The excerpt below is from our webinar “Challenging Behaviors of Children with DMD”. Thank you to our guest speaker psychologist Dr. Natalie Truba of Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Click here for the full podcast episode.
Proactive Parenting
Proactive parenting allows us to promote resilience and really focus on that growth mindset. So even when we fail, we fail forward. We’re focusing on the process, not the outcome.
We can reinforce and praise the process like, “I saw you really trying, bud. We had some good things and we identified a problem where we could have done something different and this is what we’re going to do next time…”
Once you’re really good at catching that pattern of escalation as it progresses, it allows you to change the conversation and not only focus on the outcome. For example: we regulated or we didn’t regulate, we were aggressive, we weren’t aggressive.
Change the conversation.
– Dr. Natalie Truba
When we’re parenting actively, we’re intervening during the actual moment. When we do that, we’re automatically setting ourselves up for difficulties. That’s why we want to be intervening before the moment with proactive parenting.
Proactive parenting lets us help our kids understand the chaining that goes into why they often do things they don’t mean to do – and that they very much regret – but that they continue to do anyway.
And that’s what our parents say, “They feel so bad when they do this and they don’t want to get in trouble, but they keep doing it. Why do they keep doing it?” Well, it’s not because they want to. A lot of these kids are very sensitive to getting in trouble, and they do get in trouble a lot and they do feel bad.
We’re talking about the process, not the outcome..
– Dr. Natalie Truba
One of the ways that you can help as you’re doing more and more proactive parenting is modeling those adaptive coping strategies – because what we know is that the best predictor of child coping is parent coping. Examples of adaptive coping strategies are:
- Model Verbal Strategies of Ways to Talk to Yourself – A lot of kids with Duchenne have very rigid ways of thinking and a lot of them don’t talk to themselves in their heads actively. They kind of just passively believe their thoughts and consume them. Things like verbally out loud going through your own process in front of your kids can be helpful because it’s modeling verbal strategies of ways to talk to yourself in your head – which is really hard for these boys.
- Challenge Your Beliefs – So sometimes these kids have some very, very unhelpful thinking patterns and modeling alternative ones can be helpful. So if you’re mad at your spouse and you’re like, “They’re such a jerk. And I can’t believe they did this.” And then stopping yourself and being like, “I bet they were tired. I wonder, you know, I wonder what their day was like…”
- Demonstrate Cognitive Flexibility – And then even going one step further to demonstrate cognitive flexibility for yourself out loud can be really helpful to the boys because a lot of them really do struggle with that naturally and they do need direct instruction in doing that.
The best predictor of child coping is parent coping.
-Dr. Natalie Truba
More To Consider…