A constant message in modern superhero media is that BIG
reactions are the ONLY solution. That’s not a great message for any
child, let alone those who already struggle with outsize reactions.

In The Dark Side of Superheroes, I explore
• Skills that are fundamental to controlling reaction size
• Problems with modern media
• Fantastic books that model matching the reaction to the size of
the problem.

— Useful Links —

Social Thinking

Autism Awareness Center

Books That Heal Kids

Charting a Path to Organized Thinking

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: Hello, and welcome to episode 61 of The Speech Umbrella podcast Today, we’re going to talk about big reactions, reactions that are bigger than the size of the problem. And we’re going to have some fun today because we’re going to talk about books, which is one of my favorite things.

First, I’ve got a story to share with you. A few months ago, I was talking to my neighbor. She had some questions about her little girl’s behavior. . And because I had observed her daughter around the neighborhood and in various places in the community, I thought that she might be on the autism spectrum. And so when her mother asked me about these things, that was at the top of my mind, And her mom said she loves Spider-Man, she loves superheroes, and she really emphasized how much she loved the superheroes. Now that’s not uncommon for children, but this thought occurred to me. Well, of course she does superheroes have big reactions like she does and their reactions affirm her reactions. Because one of the things I had observed about her was the size of her reactions.

So the question that I want to answer today, well, it’s really two questions. If we are teaching our children or our clients to have reactions that match the size of the problem. Are they watching and reading about characters that do the same thing? Are the characters that they’re watching on TV and in movies, characters that have moderate reactions to moderate problems and small reactions to small problems, or they just always seeing big reactions? And the second part of the question is, do they have the foundational skills to stop and think about their reactions?

Not the characters in the movies, but our clients and our children, do they have the foundational skills to even stop and think about the size of their reactions? So, this is what we’re going to cover today. Those foundational skills that I talked about. Some of the problems with modern media, what to do, and books. So, whether you’re a therapist or a parent, I hope you’ll come away with some ideas for working with children who have outsized reactions.

Okay, so let’s talk about foundational skills. Rather than taking a deep dive in how to teach matching the reaction to the size of the problem. I’m focusing more on building underlying skills. A lot of size of the problem material has been created and it’s been very well done. And I especially like the material from social thinking.com.

But here’s what I’ve noticed as far as building a foundation for controlled reactions goes. Whole body listening will take you a long way. Children who can do whole body listening generally have half the battle won. So what is whole body listening in case you’re not familiar with it?

 Here’s a good way to describe it. I’m quoting from the Autism Awareness Center. To make listening more concrete and teachable, speech pathologist Suzanne Poulette Truesdale came up with a powerful and now very popular concept known as whole body listening. This innovative tool breaks down the abstract concept of listening by explaining how each body part, other than the ears is involved. The brain thinking about what is being said, the eyes looking at or toward the speaker, the mouth quiet, the body facing toward the speaker, and the hands and feet quiet and kept to oneself.

Truesdale emphasized that whole body listening is a tool, not a rule, meaning we adults need to figure out how to use it flexibly, how to recognize individual needs as we apply it, and so forth. And there’s a lot more information on that on the Autism Awareness Center, so I’ll link to that. But that being said, that we need to recognize client’s individual needs, a lot of my clients can learn to do whole body listening. When I teach it patiently and persistently. I love it because it’s an all-in concept. They learn how to be all-in when learning. So this applies to all-in learning with matching reaction to size of the problem, and also being able to stop and think. When they listen with their whole bodies, they are just all-in to whatever you’re doing.

Here’s just one of the ways that I teach whole body listening. I have a strip of Velcro on a paint stick, and then I have pictures of the body parts that you can see listening, and they go on the Velcro strip as the children learn how to listen with that body part. Now you can also have pictures of the brain and the heart, which those can’t be seen. And you might not use those with younger children because they’re more concrete, but older children can understand that they also need to use their heart to care about what’s going on, about what other people around them are thinking and doing. And they can understand that they use their brain to also listen.

So, what does this look like in an actual therapy session? Is every child able to listen with every body part as I slowly put those vocal pictures down? In the first session, no, of course not. That wouldn’t be realistic. And by the way, I can do this individually. I can do it in a group, but it is better to build up their skills gradually over weeks, rather than falsely reward. So in other words, don’t tell them that they’re rocking at whole body listening and put the picture on. If they aren’t actually doing it. So start where you need to and build on a solid foundation. Do lots of describing what you’re noticing. Oh, I noticed that you’re listening with your feet. Your feet are still, your feet are on the floor. You’re listening with your feet and describe what they’re actually doing with that body part. Your eyes are looking at me or your eyes are looking at this picture that we’re looking at, and I can see that you’re listening with your eyes.

