How to Help Your Kid Freak Out Less

An interview with author and clinical social worker Carla Naumburg.

If you’ve noticed that today’s newsletter is a day late — and maybe you haven’t, because your life is utter chaos too! — that’s because I didn’t get enough done on Monday’s school holiday. Attempting to work while your kids are around is not for the faint of heart! I also want to thank everyone for their thoughtful comments, notes and re-stacks regarding Friday’s newsletter about how divorce affects kids — the post clearly resonated with many of you.

Today, I’m thrilled to be running an interview with clinical social worker and author Carla Naumburg. If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you already know Carla — I interviewed her here in 2022 about what parents can do to stop berating themselves. Carla is a wise and wonderful (and very prolific!) human and has just published her first book for kids, How to Stop Freaking Out, which I highly recommend.

I interviewed Carla about some of the themes in her book, including what parents can do to help kids cope with difficult feelings, thoughts and behaviors.

Carla, you’ve written such wonderful books for parents — I’m always recommending You Are Not a Sh*tty Parent and How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t with Your Kids — so I'm wondering what prompted the shift to writing a book for kids. Also, who is it aimed for?

When I'm being hilarious, or at least when I think I'm being hilarious on podcasts, I start out with something about how I was walking through a field and ray of sunlight came out and I had this amazing revelation that I should write a book for kids — when, in reality, my agent, who's amazing, called me up and was like, “How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t with Your Kids is doing really well. Do you want to write one for kids?” I was like, “Oh, that's a good idea.”

My other job is working for a nonprofit that sends free books out to families raising Jewish kids, and I work in their middle grade program. So I literally spend 30 hours a week reading middle grade books. And when we started this, my kids were middle graders, and so I felt like, yeah, this is something I can do. So we reached out to the folks at Workman [publishing], and I had a couple things I was really clear about. I wanted it to be illustrated, and I wanted it to be full color, because I think that that just makes everything so much more appealing for kids. This is not a topic that I think most middle grade kids naturally gravitate to. So I wanted it to be as appealing as possible for kids and Workman was on board.

The book is really geared towards kids, I would say, ages about eight to 11. The humor is directed at that age.

One of the first things you do in the book, and that you do throughout the book, is to normalize having big feelings — to ensure that kids understand that everybody freaks out. Can you talk a little bit about why you do that?

In this book, we really wanted to focus on the day-to-day, typical explosions or flip outs — whatever you want to call them — and there's a couple reasons I wanted to normalize them. One is, I think kids at this age are really starting to pay much more attention to their peers. It's the start of this time when questions come up like, “Do I fit in? How do I fit in? Am I different? I don't want to be different.” There’s a lot of anxiety around social stuff — and I don't mean like clinical anxiety, I mean typical anxiety. But also, shame and embarrassment start happening at this age, and all of those feelings and shifts in perceptions can be really painful and really isolating. I think that kids often will look at other kids and have the perception that everyone else is doing fine, and I'm not. And the truth is, some kids are better at fighting or containing their confusion or pain or fear. I think that at this age, it is so normal for kids who are struggling — even within the range of what's sort of typical — to look at other kids and say, “I'm the only one freaking out,” and then that shame and embarrassment can really get in the way of a kid's ability to be curious about their experience, have some compassion for themselves, and ultimately, practice the skills they need to freak out less.

Another thing you do in the book is you help kids understand why they freak out. Can you walk us through this? Why do kids (and adults, for that matter) melt down sometimes?

First, nobody ever teaches kids how to not freak out. It's not really a thing we address and talk about in the world. Social-emotional learning is all so new for kids and adults. For generations and generations, nobody talked about it.

Another reason kids freak out is that they’ve had a lot of practice freaking out. We're always practicing something, whether it's something we want to get better at or not. So my guess is that the kids who are going to end up with this book in front of them are kids who, for whatever reason, have been prone to freak outs, whether it's just their wiring or they're dealing with stress in their family. So the wiring in their brain is getting used to it. “This is how I respond when my buttons get pushed.” So they've literally gotten better at it and it’s become habitual. And that's not their fault.

