July 2024
Mending Mishaps
Hours before our week-long family vacation at the Jersey shore I got a call from my 4-year-old son's school. He fell at the park and he needs medical care. I rushed to meet my wife and son at Urgent Care, where I found my typically stoic child with a bandage around his leg, blood slowly seeping through. In his mild-mannered way, he explained that he had been running at the park when he fell and scraped his leg on a stick. When the nurse removed the school-applied bandage, I saw muscle glistening through the the wide, deep gash on his left shin and knew he’d need stitches immediately.
After numbing the area, they gave us the option to either strap him to a board, the "burrito" method, or hold him ourselves. We chose to hold him. The next 15 minutes felt like 150 as my son endured the most intense pain of his young life, and I faced one of the toughest moments of my short-lived dad life. My typically stone-faced kid, who gets compliments for being "the calmest kid I've ever met" by barbers, dentists, and doctors, had veins popping out of his neck as he screamed at the top of his lungs for the procedure to stop. In a reverse bear hug, the nurse and I held his leg while he pushed the phone my wife was holding away from his face, compelled to watch each stitch and the removal of tissue from his shin.
Ten stitches later, with instructions to avoid sand and water for the duration of our vacation, my son was back to his imaginative self, talking about tying houses to planes to bring them to theme parks as we drove home.
While things seemed to be back to normal, my mind was reeling. How traumatic was this for him? What could I have done differently? What can I do now to help him from a psychological standpoint?
My wife, a psychologist, and I discussed these questions, and the answers warrant a deeper dive in a future article. For now, here are some general strategies we use and recommend for caregivers of kids undergoing any medical procedure.
Strategies for Caregivers of Kids Undergoing Medical Procedures
Beforehand
Explain what's going to happen. Avoid any surprises and use age-appropriate language.
Provide an explanation, with a focus on the positive. Emphasize why it's happening and the end goal. For example, we highlighted the fact that the stitches are going to help bring the skin together to close the cut so his leg can heal.
Encourage questions. Find out what they're thinking and answer the questions honestly.
Address fears. Acknowledge their worries and validate their feelings. Let them know it's okay to be scared, but that you'll be there to support them.
Offer choices to give them autonomy over the situation. Let them choose a comfort item (stuffed animal, blanket), the song or show to play during the procedure, and allow them to talk to the medical staff and give input. ("Can we wait one more minute?" "Okay, let's do it.")
Role-play: Role-play the procedure beforehand, letting them be the doctor or patient.
During
Mirror and guide. They will be looking for you to meter the situation so stay strong but not unrealistically overly positive. You need to recognize their emotions and stay somewhere between where they are and where you want to be but not too much to one side.
Keep it evolutionarily fundamental. In moments of fear, our minds shift to a fight-or-flight mode, making it difficult to process words and complex ideas. Instead, we rely on basic instincts and cues. Here are some effective strategies to support your child:
Physical Touch: Hug them, hold them, squeeze their hand, or whatever physical contact makes them feel secure.
Maintain Eye Contact: Keep steady, calm eye contact to convey safety and confidence.
Use Simple, Reassuring Phrases: Repeat short, soothing phrases to help your child stay focused and calm.
Validate their feelings. Acknowledge their pain and fear without minimizing them. ("It looks like it hurts, you're doing so well!" and not "Don't be sad." or "It's okay.")
Don't interrupt the medical team unless necessary.
Afterwards
Have open communication: Talk openly about the experience and answer any questions they have.
Positive reinforcement and positive reframing: Praise their bravery and resilience during the procedure. I spoke a lot about the importance of having to go through difficult situations to become mentally stronger and more resilient. My son said he got "20 resilient points" during it and we regularly compared his capabilities to his favorite Paw Partollers.
Normalization: Reassure them that stitches are a common procedure and many people go through it. We welcomed my son to "The Stitches Club" where many of his friends and family members were members and eager to talk about their exploits.
Get them back on the horse: They'll likely have a natural adverse reaction or a hesitancy to immediately going back to whatever they were doing at the time of the injury. Knowing your child's personality, find ways to help overcome any resistance such as through visualization, gradual exposure, or under reacting and normalizing the situation when they do eventually go back to it. My son, for example, fell down a day after getting his stitches, in a seemingly similar way to the way he fell when he originally cut himself. His face showed it all. We slowed down our steps to help him up, encouraged him to check his body for harm, let him get up, then gave positive reinforcement for the next thing he did (not the getting up).
Above all, focus on their needs and find ways to support them.
Got any tips of your own? Put them in the comment section.
Brian
Stuff of the Month
Mind
The Productivity Guide: Using the Environment to Make the Most Out of Your Workday
How To Prevent Cognitive Decline After Middle Age: A Science-Based Approach
Body
Dad
The Growth Kit (Podcast)
Find the full list of episodes here. Follow The Growth Kit on Instagram. Subscribe to your favorite podcast player (Spotify, Apple). And please leave a review!
From One Year Ago
Best Of The Month
Here are some of my favorite things of the month.
Quote
"Don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would,
but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will--then your life will flow well."
