We're all in this freakout together

Carla Naumburg's 'How To Stop Freaking Out' is a funny, down-to-earth survival guide for kids with big feelings

From the author of “How To Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids” and “You Are Not A Sh*tty Parent” comes “How To Stop Freaking Out: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping Cool When Life Feels Chaotic.” I spoke to Carla Naumburg, Ph.D., about how kids and grown-ups freak out, and the mantra I use to avoid losing my sh*t with my kid. And, you can enter to win a free copy of Carla’s book! (Info in footer)

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Tell me the story of this book, and how it came to be: 

One of my other jobs is working for a nonprofit that sends free middle-grade books out to families raising Jewish kids. Part of my job is reviewing potential books. I’ve reviewed a lot of young readers editions and a lot of them really don’t change the voice or make it kid-friendly. So I wanted to do a totally different book with the same basic ideas of “How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t with Your Kids.” It’s the same ideas, but I wanted illustrations and full-color. I don’t like picking up books that are a wall of words unless I’m 100% into the topic. 

Parents think that kids have it so easy, but kids care really deeply about the stuff that happens to them. If you’re lucky, nothing terrible happens to you when you’re a kid, but even just the day-to-day grind of being a kid can lead to some freakouts. 

I was just thinking about how often kids get told what to do. That can’t be fun. 

Last night one of my daughters wanted to stay up late to watch something on TV even though she had a wicked cold, and I had to be like, No, we can’t stay up late. And she was really upset. She was feeling like, No, this is exciting and I want to stay up, I don’t want to go to bed. 

I know that if she stays up late, it’s not going to be a good idea. I have this mental file cabinet of all these options and strategies and past successes and failures and opinions, and kids don’t really have that in the same way. And even if they do have it, they don’t always have access to it, because that requires a functioning prefrontal cortex: the planning, figuring out, and calming down part of your brain. So it just reminds me how hard it can be to be a kid. 

What’s the same and what’s different about freaking out when you’re a kid vs. when you’re a grownup? 

One of the overlaps is in the styles of freakout. It’s basically fight, flight, flip out or fix. I think the core essence is often the same, but the way it presents can be different. Also, the context really matters for both kids and adults. An adult hopefully, but not always, won’t freak out in the same way at work as at home, and I think the same is true for kids. They might be able to hold it together at school and then lose it at home. 

One difference is that most adults have more internal resources. In theory, adults have functioning prefrontal cortexes. This is the part of the brain we rely on to notice what’s coming down the pike. We notice, Oh, I’m about to freak out, and maybe I’m going to use this strategy so that I don’t freak out in this moment. With kids, that can be much harder to do. So I tried to make it accessible to kids and to also normalize the freakouts. Everybody does this; I don’t want people to feel bad or ashamed if they do this. I think for kids, it can be harder to avoid it especially because they might be seeing adults in their life model freakouts. They might be seeing this and just think it’s the way things are. 

I was just about to say, grown-ups don’t have tantrums like toddlers, but actually, they kind of do. It just might not be lying down on the floor kicking and screaming.  

Sure, we see grown-ups freaking out all the time. Like when Will Smith hit Chris Rock, that was a freakout. Will Smith’s buttons were being pushed and he had this very emotionally driven and pretty toxic moment where he went up and hit him. That was totally a freakout. Sometimes it’s more mature than that, but not always. 

What’s something that you wish you had known about freaking out when you were a kid? 

I don’t remember freaking out a lot as a kid. There are some kids who might pick up this book and say, I don’t know what this lady is talking about, because they don’t really freak out either. I tried to make this book in terms of the normal, typical freak-outs, but for some kids, freaking out means they’ll get in trouble or they won’t get what they want, so they don’t do it.

I tried to make the book a mix of giving kids information they need, which is information I wish I had when I was a kid or when my daughters were kids, but also real strategies that they could try. 

I didn’t freak out externally as a kid either, but I still think this book would have been helpful to me. Because I was freaking out on the inside, and I didn’t have the tools to talk about it or understand it. I didn’t understand that it didn’t always have to be like this. 

That’s where my daughter was last night, and I had to be the one who was like, You’re not going to feel this way forever. You’re going to get some sleep and you’re going to get over this cold and you’re going to feel better. 

My go-to phrase is, “We’re going to get through this together.” Or, “We’re all on the same team.”

I love that. Because when you’re thinking, We’re never going to get through this, my child and I will be a complete wreck until the end of time, those thoughts and feelings are juicing up your buttons and making them way bigger, way brighter, way more pushable. And then the next thing that happens, which could literally just be your dog walking into the room, could be enough for you to lose it. 

The alternative to that is saying, We’re going to get through this. And every time you repeat that, you’re calming down your nervous system. 

It doesn’t mean you know how to get through it. It means we will figure it out. And there’s a sense of connection to it. You’re not diminishing their experience, but you’re also injecting some calm and some hope and some connection into it, which makes it a little bit less scary. 

In these high-tension moments, it’s often not easy to come up with the right words. I just picture our prefrontal cortex kind of struggling to stay in control and our limbic system being like, Wheee! Because the thinking part of our brain is barely functioning. So to have something ready-made that you can say, like “we’re all on the same team” or “we’re going to get through this,” is really brilliant, because you don’t have to search for the words. 

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Thank you to Carla for speaking to be about this fun, excellent book (and for calling my favorite parenting catch phrase brilliant, I will take that all the way to the bank!!). You can find “How To Stop Freaking Out” wherever books are sold, and you can connect with Carla and find her social channels at carlanaumburg.com. To enter to win a free copy of Carla’s latest book, just leave a comment below about an epic freakout you remember from your kids’ childhood or your own childhood. One winner will be chosen and notified via email on Oct. 12, 2024.