Jenny Hale created the Hale Method after burnout in her thirties took the choice away from her. On Energy Economics for Parents, she gave host Christopher Fern an order of operations—what has to happen before anything else is available—and an account of why parents keep failing at step one.
Nobody explained the pedals
Start with her analogy. Imagine teaching driving the way we teach emotional skills. Nobody says what the wheel is for, what the pedals do, or where the mirrors are. The person gets put in the car, the car gets put in motion at speed, and they figure it out. It would be chaos, and it is.
Neurotypical children absorb a lot of this by osmosis, picking up abstract rules from the adults around them. Neurodivergent kids, autistic kids in particular, often need the same material as explicit, sequenced instruction. So when a parent says “you need to calm down,” a neurotypical kid files away the feel of the thing and rebuilds it later. A neurodivergent kid asks how, gets no answer, and now carries the original upset plus the frustration of being asked to perform something nobody described.
Hale learned this from her own daughter at eighteen months, sprawled on the floor after some Duplo blocks wouldn’t fit, announcing she was tired. It was nine in the morning after a full night’s sleep. She’d been handed “tired” as the label for a sensation that was actually frustration, and she was going to keep using it. Children need the vocabulary, the cues to look for, and a demonstration of the check adults are supposed to run on themselves: how much sleep did I get, have I eaten, what’s going on physiologically that’s making me feel this way.
Physiology first, then emotions, then words
Christopher Fern called co-regulation a scarce mental capacity. Hale corrected him mid-sentence. It’s physiological. When the autonomic nervous system flips into alert or fight-or-flight, blood flow to the prefrontal cortex is reduced, and the bandwidth for analytical thought goes with it.
That correction sets the order she teaches. Physiological safety first, which means the nervous system back in the green zone before anything gets asked of anyone. Until that lands, managing emotions, taking another perspective, and considering someone else are all out of reach. Then emotional safety, where the person feels seen and validated in the experience even when the behavior was unacceptable. Then mental safety, where everyone understands the trigger and the unmet need. Each level reached settles the ones under it.
The math on families is where this gets hard. Every parent is under-resourced. Neurodivergent parents more so, because moving through the world costs them more. And neurodivergent children need more co-regulation than average. All three push the same way.
You can’t learn it during the meltdown
Hale’s answer is repetition at low stakes. A kicker lines up against a goalkeeper with nobody interfering. If the only attempt you ever made came in the grand final, in extra time, with a hundred thousand people screaming, you’d miss. Thousands of reps with nobody watching builds the muscle memory that survives pressure. Regulation has to become subconscious the same way, because the moment you need it is the moment you can’t reach anything conscious.
She has a case for it. A high school teacher came through her coach training with anxiety that showed up as irritability and one of the highest detention rates in his school. Six months later, with his own regulation in place, he was the most requested teacher there—enough students wanting his classes that the school hired someone to cover the overflow. He already taught in a competency-based system, so she handed him the emotional skills the same way: the behaviors that show you’ve mastered each step, in the order they build.
As Jenny says, it does not have to be this way.
Jenny Hale’s work is at jennyhale.org