-Epictetus
Podcast
Boredom in the Age of Information Overload by The Pulse
“On this episode, we look at boredom in the age of information overload, and whether or not it's really good for us and our brains. We hear stories about what happened when two reporters quit their digital addictions for four weeks, a monk who took his search for boredom to the ultimate extreme, and why there's value to the slow pace of baseball.”
Book
Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar by Jessie Inchauspé
She came to fame as the Glucose Godess, then biomechanist Jessie Inchauspé turned her evidence-based insights into a book. I listend to the audio version then bought the hard copy because it was so go practical and powerful. She shares ten simple hacks, including eating foods in a specific order and incorporating secret ingredients, to balance glucose levels and alleviate symptoms like cravings, fatigue, and hormonal issues, ultimately promoting better health without restrictive diets.
Product
I recently took a nutrition coach certification course through the Food Matters Institute called the Food Matters Nutrition Certification Program. What I liked was that it was self-paced, dove way deeper than a standard “eat this, not that” course, and provided input from a wide variety of respected experts in the field.
There are 10 modules (with multiple lessons under each) which include topics of nutrition in the 21st century, nutrition fundamentals, detoxification, healing your gut naturally, balancing hormones, managing chronic disease and cancer, and more.
If you’re interested in nutrition, I highly recommend this course.
Things I’ve Learned
Mind
Career Advice Ryan Holiday Wish He Knew Earlier
Here are 4 of the 37:
When you’re lacking motivation, remind yourself: discipline now, freedom later. The labor will pass, and the rewards will last.
All success is a lagging indicator… all the good stuff (and bad stuff) is downstream from choices made long before.
Focus on effort, not outcomes. Just try to make contact with the ball. Give your best effort, make contact with the ball. Let the rest take care of itself.
A friend of mine just left a very important job that a lot of people would kill for. When he left I said, “If you can’t walk away, then you don’t have the job…the job has you.”
Cognitive Biases
Is it Technically an “Addiction” to your Phone?
The Guardian breaks it down:
"In its simplest form, addiction is the tipping point at which compulsion turns into dependency, when a person’s behavior or drug use spirals out of control despite harmful consequences. Think having the occasional glass of wine versus repeatedly showing up to work hungover.
With no standard diagnostic criteria, the line between excessive phone use and addiction is blurry. Nevertheless, researchers have been exploring this question for the past two decades, and a recent summary of all the best scientific evidence – 82 studies across 150,000 participants – estimated that over 25% of people worldwide had “smartphone addiction”.
Body
Running Boosts Immunity & 9 More Evidence-Based Benefits
Rule of Thumb: No Alcohol Within 3 Hours of Sleep for Better Rest
Physiologically Speaking broke down a study on alcohol and sleep. What he recommends based on the findings:
“In this study, the participants’ pre-sleep breath alcohol levels were between 0.038 and 0.087 (the average was 0.066 or just below the legal limit) and they finished their last drink around 1 hour before bedtime. This is way too close for comfort if you want to avoid alcohol’s effects on sleep. Don’t go to bed with alcohol in your system.
I think a minimum of 3 hours seems prudent. One alcoholic drink takes about an hour to metabolize and leave your system. So 3 drinks would require about 3 hours to metabolize, more or less. This is why I advocate day drinking (kidding, folks).”
New Approaches to Exercise for those with Cardiac Concerns
Dad
Funny Marriage Advice
An excerpt from an article written by Trudi Roth at Further:
Q: What’s the secret to a happy marriage?
A: Find a partner who can cook and clean. Someone who’s an animal in bed. An individual with lots of money. And then make sure these three never meet.
Nope, this isn’t an intro to a piece about the uber-trendy topics of polyamory and consensual non-monogamy. But it is about a serious subject: how do you keep your relationship thriving until death do you part (without killing each other)?
Perhaps ancient wisdom holds the answer — here’s what Socrates said:
By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
Hmmm… maybe some advice that’s a little less… chauvinistic? Benjamin Franklin’s works both ways:
Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
Then again, perhaps a more contemporary sage, Will Ferrell, nails it:
Before you marry a person you should first make them use a computer with slow internet to see who they really are.
If you cracked a smile, then you’re onto something. A little humor goes a long way in keeping the matrimonial bonds strong enough for the long haul.
More Screens, Less Outdoor Play
Alarming but not surprising. What will it take to reverse the trend?
Be Less Serious
Sometimes Often I’m too serious (as my wife can attest to) and I’ve noticed that I’ve become more serious as I’ve gotten older. This beautiful essay, The Case for Being Less Serious, is a good reminder to live life more like a child. Here’s an excerpt:
The child is the opposite of most adults. She is not lost in some story about what her life is or what it needs to be. She’s simply living, fully present with the seemingly infinite novelty, joy, and pain that exist when you’re experiencing the world for the first time.
If there is any takeaway from this essay, it’s that you can (and may benefit from) seeing the world more like the child. Instead of being engrossed in the incessant dialogue of the adult mind, try to see the world with fresh eyes. Even if you can do it only once a week, that’s better than nothing.
The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.”