Naming The Grumpy Wumpus to Help Kids Calm Down, with Author Julia Shaw

Today's guest is someone who writes straight from the trenches of parenting young kids where big feelings, bedtime battles, and those wildly beautiful, messy moments of connection all collide. 

I’m Flora McCormick, licensed therapist and parenting coach, and I’m joined by author Julia Shaw, whose children’s book The Grumpy Wumpus was born straight out of real-life bedtime battles, public blowups, and those painfully relatable moments when a sweet toddler seems to morph into someone else.

Julia tells the story of her oldest flipping from easygoing to furious around the toddler years and how the standard emotional regulation advice didn’t land. From that frustration came a playful, powerful idea: externalizing big emotions by naming them. “The Grumpy Wumpus” creates a little space between a child and their behavior, helping kids understand “I’m having big feelings” without absorbing “I am bad.” We also connect the dots to clinical concepts therapists use with adults and kids, including how stress chemistry can hijack the brain and why connection often works better than correction in the heat of the moment.

We go deeper into the hard parts too, including Julia’s experience with postpartum depression and waves of rage that made her realize why some coping strategies feel useless mid-storm. Our shared takeaway is simple and freeing: big feelings don’t always need fixing. Sometimes the most sustainable move is to ride the wave, keep everyone safe, and trust that the peak will pass.

If you want practical support for toddler tantrums, emotional outbursts, and the messy middle between overly gentle parenting and overly harsh discipline, press play. Subscribe, share this with a tired parent friend, and leave a review so more families can find the show.

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Transcript

Meet Julia Shaw And Her Story

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today's guest is someone who writes straight from the trenches of parenting young kids where big feelings, bedtime battles, and those wildly beautiful, messy moments of connection all collide. Julia Shaw is the author of The Grumpy Wumpus, a book inspired by real life experiences with her own family and a desire to help children and their grown-ups make sense of overwhelming emotions with warmth, humor, and compassion. So great to have you today, Julia. Hey friend, welcome back to the Sustainable Parenting Podcast, where we bridge the gap between overly gentle parenting and overly harsh discipline so that you finally have the joy and ease you've been missing. I'm your host, Flora McCormick, licensed therapist, parenting coach, and I'm so glad you're here. So you wrote this amazing book. You have children ages five and two. Yeah, so take us back to the first wumpus moment. Was there a specific meltdown or parenting moment where you thought something different has to happen here?

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Yeah. Well, you know, it felt like it happened overnight when my now five-year-old was probably about 18 months, maybe two years old. And she just went from being the easiest, sweetest-tempered little snuggle bug to being this monster. Bite me and kick me. And she resisted everything. And she didn't want to put her pants on. She didn't like the cup I'd given her. She was just so mad about it, seemed like anything could set her off. And it was so hard to calm her down.

When Common Calming Tips Fail

SPEAKER_01 1:35

And of course, as all modern parents do, I turned to Google. And the answers I got, they all sounded really great. Crouch down at her level and model regulation and take deep breaths and reflect back her feelings and you know, all of the quote unquote right things. And for my daughter, none of them worked. It you know, put my hand on my chest and take a deep breath, and she would look at me and scream, Stop breathing. Don't breathe. Oh my goodness. Okay. Um, and yeah, I would try the little mantras. You know, I'd say, I am safe and I am loved. And she would say, Stop saying that. And I'd say, okay, I I need a different toolkit because this one just doesn't work for my child. And I imagine there are plenty of children for whom those strategies work brilliantly, but my daughter is maybe on some extreme end of the bell curve. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Well, I know there are people listening right now saying, Oh, thank goodness I am not the only one. Just like you said, there's several kids who do not struggle with that. There are also many kids who do. And I know from the work I do in coaching them that it's extremely lonely and isolating. Makes you question, is something wrong with them? Something wrong with me? Why isn't this landing? And I had my own struggles going through that with my child. It was more on the like super melty flop mode instead of enraged mode. But I think those are just different wompous presentations, right? The ways that their wise, wonderful self gets taken over by this very different self. And then if it is a self that does not respond to some of these, you know, as you say, quote, general suggestions, it's really upsetting and frustrating and also can then feel isolating if you feel alone in

