Jessica: Welcome to Once Upon an Upset interviews. On today's episode, I interviewed Kelsie, who goes by The Occuplaytional Therapist online, where she writes about everything from space-themed activities to sensory processing. She shares insights from a school-based professional perspective about IEPs, child development, and working with kids with disabilities, as well as a more personal perspective as a mom herself, and all focused on the importance of learning through play. In this episode, we talk about sensory processing and some of what kids who have sensory processing challenges go through, how we as parents can support them, and how we can also support ourselves, while we're having sensory challenges of our own.
Jessica: I want to apologize in advance for some technical glitches in this interview. But in my opinion, they are minor and don't detract from this really interesting conversation I had with Kelsie, who is a such a brilliant, insightful, and generous human being. I hope you'll get as much from the conversation as I did. It's so wonderful to have you here Kelsie. [Crosstalk 00:01:27].
Kelsie: I'm so excited to be here.
Jessica: Thank you.
Kelsie: Thank you for having me.
Jessica: Oh, you're so welcome. I'm thinking that from my podcast, listeners are going to be parents who have kids who may have sensory processing issues, and some parents who may notice a lot of conflicts with their kids and not quite sure what's going on. I was wondering if just to start out our conversation if you could share just some brief thoughts or observations, or knowledge about what sensory processing is.
Kelsie: That's a great question, and I think the problem here is going to be whether or not I can be brief, because I have a tendency to get rambly. So, tell me if I'm doing that, but sensory processing, people might have heard sensory used as a buzzword for lots of things these days. And it'll just be thrown around like, "Oh, we're doing sensory," or, "Oh, my kid has difficulty with sensory," or things like that and doesn't necessarily get filled into the full descriptor of what it is that people mean by that. When we talk about sensory processing at its most easiest level, it's probably something that you learned about at some point in grade school when they sat you down and said, "There are these five senses and it's sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch."
Kelsie: Well, there's more than five senses, but that's a pretty good basic overview. And sensory processing is just the way in which people perceive the world around them through those five senses and through other senses as well, for example, your sense of balance. When people talk about a child having sensory processing difficulties or sensory processing disorganization, or one of a different number of wording that, then we're talking about some way in which the input coming into the child's body and brain through their body. Something about it is too much for the child to handle, or something about it is not enough for the child to notice or in some way, the message that the child and this can be adults too, I'm saying child because that's the population I work with.
Kelsie: Something about the way that they are receiving the message is getting garbled or magnified or minimized in a way that it doesn't to maybe the same age peers, or maybe your typical person or your average person, or however you would want to work that. How is that for an overview?
Jessica: That's wonderful. That's really wonderful, and it brings me to my personal experience which I'm excited to get your input on because others may have a similar experience, where my child was in kindergarten. In his particular school, they all had to eat lunch at the same table in silence, in kindergarten.
Kelsie: Oh my God.
Jessica: And it was A Waldorf School and they were just big into this creating space for silence. Well, my son was physically incapable of tolerating the sound of chewing.
Kelsie: Oh, man. Yeah, I would be right there with him when he was there.
Jessica: And I found it really interesting because from the perspective of the teacher, she looked through the lens of empathy that maybe it would be a good idea of sitting that child next to the loud chewer, so that my son could see his essence and get along with him better, and learn that way. And it was so interesting when I started learning about sensory processing, how another lens that wound up being more productive was that he physically couldn't sit next to it. It wasn't about empathy.
Kelsie: No.
Jessica: I was wondering if you experience stories like that where in an educational environment, kids who are having difficulty with sensory processing aren't gotten through that lens.
Kelsie: I definitely see that all the time. I don't I feel like the empathy take would be a new one to me if I had a teacher telling me that. What I hear more of the time is that the child just has bad behavior, or is attention seeking, or whatever, one of a number of ways that adults minimize the lived experience of children. And I'm actually presenting a little seminar. Feels like a big word, but I'm doing a little training for teachers at the school that I work at in a little over a week that is called is it sensory or is it behavior, because they specifically asked me to speak on how people would know if behavior which is another euphemism people use to just mean misbehavior or behavior I don't like.
Jessica: Yeah.
Kelsie: Inconvenient behavior. The question meaning well, is there a legitimate reason for this inconvenient behavior, or am I really just right to be mad at it? And the even further implication being please just affirm that I'm right and that the kid is wrong or else, give me an easy fix to fix the kid, like give him a fidget or whatever.
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: And I don't think that I'm going to give the answer that they're maybe necessarily hoping for-
Jessica: Yes, yes.
Kelsie: ... because my real answer is why does it even matter? Unless you're asking the question in good faith to try to solve a problem, i.e., is this a sensory problem because can I help you with a sensory problem? But if you're asking it to try to figure out how much credit you should give a child, then the answer that I'm going to give you is all of the credit, please trust what they are telling you is in their body.
