Transcript of “My Child Refuses Independent Play”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be responding to a question that’s very similar to many that I get, and I do understand this issue because I can totally relate to the struggle of it. How do we encourage our child to play independently of us? How do we separate from them to free them up to play when our child seems to continually want our attention?

Here’s the email I received:

Hi, Janet-

Thanks so much for your podcast and advice. I hope it’s okay to ask you about a situation I’m having with my daughter. I’m a stay-at-home mom to a very bright, busy, extroverted four-year-old girl who loves having my complete attention.

She goes to school in the mornings, and in the afternoons we try to stay busy with classes, walks, and going to the park. I try to give her as much attention as I can, but I’m an introvert with ADHD and I get overstimulated and irritable from constant interaction. The only way I can get her to give me some space is if I hand her a screen, and I’m growing uncomfortable with how much I’ve been relying on screens to keep her occupied. And it doesn’t always work. Sometimes she wants me to sit down and watch the show alongside her, and I can only watch so much Peppa Pig.

I would love to help her learn to entertain herself with toys. It’s not just for me, I think it would be good for her to be comfortable being by herself. She seems to get anxious and takes it as a personal rejection when I tell her that mommy needs some time to herself. If I tell her I’m taking a break and she’s going to play by herself for 15 minutes, I have about five minutes before the bids for attention start coming: “I’m hungry.” “I need help with this.” “Come look at this.” If I tell her that I’m on a break and I’ll help her when I’m done, she’ll keep asking, “How many more minutes?” Completely defeats the purpose of a break. Last night, she got out a craft project and said, “Let’s do it together.” I said, “Go ahead. I’m going to eat a snack first and I’ll come join you when I’m ready.” She had a meltdown and then reached for her iPad.

I love that she wants to engage with me, but I worry that her constant need for my attention means that she feels insecure about her bond with me. How do I convey to her that it’s okay for us to do things separately sometimes?

A lot of interesting themes here in this parent’s note, in the issues that she’s having, this theme of a child being willing to be independent of us.

I’m going to start by offering some context for how that develops, children developing their independent play and other independent activities, what gets in the way of that, and what we can do to aid this natural process. From there, I’m going to talk about the specifics in this parent’s note.

The wish for autonomy and independence is something that naturally emerges in children. But interestingly, sometimes we can get in the way of that without meaning to, at all. This was the topic of a recent podcast I did with Hari Grebler. It was called Every Child, Even a Tiny Baby, Deserves Time On Their Own. One of the things we talked about is noticing when, even as a baby, our child is expressing their autonomy, just through an autonomous interest that they’re having. They’re looking at something, they’re doing something that isn’t directed at us. And most of us don’t know—I didn’t know until I had my education with Magda Gerber—to recognize that and honor it and make space for it with our child. Because they are showing signs of independence and separation from us, even as tiny infants. So we want to nurture those moments if possible.

Another one is a very controversial subject. People will say that it’s impossible for a baby to do anything towards self-soothing, but the experts that actually observe babies, like T. Berry Brazelton, Heidelise Als, Dr. Kevin Nugent, they notice that even preemies are attempting to settle themselves. Not because the parent or the nurse in NICU abandoned them and they have no choice. Self-soothing is a choice that a baby makes to try to find their thumb. And when we observe, we can see babies wanting to do these things. Sometimes. A lot of the time they need us to help calm them down. And even when they’re self-soothing, they need our help and support. To be emotionally there for them, to be physically there, encouraging them by letting them know that we’re there, we’ve got their back, and we’re not going to just leave them to do it on their own. We see them and we see that they’re in a process of trying to do something and we don’t want to interrupt that. That’s what healthy self-soothing is.

It’s a very tender process that happens bit by bit. And it’s something, again, like having those play moments where children are just paying attention to something else, that we can nurture by allowing them, by giving some space for that when we see it happening. And of course that starts with observation. Being sensitive observers whenever possible. That’s how we can see what our child’s interests are, what they’re working on, what skills they’re developing. We can’t when we’re always doing everything for them, assuming their needs a little bit more. So we want to try to see our child as a separate person as early as possible, that’s capable of doing some separate things.

And that sounds easy when I say it, but it’s not easy. In fact, here’s a quote from T. Berry Brazelton: “In my experience, learning to separate and to give the child critical independence may well be the most difficult job in parenting.” So this is challenging. It doesn’t feel natural to a lot of us, especially if we’re worriers, if we are sensitive and we’re fearful, maybe, sometimes, of not always being there immediately when our child needs us and doing everything that we worry they need us to do. This is one of the reasons I love Magda Gerber’s magic word: Wait. Just wait a moment to see what your child is actually doing. If they can do that themselves or get a little closer to doing that themselves. If they’re doing something, maybe, that’s really valuable, that is so easy for us to interrupt with our best intentions, but maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe it’s better if we wait a moment first and really observe. This is challenging, right?

And then the other part of being able to separate like this parent wants to and have her daughter be able to play independently. This part I think is even harder than noticing when our child is being autonomous and not interrupting that. This is even harder, because it means being independent of them ourselves. And this is also what Brazelton is talking about in that quote. Being independent of them so that we can be interdependent as two autonomous people. That’s what we’re going for, right? A relationship of interdependence where we rely on each other, but we are two separate people, we are autonomous. That means tuning into ourselves and being able to say, I don’t want to do that. This is what I’m going to do. Because what can happen is that we unintentionally give a message to our child that they need us to do what they want. That that’s a need instead of a want.

I think that is part of what’s happening in this note. I’m going to get to the details in a minute. This idea that our child seems to want us always next to them, so we go along with it. And then it’s like that idea I talk about a lot here about accommodating. By accommodating that, we’re giving our child the message that we agree that they need our attention all the time, that they can’t be okay without us, in this case, playing with them. We’re only trying to do the right thing, but we’re giving our child the impression that we don’t trust them to be able to be separate. That’s the kind of feedback loop that happens here that none of us want, right?

In RIE parent-infant and parent-toddler classes, we do this really helpful thing that comes from attachment theory. In attachment theory, Bowlby and Ainsworth talked about being a secure base. Because babies need—and as they’re developing, children continue to need—that secure base, us, that they can leave to be free explorers, coming back as needed. A secure base isn’t forcing you to be independent. The way that we play this out in the classrooms is we ask the parents to please find a spot on the floor, there’s these backjacks to sit on. And please stay in that spot as much as possible and let your child be the one to move away from you. So the children have a choice, always, of being with us in our spot or venturing out to engage with other children, to engage with some of the toys that are there.

