The Parenting Reset: How Grounding Helped Me Reconnect With My Kids (and Myself)
Feeling Burnt Out? Try This Simple Practice for Presence and Self-Discipline
These last couple of days have been strange.
My mother-in-law picked up our kids to take them with her. It has been a pretty exhausting week, and she came at the right time to offer help. Not because our kids were too much or anything like that — they are the best kids one could ask for — but because the week itself came with a lot of mental weight, and I was not fully in a position to be as present as I would have wanted to.
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She picked them up on Tuesday, and we got them back on Friday. That gave me three days to return closer to my baseline: to sleep longer, to have date nights. Damn, I missed them, but I knew my batteries needed to recharge.
I had it all. It was lovely and it helped me to keep bonding with my wife, sleep more, and have time to actually stop for a moment. I’m really grateful to my wife’s mom for that.
The truth is, I’m still exhausted.
You read my previous reflection. I’m trying to scale down. That takes time.
The thing is, I was outside playing with my kids and did a small exercise to try to stay present: I sat on the grass and started naming the things we saw together. I framed it as a game, but it really helped me stay close to them: just minutes earlier, my drifting brain was divided amongst priorities, while my oldest was scoring hard “in the World Cup” and expecting me to narrate all the goals.
The exercise helped. At least at the moment, it let me ask them questions, listen to them attentively, and actually think about the current moment rather than a moment in the future.
It didn’t last long — my thoughts kept drifting — but I’m working on minimizing that.
So what is this practice?
In the beginnings of my parental journey, one of the challenges that we had as new parents, was the tantrums. Each kid has their own version, and you have to learn to understand them, learn how to navigate, and help support and guide your kid when that happens.
It’s easy to think that giving in, trying to guide your kid in the moment, or ignoring the tantrum altogether will bring decent results. The truth is, it doesn’t work that way.
So what do you usually do? You help with co-regulating (essentially, guiding them through the self-regulation process), you help them understand what they are feeling (rather than invalidate), and then you teach.
Boy, that took me a while to learn myself. As an anxious person, my tendency was to try to educate in the moment, and that only made things worse.
So my goal was to learn how to calm myself when that happened, so I could actually help my kids by running the right process, and also help them regulate. Looking back, I’d say it’s worked better than expected.
Now, during this whole education process — if you want to call it that, though it was mostly trial and error — I came across a practice used during moments of high anxiety. Cha-ching! Magic words right there.
There’s a practice called environmental scanning. Now, I think that’s within the category of mental grounding, but we’re not going to get into Taxonomy Land here. The idea is simple: scan the room, and name the objects you see and their properties.
There are plenty of variants, like the 5-4-3-2-1 method, Rainbow Hunt, Color Scanning, but we’ll keep it simple here — as I did today.
As I mentioned before, what I did was pretty simple. Sat down with my kids, invited them to lie down on the grass in our front yard, and asked them to look around with me and name what they saw and the colors.
All the thoughts I had in my head went poof! At least for that moment. It was ephemeral, but I could enjoy actually being there with my kids.
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Why does this work?
These techniques of mental grounding are useful because they act like a reset button for the brain.
If you are stuck in a worry or overthinking loop, or in a panic attack, it’s a perfect tool to shift your focus away from that. It’s simple and direct. That’s why it also helps with tantrums, for the most part.
I knew it worked because I tried it with my kids before, during tantrum time:
what is the color of this pillow? — I show my kid a white pillow — I think it’s blue.
Noo, it’s white, papa. — my oldest, calming himself down a little
Oh really? I think you may be right.
And what color is that blanket?
It’s gray!! — smiling
Helps a lot to redirect the attention and break the tantrum, worry, and overthinking loops.
It helped me for sure.
When we are in these cycles, it’s typically because our emotional brain is running the show. We get overloaded — like we talked about last week — and then the shift moves from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala.
When you ask something simple like
what color is this pillow?
you’re not doing it because you want to know what color the pillow is, but because you are giving the brain a small, reachable task. This takes attention away from the thoughts — the concern, the anxiety, the tantrum — it activates language and perception, and brings back control through one simple success.
It temporarily separates emotion from you.
There’s actually research on something called affect labeling, which is basically putting feelings or emotional cues into words. Studies have found that labeling emotions can reduce amygdala activity and engage prefrontal regions involved in regulation.
Naturally, naming a color is pretty different from naming an emotion, but they work in similar ways. In the case of the kid having a tantrum — just to stay in the same example — the kid moves from “I don’t like papa” to “I see something blue,” and that tiny shift is sufficient to return.
This connects directly with my philosophy, because these grounding techniques become a tool that, in moments of dysregulation — moments of drift — can help us take the first step back into action, to begin our return.
In our next paid companion, we will navigate through practice, on how to integrate grounding as part of the return loop.
Until then, remember, when you are dysregulated, try to name a color you see or objects that surround you. You’ll see how much it will help you go back to your baseline.
Have a wonderful week!
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