Season 02 Episode 07
In this enlightening episode, Will and CarrieAnn Standfest dive into the world of overreactions in children and how parents can skilfully navigate these emotional outbursts. From the cereal aisle meltdown to the scraped knee in the park, they explore why kids (and yes, adults too) sometimes respond more intensely than a situation warrants. The Standfests discuss the importance of emotional vocabulary, the science behind our brain’s reactions, and the role of parents as calm co-regulators. With a blend of humor and practical advice, they offer insights into recognizing the difference between big and small problems, expanding your child’s ability to express their feelings, and the patience required to see the fruits of connected parenting. Tune in to learn how to foster resilience and understanding in your family, one Connected Parenting Minute at a time.
Season 2 Episode 7 of the Connected Parenting Minute Podcast
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Episode Keywords
Overreactions, Emotional Vocabulary, Trauma-Informed Principles, Connection-Based Parenting, Prefrontal Cortex, Co-Regulation, Parenting Podcast, Parenting Tips, Family Dynamics, Child Development, Emotional Intelligence, Positive Parenting, Neuroscience, Mindful Parenting, Behavior Management
#connectedparenting #overreactions #emotionalintelligence #mindfulparenting #behaviormanagement #neuroscience #positiveparenting #familydynamics #childdevelopment #co-regulation #traumainformed #connectionfirst #parentingminute #podcast #parentingtips #familylife
Show notes created by https://headliner.app
Music by https://lesfm.net/
📋 Episode Chapters
(00:00) The connected parenting minute is a conversation about parenting
(01:57) Sometimes our kids overreact. And we as parents should have a plan of how to handle that
(03:31) An overreaction is a reaction that does not meet the level of offense
(06:38) Connected Parenting Minute helps you with your biggest connected parenting struggles
(07:13) Children often lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel
(10:22) Children often lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel
(13:26) We have the privilege of connecting with our kids and helping them navigate emotions
(18:02) I think that about covers our podcast and overreactions
(19:29) Check out the connected parenting minute on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook
Show Transcript:
The connected parenting minute is a conversation about parenting using connection first
Will: You are experiencing that your prefrontal cortex is offline and your survival brain is engaged, which is healthy when you actually need to survive. And it’s unhealthy when you’re just mad at somebody.
Intro/Outro: You’re listening to the connected parenting minute with Will and Carrie Ann Standfest this podcast is a conversation about parenting using connection first, trauma informed principles. Because when you lead with connection, everyone feels seen, which is the foundation to a more peaceful home. This podcast reminds you that you don’t have to be a perfect parent, but we can all get a little better. One connected parenting minute at a time.
Will: Hello and welcome back to the connected parenting minute. My name is Will Standfest, and I am joined here this evening by my lovely wife, Carrie Ann.
CarrieAnn: Hey, friends.
Will: We are so happy that you’ve taken a few moments out of your day to listen to this podcast. And I really hope that we’re able to help you out and share some things that we’ve learned that have encouraged us along the way. Tonight. Drumroll, please. We’re going to be talking about what happens when our kids overreact.
CarrieAnn: Overreact? What are you talking about? Wait, that might have been an overreaction.
Will: Ah, I saw what you did there.
Will: Uh-huh.
Will: That was cute and clever. It was so good. Yes, I realize we’re not quite as hilarious as we think we are.
CarrieAnn: We do tend to think we’re a little funny, but it’s just fun sitting across the table from you and making silly jokes and making faces at each other.
Will: It is good. It was a shame because we gave a speech at Toastmasters tonight, so I couldn’t just sit in the audience and make faces at you while you were trying to speak.
CarrieAnn: Oh, yeah, you like doing that, do you?
Will: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
CarrieAnn: That’s why I never look at you when I’m speaking, because I don’t know what’s going to be happening. on the face there, it’s all.
Will: Going to be smiles and joy, and.
CarrieAnn: I don’t think that it’s going to be. We’re trying to improve our speaking game.
Will: And so because you get good at what you practice, we go and practice.
CarrieAnn: That’s right.
