Blog

Transcript of Episode 3:

Ep 3: When Children Get Stuck in Their Development

[00:00:00] Kimberly Bell: Are you interested in knowing your young child in a whole new way, understanding what’s really going on in their developing mind? Does your child say or do things that make you stop and wonder, where did that come from? Well, stick around because this podcast is designed for you. Hello friends and welcome listeners.

I’m Dr. Kimberly Bell, the clinical director at the Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development in Cleveland, Ohio. And this is the Hidden Language of Children, a podcast dedicated to understanding the children we love. and helping them grow. We created this podcast to help parents and caregivers understand the inner life of children, that constant churning of feelings and emotions that goes on inside of us.

This is the work Hanna Perkins has been doing with children and families since 1951. We help kids become the boss of themselves. We work with children who have everyday developmental struggles, like trouble listening to directions or making friends. We also work with kids who are dealing with big stuff, [00:01:00] like living with a physical disability, or parents getting a divorce, or a loved one who has cancer.

And we work with grown ups who have questions as a parent and want to gain comfort and confidence in their role. We want to share it with you because our approach to understanding children reduces conflict and makes life better for everyone. We are welcoming back Deborah Parris, a child psychoanalyst and social worker in Cleveland, Ohio.

Debbie works with children, families, and also adults, many of whom find their way to her because of issues they’ve had since childhood. Welcome, Debbie. So happy to be here. Welcome back, Debbie. The last time you were here, we talked about the concept of normality in child development, the things that are typical, how each child develops in their own way, but in a predictable progression from dependence to independence.

Today, we’re going to talk about the flip side of that concept. If each child follows their own path of development, how do you know when something has gone off track and it’s [00:02:00] time to get some extra help?

[00:02:03] Debby Paris: Well, one thing we want to trust as parents is when we feel that something isn’t quite right.

Or when a child is sort of getting stuck in terms of a developmental task so that they, for example, can’t separate to go to school over a period of time, or having trouble learning, or having trouble with their anger and are acting out at home in ways that don’t yield over time. So partly we’re looking at something that happens over time.

The other thing we always want to assess is what is going on in the child’s life. Have they had something happen to them that’s more than just the regular developmental struggles — a hospitalization, a divorce, somebody being ill, um, and sometimes we don’t know what is driving it, but we can feel when they’re getting stuck.

[00:02:53] Kimberly Bell: I think that’s a really good point to start with. And one of the things that I think has always been important at Hanna Perkins [00:03:00] is our trust in the instinct of the parent to feel when something isn’t right.

[00:03:07] Debby Paris: You have the best relationship with your child of anybody. You’re the primary people in your child’s life.

So, the communication between the two of you is very important. And one of the thing, first steps you do, Kim, in terms of your question, what is the first step? The first step is identifying that, with your child, that they seem to be having a trouble with something, and that sometimes that lets us know that there’s a worry.

And then to see what happens, and it’s so interesting in conversations with children. Sometimes they respond, sometimes they respond three weeks later, but often they respond in behavior rather than in words. So if you say something and then the behavior gets worse or repeated, you know in a way you’ve hit pay dirt.

So that is just the beginning step.

[00:03:53] Kimberly Bell: OK, so one of the things I want to kind of focus on with you today is how [00:04:00] people might experience things differently from our perspective. So one of the things parents notice right off the bat when they come to see us is that we are not focused so much on a diagnosis.

Whether it be depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or sort of all of the disorders, that we find those to be less helpful. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about sort of our developmental approach to understanding when things go wrong. Right.

[00:04:31] Debby Paris: Let me just start with the labeling of diagnosis.

It gives comfort to the other person, not to the people that are mainly involved. And it is reductive. It is describing a set of behaviors perhaps and calling it something. Our approach is if there’s a group of behaviors, We believe that behavior has meaning and is a very important form of communication for children.

