Calm Your Nervous System to Calm Your Child

Did you know that during high-stress interactions with your child, your breathing pattern, your facial expressions, your voice, and your body influences your child’s physiological state and their sense of well being? That’s right, our emotions, behaviors, and the words we choose play a critical role in the level of fear, frustration, and stress that lie at the root of our kids' challenging behaviors. When we tune into our own physiological state, we can start to consciously de-escalate conflicts and increase connection.

It’s common for parents to focus on eliminating challenging behaviors without considering their underlying cause. Child development expert Dr. Mona Delahooke describes bad behaviors as the tip of an iceberg peeking out of the water. What you can’t see beneath the surface is a child’s internal perceptions and sensations, their thoughts, emotions, memories, ideas, and intentions. Other contributing factors not often considered are the child’s developmental capacities and cognitive abilities. So, looking below the surface of behaviors can give you clues to what’s going on for your child.

Searching for Safety

Dr. Stephen Porges describes the physiological underpinnings of challenging behaviors in his Polyvagal Theory. At all times, and without conscious awareness, parts of the brain are constantly scanning our internal, external, and interpersonal worlds for signs of safety, danger, and life threat. Based on the information it finds, it will send signals to our bodies to be in one of three states: social engagement, fight-or-flight defensiveness, or shutdown. Dr. Porges refers to this subconscious surveillance as neuroception, and while it evolved to keep us safe from predators, some people have faulty neuroception that leads to the perception of threat when there is none, or to the perception of safety in dangerous situations.

When your child detects a lack of safety in their environment, they go into survival mode and have a stress response in the form of self-protective behaviors like fighting, fleeing, or shutting down. Rather than focusing on eliminating the child's difficult behaviors, have compassion for their struggle, show acceptance, and turn up the volume on relational and emotional safety. This can help your child move from survival-mode back into socially-connected mode.

When your child detects a lack of safety in their environment, they go into survival mode and have a stress response in the form of self-protective behaviors like fighting, fleeing, or shutting down.

Let’s...

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How to Cultivate Self-Love

Before we get into today's tips on cultivating self-love, I have a bittersweet announcement to make: Next week's Savvy Psychologist episode will be my last one as the writer and host of this show. It's been an incredible experience to share evidence-based psychology tips with you every week for the past two years. I'm so grateful for such a dedicated and kind audience. The feedback I've received from you has inspired me, encouraged me, helped me grow, and made me more committed to furthering the science of mental health.

Although I'm leaving the show, I'm not stopping this work - I'm working on a book on insomnia that challenges our conventional ways of thinking about sleep and provides a practical blueprint for improving sleep without medications. If you've enjoyed listening to my episodes, I think you'll like the book, too. I'm excited to share more about it, so please make sure to follow me on social media and stay tuned for an announcement soon. 

Meanwhile, I'm thrilled that I'll get to introduce to you the next Savvy Psychologist in next week's episode. Here's a teaser: Dr. Monica Johnson is an experienced clinical psychologist and expert in numerous areas of mental health, including trauma, growth, sexuality, and race-based stress. Next week, I will interview her about the future of mental health and officially pass the torch to her as the new Savvy Psychologist. Please make sure you tune into next week's episode!

Now, let's talk about something eternally important: Self-love. 

Imagine if you have to spend the next 60 years stuck in an unbreakable relationship with someone. You have to go everywhere together, do everything together, and experience life’s every joy and pain together. Would you rather this be a person you love, someone who also loves you…or would you rather it be a just-tolerable coworker you’re stuck on a forever project with?

Now the twist: This person is yourself. After all, you have to spend everyday with you, for the rest of your life. You can either put up with yourself, occasionally being at odds or maybe even frequently irritated with this anchor. You could be dismissive towards yourself or even put yourself down, sowing doubt in your dreams or sabotaging your efforts to grow.

Or you could be affirming and encouraging and compassionate.

If given the choice, which relationship would you rather be in? And if it’s the loving one, how can you go about cultivating that love? Let’s explore a few good places to begin:

Self-Love Tip #1: Listen to your body

Our bodies are...

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Mispronunciation: Why You Should Stop Correcting People’s Mistakes

A recent survey of 2,000 adults in the UK identified the top ten “mispronunciations” people find annoying. Thankfully the majority (65%) of annoyed people don't feel comfortable correcting a speaker in public.

But leaving aside the fact that 2,000 is hardly a representative sample of the UK, with its population of over 66 million, this survey raises longstanding linguistic questions: why do people pronounce words differently, why does pronunciation change, and why does so-called mispronunciation upset some people to the point of making it possible (and interesting) to compile a top ten list?

