Window of Tolerance and Parenting

Hello everyone!

Today I want to dive into a little something called the “window of tolerance”. Perhaps you have heard of it before or maybe not. As a psychotherapist I often use this term to help teach my clients when talking about stress and regulation. Working with parents to support their children through big feelings, we often discuss this as well.

Regulation .. a term that’s often thrown around and seems so simple … “just take a deep breath”. Self regulation is not simple guys, it’s really hard and takes years of practice! Having a dysregulated nervous system can look like, anxiety or depression or whatever you might be experiencing to help cope with being dysregulated. For our children who are dysregulated we might see, meltdowns, frequent wake ups at night, refusing to go to bed and so on. Although perhaps not the most adaptive, our kids are trying to find ways to help cope with the stress they are experiencing in their body. When it comes to parenting we often think about teaching our kids how to become regulated, but that has to start with ensuring that we ourselves are regulated. Parenting itself is dysregulating and we have to work every day to ensure that our nervous system is regulated, so we can properly parent our littles.

So .. “window of tolerance” .. what is this? We are all born with a window of tolerance or the space we have in ourselves to hold and cope with stress. Some of us are born with a really big window and some of us are born with a really small window, and everything in between. When thinking about babies .. those with a big window are those babies who you would describe as quite calm, those who are content and happy to lie on the floor and watch the world go by, who go to sleep easy, perhaps even put themselves to sleep. For these babies, it takes quite a bit of stress to get bumped outside of their window of tolerance where their nervous system will become dysregulated - meaning they typically cry less and are pretty laid back. For those with a really small window, it only takes a small amount of stimuli to push them outside of that window, making their nervous system dysregulated more often and easier. These babies who have a small window of tolerance are typically highly sensitive babies who typically cry more often and need more support.

We are all born with a certain window of tolerance based on genetics and then as we go through life, that window is affected. Depending on what happens in our life .. perhaps we experience trauma as a child, then we grow up and school is difficult, making friends is hard, we have little support, then our job we gain is stressful, our child is now highly sensitive, etc. All of these items make our window smaller and smaller. Then we have to consider how we are speaking to ourselves .. our inner critic. Perhaps we are really hard on ourselves .. “I’m so dumb” “I’m such a bad parent” “I should have done better”. This all decreases our window as well. The way we hold our body when we experience stress also affects our window .. perhaps we hold our breathe when something stressful occurs or we clench our fists. This is all triggering to our nervous system and pushes us into a state of dysregulation  .. decreasing our window again. Our window that perhaps already started out small is now nonexistent. Meaning we can’t handle any stress without becoming dysregulated.

So what do we do? How do we effectively parent when we are in a constant state of dysregulation? How can we teach our children how to get though big feelings (because they ALL have them) when those big feelings are triggering to us as a parent. I can help here! Therapy can help! Psychotherapy can be a wonderful tool here to help you increase your window of tolerance so you can also help your children cope. I can also work directly with your child to help support them with this too (which of course involves parenting support too).

This being said there are absolutely certain things you can do yourself to help increase your window of tolerance. Let’s look at everything I’ve mentioned above and let’s look at your life. Working on positive self-talk and compassion is very important .. “today was hard, but I am a good parent”. Let’s look at what you do when you experience stress, is there something that can be altered to be more effective and gentle on yourself (rather than holding your breathe, you breathe deeply). Let’s look at the stimuli in your life, is this affecting you? Perhaps using tools to support yourself in sensory overwhelming situations may be important (earplugs for example). We want to work on widening our window of tolerance again, which all of these strategies above will help with. We also want to work on ensuring that we stay within our personal window of tolerance. We need to learn to check in with ourselves, recognize our needs and support ourselves. We need to check in with our bodies .. what are the clues that let us know that things are becoming too much? Then we need to work on creating a resource list together to be able to bounce back into and stay within our window.

With our kiddos, we can do the same. Once we can affectively manage our own stress and our window of tolerance is manageable, we can then effectively teach our children how to cope with their stress and stay within their window. For our children that’s all about co-regulation and teaching them how to stay within that window. For our highly sensitive children, who have small windows of tolerance, it’s important to give them opportunities to experience a small amount of stress to help teach them to come back down again. Meaning, for a small amount of time, we can push our children to the top of their window and then help co-regulate to help teach them to come back within their window. Remember that for little kids this is nearly impossible to do on their own, they need support, they need co-regulation. This means we need to help breathe with them, hold them, sit with them, whatever it might be that helps calm your child. We need to support them and help teach them how to support themselves and then eventually they will be able to regulate themselves.

Parenting is hard, it’s often dysregulating and very challenging. Our children feel things very deeply a lot of time and it’s our job to help hold those feelings and let them feel safe while feeling them. Woah that’s a lot to carry! If you feel like you need support within your family whether it’s through play therapy for your small human or talk or art therapy for your older child or yourself or solely parenting support .. I am hear for you and would be honoured to walk alongside you on this crazy journey of raising small humans!