Parenting Your Highly Sensitive Child with special guest Asia Irgangladen and Purposeful Parenting Now

Welcome back to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Hey parents, did you know that 15 to 20% of children are born with a nervous system that is highly sensitive? These kiddos are overwhelmed by high levels of stimulation and activity. They have a hard time transitioning and they're super sensitive to the emotional distress of others.

Highly sensitive children are often quick to react to everything. Although, and get this, they'd prefer to reflect before acting. So parents, if you've been struggling with a child who is emotionally intense and demanding, or maybe you have a child who's fairly easy to raise, except when they're with a group of children or people they don't know, I have a great resource for you. My special guest, Asia Ergogliden, is the founder of Purposeful Parenting Now.

Growing up as a highly sensitive child herself, Asia is dedicated to showing families how to cultivate healthy relationships by shifting their focus, implementing strategies and structure in their home, and developing clear communication with your highly sensitive child, which allows you and the child to hear each other. Asia draws on her special education teaching background as well as a positive parent educator certification.

She provides her clients with a comprehensive problem-solving toolkit, a step-by-step system that includes mindfulness strategies and clear guidance for families to transform chaos into calm. In today's episode, Asia is going to explain the difference between a tantrum and a meltdown and how emotions are like poop. So listen in parents, having a highly sensitive child is not a problem when we seek first to understand why they behave the way they do.

Welcome to the show, Asia. I'm so excited to have you here today so you can talk all things mindfulness and highly sensitive kids. But let's begin with a little bit of background about you and how you became a parent coach, how you got to be where you are today. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm excited to be here. I've been a teacher my whole life, lining up stuffed animals, assigning my brother homework assignments when we were little. And then I moved on to be a camp counselor and a nanny and a lifeguard, all before I decided to become a special education teacher. And when I became a special education teacher in Philadelphia, I quickly noticed that services for families and children provided by the state or insurance were not providing the support in home or at school that they really needed. So a lot of families were really struggling. Some of them were in crisis and year after year, these parents would slip through the cracks and still be in the same situation they were in the year before. And even parents who got support, the employees were constantly shifting. It's like a revolving door. They didn't get to see the same people and, you know, on and on. So one of my parents in particular, her name was Serena, and she was in this predicament.

And her son, Devin, came into my kindergarten class with many behavioral challenges. He was highly sensitive. He had high energy and what we call highly spirited. In my classroom, we implemented routines and expectations and lots of behavioral supports to help him thrive. And the first few weeks, you know, we had to get our footing. But like less than a month into school, Devin was able to move through his day pretty smoothly. But at home, mom reported the opposite behavior. At home, he was tantruming constantly, that like blood curdling scream kind, the best. And he was unable to be flexible or listen to directions. And mom was clearly exhausted. She told me that every day she felt like she was going to battle, which is like so heartbreaking and something parents report when they are dealing with these behaviors. So when I would come, you know, my classroom was in the basement, I would come upstairs and I would give like the glowing review of his day. And she,

she would just get more and more sad every time I told her. So it came to me that she's not being properly supported at home. And so I thought about that for a while. And then one day she, She came to pick up Devin.

He had the job of light inspector that day, which means he turned on and off the lights. Loved it. And I told mom what a great day he had. And mom looked at me and her face was really red.

Her eyes started to well. And I asked her if she wanted to come inside to talk because she was clearly at the edge. And she told me that it's so hard for her to hear about his behavior at school because at home it was awful. And he had meltdowns and she just didn't know what to do anymore.

and she felt like she said, I must be a bad mom. I don't even know what to do with my own child. So I listened to her and she felt really desperate and left my room feeling hopeless. And as she walked up the stairs, a light bulb went off in my head.

And I was like, wait, I could be the person supporting parents at home. And I was so excited that I chased after her. And I said, what if I come to your house twice a week for an hour and teach you what we do with him in school? And her whole face lit up.

