Parenting during crisis
Getting help
The Yolo Family Service Agency offers low-cost counseling to Yolo County residents. With offices in Davis, West Sacramento and Woodland, the agency offers a sliding fee schedule and accepts many major insurance plans. Contact an intake coordinator by calling (530) 662-2211 or visit http://yfsa.net.
The Yolo Crisis Nursery provides services to families with young children (under 6 years old), who are experiencing life crises or high levels of stress. The program provides services at no cost for eligible families. To speak with someone from the crisis nursery, call (530) 758-6680.
When the city’s Child Care Services Office surveyed local parents, teachers and child care providers about the topics they would most like to see covered in a series of free parenting classes, the usual subjects popped up: toilet training, discipline and kindergarten readiness.
They are the same topics child care and child development experts cover year after year in parent education programs around town. And thanks to funding from First 5 Yolo, the office will be able to offer them again this year.
But there also was a new subject parents wanted covered this year, a surprising addition to the list of top five topics parents wanted to learn about: parenting during crisis.
It was not a class that the city had offered before, says Joyce Lee, a child development consultant with the city, “and I’ve never taught this before.”
But clearly, there was a desire in the community to know how best to steer children through the crises of life, be it divorce, illness, death, unemployment or anything else.
And in Lee, it turned out, the city had just the person to teach the class.
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Lee refers to herself as a “jack of all trades” when it comes to child development. She has been a preschool teacher, taught child development at the community college level, regularly teaches parent education classes in Davis and has served as a child development consultant with the city for the past 11 years.
She is a mother to two boys, ages 9 and 13, and has lived in Davis for more than a decade.
An optimistic person by nature, she was never one to worry about crisis befalling herself or her family, she says; rather, one of her favorite sayings was, “What are the chances?”
Now, she said, “I’ve learned never to say, ‘That’s not going to happen to me.’ Now I know.”
She knows because it happened to her: One year ago, Lee was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.
It was a diagnosis that carried with it not just a year’s worth of surgery and chemotherapy and being unable to be the kind of hands-on mother she had always been, but also all of the fear and anxiety and worry one would expect with a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. It was, in short, a personal and family crisis.
And having been through the fire — Lee is now in remission — she brings the lessons learned from her own personal experience, as well as her professional expertise, to the topic of parenting during crisis.
“At its most fundamental level,” Lee told a class of parents last week, “crisis represents a threat of loss.”
For her, it was the possibility of losing a battle to cancer. Of having her sons ask, “Are you going to die?” and not being able to say, “No.”
For others, though, crisis can be loss of a marriage, a job, a lifestyle, a way of life, or even a dream.
Regardless of what it is, Lee said, “everyone goes through crisis. If you’re living life, crap happens. But how we respond and deal with it is what makes the difference.”
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Often, Lee said, children and adults respond to the stress of crisis in the same ways: difficulty focusing, trouble sleeping, excessive worrying.
But children have their own additional hallmarks of stress, she explained, and it’s important to acknowledge what they are and why they are happening.
Regression, she said, is huge.
Accomplishing the milestones of early childhood, Lee noted, takes a lot of effort on the part of young children, whether it’s mastering speech, using the toilet or anything else. Add the stress of a crisis and it may well be more than their little minds and bodies can take, thus a return to bed-wetting or thumb-sucking.
“They are trying to soothe themselves the way they always did,” Lee noted.
Also very common are physical aches and pains, particularly stomach aches, headaches and ear aches.
“It may not really be hurting,” she said, “and the doctor may check his ears and say they’re fine, but it’s because there is no other way for (him) to say, ‘I’m hurting,’ so he’ll just say his ear hurts.”
Similarly, there’s acting out: With no other way to express their fear and anxiety, children may resort to hitting and biting.
“If this child’s life is unraveling,” Lee noted, “it’s very hard for him to remember (how to act socially).”
Sometimes with older children, it’s a need to be perfect, to ensure they don’t add to the stress in any way. It’s something Lee said she watched for in her older son: “That was my biggest concern, that he would be as good as possible.”