So that what we’re looking at is not what it looks like and what the symptoms are. [00:05:00] We’re looking at what is it feeling like, what’s driving it, what is it telling us about something of the child’s inside experience and outside experience. So it’s a much deeper Deeper, um, resonant relationship based way of thinking that children are people, that they have a complexity inside themselves and that development keeps changing.

And that as they struggle, we want to understand what they’re struggling with. We don’t want to just label it. And then, you know, give some proforma kind of treatment that doesn’t really have a humanistic center to it.

[00:05:34] Kimberly Bell: So I wonder if we can give an example of that. So something that, um, may look like anxiety when really what a child is struggling with is maybe a transition, um, to a new phase of development.

So let’s talk about maybe separation anxiety.

[00:05:53] Debby Paris: OK. For children, when they’re about to make a step forward, they often take a step back first. [00:06:00] So that, we call it regression when somebody is moving back. And sometimes there’s a little bit of regression before there’s a progression. But with separation anxiety, what looks like, what we’re looking for in, the sort of progressive development is that there are feelings of attachment.

There can be feelings about separation. That doesn’t mean it’s a separation problem. Having a feeling isn’t the same as having a problem. The problem comes when they can’t master the task so that they can enter a new environment, let’s say school, with feeling of safety, feeling of being known, some feeling of zest, um, even if there’s back and forth feelings about mom and dad or being away from a caretaker.

When they get stuck, sometimes it means that they separate if separate is just a physical thing, but they haven’t actually been able to bring their full selves to the new environment because some feeling is holding them back and it’s too much for them so that they can’t learn or they can’t [00:07:00] connect to the teacher or the other children.

And what it can look like is a kid that shut down — that isn’t taking in, and in terms of diagnosis, um, many times that gets called auditory processing problems. Or if they’re having a problem and they can’t stand it, they can be running around and sort of physically discharging it, and that can be called ADHD.

So the differential assessment comes from the child being known and listened to and understood. Is that answering your question?

[00:07:31] Kimberly Bell: Yeah, oh for sure. Yeah, it’s, it’s one of the ways that I always think about it is that we relentlessly at Hanna Perkins ask why?

[00:07:40] Debby Paris: Yes.

[00:07:40] Kimberly Bell: So if there is an attentional issue before we say there’s something biological going on, our question is, “Is there any other why that we can come up with to describe that?”

Or anxiety disorder. Is there, is there a why? You [00:08:00] know, why the anxiety? Why the separation anxiety? Why the depression? Why, why, why, why? So we don’t stop at a behavioral diagnosis.

[00:08:08] Debby Paris: Well, and I think you’re right that culturally there’s much more focus on, um, labeling things and calling it hard wiring or biological.

What’s hard about that is so many things can be missed about what a child is struggling with, and when we’re talking about a kid getting stuck it’s sort of a crisis and an opportunity, in that it’s hard when your child isn’t doing what you want them to be doing or they need to be doing, but it gives us an opportunity to look at the why.

What is this about? What did we not understand or know or help a child with? Not because we’re failures as parents, but because it’s very complex and where you’re a success as a parent, uh, as a parent is when you respond to a child as a person that has complexity, that we want to help express something and we [00:09:00] want to make sure that we hear it and that will often ease up what’s going on.

And as I think we said last time. So many times children’s anxiety that gets labeled is based on some misconception about a piece of reality or some, some confusion because their minds and brains aren’t fully developed yet. So they process things very differently from how adults process things. And that’s where a lot of confusion can happen.

[00:09:31] Kimberly Bell: That’s OK. So let’s dive into that because I have a question about that. So given our developmental focus, we are always acutely aware of how children view the world, but that’s not easy for parents to do because a lot of the times they don’t remember that point of view by the time we get to adulthood.

It’s just that we’re child therapists. So we spend a great deal of time living in that world, right? Living in [00:10:00] that world of seeing the world through a child’s eyes. So let’s talk about some of the things that, um, maybe would help parents understand the difference between their thinking and the thinking of their child.

