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-



All three sit down and work on the puzzle
together, helping each other, laughing at the
words: sunflower (backward and diagonal!),
water bottle, Roborovski.

“Can we do another one?” they beg.

And so begins a new cognitive behavioral
therapy practice, inspired by far too much
time stuck at home and on iPads. I print
word searches for everything. My 13-year-
old’s cell biology unit? Everyone find the word
mitosis! My 11-year-old’s research project
on Albert Einstein? Equation, relativity,
science, invention.

I begin to make my own, quickly typing up
searches that might make a child smile when
they can’t stop crying or distract them in the
middle of a meltdown. I include holidays and
YouTube celebrities and silly facts about our
dogs. Anything that might interest them.

Panic eases into focus. When one of my
kids starts to circle the hidden words, to
announce “Ah ha!” and pump their fist, the
others run over to see what they’re doing,
pull up their own chairs and search, too.

This isn’t homework, even when it’s about
something they’re learning in school. The
paper gets recycled afterward, sometimes just
30 seconds later. And yet the act itself centers
and soothes. The puzzles give my kids what
coloring books and yoga never could — peace,
even pleasure, in the midst of distress.

Now we’re heading back into the classroom
but only two days a week and with the
constant threat of closing again. It’s a lack of
consistency that feels like torture for children
who need routine and physical proximity to
their teachers and peers to stay regulated.

So we find fun where we can. More
importantly, we find order in a time that
otherwise feels chaotic to all people — big and
little — right now.

If I had known these puzzles provided this
sense of purpose to my children, I would have
started making them when my son first began
school. I would have met him in the pickup
lane with a Black Hole word search in hand. I
would have given my daughter an Artists Who
Draw Horses word search when she woke up
far too early on a Saturday morning. I would
have researched every Minecraft phrase
and created a Mega Gamer word search
for all three kids, keeping them busy for
hours on those days we were stuck at home,
long before COVID-19, simply because we
struggled that day.

If nothing else, the pandemic has given our
family this gift. And I am grateful. n
Washington FAMILY.com 35