The other thing I really wanted to acknowledge in the book is that sometimes when we freak out, it actually feels kind of good. Like, generally, it's an unpleasant experience, and often it can either get you in trouble or make it so you can't achieve your goal and get the thing you want. But there are those moments where releasing all that stress and tension out of your body feels kind of good, right? So what I talk about is finding ways to discharge that tension — to get some relief — without freaking out.

The other reason kids freak out is this — and I worked so hard to write this in a not shaming way — but if people in your life are freaking out a lot, if this is what you see in your life — your culture, your teacher, your parents, or someone else in your family — you may be more prone to it.

And then the last point is that this is very quote unquote normal. Parts of our brains are wired to freak out, even though it's not always helpful. This part of our brain developed when most of the threats we faced were physical, like saber-toothed tigers coming at us. The freak out part of our brain hasn't really evolved fully to have a more effective response to [newer] kind of threats that are more social, emotional, and financial.

So freak-outs are normal, and there are good reasons why kids have them. But what if you’re worried that your kid freaks out too much? How can you tell if your kid actually needs professional help?

I talk about this in the book — about taking a mental health day from school and talking to a trusted adult. And I go into a little bit about what a therapist is and how they can help. But what I want to say to parents is that if a parent is noticing a significant change in their kids’ freak outs, either in the frequency or the intensity, and they don't have a sense of why — for example, if it's not the start of a new school year, it’s not that a family member or maybe a pet has died recently, if it’s not due to something like parental divorce — if you can't figure out what is going on, that might be a reason to reach out for further help. And even if you can figure out what is going on, if you as a parent are overwhelmed by your kids’ freak-outs because you're also dealing with the craziness of the fall or the craziness of the holidays or your divorce or your loss, those are reasons to reach out for help.

Also, if your kids’ freak outs are preventing them from being successful in social, academic, or sports situations — like, if your kid is having a hard time making friends, if your kid is getting asked to leave class, if your kid is getting sidelined on the soccer field or not being put up on the stage because of their outbursts — if you are noticing that your kid can't be successful, that's something to talk about. And if you are ever worried about safety issues during your kids’ freak outs, get more support.

Talk to the adults who see them in other settings, too. Because if a kid can hold it together in the classroom, on the sports field, at practice, at Grandma's house, wherever it is, that's a good sign that they have some coping and regulation skills. That doesn't mean that the parent needs to just suffer through their kids’ freak outs at home. The parent might also need more support and information and resources at home. But it's helpful to know if a kid can hold it together in different contexts.

And when parents ask, “who do I go talk to for help?” The two places I would say are either the pediatrician or someone at the school — a teacher, or a counselor, or somebody at the school who could give you a sense of what your options are.

Thanks, that’s really helpful. In your book, you also try to help kids understand the difference between thoughts, feelings and behaviors. I think adults struggle with this too! What can we do to help kids distinguish between these things, and why is it important to do?

So a freak out primarily is about a behavior, and these freak outs happen when our buttons are pushed. And we can't always control the button-pushers in our life. Most of the time we can't. But we can do things that will make our buttons smaller, dimmer, harder to find, less pushable. And in order to do that, we have to back up and understand the difference between thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

One of the things that I think is really important is to teach kids how to make the distinction between a thought and a feeling. And the easiest way I know to do this is to start a sentence with “I feel X.” I feel sad, I feel angry, I feel confused. Those are feelings. But if you are starting a sentence with “I feel like,” that's actually more likely to be a thought. I feel like hitting someone. I feel like I'm going to cry. I feel like I want to run away. When you put that word “like” in there, it actually almost always turns it into a thought.