She was like, I didn't know you did that. And I was like, I didn't know I did that either. Oh, I love it. I began to work with her the following week.

And we problem solved and we created systems and we reflected and transformed her home life. And she was able to get through the day without meltdowns. And if there were meltdowns or challenging behavior, she felt confident that she could handle it. And so Serena was my very first client.

And from my work with her, I realized that she's probably not the only parent in this situation. and in my chosen line of work as a special education teacher and a positive discipline parent educator and a consciousness parenting coach, I have all the tools and knowledge to help these parents, especially with highly sensitive children or behavioral needs or special needs, that I can help them with things that they never learn. And I realized that until caregivers are given support and until caregivers of children who need the support have clear communication, reflection, high expectations for their child and for their growth, they will continue to be exhausted from putting out fires. It was then that I decided that that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be the resource for parents to help them so that they could do what I do in my classroom and now inside parents' homes. So that's what I do today. I help parents learn skills so that they can help their families thrive and parent with confidence.

awesome so that's how we got connected we have similar interests in helping parents of course and uh and I love that for me I was an in-home family-based worker for 20 years and that was like all I knew and uh and you were kind of the opposite you were like hey we can actually do this in the home we can actually go and do this and so we have that in common I guess but I love that you were able to notice it on your own and just be like hey there's a need and I want to go fill it and I can do this. And so, so you have a company called Purposeful Parenting Now, and I'm going to put the link for that in the, in the show notes as well. But you really do specialize in those highly sensitive kids and their parents, teaching their parents so that the parents can do what you would do at school. They can do at home, but can you talk a little bit about your interest in that, like your specialty with highly sensitive kids and maybe what you notice the world is like for a highly sensitive child and how you can support those kids. I think that from the generation above me to my generation, there has been great shifts already in terms of allowing children to be scared, allowing children to express their emotions and things like that. And for a highly sensitive child, often what the world does is push them,

right? It's okay. You can do it. You can do it. And it pushes them and pushes them and pushes them. And some children who are not highly sensitive, that's fine for them. They can get that push and they can do whatever they need to do. But for a highly sensitive child, that can be traumatizing for them. And then instead of doing the thing that you want it to do, which is expose them to it, and then they will see it's okay. It makes them shrink and pull back and not be able to be even receptive. They shut down because they're overwhelmed. So highly sensitive children, it's not like a choice where they're having a temper tantrum. I mean, sometimes it is children are children. But often it is something that we would call like a shutdown or a meltdown, where they are too sensorily overloaded to be able to make a choice. They're not using the part of their brain that they're able to do logical thinking, flexible thinking. And this can happen if they're like overwhelmed with noise, it can happen if they're overwhelmed with lights or a lot of people.

So we just need to be aware. And it can happen like with they're afraid of something specific, like afraid of going to a specific place. And it, and that doesn't mean that you don't expose those to them, to those things. You just do it slowly. And it's not forceful. It's not like you make them do something they don't want to do. And I mean, the way I was raised, you kind of did whatever you, you were told to do. I was very, I was a highly sensitive child. And I, you know, when I, the fire people firemen came to my school I was like I'm not going out there I know those things make loud noises and I ended up getting in trouble because I refused to go outside and then and then it was okay you know they figured out that I was having a meltdown and not trying to be you know bad but that's the idea they can't handle it and they're being labeled as disruptive and so often what we try to do and with good intention is we try to almost coerce the kids and convince them that it's okay, that they can do this, it'll be fine. And in their head, they're going,

no way, you know, this is like, completely terrifying. You talk about multi generational mindfulness. Would you explain to our listeners what that means? Yeah, so multi generational mindfulness is about teaching mindfulness to everybody in the family.

And what happens often is, is parents want to teach want their child to be mindful and want their child to do this, but they themselves are not able to do that because they haven't practiced it either. And many things are passed down from generation to generation to generation. Traumas, things that you're afraid of, cultural things that are passed down through each generation. And so really being able to work with the parent also and say, okay, what are you trying to teach when you spank?