Jessica: Yeah.
Kelsie: So, that's the more common angle that I bought up against it from, but yes, all the time. And I'm about to go off on a little tangent here, so feel free to just holler at me if you want me to stop, but I was actually just thinking the other day about how... oh, about the way that we don't... Like I was saying about trusting kids to report their lived experience, and part of it is that kids like a 5-year-old doesn't even necessarily have the words to describe their lived experience, or they might not be super-duper accurate words, or possibly aren't even... Maybe chewing isn't a real obvious one.
Kelsie: But if there was a 5-year-old who really couldn't tune out the sound of the air conditioner in their room, but they didn't even know that the air conditioner was what was making that noise, and they didn't even know that the air conditioner could be turned on and off because maybe they're at school in the summer, and so it's on all the time. And they maybe don't eat... So, I say they don't even have the language to tell you, but I even mean they may not even know in their own brain why they are just feeling irritable as soon as they walk through the door, and it's because there's like this whiny noise in the background that's driving their brain crazy.
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: Part of what I do in OT is trying to help teach kids to be able to self-advocate. Part of what I do in OT is trying to help kids be able to drill down in their own self to find the thing that they need to be able to self-advocate about. Part of it is trying to help the adults in the child's life be able to facilitate that, because they're the adults and they should be able to do that. It's just a real multi-faceted thing that's not as easy as, "Oh okay, well don't sit by chewing noises." I mean that one's fairly clear-cut. I don't mean easy in the sense that it's not meaningful, or not a problem that needs to be addressed. I just mean that if somebody handed me that one, I could fix it real fast, and some of them I can't. Some of them I can't fix real fast.
Jessica: But you're making such powerful insights that are so interesting to me. It sounds like that there needs to be a shift with the grown-ups to go away from thinking about behavior to becoming environmental detectives, to figure out what might be in the environment, or in the way from this child's being able to connect with what's going on in their world, so that they could thrive and express themselves. Is that accurate?
Kelsie: Yeah, it definitely can be. And I don't mean that in the absence of everything else that this should be the first place that people are looking or anything like that, but almost it's I want people not to necessarily move away from behavior or ignore behavior, but to become better interpreters of behavior-
Jessica: Ah.
Kelsie: ... because behavior is early self-advocacy. If you think of trying to spoon feed a baby purees, I know some people don't do purees, but if you picture that as an example, and you think of trying to put the spoon in their mouth and the baby turns their head away, well one thing you could do in response to that would be to get angry about it and shove the spoon in their mouth anyway, because you're an adult and you can probably put a spoon in a baby's mouth if you really, really want to. I think most people wouldn't do that, unless they were having a really bad day and not very in tune with what their baby was telling them. I'm not saying that I think most people would do that.
Jessica: Right.
Kelsie: What is difficult about that situation is that the baby could be communicating one of 80 different things. It could be like this particular food is gross. It could be like I still have food from the last bite in my mouth, please give me a second. It could be like oh, the dog just ran over there and did something and I'm looking at it. The adult does not expect the baby to talk, or articulate their concerns. They're used to being a detective in that instance and figuring out the baby just because again, behavior isn't only a euphemism for misbehavior. It means literally anything that you do is behavior. The adult is used to being you did an action, I have to interpret the action.
Kelsie: Oh, I see the dog running by, now I realize that's probably what we're looking at. But then as soon as a child develops the ability to talk and especially kids who are precocious, or seem like they have a big vocabulary, or they can say whole sentences, but even kids who are just completely typical in terms of language development, especially if they're first born because I have been around a lot of kids before, and maybe they're just suddenly like, "Oh my gosh, this 3-year-old or 4-year-old or 6- or 7-year-old can say all of these words so clearly. They can probably totally tell me what's wrong.
Kelsie: And even when they're flooded with emotion and even when they're in a stressful situation, they should be able to verbally articulate exactly what it is that's bothering them, even if they don't know necessarily what it is. And if they do anything with their body that I don't while they're trying to do that, then I'm going to hone in on that and I'm going to think that they're misbehaving. And obviously from everything about me and my tone of voice, I think that that is missing the point, where I think that their behavior usually says a lot more than their words actually do. and I have a child with some pretty significant speech delays.
Kelsie: And I think that in a way, it has given me a crash course on both reading behavior and on not taking the words literally even slightly. It cracks me up when people get real bogged down and exactly the words that a child is saying, or exactly the way that they express something, because I'm so used to taking something that is really, really, really far away from the literal meaning of the words that you mean and understanding what my child means by it, because he uses a lot of things to his own language and his own jargon. I think I have a little bit of a gift in that way for him.
