Leaning Into the Hard as an Acton Mom

Allowing Struggle

​A guest post by an Acton parent, Danielle Klafter

​Allowing struggle is part of Acton’s core philosophy. Don’t run from it, hide it, or try to avoid it. If anything, heroes and parents alike are encouraged to lean into, learn from, and eventually wrestle through whatever struggle they face. It builds resiliency, perseverance, and confidence. It’s part of the hero’s journey.
 
Therefore, we were warned, entering our first year at Acton, there was a honeymoon period at the start of the year. Emotions and learning and structures would seem to flow well for a while, but eventually the struggle would set in. One or more of the three-headed monsters of resistance, victimhood, or distraction would rear their heads.
 
I watched my five-year-old daughter shake Mr. Zach’s hand on the first day of school and heft her lunchbox and water bottle inside the doors all on her own. I felt pride and disbelief that she was already at this stage in her development and off to “big school,” as we call it in our house. Then I waited, expecting things to hit an inevitable layer of hard. Yet the first few months went incredibly well. She did great at making friends, assimilating to the longer school days, learning to be self-sufficient, and started trekking through some of her studio badges at a clipping pace, proudly announcing what she had finished in the car ride home from school. I waited so long for the honeymoon period to end that I started to fool myself into thinking maybe we would be the exception and it wouldn’t hit.
 
It wasn’t until session four, during the long cold days of January that she received her first reset, something which happens when a hero crosses the guardrails of the studio. Honestly, I was a bit relieved and felt it was overdue. At home or at preschool she tended to have slightly aggressive outbursts or retaliate with physical hitting towards others if she didn’t get her way. My mother’s instinct was her behavior at Acton had been too good for too long. I took the reset as a sign she was getting more comfortable in the environment and letting more of her true self show. A positive thing. However, upon a second reset a week later, she didn’t want to talk about it, her eyes dragging the floor.
 
Soon after, behavior imploded a bit at home. Aside from the two resets (not a major issue from our perspective), nothing seemed to be overtly wrong at a school. Yet my hero started having multiple emotional meltdowns a day at home, bursting into tears over seemingly small things. This was a change from her previous tendency to react in more aggressive physical ways when she was dysregulated. While the tears more easily engendered my compassion and attunement, multiple meltdowns in the space of an hour left me exhausted and strung out. I couldn’t keep up with what felt like endless attachment needs. One Saturday morning I set an intention of taking her out on a mother-daughter date, but she had three meltdowns before I could even dress myself, eat breakfast, and get us both out the door to the coffee shop. I was overwhelmed.
 
The worst part was that neither my husband or I could find an obvious cause to the change in behavior. “Did something happen at school?” I asked. She shook her head no. But all these tears weren’t just about misplaced sweatshirts or choices of what was for dinner. Words from my own therapy echoed in my head: The issue is never the issue. There was something deeper going on to my daughter’s dysregulation. But I couldn’t figure out what.
 
She started resisting going to school. On our worst days the morning routine devolved into me physically carrying my crying hero to the car not yet fully dressed and hoping we would both calm down a bit by the time we pulled up to the drop-off line. It consistently took her longer to get out of the car. I wasn’t supposed to walk her inside the building. What was I to do if she refused to go in on her own? Occasionally I wondered if I should cave and give her a day at home. School days were a lot to get used to as a five-year-old. But I also didn’t want to send the message that she could cry hard enough and avoid something hard. So we kept sending her to school. Was I doing the right thing? I constantly doubted.
 
One day amid her tears she cried for her four-year-old preschool teacher. “I want to go back to Ms. Kristen’s room,” she said.
 
This made sense to me. She’d had a great relationship with Ms. Kristen. It had been a safe and happy place. Acton was harder. While the guides at Acton are warm-hearted, they didn’t carry the same role. The delight and hugs and play she experienced with her preschool teacher were likely not nearly the same at Acton. Ms. Kristen’s room was easier. Acton presented more challenges, more modes of growing up and being self-sufficient.
 
“What is it about Acton that’s hard?” I said.
 
The only things she was able to verbalize were that the days were long and there were lots of rules.

With so little to go on, my best mom-gut translation was that she was experiencing a lot of self-imposed perfectionistic anxiety, wanting to perform perfectly at school all day, which was not developmentally realistic. Perhaps she was holding everything together as long as she could all day at school and then melting down at home where it felt safe. But I couldn’t be sure. So I finally reached out to the guides.
 
There are specific guardrails for parents in how we are to communicate with guides. We aren’t supposed to try to intervene and fix things for our kids, or ask guides to take away their struggle. So I endured the struggle as long as I could at home but then felt desperate enough to reach out. I appreciated so many things about how that interaction went.

1. I didn’t ask for my hero’s struggle to be made easier. But I did let them know what was happening at home and asked if they could offer any observations or pieces of information I might be missing.
2. I was affirmed for the way I approached them and for holding the mindset of wanting to support rather than rescue.
3. They were grateful for the new information and they offered helpful choices and ideas, both for me as a parent and for my daughter as the hero, on how to keep navigating this stuck spot.
4. They ultimately honored the struggle for both of us, using emotionally intelligent approaches to present insight and suggestions, but leaving the autonomy of choice in our hands.

