Calm Comes First: Why Regulation Has to Come Before Reflection and Repair

The High Holidays hand us a built-in rhythm of reflection and repair. But that rhythm falls apart if we skip the step that makes it possible, which is regulation.

Neither children nor adults can access real empathy, reflection, or repair while dysregulated. So the year’s most sacred work actually starts one step earlier than the story we usually tell about it, with getting calm enough to connect.

I want to say the harder version of this too, because I think it is true. We have been underserving our kiddos by improperly scaffolding this season, by taking an approach that is not really child-centered to the things we prioritize offering them. By no means am I saying stop talking about shofars and apples. I am saying that the sequence we hand people is missing its first step.

What has to be in place before a child can reflect or repair

Teshuvah is literally turning back, returning to ourselves, and it is part of the repentance process. Cheyt, which usually gets translated as sin, means missing the mark, and I love that our sages had such a solution-oriented and forgiving mindset in the naming of it. This is a person missing the mark. We are not super irritated with them. They maybe need to stand a little closer, or work on their aim.

So the work is equipping our kiddos with a better bow, and more aim, and more strategy, so that when they hit a moment that feels complicated, they already have a way through it.

And repair is a process with steps. It is not a word we make a child say while everybody watches. Worth naming too that all of this is about repair between people, which our tradition teaches is ours to do; what happens between a person and the divine is its own conversation.

They are not giving you a hard time, they are having one

That line is from a song I wrote for my best friend, who kept getting upset with herself for getting short with her children, and it is still the most useful sentence I know for a hard moment.

We are born with all our feelings and no skills, and no way yet to recognize them or share them until we grow and practice. Even fully grown grownups struggle when we are mad or tired or hungry or anxious or sad.

And language disappears under pressure. When we start to get dysregulated, when the body moves toward fight or flight, blood moves away from the extremities toward the parts of us the body has decided matter most. That is why cold feet feels so literal: under stress, blood really does leave your feet. So the words are the first thing to go, for a four-year-old and for the adult standing over them.

Glitching hour

Dysregulation is cumulative, which is why we call it glitching hour, and it happens in a million different ways that we are not always aware of.

Imagine you are driving and you almost get into an accident. You do not, and within seconds your brain knows you are safe. Your body is somewhere else entirely: sweaty, fragile, heart still pounding. The stress hormones are already out, and it takes real time for your body to come all the way back to baseline.

Which is why a child who was fine on Tuesday comes apart on Thursday over something smaller. Nothing about the moment changed. The pressure underneath it did, and the pressure is the part we can actually do something about, mostly by lowering it before we need to.

We do guilt pretty well. Shame is the problem.

I learned the difference on a hard day in 2022, when I could not get to a synagogue and things at home were heavy. I spent that day with Brené Brown’s work on shame, and it changed how I parent and how I teach.

As Jewish people I feel like we do guilt a lot, and honestly, we do it kind of well, because guilt can be productive. It moves a person toward doing the right thing. Shame is totally destructive, because it makes you think you are not capable of doing the right thing.

And every kid gets that idea at some point, that they are not good inside, or not fully capable, or that the grownups in their life are not confident in them. Every kid thinks that sometimes. So what I want, more than most things, is to do some anti-shame vaccinating of this generation of kiddos, because we know more now so we can do better.

For the people who run the building

Two frames from Dr. Becky Kennedy that I use constantly, and that I think belong in leadership conversations and not only in classrooms.

The first is a child flailing in a pool. You are not angry at the child. You are going to do one of two things. You are going to teach them a skill, which is how to swim, or you are going to change their environment, which is getting them out of the pool. She says that essentially all of raising children comes down to figuring out which one is needed, and I find it an incredibly helpful framework that has carried me through a lot of professional and personal wondering. It is also a much better staff meeting question than most of the ones we ask.

The second is what she calls the most generous interpretation. I do this exercise with clergy when I visit synagogues, because I teach them that they have to stop shushing families. If a kid is poking and poking and poking, we can think, this kid is trying to get attention and it is so irritating. Or we can think, this is a human seeking connection, and I need to recalibrate myself so I can understand this behavior as communication and meet the need underneath it. That is a big difference, and a constructive one.

If your building has a plan for what the children will learn this season, and no plan for how the adults will stay regulated, that is a conversation worth having before the holidays begin.

What this actually looks like on Monday

Regulate proactively. Build in the recovery instead of waiting to firefight.

When I walk into a room of kids I do not start with the content. I sing Hinei Mah Tov as a zipper song, and then I always sing the ABCs, because I want them to feel competent and confident and I want to be able to look them in the eye and honestly say, you sound great, you are doing well. And then we take three slow deep breaths. That sequence takes about four minutes, and only then do I begin.

Spend fewer cognitive calories on compliance. Thinking uses about twenty percent of your calories every single day, and chess players have reportedly burned an extra two thousand calories on a tournament day from their brains alone. Every time we ask someone to do something, and every time we repeat the task, we are spending a little of that, and repeated verbal reminders are not a good use of anybody’s. A song can be the cue for a transition instead, and then the song does the reminding rather than you.

Rehearse the words in calm moments, so that they are available when language goes offline. We can anticipate these scenarios pretty well, because they are the standard problems of early childhood. When you get a boo boo. When you fall down. When your grownup leaves. When somebody takes your toy. You know the things. These are the moments I wrote Big Little Songs for.

Get your own regulation first. With little ones, co-regulation is not reciprocal. If I pass a sad friend on the street, a little of her sad might rub off on me and I am still fine. If I pass a very sad child while I am already a little sad, I might just overwhelm them with mine. So it is our responsibility to arrive regulated. That is step zero, and it is the one that trips people up, because if you do not get it right then everything after it can start to crumble.

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