Curious Neuron Podcast
Do you have frequent emotional outbursts, often feel triggered by your child's behaviour and struggle to teach your child how to cope with their emotions? Neuroscientst, Dr. Cindy Hovington can help you understand your triggers, recognize and break your emotional patterns and model healthy emotional coping skills for your child.
Curious Neuron is an internationally recognized emotional well-being resource for parents with their evidence-based educational content being consumed in over 70 countries! Dr. Hovington is a leading thought expert in emotion regulation and parental well-being as well as an international speaker on well-being and emotional development in children.
As a mom of 3 with a doctorate degree in neuroscience (specializing in mental health and emotional well-being), Dr. Hovington understands the struggles of parenting and how this can often make parents to feel overwhelmed and stressed. The goal of this podcast is to help parents gain awareness of their emotional triggers, understand how their past influences behavioural patterns they can stuck in and help them learn how to model healthy emotional coping skills for their children. Cindy is also the Director of The Reflective Parent Club, a community of parents that implement the knowledge they learn from Curious Neuron to build emotional resilience and reflective skills to help reduce their stress and build a stronger relationship with their family.
Join us every Monday for conversations with leading researchers and best selling authors in parental well-being, childhood adversity, attachment, emotional development, stress management and emotion regulation skills. Past guests include Dr. Bruce Perry, Dr. Marc Brackett and best-selling authors Dr. Ramani Durvasula and Stephanie Harrison.
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Curious Neuron Podcast
Embracing Goodbyes: What to do when a child struggles with getting rid of a toy
Does your child struggle with letting go of toys they love?
Saying goodbye and having closure is something we need to support our kids with.
I hope this week's episode helps not only your child with closure, but helps you the next time you need to say goodbye to a loved one or something major.
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Hello, dear friend, welcome back to the Curious Neuron podcast. My name is Cindy Huffington and I am your host. I am a mom of three from Montreal, canada, and I have a PhD in neuroscience. My goal is to help you with your emotions and learn how to regulate them. Through the people that I interview and the research that I share, I also want to help you model these emotion regulation skills for your child, because not only do emotion regulation skills help reduce your stress, but they support our well-being and as parents, we need to support that and nurture that as much as we can, because when we are not well, we struggle to show up for our kids in the way that we know we need to show up.
Speaker 1:This week I'm back, actually, so I was in Abu Dhabi last week. When I posted last Monday I was already there and it was quite an interesting week. I learned a lot about education there and what they do in terms of supporting parents and all the programs that they have for children, and I went there to talk about emotions, and so it was really interesting to have the conversations around how we can support that for kids and how we can teach parents about the importance of emotion regulation skills. I'm really grateful that I had this experience. I'm happy to be back home Right now. As I'm recording, I am fully jet lagged and struggling with the time change and the jet lag, everything all together. I have been struggling with sleep a little bit and it's catching up, but we will get there. The week is young.
Speaker 1:Today I want to talk about something that I experienced last week as well actually the week before and it was quite emotional for me, but there's a method that I have developed or came up with, I guess. In the past year. I taught this to my kids, and now I want to share this with you, because the more I talk to people about it, the more they say that this is something they wish they would have known when they went through a hard transition of saying bye to someone whether it's because this person passed away or they had to move away saying bye to something it could be a house, it could be an item and as adults, we struggle with this, and so, now that we have kids, I thought it would be great for us to have at least this sort of tool in our toolbox so that we can offer this to our kids and support ourselves as well when we are transitioning and saying bye to someone or something. So if you are going through this or you want the right skills for that, stay tuned First before we begin.
Speaker 1:As always, I would like to thank the Tannenbaum Open Science Institute for supporting the Curious Neuron podcast, as well as the McConnell Foundation. Both of these organizations believe in the importance of sharing science, you know, in an open-ended way, as I do here with Curious Neuron, with the podcast that is free for everyone to access and the website at curiousneuroncom and our social media account. You can follow us on Instagram at Curious underscore Neuron, or on Facebook. The handle is Curious Neuron. There's a Facebook group as well the Reflective Parent. I think that is important for all parents to have access to science, which is why we do what we do here at Curious Neuron. And if you, like you know you would like a little bit of extra support, then we also have the membership. For those of you who are not sure about it, we have stretched out the free trial to two weeks. I want to make sure that you give it a good test and that you see if this is something that works for you.