The RIE center where I mostly have taught has indoor/outdoor choice. Usually the parents are sitting indoors and the babies one day start to crawl or scoot on their tummies and they’re able to move out into the outdoors. And maybe they’re moving around the corner where the parent can’t even see them from where that parent is sitting. The facilitator, which would be me or whoever the teacher is in the classroom, can see them and make sure that they’re okay. It is a safe space, so there aren’t many ways that they could get hurt. But we can keep an eye on them and maybe we’re the ones that move around.

And then if two children are coming together or maybe a child is starting to climb on something that we haven’t seen them handle before, then we go close and we’re able to demonstrate for the parents minimal interventions. Interventions that allow children to develop their sense of competence and autonomy and develop their motor abilities or their problem-solving abilities or their creative abilities with play. So we’re there as backup to make sure they’re safe, intervene as minimally as possible to give them the most encouragement and confidence in themselves.

We recommend the parents do this at home too, of course. When they’re enjoying playtime with their child, that they plant themselves, allowing their child to move away from them and explore in safe areas. Sometimes when parents come into the classes when their child is a toddler, they haven’t been there since their child was an infant, so they’re coming in with their child as a toddler. And oftentimes the toddlers will try to bring the parent with them around this room to look at things. Of course, we never insist parents do it a certain way, but we suggest, we recommend that the parent insists that they’re going to stay there. Very kindly and not intensely, but just confidently. “I’m going to stay here. I’d love you to stay with me. You could sit on my lap. You could sit next to me. Or you can go look at the toys.”

I’m not trying to coax you to leave me and be “independent.” I’m not uncomfortable if you’re staying with me that, Oh, there’s something wrong and I really don’t want you to be here, because children pick up that vibe from us. Do they ever! And that makes them want to cling even more, when they feel that we’re not comfortable with them staying there. What works best is to be totally welcoming of your child being there. Children don’t want to sit on our laps for their whole life. It’s somebody like me, with the grown-up kids: It’s nice to have children want to be with you. And so they have that option.

But then sometimes the parents will worry, Oh, my child is getting upset that I’m not coming around with them. And that’s where we may have given a child that impression, because we’ve just tried to go along with things and be a good parent, they’ve gotten the impression that they need us to be there. When in fact they just want us to be with them. But what we want is for them to be free to explore and engage with other children without a parent looming over them.

It’s this interesting model that we can all learn from and that really helps children’s play to thrive and their social skill and everything else, all of their skills. And what I recommend to parents is that they do this everywhere that they go with their child that’s really a place for their child to explore. If they’re just on a playdate, at a birthday party, going to the park, this parent said she’s doing classes. Plant yourself, this is what I recommend, plant yourself somewhere as the secure base. If your child wants to drag you around with them, kindly say, “No, but I’m here for you. Whenever you need me, just come. I’ll be here.”

In the classrooms we do that also, because sometimes the children will be getting very involved in things and then they turn around and they want to know where their parent is. And if the parent’s moving around, then that’s discomforting for the child. It distracts them, they can’t focus on what they’re doing. That’s another reason we recommend staying put and being that secure base. Stay put. Insist on it, kindly.

Your child will maybe get mad at you and resist the first few times and try to coax you and act like they can’t do it without you. And this is the hard thing about all of this—and again, I’m going to get into this parent’s specifics—but the hard thing here is that if you’re a person who’s easily guilted, like me, or you go into that place of worry, then children are amazing the way that—I believe this is them wanting to shape us up, unconsciously, I believe that’s what they’re doing. But on the outside, it looks like they’re just not going to survive if we don’t follow them into a playground where all the children are and hold them by the hand. If we dare to be somewhere separate, they can make it seem like we’re doing this awful, awful thing to them. And we can fall into guilt about that, Oh no! Just as with children, when we’re in that feeling brain, when we’re in that less reasonable brain, we lose reason. Just like children do.

When we can get out of the fear place and the guilt place and see this from a place of reason, we notice, Well wait a second, I’m right here. I’m staying in this spot, I haven’t left. And they have a choice to come be with me anytime. So why does this feel like I’m doing something so wrong and abandoning my child? Just because I’m setting this boundary that I’m going to stay here. Whenever they need me, I’m still there to give them my attention whenever they need me. Children can take us to these places where we lose reason. It’s happened to me a lot of times, so I do relate to this. But we’re not doing our child favors when we do that.

Another way to think of the word independence is freedom, right? So it’s not like we want our child to be independent because we don’t care and we need them to take care of themselves. We want them to be free to explore their way, to create play that comes from inside them, to be able to thrive in all these situations. That idea helped me a great deal to get over the hump to setting the boundaries that I needed to set, allowing myself to separate.

I’m not talking about necessarily physically separating in another room, but just separate as a person, holding my own. This is what I’m doing. You can want me to do something else, but this is what I’m doing. And it’s okay if we’re in conflict. It’s normal to be in conflict in life, and I can love you through conflict. We’ll survive it. That’s part of being in relationships, that’s part of life. It’s interesting where children can take us in our minds because we love them so much, really.

These are the two aspects to work on when we want to encourage our child’s independence to emerge and for them to be able to be separate. The two things are to notice it when it’s happening. Those little things our baby even does, those moments our child has where they do have an idea. And it’s really hard not to jump on that sometimes and say, “Oh yeah, you can do it this way or that way,” and put our own two cents in, I always want to do that with play. But to hold back on that, to wait, use that magic word, wait, and allow it to be. So there’s that aspect. And then the other aspect is the boundary aspect, where we’re taking care of our independent self.

Now I’m going to talk about that and how it works with the particulars this parent has shared with me. It’s interesting. She describes her daughter as a “bright, busy, extroverted girl,” and that doesn’t sound like a child that wouldn’t be very independent as well, right? That’s the interesting thing is oftentimes it’s these extroverted children that are wanting to lead us as well. But underneath it all, they’re hoping that they don’t have to, because they know they’re only four years old, and that’s a big burden on them. That doesn’t free them, it does the opposite. Instead of playing the way children can play, now I’ve got to keep seeing if she really means it. Is she going to stick by what she said or is she going to melt for me like she sometimes does? They go to that place. So it’s very often these strong personality, intense, dynamic children that are the ones that can seem the most clingy and needy. That’s interesting, right? And when we go to that reasonable brain that we have, it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t add up.

This parent tries to give her as much attention as she can, but she’s an introvert with ADHD, and she gets overstimulated and irritable from constant interaction. I can totally understand that, and I think a lot of parents do, even when they don’t have ADHD, because that’s not a natural situation with two people in a relationship. It’s not natural for us to be interacting all the time, so it’s not going to feel right and it’s not going to feel comfortable.