 That really helps them connect what they’re actually doing with the skill that we’re trying to teach. And once they can listen with their whole bodies, you can build up their time. I mean, it just might be one or two seconds that their whole body is still, and that they’re really tuned in at the beginning. So again, I use another Velcro strip and I have pennies with Velcro on them. And I’ll just gradually lay the pennies down and we’ll try and build up the amount of time that they can listen with their whole bodies. And I give them lots of verbal rewards and then of course they need to move. They’re children, so we build the movement breaks too. And you might do movement before you try whole body listening. You might come into the room and do a silly dance or something, you don’t know. Have the kids been sitting at school all day? Do they need to move before you try this whole body listening? So that’s part of using your judgment to figure out when it’s best to do it.

But i can’t tell you how valuable it is to go for the big win where they can listen with their whole bodies for a certain amount of time and really take in what is going on around them. For many children, there is also a certain amount of self-reinforcing reward to this. When they actually listen with their whole bodies, there’s a calmness and a stillness that they might never have experienced before, that they find very rewarding.

And okay. If you’re wondering where to get whole body listening stuff, it is everywhere. Um, internet, on Teachers pay teachers, lots of companies offer things for whole body listening. Books, posters, videos, the body part pictures. It’s all out there.

Here’s one thing I realized from preparing this podcast, I can’t talk about size of reaction without talking about perspective. We do divide up social skills to teach and to talk about them, but they are so intertwined. They’re just like a rope. And as I was preparing this, I kept thinking you’re going off into perspective and we’re supposed to be talking about size of the problem until I realized okay, this is just going to go together. Whole body listening, size of the reaction, perspective taking, it’s all a little bit in this podcast.

So, what about perspective? Once they can listen with their bodies, then they can notice others. Then they can start to understand that other people have different thoughts and experiences, and that in turn helps them moderate their reactions. And I have a video about this called The Conversation Game and podcast number 50, also called The Conversation Game. And that is about noticing and remembering things other people have said and starting to be able to take their perspective.

So all these ideas are in addition to direct teaching about appropriate sized reactions, which is also important. But after these foundational skills are in place, you will have made life so much easier. What will be left to work on as far as the size of the problem will be less. Your intervention will be more effective.

. Well, I think I’ve talked about whole body listening enough. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I love whole body listening. Let’s go onto modern media. Here’s a problem, I see big reactions are always justified with superhero media characters because the problems presented are earth shattering, universe bending, and require immediate and often violent responses. So many of my clients love this media. They are exposed to a lot of it. And the way the stories are set up, there’s very little nuance. There was very little need to stop and think and wonder about how big the problem is. These stories don’t reflect real life in so many ways because our lives are mostly made up of small and medium-sized problems and occasional big ones thrown in. Big reactions can be fun and exciting, and I like those movies and books too, but a balance is needed. I have noticed, especially in young adult literature, there are so many dystopian novels. I remember one of my pre-teen children telling me that all the books he had been assigned that year were just depressing. Lots of big problems. unjust society, death, suicide. And please, these are children we’re talking about. Let’s get some balance.

 There are wonderful books that were written some time ago that certainly do deal with death. I’m thinking of one of my favorites, Bridge to Terabithia. But they are not the kinds of books where you have whole societies that are experiencing oppression, and death is this cataclysmic event.. We need more current books and movies where the world doesn’t have to be saved from extinction every week, so that we have models of ordinary people solving ordinary problems. How much good can our intervention do in teaching someone to have appropriate sized reactions, if they are getting barraged by the opposite message. Now this of course is in the parent’s ballpark, but as therapists we can introduce children and families to great books that show ordinary people solving ordinary problems and also books that show characters having outsized reactions, but in a fun way. So we can kind of see the humor of it and laugh about it.

I found a website just this week. It’s called Books That Heal Kids and it has books in all these categories, growth mindset, size of the problem, solving problems. I just love it. I poked around and ended up ordering six books, so I better not go back there for awhile.

I was going to save the best for last, talking about some of my favorite books, but here I am, I’m already talking about books. So let’s just go into that. Okay. My all time favorite children’s book for talking about big reactions is Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. My kids loved Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. I love Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. It’s that old when I was growing up, I read Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.

If you’re not familiar with the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle character, she’s a woman in a community where all the parents go to her when their children have problems that they just can’t solve. And most of these problems have to do with big reactions for small problems. And Mrs. Piggle Wiggle has a little bit of magic besides a whole lot of common sense, so she can give the parents a potion or a pill or something that can cause The big reaction to have real actual results that help the children realize, wow, that was way too big. One of them, for example, is about a girl who cries at everything, every little thing makes her cry. And so, with Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s help, she starts crying and it floods the playground, it floods her house. And the tears just caused this huge problem. And then she realizes, oh, well, I don’t need to cry about these little problems. So that’s the magic of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. By the way the author of the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books is Betty MacDonald.

