You can’t calm an anxious child when your own stress and anxiety are off the charts!
It’s hard to be a parent when the world is unstable, normal activities are interrupted, and your social life shrunk down to the bare essentials! It’s understandable that all this ‘Family Time’ while having the enormous plus that we get more time with our kids can eventually get on everybody’s nerves!
Parenting any child during a crisis whether it’s in the world, in their school, or your own home can be extremely difficult. when your child has special needs and can’t cope well with change it requires monumental, support from his/her parents!
Originally from the USA, I met my husband on a trip to Sweden nearly 18 years ago. It was love at first sight! We now have three kids and live in a converted Swedish barn from the 1700s
Two of our three kids have ADHD and Dyslexia diagnoses. Our oldest Lage (14) has ADHD predominately hyper and our daughter Maria (11) has ADHD predominately inattentive. They have a younger sister Frida (6).
Living under High Stress allows Irritation to GROW!
Everything came to a head the other day when my husband and I seemed to be irritated with each other all evening! The house was a mess and the kids, who caught the stomach flu, needed to stay home for several days!
In the middle of washing puked on clothes and bedding that my youngest wet the night before our well ran dry!
We suddenly had no water! (probably due to the extreme cold -24 Celcius or -13 F) To my surprise, the pipes weren’t frozen. The well was simply out of the water!
Keeping logs on the fire was a must, and I still needed my woolen sweater indoors!
When my husband came home from work he was frustrated that the house wasn’t clean and I didn’t blame him! I was frustrated too!
I was frustrated to the point of feeling helpless and I didn’t even know where to start cleaning up!
As the well began refilling we got the water back on, but the laundry pile was huge! There was no way we could wash everything with the little water had and do all the dishes!
Dishes had piled up in the sink, a piece of trim that needed replacing lay half painted on the floor, puke buckets were scattered around the house, and my daughter had strewn Barbies and their paraphernalia all over the place because I insisted on entertaining her without an iPad as least for part of the day!
I knew the house was a mess and yet I could NOT figure out where to start! No matter where I looked the mess was so big and so wide that I didn’t feel that anything I started on would even make the slightest dent in the mess!
I felt like the kids in Dr. Sues’s book ‘The Cat in the HAT’! When the cat made a gigantic mess of the house, and kids realized their mother was coming home from work!
Annie
How I wished I had magic fingers like Marry Poppins and I could just snap the mess away!
Finally, I sat down to do computer work that I knew I could finish before supper, but when I was done my husband was irritated that I hadn’t started dinner sooner and I was irritated right back!
After dinner, I announced that the whole family would help clean the house! I gave the kids chores ran between the three of them giving them cleaning supplies and helping them when they got stuck. My husband cleaned the kitchen.
We all worked together for about half an hour cleaning the house. This made a tremendous difference in our moods! Don’t underestimate the power of Family 15! The whole family taking 15 min to quickly get the house picked up!
The clean-up helped my husband and my mood, but later that evening we missed a change of time for my daughter’s Judo class, which led to an unnecessary car ride and my daughter missing her weekly training!
We both felt the irritation creep back in while despite feeling exhausted we tried to help my daughter with a long homework assignment!
Both of us went to bed snappy and irritated!
That carried over to the next morning when David mentioned that I sounded irritated when I talked to the kids that morning. Apparently, irritation had crept back into my voice over the last month or so!
This was not what I wanted to hear, but it caused me to do some self-reflection.
As much as I love my kids, dealing with their ADHD behaviors even on good days is trying! I have had to work on myself several times over the years to learn to stay calm in the midst of chaos and to remember to show empathy. Showing empathy is not my strong point!
We all need to take a look at ourselves and reaccess at times.I realized that the Covid-19 pandemic caused a baseline stress/anxiety that I wasn’t even aware of until I was forced to take a closer look!
Annie Eklöv
Most parents are dealing with highly stressed children. In order to help our kids, we suppress our own stress and anxiety!
The problem is that suppressing our own anxiety, worry, stress, or panic doesn’t help our kids in the long run!
Living with raised stress levels and high anxiety for years takes a toll!
On top of my own anxiety over Covid-19, I was dealing with my son’s anxiety over the pandemic and his tendency to use covid as an excuse to flee from his problems at school.
Annie Eklöv
The fact that Lage clashed with several kids in his class just made him want to claim he was sick more often! (In Sweden kids in junior high go to school every third day, to keep the classes separated. They study remote on other days.)
The school was incredibly slow in dealing with the problem, and my husband and I had to fight to get him in another class!
I felt my stress levels continually going up, up, up like an elevator headed for the top floor of a skyscraper! I helplessly wondered what would happen when I hit the penthouse!