She says, “she seems to get anxious and takes it as a personal rejection when I tell her that mommy needs some time to herself.” One thing I would do here, because it will help us to be that autonomous person with her and see her as an autonomous person. Start using first person with her, instead of saying, “Mommy needs time to herself.” That’s not very direct. Children like this, and most children, really need that exchange as two people. “I’m going to do this now. I want to be by myself. This is what I’m doing.” I believe it will help you, it helps me, to believe that I’m talking to a person when I’m not talking about myself as mommy. When I’m saying, This is me. I have wants. You have wants. Of course, I’m always going to be there to take care of your needs as best I can, but I’m not going to take care of everything you want because sometimes it’ll be in conflict with what I want. It’s so much easier to do that when we’re in the habit of being you and me, two people.

In terms of her daughter being anxious and taking it as a personal rejection, I think that might be a projection on this parent’s part. Because how could this child feel personally rejected when we give them plenty of attention and now we’re just asserting ourselves? She may be acting like she’s rejected, but in her heart, she knows she’s not being rejected. She knows you’re being a leader, and the leader that she needs. And anxious. I mean, that may be there. And it might be a reflection of this parent feeling anxious about standing up for herself. That’s how tightly we can get involved in these things emotionally with our child. It’s really easy to do, we all do it to some extent about some things. To try to extricate ourselves from, Okay, I’m kind of anxious. Now that’s going to make her more anxious. And when I see her anxious, that’s going to make me more anxious. It goes back and forth, back and forth like that. And it doesn’t help either of us. Of course, it doesn’t help our child, it doesn’t help us, and we can get caught up in it and it just keeps kind of building on itself.

We usually have to be the ones to get into our reasonable brain and see our way out of this. It usually can’t be our child first. It needs to be us. So consider the reasonableness of what you’re picking up, the impression that you’re getting. Think about all the time that you do give her and that she’s this extroverted girl. I mean, you can’t be an extroverted girl and be that anxious about rejection because that would not make you an extroverted girl. So it doesn’t really go together. And there are other things like that. I’m sure that when this parent reflects, she can consider whether this is the truth or a reflection of her fears of what might be going on. Feeling maybe guilty, that she doesn’t deserve to take care of herself and do what she wants, that she has to give her whole self up to her child. Take your time to yourself. Say it confidently. Know that you’re going to get pushback.

She says, “If I tell her I’m taking a break and she’s going to play by herself for 15 minutes, I have about five minutes before the bids for attention start coming.” So when you do this, because you know her very well, expect that you’re going to get every bid under the sun for attention. Every clever way, every dramatic way, every upset way, every guilt-inducing way. She’s going to have to go there. She has to, to make sure that she can really be free of you. I mean, that’s the way we have to look at it underneath this. And I believe that. It’s not just something we have to tell ourselves to make it work, it’s the truth. So expect “I’m hungry,” “I need help with this,” “Come look at this.” And just answer from that place of I’m independent, I’m confident, I deserve to separate. She will be free when I do. When she knows that I can, it will free her. There’s only positives here in what I’m doing.

So, “How many more minutes?” “You know, I’m not sure. Five or 10, I think.” “I need help with this.” “I’m sure you do, and I can’t wait to help you when I’m done. I will when I’m ready.” “Come look at this.” “You know what, I’m not going to right now.” And it’s okay, also, if these statements are coming at you like rapid fire. Just let a couple of them go, holding your own pace. Don’t get caught up in her pace. Her pace is going to be urgent and persistent. Your pace is slower. It’s centered. It’s not reflecting her energy. It’s holding your energy. With practice, this gets easier, but it’s really important.

When you respond, you don’t have to respond right away. “I’m hungry.” “Oh, okay!” “I’m hungry.” “Oh, you must be getting ready for dinner soon. We’re going to have it soon.” “I need help with this.” “Well, let’s put it on hold for a little while.” Then she says, “Come look at this.” Maybe you just let that one go for a minute, because she knows, she knows what she’s doing. She knows that this can get to you, so don’t let it get to you. See this as her path to freedom. It’s a bumpy, bumpy path, right? Let her have her path. You hold your own.

“If I tell her that I’m on a break and I’ll help her when I’m done, she’ll keep asking, ‘How many more minutes?'” So let her ask, let her ask, and then, “Oh, you asked how many more minutes? I think it’s about 10.” And then let her ask. You don’t have to answer every time, but this parent says that “completely defeats the purpose of a break.” Yeah, it does. But it’s a temporary situation, if you can commit to your role. Not to that you have to say certain words or certain speech. Just consider it an improvisation, where all you know is your role and your role is to be inside yourself, strong, this kind of hero for her. That can be separate, that can take care of yourself, giving her incredible positive messages. And again, freeing her to be able to entertain herself and play by herself.

And then she talks about the craft project and that the parent said, no, she wasn’t going to do it with her right then, and her daughter had a meltdown. Yeah, those meltdowns, those are releasing control, meltdowns, oftentimes. And if she’s having a meltdown over that, think about it, she needs to have a meltdown, right? If children are having a meltdown over these inconsequential things, that means it’s not really about that. It’s some release that she needs to have. So try to trust that. It’s the truth.

But then here’s the part I want to help this parent with. She says, “she had a meltdown and then reached for her iPad.” So when I’m talking about boundaries, the first boundary that I recommend for this parent—this is going to give her some practice for the next one. The first one is boundaries around the devices, because a lot of reasons. But studies show that giving children free access to tech devices, it interferes with, among other things, the development of self-regulation. And that’s a big part of what you’re working on here. So children aren’t able to process uncomfortable emotions as they need to to build resiliency, because every time they’re going there, there’s a distraction for them. There’s this very powerful and potentially addictive distraction for them that allows them to avoid all the natural, typical feelings that children need to have, that they need to experience, and learn, with our support, that these are normal. Frustration, disappointment, boredom, anger, sadness. Life gives children all of these natural opportunities for this. Like her mom saying, no, I’m not going to do a craft project. It’s important that she has a chance to experience that all the way. Experience that meltdown, experience all those feelings, and get to the other side of them, without having this very potent distraction to lose herself in.

And then just on a practical level, using devices as the consolation prize for our attention, that means that we’re setting up a situation where they’re going to be wanting to be on devices whenever we’re not paying attention to them. There’s no time in the day for her to be freed up to pass through that empty, often uncomfortable, space needed to be able to initiate her play, to have all the wonders and the freedom that we want to give her of the free exploration and the play. The devices are getting in the way with us being able to be a secure base and her being able to be the free explorer. Except in this case, she wants us to be the explorer with her and we’re saying no. But now she’s got this other thing that she’s going to go to that has nothing to do with all the places we want her to be able to go, which is to be comfortable and even enjoy being with herself. That’s such a lifelong gift, so valuable. And it’s not likely to happen when she has the option of either the parent’s entertainment or an entertaining device.

I think we can all relate to that, just what our devices do to us as adults, that we don’t have those moments of boredom. At least for most of us, we were able to develop our abilities to entertain ourselves. But children are in the development stage, this is much more important for them even than for us.