So, no, sorry Well, let’s talk about time So the evaluation of time and our sense of things in time perspective and how that might be missing in a child developmentally.

[00:10:26] Debby Paris: Well, I Think let’s start the discussion by actually addressing the fact that in a way parents have some sense of it, but it isn’t reinforced.

After all, you wouldn’t expect a three year old to read War and Peace. You wouldn’t expect a first grader to do advanced calculus. We actually know that the mind is developing, but time is such a good example. Because for children, time is not yet a measurement in terms of seconds and minutes and hours.

It’s a measurement in [00:11:00] terms of what happens in a particular space of time. So, we can leave a child for 15 minutes and say it’s only 15 minutes, and that can be fine if they’re playing with a well known caretaker and they’re having a good time. But if in those 15 minutes something untoward happens, or they get scared, or they get angry, that can feel like hours rather than 15 minutes.

So when we’re working with young children, we’re really talking about the feeling state and the experience in a time frame rather than the measurement of a time frame. So our measurement is through feeling, not data of seconds. Does that make sense?

[00:11:40] Kimberly Bell: That is perfect. Yeah, that’s exactly, uh, that’s exactly the way I think about it too.

And I think so helpful to understand why you can say, well, I was only gone for two hours, but it seems like while you were gone, the world fell apart. Um, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that your child is having you know, an impulse problem or an anger [00:12:00] problem or like … Not everything is sort of a problem if we can understand from the child’s perspective, how they viewed the situation.

I’m, I’m avoiding, you know, I’m avoiding using the, the, the T word, uh, because I want us to use it in a minute, the, the, the big trauma word. Um, so the other one is, this idea of reality, the reality testing versus imagination. And one of the things that I know parents often struggle with is this idea of, “Oh, I want my child to maintain their imagination and their freedom of thought.”

And oftentimes we bring in reality. And it can feel like we’re taking something away from the child, sort of focusing them on, um, being able to think in sort of realistic ways as opposed to their florid use of imagination.

[00:12:57] Debby Paris: Well, I think we all want our [00:13:00] children to be able to access their creativity and their imagination.

But, um, imagination comes best when it actually isn’t believing it’s totally real. TOTALLY real. There is a part where in imagination kids feel like their play is real, playing with, um, building a tower with blocks and putting cars in. They can get into that story, but what we’re looking at is where the, um, reality is scary and overwhelming.

And if we can’t, um, identify it, we can’t help them with something. And if the reality is overwhelming, the imagination can be overwhelming. For example, let’s take Halloween.

[00:13:41] Kimberly Bell: I was just going to say, let’s make Halloween,

[00:13:44] Debby Paris: and it again, a two year old isn’t a three year old, a three year old isn’t a four year old, a four year old isn’t a five year old.

So the first thing we want to assess is what is their, what is their capacity for understanding what’s real and what’s pretend? Because if they think the pretend [00:14:00] is real, it will be very scary. If they think the witch is real, or if they think that their parent puts on a mask and it changes them. Even if the parent changes a hairstyle, for a young child it can scare them because it feels like that’s a different person.

We do not want the imagination to be a source of terror. We want it to be a source of fun and creativity. So explaining the reality that people don’t change, that the costume is a mask that goes on and off and children can experiment with it and sort of how you experiment before you go to a doctor’s visit, where you, you practice so that a child can get a sense of the reality.

But when the goal is to confuse the child, the goal is, Because we love the feeling of, uh, dressing up for Halloween or, um, other holidays where there’s a fantasy element. As adults, if we insist on that with the [00:15:00] child, and it makes the child scared, that isn’t helping them. It isn’t helping their creativity.

Then their creativity is a discharge of the wrong thing instead of moving in the right thing. And I think that children are very expressive through art, through play in early childhood, and that tactile stuff is very helpful. But translating something scary and understanding that it’s scary, and then bringing in what the reality is, only helps children with mastery.

