When Two (or more) Kids Are Dysregulated at Once! {EP 190}

Robyn: You're not going to find the Start Here podcast by just searching in your regular podcast app. You have to go to RobynGobbel.com/starthere, subscribe, and then you can listen to in your regular podcast app, but it requires a subscription first. It is free. It is 10 episodes, the 10 episodes you'll find here on the baffling behavior show, but there's 10 episodes. I kind of picked the 10 that I would want folks to listen to and place them in order. And said, start here. After that, I want you to go to RobynGobbel.com/podcast there's a search bar there. Podcast apps themselves are notoriously just terrible to search, so you do have to leave your podcast app go to RobynGobbel.com/podcast, there is a search bar at the top of the page. Type in whatever it is you're looking for. And if I have an episode about it, and I probably do, it will come up. The episode will come up. The episodes are numbered, so you'll be able to see on my website that you know maybe episode 68 comes up, then you can come back to the app and scroll back to Episode 68.    

Robyn: Now, of course, if you are a long term listener, or you don't have a need that feels really specific or pressing, You can just listen in order. You can go backwards. You can start at the beginning and go forwards. You can just scroll through and look for topics that interest you. But if you need a little more structure, there's the Start Here podcast and the search bar at RobynGobbel.com/podcast. We are here today with week five of a six episode series on supporting siblings of dysregulated kids. So Episode One was about how to address siblings who feel like the way they're being parented is unfair, and basically what we talked about in that episode is making sure that you're applying this nervous system approach to all humans, not just to all the kids in your house, but like to all humans in general, right? It's requiring a complete kind of world view shift. The second episode, we talked about how to teach siblings about the brain and about Owls, Watchdogs and Possums. The third episode, we talked about honoring the grief, right? Really honoring the truth of our other children's story of being the sibling of a child with a special need that has behavioral symptoms we. And then honoring the grief that goes along with that.   

Robyn: Then we did how to help siblings when one child is dysregulated. We did that last week, right? So there was an assumption in that episode that that you have a dysregulated child, but your other child, or children is regulated enough or has enough Owl brain that they can kind of participate in a plan that's been created for them for what to do when they have a very dysregulated child. So that was last week. Now this week, we're going to tackle the topic that I know so many of you have said I'm waiting for this topic. We're going to talk about what to do when you have two or more kids who are extremely dysregulated, right? I think if you have one exceptionally dysregulated child and one very mildly dysregulated child, the what to do is a little more clear. It's not easy, it's not fun, but it's a little more clear. But what do we do when we have two or more kids who are both, or all are pretty dysregulated. Before you invest the time in listening to this episode. I want to be very clear up front, I do not have a magic answer for you, right? I promise you that a magic answer doesn't exist, right? If it did, you would have found it by now. So you are not going to get to the end of this episode and feel gratitude for me that I've solved all your problems and now you know exactly what to do, and you have two intensely dysregulated kids, and I just want to be super clear about that up front, because your time is precious, and it's very possible that everything I'm going to talk about you already know, and you are all ready doing.    

Robyn: Now that truth will likely either relieve you or really irritate you, right? Like, oh my gosh, I've just invested another half an hour and listened to this person talk again, and there's still no answer, right? And that makes sense that that would feel really irritating. I do know that sometimes when I sit with families, they feel as though this is a relief, right? They feel as though that the fact that they haven't found an answer to this problem yet isn't because it's hiding from you, right? Or it's because you're not a good enough parent to have figured it out, right? That's not why there's no answer, right? The reason there's no answer is because it just literally doesn't exist when you have more people who need help, more people who are dysregulated, then you have people available to help, right? Then you have, you know, grown ups who are regulated theoretically, right? When the scales are tipped and you have more dysregulated people, more people who need help, this always becomes about triage and asking ourselves the question, what do I need to do? How do I do it? To re-establish safety the fastest and the quickest. Now, please notice I didn't say, what do I need to do to reestablish regulation the quickest and the fastest, right? But when you are finding yourself in this intensity of crisis mode, you likely have a situation in front of you where things are feeling unsafe, right? And so the goal in that moment is, how do I at least reestablish some safety so that then I can go back to my Owl brain, right? That sounds super hard, if not impossible, to be Owl-brained when the situation is unsafe. How do I reestablish safety the fastest? Here's some things I might be considering, who is the most dangerous to either themselves or to others?   