So that’s boundary number one that I would set. And I’d prepare myself for a lot of blasting about this, and all the questions. So be really clear, set out times: These are the times you’re going to do it and not the rest of the time. If you leave that as an open question, then you’re going to have to be setting a boundary all day long. Not now, not now, not now. So set it out ahead of time: these times every day, or these two times a week, or not at all, or whatever you decide. Set it up that way so you’re not constantly having to set this boundary, because it’ll be easier for her and easier for you if it’s established early and established clearly and solidly, with all the noise she’s going to make about it. Oh, this girl is intense. She’s got a lot of pushback that she’s going to give you, so get ready. Maybe she’ll be persuading, she’ll be pleading, she’ll be vulnerable. Let her go there. Remind yourself it’s safe, if you can hold your center, knowing that what you’re giving her is actually freedom.

After that boundary, then the boundary of you saying no. That’s the order I would work on these. Because maybe if you allow that process with that boundary and all the grief you’re going to get about it to work, then it will give you more confidence to set this other boundary. Which is, for a lot of us, it’s even harder, because, as this parent said, “I love that she wants to engage with me.” Yes, and we’re not going to taint that at all by putting parameters around when we’re going to engage with her.

She says, “I worry that her constant need for my attention means that she feels insecure about her bond with me.” I think that’s, again, a fear place that this parent is going to. Because she actually said it, “I love that she wants to engage with me.” Yes, she wants to engage. “But I worry that her constant need for my attention. . .” So that’s where we can get hooked in and guilted and worried, when we see it as a need for attention. She was correct, I believe, in the first part of the sentence: wants, she wants to engage. She wants constant attention, she doesn’t need constant attention. What she needs is a parent who can be honest with her, who can be a leader, who isn’t afraid of her feelings.

That’s such a gift we can give children, that they’re not going to thank us for right there, but it is huge. To show her, You know what? You can melt down and I’ll have all the empathy in the world, but I’m not trying to change your feeling. I’m not trying to fix it. I know you’re safe, I know it’s healthy, and I know on the other side of this is freedom. And that’s what you really need from me.

I know this is a difficult reframe, so many people have a hard time with it. And we do play a big part in this. And that’s good news, because that means we can make this shift. But we have to be committed, as with everything with children, we have to go with it and believe in it. So that’s the part to work on even first, before you work on the boundaries with the tech device or with your attention. Working on why. Why are you doing it? None of it is selfish. It’s far, far from it. It’s being heroic. It’s doing the hard things because we love our children so much and they deserve the very best that we can give them. They know it’s easier for us to say okay, they already know that. And they know that real love is the hard things.

I believe in this parent. I believe in all of us because if I could do this, I feel like anyone can. Thanks so much for listening. I really hope this helps.

And for everything about boundaries, I hope you’ll check out my No Bad Kids Master Course at nobadkidscourse.com. And also my books, that are going to be re-released now with a new publisher. They had been self-published for years, and now they’re going to be with Penguin Random House. Very exciting! They’re now on pre-order, but will be available at the end of this month.

We can do this.

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Transcript of “Toddlers That Won’t Go to Bed (Solutions from Eileen Henry)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I have the pleasure of hosting Eileen Henry. She’s a longtime friend and fellow RIE associate. And she’s a pioneer, as one of the first child sleep consultants in the U.S. She’s been helping families achieve peaceful and lasting sleep for decades. Eileen offers effective, holistic solutions that end up transforming parents’ experience with sleep and common behavior issues in the early years of development. Eileen’s the real deal, and when she works with you, it’s with her and the unique method she developed, not borrowed ideas from other experts.

She says: “Underneath most behavior is a need that longs for expression. Often these needs are in conflict with one another in the early years.” I’m really excited for the second opportunity to share Eileen’s sage insights with you on Unruffled.

Hi there, Eileen. Welcome back. Thank you so much for returning to share with us.

Eileen Henry: Always a pleasure.

Janet Lansbury: As Eileen knows, I sent her a whole bunch of questions. They were just some that I’ve been saving because they’re all around what Eileen is an expert in, which is sleep issues. All of these are about helping our child to get to sleep. It’s not about what happens after they’re already asleep and it’s done, but it’s that process of helping them get to bed, which can be very challenging, obviously.

I thought maybe we could start by having you say a little bit about what you thought about all these notes, if there’s something that stuck out for you as a similar theme in the issues parents are having. Some general guidelines, maybe, that you could offer before we get into the specifics.

Eileen Henry: Yes, I’m happy to. I noticed they’re all toddlers. I think the youngest one is a year old, and that’s coming in the beginning toddler. And then there is the accomplished toddler: two, two-and-a-half, coming into three years old. Very verbal, and they’re accomplished in their basic skill set and they’re practicing their skills. And they really show up in the night before bed when it’s time to let go and say goodbye to the day and separate from parents.

I like to look at this in the macro and then the micro. The macro, the family system, we’re working on meeting the needs of the child in the context of the most dynamic stage of growth and change in a human being’s lifetime: development. And development is the most interruptive thing to sleep. And it’s kind of an entropic system, early family life. It’s going from order to chaos to order to chaos. Order is when the habit formation solidifies and there’s a good habit, a good routine, and things are rolling along. And then chaos comes in big leaps of development and change. And toddlers are really apprehending a lot of emotional change, cognitive change, and change is happening in the environment too.

Janet Lansbury: And physical change too, in their development.

Eileen Henry: Oh yeah. And our job is really, if we think of the overall, is to create a sense of order just enough that over time we’re modeling the ability to return to order when life and change and growth and development takes us into chaos. So we’re always ushering them back into a place of order, into a place of stability. And that learning, that’s a two-decade proposition and learning experience, really. Because that’s how long this kind of dynamic brain development is going on.

I really identify with the toddler. This is the training ground and it really paves the way to the young child, the adolescent, and the teenager. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when people come to me with toddler sleep, it’s not a genuine sleep issue. It’s a boundary and a habit issue. And that’s great news because, as you know, Janet, Magda told us we can change anything we’re doing with our children at any time. And I love that because we’re going to do this over and over with our children.

Janet Lansbury: That’s right. It’s never too late. It’s never too early to start thinking about creating routines that you want to work in the future or that you hope will work.

And I am with you totally on loving the toddler years. One of the reasons is they’re just a mess, putting it all out there. Hopefully we see it as kind of a lovable mess, but as we get older, we’re more hidden in our feelings and things we’re going through. Toddlers just are like an open book.

