The Baffling Behavior Show {Parenting after Trauma}

Sometimes you work so hard to stay ‘calm’ but then realize- it feels totally fake.  Yeah, that’s because sometimes calm makes no sense! Sometimes the behavior is serious, and you are mad, and of course you are.  Regulated doesn’t have to mean calm, and there’s a four-step process that can help you hang onto your owl brain by one sharp talon even while your watchdog is starting to get really active...

Does hearing “no” or “not right now” or “stop doing…” seem to bring your child’s back-off watchdog or shut-down possum out? Or even worse?? Almost every family I’ve ever worked with has had some sort of struggle with their child tolerating frustration, or disappointment, or not getting what they want.  These kids look ‘spoiled,’ and the judgment from others is REAL.  But accepting no and toleratin...

I know how intensely we want a checklist. Do this, this, and this, and the dysregulation will end, and your kid will be OK. This episode is the story of chasing exactly that list (Dr. Sears' Attachment Parenting checklist that I worked to check off one by one) and finding something else entirely in Dan Siegel's Parenting From the Inside Out . He didn’t give a checklist at all, just a way...

Sometimes it’s the little moments that overwhelm us more than the big, scary ones. The "whatever" muttered under their breath, the stash of snack wrappers under the bed, or they flatly deny something you're 99% sure they did. Sure, these things are frustrating, and it makes sense you’d have a reaction- but for some reason, you find yourself in zero to fury before you even had a chan...

I know you are working so, so, so hard to hold onto your owl brain. Maybe you're at the stage where you don't even notice you've flipped your lid until hours later.  Maybe you're at the stage where you can see it happening and still can't stop it.  Either way, there's probably an old, familiar voice telling you that you should be further along than you are by now. I w...

Almost always when I’m teaching or presenting, a parent is finally brave enough to ask: “What if I'm too burned out to do any of this?”  And then at least half the other parents in the room look expectantly at me because they, too, are wondering how they could possibly conjure up enough energy to use playfulness. They aren’t even sure they like their kid enough to offer enough cues of safety....

You've called every therapist in town and heard the same thing back: not taking new clients. Or you're the one on the other end of that call, staring at a kid whose behavior you can't make sense of, wondering if you're just not cut out for this.  I get it. I intimately understand both sides of this struggle.  In this episode, you'll learn: Why a dysregulated parent needs t...

My guiding north star when I was a therapist working with kids (and grown-ups) was always helping them not just get to know their brain and how it works, but actually to develop a relationship with the parts of themselves that seemed to always be getting into trouble. It's not really just brain facts that are helpful to kids. Teaching them about their brain creates the possibility that they c...

You've probably heard "a dysregulated adult can't co-regulate a child" a hundred times. But if you've ever been stuck in a store with a screaming kid — or a classroom with 17 screaming kids — and zero bandwidth left, you know how useless that advice can feel in the moment. This episode is a conversation with Chrissy D'Agostino, co-author of the new Early Years Guidebo...

You want the flowchart. Of course you do! If X, then Y would be something to follow when there's no bandwidth left to think it through in the moment. But there isn't a flowchart, and this episode gets into why: stress capacity shifts by the hour, different nervous system states pull different memory networks online, and two nervous systems are shaping each other in real time, not just on...

OT on Tuesday, a speech eval callback on Wednesday, play therapy on Thursday, a school meeting on Friday that's really just another appointment in disguise. When the calendar starts looking like a second job, the question that actually matters isn't a number — it's whether all of it is moving your family toward regulation, connection, and felt safety, or quietly draining it. This ep...

So many struggling and overwhelmed parents feel like their biggest problems are their kids' behaviors and the chaos that's taking over their family. This week's guest, a longtime Club member, talks about how she slowly came to realize that what she really needed to focus on wasn't strategies to change her kids' behavior, but experiences that would soften the shame she was...