Robyn: That doesn't necessarily mean who is the most dysregulated, although it certainly could, but all of y'all have kids whose intense dysregulation is expressed in a wide variety of ways, and some of that intense dysregulation is quite dangerous to themselves or to other people. And sometimes intense dysregulation is still very intense dysregulation, but it is not, in the moment physically dangerous. So it's always about the number one question being, you know, where's the most risk? Because we've got to prioritize physical safety first. If you have an attack-level Watchdog, right, then they are almost certainly the child who is the highest risk. And getting the physically dangerous behavior to stop is going to be the priority. So that mean you're giving attention to your kind of triaging the child with the most dangerous behavior. But actually it also could mean that you are prioritizing or triaging the most vulnerable child, right? So if you have a 15-year old who's being physically aggressive, but you also have a toddler, it might be true that in that situation, the most effective, quickest, safest thing you could do is actually to tend to that toddler, to get them to a place of physical safety, because they are the most vulnerable, they cannot protect themselves. So we're going to find safety for the toddler and then address the safety of the 15-year-old.    

Robyn: Now maybe you have a 15-year-old who is very escalated. But you know this child, and you know that actually, you know they're relatively, quote-unquote easy to de-escalate. And fact, maybe your gut instinct is that I could de-escalate this 15-year-old faster than I could, you know, get this toddler to physical safety, so then you're gonna attend to the 15-year-old first, right? Because, you know, that's the way you can make the situation safest the fastest a long, long, long, long time ago, when I was a baby social worker. I worked in the emergency rooms, and so I witnessed, you know, triage happening firsthand. And generally speaking, I wasn't involved in the triage process, right? Like, you know, when you go to, like, urgent care and ER, the first thing you do after you get checked in is you see the triage nurse and they assess what's happening. And then the order in which you receive medical care is based on the assessment of the triage nurse and how quickly you need medical care, right? The ER, is not first come first serve. And also, having been a patient in the ER, it feels terrible to be triaged to the, you know, bottom of the list. It feels awful to triage people to the bottom of the list right like as a triage nurse, as the medical team making these decisions, nobody wants the job of deciding, like, who is the worst off right now, who needs medical care the fastest? Who will have the biggest risk? Who is at the biggest risk, or who will have the biggest, I guess, negative impact if they don't receive medical care, the fastest, right?    

Robyn: And those are decisions that feel terrible to make, but it is a reality. It is necessary. Somebody has to do the job of making that decision, because there are way more hurting people who need medical attention, then there are medical professionals in an ER, and this is also true in your home, right? There are more dysregulated kids than regulated adults. I mean, if you have two dysregulated kids and you have two regulated adults, then the best thing to do is to, you know, send one adult to this dysregulated kid, and one adult to that dysregulated kid. And maybe you have a dysregulated child who really needs two adults involved to kind of help create safety. So then the two adults would go to that one child, you'd, you know, get to a place where you're established at least safety, not regulation, but at least safety, then the second adult can go to the second child, right? If the number of dysregulated kids equals the number of regulated adults, this is not easy, but slightly easier. When it gets really hard is when there's more dysregulated kids than there are adults, just like in the ER, right. I mean, I've worked in the ER, where we've had one or two doctors, that was how small we were, one or two doctors, you know, two or three nurses, and certainly we've got way more folks than that out in the waiting room. If we just have one patient, they just would come right on in, right? Like, there's no triage, right? They just come right on in. But that almost never happens, right?    