Speaker 1:I have been working with parents now since July, and it is amazing to hear that parents are talking about how it's changed the way they respond to emotional situations, not just with their kids, but with adults around them and their partners to emotional situations not just with their kids, but with adults around them and their partners, in terms of being able to respond and pause a little bit longer. Every single week, I meet with the Parents Insider membership and we talk about some reflection prompt, something, some aspect of our life that I just want everybody to pause and reflect on and give some thought, because if we continue on this autopilot function, nothing will change and things won't get any better. If we want to feel less stressed and gain a little bit of control over emotions, we need to understand the situations that trigger certain emotions, and that's my whole goal with the Reflective Parent Club, which is our membership. You can learn more about it. Click the link in the show notes if you want to visit our website, or you can also download a freebie in the show notes. It's our parental wellbeing starter kit, and so if you don't know where to begin, you can download this 40 page document and get a head start, all right.
Speaker 1:So last week, um, they my mom, my uncle sold my grandmother's house and so this before I left to go to Abu Dhabi, I went to the house and went to help them out a little bit, but mostly I needed to say goodbye. And you know, I know that it's just a house, but obviously there's a lot of emotional connection to it. My mom, my uncle, grew up there I almost grew up there because I was there every single day as a young child. All my childhood memories are from that house the house and they had a lake house as well and so all of my memories are of my grandparents and their homes. And so to me, saying goodbye to that house was very emotional as well.
Speaker 1:And when things like that happen, it could be something as big, as you know, as a house where there are a lot of memories, many years and decades of memories. It could be a person that passes away. It could be as small as a toy that you no longer use For a child. It could be a toy that they had so many good memories of and they're done with it. It's a baby toy or a younger kid toy and now don't need that anymore and you need to give it away or do something with it. You can't just keep it in your home.
Speaker 1:I know that lots of kids struggle with this, and, and some of us as adults, we struggle with those really intense sad moments as well, and so I came up with this a little while ago where I took it from? So it's not my own idea, but was it, marie Kondo, this or being grateful or saying thank you to clothing items, or as you were getting rid of things in your home that you would say thank you to it first? And I brought that into every aspect of my life in order to kind of support the emotions that came with it. So it wasn't about like clearing my home, but little moments that were coming to an end to just say thank you out loud. And so this is what I did with my grandmother's house.
Speaker 1:I went into the home and first I had done this with my kids a couple of weeks ago. We went together and I explained to them what I was doing. So they walked into a room and they saw that I was crying, and then I explained to them that I was taking the time to sit with the memory that I was having in that particular room. I took the time to go into each room, each space of the home, outdoor, indoor space, all of them, literally all of them and sat with that moment of a memory, or many memories, the memories that I had in that room. And so, for example, the memory of the front porch for me is sitting on the rocking chairs that they had there, these sort of outdoor rocking chairs, and I would sit there with my grandfather, or sit there with my grandmother and just look at the people walking and have conversations, look at the squirrels come into their backyard, and so, just sitting there in that moment, closing my eyes and remembering that moment, and once the memory was over, I would say out loud thank you, goodbye, and that allowed me to kind of appreciate the memories that came with each space. But, in addition to that, or and also understand that there's a closure in that moment right now, and I found it really helpful, it doesn't mean that the emotion is going to be easier, it, you know, for me it still led to crying. Obviously, it was still a very sad moment.
Speaker 1:And as I went from room to room, you know, in the living room, the memory is every time I was sick, I would lie down in this sort of lazy boy chair that my grandparents always had in the corner of their, their living room. My grandmother would make me some soup and I would rest there. That was the recovery chair. That's what my grandmother would call it. That lazy boy was the recovery chair, and so I'd go have lunch and then lie down there and nap and she would cover me and make sure that my toes were covered with the blanket and wrap them up, and my grandfather, who sat in that chair all the time, would move when I was sick. He wouldn't sit there, he'd sit on the couch, uncomfortably, in order. You know, the angle wasn't the right angle to watch TV, but he would sit there and I would rest and recover. And so those were my positive and good memories of that space, and I'm sure you could hear it in my voice I'm, you know, getting emotional just remembering that, because my grandfather has passed on and now we're losing the house. Right, the house is gone, and so, and that's why I'm saying that it's okay to feel sad, it's okay to sit with that sadness a little bit, and that's what sitting with that sadness looked like for me remembering the moments and then saying out loud thank you to that moment, to those moments, goodbye.
