Mommy/ Baby Games: With Boys

We are living in a household with 2 very different boys.  Hudson is so calm and even keeled and always has been.  Eli, on the other hand,is a little more rowdy and feels angry at us a lot.  A brooder of sorts. (I think he gets that from his father:-)  We have been trying various ways for Eli to talk about his emotional life.  We have gone to therapy ourselves,  to get our emotional lives back on track.  In doing that, my therapist recommended a book called, Holding Time, by Martha G. Welch, M.D.   We have been using the technique for over a year now and it has been one of the only things that has worked to calm Eli down.  Basically, you plan a time everyday for a holding time. You allow yourself to get in touch with your own feelings of frustration and you express them to the child, who then expresses them back with struggle, refusing to give eye contact, crying.  It is important that the whole time you are listening to your child and not giving up on making eye contact  Many times this process brought me to tears trying to figure out why my child was soo mad at me.  After a while Eli will start to use his words and say things like "I'm mad at you because you took my ball" and  "You were mean at me" and start to cry like someone who is actually sad instead of mad.  If Eli can begin to express the true feeling of sadness rather than go straight to anger everytime then he is creating a new emotional skill set as well as, neural pathways.

(We used this technique with Hudson when he was 2.5 and Keith was shocked to find out that Hudson hadn't been letting him hold him and had been mad at him for some 3 months because he accidentally hit him in the tummy with a ball while they were playing.  3 MONTHS!!! He was internalizing all of those feelings at such a young age.  Now Hudson is very verbal about his emotions. "Mommy when you get mad at me I get mean at you!" and I say,  "Okay, okay let's talk this out.")

There is another body of work that is similar called, Map of the Emotions,  by David Berenson MD.  It tells you how to distinguish between moods and emotions.  A very important distinction because during a holding time if your child and yourself don't get to a resolution, you have to do it again until you do.  So recognizing when you are stuck and why you stuck in a mood rather than processing an emotion is key.  Eli is very sensitive.  His feelings get hurt faster than other people's so I have to give him tools to process those feelings or he his going to be a tyrant!   So with this as the back drop imagine my surprise at finding that role playing mommy and baby with Eli would accomplish some of the same things. 

I believe Eli's anger issues come from having a hard time attaching to me as a baby.  I had my children very close together (got preggers when my oldest was all of  9mos).  I had horrible post-partum depression.  Eli didn't get what he needed.  I breast fed and co-slept but I didn't carry him close to me like I did Hudson.  I was emotionally drained and had the lowest energy of my life.  I felt like I could sleep all day everyday. Everything was a struggle: making food, going to the grocery store.  I would force myself to get out.  But I mostly went to my mom's house for a reprieve.  I eventually solved my post-partum issues but was still left with an unhappy toddler.   One night I decided  I was going to completely follow Eli  and Hudson's lead and play any game they brought up and this is how mommy lion and baby lion came to be.  It was really interesting to watch my very aggressive 1.5 year old calm down and be a baby during this game.  Hudson and Eli would lay with me and let me pretend to bathe them and nurse them and feed them and cuddle them while we "slept".  It was amazing to see how calm they both got.  It was like an opportunity to have their mommy all to themselves in a way they hadn't .

I decided to use this role play as an opportunity to do a bit of therapy to give Eli a chance to express his emotions.  At first I would just follow his lead and he'd say he wanted to nurse on the mommy lion which was interesting because he stopped nursing a few months earlier-  I believe because he was mad and felt rejected by me and my attention towards Hudson.  We were able to let the boys learn how to share a mommy, which has been hard for them.  We graduated to mommy and baby kangaroo's so that I could put them in  a pouch, usually a blanket and let them sit very close to me.  Then they graduated to wanting to be my baby again and we got a giant fleece and they could take turns pretending to be in my belly again.  At this point, Eli started to nurse on me again. He only does it intermittently but I think for him it shows me that he trusts me again.  He still gets frustrated but we know straight away that we have to find an outlet for his feelings so that he can move on.

Every morning now, Eli pretends to be a Lion so that he can have an outlet for his frustration at being a toddler with not as much power as he wants.  He roars and play scratches and pins us down.  And then two seconds later he is the baby lion who needs to hide next to his mommy from a hyena.  Or, as in the above photo, he hides in his den!