Eileen Henry: They are. And what they’re grappling with is a lot that human beings, we do all our lives. And I think one of the most interesting elements of humanness is desire and longing. And toddlers, we see it in their behavior—and you’ve talked to this a lot, and I love how you speak to this—that underneath the behavior are needs. And if we can get under the behavior, the desire, the longing, the asking, mommy, mommy, mommy, running around, that wild burst of energy they can get before bedtime. Underneath the behavior is the desire to connect, the desire for some control.

And I like the word “apprehend” because it really captures how the embodied toddler is coming into these natural human feelings of desire and longing and wanting and expression and mischief and curiosity and all of that. They apprehend it in an embodied, physical, highly expressive way. And they’re having conflicting needs.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, and that’s what you’re reminding me of is that even though I said they’re putting it all out there, they’re putting it all out there, but not in a way that’s clearly going to communicate to us all the time what the actual need is. Sometimes it’s, “I need to be with you all the time!” That’s what I’m saying and that’s what I’m demonstrating. But what I really need is the order that you can give me. What you’re talking about, about order. And so that’s where it’s so easy to get misdirected by them because obviously our heart goes out when they’re saying, “I just need to be with you. Don’t ever leave me!” kind of thing.

Eileen Henry: And the truth of the matter is, because they’re still immature, so this rising up, this first time in toddlerhood, these genuine feelings are coming up, they’re still immature and they don’t know the difference between a need and a want. And that’s our relentless job, to discern that for them. If we think about it, we look around, a lot of grown-ups struggle with that, so we can really give toddlers a big break.

Janet Lansbury: Absolutely. Okay, we better get going on these questions because we do have a lot and I want to get to as much of this as possible, get your expertise. And I know parents really appreciate hearing advice on these issues. Here’s the first one:

I’ve recently bought No Bad Kids and I’ve been implementing some of your disciplinary guidelines and I’ve noticed them make a huge difference in my relationship with my daughter. Meal times are much smoother. I’ve noticed that she appears so much more confident to explore and play on her own. I’m feeling less guilty and much more confident about setting boundaries. Yay! And our time together feels really connected.

One area I’m still struggling with is bedtime, which has never been particularly easy for us. My daughter has a sensitive nervous system and definitely takes a while to wind down in the evening. That being said, we had a nice little rhythm going until this last week. The rhythm was: physical movement and dancing, wind down, dinner, bath, husband reads with her, he leaves the room, I come in and sing songs with her, sleep. We’ve been staying at the in-laws’ while they’re away, I think this might be a contributing factor. And as soon as bathtime is over and I’ve finished reading to her, singing songs, and winding down, she all of a sudden becomes giggly and starts climbing off and onto the floor bed, crawling around the floor, picking up anything on the floor that she can find. Last night it was a lamp, which I’ve since moved away.

And then she starts either hitting or biting. Last night after she had bitten me twice, I told her that I wouldn’t let her do that and that I’d send her dad to finish bedtime. She cried for about 20 minutes straight until I eventually came back into the room and from there she managed to get to sleep, but this was already way past her bedtime. We’re facing the same situation tonight. I’ve been bitten twice and I’ve now left the room and her dad is reading to her. No tears yet, though.

Any tips you could offer would be so greatly appreciated.

Eileen Henry: Okay, yes. The first thing I would ask is how the naps are. Most toddlers at this age still need a combined two minimum, preferably three hours of day sleep. And so if they don’t get that, the cortisol builds up and the wild child shows up right before bed. I love the ritual that they have—the physical activity, dancing, moving around, and how they wind into the night. And I trust mother’s intuition that she has a sensitive nervous system. Those nervous systems need a little longer to wind down, and so I would start earlier with that winding-down process, but I really love that. I love the dance before dinner and then coming in to dinner, then books. And once we enter the bedroom, we want to create a really intimate, close connection.

I wonder about the floor bed, too. Sometimes for this age child, that can be a lot of room and, depending how the setup is, I always ask for pictures of the physical environment. So once they start crawling up and down and off the bed and all around, the container might need to be brought in. And I’m also not sure if the parents are the body boundary, if they’re laying down to have her stay on the floor bed. Our presence can become really stimulating for our little ones, especially this age. So if we combine a little lack of sleep during the day, or even if she’s getting enough sleep during the day, let’s say she’s getting great naps and this behavior is still showing up, I would recommend bringing in the container to give her the ability to move around.

As far as the biting goes, my daughter, when she was two-and-a-half, left a RIE class after her best friend bit the heck out of her, and she looked at me the next day and there was still a mark on her arm and she said, “Ava didn’t mean to hurt me, she just meant to bite me.” It’s so true. It’s that impulse, that compulsion, just like that nyump expression. And sometimes it’s an expression of passion, excitement, this idea called cute aggression. When human beings get really excited, it’s just like, I want to bite it! I would say, in a quiet moment: “I notice that you get really excited before sleep time and you bite.” And offering something to bite in the bathtub, offering a lovey, the transitional object, something they can bite. And I would remove myself after the first bite. So, “Oh, you bit me, I’m going to step away.”

But the need for attachment, closeness, connection, and the opposite, equal conflicting need for autonomy, separateness, authenticity, those are usually the two conflicting needs at this time. So I give a lot of preparation to the physical environment and the emotional environment because we’re sculpting a container that holds our children, it holds our toddlers, it holds their sleep. And it also holds these expressions of needing to move and needing to get that out of the body. That’s what they are in charge of. They’re in charge of moving their bodies and finding the rest, and we’re in charge of holding the boundary and coming and going in what I call “co-regulation in motion.”

In toddlerhood, these natural behaviors come up and the parent being next to the child is really stimulating. Quite often the child can find rest sooner if they have a safe environment. They can roll around, play with their lovey, play with their toes and their hands, and walk around and let the body find rest. So I would just need more information on the physical environment. And I know they’re at their in-laws’ house. So it’s a new environment, that’s challenging. But the floor bed at home, what is that physical environment like? And how to create a little more containment for the one-year-old to move about and get that energy out of her so that her body can find rest.

Janet Lansbury: I was thinking about what the parent said about the sensitive nervous system too, which would make a child even more sensitive to the energy of the parent. And then if the parent’s getting annoyed—which is very normal for us to do, we want our day to be over as a parent, and now it’s taking longer and longer. And so now our energy is not just exciting because it’s a parent, but it’s unnerving because our vibration is not a comfortable one.

Eileen Henry: Yes, and they’re interested in that. That’s curious . . . They’re learning in relationship. And sensitive nervous systems don’t usually happen in a vacuum. They happen within the nervous system of the family. And so we want to be mindful of any somatic practice of self-regulation starting earlier. When we notice these things in our children at a year old, it’s not too young to say, “I see and I hear you. I see this at night. Let’s get to the bedroom sooner so you can crawl up and down off of the bed for a bit, and then settle in for story time.” I don’t know what time they’re hitting the bath, but by bathtime she might be a little overtired. This is classic a-little-jacked-up-on-cortisol behavior.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And one of my three children, bathing actually stimulated him, so it didn’t have that effect that we hope it’s going to have. So it’s not necessarily a calming-down experience for children. It can be an excitable experience too.