There are a couple of reasons why this is a really important distinction. One is that we really can't control our feelings. We can do things that are going to influence them — so if I listen to a really sad song or watch a scary movie, that might make it more likely that I feel sad or scared, but we can do all the happy things in the world and still feel sad. So it’s important to understand that a) we can't control our feelings, and b) feelings tend to come and go. We've all heard about emotions being described as waves, that they start out kind of small, and then they get really big, and then sometimes there's a big crash, and then they smooth out. I think that's a really good analogy. With emotions, you're not going to feel this way forever, even if you feel like you might.

Also, feelings really do live in our bodies. And for most folks, we very quickly and almost automatically attach a thought to our feelings, and then we get caught up in the thoughts — but often when we move or soothe our bodies, that can also help soothe or change our emotional state.

Thoughts, on the other hand, are these words in our brain and nobody really knows where they come from. Sometimes we have a sense, but sometimes they come out of nowhere. And thoughts — we often can't control the first thought that pops into our brain, but we can often choose the second thought. And when I say that, people will sometimes think, “Oh, we can just choose to think something else.” And obviously it's not quite that simple, but we can make choices about what to think next. And if that unpleasant thought keeps popping into our head, that's when it can be a great idea to turn on some music, and maybe those lyrics are going to put a different thought in your head, or recite a column or a mantra. There's things we can do to start thinking something else.

The important thing that I want kids to know and notice is that not everything we think is true. And I think this can be really obvious to kids. Like I can sit here and think that I'm the Queen of England all day long, but I'm just not, right? And thoughts can lead to freak outs. Like “everyone hates me,” or “I don't have any friends,” or “I'll never be any good at this,” or “I'm different from everyone else.” Those are the kinds of thoughts that when we have them, we can automatically assume they're true, and we often do, and then that can lead us to a freak out.

What I say to kids — and to everyone— is that every feeling is okay. There's no such thing as a wrong feeling. Some of them are really unpleasant, but none of them are wrong, and they're often generally a match for whatever we're thinking. There’s also no wrong thoughts. There are thoughts that are false, and there are thoughts that are unhelpful, like, if we walk around all day thinking, “I hate everyone, and everyone hates me,” that's going to make life harder, much less pleasant, and will be more likely to freak out. But technically, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just not helpful.

Also, our thoughts and feelings are always happening. We're always feeling things, whether or not we notice it, and we're always thinking things, whether or not we notice it. If we never notice what's going on with our thoughts and feelings, and if we never figure out how to identify what we're thinking or feeling, we're going to end up having freak outs and have no idea what to do about it.

But then thoughts and feelings are different from behaviors. And the way I think about behaviors is: if there was a fly on the wall of your house or a camera in the corner, anything that the fly or camera could see, that's a behavior, and what we most generally can control are our behaviors. That doesn't mean it's easy, that doesn't mean we're going to be perfect at it, but that's the goal. It's all about the behaviors we choose in response to those thoughts and feelings.

Once you start to think about the difference between thoughts, feelings and behaviors and how to manage them, it can really make a big difference.

Okay so here’s a real world example that may or may not sometimes happen with my one of my kids. Maybe you can walk me through how to handle it. So let’s say a kid has the tendency to have anxiety spirals right before bedtime — they’re feeling very anxious, and then they start saying things like, “none of my friends actually like me,” or “everybody's pretending to be my friend, but they're not really my friend.” So there are feelings here, and there are thoughts coming from the feelings. How can we help kids in these situations recognize what’s what and help them calm down?

So that child’s feeling of anxiety is totally reasonable, given what their thoughts are, right? Our feelings and thoughts hang out together. They're, like, besties. And what is going on with one is going to absolutely influence the other. And in that moment, that kid is kind of freaking out.

So, first of all, this is 100% relatable. I have those experiences at night. My kids have those experiences at night. I think every human who has stayed up too late, and is just too tired, has had those experiences.