Sometimes our kids overreact. And we as parents should have a plan of how to handle that
Speaking of practicing, we should probably get to some of the points of our show tonight.
Will: Absolutely. So tonight we’re talking about overreactions.
Will: Because shockingly, sometimes our kids overreact.
CarrieAnn: It’s true.
Will: And we as parents should have a plan of how to handle that.
CarrieAnn: Yeah.
Will: Of how to deal with that in a connected kind way.
CarrieAnn: I agree.
Will: The first point tonight is that everyone overreacts sometimes. Everyone overreacts sometimes.
CarrieAnn: And we have to remind ourselves that this includes our children.
Will: It also includes us.
CarrieAnn: Yeah, it does include us. I think we tend, because we’re paying so close attention to our children’s behaviors, especially in certain circumstances, that we tend to see that as a negative emotion.
CarrieAnn: And then we try to squash it right away because we don’t want them to overreact. We want them to act appropriately to the circumstance.
Will: so you’re saying when my kid wants more Saturday cereal at target.
Will: That then they completely melt down the cereal aisle over the fact that I decided we don’t need more Reese’s puffs or cocoa krispies?
CarrieAnn: That might be an overreaction.
Will: Just maybe.
Will: What about when I then yell at my kid and tell them to get back in the cart and stop making such a big deal out of this thing and then drag them out of the store kicking and screaming? Maybe you’re lifting their arms so they’re about a foot off the floor.
CarrieAnn: Yeah, that would definitely be an overreaction.
An overreaction is a reaction that does not meet the level of offense
But while we’re talking about overreactions, I mean, really, what is it?
Will: We’re giving examples, but a good definition that we’ve been using inside our home. And I think we’ve talked about this concept.
Will: Each situation or each problem you face has a level of severity. And for our children, we kind of simplify that down to either small and large problems. Or sometimes for our teenagers, we’ll add small, medium and large problems to give them a little bit more delineation.
CarrieAnn: Right.
Will: But an overreaction is anytime where your reaction to a situation does not match the level of offense.
CarrieAnn: Yeah. And that is a good definition, especially for some of our kids that struggle with overreacting.
Will: We.
CarrieAnn: Can simplify that and try to talk to them explaining that there’s a big reaction and a little reaction. And then we talk about, well, is this problem requiring a big reaction or a small one?
Will: Because there’s something to say there, that a big reaction is not inherently bad.
CarrieAnn: Right.
Will: In a big bad situation, it is normal and appropriate to have a big reaction.
CarrieAnn: We are trying to give our kids context for what is a big problem and what is a little problem.
Will: Yeah.
CarrieAnn: Because again, our children’s brains are not fully developed and often they will feel like a little problem is a huge problem to them.
Will: Well, it’s not just our kids.
CarrieAnn: Well, yeah.
Will: How many times has, some really slow person in the self checkout line or perhaps a rule at target that you’re not allowed to use the self checkout line because you have too many things in your cart.
CarrieAnn: I plead the fifth on that right now. Okay, I will be honest about that. I have a little bit of a problem that one of the targets we frequent put a ten item limit on their self checkout. And so now I have to wait in a line for an actual person to check me out. And they are always inefficient. I might have some feelings about that.
Will: I love you very much. It is frustrating, but I’m just trying to say. I just started to highlight. We all go through this.
CarrieAnn: Yes.
Will: The Starbucks line takes too long.
CarrieAnn: The person in front of you driving. I think we get the picture.
Will: We all have these overreactions and we have to give our kids the grace that when they have overreactions, they literally have undeveloped brains.
Will: Your brain does not fully develop until the age of 25.
CarrieAnn: And even when it’s fully developed, you still have overreactions.
Will: Yeah, we all do. And it’s the emotion. It’s what else is going on. The other things that are surrounding that that can cause us to have these overreactions. Because a lot of times when we overreact, that’s not the thing. The thing that causes that we overreact to is not the actual problem. It’s the thing behind the thing that’s really going on. And that’s what we get to help our children with. It’s a process. There’s something else going on there.