Jessica: Yeah, that's really fascinating and such an interesting perspective to think of language as still something that needs some interpreting with a lot of awareness of the child and the environment. That's really interesting. In your practice, I'm just curious if you could give an example of maybe if... I don't even know if there is a common situation where a child comes to you because they're having some sensory difficulties. What are some of the things that you do with the child? I know you mentioned that some things are easy for you to solve and some things aren't, but I thought it might be useful if it's even possible. It might be too big of a question, but to take something and explain some of the exercises, or some of the play. I don't even know the right language there-
Kelsie: No, that's... Yeah.
Jessica: ... for what you can provide.
Kelsie: One caveat is that I think that what I am doing is great occupational therapy, but I also know that what I'm doing is pretty different from how a lot of people do occupational therapy. I wouldn't want somebody to hear this and think... well for one think, "Oh, my kids OT at their school definitely does this, or also my OT at their school doesn't do this. What are they doing?" Because there's a lot of ways that occupational therapy can look, and I am a little bit radical in some of the things that I try to do. This year, I've been trying to create demands free sessions which is not something that a lot of OTs, or at least not a lot of OTs in the spheres that I work in try to do, but I try to give the kids basically complete autonomy over the session.
Kelsie: And I do a lot more front loading of the setup, so that nothing that they do in the room can be wrong, or the wrong choice. Everything is working on their goals. Anyway, I say all that as a caveat because OT can look a lot of different ways and it can still be good and be helpful and all of that. I don't think that the only way that I do things is the only way to do things. This is where we get a little more complex than the five senses, because the most common thing that I end up treating with kids is in the realm of interoception, which is a word for your inner body sense. And I'll expound on that in a second, and proprioception which is a word for your deep body sense, or your sense of your body in space a little bit if that makes sense.
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: Interoception is your inner body sense and that can be even further split down into your biological and your emotional inner body senses. Your biological ones would be your sense of needing to go to the bathroom and being aware of that, or your sense of needing to eat and being hungry, whereas your emotional ones would be your sense of being able to interpret that the fluttery feeling in your stomach is because you are anxious or nervous, and your sense of being able to interpret that the way that your face is getting hot is because you are angry and things like that. For sensory stuff, I tend to either have little kids like preschool age and with them, it is mostly me, their teachers, and their adults and trying to work with the adults much more so than the children.
Kelsie: When they get to sometimes kinder, but especially first, second, third, then the locus of it shifts. And I start working more directly with the kids to work on a lot of times identifying those inner body senses. Proprioception comes into this because those are the kids who are bouncing off the walls, and they need to move. And they need their body to be moving, and they need deep pressure to be able to regulate. I do a lot of play with them in regards to describing their energy level, describing their focus level, noticing how different activities swinging on a swing or jumping on a crash pad, or jumping on a trampoline affect those activity levels.
Kelsie: They get to a point where they can the ideal being that they would get to a point like me as an adult where I can say, "Oh my gosh, I have been sitting here writing this report for an hour. And I need to just stand up and walk around the room and get some blood flow back into my body before I can sit and think anymore, because my brain is fuzz at this point and I am tired of sitting here. And also I'm thirsty, so I'm going to go refill my water bottle." I did a check of myself and noticed all of those things. I didn't just sit there in front of my computer and just zone out real hard, because I was exhausted. And I knew that doing all those things would help me reset enough to be able to continue working on my work.
Jessica: That is so interesting.
Kelsie: Just sit there and zones out real hard, because they don't have the awareness to go through their body and check all of those signs. They may not even be putting together I'm bored or I'm zoning out, or I'm losing focus. It's just happening to them. They're just being crashed on by the wave. The other thing is that a lot of people think that I'm going to fix the way that their kid is, or I'm going to change the sensory processing method that they have, and I'm really not. I have clinically significant level of sensitivity to noise and a few other things I got my hands on a profile for adults and did it. Went to work at a certain workplace and I still have those.
Kelsie: I'm still an adult and I still have those, but I know how to manage them. I'm doing a lot of teaching kids in their bodies, because their body is going to stay their body.
Jessica: That is such powerful stuff because in my mind, I'm thinking back to my son back in a school situation. And I can imagine that that can be a really, really frustrating and even scary situation for a kid who doesn't have that self-management and who is taking it like a wave. And if he's feeling like he needs to move and isn't able to, and then along with that isn't aware that he's thirsty and along with that isn't sure why his face is hot because someone just maybe bothered him, I mean all that stuff on top of each other, I would imagine that's pretty common for sensory kids to have a whole stream of stuff bombarding them and then would be...
Kelsie: Yes.
Jessica: Yeah.
Kelsie: And then after enough time, after enough time with the adults in their life telling them every time that they explode, you're making red choices, you're doing this because you're bad, you are making bad decisions, then they believe it about themselves.
Jessica: Yes, yes. It makes things much more burdensome, because then there's the disapproval and the shame element on top of things that they're not even sure what's even going on in the first place. Yeah.
