Daily Archives: November 17, 2017

You can imagine that with eight children it was often noisy and stressful at our house.  None of my children were quiet, laid back people and they learned to talk louder than the other person in the family talking in hopes that they would be heard above the crowd. Often when I would be dealing with one child I would have 2-4 other children trying to talk to me at the same time.  I did try to explain many times to them the concept of waiting for their turn to talk to me, of how it actually took longer to help their brother of sister because they were talking to me too and so they ended up waiting longer, and just the politeness not talking to others until they were finished with what they were doing.  That being said, my children always thought that what they needed or wanted to talk to me about was more important than what their brother or sister could possibly have wanted to talk about (gratefully they have grown out of that illusion).  Even though it got better when they became adults, we’re still a noisy group.  Often it was very stressful in trying to handle the needs of so many people and some serious problems but I learned a technique that helped me in those situations and in other hard to handle things.  I would stop and ask myself in the midst of the problem if I was doing the best I could.  If the answer was yes then somehow just stopping to take the mental check helped me to de-escalate and I was able to handle the situation much more calmly.  If the answer was no, and I always knew instantly if I was doing the best I could, then I would take a deep breath and think about what I could do differently to regroup and then go forward, and the amazing thing is this only took a few seconds to do.  Sometimes I needed to apologize and sometimes I needed to get rid of the extraneous distractions to focus better on the problem. Sometimes there was no immediate solution but I was able to handle it better because of my little stop/check technique.