CarrieAnn: An overreaction is a reaction that does not meet the level that the situation requires.
Will: And point number one is that we have to remember that everyone overreacts sometimes. Before we get to point number two, we’ll have a quick break with a word from our sponsor.
Connected Parenting Minute helps you with your biggest connected parenting struggles
Hey, you, our favorite listener. We want to answer your question.
CarrieAnn: We have a special bonus episode we’re going to do at the end of season two to help you with your biggest connected parenting struggles. We see you sitting in your car or riding your bike or walking your dog. So spend that time thinking about the things that you’ve been struggling with.
Will: We want to help you be the most connected parent that you can be. So contact us using connectedparentingminute@gmail.com, or message.
CarrieAnn: Us on Facebook or instagram.
Will: Remember, it only takes a minute.
Children often lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel
And now back to the show. Point number two, children often lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel.
CarrieAnn: Children lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel.
Will: Yes. So emotional vocabulary is a concept that I think we inherently understand. It’s a vocabulary of emotions. Being able to express the gamut of emotions that a person can feel.
Will: And we have to understand that our children are children, they are growing up, they are learning new things and all that. And a lot of our children don’t have a vocabulary of emotions beyond happy, mad or sad.
CarrieAnn: Yeah.
Will: And to illustrate that point, to help us understand how that even works, even in adults. Did you know that Brene Brown, famous author, speaker, all these things, she did a survey of 7000 adults.
Will: Do you know how many emotions the average adult in that survey could answer? Could name like six.
Will: Three.
Will: It was three.
CarrieAnn: Let me guess, happy, mad, sad.
Will: Yeah, pretty much.
Will: Lovely.
Will: Fascinating. If 7000 adults struggle to name more than three emotions, we can cut our kids a little bit of slack.
Will: To help us understand that there are more emotions than that, the University of California, Berkeley did a study with over 2000 different clips with 800 men and women and went through and cataloged their reactions to these clips. These are emotionally evocative clips.
Will: And they were trying to capture kind of the gamut of how many emotions are there out there. This study came up with 27 different categories of emotions from admiration, adoration, appreciation, amusement, anger, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion. These are alphabetical. I wasn’t trying to alliterate on a’s.
CarrieAnn: I caught that.
Will: All that to say, there is a wide gamut of emotions out there that even we as adults don’t fully comprehend and fully have a grasp on. We need to coach our children and help them understand and expand that vocabulary. This is something that one of our children, when they were in therapy, the therapist specifically worked on helping this child expand their emotional vocabulary. M because this child’s crutch is whenever this child is feeling upset, they go back to I’m frustrated.
Will: And okay, that’s not happy, mad. M sad, but frustrated is like kind of this in between emotion that really needs to be unpacked a little bit more.
CarrieAnn: Right. Because there was a lot of different things she was feeling, but frustrated was the only one that she knew to.
Will: Be saying, yeah, that’s all she could articulate.
CarrieAnn: Right. That was all she could articulate in the moment as a parent. It made it hard to help diagnose well, what is going on? What is actually the root cause of this?
Will: But she didn’t know.
Will: Yeah, she didn’t know. She honestly didn’t know how to express beyond that kind of surface level expression of frustration. And it was our job to help give her the words to unpack that.
Will: And to work through that both with therapist and with us outside of the therapy.
Children often lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel
CarrieAnn: Right. And one practical way you can do that is by actually naming emotions as you see them with your kids.
Will: Yes.
CarrieAnn: Your son falls and trips and hits his knee and like, wow. Obviously, after you comfort him and stuff like that, that must be really. I mean, that hurts. But you notice that he seems kind of angry.
Will: Wow.
CarrieAnn: It seems like you might be a little angry, buddy. Do you think maybe you’re a little embarrassed? Do you think maybe you’re worried about what your friends think? There’s just all these things that you can throw out there to help give them a, feel for. There’s more than just, I’m upset.