Kelsie: And anyone who's ever yelled at their kid which is also me, I'm not saying that I'm some wonderful saint. Anyone who has ever yelled at their kid knows that they were not choosing to lose it right then in that moment. They weren't thinking with their thinking brain. They weren't like, "You know what would be great for my relationship with my child right now is if I just screamed at them. I think that's the best decision for all of us." No, you were reacting. You were reacting with your impulsive brain, and you're an adult. And that doesn't excuse it, that doesn't demonize it.
Kelsie: Just it is what it is, and adults have the responsibility and the capacity to access resources to choose over time to be better and to practice to be better, but we expect so much maturity out of children when they aren't even being taught it, or maybe modeled it. And we treat them like when they lose it, whether that means scream at a person or throwing something or hitting someone or flipping something or whatever, we treat it like it was all about their choices. It was a good choice or a bad choice, and they're making a bad choice, or maybe this is just the area that I'm in, but this is language that I hear a lot in the schools-
Jessica: Absolutely.
Kelsie: ... especially green and red choices because now, they don't... the same thing. The kids knows it's saying the same thing. They know that green is good and red is bad and...
Jessica: Yeah, it's so interesting from when I was going back to what you said about the adults. I know from for myself, I grew up in an environment where it was behavior. There was good behavior and there was bad behavior, and you really had to muscle through. Nobody really talked about, "Well, let's talk about all this stuff you're in having an input, and let's talk about how to manage it, so that you can have some self-leadership and advocate for yourself and have your needs met." There was never any of that conversation. There was just, "If you muscle through and behave in a certain way, then you get rewarded. And if you don't, you get punished and you get something taken away."
Jessica: I feel like for me with my son, it's been such a re-parenting myself because then I get to see the stuff you're talking about with the adult. When I hear him misbehaving, I go I'm sure there's some part of me that says, "Well, he's not supposed to be like that. He's not going to be ruined in life if he's like that." So, I have to teach him to stifle that and look the part of a well-behaved person. And then I realized well, there's a huge cost to that with someone's vitality and well-being and self-expression if they are pretending to be well-behaved, but they have issues, or a lot of feelings that they haven't investigated. It's just so interesting to hear about the adults also having sensory stuff that we haven't even addressed, or had compassion [crosstalk 00:26:30].
Kelsie: Oh my gosh, yes the adults. If I could wave my hand and heal things for the generation who already have to be adults and who have to choose to make this better for the next one, I would do it. I'm right there in the same boat with you that I still have voices that pop up in my mind when I'm parenting, or when I'm working. And I'm getting better at just acknowledging their sources, and not that they are the objective truth of the universe, but that they also have a source, even if I can't necessarily remember exactly where it came from.
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: People wonder what fills the gap when you take away reward and punishment like oh, but then kids will just run wild and do whatever they want. And what fills the gap is relationship. Whether it's parenting or whether it's occupational therapy or teaching I would say, or whether you're an adult and you're living your own life, the thing that you're living for isn't just... I mean I guess there are things that adults reward themselves with throughout the day, but even that is almost a relationship with yourself in terms of self-care, but that is a philosophical branch that I haven't explored before. I don't know that I want to do it out loud for the first time in my life.
Kelsie: But at least the kids, every time I get a new kid on my caseload and especially when I first introduce them to this demands free session, where I am not taking them into a room and sitting them down and telling them exactly what they have to do, but rather taking them into a room, and it has six things set up around the room. And some of them stay the same every weekend and some of them change. And they can do what they are interested in doing, and I will follow their interest, and we will build on it together. It usually takes a little while, because they don't know what to do with that, having been in the school system up until that point.
Kelsie: And then it explodes with relationship benefits, and I'm not trying something magical because... I mean I have kids on my caseload have a diagnosis of selective mutism, and they don't speak to me just we do it this way, but I have kids who have severe anxiety stuff, and I'm not saying that this solves it. I am saying that the level of relationship support that I get in terms of being able to make incremental progress every week is better to me, than if I sat them down and we worked on a worksheet. And then I had data that was more evenly spread for me to make it look good on paper.
Jessica: That's...
Kelsie: And usually with some extra work and some data gathering, then I can gather enough to make sure that it at least makes sense on paper.
Jessica: Yeah. Would you say that based on what I'm learning from you, listening to is that relationship has a higher value than performance in some ways. When there is that sense of relationship, then natural flow may occur in terms of functioning or skillsets that when a relationship-
Kelsie: Yes.
Jessica: ... is there, there's more of an incentive to feel comfortable to learn or practice skills?
Kelsie: Yes, and a good example of this is from the other side of occupational therapy is fine motor skills, and that's often handwriting. And I would rather that a child feel safe to write one sentence about something that they love spontaneously, than that I make them do worksheets every week and hope writing gets incrementally better in that way. And I had this with a student last week, and it was like it actually was one of those magical the angels are singing moments, because he spontaneously... I suggest to him every week, "Hey, let's write a sentence," about what we did after we do fine motor games and stuff like that and he has always done it. I wouldn't demanded of him if he was resistant, but he's not.
