How to Apply A Penny or Two with Your Child
Check-out my post A Penny or Two for Your Stress, I use the same ideas from that post in this blog.
We all experience events in our day-to-day that take our pennies away. The same is true for our kids, teens, and young adults. Below is a step-by-step activity that you can do with your child to help them recognize what takes their pennies away, how you can pivot your expectations, and when to start using other effective coping skills together.
If you child is non-vocal and can’t engage in vocal back and forth communication, no worries still apply steps 1-5 below, skip step 4, but create this list for your child and/or with loved ones to help support your and your child’s energy.
Step 1) What do they identify with that gets taken away when they get upset such as pennies, bubbles, petal from a flower, “X”, video game power bar. Below, I’ll refer to pennies as points.
Step 2) Work together or they can do this on their own to create a list: 3-10 events that make them upset such as cleaning their room, putting their toys away, going to school, when someone says something to them (bully, teasing, hearing the word no), etc.
Step 3) Figure out how many points get taken away per event occurs. This may change as they get older, have more coping skills, or day-to-day.
Step 4) Optional step - talk with your child on how they feel or act when these events occur. For littles this could be crying, screaming, saying no, throwing themselves on the ground. For older kids this could be raising their voice, screaming, a certain phrase “come on” when playing a video game, slamming their door or controller, shoulders tense, chest quickly rises and falls, etc. The purpose of this is help your child recognize how they are feeling in their body and how this relates to them having a more reactive response.
Step 5) When they get down to a certain lower number of points such as 1-2, ask them what you can do to help give them points back. Begin to help them practice calming strategies. This step is not designed to negate every-day tasks. We all have things that make us upset and take our pennies away but we have to do them. As adults we call these “Rent Pennies”. Step 5 is where we can start focusing on calming or coping strategies with our child.
Christine Miserandino originally created the Spoon Theory in 2003. Originally focusing on health conditions such as lupus and only having so much energy in a day, click here to read the original essay.
