In this article, I am going to explore how to support the student in your home if they are experiencing overwhelm as they engage with remote learning.

Overwhelm is an awful feeling.  However, the feeling that one gets when overwhelm is replaced with the belief that it can be done, is awesome, isn’t it?

With the ongoing restrictions that are taking place and students continuing with remote learning, overwhelm will be common.  So, what can we, as parents, do to help our overwhelmed student?

Read on to find out how to recognise overwhelm.

How to recognise overwhelm.

Overwhelm is something that is often unrecognised.  As parents we can find ourselves seeing something else.

Young people who experience overwhelm may find the following being said about them:

• “They are being lazy.”

• “They are not engaging with their work.”

• “They really should be trying harder.”

• “They are too easily distracted.”

• “Why can’t they just get on with it?”

• “I wish they would stop staring at their smart phone when they are working.”

What I am indicating here is the tendency for us as parents to judge behaviour on face value before we really get to the root of what is really happening.  There is a risk that we react to the outward signs of overwhelm whilst failing to identify need and we somehow respond in a way that doesn’t really help the student.

Some of the behaviours that we may observe could be:

• Procrastination,

• Frustration,

• Restless or being distracted,

• Lack of focus,

• Emotional outbursts,

• The bare minimum of work being delivered.

This is not an exhaustive list.

When this is taking place, simply judging and calling out behaviour is only going to bring about defensiveness and break down in communication.  As parents we need to come at this from a different angle.

A coaching approach to empower your student out of overwhelm.

As a parent and neurodiversity coach, I have learnt over the years that simply telling someone what they need to do to change often goes on deaf ears.  A lot of my training as a coach was on self-management for those times when sat with clients who could not see their way forward.  Often I would have a tonne of ideas as to what my client should do.  I would be itching to tell my clients what I thought and then my self-control would kick in so as to give my clients space to work it out for themselves and in doing so, they, come up with better ideas because they are the experts in themselves.

By keeping my ideas to myself, there is space for my clients to articulate their thinking and this helps to identify next steps.

Whilst it isn’t always good to use this approach with family members (especially if they are REALLY stuck), I believe that we, as parents, don’t use this approach enough as we so often think that we have better ideas. Afterall we have so much more life experience, don’t we?  Actually, yes, we do have loads of life experience compared to our children, but the challenges that our children are facing are specifically theirs, not ours.  We can only walk alongside them.  Likewise the challenges of our past will be specifically ours.  They are not the same as our children’s.  To often we think we know the answers to certain challenges, but they come from our own perspective and we try to ‘shoe-horn’ them into the lives of our kids only to find that they do not quite fit.

In certain circumstances, it is best to give our children the space to attempt to find solutions.  We can facilitate the process if they are willing.

The following steps from my F.E.E.L coaching approach may be useful.

Find out what is making the child is behaving in a certain way.

You can see that in the F.E.E.L approach I am proposing that we take steps to find out why the student in the family is using behaviour or verbal statements that seem to inhibit their engagement with remote learning.  The trick here is to be gentle with open questions, get them talking whilst avoiding judgement or making statements about what we think is going on.  You will know the saying about why we have two ears and one mouth!

Explore the reality of the situation or challenge.

Once the student has acknowledged that something is causing them to use behaviour like this, then we need to explore with them what it is that is causing upset, anxiety or overwhelm.  Again, gentle open questions that expand conversation will be useful.  See if you can help the child to articulate the challenge in one easy sentence.  E.g “I have this massive essay to write and I feel stuck!”

Explore options for dealing with the challenge.

It perhaps can sound weird that we has parents would ask a child who is ‘stuck’ about the options for moving forward but the reality is the feeling of being ‘stuck’ is probably about the intensity of overwhelm dominating any sense of creativity that could lead to a way forward.

There is a good chance that by calming the student and us believing that they can find the way forward, they may start to believe that too.

I like to have fun with this stage of the process.  No ideas are wrong here.  We can have as much fun as we want.  Believe it or not, in some of my adult coaching sessions I have had clients imagining that they are super heroes approaching a challenge.  This brings about a sense of empowerment, fun and of course takes one’s mind off the overwhelm! Of course, this is not reality, but just by having fun thinking, it takes the mind to another place and this seems to unlock creativity.  Kids are going to be even more up for doing something fun and it really could help.

Try and get up to five ideas for tackling the challenge and list them.

Let them choose the option that they are willing to try.

Whilst we may have our own thoughts about options to try, let’s just hold off and let our children consider their next steps.  They have literally gone from being stuck to having five options to try in order to move forward.  Let us give them the choice as to which to try first.  They will take ownership of that approach if they have come up with it themselves.

But what if they don’t have any ideas?

Yes, this is quite possible and we need to exercise discernment.  Sometimes this approach won’t work if the task or challenge that they are addressing is unreasonable or beyond their skill set.

This is why support for dyslexia also needs to be in place whether that is educational, emotional or technological.

You will know that I am a huge fan of assistive technology and that I believe that every student should have access to these brilliant tools that can help with study, dyslexic or not.  Assistive Technology helps a child / student to focus less on learning difficulties and focus more on learning and expressing their learning.

An example of assistive technology that I think that many students could use, dyslexic or not, is Glean.  Glean records lectures and lessons and the student can annotate the recording as the ‘event’ takes place.  If the student ‘zones out’ then it’s not a problem, the content has been captured and can be relistened to.  This takes away a lot of the anxiety in attending classes and lessons in person or online and will make learning and ultimately recall of that learning easier.

Check out the video below to see how Glean works.

The thing is, being a parent, we may not know about assistive technology options and which products would be the most suitable for the student to use.  Our children and young people will not know either and so the F.E.E.L approach may require an assistive tech solution that helps.  So, it is good to keep up to date on what is available should your student run out of ideas.

To do that, feel free to check out my assistive technology summary on the Studying With Dyslexia Blog and I will keep adding to the list of products that I am aware off.  Some of them will be free too!

Final Words

Telling your student what to do when they are stuck in the middle of their overwhelm could overwhelm them more or reduce their desire to study autonomously.  We can empower the dyslexic learners in our families to find solutions to overcome overwhelm themselves and this should be our first approach.  I shared with you the F.E.E.L coaching strategy to help with this.  That said, if their creativity is stuck and they can’t find the ideas that they need to move forward, then we as parents should be armed with knowledge that we can use to seed the engagement of our dyslexic learners making sure that the learner is taking ownership of what is happening for them. 

This empowers them, builds confidence and good self-esteem.