Will: Yeah, no, that’s really good. I think that’s a great way to help your children develop an emotional vocabulary for us to name a little bit more complex emotions around what they might be feeling. And that also gives them the voice, I wouldn’t say it. When we name these more complex emotions, we try to make sure that we name it as an observation and a question and not as an accusation. Or you’re clearly feeling frustrated, or.
Will: You’re clearly overwhelmed, you say, well, you seem upset, darling. Are you feeling overwhelmed about this? Are you nervous about this, about what’s going on later tonight? You can try to unpack those, but do it in a curious way.
CarrieAnn: Exactly.
Will: Because that gives your kids the voice to say, no, I’m not worried about that.
Will: I’m upset about this.
Will: Right.
Will: All of a sudden they’re unpacking it for you.
CarrieAnn: Exactly. One other thing to note in that is that idea. When our kids are in fight, flight or freeze mode, when something just happened, sun falls and scrapes his knee or whatever, we have to connect first. We have to meet them where they’re at, help them regulate. We have to be their co regulator so that they are able to calm and start thinking with that prefrontal cortex thinking part of their brain. Because we just got in a fight and, wow, you seem really angry. It’s not going to sink in. They’re already upset. But like you said, it’s not an accusation, it’s an observation.
Will: Yeah, and keeping that playful, questioning tone can really help in that situation. And what you’re saying, too, about the prefrontal cortex is brain science.
Will: When you are in fight, flight or freeze, when your lower survival brain takes over, the blood is not being directed to your prefrontal cortex. You literally can’t process logic or vocalize words, because that’s all handled in your prefrontal cortex. That is not online when your survival brain takes over.
Will: Exactly.
Will: Most adults have experienced this. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’re just so upset and the words won’t come out. Right, like, you’re so upset that you can’t get the words to come out.
CarrieAnn: Because they’re not there, you can’t access them.
Will: You are experiencing that your prefrontal cortex is offline and your survival brain is engaged, which is healthy when you actually need to survive. And it’s unhealthy when you’re just mad at somebody.
CarrieAnn: Right. All right, so point number two is children often lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel.
Will: All right, darling, so what’s point number three?
We have the privilege of connecting with our kids and helping them navigate emotions
CarrieAnn: Point number three is we have the privilege as parents to connect with our kids and help them navigate these emotions.
Will: We have the privilege of connecting with our kids and helping them navigate these emotions.
CarrieAnn: I have to say, first off, listeners, that the very fact that you’re listening to a podcast about parenting and about learning how to connect better with your kids puts you miles ahead of where you may have been.
Will: Hey, good job for you.
CarrieAnn: Good job. That is a big deal. So give yourself a pat in the arm or, buy an ice cream. I don’t know.
Will: Have a nice coffee.
CarrieAnn: There you go. We get to notice these emotions in a nonjudgmental way, which, again, just brings up the observation pieces. Hey, it looks like this might be something you’re experiencing to our kids, and it helps them start to build that emotional vocabulary.
Will: And going back to what you’re saying about the prefrontal cortex being online, the other thing we can do is be the calm when they can’t.
Will: When our kids are upset, when they can’t get the words out, when they’re having a big reaction, when they’re having an overreaction, when they shouldn’t.
Will: We can be the ones to come in and be calm, right. We can be the co regulators. This concept of when they’re a little, little baby, we regulate for them. And then as they get a little bit older and there’s like some mirror neurons going on and they can mirror how we’re reacting.
Will: We can kind of co regulate with them and walk them through that so that as they mature and become adults, they can learn to self regulate exactly. On a line. That’s always helped me. I’ve seen a bunch of different places. I don’t know who to credit. It to kind of convicts me a lot of times is that my kid is not giving me a hard time. My child is having a hard time.
CarrieAnn: That’s a hard thing to remember as a parent because you’re directly affected by what’s going on.
Will: Right.
Will: and it feels like your kid is intentionally giving you a hard time.
CarrieAnn: Sometimes they might be. Sometimes. All right, sometimes they might be. But if we can’t maintain this mentality that they’re doing the best that they can, even if they’re pushing your buttons, and how do we help them to get into a better place? We’re almost able to kind of self regulate ourselves and then again, bring in that co regulation piece.