Robyn: So triage feels yucky. You are not going to end this episode and decide that triaging and having to make these impossible choices is something you feel good and confident about, and it's not dysregulating anymore to have to make these decisions. No, triaging is awful. I. It feels awful to make these decisions. In addition to working in an ER, I worked that ER position where I was on call overnight for multiple ERs, right? I was a social worker. ERs don't need- at least the ers in this particular hospital network I was involved in, don't need, you know, 24/7 social workers, and so I worked on call for multiple smaller ERs throughout the city overnight. Sometimes I had to triage, right? It wasn't just a medical team triaging. I had to triage. I sometimes had multiple calls coming in from multiple ERs, and two of those patients could be in severe crisis, and I still had to choose, where am I going to go? What am I going to do next? Now, because they were in an ER, before I got involved, I had a medical assessment and they were in an ER. I knew that they were at least physically safe, right? So that kind of criteria was alleviated for me. I was a social worker. I wasn't responsible for creating their physical or medical safety. But then after there, you know, if I had multiple patients to tend to, I had to triage, right? So then my next decision-making came to things like, who needed help the fastest, who needed help that was the easiest and the fastest to access, right? Like, maybe I had, you know, pretty intense mental health crisis in one place, and a client who needed community resources in another place, right? And the community resources client was going to be fast, right? I might prioritize them. And I would definitely prioritize them if that patient was at the ER I was currently at, whereas maybe the other patient in bigger crisis was at a different er, right, like it wouldn't make sense to leave and come back.   

Robyn: So these are not always clear cut decisions. Like, we can't make a an exact flow chart ahead of time, right? We are making decisions based on, you know, who needs help the fastest who needs help that's the easiest and fastest to access. Like, where am I going to kind of get my most bang for my buck? And it is terrible to have to make those decisions, right? There's this feeling that somehow, by triaging, I'm almost like ranking who's most important, but I wasn't, right? It's a resources based question, not a which human is more important based question is a resources based question, what resources do I have in this moment, and where do I apply them? First, that is going to make the biggest impact, and then where do I go next? So, I gave you that very long winded story, because there's a similar approach here. Who is the worst off right now, if you have a kid who is always the worst, or if you have a kid, let's put it a different way, if you have a kid who is always the second worst, that feels bad, right? You're probably feeling guilty for always tending to one child's needs over the other, and I get that, that feels bad. If that's the situation that you're in and you haven't yet listened to the episode where we talk about grief, and the episode about where we talk about helping your kids make sense of, not like, but make sense of their own story and their own unique experience in your family. That was two episodes ago. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, you're going to want to head back to that one. When this episode is finished.   

Robyn: We are gonna have to figure out, how do I help my other kids make sense of this experience that is, of course, feeling extremely unfair to them. It's, of course, feeling like, you know, the child who follows the rules, the least, the child who's always breaking the rules, the child who's always causing trouble, they're the one getting the most attention. And it makes a lot of sense that that's going to feel unfair, and it's going to make a lot of sense that you feel a lot of grief related to that. So if you find yourself in that situation, you're always you know, there's always a child who's second and you haven't listened to the grief episode, helping your other children navigate their grief as well as you navigate your grief, head back to that one as soon as this episode is over.    

Robyn: The reality is that it is very hard and possibly bordering on traumatic to be the sibling of someone who always seems to have more acute needs than you do, right? And a lot of more acute needs than you do. That is hard and not fair, and it is also for a lot of you listening the story of some of the children in your home and figuring out how to help you and your kids just kind of connect to the honesty of their own unique story in your family and then grieve that, is a really important piece of that. So we're asking ourselves in this moment, which child is the most vulnerable, what's the quickest path to keeping that child, but really, if possible, all of them the safest. And we're talking about split-second decisions here, right? Remember, I'm not talking about where to prioritize bringing a child all the way to regulation. I'm talking about, we've got two intensely dysregulated children. How do we at least establish some safety, then we can start to make more decisions about what to do next. I have found that it's really important for parents, caregivers, people in charge of dysregulated kids, to try to find a way to be at peace with your own limitations. If you have two or more highly dysregulated kids, and you've at least established some safety, but you still have two dysregulated kids there is. There's only so much you can do, right? Imagine that you have two crying one-year-olds, right?   

