The Practice Run

Slowing everything down to alleviate stress for children (and us)

If you’d prefer to listen to this, there’s an audio version in the Un-Normal podcast

Something I’ve often noticed as an adult is the way that we - adults - define what is ‘fun’ for children. And then can get pretty pissed off if children don’t agree with us. As in, if they then don’t have fun.

We do it all the time.

Let’s take Christmas as an example. Adults go to great lengths and a huge amount of stress to create a magical day. Children, especially little ones, often find it all a bit overwhelming, and usually demonstrate that in their behaviour. Adults feel frustrated, resentful, wonder ‘why do I bother’ or tell children they are ungrateful (explicitly or otherwise).

Children feel that their response to the day is ‘wrong’, so learn to perform enjoyment.

For some children that continues into adulthood. For others, Christmas is a genuinely enjoyable experience. And then for many it’s a bit of both - enjoyable and stressful.

Photo by Rebecca Campbell on Unsplash

When any transition or change is difficult, as it can be for autistic folk, it makes sense that something as massive a deal as Christmas or a birthday could be totally derailing. There are numerous changes that are happening all at once, and lots of things that we commonly rely on to keep ourselves feeling on an even keel get taken away. And then there is the expectation that all of that is meant to be enjoyable. Often it is both of these things, and more, that can cause unexpected conflict for families. I mean, it’s sort of a cornerstone of life in general - often conflict and struggle comes from the difference between expectation and reality. And then either we shift our reality, we shift our expectation or we just have some feelings about the mismatch and don’t shift anything.

But why do we have expectations about things? Like, in general? Strange question perhaps but we have so many. So many unconscious and conscious expectations about how things should be. That we are then shocked about when it doesn’t come to pass. But why? Who decides the future? Who decides how we or children or anyone are going to respond to something? Especially something unexpected or new.

There are many reasons why people might find a novel situation difficult, and then that situation might be made more difficult by the expectation that it will be enjoyed. If we switched our assumptions and prepared people - ourselves, our children - for what might happen as well as some of the things that might be unexpected, there is a safety net laid down.

We sometimes do this for transitions that we accept - societally - as challenging. We allow children a ‘settling in’ period at school. We might even walk them through the school run, or get them to wear a uniform before they start so that there aren’t a ton of new things all at once. We might arrange for them to meet classmates.

But what about events which aren’t ‘meant’ to be challenging, but for some people just… are? We don’t tend to prepare children for birthday parties, for example. Because they’re ‘meant’ to be enjoyable and fun but many children (and adults) find them stressful and overwhelming. And then because we can’t process that maybe the enjoyable thing is or was stressful, we don’t make allowances for it. It took me years, and a lot of compassion for myself, to accept that I need to come home from a social event that I’m ‘meant’ to enjoy and lie in my bed and stare into space for at least an hour if I’m not going to go through the rest of the day on auto pilot or in a state of high stress. That it might be something I needed to recover from.

What would it be like, I wonder, if we took time to prepare children - and ourselves - for more of the daily events of life. To do actual or imagined practice runs, to talk about expectations and make them explicit - which often takes the power (and shame) out of not meeting expectations.

I think one of the reasons we don’t do consistently this is that it involves slowing down. So often we just go from event to event or task to task without stopping to decompress. Living life on fast forward, in a state of high stress, in survival mode. That isn’t a state in which we are usually able to reflect let alone encourage reflection, planning and preparation in someone else.

But what would shift if life was lived more consciously? As expectations are made more explicit, other feelings and assumptions can be too. And that can take you to some interesting solutions.