WF
MY TURN
Finding r
e d
Or in
How word
searches have
helped my
children learn to
self-soothe. By Hannah Grieco
34 Washington FAMILY APRIL 2021
year-old, running behind the sofa to hide.

Her pink fleece blanket, in dire need of a
wash, covers her little body. She shakes
and huddles down, desperate to sink into
invisibility. It’s 9:05 a.m. on a Tuesday. I head to
my laptop and quickly create an LOL Doll
word search.

“Hey, grab a pencil!” I call to her.

“Something’s printing up for you!”
She runs to the printer. A crisis averted.

Selective mutism, like many anxiety-
related disabilities, makes distance learning
especially difficult. My daughter will talk
to — and yell at — me, but not her teacher
or classroom assistants. Not her peers.

She stays silent online with them, refusing
even to turn on her video camera. She
only occasionally emails a short message
to a friend she used to play with before
COVID-19 hit.

All of my kids are struggling with
virtual learning, despite their kind and
patient teachers and despite me feigning
enthusiasm as I physically toggle between
three kids who desperately miss human
connection and who express that grief
through meltdowns and school refusal.

There’s only so much one mom can
do, even with virtual therapy sessions for
each child and a background in parenting
uncomfortable behaviors. My oldest child is
on the autism spectrum and my middle child
struggles with mood dysregulation. All three
of my kids fight when distressed, become
irritable when sad and sink into fearfulness
when their schedules become too loose or
change too quickly.

COVID-19 brought that to a whole
new level. Isolated at home, the school
experience fluctuating and confusing,
friends all but lost to them, my kids’
behavior exploded in hard ways.

But what can we do when all the coping
strategies in all the child development books
don’t work to soothe our kids?
We improvise and frantically Google
“hamster word search” one day, in hopes of
keeping a kid from loudly crying during a
Zoom meeting.

“Can I have one, too?” my oldest asks
when he sees the paper.

“Me too!” his sister demands.

HANNAH GRIECO
“I hate school! I hate
everybody!” screams my seven-