What are you trying to teach? And being able to break down why are they doing this? And is it something that they still need to be doing? Or is it something that they're practicing just because it's the way that it was always done and it's been passed down through generations?

And there are studies that show, they've done studies with mice, they've done studies with humans, that traumas from generations back are passed down through seven generations. So if something happened to you seven generations ago, it's passed down through all of those lines. So being able to break those patterns and say, okay, so I'm afraid of this thing. Does that make sense in the current environment that I'm in?

Does this still hold true? And helping the parents work that out so that when they're dealing with their children, they're not being overly fearful. They're being reasonable. And then they're able to be more centered themselves.

And then they can teach their children to do that. It's hard to teach your children to do something that you can't do. You also talk about emotions being like poop. I attended one of your webinars a ways back where you described tantrums are like poop or emotions are like poop. So I love that. And I'd love for our listeners to hear more about that.

so tantrums are like energetic poops I like to say to parents in many ways but if you think about yourself and you're in the grocery store with your child and they're like I need to poop right now and you're like okay gotta get into the bathroom and you get like sweaty and hot and anxious and then you think about the feeling that you have when your child is about to have a temper tantrum in a store and you're like, I don't want this to happen. And you get sweaty and uncomfortable. It's like the same kind of feeling because you're trying to stop something that is not going to stop. And when that happens, it feels really bad. So they're like energetic poop in the way that the longer that you delay a poop, the more urgent it becomes. The longer that you delay a tantrum,

the more urgent it becomes, the more uncontrollable it becomes, and the more explosive it becomes. So if you think about yourself, like if you're in a public place and you are like about to cry and you don't want to cry, you're like, don't cry, don't cry, don't cry, don't cry. And then you get into your car and you're like, and it like explodes because you're trying to hold in this thing that needs to come out. And with children, especially like you would never say to your kid, hold in your poop forever never poop you gotta just hold it in but we do that with our children for their emotions we're like don't have a tantrum here don't have it here you can't have it here either you can't have it anywhere and it's not possible for children to not have big emotions they are practicing how to have big emotions we need to support them so that they know it's okay to be really angry it's okay to be really upset and that they can go through these big waves of energetic emotion and that they are safe doing that. And we, with, with an expectation that they will never do it, they will never learn how to manage their emotions.

Right. So we do want our kids to make mistakes. We do want our kids to throw fits or have a fit, get it out of their system and then, and be able to recoup. Right. And then if they did something wrong, they can make it right. And they can learn about all those things when they're in the comfort of your home and the safety of your home and your environment with you guiding them and leading them along. So how can we support our kids when they're having those big emotions and we're embarrassed or we're rushed or in a hurry and don't feel like we have time or we still have the energy? So the first thing that you need to do is to get into a place of acceptance because the more that you resist it, the longer it's going to take. The more you're like, this isn't happening. This isn't happening. When it is happening, the longer it's going to take. So getting to a place where you're like, okay, I don't want this to be happening right now. I really don't like that this is happening right now. I wish it weren't happening right now. And it is. So being able to flow the same way that you ask your child to. Often we ask our child to go with our flow.

Today I need to go to the store and then we need to do this and then we need to do this. And you expect the child to go with your flow, which they can do sometimes. And sometimes they cannot. So it's being able to identify like, okay, so right now, they cannot go with my flow anymore.

And I need to go with their flow. And of course, there are things like weddings or things like that, where like, you can't bend to them. But there often are situations when you can, and it might be annoying, you might be mad about it. But if you stop and think for a minute, Everything will be okay if you stop for 10 minutes and go through whatever your child needs to go through with them.

So that's the first thing, being able to be in acceptance. The second thing is to try to get yourself out of the eye of other people. Whether that means going to your car, whether that means going to their room. Because whether you're out in public and parents are staring at you or other people, I mean, you know you hate that feeling.