I’m a phonetician – an expert in the way people make speech sounds and pronounce language. I’ve also written about what we can learn about a person from the way they speak.

A universal truth about language is that it is subject to constant change – and pronunciation is just as likely to change over time as aspects like grammar or vocabulary.

How language changes

One criticism of speakers who pronounce nuclear (“NU-cle-ar”) as “nucular” is that it does not match the spelling. In fact, English is known for having some very irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences, so that argument doesn't always hold up. The most extreme cases are probably family and place names: the surname [that looks like] Featherstonehaugh can be pronounced to sound like “Fanshaw,” for example, while Torpenhow in Cumbria is pronounced “Trepenna.”

How did we get to those pronunciations? Through a process of gradual, historical language change. These changes could be the result of social interaction (“other people say it like this”), mishearings, spelling pronunciations, phonetic processes or the influence of other languages, among other things. Certainly, language change is inevitable, which is handy because it keeps us linguists in business and generates a lot of copy for newspapers and the like.

Let’s have a look at some of the pronunciations people objected to in that survey.

Espresso

“Espresso” is pronounced “expresso” by many people, even though there is no “x” in the spelling. This...

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'Stationery' Versus 'Stationary'

One difficult set of words is “stationery” and “stationary.” They are pronounced the same, but mean different things. They’re homophones.

You can trace both words back to the Latin word “stationarius,” which meant “without motion,” and in Latin, it seems to have been used to describe a military station.

‘Stationary’

It’s easy to see how a Latin word that meant “motionless” gives us the English word “stationary,” which essentially means the same thing: “not moving, fixed in one place, still” and so on. 

Almost every big gym has a row of stationary bikes.

You can remember the spelling of this word by thinking that when you are stationary, you are often standing. Since “standing” is also spelled with an A, the association can remind you to put the second A in “stationary.”

‘Stationery’

The story of how we get “stationery” is a little more interesting. 

In the Middle Ages, many villages and towns got goods from traveling peddlers, but as anyone who’s packed too many books on vacation knows, books and other paper products are heavy, so booksellers and people who sold other paper products usually sold them from a storefront—a stationary location, as in a location that didn’t move, a station. Then these sellers became known as “stationers.” Then by association, the products they sold, the stationers’ wares, became known as “stationery” with an E after the name of the people who ran the shops—the stationers.

And as a delightful aside, the Oxford English Dictionary describes a livery company of the City of London formed in the 1400s called the Worshipful Company of Stationers, which was essentially a guild of stationers, and it still exists today, but it’s now called The Stationers’ Company.

The Oxford English Dictionary also says Stationer (at the time spelled Staciner) was a surname in the late 1200s. If your last name is Stationer, it probably means one of your ancestors was a bookseller, printer, or bookbinder.

“Stationery,” with an E, is paper, usually paper you use for writing letters or notes, and  “stationery” is spelled with an E because it goes back to the stationers, the people who ran the shops. But if that doesn’t help you remember the proper spelling, here’s a simpler...

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Grammar Quirks: W. Stone Cotter on Writers Who Are Cynical About Writing

Grammar Girl: What’s your favorite word and why?

W. Stone Cotter: For years it was "melancholy," a word which, when spoken, sounds as blue as its meaning, and also works well in sentences that feature a kind of sing-song meter. (One of my favorite books is Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," a miscellany on depression published in 1621.) But lately, I like the word "oblivion," which is highly flexible, weirdly musical, works as a concrete object or an abstraction, and sounds cool as a zero-article term, especially at the end of a sentence: "Ginger exited the entrance ramp, and met with oblivion."

GG: What’s a word you dislike (either because it’s overused or misused) and why?

WSC: Any of the adjectival filler terms like "amazing," "incredible," "wonderful," etc. They've lost their real meanings through generalized overuse, which is a shame—they were all sound, utilitarian, narrowly defined words at one time. I try to edit them out of any sentences in which they want to be, but it's tough! They're so easy to fall back on, and I still find myself using these toothless words out of pure laziness.

GG: What word will you always misspell?

WSC: I really have to think about how to spell "necessary," and most of the time I'm obliged to look it up, including just now.

GG: What word (or semblance of a word) would you like to see added to the dictionary? Why?

WSC: I wish there was a word which means "homesick for a place one has never been." There might be some long compound word in German for this idea, but nothing in English that I know of. I can't even think of a passable coinage. "Wistical"? Nah. "Whencelonging"? No. "Hankerpining"? I don't think so. 

