Things That Work #2: Breaks, not Blowouts

The Child and Parent Resource Institute (CPRI) in London, Ontario, runs a clinic called The Brake Shop. Periodically, they offer a free six-night "Leaky Brakes 101" course for parents and educators and social service and medical professionals. For those of you who dig the whole diagnosis-alphabet soup scene, they deal with OCD, ADHD, ODD, Tourette's, rage problems, and related stuff. For those of you who don't, they deal with kids who, for whatever reason, Have Trouble Stopping... whether that comes with a diagnosis or not.

If you live in southern Ontario and you can get to one of these, it's worth a million bucks. It completely turned my thinking inside out, about why my kid does what he does, and how I can help him do better. For those of you more than a couple of hours from London, Ontario, you can get on their website and take in a lot of the materials in printed and recorded form. Not quiiiite as good, but still very helpful. Check out http://www.cpri.thehealthline.ca/clinics.asp?page=1 .

Anyway, the section on rage and emotional explosiveness included the "frustration beaker" (available in the "Putting the Brakes on Rage" printout in the "Strategy Documents" section. See, we can all tolerate a certain amount of frustration (some more than others). But when the beaker is getting too full, it doesn't really matter what the "trigger" is that set off a full-blown meltdown. The point is that there was not room in the beaker for one more frustration/annoyance/too-hard challenge. Kaboom. And it's usually the kids who are vulnerable to can't-cope-any-more meltdowns who face more challenges in getting through an ordinary school day that's business-as-usual for everyone else.

The strategy that flows naturally from that is to find ways to empty out the beaker, through the day -- because once a meltdown has started, there's really no way to divert it before it's run its course. Better not to have it at all.

Right now, thanks to my flexible home-based business (as in, I understand how freakily unusual my situation is) I go to the school twice a day and take T.K. out for recess/nutrition break (we're doing that "balanced day" nonsense). We ride bikes. We climb trees. We scooter. He has a snack. For him, exercise and fresh air and physical space and an absence of hectoring classmates and commanding teachers is a fabulous beaker-emptier. His teacher reports that he returns to class relaxed, refreshed and ready to learn.

I am sure that the readers who can implement this same solution exactly as I have... well, if there's more than four or five of you, I'll be surprised. But start giving thought to the things that empty your kid's beaker, and how they can, somehow, even in very small ways, be worked into his/her day.

I'll give some more beaker-emptying suggestions on future posts.