Eileen Henry: Good point. Then that way we would want to put that earlier in the ritual, maybe after the dance party, then the bath. We’re going from an upright, active love, family environment to horizontal, quiet love, sleep environment.

Janet Lansbury: Great, I love that. Okay, here’s another one:

I’m a mum to T, a delightful, curious, intuitive, and strong-spirited 23-month-old who’s an incredible communicator, strong verbal skills. Myself and my partner follow a gentle, respectful approach with her and have done from the beginning. I’m currently at home with T full-time except for naps, and one afternoon a week when my mum has her. I really feel I need this time and space to refill my cup.

In the last few weeks, my mum has received a cancer diagnosis, and whilst we are awaiting a full diagnosis and prognosis, I believe the cancer is advanced and we are perhaps facing the end of her life. I—understandably, I know—feel overwhelmed and sad and find my tolerance and patience with my daughter is in much shorter supply than usual. In light of the diagnosis, I’m not asking my mum to look after T, as I feel she has enough to manage and process at the moment.

T is also beginning to refuse her nap, which I’m finding so frustrating and feel myself becoming uncompromising and resentful with her in the moment. We have recently stopped feeding through the night, which on the whole T has managed and accepted very well.

I wonder if you can speak to how to navigate this time— the frustration I’m feeling towards my daughter when she refuses to nap, losing the small window I have to myself now, and also how to navigate any changes that may help support me during what I feel will be stormy clouds ahead for our family.

I’m mindful that the gentle approach to making changes such as stopping feeding or bed-sharing is to do this when there are no big life changes imminent. Whilst I don’t particularly want to stop either, I worry that if my mom’s prognosis is poor, I’m going to be rocked to my core and I’m not sure I will be able to manage feeding and the lack of space bed-sharing currently allows going forward.

Any insight, wise words, and tips gratefully received.

Eileen Henry: This is when human beings are the most human: grieving. Yeah, all these feelings that are coming up for you, “uncompromising and resentful with her in the moment.” That’s so human. That’s so understandable when you’re going through grief. And this is a unique grief, this mother is in the middle of the past of being mothered by her mother and mothering. This is a huge transition. It’s kind of this mom to not want to put too much on her mother as far as doing the caregiving with her, given what she’s going through. I would say if you could carve out time of just the three of you being together and just being present with each other as much as possible and really sinking into this time, this huge transition.

You stopped feeding through the night, which your toddler accepted very well—hold on to that. Developmentally, she’s capable of holding on to night weaning and you don’t need to go back to that, because that’s going to deplete you. And you want to be as resourced as you can going through this time. As far as bed-sharing, you could make that change. But I would say, trust yourself. Is that a change that you really feel like you could make right now?

And as far as the nap goes, if you’re doing bed-sharing at night, I take it that your daughter is reliant on you to lie down with her for naps. Here again, it would be setting up the sanctuary of rest, relaxation, downtime, and not even call it nap. But at this age, if she’s used to you being with her to get the nap, it’s going to be hard to change that at this age. You could just transition to downtime and go to bed earlier or be with her. Your body might need a nap at that time. Grief is exhausting, it takes a lot of energy to be present with grief. But if you could create a space that you could just give her permission to, you can make noise, you can sleep, you can hang out, you can play. And this is the downtime. And we give them an environmental cue. I like using a light cue. Red is slow down, hang out, quiet play and green is go, dog, go!

Janet Lansbury: Are you saying that the parent would separate and say, “This is your time. You can go to sleep if you feel like it. You don’t have to.” And letting go of that pressure the parent’s putting on herself. Often it’s letting go of something around sleep that makes it work, just because sleep is letting go, right? That starts with us letting go. So letting go of that it has to be this way. Like, Here’s some things in your room. Hang out, but I’m going to rest. I’m going to go rest now.

Eileen Henry: We’re modeling self-care and we’re showing our daughters how to love the self, how to take care of the self as far as the basic needs. And it’s okay. Because we also have that need for closeness and attachment versus self-preservation, authenticity, and autonomy. And we want our children to integrate those two because those two needs, that are in conflict, they’re going to have to navigate and even negotiate in every close relationship they have in this life, especially their intimate relationships.

So what we want to do is create, again, a sanctuary, a calming, peaceful place that we can release the child to. And I don’t know how this little one, how her autonomy muscle is. If she’s used to having the place in RIE, the yes space, where we can release our little ones to and they have autonomous, self-directed play. And we come and go. Check in, go do our thing, come back and check in. And that can be built at any time. I just don’t know, going through grief, if this is something this mom can take on. I would encourage her to let go.

Toddlers are great at grief. They can cycle through every stage in like 20 to 30 minutes. Denial, bargaining, sad, disappointment, anger, rage, sad, frustration, acceptance. And when I work with mothers who are going through a grieving process and changing sleep habits in their home, what they’re faced with is their own grief and then their child going through their loss in grief of separating, saying goodbye to the day, letting go of mom and dad as their sleep rock. And I do discuss in toddler sleep the process that toddlers are going through. A letting go, a loss, a grieving. If they’re letting go of the breast as their sleep crutch or being in constant contact with a parent. And as we usher them and support them into moving into greater abilities and autonomy, they have to let go of that. And they experience all the feelings of grief.

The only other attachment person that talks about this and the grief around sleep and saying goodbye and letting go is Gordon Neufeld. He really speaks to this beautifully. And we both agree that we meet that letting go with ritual—storytelling especially, as part of the ritual—and lullaby. Those are the two perfect ways to meet grief and letting go, because that’s how we’ve dealt with it for thousands of years. Before the written word, we did oral storytelling. And the lullaby is an ancient, ancient form that we use in rituals, especially rituals to deal with sadness, loss, and grief.

Janet Lansbury: And do you feel like since this is a grieving, letting-go process, that this is also a time to consider that there may be some really healthy crying children need to share?

Eileen Henry: Yes.

Janet Lansbury: Generally I always feel like, and I would notice this in my children, if children this age, that are in such emotional turmoil for a good part of the day, if they don’t have regular venting periods, which is usually around when we set a boundary with them, Sorry, we can’t play outside anymore. It’s really time to come in. If we could see those all as positive sharing that our child needs to do, if we could keep reminding ourselves of this perspective that, Oh, I haven’t done a bad thing as a mom, this isn’t bad. This is actually really a positive thing. Then our children don’t have to store it up until the end of the day.