One of the things I will say to my kids is, “your brain is so exhausted.” And if you want to talk about this in a more science-y way — which I wouldn't recommend doing with your kid at night because they're too tired — you can say, “your prefrontal cortex is done. It's toast. It's shut down for the night. There's there's no accurate, thoughtful, calming down brain functioning happening right now. Your limbic system, which is the freak out part of your brain, is running the show.’” Exhaustion is one of the things that turns our brain into freakout mode. Our buttons are big and bright and everything pushes them. So what I will say to my daughter is, “I totally know you're having these thoughts and feelings and it’s not going to be helpful at all for us to discuss them tonight when your brain is so tired. So we need to figure out how to get you to sleep. And then I promise if all of this is still going on for you in the morning, we will sit down and really dig into it and talk about it.” And I say that because I want my kid to know that I'm taking them seriously, that I'm taking their thoughts seriously, even though in my brain, I'm like, “this is just exhausted brain talk.”

So and then in that moment, what do we do? Because it's not like you can just turn off your brain. So strategies that work for my kids are listening to music, which is essentially just a way of inserting different thoughts into your brain, because then you're ideally thinking about the lyrics. Or doing a little bit of reading at night can be really helpful. And for me — and I'm not saying I recommend this to everyone, but — what I do for myself is I get an extremely long, fairly boring audiobook with a really dull narrator. I literally do this every night of my life, Melinda, otherwise I can't fall asleep, and I turn it on and I set the sleep timer for like half an hour, and I listen to the book, and every time my brain starts to wander into, like, anxiety mode or overthinking, I try to bring myself back to listen to the book, and eventually I fall asleep.

So for a kid in this situation, I wouldn't start talking to them about thoughts and feelings, because, yeah, they’re too tired. I think it's a great conversation to have another time. But in the moment you can say, “your brain is really going but it's a tired brain, not so helpful. How do we calm your brain down, and then we'll talk about all this in the morning?” And nine times out of 10, or maybe 9.9 times out of 10, there's nothing left in the morning to talk about, because their brain has regrouped.

This makes so much sense. So the idea is to help kids in these situations identify some button-reduction practices to help them calm down in the moment. I know in your book you list a number of things kids can try in order to accomplish this.

Yeah. I wanted to communicate to kids and parents that these these skills aren't hard, and they aren't unpleasant. Most of them have to do with calming down your thoughts — moving your feelings through your body, or relaxing your body where your feelings hang out or connecting with other people. I think kids are going to sort of naturally know what seems appealing to them and what doesn't.

My daughter is very much a “I want to squeeze something” type person, so we have a lot of stress balls. She knows exactly when she needs to grab one, and it makes her feel better. Sometimes I feel like sometimes my kids know what calms them down better than I know what calms me down.

Can I tell you? I’ve been a clinician and doing clinical work since I was, like, 21 years old. I'm 47 now. I would say it's the past five years that I've really tried to figure this out. So you are not alone. Just the other day, I did a whole day of radio interviews. And I got off the phone, and I was like, “I have to go for a swim. I have to.” And I was so proud of myself for being like, “I need to get outside. I need to be in water.” And four years ago, I would not have realized that, and my kids would have come home and I would have screamed at them.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

My recommendation for this book is that unless you have a really good sense that your kid is the kind of kid who will want to read this book, don't hand it to your kid. Nobody wants to be handed a self-help book they didn't request. Get the book and then just leave it out. And then if your kid asks about it you can be like, “check it out if you want to read it.” The more you push it on your kid, the less the less likely they're going to want to read it. Or, if you're in a difficult situation and if you feel comfortable doing it, say to your kid, “look, I know we're going through a hard time. This book might be interesting to you, if it's not that cool too.” Taking the pressure off it can sometimes make kids more interested in engaging.

That is such, such a good point. Because I did wonder. I was like, wow, my 10-year-old would really benefit from this book — but how do I give it to her? Because if I'm like, “you should read this,” she's gonna be like, “don't tell me what to do.”

My god. Your daughter is my is my spirit animal.