Every morning (or afternoon or evening) feels like just one long stream of complaints. Breakfast isn’t right, the bowl isn’t right, SOMETHING is always not right, and no matter what gets fixed, it’s never right enough. ^That perfectly describes a nervous system stuck in protection mode.  This week’s episode explores how and why nervous systems get stuck and practical ways you can help- even when N...

Screens. Sugar. Anything that feels really good. The advice to just "lower the demand" can fall really short because for some kids, more access brings real relief. But for others, more access actually causes more stress and we wind up asking kids to take on a responsibility that is beyond their developmental capacity.   This episode digs into what's actually generating the stress un...

Every behavior. Every parenting moment that feels impossible. It all comes back to three sentences — the three core tenets that distill how relational neuroscience makes sense of behavior and give us a roadmap toward change. This episode lays out the three truths underneath everything I do — this podcast, my books, The Club, the Immersion Program — and why they matter more than any single strategy...

You know that kid who just can't stay in the therapy room? They leave, wander around, get into things that aren't theirs, or are maybe even destructive? And three therapists have already called it quits. Maybe this describes your kid. Maybe this describes the kids you work with. This episode is for both of you. The helper who is trying to be with this kid, wondering what they're doi...

When life is overwhelming and your kid's behavior makes no sense — and feels like it's getting worse — even the best resources get hard to use. You're too dysregulated to sort through 270 episodes or an almost 300-page book to figure out where to start. Of course you are. This episode breaks down why you freeze in the face of new information, or end up just begging someone to tell y...

For years, "the four functions of behavior" has been the go-to framework for understanding why kids do what they do: attention, escape, access to tangibles, sensory. It's not wrong, but it's not the whole story either. In this episode, we dig into where this model actually came from, what it leaves out, and what's underneath it once we go looking with a relational neurosci...

We've been in a three-part series on sticky behaviors (behaviors that don’t seem to change, no matter WHAT you do!), and today we're doing the detective work: what is your specific child's nervous system actually predicting?  In This Episode Three detective questions to help you identify what prediction might be driving your child's stickiest behaviors, and what those behaviors...

Part 1 was about why sticky behaviors stay stuck. Part 2 is where the hope lives. We're diving into the two mechanisms that actually change sticky behaviors at the neurological level. This is the episode that makes the hardest ask of Part - shifting away from ‘fix-it’ and ‘this has to change’ energy- make sense. In this episode you'll learn: Why your child's dysregulation isn't...

If you've tried everything and a behavior just won't stop…that's a sticky behavior. Let's dive deeeeeep into the neuroscience behind the behaviors that feel impossible to change. We'll touch on how the brain stores predictions and how the most well-meaning response can actually, unintentionally, keep those predictions locked in place and perpetuate that sticky behavior. Th...

When kids can't tolerate boredom, it's easy to forget to put on our X-ray vision goggles and chalk it up to too much screen time or even not enough gratitude. Our kids’ reaction to boredom triggers OUR watchdog brain! If we can invite our owl to come back, we will almost certainly see that boredom flips our kids’ nervous system into protection mode. In this episode, you'll learn: Wh...

A dad - who is also a former foster youth and the director of non-profit supporting foster and adoptive families - shares an honest and tender conversation about what it's actually like to parent kids with big, baffling behaviors when life is also impossibly hard. He shares the staggering losses his family has carried over the past few years, how he found The Baffling Behavior Show, Raising K...

A single mom who adopted boy-girl twins through foster care shares about her slow, almost invisible journey from survival mode to genuinely delighting in her now-13-year-old kids. Nothing shifted in one big moment.  Yet somehow, everything changed. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the shift from "I have to fix this right now" to "I can just be with you in this" is the th...

Parenting kids with big, baffling behaviors is hard enough. THEN someone has opinions about it. This episode breaks down why people say the things they say, what's actually happening in you when judgment lands, and how to respond- or not respond- in a way that protects your own regulation. In this episode: Why unsolicited advice and criticism are almost always a projection from the other pers...