Social-Emotional Learning & Development: Helping Your Gifted Child Develop and Use Distress Tolerance Skills

Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog. This is the fifth article in our series on Social-Emotional Learning & Development: Why SEL is Essential Education Today. I’m Dr. Ann Weller, owner of Plumtree Psychology, in St. Charles, Illinois, a clinical psychology practice that provides academic and clinical testing and therapy. In this blog, I will share how to help your child develop and use distress tolerance skills.

Tolerating distress is a life skill. In fact, this may be one of the most important areas you can focus on as a parent. Intellectually gifted children are more likely to experience clinically-significant emotional and behavioral problems. Recent research has shown that one in five students at Ivy League schools self-injure. It doesn’t start in college. I’ve worked with high-IQ kids as young as three years old who already bear the burden of undue stress. Distress tolerance skills help a child cope with a challenge without making things worse. While these skills often have the effect of helping a child feel better, the true goal of these skills is to reduce and prevent maladaptive behaviors, meltdowns, blow ups, outbursts, saying or doing hurtful things, sabotaging their work, damaging things around them, yelling, screaming, hitting. These behaviors create a set of additional problems beyond the original triggering event that make a child’s life harder in the short term, and maybe even in the long term.

Distress is a physically and cognitively intense experience. It’s not something a person can be talked out of, usually. So we start with skills that go right to the body. Here are three body skills:

1. Intense exercise is great. Just a few minutes of basic but vigorous movement. Here’s a series for kids: five jumping jacks, five sit ups, five push ups, a five-second plank and five deep breaths. Repeat five times.

2. Deep intentional breathing slows the heart and lowers blood pressure. Kids usually like a skill called color breathing. Imagine a soothing color and breathe it in. Feel it with every breath. Feel more and more of your body, until your body is relaxed. You might even picture exhaling an ugly, stressful color.

3. Noodle body is a kid-specific muscle relaxation strategy. Think of spaghetti noodles before they’re cooked — they’re stiff. Make your body like that — every muscle is tight. Now think of a cooked noodle. Make your body floppy like a cooked noodle. Repeat raw to cooked noodle, five times.

Distress tolerance skills also can be used in the mind. Here are three mind skills:

1. Take a mental vacation; no less than a minute, no longer than an hour. Do something you enjoy. Read a book, ride a bike, make cookies, call a friend. Do something that keeps your mind and body distracted, and then return from vacation and back to task when you’re calm.

2. I love the skill of imagination. Gifted kids have imagination in spades. But when upset, it’s often because they’ve used their imagination to envision things going horribly wrong. They look at the present and predict the future and think of all the bad stuff. Instead, use imagination to picture things going well. Envision successfully completing homework. Imagine feeling happy at school. See yourself being good at something. The key to imagination is to use all five senses. What will it look like, sound like and feel like when things are going well? Make that happen in your body.

3. Self-talk. We talk to ourselves all the time. When things are going badly, it’s almost always because our thoughts have gotten us into a bad state. So use deliberate, positive self-talk. These are short statements like, “I can’t do it…yet.” This statement implies that skill and learning is a process, and eventually it will work. Another sentence is, “This is difficult, and I can keep trying.” Or, “I’ve done hard things before, I can do this, too.”

These six evidence-based tried and true skills I’ve just explained, will be totally useless to you as parents unless you do them correctly. So here’s how to set it up:

1. Skills have to be taught and practiced before the child gets upset. So consider a social skills lesson. Take five minutes at dinner and practice.

2. Teach no more than one to two skills a week. Have your child become an expert in them.

3. You have to coach the skills effectively. Directing a child when they’re upset to use a skill won’t work. They’ll resist. So instead set it up. Here’s an example: “Chloe, we’re going to start math now. I predict that there will be at least one time when things get hard. Let’s think of the skill that you’ll use when things get hard.” The child picks the skill. Write it down, put it on the desk. Then when they start to get upset — point kindly to the skill — join your child in doing this skill. Don’t talk a lot. Just do the skill. Take your breath, say your self-statement. When the skill is used, reward your child for that. This is an immensely successful, amazing thing they just did — way better than actually finishing the math problem. They calmed their body and stayed in control. Your six-year-old just learned what many Ivy League college kids cannot do. Stop the presses! Make a big deal about this!

4. Distress tolerance skills are to be used over and over; use them one after the other all in one session. Keep going until the child is calm.

Thank you for reading this article on social-emotional learning. We hope that Vanguard Gifted Academy’s Education blog will continue to be a valuable resource for you. If you have any comments or questions about what we discussed today, please visit Vanguard’s website at vanguardgiftedacademy.org or call Vanguard at (224) 213-0087.