Grand Prize Parenting Moment...We All Have Them.

              We all have moments as parents we reach for something that works and hang on to it and we feel like we just received our own invisible grand prize trophy on figuring out our child. Moments you won’t find in a how to raise the perfect child handbook or no specialist will tell you to do.  It has nothing to do with a system of steps to take and you’re not going to find it on the Internet. A Parenting moment that by some miracle works for the time being and I can tell you what works today, may not work tomorrow.

 When my son is in tantrum mode he will go into his room and shut the door. Then I find myself wanting to find way to calm him even if I know there is no way. I used to open the door every few minutes and ask him if he was OK and it never worked. He would jump right back into full on tantrum and shut the door. He can’t open doors yet, so coming out on his own isn’t an option and that has prompted me to want the door open for him. The other day I started thinking about my approach and morphed myself into autism. He is already in process breakdown mode and I am, to him, a big person. I open the door towering over him and to top it off I am asking if he OK. A question he can’t answer and I realized just how frustrating that has to be for him. He understands my question but he can’t tell me.

                I tried something new that made me feel like I won the parenting grand prize after I spent some time thinking about the situation. He was in his room again having a tantrum because he couldn’t process coming into the house from the car so quickly. There is so much in between he wants to discover that it is always a problem to make that transition. I waited for what sounded like a calm moment. There is a two inch gap under his bedroom door so I laid down on the hallway floor and said his name very quietly under the door. He also laid down on the floor so we were face to face. His pupils were huge and that told me he was still not completely back from the place that was causing him to be so upset. We laid there and I sang him a song, which happened to be Gotye Somebody That I used to Know, because it grabs his attention for whatever reason. I literally watched his pupils return to a smaller size. Once his pupils returned to normal and he seemed OK I got up and opened the door. This time, he came out and was back to a happy toddler.  If I would have gone into his room he would not have responded to me that way at all and calming him would have taken much longer.  Now when I think back and picture this tactic in my head it makes me laugh because it really is just silly.

                I can picture a professional telling me to lie on the floor and sing a really bad song under the door and it cracks me up but it worked and I am hanging onto it. Even if the tactic is unorthodox and completely silly use it and if can make you laugh, even better. What works today may not work tomorrow and that’s OK because it’s not tomorrow yet.