Very often a crisis is something parents try to keep from their children in order to shield them from having to go through any of that. But kids are smart, Lee said.
“If things are really tough and you’re puffy-eyed all the time but you say everything’s fine, they know. And that makes them super nervous,” she said. “It’s OK to say, ’I'm worried… I’m sad.”
Otherwise, she said, “they sense the stress. They know it’s going on, but they don’t really know … so they worry.”
The key, she said, is sharing just the right amount of information.
One of the hardest things Lee faced was telling her children she had cancer. She was particularly nervous about answering the main question she expected: “Are you going to die?”
“How do I answer? Because I don’t know. Do I lie? Because I can’t say, ‘No.’ ”
She role-played with a friend to prepare for the conversation that she and her husband, Ken, would have with their boys. In the end, though, it wasn’t a question that came until later. And when it did, her answer was, “I hope not. And I will do everything I can to be here.”
“You don’t necessarily have to tell them everything,” Lee said. Give enough information, she explained, but no unnecessary details — give them a skeleton, and fill it in with the answers to the questions they ask.
“It’s like talking about sex with children,” she noted. “Ask yourself, ‘What are they really asking?’ ”
And very important in the Internet age, said Lee: Urge your children to come to you first with questions.
If you don’t know the answer, say so, she said.
“I told my guys, ‘Come to me. If I don’t have an answer, we’ll go try to find it.’
“Reassure them with the things you do know: ‘I absolutely love you and will do whatever I can to be there for you.’ ”
Another key in helping kids through a crisis is for parents to take care of themselves. It’s always important, Lee said, to acknowledge what you can control, and to let go of what’s out of your hands.
“When I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I thought, ‘I can look for the right doctors, research the treatments … but there’s a point when I can do nothing. And that was the most freeing thing, actually. This I have control over, and this I don’t.
“It’s super scary at first, but you do it, let go and it’s like, ‘Whew… I should have done that before.’ ”
Equally important for parents, Lee said, is not trying to be a super parent.
For her, that meant recognizing her children would be just fine even if she wasn’t available to pack their hockey bags, get them to practices or help with homework.
“When I was first going into surgery,” she said, “it was the first time that I wasn’t going to be there. … I was going to be out of commission for two weeks. When you’re in that mode, it’s very hard to see that it will be OK.”
But you anticipate the challenges, she said, try to plan for them, and rely on a support system.
And if you reach a point where you really can’t handle the stress, she said, get help.
Whether it’s a grandparent, a neighbor, a friend or professional help, she said, “sometimes the best thing you can do for your child is to go seek help.”
“You’re not losing it, you’re just in crisis and everyone goes through crisis,” she noted. “Anyone can fall apart in crisis. No one is immune.”
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Lee says incorporating her own story in the classes she teaches is nothing new.
“Whenever I teach child development classes,” she said, “it’s always really important to me for it to be really real. So it’s absolutely very natural that I would share what I went through. I know what it feels like when you cannot get out of bed.
“But I also know what it feels like to have a support system … people made dinners for us every other night for nine months. I know what a difference it makes to not have to worry about finances. To have a husband who could be home every other week when I was in chemo.”
And she knows, Lee said, that not all parents have that, that for parents with limited resources, and for single parents especially, there is not a lot of help out there, particularly when it comes to free or low-cost counseling.
What is out there are two excellent local resources: the Yolo Crisis Nursery and the Yolo Family Service Agency (see box), both of which Lee urges parents to use if needed.
And then there is this, Lee said: “This too shall pass.”
“You cannot stay in crisis forever,” she said. “And being in a crisis is when change usually happens. It’s most likely not the way you would choose to change or alter your life, but often there are remarkable things that happen in our lives after crisis.”
For her, she said, it is a family that weathered the storm and is closer than ever before.
— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at aternus@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8051. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=127971
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Posted by Anne Ternus-Bellamy
on Jan 23 2012.
Last Login: Mon 21 May 2012 01:17:01 PM PDT
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