During one of the recent snow days home, my kids were getting really sick of being cooped up inside and struggling to be able to play with one another successfully. They both needed more space than was available inside, and they were both sick of trying to play bundled up in the snow, and the end result was lots of screaming and snatching toys and sobbing and calling for help.
Finally I held both their hands and sat down on the ground (so nobody could run away) and said, “I think everybody needs time to play by themselves.”
Surprisingly, they both agreed on that. (They don’t usually.)
I turned to Summer and said, “Where are you going to play?” (I was intentionally choosing to offer her first pick. She tends to be less explosive when upset than Apollo is, and as a result, I worry that sometimes I default to favoring what Apollo chooses if both kids are going to disagree about something. I don’t *want* to do that; I’m trying to be mindful and wary of it. So, in this instance I intentionally picked her first.)
She said, “I just want to stay in this room,” which was the living room, which is what I expected.
I said, “Okay, and what’s your plan to do in here?”
She sometimes can’t articulate herself quite so clearly, but this time she did a great job. She said, “I just want to pretend a game and talk to myself and I will watch a show while I’m doing it.”
“That sounds great. Okay, Apollo, where will you go?”
He was already mad about it. He said, “no, I want to be in here!”
“Well, what’s your plan to do?”
“I want to play my iPad and charge it at the same time!” (This is a new thing lately. Give a perfectionist the chance to reach 100%, and apparently he will earnestly believe that he should perpetually reach 100%, even if it’s a battery percentage 😅)
“Okay! That’s fine. There are lots of outlets in this house, so we will take your iPad and charger and find a different one than the one in this room. Summer has to be in this room because the TV is in here and her plan is to watch TV, and your plan is to be by an outlet. I think the couch by the outlet downstairs is probably the comfiest.”
He was very displeased with this plan, so I took the iPad and the charger and the boy and helped all of us go downstairs to the couch by the outlet. I got it set up for him and he lamented to Dad (who was also downstairs) about how unfair it was.
His anger didn’t really have to do with anything other than that he hated feeling like there was some power taken away from him. *I* was the one who decided that the kids needed to be in separate places for a while for their own safety, and I probably wasn’t *wrong*. I had done everything I could to talk with both kids and make sure all stated needs and wants were met except the literally impossible one of “we both want to be in the same room yet somehow not with one another”.
And, still, despite that, he was angry to have power taken away from him. And he was *allowed* to be angry about that. I don’t have to question myself, and him being angry doesn’t mean that I did the wrong thing. Sometimes in life, people feel anger.
I also knew that his anger was really deeper and larger than the topical thing. He was feeling frustrated, full of energy that felt “trapped” and cooped up by the cancellation of the predictable routine of school and the weather outside. These things aren’t my fault, so I’m not going to go around taking the blame for them or feeling bad or guilty for them. Nor do I have to solve them.
He told me to go away, so I did. I went and sat on the stairs, so that a few minutes later when he inevitably came to the stairs to try to tiptoe up without me finding out about it, he couldn’t. I felt very strongly that the kids legitimately needed a break from one another. Neither of them could relax or even do an activity they enjoyed when they were both setting one another off every few seconds. I could already hear how much happier Summer was upstairs, chattering away a story to herself and watching her favorite show. I wanted the same for Apollo; he’s got a game on his iPad he’s super into lately and I felt confident he could get invested in it if Summer wasn’t around to keep kicking him. So,
I didn’t just “express a wish”; I actually held the limit, by sitting on the stairs to stop him when he inevitably came to see if I was really serious about it by trying to sneak back upstairs. I wasn’t doing it so he would “learn his lesson” or so that he would “have consequences”. I knew Summer had no problem with this plan, and Apollo did, and I also believed this was the right plan for right this moment. So, I positioned myself towards Apollo but giving him space, so I could help him when he needed it but respect him asking me to go away.
So Apollo was downstairs, and angry about it. He got annoyed that he couldn’t go up the stairs (cause I was on ‘em) and started walking around sort of punching stuff. He wasn’t really punching it to break it or to hurt (the object or himself); he was doing it to blow off some steam — to get some proprioceptive feedback — and also to communicate how angry he was about this sequence of events. I didn’t say anything. It makes sense; when you’re mad, you want proprioceptive feedback, usually in the form of exertion or impact. He was choosing impact.
I didn’t love his choices of which objects to punch, but they weren’t necessary for me to immediately intervene either, and he really was doing the “wind up a huge punch like a superhero and then spin around and do dramatic arm movements and then punch it with all the force of a tiny little tap” thing that kids sometimes do, so I definitely didn’t really need to intervene. My choice would be pillows or stuffed animals, which I sometimes offer to my kids, but i also know that you can’t really learn new things when you’re actively dysregulated, and since I was the *cause* of the anger (in his mind), he wasn’t feeling like he was “on my team” and ready for me to sub in a stuffed animal or whatever.
After he’d had awhile to walk around and huff about it, I started to feel like he wasn’t going to be able to bring himself down without some more support, because it seemed to me like he was getting more angry, not less. I wondered if my lack of reactiveness to him — intended to give him space — was making him feel like he needed to escalate further to be “heard”, so to speak. So, I came downstairs.
I found him getting ready to do a flying kicking leap into the side of an empty cardboard box, which he did right as I got there. I said, “oh, good idea, punching and kicking cardboard might help you feel better.”
He looked at me suspiciously. I don’t think he expected me to be on board with this calm down method. He halfheartedly punched the box.
I nudged the box toward him and made a “mean” sound as if the box was being “mean”. Like, “grrr.”
He caught my eye and grinned, and punched the box a bunch of times.
I made the box make angry noises and advance toward him. He was laughing and punching it. Then he lay down and kicked it. I actually left to go find a marker and came back and drew an angry face on it (announcing what I was doing, and him agreeing and brainstorming, which told me that he was past “anger” and into “just needing a way to defuse this residual tense energy”).
Then I suggested climbing inside the box. “You could punch in four directions at the same time.” He thought that was very funny and a great idea. For the next few moments the box was shaking and ninja noises emanating from inside of it.
Then he punched and leaned, to make the box fall over on its side.
Then he looked out at me and said, “look! It’s a train!”
And the moment was past. We spent about 20 minutes making train buttons (modeling meaningful writing!) and then he remembered his iPad was down here and then he got wholly sucked into mastering the minutiae of landing a plane perfectly on a runway, like I knew he really wanted to do with at least some part of his day.