Creating The Grumpy Wumpus Language

SPEAKER_00 3:33

that. So tell us a little bit more about how you, you know, came to the idea of naming it as Wumpus. What was important about that for you to tell the story that way? And what was important for you about how you brought in the resolution at the end?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Oh, yes. So it it really started with my eldest daughter, and the seed was this vision of her almost as a changeling, like just morphing into this whole other creature that bore no resemblance to my sweet little baby. So that was where I was like, oh my gosh, you're so grumpy, you're grumpy wumpy, you're grumpy. The language just kind of from efforts to keep it playful, just kind of grew on its own. And that was what came out of my mouth. And I was like, oh, I kind of like that. And and she adopted it and we started using it. And then I wrote the story and it kind of sat in a drawer for a few years. I I tried to go the traditional route and find an agent, and no one wanted it. So it was yeah, I but then I finally had the confidence to just put it out there on my own, and it seems to be landing with people, and I'm just obsessed with it. So it's been a lot of fun for me. But yeah, it was just kind of this desire to make it playful, make it accessible and child friendly, create enough of a perceptual gap between like it's not you're not a bad kid because you're in this moment, you're just having these big feelings that have swept in, you're not yourself. It

Postpartum Rage And Riding The Wave

SPEAKER_01 5:10

also came from from me, from my experiences with big feelings. I had never been a really angry person before. I didn't have much of a relationship with anger, and then I got really bad postpartum depression, and I started getting these sweeping moments of just pure rage that I had never felt before. Yeah. And I would try to deploy the strategies I had advocated for my daughter, you know, take deep breaths, drink some water, step outside. I would do them, and it it would not work at all. And I was still enraged. And I was like, well, no wonder she's mad at me for proposing all these things. They don't work, nothing works. So yeah, I I think having my my own connection to big feelings and trying to get more granular and how they show up for me and in my body really helped me to understand and reflect some of that back to my kids in a language that they could take.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Oh, I love that so much. Yes, so beautiful when you can reflect in yourself. And and so you sought this way to like sort of externalize. This isn't you being, you know, bad, grumpy person who's making life hard for us all, which, but side note, that is how it can feel in the moment, right? And and yet, if parents can use something like your book to get them a different language to be able to use in their own brains and with the child, you know, this is really founded on so much clinical research, Julie. I don't know how much you dove into that before writing, but this ability to externalize, whether it's anxiety or sadness or rage, and say, wow, that's my brain being hijacked by like the chemistry of feelings. And that's why it's not coming from my wisest self. That self still exists, but it's just hijacked by this chemical flooding in this moment that makes me feel like I need to fight or or run for survival in some sense. So I love the externalizing in the language of naming a grumpy wumpus. And then I love that there's some sense here that you can try various approaches, and then sometimes we just need a little space till that like anger curve I think of like a bell curve goes up, comes down. Sometimes we just need a little bit of space, a little bit of time for that process to happen without a parent forcing it to happen faster. That's kind of part of what I took away from your book.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

I I didn't want it to become an instruction manual for fixing big feelings. I don't actually believe that big feelings need to be fixed. Like you were saying, sometimes they just sweep in and then they blow out, and you can just let them exist.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Like ride the wave. I mean, if you do any research in dialectical behavioral therapy, this is a whole like method around this for adults who still struggle with that. The like analogy is to ride the wave.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Totally. Well, and that's so funny you say that. I was listening to a podcast recently, Ezra Klein, in conversation with Pima Chodron, who writes a lot of Buddhist work, and she was talking about how important it is to befriend your difficult emotions and sit with the feelings without trying to change them. And I was like, oh my gosh, I accidentally wrote a Buddhist children's. I didn't even mean to. I sort of stumbled backwards into all of this research-backed and very valid approach.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

So yeah, isn't that so nice when like the universal truths of the world just come through us in our maternal gut instincts? I think there's just so much there. Remembering our inner wisdom comes from these collective wisdoms. And

Where To Find The Book

SPEAKER_00 9:04

tell us a bit about where they can find your book called The Grumpy Wumpus.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

For anybody who's not local, the book is on Amazon and it's also available in hardcover through Ingram, Ingram Spark. And yeah, there are more Wumpuses coming. The Wild Wumpus is coming out this summer, followed by a tiny wumpus. And then later this year, I have a much more personal wumpus that's about me. My it's called My Mommy is a Wumpus. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Well, gosh, Julia, in closing, I think if a person listening has a child who turns into full-blown grumpy wumpus at bedtime or at Target or over a sandwich cut wrong, what is one thing you hope that they can do in that moment?

SPEAKER_01 9:50

I hope that they can ride the wave. I hope that they can understand that it's not anything that they are doing wrong, and that the feelings can come and go, and they don't need to take quite as much personal responsibility for their child's emotional state.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

I appreciate this, and I personally loved reading The Grumpy Wumpus, and I'm so grateful for you telling this unique story.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Oh, thank you so much for having me. This is a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Listeners, if you need parenting advice, talk to my mom. Sustainable parenting with Flora McCormick.