Robyn: Like my best friend has twins. If you had two crying one-year-olds, you'd do what you could to soothe them both at the same time, right? Maybe you would hold them both and kind of bounce around. Maybe you'd rock them both, right? You would do whatever you could to kind of attempt to soothe them both simultaneously. And then you would wait for one to be regulated enough that you might be able to set one down and focus exclusively on the other. And if you have two dysregulated one year olds, it might feel sometimes, or even a lot of the time, like neither one ever soothed, and eventually you would join them in your dysregulation, and you'd probably cry too, and then eventually, even that would be over. It doesn't last forever. Now that is a crummy consolation prize. But I do think that that's helpful to consider is that nobody has ever been stuck in chronic, intense dysregulation that has never ended. Some of you have kids who are chronically dysregulated. I get that, but I'm talking like attack level, we've got, you know, safety concerns, level dysregulation, right? Sometimes that idea, that, like, if you have two highly dysregulated, you know, screaming toddlers, that you try to regulate both at the same time, and then one gets a little more regulated. So you kind of set that one aside and focus on the more dysregulated one. And then sometimes nobody ever seems to get regulated, and everybody's dysregulated together, including you. And you sort of just like, wait for it to be over. Sometimes that exact same thing is going to happen in your family with big kids, big multiple dysregulated kids. So after you establish safety, I mean, same thing here, like, if you had two highly dysregulated toddlers, but one was in danger, you would certainly go to that one first, right? So same thing here, like, if you have two super dysregulated kids at once, you're going to, you know, find safety, and then not regulation, just safety, and then you're going to do what you can do to simultaneously co-regulate them both at the same time, and maybe one will eventually get regulated enough. And I'm not talking regulated, I'm saying regulated enough, like their level of activation comes down a notch, which then allows you to turn all your attention to the other one. Right? And maybe sometimes everybody just stays so dysregulated that you get dysregulated too and everyone's dysregulated. Everybody is just dysregulated until it's over.   

Robyn: You may know that one child regulates pretty quickly with a certain intervention, like a certain scent or a certain snack or a certain activity, right? So have those things always nearby and available. This goes back to kind of those ideas of like fanny packs, dysregulation kits. Now, I know a lot of you listening don't have this and you're probably rolling your eyes, like, I wish there was something that I knew always regulated my kid. Okay, I get that, but some of you do have something that is a pretty, you know, foolproof method you can apply that does help bring a little bit of regulation to a child. So have that always nearby, set up your life so that you can more easily access the tools that bring regulation the most quickly. And then go back to the grief episode, because it sucks to set up your life to always, you know, be wary of somebody's potential dysregulation, but if your child had a medical diagnosis, you would set up your life in a way that you always had access to the kinds of things that they needed if they had a medical crisis. And I know it feels different, because behavior based symptoms look like things that are about, like, moral goodness, good parenting, things like that. And there's this sense of like, I don't want to set up my life for those things. And so this brings us back to, you know, the grief of recognizing that these symptoms that your child has are just as valid as symptoms of, you know, a nervous system disability as medical symptoms would be of a child with a medical diagnosis or medical disability.    

Robyn: Now, if chronic, intense dysregulation is happening repeatedly, we've got to find a way to shift out of respond, respond, respond, energy and shift to bigger picture. How do I bring more regulation to our family as a whole energy, right? It's hard to get out of respond, respond, respond. But if we're chronically dysregulated, and we're like significantly chronically dysregulated and we're chronically in responsive mode, we've got to find a way to break that pattern, right? Chronic dysregulation is confusing, because acute dysregulation calls for an acute response. But if the dysregulation is chronic, then it literally becomes impossible to chronically respond to the chronic dysregulation. And even if it were possible, it just is creating this perpetual cycle that feels an impossible to break out of, and in many ways, can become impossible to break out of, even when the dysregulation seems chronic and impossible to get a hold of. There's got to come a moment where we step back and look at, how do we stop being responsive to all the dysregulation, and instead how can we become preventative instead. I have an old podcast episode about what to do when your child is always dysregulated. There is also an infographic that goes along with it. I'll make sure links to those get popped into the show notes. The episode is episode 18, so you have to scroll way, way, back, you might find a few helpful tips in that episode.    

Robyn: And you got to think about, you know, what are the services my family needs, and how do I get them? And again, I know some of you probably roll in your eyes like, yeah, as if that that's that easy, right? But if you have multiple chronically dysregulated kids at once, you can't you aren't superhuman. You yourself are not magic, right? We've got to find a way to access something that could bring some safety into your home. We want to look at the services you do already have. Is it the right service? Is it the right intervention? Is it making things worse by chance? Is everybody's meds adjusted appropriately? Right? As kids grow, they need med adjustments and for all sorts of other reasons, sometimes meds were working and now they're not working anymore, right? Do we need to lower the demands in our family? Do we need to increase the structure? What tweaks can we make so everyone's stress response system isn't chronically, chronically on fire. I have other episodes about looking at how to lower demands in our family so that we can decrease the stressors. I have an episode about the stress response system. If this is some new concept for you, the way the stress response system works is, if it's not healthy, and if you have multiple chronically dysregulated people in your home, your stress their stress response systems is almost certainly not, I'm going to say healthy, but it could use some strengthening. Let's put it more like that.    