GG: Any grammar pet peeves we should know about?

WSC: When the word "disinterested" is used as a synonym for "uninterested." "Disinterested" means "impartial," and nothing else. Grrr.

GG: To what extent does grammar play a role in character development and voice?

WSC: It's everything! Especially in dialogue. I feel that I can construct a character more convincingly if I...

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Berlin Turns Red

This episode deals with sexual assault. The descriptions of historic events may be triggering for some readers or listeners.

Soviet forces advanced with lightning speed since launching their offensive against Berlin in the third week of April. Two huge army groups were converging on the city from the south and east, while a third was wheeling in from the north.

On Friday, April 20, 1945, Hitler’s 56th birthday, Marshal Zhukov’s one-and-a-half-million-strong army had begun shelling the city center from its positions in the northern suburbs, while Marshal Ivan Konev’s forces were approaching the city’s southern outskirts. The Red Army had soon encircled the German forces that remained in the city, trapping the beleaguered defenders.

When the Russians finally arrived in the city center around April 28, they terrified the civilians who were cowering in their cellars. The door to the cellar in which the Schneider family was hiding was kicked open by a booted foot and, said young Helga Schneider, “We found ourselves face to face with six Russian soldiers, all aiming submachine guns at us.” Two of them had shaven heads, three wore fur caps, and one had black curly hair and a beard that came down over his chest. The soldier with the beard asked peremptorily: “Here soldaty germanskie?”

No one responded; they were too terrified.

“Soldaty germanskie?” the soldier repeated, this time with real menace in his voice.

Young Helga’s step-grandfather managed to stammer a reply: “No soldiers here.”

The Soviet infantryman looked furious. He spat out his response. “You lie! If soldaty germanskie here, you kaput!”

'War kaput!' screamed one of them. 'Hitler kaput!' He demanded the watches of everyone in the room. 'You give urri or you kaput!'

The six soldiers pointed their submachine guns at the assembled group. “War kaput!” screamed one of them. “Hitler kaput!” He demanded the watches of everyone in the room. “You give urri or you kaput!”

Everyone handed over their watches, and then the soldiers left.

But shortly afterward, two very different Soviet soldiers burst into the cellar. Drunk and heavily armed, they snarled at the terrified occupants before turning to the two teenage girls, sixteen-year-old Gudrun and fourteen-year-old Erika. “You, Fräulein! You gut! You come with me!”

Gudrun’s mother protested and was kicked in the stomach. Erika’s mother begged to take her daughter’s place and was beaten unconscious.

Young Helga Schneider buried her face in a jacket...

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How to Handle a No-Show

A loyal Modern Manners Guy reader emailed me recently about a client who pulled a no-show for a scheduled meeting.  My listener skipped dinner with her husband and stayed extra late at the office just to accommodate said client’s “busy schedule.” Yet when the big day came, the client bailed without a call, text, or email. Needless to say, my listener was extremely upset. Well, she used a more colorful word, but we'll go with upset here.

Call it an inability to commit or a lack of maturity, but when you tell someone you’re going to be somewhere, and then don’t show up, you stand to lose tons of respect. Period.  I understand that unexpected things happen, but there is no excuse (with all the technology avilable to us today) for not letting your colleague know that you need to reschedule — this goes for both personal and professional meetings.

If something important and unavoidable does come up, there is no excuse for not letting your colleagues know that you need to reschedule. 

I spoke about a similar issue in the article, What to Do if You’re Stood Up, where I gave 3 tips on how to handle being stood up. However, today, I’m going to discuss 3 tips on how you should react when the immature person who stood you up calls you back…hopefully to grovel:

Tip #1: Be Stern  

Some people assume that being mannerly means you have to keep your mouth shut and smile pretty at all times. Not true! Just because you don’t want to curse or throw things, does not mean you need to be walked all over. Being mannerly allows you to be witty, sharp, and make yourself understood using your brain, not your brawn.

Never be afraid to stand up for yourself and let the no-show know that your time is too valuable to waste.

So when the no-show calls you back with a lame excuse, don’t be afraid to tell them exactly what you're thinking. Just don’t lose your temper. Doing that weakens your argument. If it was a professional engagement,you could try something like “We made these plans 3 weeks ago and confirmed them the day before. I know you have a phone. I would have appreciated some form of contact to let me know you would not be arriving so that I could make alternative plans.”

Tip #2: Don’t Be Quick to Reschedule 

Time heals all wounds, right?  When the no-show calls you back to give an excuse about why they couldn't make it, they will most likely...

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