If you have a 4/5 year old in your home you might be noticing an increase in emotional meltdowns in your home.
It can feel pretty sudden too!
Just out of the blue it’s like you’re in some kind of Real Housewives drama show and your little one is the screenwriter, producer, and the star.
The rest of the family are just background characters walking on eggshells, hoping not to set them off.
This is common at this age and it’s a stage I call the Limbic Leap.
Basically it’s a huge developmental milestone where their amygdala (the “security-system” portion of their brain) is going through quite the growth spurt.
So while their brain is re-calibrating, they’re a bit more sensitive than normal.
This means there may be more teary eyed confessions about taking a block from a friend 2 weeks ago and worrying that the friend now hates them.
More outbursts about why you’re the biggest meanie for asking them to pick up their crayons. And probably a healthy dose of high-pitched “I can’t dooooo iiiiiiitttttttttt” moments for tasks they’ve done a million times before.
I have a whole breakdown about the Limbic Leap and what’s going on in their brain while it’s happening right here. Now here’s the kicker.
The pandemic has made this already challenging time period in their growth that much more challenging and its impacting their behaviour in all kinds of ways.
I’ve noticed a few common behaviour’s happening after conversations with my clients, the parents inside ParentAbility, and from threads inside the free parenting community The Parenting Posse- so let’ go ‘head and talk about it!
On this episode we´ll discuss:
- Why are kids having more breakdowns than usual?
- How has the pandemic affected them emotionally
- Learning how to handle it
Grab the Scripts to Manage the Top 10 Crazy-Making Behaviours: prnt.link/scripts Watch the video recording here: Join the Parenting Posse: prnt.link/group the Mudroom is recorded live every Wednesday at 1:30pm ET/ 12:30pm CT/ 10:30am PT on Facebook: facebook.com/arfamilyservices