And that will help them with their imagination too.

[00:15:33] Kimberly Bell: And I think, you know, also I want to speak to since we’re talking about sort of when things go wrong today is that it’s not unusual for us to be much more comfortable working with the fantasies of children because their fantasies tend to lead to their anxieties.

And so you end up with a lot of misperceptions. Um, of [00:16:00] the events that are happening around them, whether that be taking responsibility for divorce or somebody in the family got sick and maybe they had a negative thought at one time. And that can seem like such a strange reason to develop, you know, an anxiety disorder.

[00:16:20] Debby Paris: Well, you bring up such an important point. And some of this has to do with education in terms of how we teach children about things and tell children about things. As adults, we are used to getting information delivered to us that then we process and use. That isn’t how young children work with educational direction.

With young children, so many times, it’s trying to figure out where the misconception is and correct the misconception rather than just giving them explanations. Yes, just giving an explanation won’t work if we’re, if they’re stuck with, with the misconception. So much of early childhood [00:17:00] education is helping the child express it so that we can hear the misconception, so we can correct for reality.

Your example, my parents got a divorce because I was misbehaving. It’s my, I am the reason that happened. We need to help a child, or it’s great to help a child, be able to express that so we can say, wow, that’s such a big mix up, that must have made you so worried. So that it’s really a process of conversation rather than just a didactic, uh, deliverance of information.

[00:17:36] Kimberly Bell: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Well, you’ve just described essentially child therapy, too. That’s exactly what we do in child therapy is we unravel the web of, uh, thoughts, feelings, and ideas that underlie this behavior that other people are seeing.

[00:17:53] Debby Paris: Right. But I think for parents in, look, parents are the first [00:18:00] teachers, the first loved objects, in a way the first therapists in that they are want, particularly with very young children, parents are the ones that are having the conversation, seeing the behavior and that the child is connected to.

So a lot of our work here is also to help parents be able to talk with their children in a way that helps them, which not only helps the child, but it helps us as parents feel that we’re getting it. Because I think the hardest thing when your child is struggling with something as a parent is, at the get go, we don’t quite get it, you know.

And we might put our ideas on it and test them out and often it doesn’t work because it’s really not our ideas that are the issue, it’s the child’s idea. But it’s really, um, very, uh, sort of strengthening for parents to know that they can talk to their children about feelings perhaps with the help of a therapist and sometimes a therapist, but that we’re all together and trying to help the child unravel what’s gotten all tangled up.

[00:18:59] Kimberly Bell: [00:19:00] Yeah. I think that’s a really great way to think about it. And that segues, segues us into this next point that I wanted to talk about today, which is the, the big T — trauma — and how sometimes it’s avoidable and sometimes it’s not. There are certain realities in the world. Parents get divorced, children have to have surgeries.

Sometimes you have to move away from friends and family. Um, two parents have to work. I mean, there are realities and I, I often see parents in such a, in such a tangle around, “I’m doing something to harm my child, but I don’t feel like I have a choice,” which then creates feelings of frustration and anger and defensiveness and, you know, all of these things, which can be tough to see.

And so I want us to talk a little bit about, um, preparation first, and then how preparation will never be perfect. So, because a lot of people are [00:20:00] like, well, I didn’t tell my child about their doctor’s appointment because I didn’t want them to worry about it ahead of time. Let’s speak to that.

[00:20:07] Debby Paris: OK. Um, let me just back up one step and then get to the preparation, which is, When parents are feeling like they have to do something that’s going to cause pain and suffering for their child, it’s an awful feeling for the parent.

And what we are trying to help you understand is there are things you can do, because life happens. And part of our job is to help children manage the life that happens, not by tough it out, but by helping them master hard things. And when parents can see that even though something hard is happening, they can help a child with some mastery.