Kelsie: He's always done it, he's always interested in it. And then we read them back later, so he knows that his words are valuable to me like, "Oh, what did we do last time? Oh, look we can roll these pages and you're the one who chronicled them? That's super cool."
Jessica: Wow.
Kelsie: Last week, he spontaneously wrote a different sentence that end of session sentence. He just wanted to write it and so he did. And I was glowing.
Jessica: Wow.
Kelsie: It was delightful.
Jessica: That's really quite beautiful. I mean to me, it illustrates so much of what you're saying. And yes, I know there's not always magical moments, but when there is relationship over expectations, it sounds like it just changes the whole dynamic. My son had started occupational therapy, a very different occupational therapist where there were those demands. And for my son, it just felt for him like someone, "Here we go again, someone's asking me to do something that I don't want to do." And he didn't want any of it.
Kelsie: Yeah, it's another teacher... Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. So, the relationship it's like maybe it's a different kind of thinking about priorities. Are skillsets as important as relationship, or it's so different than the way I was raised, skills, skills like...
Kelsie: It is, yes.
Jessica: [crosstalk 00:33:00].
Kelsie: And I am starting to drill down and try to find, and it is making me have faith that this isn't just an OT thing, because I try to carry it over into my parenting as well, not exactly the same because it's not the same to be a parent as to work as a professional. And I see my kids for more than 30 minutes once a week, but I follow some speech language pathologists on Facebook who are branching out into this same way of session. Some of whom are specifically working with kids who are have speech difficulties, and some of them who are working with kids who are learning how to use AAC or augmented alternative communication, which could be a communication board, or a communication tablet.
Kelsie: I feel like this could be a classroom. I feel like it would look pretty different than the traditional classroom. I know that a public school teacher can't just up and decide to change everything, because they have to answer to administration and stuff like that, but I feel like there are still principles of... the principle of hey prioritize the relationship first because kids want to do well when they're in a relationship with the adult in their life is a principle that carries everywhere.
Jessica: It really is magical. When I've seen my son with a teacher and the teacher connects first and asks questions, my son transforms into someone who's shining and someone who's interested in sharing. It might not happen right away. But when he goes and sits down and he's shown what his expectations are, he can't wait for the room. It sounds so simple, but there's something really intrinsic about relationship before skills I guess.
Kelsie: It's hard and it's tiring as adults, because you just want to be... just because this is more clear example from parenting. Sometimes, you want to be like, "Just brush your teeth, just brush your teeth."
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: "And this could be a 2-minute thing. It doesn't have to be a 15-minute thing."
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: "Let me just brush your teeth for you, or you just brush them for..." My kids are two and four, so me it's still...
Jessica: No, I just had that conversation with my 10-year-old last night.
Kelsie: Right. "And you know anything, whatever, not just brush your teeth, but just put your clothes in the laundry, just do... I'm already doing so much for you just do the thing. I'm asking you to come one inch and I'm coming a mile, just do the thing." And I get that, I get that. I really, really do that it's exhausting. And whether in a professional setting or at home, it is, it's tiring. And also, I haven't ever had a time where I summoned up the energy to be playful about bedtime, even though I was just like, "Just go to bed and let me do something by myself for five minutes." I haven't ever had a time where I regretted it. I have also being honest, I've had times where I truly feel like I just can't.
Kelsie: And sometimes that just happens, and you just had to be no nonsense about it and go along with it. But every time that I have managed to make myself be playful and make myself value the relationship over getting the kids offloaded, so that I can go watch a show, I haven't ever gone downstairs finally at the end of it and been like, "Gee, I wish I hadn't done that."
Jessica: Yes, that's so true.
Kelsie: If I can do it with my logical brain, if I can use my logic brain to talk my impulsive brain into actually behaving like an adult and a fun adult who loves play, then it always goes better.
Jessica: Yeah, but it's just like it reminds me of what you were talking about before with the adult sensory thing. When I'm in that moment and my son who does have sensory avoid, he does not like the sensory experience of brushing his teeth.
Kelsie: Oh, yeah.
Jessica: It's really physically horrible for him. And then my mind, I immediately get I don't know what name you'd call this sensory experience, but this catastrophizing where suddenly I'm like, "Oh my God, I can see the drill at the dentist, and there's going to be consequences." And I start escalating and in those moments, like you said, if I am able to catch myself and I'm able to do some management and understanding where that comes from, and that can be playful, it's amazing, like you said the difference. Sometimes, I'm tired and it's just so difficult to find that door to get into that managed person.
Kelsie: It is, it's hard and it's a muscle that you're flexing. Just like any muscle, it gets better as you exercise it.
