4 Easy Steps to Overcome Morning Terror: Kids and Daycare

‘My lad screams and freaks out whenever I have to go to work. I get up a whole extra hour early, to ease him through the process gently, but nothing I do makes it any better. I explain how important it is for me to work so we can live, and how I understand how he is feeling about it, but it doesn’t change his screaming in terror and trying to block my way to the door.’

A question like this comes up about every other day on parenting lists. 

That small children have a blatant preference for the company of their people, and sometimes one parent or the other for a phase of life, is as predictable as Monday morning coming after Sunday night.

While, obviously, it is ideal if kids have their needs met, and their need for their parents are as real as their need for food and air, I also live in the real world: the one where US healthcare costs cause more middle-class bankruptcies than any other factor; the world where millions of very real children are starving to death for real, every day. 

The one where single parents comprise a significant portion of the workforce.

The other day I said,

there is the ideal, the preferable, and the possible

Sometimes what parents get to choose from is in the last category. Reality really sucks sometimes.

This means, pragmatically, sometimes the child will continue to be wild with frustration and annoyance over a parent doing what parents get to do: work outside the home in an environment openly antagonistic to children (read: where kids ain’t going to be allowed to be.) We can argue for days about what’s wrong with that, and why it’s possibly unnecessary in the very many cases, and how children are as much a part of human life and the world as the grown-up. . . and here we are, today, anyhow. Are we having fun yet?

Back to the miserable parent with the frantic child.

Lots of people give lots of advice in this scenario –from ‘sneaking out’ (aka: destroy trust early, it’s simpler than waiting) to ‘make major lifestyle changes so you don’t have to go at all’ (underlying suggestion: please start again at the beginning and be born with more privilege next time) to bribes, threats, ignoring it, promises about later, using different words to explain it better, saying ‘parents always come home’ or ‘I’ll be back later’ (and other temptations for Fate) and all manner of other ineffective and unhelpful things.

In the History of Explaining Things to Upset People. . .

The thing is, in the history of explaining things to upset people, no one has ever been made less upset by any explanation. Sometimes they may be effectively silenced (because ‘this is the reason you’re not welcome to be upset’ can really be a powerful message) but the emotional response to the reality they dislike remains exactly where it is, only simmering perpetually in the background. Yay.

As a friend’s counsellor pointed out: 

people give hugs and tissues to crying people because they want them to stop crying,

not because they want them to let out all their big feelings for however long it takes right now

Actually, people really need to let it out and to feel felt, as Bessel Van Der Kolk puts it, not calmed.

The calming will come on its own, once the feelings are felt through. The feeling through the emotions part –we don’t like that.

The calming will come on its own, once the feelings are felt through

We Don't Like That

First, because it upsets us. We feel their feelings (natural empathy) and we dislike those powerful feelings even when they are not ours.

Second, because it feels like it is going to literally take forever. It won’t, because emotions are a passing chemical response in the body/mind, and those chemicals deplete over time … eventually. (The longer its been since anyone was effectively empathetic with the feeler, the longer it will take because the backlog is bigger and feeling felt is such a unique relief. . .  but that doesn’t have much to do with little kids.)

Third, because people having big emotions around us feels (often) like they’re saying it is our fault, and we often feel compelled to justify, explain, inform or convince them why they’re wrong. Not a lot about trying to tell an upset someone about how they are wrong is likely to improve their mood. . .

Fourth, because it’s not fair. Few people have ever had much experience with feeling felt themselves, especially as kids, and we are deeply agitated by kids ‘getting away with’ things we were banned from doing. This is very stark in people who were shamed as children (like ‘boys do not cry’ or ‘how dare you?!?’)

And you know what? It is not fair. Truly.

It is not fair that people ever treated children and their emotions that way. It is less fair to mindlessly pass it on to another generation of innocent children. Becoming aware of this impulse to seek revenge on the next available victims is often sufficient to stop the cycle: Oh, that’s just those nasty old voices of those old crones who were wrong then, too… I can do something differently this time.

What Do I Do Differently? 

4 Easy Steps to Handling Kids’ Objections to What is Happening

     Step one: empathy

     Step two: repeat step one

     Step three: resist the urge to explain, justify, inform or convince

     Step four: empathy

Not so Easy, Is It?

The urge to rush to explain, justify, inform or convince is powerful, because we feel like our kids’ reactions are blaming us, and there are few things our culture is less comfortable with than blame.

This is where the adulting gets hard.

Courage, dear.

Scene:   Bedroom, early morning, mother and child getting ready for the day

Mom:    I AM GETTING READY FOR WORK NOW, DEAR

Child:   [SCREAMS, BITES HIMSELF, THROWS THINGS, RAGES ABOUT WANTING TO BE WITH                MOM, ETC]

Mom:    You are feeling so angry and scared that I am going to work, because        you really need me to stay home …

Child:   [SCREAMS MORE, THROWS HIMSELF TO THE FLOOR, SHOUTS AND CRIES]

Mom:    [with intensity] I REALLY HEAR YOUR FURY AND TERROR OVER MY GOING TO            WORK  TODAY, THOSE ARE BIG AND POWERFUL FEELINGS!! YOU ARE FEELING SO        FRANTIC FOR ME TO STAY!

Child:   [CONTINUES SCREAMING AND BEHAVING ANGRY AND FEARFUL]

Mom:    I CAN REALLY FEEL HOW INTENSELY FRIGHTENED AND ANGRY YOU ARE ABOUT ME      GOING TO WORK BECAUSE YOU REALLY NEED ME TO STAY. I AM STEPPING OUT THE    DOOR NOW, HEARING YOUR FURY AND TERROR AT ME GOING.

And . . .  scene.

What is happening here that is so different from the ‘usual’?

Two really big things:

     1.       no one is trying to dismiss or silence the child’s emotional reaction –quite the opposite. This is a parent saying ‘I hear you, and I am here with you hearing you’ which builds trust, and;

     2.       this is a completely neutral and blame-free response that does not personalize the child’s emotion as the adult’s fault, or suggest in any way that the child is to blame for either his feelings or the adult’s emotional reaction.

Notice, this doesn’t magically make the child’s feelings go away.

Why would it?

This is the child who is, in the child’s terms, losing their parent (for the moment, for the day, for the duration of the deployment, or, when the child is really young and can’t understand the parent leaving and still existing somewhere else, forever.)

So, the child starts with powerful feelings that don’t go away by the end, how does that ‘work’? How does that qualify as ‘working’?

In mainstream terms, where the goals is to control the child, their emotions and every aspect of their expression of emotions, it doesn’t work.

it does not work at all for that

We Are Not Seeking That Goal

We are not seeking that goal.

We are also not seeking the underlying goal embedded in that control: to stop the parent feeling anything about what is happening for their child.

One of the things mainstream advice is really resistant to is any suggestion that the parent’s actions might reasonably make the parent feel bad. 


If the child feels bad, well, that’s just to be expected, but parents should be forever free of anything like guilt, regret, responsibility or even compassion for what their child is experiencing when they have no power to fix it.

That’s the thing that takes the courage: the ability to have compassion for a child’s genuine experience when they are suffering and the situation causing it is impossible for us to fix.

The parameters of interacting with humans (even small ones)

               You can’t control them

               You can’t control their feelings or emotions

               You can’t control how they express their feelings or emotions

               You can’t demand trust or respect

               You can control your words and actions

               You can understand your own feelings or emotions

               You can help them feel felt and heard and understood

               You can foster trust and respect

That is what that 4 step plan reaches toward: fostering trust and respect, by helping them feel felt, heard and understood.

I did say that it takes courage because it's hard.