And also, you probably won't make the same choices you would make by yourself. because you're like, people are always looking at me. Should we stop doing it? And even in your home, if you're like with in-laws or grandparents or anybody like that, being able to get out of their eyes too so that you, once again, you're not getting any judgment from anybody else so you're able to make the choices that you want to make.

It's also just like more respectful for them to put them in somewhere where not everybody's looking at them. Like I don't like to freak out in front of a bunch of people. I would like to not be in front of a bunch of people when I do that. So it's like it's respecting them also to get them to be in a more private place.

One thing I hear quite a bit is if I allow my child to have this meltdown or if I stop and pay attention to their meltdown, I'm actually sort of like giving in and they're just going to think they can get their way. and so you know there's that pendulum of either being like super strict and demanding as a parent or being that helicopter and almost overly apologetic or or too nurturing you know and too nice can you talk about that a little bit there's like authoritarian which is like i'm in charge you do what i say because i said it and it's not a lot of flexibility and then the other pendulum swing of that is permissive which is like please walk on my back take everything from me. And in the middle is more of authoritative, which is like, I am in charge and we are working as a team together. There are some children who, if you're like one,

two, they will stop what they're doing and they will listen to you. There are some children that if you're like one, two, it will send everything into 10 times worse. And so it's not about allowing your child to like do whatever they want. It's about knowing what is going to work with your child. So if one, two works with your child, great. And if it doesn't, then doing that is not actually working. It's not actually going to stop the situation and help them.

So the more that you try something, if it's like, I'm allowing them to tantrum. So what does it look like when you don't allow them to tantrum? Do they actually stop? Does it just turn into both of you having a temper tantrum at each other like really trying to think of like what is what's actually happening even if it feels like weird to to not be the one in control which I'll tell you a little secret you're like never actually in control he just likes to feel like you are so if you look at the situation actually in like a clear way generally if somebody is having a tantrum and you are trying to make them stop having a tantrum by yelling at them or being more strict with them, it's not going to work anyway. And so the idea is not to let them do whatever they want,

but it's to co-create with them, to talk to them. So calm them down, come up with different strategies so that it doesn't need to be this big explosion of you two crashing into each other. It can be you supporting and being able to help your child. And then it's not like you guys are enemy is you're on a team. And that way you can work together. And of course, there are moments as a parent where this is the way it's going, because this is the way it's going. That doesn't go away. But there are many moments when parents put down the iron fist when they don't really need to. And this also takes away the child's ability to be able to problem solve for their own problems.

We don't like ask them, what do you think we should do? And children are really smart. They can often come up with really good and creative solutions. So it's also empowering them to be responsible for your relationship with them and not just having you be the one who is in charge because you are older, which is kind of what happens with parenting. You also talk about the difference between a tantrum and a meltdown. And maybe people don't always really get the difference. And then how do you, how do you respond to tantrums different than a meltdown?

So a tantrum is when a child is trying to get something or stop something specific. So it's like if they want a toy and they can't and you can't, you're not getting it for them. And you can say something, you know, you can say something validating of like, that toy is a really cool toy. I understand why you want it and we're not going to get it today.

So the things you can look for for a tantrum are like them looking at you to see if you're looking at them. if you go away from them it'll like stop and then they'll like crawl back in the room after you and then start screaming again and you're like okay um it's a little bit more of an act and that doesn't mean that they're not having feelings because there are but it's more like frustration and anger feelings so you can ignore that more you can be near them and be talking to them a little bit but not giving it a lot of attention especially you need to move on with your original boundary Because if you wait an hour to give in to their tantrum, now they know, okay, so I have to do this for about an hour.

And then I'll be able to get the thing I want. I want power in this situation. So another thing you can do in a situation like that is, like, offer power in different ways. Like, you can't have the blue pajamas tonight because they're dirty.