Jessica: Oh, yes.
Kelsie: People get frustrated that they don't just learn about respectful parenting or conscious or mindful or positive or gentle, or anyone of a zillion other names. They don't just learn about it, and then a switch flips and their kid is great, and they are great and everything is great. It takes time and it takes effort, and it takes practicing it and all of that is relevant. And I mean I do better now than I did four years ago. I also have a different kid than I did four years ago. So, it's a little hard to have an exact metric to compare it to-
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: ... but I feel like less stressed overall and more I feel like I have a base of support on what it is that I'm doing. And also, I have begun to see even with kids who are four and two, I've still begun to see the benefits of them having this relationship with me that I didn't necessarily have with my parents. And that I know kids who don't have relationships like that with their parents, that I can just see this self-autonomy and self-expression and freedom and joy that I want for all kids.
Jessica: Yes, yes, that's really beautiful. And what you said also reminded me of a lot of parents when I read posts in different Facebook groups. And I certainly have this when a kid who's having difficulties managing sensory processing of their environment goes and sees part of the family who's still back into the observing the environment to make sure everyone is well behaved and an eye for criticism.
Kelsie: Oh, yeah.
Jessica: Yeah, and those moments are very challenging I feel like for parents, in those moments in particular to juggle the empathy for our children and try to keep an eye out for our parents to not criticize our children when we're trying to develop relationships. Those moments can happen a lot, and they're very stressful to try to get the-
Kelsie: Oh my gosh.
Jessica: ... grandparents on board, right?
Kelsie: At Christmas 2019, my parents literally sat us down after we put our kid to bed and were like, "So, do you plan to discipline your children ever?" And we were like, "Cool, great. This is a great conversation to be having." And it was after probably the worst day that we'd ever had with my child who's autistic, and they didn't know for sure at the time we had suspicions. And they had skipped their nap, we have been up earlier than usual. Then we had been out all morning. This was all pre-COVID. Yeah, yeah, I said 2019.
Jessica: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kelsie: We have been out all morning, and then we had gone straight to a restaurant and sat at the restaurant for a long time, because the food got delayed or something like that. And we were seated next to an elevator in the restaurant, and the elevator didn't work or had an issue with it. The doors kept opening and closing and the button light kept staying on. And my child loved elevators and-
Jessica: Oh, Lord.
Kelsie: ... missed their nap, not eaten in hours, everything is weird, been woken up too early, been out all day, sitting next to their favorite thing in the world and it keeps opening and shutting, and we won't let them go in it. And it's like they lost their whole entire mind. And my husband ended up taking my child and going outside with them, and just walking around and settling down. And what my parents took from that was like, "We will just let this child do whatever," but the child was two years old at this time. It's not even out of the realm of just a 2-year-old. And what my parents took from that was, "You'll just let them do whatever they want," and I was like, "What do you even wish that we would have done?"
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: Because my own parents parenting style would be like scare us or hurt us, or make us fearful enough of whatever to be able to put up with whatever and...
Jessica: Yes.
Kelsie: And I was like I basically had a far less polished and far more impromptu, and far more rambly and way worse articulated version of this exact conversation with away from having learned anything other than, "Oh no, our daughter has gone off the deep end," but...
Jessica: Oh my God. I think that there are so many people who can identify with the restaurant sensory children in restaurants plus an elevator. Oh my Lord. I...
Kelsie: Right?
Jessica: There's so many people who've been there myself included, the restaurant with grandparents is a recipe for...
Kelsie: It was like little toddler torture, it was the worst. What are we doing with this poor baby?
Jessica: Yes. So, that's such an interesting series of context lenses all melded together. I'm just curious for people who are listening, who are going through stuff, I mean my son's 10 and he has difficulty sitting still at a restaurant. It's just not his thing. My husband and I are like, "Why do we need to torture the child and have him have that skill right now if that's [crosstalk 00:44:18]", but a lot of people have to go to restaurants and meet with extended family members. And I'm wondering if there's any advice or words where if parents could give their parents this little section of our interview, what way to reframe for these grandparents, or these extended family members to help them understand that their concern doesn't perhaps there can be some flexibility.
Kelsie: Well, for one thing, I feel like there's a little bit of a catch-22 where it's like, "Oh, if you let your kid use a tablet at a restaurant, then you're one of these modern parents who just lets the screen babysit their child. But also if your kid makes any noise at a restaurant, then you're the worst ever." It's like you got to decide ahead of time, you got to set everybody up for success, what's the most important to you right now. If what's the most important to you is we all have a family meal, then having a family meal is probably going to happen more easily at your house, or you get takeout and go to a picnic table. If what's more important to you is we sit in this particular restaurant that meanwhile really likes and everybody be as quiet, then maybe you need to bring a tablet.