It, it helps parents feel better and be able to, to help children in a long term way. So the idea of preparation It’s so interesting because we often do know how to prepare children for what’s going to happen. You know, that we’re going to be moving on this date. [00:21:00] Things will be in boxes, but we do want to put language to all those different steps.

But I think what’s the hardest thing to help a child be prepared for is how it’s going to feel.

So we’re not just talking about what’s going to happen. We’re talking about how it’s going to feel. So. That’s hard when we as the parents are also having the feelings about the move, about the hospitalization, about the fact that our child is going to cry when we say you might be getting a shot.

And I think what we want to do on the mastery side is help the child by putting it into words for them and with them, and then practice. You know, let’s talk about what it’s going to be like at the doctor’s. What is the shot like? Giving a shot to the doll. You know, giving the blood pressure thing for the mother.

Lots of, uh, lots of play and that’s a place for imagination that helps with mastery where they get to do unto others as what they think is going to be done unto them. But I think the preparation steps are, um, a [00:22:00] process, not just a one time thing. And I do know that as a parent, we, we do get worried about, um, saying something and doing something where a child is going to have a big reaction.

But the big reaction gives us a chance to talk about it more over time. So the steps are, telling what the steps are, and then helping with the feeling. But one other thing about preparation, and this I learned long ago at Hanna Perkins, we can prepare a child for everything and then something won’t go right.

And in a way what we want to do is prepare them for that. You know that we’ll prepare for every step but there might be a surprise and we want to be prepared for that. So it actually is helping both the parent and the child by going through those steps.

[00:22:45] Kimberly Bell: Yeah, that is one of my favorite things, um, is that.

that preparation for the surprise for the things you can’t prepare for. Um, and also understanding, speaking to what you said about feelings and how you experience it is [00:23:00] letting kids know that something is coming, is uncomfortable because they will have a reaction to it. And they may need to talk about it every day, every day, every day for a week.

Understanding that that talking about it every day, every day, every day is part of practicing to manage and modulate the anxiety, the nervousness, so it’s not a shock to the system the day of. Because no matter how much you prepare, no child is going to walk into a medical situation free and breezy, right?

Like.

[00:23:31] Debby Paris: Right. And children do not like surprises. There’s a confusion about that, a surprise party, we’re going to surprise them with a new thing, and should I say always, you know, if they get the bike that they’ve been wanting, and that’s a surprise, they can handle that, but in terms of events, it could be too much for their system.

And what happens to a child when it’s too much for their system? They have to shut down in some way, or they have to get away from it in some way, like we were [00:24:00] talking about at school before. So they’ll either go blank or fall asleep or they’ll run around or, you know, and sometimes you get the reaction after, but.

A surprise, and sometimes we can’t help when there’s a surprise, if there’s an emergency and they have to go to the hospital, we, we can’t, we can’t have prepared them for that. But what we can do is talk about the fact that it was a surprise and it didn’t feel good and it was too much. And many times we’re talking to children, not just about a feeling, but the strength and size of the feeling.

how big the scary was, how big the mad was, how big the worry was. Not just you were worried, you were scared, all of which is good to say, but the magnitude. And when there’s a surprise, it goes from zero to 90 and you don’t help a child go from zero to 10 to 20 to 30.

[00:24:51] Kimberly Bell: And I, so I think to, to kind of just wrap up, I think there are two sort of concepts, the Hanna Perkins concepts that I love so much.

[00:25:00] Um, One is children can get through anything that can be talked about. Yes. Sort of put a big old period exclamation point at the end of that. Um, and the other one is this idea that hard feelings are OK to have. That parents can be anxious, kids can be anxious, everybody gets scared. And we’re not trying to protect children from the world.

We’re trying to talk to them and help them work through, manage, and experience that because life will never be free of conflict.

[00:25:40] Debby Paris: So those two ideas go hand in hand. Anything that can be talked about can be managed and mastered. It’s the things that aren’t talked about that go underground, that go sideways, that stay mysterious, that cause many of the struggles and problems and getting stuck in the growing up [00:26:00] trajectory.

