The Baffling Behavior Show {Parenting after Trauma}
Formerly the Parenting after Trauma podcast, internationally recognized children's mental health expert Robyn Gobbel decodes the most baffling behaviors for parents of kids with vulnerable nervous systems. If you're parenting a child who has experienced trauma or toxic stress or a child with a neuroimmune disorder, sensory processing, or other nervous system vulnerability, this show will let you know you are not alone. You can stop playing behavior whack-a-mole because Robyn offers you tools that actually work.
You can become your child's expert, feel more confident as a parent, and bring more connection and clarity into your family.
Educators, therapists, coaches and consultants- you too can learn all about what behavior really is and become more effective at helping the families you support. You can love your work again!
Episodes
388 episodes
EP 287: How to scaffold "accepting no"
Does hearing “no” or “not right now” or “stop doing…” seem to bring your child’s back-off watchdog or shut-down possum out? Or even worse??Almost every family I’ve ever worked with has had some sort of struggle with their child toleratin...
EP 286: A Checklist for BEING, not doing
I know how intensely we want a checklist. Do this, this, and this, and the dysregulation will end, and your kid will be OK. This episode is the story of chasing exactly that list (Dr. Sears' Attachment Parenting checklist that I worked to check...
EP 285: Triggers & Beliefs Only Parenting Seems to Activate
Sometimes it’s the little moments that overwhelm us more than the big, scary ones. The "whatever" muttered under their breath, the stash of snack wrappers under the bed, or they flatly deny something you're 99% sure they did. Sure, these things...
EP 284: Wherever You Are is Exactly Right (me too)
I know you are working so, so, so hard to hold onto your owl brain.Maybe you're at the stage where you don't even notice you've flipped your lid until hours later. Maybe you're at the stage where you can see it happening and ...
EP 283: What if I'm too burned out to do any of these things?
Almost always when I’m teaching or presenting, a parent is finally brave enough to ask: “What if I'm too burned out to do any of this?” And then at least half the other parents in the room look expectantly at me because the...
EP 282: Parents & Practitioners Need the Same Thing- and it's not more tools
You've called every therapist in town and heard the same thing back: not taking new clients. Or you're the one on the other end of that call, staring at a kid whose behavior you can't make sense of, wondering if you're just not cut out for this...
EP 281: What I Wanted Every Kid in My Office to Know
My guiding north star when I was a therapist working with kids (and grown-ups) was always helping them not just get to know their brain and how it works, but actually to develop a relationship with the parts of themselves that seemed to always ...
EP 280: Either You Co-Regulate or You De-Escalate: An Interview with Chrissy D’Agostino
You've probably heard "a dysregulated adult can't co-regulate a child" a hundred times. But if you've ever been stuck in a store with a screaming kid — or a classroom with 17 screaming kids — and zero bandwidth left, you know how useless that a...
EP 279: Is There a Behavior Intervention Flowchart??
You want the flowchart. Of course you do! If X, then Y would be something to follow when there's no bandwidth left to think it through in the moment. But there isn't a flowchart, and this episode gets into why: stress capacity shifts by the hou...
EP 278: So Many Services! How to Prioritize?
OT on Tuesday, a speech eval callback on Wednesday, play therapy on Thursday, a school meeting on Friday that's really just another appointment in disguise. When the calendar starts looking like a second job, the question that actually matters ...
Ep 277: This Kind of Shame Doesn't Heal Alone: A Parent Guest
So many struggling and overwhelmed parents feel like their biggest problems are their kids' behaviors and the chaos that's taking over their family. This week's guest, a longtime Club member, talks about how she slowly came to realize that what...
EP 276: Cues of Safety: How to Help when Nothing is Ever Right
Every morning (or afternoon or evening) feels like just one long stream of complaints. Breakfast isn’t right, the bowl isn’t right, SOMETHING is always not right, and no matter what gets fixed, it’s never right enough.^That perfectly des...
EP 275: Does Lowering Demands Ever Cause More Stress?
Screens. Sugar. Anything that feels really good. The advice to just "lower the demand" can fall really short because for some kids, more access brings real relief. But for others, more access actually causes more stress and we wind up asking ki...
EP 274: The Only Three Things You Actually Need to Remember
Every behavior. Every parenting moment that feels impossible. It all comes back to three sentences — the three core tenets that distill how relational neuroscience makes sense of behavior and give us a roadmap toward change.This episode ...
EP 273: What this Framework Asks of Helpers
You know that kid who just can't stay in the therapy room? They leave, wander around, get into things that aren't theirs, or are maybe even destructive? And three therapists have already called it quits.Maybe this describes your kid. May...
EP 272: Where Do I Even Start? A Brand New Listener's Roadmap
When life is overwhelming and your kid's behavior makes no sense — and feels like it's getting worse — even the best resources get hard to use. You're too dysregulated to sort through 270 episodes or an almost 300-page book to figure out where ...
EP 271: 4 Functions of Behavior, FBAs, and a Nervous System Approach
For years, "the four functions of behavior" has been the go-to framework for understanding why kids do what they do: attention, escape, access to tangibles, sensory. It's not wrong, but it's not the whole story either. In this episode, we dig i...
EP 270: What is Your Kid's Nervous System Predicting? (Part 3 of 3)
We've been in a three-part series on sticky behaviors (behaviors that don’t seem to change, no matter WHAT you do!), and today we're doing the detective work: what is your specific child's nervous system actually predicting? In T...
EP 269: What Actually Changes Sticky Behaviors (Part 2 of 3)
Part 1 was about why sticky behaviors stay stuck. Part 2 is where the hope lives. We're diving into the two mechanisms that actually change sticky behaviors at the neurological level. This is the episode that makes the hardest ask of Part - shi...
EP 268: Why Sticky Behaviors Stay Stuck (Part 1 of 3)
If you've tried everything and a behavior just won't stop…that's a sticky behavior. Let's dive deeeeeep into the neuroscience behind the behaviors that feel impossible to change. We'll touch on how the brain stores predictions and how the most ...
Ep. 267: Boredom Triggers Dysregulation
When kids can't tolerate boredom, it's easy to forget to put on our X-ray vision goggles and chalk it up to too much screen time or even not enough gratitude. Our kids’ reaction to boredom triggers OUR watchdog brain! If we can invite our owl t...
EP 266: When Things Are Genuinely Impossible: One Dad’s Story
A dad - who is also a former foster youth and the director of non-profit supporting foster and adoptive families - shares an honest and tender conversation about what it's actually like to parent kids with big, baffling behaviors when life is a...
EP 265: Nothing Changed & Everything Changed - A mom interview
A single mom who adopted boy-girl twins through foster care shares about her slow, almost invisible journey from survival mode to genuinely delighting in her now-13-year-old kids. Nothing shifted in one big moment. Yet somehow, everything...
EP 264: Responding to the Judgement and Advice from Others
Parenting kids with big, baffling behaviors is hard enough. THEN someone has opinions about it. This episode breaks down why people say the things they say, what's actually happening in you when judgment lands, and how to respond- or n...
EP 263: The Framework That Works on Everyone in the Room
Whether you're supporting a dysregulated eight-year-old, a parent who's convinced nothing is working, or the version of yourself driving home after a really hard week, the science is exactly the same. Let’s look at how the theory under...