ll finish the program with more confidence than before, and you’ll gain a community of parents who are going through some of the same experiences you are. Having others who understand your circumstances is priceless, as there may be many who — despite really wanting to understand — just don’t.