So we do want to remember as we go to the second part, that anything that can be talked about can be mastered. So the hard things in life are, are partly the growth things in life. You know, conflict is inside of us, conflict is between us and the world, but conflict sort of makes us grow as long as it is appropriate to what the mechanism can bear at the moment.

But when something hard happens, Our job is, you know, I think what parents want to do, of course, is protect children from the hard things. But we can’t always do that. When there’s a hard thing, we want to help a child know that they can handle the feeling. One of the things that people have a very hard time with is around sadness.

They don’t want children to feel sad. One of the things that I’ve always recognized is, you know, if you can’t feel sad, you can’t feel happy.

[00:26:56] Kimberly Bell: Right.

[00:26:57] Debby Paris: You have to have the panoply of feelings, the wide [00:27:00] range of feelings. So. the idea is children need to be able to manage to be sad. They need to be able to manage to be anxious.

Anxiety can help us sometimes if it’s titrated, if it’s the right proportion. Children need to be angry and be able to use it in a right way. So we’re helping them with the hard feelings so that they can feel all the feelings and not feel overwhelmed. So again, it’s a question of size. Is it too much?

[00:27:27] Kimberly Bell: Right. And, and also a question of, um, is it something that you have to fix, handle or change? Because sometimes we can’t do anything about those things that we worry are going to be, you know, big T or little t traumatizing to the children in our lives. And so we don’t want to talk about it because we can’t fix it.

And the importance of just processing the feeling and, I’m so sorry that we can’t change it, like there’s, you have to have the surgery, we’re going to get a divorce, we have to move. These are the realities, and so not to [00:28:00] avoid having those conversations, because it’s the not processing the feeling that leads to what we then call an anxiety disorder or something along those

[00:28:08] Debby Paris: lines.

But I think that for parents, um, who you mentioned before feeling guilty, it, it sort of goes with being a parent, but we don’t want it to… to run everything because reality does happen, divorces do happen, moves happen, hospitalizations happen, but in a smaller world, friends leave or choose other friends and children’s feelings get hurt.

And we want to always rescue our children from the hard feelings and it’s helpful to know that A, we can’t, but B, it doesn’t help them to rescue them. And that what we’re really trying to build in children and again, crisis and opportunity is a certain kind of muscle and strength that can handle bad things that it, you know, the, the idea of the helicopter parent, that’s always fixing everything and making sure [00:29:00] everything’s OK actually is not in the best interest of your child. We want to help the children meet what they have to meet, opposed to rescue them from all of the world. And it is hard when they have to meet something we didn’t plan on. We don’t like that we feel isn’t fair. That doesn’t mean we can’t help them with it.

That doesn’t mean that, um, we have to close it off because it’s so bad. It’s actually the time to move towards it, not away from it. And to use language and talking and play sometimes. And knowing that they’re having a feeling about it isn’t a sign of a failure about it. It’s actually helpful, and then once they have the feeling, we can sympathize with how hard it is, and often how angry they can feel that they don’t have control over something, and how hard that is.

Don’t we all like to be known? Right. Don’t we all like to have somebody say, that was really, hard. I’m so sorry. [00:30:00] Opposed to, well, why don’t you do this and why don’t you fix that? That doesn’t help us.

[00:30:03] Kimberly Bell: Right. And then finally, I don’t want to give, um, like short shrift to this idea that we ignore the biology.

I mean, there are so many things that kids have to deal with, you know, an ADHD, diabetes, cognitive struggles, learning disabilities, um, autism, like we, they, all of those things are there. And I think the point we want to make is that no matter what biology you bring to a situation, there’s a psychological overlay that goes into coping with it.

All of it.