Robyn: If you need to strengthen the stress response system first, you have to not overwork it, right? And so looking at ways we can decrease the stressors decrease the demands, like lower the bar, right? Like whatever language you want to use is, how do we shift what's happening in our home so that the stress response system is going off less frequently. If I got into that right now, we'd start to have an episode that's about lots of different things at once that's not super helpful to you. So I'm going to link to other episodes down in the show notes. Now I told you I didn't have a magic solution for you, but what I hope you're leaving this episode with is maybe a moment to relieve yourself of some guilt you're not doing it wrong. It's crummy to have to triage which kid needs help the fastest, and it is crummy if you have a kid who is always second, right? And there's a lot, a lot, a lot to to grieve inside of all of that. But there's also something to be said with just coming into contact with, like, touching with, like, just being honest with what reality actually is. So thinking about, I've got multiple dysregulated kids at once. How do I apply the idea of triage to them? Knowing that you're probably not going to be able to make a quick flow chart, it's going to depend on so many things. Where are we? Are we home or somewhere else? What room of the house are we in which kids are involved? What's within arm's reach that could be dangerous, right? There's so many things you're gonna have to make split second decisions about. That's the point of the stress response system. That is the actual point of our Watchdog brain, right? Because Owls are slow, so let your Owl fly away, let your Watchdog make a really, really, really fast decision about what to do. That doesn't bring everyone back to regulation, but at least re-establishes safety. And then we have to begin the triage process.    

Robyn: Okay, next week, we're going to talk about helping siblings of verbally aggressive kids, right? Like you already know you cannot control what comes out of your kid's mouth. And maybe it doesn't even only happen like this verbal aggression or the mean, hateful, bullying words, maybe that is happening at times, more than just when they're really dysregulated, right? Like they're just sitting at the table coloring, and they say something hateful to their sibling who's sitting next to them, and as best as you can tell, it just came out of nowhere, right? Sometimes our kids are truly pretty low level, dysregulated, and they can say some pretty hateful, hurtful things, and the reality is we can't stop it, especially if they weren't even outwardly severely dysregulated, because you have no idea it's about to happen, right? So if you can't stop it and you can't prevent it, what do we do? How do we help the kids who are on the receiving end of that verbal aggression. We're going to talk about that next week, and that is going to round out our series on supporting siblings. Now, I know there's probably 9,000,467 other topics we could talk about with regards to supporting siblings, but these are the six that I chose for now, and the six we tackled, and this podcast is going to go on forever and ever and ever and ever, right? So I'll just come back and hit the topics that we didn't do in this series. You know? I'll just have to do them later.   

Robyn: So before I sign off, let me just help. You. Know where you can go to get some more support if you need it, you can check out my book, Raising Kids With Big Baffling Behaviors. It's in paperback. It's an audio, it's an ebook. You can get it wherever you buy books online. You can just keep listening to the podcast. You can head to RobynGobbel.com/freeresources and download all of my free resources that I have, and I've gotten in the habit of adding probably about one a month. So if you haven't been there lately, go ahead and check those out.   

Robyn: You can come and join us in the club the next time the club is open, the club is a virtual membership community for parents, specifically of kids with vulnerable nervous systems, big baffling behaviors. Where we have a support community, very active forum, and a forum that I'm very active in. We have live events. We have a huge video library of, gosh, it's 100 videos at this point, and it's always growing. The Club opens periodically, so you'll just have to go and check it out see if it's open, and if it's not, you can get on the waiting list or just kind of keep checking back. That's RobynGobbel.com/theclub. It is an honor and a privilege to walk with you on this journey to receive your trust. I take your trust very seriously. Thank you for continuing to come back, continuing to hit play, continuing to be vulnerable enough to kind of let me into your life. I will see you back here next week on the baffling behavior show, bye, bye!