30 Years. Thousands of Kids. Here's What Real Nervous System Regulation Looks Like | Nervous System Regulation | E450

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge (0:00)

People often ask me, Dr. Roseann, after 30 years of doing this, do kids really get better? Guess what? Yes, absolutely.

I'm Dr. Roseann, and I'm a mental health trailblazer. And today, we're diving into how did those thousands of families I worked with learn to have calm in their daily life, and exactly the signs you need to look for.

Do kids really get better? My answer is always the same. Yes, absolutely. But maybe not in the way every parent or caregiver or teacher or grandparent thinks, because when parents imagine improving their kid's behavior or creating some change or healing in some way, they imagine a kid who never melts down, never argues, never struggles. And that's not what I see. It's not realistic. And what I see is something far more beautiful. I see kids getting their lives back. I see families getting their lives back. And today, I want to really tell you what that actually looks like, because so much of what we expect about kids and behavior is setting everybody up for failure. We live in a world where it looks like everybody's kid has behaved. I'm telling you, Dr. Roseann is telling you no. So let's talk about what we should be looking like, right? What should we see? Number one, we see kids becoming more flexible. One of the first things parents notice when they focus on regulation first, when they focus on regulating themselves first, regulating their child, they're not seeing less emotion per se, right? And you're thinking all emotions are bad. Please, no, that's not the case, right? This is an Aquarian telling you that.

It's really about fewer battles and conflicts, right? So for the kid of any age, because everyone always wants to know, what age am I talking about? What problem am I talking about? You all think there's something really specific. This is, again, agnostic to age, agnostic to the problem, because that nervous system knows no difference between your age and problem-solving and all that. When we regulate ourselves, regardless of our own history, when we regulate our kids, regardless of what you think they can't or can't do, things improve, right? So, this isn't about a kid who never falls apart and who's falling apart, you know, because, I don't know, your cup is blue and it was supposed to be orange, but now they can grab the green one without freaking out, right? So, they can tolerate a change in plans. They can recover, and maybe not immediately, but they learn to begin to recover. And that's about shifting gears, transitioning, pivoting, sometimes they need your help, but they're not like drowning in two feet of water anymore. And that's because that nervous system is regulated enough to tolerate discomfort and create some more flexibility, right? It's about that capacity and flexibility changes everything. So, we have a little bit more of a flexible kid. Maybe we have a lot more flexible. Maybe you're more flexible. Maybe you let go of some of those expectations, and you also don't care anymore if, like, your father-in-law has a little something to say or whatever it is.

Number two, what are we seeing in the things that are different? And again, these are based on me working with thousands of people over 30 years, right? I'm just sharing. So number two is they recover faster. So, parents will often say to me, you know, meltdowns aren't gone, but they're different or the sauciness, backtalk isn't totally gone, but it's better, right? So instead of like their meltdown being 90 minutes or an hour or three days, they're like, look, it lasted 15 minutes. So instead of ruining that whole day, everyone is recovering and that recovery is one of the clearest signs that the nervous system is becoming healthier and that it's healing. In the absence of stress. And to me, healing is about, we talk about physical healing, but I also want you to know it's about mental healing and that flexibility that comes with having that ability. Okay, now let's talk about number three. So they stop living in survival mode, right? So one little guy worked with, he used to walk in a school pretty much every day, already overwhelmed. They had to have somebody come and meet him, and otherwise, he wouldn't even make it 20 minutes. So every sound, every demand, every transition really felt like too much, right? So months later, his teachers told his mom, which seemed that he's smiling again. What a great thing to hear from somebody. And not because school became easier, because his nervous system really had enough capacity to experience joy, which sounds contraindicative, like not, you know, like, well, that's not what that's, I don't really get that, right? Sounds counterintuitive.