Kelsie: Whatever you need to do is okay, you've got to prioritize your priorities is what I'm saying. And just because you do something once, doesn't mean you have to do it for all time and always. I am the self-proclaimed queen of flexibility and, "Hey, if it works today, then let's do it today and if it doesn't, then we'll do something else tomorrow." Because I feel like, like you mentioned catastrophizing and I feel like parents have a real quick tendency to go, "Oh my gosh, my kid is having a rough time this time. If I extend this grace to them in this way or this one caveat to them in this way, then I'm going to have to do that forever until they're 18." And it's like no, maybe you just have to do it today, it's okay.
Kelsie: And then I mean the other thing, the real advice I would give parents is that you're probably better off that grandmas also do well when they can. Just let kids do well when they can, grandmas do well when they can. If grandma is not open to learning about if they're not interested, then no matter what you lecture or what evidence you put in front of them or what you say, it's not going to do anything and they're still going to judge you. You have to decide whether the relationship is more important than the judging, and you have to mitigate the situation in other ways like I've already described.
Jessica: Yeah and we have to [crosstalk 00:47:13]. Sorry, sorry.
Kelsie: No, no, no, I was going to say that doesn't mean that it's like hopeless because if you do have a family member who is actually willing to listen to you, not just a conversation about how you're doing a bad job at parenting. I mean I feel like the simplest and yet the most profound frame shift that you possibly can is literally just to ask a person, any person, a grandparent, a teacher, a parent, any person how would you treat this child right now if this child was another adult.
Jessica: Hmm. Yes.
Kelsie: If you wanted to go to lunch with a friend's group and the friends were all adults, and one of them said, "Let's go to this place. I love this place," and another one of them said, "I'm really sorry, I cannot handle that place because of whatever reason they gave. I'm allergic to an ingredient there. The sound is too loud for me to be able to hear you talking. The smell of it is really nauseating to me. I had a bad date there, and I don't want to go back." Whatever reason they gave, most adults defer to another adult.
Jessica: Mm-hmm (affirmative), that's right.
Kelsie: But most adults don't consider children's opinions to be worth really listening to or deferring to. And I don't mean that you have to give in to everything that they say all the time or whatever. I just mean that you can picture them like an adult and picture how you would react to this. Because then if there was a strong other reason or whatever, then you'd have a conversation about it. And you would collaborate until you found an equally amenable solution, but most adults with most kids just are like, "Well, my opinion trump's yours so suck it up."
Jessica: Yeah, and that goes back to what you were talking about before about the adults and the adult sensory. And then somehow I always forget this that when I'm with my father and he's feeling critical or sounding critical about my son's behavior to put that in context with what he was allowed to do.
Kelsie: Yeah, exactly.
Jessica: He was a kid, and maybe that can help find a little empathy like, "Wow, he was never allowed to misbehave once, or he would be named." In some way, maybe these parents are old-fashioned in the sense where they're trying to preserve this sense of, "Well, don't go into the area of red where you're going to be punished in your feet." They're catastrophizing you're going to ruin the future, they're going to never get a job and all that. They're coming from... Yeah, go ahead.
Kelsie: I think at a very neurological level, take a certain behavior, let's say screaming or yelling or anything like that, if someone every time that they ever screamed or that they ever yelled was punished for it, and the punishment didn't help them with whatever it was that was causing them to scream or yell, it overpowered their body so strongly that they were able to force themselves into fight or flight, or freeze in order to internalize the feelings enough to not scream or yell, even though the problem still existed and hadn't been solved in any way.
Jessica: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kelsie: After years and years of that, their body has learned look, screaming or yelling will push yourself into flight or freeze. But a lot of people when they become an adult, especially if they were flight or freeze, a lot of people start feeling like it ought to be their turn to get fight as an adult.
Jessica: Yeah.
Kelsie: And I feel like that is what makes kids who are yelled at grow up and yell. There's a lot of complicated reasons to it, but I feel like one of the reasons to it is that your brain is aware that a scary loud, yelly situation is going on and the neurological pathway that your brain has for scary loud, yelly situations is fight it or run away from it. And now you are the adult, so you cannot run away from it. So, what you better do is fight it, and that means fight this kid who's right here in front of you. And it takes time and it takes effort, and it takes practice and it takes self-awareness to be able to start breaking that neurological pathway and building a new one.
Kelsie: And every time that an adult who was yelled at when they were a kid doesn't yell at their kid, they are breaking that pathway a little bit harder and creating a new one. Even if that's do something silly or do something to snap yourself out of it, those things break that they break the neurological pathway. Physically speaking, the neurons in your brain that are firing to each other, it is disconnecting the pathway that they have created over years of having that experience. And it's a bold and powerful and strong and brave thing to do every single time that someone manages to do it. And I think that parents who are trying real, real hard maybe don't hear that often enough.