Speaker 1:And then I moved from room to room, space to space, and did that. If I had to cry for a while in that room, I did that If I had to just have a memory and I was fine with it. I moved on, but I respected the needs that I had and it made it slightly easier not emotionally, it was still sad, but I felt like I had the right closure and I think that we can teach this to our kids. Right, this idea of not getting over it, like the moment let's say the toy example right, it's not just about telling them oh, get over it. You played with it when you were young, it's over. Now You're 12 years old, just get rid of this blanket or this stuffy. It's really, it's nothing. Really like what is it Right? And and honestly, I, I've, I've done that with my kids without realizing.
Speaker 1:A few years ago I was just so overwhelmed with how many things we had in our home and when my, our siblings, my husband and I started having kids, it was the right time for us to start giving things away and I wasn't respecting that. There was a need or an emotional attachment with my kids. And now that I've understood that. I really appreciate and respect that. We have to do the same as adults and there might be little moments where it's hard to let something go. We have to see that with our kids as well. Right, we have to appreciate that there might be a toy that means a lot to them Doesn't mean we're not giving it away, right. It doesn't mean that we have to keep it the rest of our lives. There might be some, but most things will have to leave. There will be this transition, there will be this goodbye, but most things will have to leave. There will be this transition, there will be this goodbye.
Speaker 1:But why not teach our kids to sit with that moment first, to allow that transition to happen a bit more intentionally? Where we sit with the toy, talk together about it, have memories, maybe take a picture with it, a last picture with it, appreciate it, talk about it again, whatever it is, whatever works for your child, but then saying goodbye, thank you, goodbye. And I think that shows them that emotions exist. They are there. We're not trying to push them to the side, we're not trying to ignore them. That's what it means to sit with the emotion and if we can just keep doing that in very small ways. Like I said with toys, they're very small transitions, but if we can get them into this habit of this, thank you goodbye.
Speaker 1:This appreciation for a thing, knowing that it's not forever, this appreciation for us, for people, homes right If you have to switch home, a grandparent or a family member passes away, to know that. It's okay to be sad, but let's try at the same time to think about the good moments we had with this person. And it doesn't mean that we're not going to cry, it doesn't mean that it's going to make it easier in the moment. But focusing on that appreciation and that joy that we had with the thing or the person will make things marginally easier. And I hope that it's a skill that we can teach our kids. But before we teach our kids we need to practice it ourselves. I'm very aware that not everything or everything can't be forever right and just like this podcast, one day the episode will be thank you goodbye, and that'll be for the community. One day, maybe, thank you goodbye will be for Curious Neuron. It doesn't mean that it's going to make it much easier, but the appreciation part just really maybe marginally easier, but the emotion is still there, and so I hope that this sort of thank you, goodbye tip is something that you can apply for yourself and for your child. You know I think about all the people that have reached out to me in the past year.
Speaker 1:Even with a marriage, sometimes in the bad moments we forget right to see the good moments, because if you're separating from somebody or divorcing your partner, you might not recall the good moments. Because if you're separating from somebody or divorcing your partner, you might not recall the good moments. Maybe the transition could be a little bit easier and that closure could be a little bit easier. If you think about some of the positive aspects and you can do that with your child you can sit with your child and say you know you're still going to be seeing, you know your other parent, but I'd love to sit down with you and think about the good moments and, yes, us being together in the same home. We have to say goodbye to the home. We have to say goodbye to what you knew as the two parents together, but let's say thank you first and let's do that together. It'll be emotional for you, but it's okay to show your child that it's not. It's important for your child to see that you are also experiencing emotions around this.
Speaker 1:This was a short episode, but I hope that this tip of taking the time to pause and say thank you is helpful for you. I will see you next week with another amazing interview that I had, and I can't wait to share it with you. Please take a moment to rate the Curious Neuron podcast, wherever you are listening to it, share it on social media, share it through emails, through text messages, help us get the word out and help us grow this community. I will see you next Monday. I hope you have a wonderful and beautiful week. Bye.