I’m not normally one for metaphors, but this one rang a discordant bell with me.
Have you ever heard of spoon theory? Here’s a short summary for those who haven’t: Every morning when you wake up you have a number of spoons in the drawer that you can use. The number varies from person to person. Some have a lot, others very few, but every morning you wake with some. Every activity and interaction you have uses a spoon, once dirty it can’t be used again until you clean it. The more you have to do, the more interactions you have, and the more intensive those interactions, the more spoons you need to use. If you are lucky enough to have a lot of spoons, then this is not an issue. If, like most fae children (and people with depression or anxiety and a plethora of other conditions) you don’t have a lot of spoons, you find that you run out by mid-morning or lunchtime at the latest.
At this point, you can shut yourself away and rest (wash the damn spoons so you can use them again) or ‘borrow’ spoons from tomorrow’s drawer to get you through – the downside being that you will then have less spoons for the following day.
For a lot of people, stopping and taking time in the middle of the day to ‘wash the spoons’ is simply not an option, so we blithely borrow from the tempting “tomorrow drawer” until we can stop.
For children, school is basically 5-6 hours of unrelenting intensive interactions. We hope they are mostly good, but realistically everyone has bad days. By the time they come home, often they have burnt through all their spoons for the day, and maybe even a fair proportion for the following days. They are done with being able to cope with the mountain of unclean spoons they are buried under, and collapse. We see this as a meltdown and outburst of anger because, from our perspective, we asked for something trivial like ‘take your shoes off’. For our child, this is one spoon too many, and they are done. They don’t mean to make us tear our hair out, but from their perspective, people have been demanding one thing after another from them for hours.
Is there a solution? Honestly.. Not really, but you might be able to recognise the signs and mitigate the symptoms. First off, reduce the number of spoons they need and, where possible, put off anything for the first hour after they come home. We are fortunate to be able to provide our daughter a bedroom and a playroom/sensory room. I recognise that this is not normal, and some children don’t even have their own bedroom, but try to find some space where they can go when they first come home and be left in peace. Even if it’s just a pop-up tent.
Research has shown that tablets are helpful in supporting the development of neuro-divergent children. Our fae loves Khan Academy Kids and Duo ABC. So when she comes home, before anything is demanded, she is offered the chance to curl up for a bit with her tablet to ‘play’.
Even if it’s just a “soft corner” in a room with a stack of pillows and blankets, so long as there is no background noise, or demands made, it will give your child a chance to regroup and ‘wash some spoons’.
If at all possible, give your child simple choices: do they want to get changed now or in 5 minutes? (If later, set a timer they can see that will let them know when time is up). Don’t take it personally if they don’t want to talk to you: let them come on their terms.
Recognise that trying to discipline the behaviour, or sanctioning it, is going to get you nowhere: they are not being naughty, they simply can’t cope. Something I think we can all relate to from time to time: I would have written this up earlier, but I didn’t have the spoons.
Raising the Modern Fae 