The Mrs. Piggle Wiggle book is a chapter book and I’ve got five more chapter books I want to talk about. The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes is about a girl who is inadvertently involved in bullying another girl. She doesn’t want to believe the other girl, her friend does, and she just doesn’t say anything. And she comes to realize the consequences of those actions.

It’s really great for perspective taking. The Search For Delicious. Oh, I love this book. My sister discovered it, and she told me if you ever find The Search For Delicious, you get it. Because it’s so old, you would find it in a used bookstore. Of course now online, you can get so many of these wonderful used books online for just pennies. The Search For Delicious is by Natalie Babbitt. And it’s about how a very small problem becomes a very big problem because of people’s reactions and their perceptions.

Tuck Everlasting is also by Natalie Babbitt, and I love Tuck Everlasting because of the stillness and the quietness of it. In the Tuck Everlasting movie, they actually amp up some of the action. Like they felt they needed to. I suppose because they thought maybe the book didn’t have enough action. But what is so wonderful about it is some of these characters have a really big problem, but they manage it so well. They manage it with such calmness and with such confidence. And it’s just a wonderful book to read about how to react to problems.

Next up is a book called A Room Made of Windows and it’s by Eleanor Cameron. I think this book would be appropriate for someone who’s maybe in the fifth or sixth grade and on up. The author did such a good job in helping us see other characters and helping us realize other characters can see themselves. The main character is a young girl with some difficult personality traits. But she comes to see herself as other people see her and realizes that, oh yeah, that was kind of a difficult behavior on her part. And another thing I love in A Room Made of Windows is an adult character expresses his regret and his sorrow that his outside reaction caused emotional pain in the child.

Here’s the last chapter book on my list. It is so much fun, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E L Konigsberg. Oh, so the main character has a rather big reaction to just ordinary problems that are happening to her, that she perceives her life. It’s just not going the way it should. And she decides to run away and take her younger brother with her. And from there, it’s just a glorious adventure. Okay, that’s it for the chapter books.

For The younger crowd here are some picture books I love that can help us talk about big reactions for small problems. Oh, Were They Ever happy by Peter Spier is about children who take it upon themselves to paint the house while their parents are away. And the pictures are hilarious. Henry’s Awful Mistake by Robert Quackenbush. Henry sees a bug in his house and his reaction is huge. And Frog and Toad, the Lost Button by Arnold Lobel. Toad has a really big reaction to a lost button and realizes that he has hurt his friend Frog’s feelings. Then we get to see how Toad makes up for hurting Frogs feeling and it’s really sweet.

Let’s talk about what you could do when a child has an outsized reaction. Children are watching you, of course. So calm logic is your friend. Be calm yourself. Be confident in saying no when that is the needed response and be confident in waiting it out, if you need to, while communicating your reason. Let me give an example of when I did a lot of this with a certain client. I had a client who had huge reactions to the very smallest problems. For example, we were working on telling stories and we each had a little chart where we would check off as the other person told a part of a story. And my check marks did not please him. I’m left-handed and my check marks did not go the right way. And he wanted me to change them. And I said, well, no, you don’t get to say how I write things, you can say how you write things. And that caused a storm of tears and a huge reaction.

And I just waited them out. It was loud. It wasn’t great. His mom, I’m sure, was wondering in the waiting room, what is going on because he could be heard throughout the clinic. After about 10 minutes, he calmed down and we went on with the things we were going to do in the session.

What was interesting to me was that never happened again in that particular specific situation. He never got upset again at how I wrote a check mark. But he had plenty of other big reactions waiting in the wings and I just had to wait them out. Gradually, his reaction time shortened. Gradually, the frequency of when he had big reactions lessened until it became so much better. But it left me wondering, how many problems does this child encounter in his day? If these little tiny things cause a big reaction, how accustomed is he to dealing with problems? And so I think we need to not intervene for our child in every situation, we need to let them have a little bit of a struggle, figure out how to do things.

If I could suggest anything for this client outside of the therapy setting, I would recommend responsibilities such as chores, like I talked about in my podcast number 55, Charting a Path to Organized Thinking. And I would suggest less screen time. I think those two things would make a huge difference because this client is flying under the radar. He’s not meeting his potential and he’s using his big reactions as an out for not taking more responsibility.

 Well, it’s time to wrap up this podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. I’m just going to do a brief summary of what we talked about

Whole body listening will get you a long ways to a child being able to self-regulate and control the size of their reactions. Let your child struggle in a safe way, in a safe place, the home, the clinic, but do let them struggle. And expose them to good role models in the media, in the books, in the things they see, in the things they watch and read. And talk about character’s reactions, talk about the big and small and the medium problems and the size of the reactions.

These are all simple things you can do to help your clients or help your child master the complex social world, because remember when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself. Talk to you next time