Most of my worry was focused around Lage falling behind in school, and the problem of getting the school to help before he lost all confidence in his teachers and mentors! I didn’t want to take more drastic measures and switch schools, but nothing I did seemed to help!
While my son was dealing with his school problems, my youngest (Frida) who started school this year had problems of her own!
First, it was problems with friends who didn’t want to play with her during recess, and when we finally got that sorted she didn’t want to go to school because the days were too long and she got tired!
Annie Eklöv
Our mornings began with the nearly impossible task of convincing a 14-year-old and a 6-year-old to go to school!
Thankfully my middle daughter often went to school with a smile because that was one place to meet her friends in the middle of the pandemic!
When the kids got sick and the water quit working, in the midst of a two-month cold streak, it was the tip of the iceberg!
Hitting the Tip of the Iceberg forces us to make a change in our lives!
I no longer sounded or felt like a fun mommy to be around, and I didn’t want to be that nagging irritated person I saw in the mirror!
Don’t wait till you’re stressed, frustrated, and falling apart to make a change! If you feel your stress levels rising take a step back and access the situation! I had to reread my own post about how to take care of myself when caring for others!
The ideas in this post saved me from the brink of depression several years ago when my daughter received an ADHD inattentive diagnosis and my son who was struggling with his own ADHD, depression, and anxiety was demanding all the strength and patience I could muster!
It was during this time my husband was working away from home on a weekly basis and he didn’t understand how bad things were with our son until months after his alarming behavior started! Some of our son’s behaviors you had to see to believe!
It was after this experience I tried to better incorporate my husband into our daily lives even though he was not physically present. If you want to read more about how to do that check out the link below! (The post is not just for parents of ADHD kids)
Today I am at home and all the kids went to school for the first time in a long time! I am using this morning to do some self-reflection and breathe a sigh of relief at the quiet that surrounds me (my kids are incredibly loud!).
Making a Change
Not having any time to myself (or yourself) to get a breather is not healthy!
My husband and I had the luxury to sit down after the kids went to school and talk about better strategies for getting the kids to school in the mornings!
We got things right between us and decided to revisit Ross W. Greene’s book The Explosive Child.
Now that the kids are a couple of years older we wanted to see if we could get the strategies in his book to work even better!
I felt tired and exhausted after trying to carry the majority of the burden for the kids not doing well during the pandemic! I felt that some collaborative problem-solving with the kids sounded like a breath of fresh air!
So. . . We are going to try to sit down with our middle child and see if we can work out some morning problems together.
It seems like a good place to start to ask her to collaborate with us because she is doing better than the other two right now and I think starting with some easier problems will help my husband and I work on our collaboration skills before we try tackling some tougher problems.
I personally needed some self-care!
Sometimes I am mildly jealous of my husband’s work.
He seems to ventilate and recharge better than I do because he regularly leaves home and gets breaks from the challenges that he finds there.
Sometimes just stepping out of family life for a few hours gives inspiration and ideas for how to make things better!
Annie Eklöv
I personally work half-time, but corona affected my job and I am currently at work only a fraction of my regular hours.
The decision to work half-time came easy for me when I realized that my son who had been coming home directly after school for a year and a half (because I was at home with his baby sister) couldn’t return to his after-school activities!
He hit a tough spot with his ADHD and needed more time and attention from us. I called my job and spontaneously reduced my hours that every day!
To help myself through the more recent challenges that my family was facing I decided to call a friend. . .
- We agreed to take some time to exercise together in the great outdoors every week!
- She was someone I could talk to about the situation with the kids. Sometimes it’s helpful to get a new perspective!
This combined with prayer and trying to get more sleep (I am not the best sleeper when I am worried) is helping me to be a happier, empathetic parent again!
We all have bad days, and we all need to reassess from time to time! It’s what you do when you hit a wall or find yourself frustrated, worried, and angry that makes the difference!
Annie Eklöv
I encourage you to hop over to my post on How To Care For Yourself When You Are Caring For Someone Else!
This is such a great resource that lists ideas for self-care in an easy-to-read list form. I did not repeat all the ideas in this post, but I strongly encourage you to click the link below and implement some self-care ideas today!
If your struggling with complex Kids and feel that your parenting technics are failing check out Impact Parents!
The link below will lead you to free printables and parenting courses led by Elaine Taylor-Klaus & Diane Dempster leading world experts on parenting complex kids & teens,
| “Sanity School®” Parent Training Course by Impact Parents (Online Behavior Therapy) Explanation: “Training program for parents of children with ADHD and related challenges offers reality-based strategies for parents (Behavior Therapy). Online classes are affordable, accessible, and effective, reinforced with a workbook, weekly emails, an online forum, and group Q & A calls with a coach |