 
The guides said none of my hero’s behavior issues were manifesting at school. This confirmed my hypothesis that my hero felt she had to be perfect and held together while she was there. I don’t think this was in any way the fault or expectation of Acton or the guides. I suspect my daughter would’ve had to face this struggle no matter what school she had been at that year, and I have no doubt that sitting in a desk all day and being asked to conform to the pace of a standard classroom may have exaggerated her sense of perfection. With the onset of her first resets, the guides also wondered if she had developed a fear of being in trouble. Combined with her high expectations for herself, they could see how she might think only happy emotions could be shown at school since angry or frustrated emotions and the possible accompanying actions (i.e. talking meanly, hitting, etc.) equals “getting in trouble” for her whether that was a hero tattling on her, a peace table, or a reset. This, of course, was not the message they wanted heroes to have. The guides spent the rest of our communication attempting to puzzle this out with me and propose possible ways to approach conversations with my hero, beginning by giving her choices.

• Would you prefer to talk about this with us at home or with a guide? (if the latter, which guide?)
• If at home, would you prefer to talk about this with just mom? Just dad? Or with both of us?
• Would you prefer to talk about it at dinner? After dinner? Or right before bed?
• Would you prefer to draw about it or talk about it? 

 
My heart broke that my mere five-year-old was wrestling with a sense of insecurity over perfectionism. Was this my fault somehow? While self-blame wasn’t the solution, it did give me opportunity to reflect on ways I could better counter this mindset as her parent.

---

The first thing we chose as parents was to explicitly release our hero from any expectations for her to work on her badges all the time at school. “It’s okay to take breaks,” we told her. “It’s okay to just play if you need to.” Then we started handing her a mantra—"special words” we called them. Every night when I put her to bed and every morning when I dropped her at school, we rehearsed these words before she got out of the car.
 
I am loved. I am already good enough.
 
We whispered the words to her stuffie and allowed her to bring that stuffie along to school so the stuffie could help remind her too. The stuffie had to stay on her hook during most of the school hours, but she could bring it out during free play or leave the classroom to take a break and hug it if she needed some emotional support.
 
The emotional volatility at home started to subside. School wasn’t perfect, but it seemed to get easier. Our hero also spent most of the next two sessions not working much on her badges. At first I found that a wonderful thing. By the second session of little progress I started to feel some anxiety and wonder how and when to build facing hard things back into her world. I didn’t push for anything specific to happen at school, but we did add one more mantra to her special words.
 
I can do hard things.
 
She eventually found her way back into the work on her own. At the guides suggestion, we never had a formal journey meeting (with guides and parents and hero) in the thick of our hero’s struggle. They wondered if that might be too intense for her since she was already reticent to talk about it with us at home. I appreciated that intuition. But we did have a super helpful one a couple months later. Our hero had stalled on her reading drawers, and I knew she was capable of reading the words, so we didn’t know where the resistance was coming from. Using questions with two options at a time, the guides were able to help her voice it was the handwriting page she didn’t like. This was helpful information and gave me a concrete place to begin supporting her in a practical way at home.
 
Over the next session break, my hero pulled out an activity book and we encountered a stuck place where I had an aha moment. It was the lowercase letters she felt unequipped to write, and the handwriting sheets were all lowercase. That I could help her with! After just a few handwriting sessions at home, she went back to school and completed her next reading drawer. We both felt really proud.
 
Acton knows that encountering and facing struggles is important for heroes. I know that too theoretically, but it was also incredibly hard in the midst of the emotional meltdowns, and limited communication of my daughter, and watching her not accomplish badges at school to tolerate the emotional discomfort. There were days I wanted it all to go away. I wanted easy. Yet, I also can’t replace the joy of seeing my hero come out on the other side and figure out how to keep working at something that was previously too overwhelming for her. If we had tried to step in and rescue or take a shortcut, our whole family would have been robbed of that joy.
 
One of the aspects I love about Acton is that heroes are allowed to struggle in unique ways and aren’t asked to conform to standardized learning or pacing or behavior. For some heroes, their challenge may be working towards getting less resets in the studio. For my hero, her current challenge is getting a reset without allowing her self-worth to be threatened. The flow of the Acton studio allows for both, and it allows for my hero to choose a pace of learning that is right for her. If she needs to take a break and play, she’s allowed to make that choice for herself. When she’s ready to challenge herself in learning, she’s given opportunity to do that as well. At home, I’m learning to better instill value in my daughter through attachment interactions that have nothing to do with behavior or performance, and I’m working to intentionally separate her performance from my value and worth as a parent. There are opportunities for growth and challenges to face on all sides.

---

Danielle Klafter

Danielle is an Acton mom, and writer. Read more about Danielle on her blog.