The day is going fine. Then, you hear a stomp or perhaps a door slam. A questioning conversation quickly escalates and before you know it, you’re in a full-blown crisis with your child who experiences mental or behavioral health challenges.

Here are five things to remember while a child is in crisis.

A young person displaying a strong emotional reaction, likely in the midst of a crisis, with disheveled hair and an open mouth suggesting shouting or intense communication.
  1. Behavior is communication. The situation you’ve now found yourself in escalated from something. Real or perceived, something caused your child to spin up into a whirlwind. Their behavior is communicating a need or fear that their brain can’t process. If you can crack the code, de-escalation is possible before things get trickier. To reach the root cause, you may have to ignore behavior or harsh words. It’s a worthy sacrifice for peace. You can always address those when balance is restored.
  2. Enact your safety plan. To enact a plan, you have to have one prepared before the spin up happens. Safety plans come in many forms, but they’re written in advance to reduce the number of decisions that need to happen during a mental/behavioral health crisis. It also includes plans to keep others, such as siblings or pets, safe during the crisis.
  3. Protect vulnerable parties. If you don’t have a safety plan, while the spin up is in the early stages, take steps to protect vulnerable parties in your home. Put pets behind a closed/locked door. Designate one parent to take other siblings to a room away from the conflict (lock the door) or to a neighbors house. An iPad and a loud movie can cover a lot of conflict coming from a different part of the house.
  4. Give space, remove threats. As the crisis continues, do two things concurrently. First, give the child space to feel their feelings. This is the time to stop talking (that’s super hard, yes) and ignore behaviors that aren’t essential to immediate safety (even harder, but they can be dealt with later). At the same time, this is a time to subtlety remove objects that can be thrown, swung or used as weapons.
  5. Know your red line. There’s a point in this situation where things are beyond your ability to support. It does not mean you’ve failed. It means the situation has reached the point at which there is real danger of self-harm for the child, harm to others in the home or severe property damage. You can’t de-escalate alone safely after that point. This is when you must call for help either through the child’s care team, a mobile crisis unit or by calling 911.

In a future post, we’ll discuss more about discovering your red line and things you absolutely should not do in a crisis.