Eileen Henry: Yes. I’m thinking of that previous letter, the little two-biter. Mom stepped away and her daughter cried for 20 minutes and then she came back and she was ready to go to sleep. She had the release she needed. Here again, release is so important.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. I like that analogy of the container, but for my survival it’s been more like that little bit of emotional distance of kind of being the therapist that I guess contains, but it’s more like witnesses. It’s more like allows for, makes room for, and doesn’t have to take it onto myself in any way.

Eileen Henry: Yeah. We’re doing something with our children that therapists will intentionally do but don’t want to unconsciously do. We’re in parallel process with them. And that’s going to be the challenge of this mom. Parallel process is if we start to feel the feelings of the other so much that we get carried and swept away in their experience and we don’t remain differentiated.

Janet Lansbury: And it’s really hard not to do that, by the way. Really, really hard. But that’s why I like the visual for me, the feeling of being the anchor. People will say to me, “Well, I’m riding these waves.” No, don’t ride the waves with your child! If you’re surfing all day, you’re going to be wasted.

Eileen Henry: You’re going to get swept away.

Janet Lansbury: But if you can be an anchor, then it’s passing through and you expect it to. You’re not trying to stop the waves or tame them. That’s why I hate that term “taming tantrums” and things like that. No, that’s us trying to control something that we don’t any of us control, which is our feelings.

Eileen Henry: No. I think tantrums are absolutely something that the child can handle. They can’t control it. It kind of has to ride its course, right? It just rides its course and then it comes down and all of a sudden it’s, “Oh, a bird!” They move through.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And it’s very sudden a lot of the time, like, What just happened? They’re fine and I’m still a mess. What’s going on here? But yeah, that always amazes me. I’ve seen that so many times with children I’ve worked with, my own children, that you feel like, as a parent that’s sensitive like I am, It’s the end of the world! And now two seconds later, What just happened? They’re all, La la la, everything’s great. What happened? And that’s why people think they’re faking it, right? Because how can they do that? But that’s the healthy way that children vent.

Eileen Henry: That’s what I mean by integrate. So the more we hold that anchor for them—I like the anchor too—holding that space, they’re able to move through those feelings. And I’ve noticed with my own and with children that I’ve worked with and the feedback I get from parents, it’s scary. And yet over time as they develop, it integrates into a very fluid and flexible emotional system. No one feeling takes them out. They’re able to have all the feelings of being human and all the feelings of grief and all the feelings of loss and all the feelings of frustration and disappointment, all of it. I think it may have been Gordon Neufeld who says, and they have every right to have every feeling.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And Magda said that too, all the time. Even about infants, that they have a right to cry. Okay, so moving on. That was wonderful, thank you. Here’s another one:

My daughter is turning three in March. She is soooo needy. She has been this way from the day she was born. She still needs me to put her to sleep. I stay with her until she’s fallen asleep. If I try to leave while she’s still awake, she screams and cries in despair to the point she will vomit. My back aches on a daily basis from carrying her. That’s the only way she will fall asleep.

On another note, she’s extremely needy. I get stressed because she doesn’t let me do anything. I tell her I need to get ready and will come back in five minutes. As soon as I step into my room, she’s calling for me. “Mommy, mommy!” It goes like this all day long. I give her my undivided attention, but it’s just not enough for her. I’m a stay-at-home mom and only work on Sundays as an RN.

I’m exhausted. Please budge me towards the right direction.

Eileen Henry: Oh, the three-year-old’s on top.

I’m going to go into the language of, “she still needs me to put her to sleep.” In my book, I talk about the difference between authentic need and parent-reinforced need. So, this is good news: This is a parent-reinforced need. She doesn’t need you to put her to sleep, but in her little mind she does because that’s the only way it’s happened. So, she can do it. She wants you to put her to sleep. And this is the discernment we have to do, the difference between a need and a want. And if you don’t, “she screams and cries in despair.” That is because she hasn’t learned another way to do it. But she can. She can.

And the great thing about working with a three-year-old, they have all their skills, they’re just practicing them over and over. They’re verbal. If there are any words coming out of the mouth, that means they do have access to what higher brain they do possess. And that actually isn’t distress or despair, that is longing and desire and come fix it because I don’t know any other way.

So I would encourage her to allow her daughter to learn how to navigate the liminal space of consciousness. From consciousness to unconsciousness, that’s the space that our toddlers have to confront to become skilled sleepers. And we help them. We set them up, we prepare them. I use storytelling, lovies, play, dress rehearsal, lullaby to set them up with a ritual that is irresistible to the toddler to prepare them, to release them into that space and learn how to navigate that space.

“She doesn’t let you do anything.” That means she’s in charge. And when toddlers are in charge, no one really gets what they need. It’s chaos. If I see an amount of chaos in an exhausted parent, it’s she’s gotten on top of the sleep ritual.

And the vomiters, oh my goodness, that’s a longer discussion. I’ve worked with varying degrees of vomiting. And it’s disheartening and it’s really upsetting to parents, yet it’s one of the easiest things for them to do is vomit. Crying and vomit is easy. It’s not like the vomiting that grown-ups do. It’s very different. We give them permission to vomit, actually. That’s just flat-out honest. We prepare them. We set up the crib, we set up the space, we put out new jammies. I have some of the most incredible stories I have about the cathartic experience vomiting children went through and got to the other side. A two-year-old who went to the crib and pointed and gagged and pointed to the crib and shook his head and said, “No more, no more.” Because his mom told him over and over, “It’s okay if you vomit. You don’t have to, but if you vomit, I’m going to clean it up, I’m going to take care of it, and we’re going to put you back to bed.” A toddler who is three years old at the gate, and his mom set him up, he had his bucket, they went through the dress rehearsal. And she sent me an email the next morning, she said, “I was in the kitchen and I heard the bucket fly over the gate. And I went and he looked at me, he said, ‘I don’t need that.'” And he went and got back to bed and he went to sleep. He was given permission for even that expression.

Janet Lansbury: Because the parent had the perspective that you gave them to not be deeply alarmed, like most of us are, especially the first time that happens.

Eileen Henry: Two to three years old, I tell parents, this is the age where we titrate the bad news and the great news, because it’s both for the child. That grown-ups are in charge and we don’t harm ourselves anymore to take care of our children. If our back is genuinely hurting, we look at the child and say, “You know what, sweetie? When I do that over and over, that hurts my back. So I’ll come sit down. You can sit in my lap.” We give them options, but we don’t do things that hurt us anymore. Because again, we’re modeling what it’s like to take care of ourselves and treat ourselves lovingly.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, I think it’s so hard for us, it was for me at first, to frame these kind of boundaries and sticking up for ourselves as such a positive, important teaching moment that will benefit our child their whole life. If we can see boundaries that way.