Will: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s really good. Because even if they are pushing our.
CarrieAnn: Buttons, there are buttons.
Will: They are our buttons. It is not their job to avoid those. It’s our job to make it. So pushing those buttons does not get them a big overreaction.
Will: Yeah.
Will: Which, again, is modeling for them the way we want them to grow up to be.
CarrieAnn: And I think one thing that we tend to forget is when we’re making these changes 1 minute at a time.
Will: Yeah.
CarrieAnn: We’re not going to necessarily see the long term results. We have to remember that we’re playing the long game.
Will: Yeah, that’s a really good point.
CarrieAnn: We’ve had some kids that we’ve been working on certain aspects with them for a really, really long time.
Will: So long.
CarrieAnn: And once in a while, we get a glimmer of hope of, hey, did you notice that that kid did this thing? And we’ve been working on that forever, but all of a sudden we see them doing it. And, to me, that’s just a reminder that, okay, what we’re doing matters, and it’s not going to be overnight, but I’m not going to change overnight either. And so granting them the grace that we’re just going to keep doing what we know is the right thing to do, and eventually we will see that relationship grow. It’s an important thing because we can get discouraged so easily when we’re still facing these big behaviors, when we’re still dealing with all the meltdowns, having the overreactions, these things. But we have to look for the little wins in some of those things.
Will: Yeah, absolutely. It is so easy to get lost in the weeds, to get caught up in the day to day, and not be able to see the long term progress. And that’s something that I’d encourage you to find a way to reflect back on. If it’s something you do every six months, once a year. Taking some time to think back to what were the things I was struggling with as a parent a year ago? And what does that look like now?
Will: Right?
CarrieAnn: I mean, heck, write down on a sticky note and stick it on your bathroom mirror of, this kid is getting a little better at this. A little better at that. I’m getting a little better at this or a little better at that.
Will: There it is. That’s the real progress.
CarrieAnn: You’ll notice it after time. And it’s a good thing. It’s in a good way to encourage yourself.
Will: It really is. that’s a fantastic way to do it.
I think that about covers our podcast and overreactions
I think that about covers our podcast and overreactions. So let us go back through the three main points and then we will head out.
CarrieAnn: So point number one is everyone overreacts sometimes. And our kids, they’re no different.
Will: Absolutely. Point number two, children often lack the emotional vocabulary to express how they feel.
CarrieAnn: A lot of adults do too, for sure. And point number three is we have the privilege and the blessing of connecting with our kids and helping them navigate those emotions.
Will: That’s so good. I love it.
Ashley Taylor Rose says this podcast encourages her to be a better parent
Well, thank you for joining us this evening. We are so glad that you’ve chosen to take a few minutes out of your day to spend with us on the podcast. I hope that the things we’ve talked about have blessed you or encouraged you. I’m going to take a minute and read a listener review on the thing. We’re going to try out a new thing. I heard this on another podcast and I’m copying it.
CarrieAnn: Awesome.
Will: Ashley Taylor Rose wrote that this podcast encourages me to be a better parent. I’m so thankful for this podcast. I learn a lot. Well, thank you for that note. Ashley Taylor Rose thank you. If you want to hear your review, read on an upcoming episode of the podcast, jump over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you’re on and leave a review. I would love to read a couple of them on the air.
CarrieAnn: Woo.
Will: Make sure you submit a question for our question and answer episode at the end of the season.
Check out the connected parenting minute on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook
And before we go, we’d like to. Remind you…
CarrieAnn: you don’t have to be a perfect parent,
Will: but we can all get a little bit better. One connect a parenting minute at a time.
Outro: Time thank you so much for listening to my mom dad’s podcast. I hope you feel really inspired today. And remember to subscribe for the next episode.
Intro/Outro: For more parenting tips or to connect with us, check out the connected parenting minute on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can send us an email using connectedparentingminute@gmail.com.
The Connected Parenting Minute 