[00:30:40] Debby Paris: Well, there are two different lines of that. I agree completely, but first of all, just to back up, one of the reasons to think about the emotional side is to be able to do a differential assessment of what’s going on. And usually it’s, um, it’s, it can be a, not usually, but often it’s a [00:31:00] combination of both.

But any child that has a particular um, struggle to deal with that’s physically based, whether it’s the brain, whether it’s the chemistry, um, besides the fact that we want to address the physical, that what does it feel like to be that child? And while can, how can we identify the feelings about it? For example, a child with diabetes, the issue of control is so important.

The issue of being scared. The issue of not getting to do or eat everything that they want or the way they want. There are feelings that go along with that. So just to say, you need to do that is not going to be the ultimate help for that child. But circling back, what we want to know is some of the causal stuff.

Are the emotions causing the physical or the physical causing the emotions? And that requires really thinking about both sides of the [00:32:00] equation and exploring it, not just plopping your money down on one side. Right. Right.

[00:32:06] Kimberly Bell: OK, Debbie, are you ready for our segment on things grown ups say to kids that might be a little less than helpful?

[00:32:11] Debby Paris: I am.

[00:32:12] Kimberly Bell: All right. We call it, “Let’s Rephrase That”. OK. Let’s say you’ve asked your child to do something, maybe an age appropriate household chore. Maybe you’ve asked them three times already and are getting impatient and then the child gets pouty about it and people say, “Don’t get mad at me! ”

[00:32:31] Debby Paris: Well, this is, this is what we call a power struggle. I, you know, one of the, the, the things that always helps me is if you want to know how somebody feels, see how they’re getting you to feel. When the child is not listening to you, you end up feeling sort of ticked and it ends up being, who’s got control here? And that takes the conversation the wrong way.

And they’re inviting, the child is inviting you to say, “I’m the strong man [00:33:00] here, I’m going to make you do that chore,” which gets nothing done except maybe the dish is cleared. So I think the idea would be to say, “You know, there’s got to be a reason that you’re not listening to me. Are you mad that I’m asking you to do this?

Or is this something that feels too hard for you to do? Because, you know, other times you’ve done this and it felt so good about helping out in the house and being part of the family. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s. That’s the kind of thing, when I say something like this, I think some parents feel like, oh come on, we’re the parent, they’re the kid.

And that is again at the power play piece. I’m not saying let the kid off the hook and say, it’s all right, you’re having a feeling, don’t do it. The whole purpose of understanding a feeling is to help a child do better, not to excuse the bad behavior. So that’s actually what we’re talking about. How do you help the child do the thing in a way that feels like mastery rather than imposition?

Yeah. All right. If you have a question you’d like to ask about your child or parenting, we’d like to hear from you. If we don’t have time to take your [00:34:00] question online, we’ll try to respond directly to you. To submit a question about your child’s behavior, send us an email at hiddenlanguageofchildren at gmail.com or visit our website at hiddenlanguageofchildren.org. To wrap up, I just want to let everybody know that if you have questions about your child’s development or if you’re concerned that a transition has turned into a trouble or you’ve gotten a diagnosis that’s worrying you and you’re looking for help for your child, the Hanna Perkins Center has an outpatient clinic, the Hadden Clinic, and we are here to help children ages zero to somewhere around 26.

And all you have to do is give us a call at 216-991-4472 and ask to receive services in our clinic and we will be happy to help. Thank you for joining us. We are grateful to all of our listeners today. We hope you enjoyed this conversation [00:35:00] and found it to be helpful when making parenting decisions appropriate for your child.

The Hidden Language of Children podcast is a production of the nonprofit Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development in beautiful Shaker Heights, Ohio. If you like this podcast, please subscribe to hear future episodes and share it with friends and family. We welcome your comments and questions. Contact us by email at hiddenlanguageofchildren at gmail. com. For more information about our approach to healthy child development, visit our website, hiddenlanguageofchildren. org. I’m Dr. Kimberly Bell, and we’ll see you next [00:36:00] time.