The past few weeks of parenthood have been a bit of a rollercoaster. During 2020, my son developed a sudden fear of the stairs in our house. He had trouble descending the stairs without help. Since this coincided with our keeping him at home during COVID, we chalked it up to mental health impacts from being kept at home. (Our friends' kids had potty regressions around the same time, so we felt like all kids were understandably struggling with COVID disruptions.) I worked with him to climb and descend the stairs from the bottom, first just 3 steps and back down. Then, 5 steps and back down. Then, 7 steps... etc. until he was able to mostly get down the steps by himself. (Our stairs have 14 consecutive steps, straight up and down without spiraling.) He was still nervous and would hold the handrail with both hands, gingerly taking each step. We figured it was a fear that might ease up over time, as he would need to take the stairs everyday to get out of our townhouse. When we finally sent him back to school (around October 2020), we felt sure that his remaining fear of the stairs would naturally dissipate, but it did not. It lingered, until recently I noticed that he was so scared of letting go of his second hand on the railing, that he could not carry anything down the stairs with him. If he wanted to carry something small, he would throw it down a few steps, onto the middle of the stair well, and then descend half of the stairs with both hands on the rails, and then pick up the object.
When I mentioned to my son that we would begin to practice carrying an object down the stairs, he felt panicked and actually regressed even more. One morning soon after, he was unable to walk down the stairs at all. We had to carry him down the entire set of stairs a couple of times that morning, just to get him to school. (I thought about keeping him home that day from school, but we also did not want to disrupt his routine so much that we created an even bigger problem in the long run.) That day, I called his pediatrician and left a detailed message, but did not actually get in touch with them for a few days (they have a pretty frustrating system of leaving phone messages, no direct line that can go through to a nurse). That day, without having heard from his doctor, I decided to try something new on my own. After doing the same practice of walking up and down the stairs in small chunks, I tried asking him to stand with me on the top step of the stairs (eg. one step down from the very top) and to sing a nursery rhyme with me. I wanted him to sing, because it gives him a somewhat lengthy exposure to being in that scary part of the stairs, while breathing in and out to help him stay somewhat relaxed. (And he loves singing, so it was a good way to distract him.) That first day, we sang three or four times during different parts of the day -- when he came home from school, before nap, after nap, and before bedtime. By the end of the day, he began to be able to sing on the top step while patting his second hand quickly on the hand rail (still holding on to the rail tightly with his first hand). Over the course of the next few days, we would repeat this exercise multiple times a day, and he began to be able to take his second hand farther and farther away, high-fiving me and waving at me and even laughing at my fabricated fart sounds interleaved into the nursery rhymes. We kept doing this exercise, and I could see that my son was feeling more and more relaxed going down the stairs each day. Today, we started practicing singing on that top step while he patted both hands on the hand rail, and he was able to let go of the hand rail completely and give me a double-handed high-five while singing. After singing, he casually walked down the stairs, like himself in pre-COVID times. Tonight, he remembered at bed time that he had forgotten his toy airplane upstairs. I casually asked him to go fetch it himself, and he was at first resistant. But, with a little nudging, he went upstairs to get the airplane and came down the stairs with no issue. I stayed inside his bedroom to wait for him, to show him that I felt confident he could do it without me there to even watch him and cheer him on. Once he came downstairs, I gave him a high-five and felt so proud of this kid for pushing through so many times. What I learned from this experience and from the experience of working with my son on feeding therapy (and from working with my daughter on early-intervention physical therapy to address torticollis) is that our kids' brains are very plastic. They can learn, and more importantly, they can un-learn ways of thinking and being. What feels to them like a huge wall of impossibility can be taken apart, piece by piece. It takes trust and joy to make that happen, and when it does, it is the greatest lesson on growth mindset. It has not been an easy year, but I feel so proud of my son for having made strides in the things that are the hardest for him. (Next steps: we signed him up for a very basic gymnastics class, and my husband plans to take him rock-climbing semi-regularly to help him to work on gross motor skills. They went together for the first time yesterday, and although my husband had to bribe our son with a bunch of gummy bears, my son was able to push through his fears and do some successful climbs at the end -- and enjoyed it! We are also working with his OT on simple daily exercises that we could do at home to improve his balance and comfort on un-even surfaces.) I love this kid to the moon and back, and we feel SO proud of him for trusting us deeply and constantly working with us to push through his self-doubts. I read somewhere that we cannot guarantee our kids a happy life. In fact, it is almost guaranteed that they will have many obstacles that we cannot foresee, and it is our job to teach them perseverance, so that they will be prepared when the time comes. Parenthood is such an amazing journey, and I feel so privileged to already see how my kids are both able to persevere on their own terms.
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About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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July 2021
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