But you can wear the red ones or the green ones. Like, giving them a way to give them a little power back. Because that's what it is. That's, like, a power struggle.

a meltdown is like a like i'm overwhelmed and i can no longer function like if if a child is having a meltdown over a toy and you give them that toy the meltdown's not going to stop they're like already too high over capacity their threshold has been reached and they're in meltdown mode and for that it's more just you have to take them somewhere quiet be with them and just help them self-regulate, deep breaths, things like that, because that's not, they're not in the choice anymore. Your goal at that point is not to continue the direction or the consequence for their action or whatever. It's to get them calm. And that doesn't mean you're giving in. It means as soon as they're calm and then you wait a little while, you can go back to the original quote unquote problem and address it and deal with it. If it sends them into another meltdown,

well, you got to work through that one. And then you can come back again later. doesn't mean we're just giving in when a kid's in a meltdown mode we don't give them the excuse of not having to follow through with something we just have to delay it and when you're in meltdown mode like when i'm in meltdown mode i'm hearing because in the meltdown you can't learn you're not your brain is not ready to receive new information so a lot of times i'll hear parents like trying to reason with it when they're there like i'll do it tomorrow and it's like there's no reason to have any conversation because they are not hearing you. It's only to bring them down, to bring their frontal cortex back into action because it's not working in that moment.

What kinds of things with highly sensitive kids can parents do to prepare for that quote-unquote worst behavior that they just dread happening? The first thing I would say about a highly sensitive child is to prepare them overly for everything. So if you're going to go to the aquarium for the first time. Look at videos of the aquarium you're going to go to. Show them a map of the aquarium. Do some acting out. When we go to get lunch at the aquarium, this is what it's going to look like. And do a role play with them. Spending a lot of time prepping them to go do whatever they're about to do. And parents sometimes say like, that's so much work. But the reality is, is that you're either going to put in like a nice system that's going to work, or you're going to have to put, use a lot of energy in a meltdown. So you can choose where you want to put your energy.

You're going to use the same amount. So really prepping and also having like code words. So with a lot of my parents, I teach them to have a code word with their child of like if they are feeling like they're getting above their threshold, if they're they're getting a little whoop. And we work with parents to to have to help children identify what it feels like in their body.

What does it feel like in your body when you are getting scared? What does it feel like in your body when you are feeling overwhelmed? And you look to teach them their own body cues so that they're able to identify them before they go off the rail. And so helping the parents stay mindful of maybe their own feelings as well, right?

When they start to see their child do X, Y, or Z, they kind of know a meltdown is coming or happening. How do the parents keep themselves in check and what kinds of things can they do so that they're not joining in on that yeah on that battle or that emotion so often when there's like a meltdown about to happen in a from like a going somewhere new kind of thing it all has to do with expectations right like the parents like i'm taking you somewhere fun to do something fun and now you're not even appreciating my day and so that's that's something like that's like programming that we have to take out of our brain because we're completely projecting our experience onto the child i remember when i went to disney world with my whole family my little brother he would never not having fun, not having fun the whole time. And my dad was getting so frustrated with him because he's like, we're in Disney World. Why aren't you having fun? But it wasn't helping because it was my dad's expectation that we're going to go on this family vacation and it's going to be the best. So really as a parent, being able to be like, okay, I need to be intuitive and be aware to what my child needs. Even if it's not the thing that I thought it was going to be,

I need to be paying attention to what my child is doing so I know how I can move to help. Because a lot of it comes from expectations. So how can people get a hold of you, Asia, that really want to learn more about how they can prepare to handle some of these meltdowns, moments when their child is overwhelmed, and just become more confident in their parenting with their highly sensitive kid? How can they reach you?

My website is PurposefulParentingNow.com. There's a free gift on that website. So it has a lot of calm down techniques that you can use with your child.

I have an Instagram at asia.ergangladen. From there, there's contact pages. You can send me emails.

And my email address is purposefulparentingnowatgmail.com. And we can set up a time to talk. Thanks so much for being with us today, Asia.

Thank you for having me. All right, that's it for today. Join me next time for more tips, tools, and resources so that you can become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. Thank you.