Kelsie: I want to say that too because I don't want this all to just be like, "Yeah, ra-ra, you're the adult, be the adult, blah, blah, blah." That's not what I'm saying. I have that little kid inside of me too, and I understand it and I...
Jessica: I see.
Kelsie: Somebody should have helped them solve their problems, instead of yelling at them. And it's not fair to have to grow up and be the one who has to do it for both generations, for you yourself and for your kid, and maybe for your grown-up for having extend grace to two. They're not explaining it to you. It's not fair to have to do it in all directions. It's not and you're doing it anyway, and that's super amazing.
Jessica: Wow, that's so beautiful. It really acknowledges parents a lot of us in this middle generation recover from that and also wanting to create a whole different set of connections for our kids. Really powerful stuff, but I'm thinking about the residuals of the parents generations, and this meeting expectations and being rewarded. You talked about how you can envision a different kind of classroom. But in your opinion, do you feel like kids are evolving to want more connection-based learning? And do you feel is there any evidence from your work and the kids that you see that the problems sometimes come from classroom environments that are these old-fashioned environments, that are expectation oriented, instead of relation oriented? Is that a big part of what's going on?
Kelsie: I don't know that kids are any different than they always have been, but I do think that we're almost at an intermediate stage of some parents trying to be more connected, and some teachers knowing how to do it. I feel like that leads to kids who may seem worse, or they have higher expectations, but it's just because they have any at all, because there's an era in which you could time travel to. And it's like children should entirely be seen and not heard, and just no one with learning difficulties is identified in any way. You're just the stupid kid, or you just don't go to school or whatever, and there's not even a push for everybody to be publicly educated.
Kelsie: And you get to get in life and it just didn't know... If you go back to that era, I don't think that children were fundamentally different, but I think that the environment that they were being raised in was so quick to mold them into look, you better just shut up and take what you get that there wouldn't have been a lot of room for exploring what else things could look like. And now it's like we're half of the way there, or we're a little of the way there. I think that that makes it more of a more of a challenge, because you might have kids who are expecting to be able to build a relationship with you. You might have kids who you might be the first person in their life who has ever seemed like they were interested in what they had to say, or cares about them.
Kelsie: And then you have to be able to teach to the balance and still be able to manage expectations, and all of that with kids coming from all kinds of different backgrounds.
Jessica: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, we're heading towards an hour here.
Kelsie: Yeah.
Jessica: And before we end, this has been such interesting and powerful stuff. I'm so grateful for all you shared. Is there any last thing that you feel a desire to share with parents who are trying to create environments for their kids to thrive in and feel good inside? Do you have any last words you'd like to share?
Kelsie: I feel like I really summed it up when just that there's an inability to this kind of work whether professionally or personally, where it feels like you're just doing the same thing every day of your life. And you're just picking up the same toys off the floor, and you just have to feed everybody, and they all have to eat protein in kind of a vegetable. And then the next day, same thing and then the next stage, it's just the same thing. And maybe I wish that for one day, we would not have a meltdown about such and such, or I wish that we could go one day without everybody screaming at each other.
Kelsie: And it is important that everyday thing is important and being there to support your kids' feelings, instead of trying to solve them for them is important, and giving them space and vocabulary to talk about those things is important, and hearing them and hearing their opinion and talking to them a person is important. And every single bit of it, a relationship is built a zillion little moments and not on any one thing that you could do, or any one day that you could have, or any one OT session that I can pull off. None of that means nearly as much as the first three seconds of seeing them after they get home from school, and they see your face light up and they know that you mean it, or you just dropping a little comment about how much you love them at a random little time.
Kelsie: And those are the things that become the threads that just make up the whole entire weaving that they see when they look back on their relationship with you. And just this is a marathon of the little things, and yet all of the little things are they are meaningful. And I feel like sometimes it's real, real easy to get lost in feeling like it's just an endless onslaught. And I just would want parents to know that it means something, it really does.
Jessica: That's very beautiful. Thank you so much Kelsie. And for listeners, Kelsie has a really wonderful Facebook page that I'll link in the text of this interview, so that you can find her posts, and so many really inspiring thoughts and ideas and your Facebook...
Kelsie: Come hear me ramble in written form.
Jessica: Yeah, it's wonderful. I'm just so grateful for your time, and this has been so refreshing hearing your perspective and your ideas, and the love you have for children, parents and having everyone connected together. Thank you so much Kelsie.
Kelsie: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
Jessica: Yeah, I hope you have a good rest of your day.
Kelsie: Thank you.
Jessica: Bye-bye.
Kelsie: Bye.
Jessica: Bye-bye. You've been listening to Once Upon an Upset interviews. For Once Upon an Upset Podcast for kids and parents, please visit onceuponanupset.com, where you'll find stories and conversations to help make sense of difficult times. This episode was written and produced by me Jessica Laurel Kane, and the music was made by Jerome Rossen at Freshmade Music. See you next time.