Eileen Henry: So underneath is the need, we want to meet the need. And then the behavior, we’ve talked about “letting it ride,” that expression and then it integrates and the nervous system calms down. The more the behavior meets the strong boundary, the loving limit, and the environment stays consistent, strong, and it holds, the behavior, even the vomiting, it goes away.

Janet Lansbury: Right. Because there’s a calming effect of, Oh, I don’t have to run everything. They’re comfortable being my leader, they’re comfortable doing this.

What I would say to this parent too, what I would suggest is that she gets the practice. Because I feel like bedtime is the hardest time to set a boundary. We’re tired. They’re tired. It’s this sensitive time for us separating from our children. It’s not just them separating from us. It’s us. And we want to feel like it was a good day and it’s all nice so that we can get to sleep and not feel agitated and worried that it’s all wrong and everything’s bad. It’s a really important time for a positive feeling. So I would just lean into the boundaries all day long so that you get a lot of practice with the dynamic of: I set the boundary. You get upset. I hold the boundary because I love you too much to not hold this for you. You need me to. And yes, you’re going to rail at me and scream at me and whine and say my name 50 million times, but I love you too much to crumble for you. It’s this really powerful, loving reframe. And the more practice she gets, the better chance she’ll have of being able to do this at night. Which is the hardest time, for me at least.

Eileen Henry: Yes. And setting the stage. A three-year-old, we can look at them and say, “You know what? I want to create a bedtime we look forward to.” That’s why I involve toddlers in their own solutions. We actually collaborate a solution with them. Now, we’re in charge of it, we show them the structure of it. And then we allow them to invite in the stuffy support animals, we invite in this creative connection we forge with them—what bridges us to the next day, where we’re going to meet, where we might meet in our dreams. A verbal child, this is when we really want to create an intimate, lovely preparation to then release them and let go of them.

Janet Lansbury: And I think the more mutual it is, the easier it’ll be for us to release it. Because there’s trust. Our child will make deals with us that they will not follow necessarily, they will not come through on. We shake hands on like, “Alright, we’re going to hug three times and say goodnight, and that’s going to be it.” And we can’t expect them to go with the deal, but at least we know they made this deal. And so I’m going to trust that if they’re not accepting it now, it’s because they need to vent something with me as I’m leaving or whatever it is. And it helps them to get a sense of control too. So yeah, I love that idea of children participating in the ritual. Their ideas about what do you need, what do you want, what should we do? And then, Okay, here’s how we’ll do it, then. Us having the final say.

Eileen Henry: Right, we’re modeling. So we’re saying, Okay, what are your non-negotiables? What do you want before bedtime? We’re going to have this, we’re going to have that. We’re going to make sure to make time for you crawling up and down off the bed. We build it into the ritual so that the child feels seen, heard, and understood, that they’re an active part of this and we’re creating something together to look forward to. And then we literally release them into the sanctuary. We release them into their imaginations, their wonder. They have their lovies. We give them what they’re in charge of in their environment, the lovey, the support animal.

I use storytelling kind of like lore, and there are archetypes in the story. There’s the vulnerable one we take care of and nurture. There’s the protector, maybe a bear. Lately dragons have been really popular with little boys as the overall watching over, protecting the space. And we give them these archetypes and we release them to it. We release them to the self, and we release them into their unconscious where all the shadow material waits for us in our dreams. They’re so good at it.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, they are. And if we go into that knowing that we’ve done this together, and sometimes I even say, or even suggest, I remember saying this to my children, “If you have more feelings as I’m leaving, you get to share those and I will be back to check on you.” And that’s in the routine. We practice that. So it’s really, it’s in the play for us. It helps us kind of settle into our role a little bit better. I needed a lot of help with this. That’s why I’ve got all these ideas and why I have ideas for other parents too. Because there’s no one with a harder time setting limits than me. I mean, I love the expression, “I never let go of anything without leaving claw marks in it.”

Eileen Henry: Me too. I think I know where you got that one from. I like that one.

Janet Lansbury: And children are like that, right? Young children are. And they’re supposed to be, and that’s okay. If we can normalize that for ourselves and expect it, even, it’s just going to be easier for us to face it with that heroism that we need so often as parents around boundaries.

Eileen Henry: It is. And I tell parents, you just have to be good enough. My kids are way better at boundaries than I am, to this day. Just good enough. Thank goodness we don’t have to do it perfectly.

And that checking in on them, if we can lead the check-ins and reassure the child, I’m going to go do X and then I’m going to come back and check in on you. And if you can keep it a little lighthearted—you talk about this, I’ve heard you talk about this—staying in lighthearted and almost playful. I used to tell my daughter, “I always have three more kisses in me, so when I come back, you tell me where you want those kisses.” And she’d want them on her doll, on her elbow. And it was a little playful.

Also, a magical little phrase and mantra is, “You know what, sweetie? I’m going to give you longer to work this out. I’m right over there. I’m going to be back. I’m listening. I hear you calling mommy, mommy, mommy. I hear that. And I’m going to give you longer to work this out and settle down and go to sleep.” A three-year-old, we can start to speak to them. And I think that is a respectful, gentle way of speaking to a child. It’s just their reaction can be anything but gentle. They’re ruckus, they’re rough and tumble, so that’s going to come back at us.

Janet Lansbury: They’re not unruffled, which is partly what I love about them. But yeah, the reason to have that light attitude too is—and not that we can snap our fingers and have this, it’s all about this perspective and everything that you’ve talked about here today. It’s important because then our child isn’t feeling those intense, uncomfortable things coming from us that they’re going to absorb, and now they’ve got to deal with that too at bedtime. If we can be clear and confident and light in what we’re doing, they have nothing else to dig into there when they’re clawing. There’s nothing, it’s like we’re light as a feather. What are they going to claw into? And that’s what they need. They don’t want to be stuck either, in their heart of hearts. They don’t want to be in that in-between place. They want to go to sleep too, down deep, because they’re exhausted.

Eileen Henry: They don’t want to work that hard. They will.

Janet Lansbury: It’s like they feel like they have to, they can’t be the one to let go first. It’s this wonderful way they’re built.

Eileen Henry: When you’re in the moment, I do appreciate how hard it is when your child’s tugging on your heartstrings.

Janet Lansbury: It really is. And so we do whatever we do and then later we look at it and say, Okay, maybe I want to be kinder to myself the next time. And I’ll try it, and we just do our best. And at some point we realize, because we see it evident in front of us in all the boundaries that we set, that, Oh my gosh, that was a gift that I just gave my child.

Eileen Henry: Yeah. I think there’s a magic in preparing ahead of time, preparing the child, walking them through, having one last night. Especially if they’re heavy sleep crutches, like still holding them to sleep or nursing them to sleep or being with them or picking them up a bunch of times to fix their sleep for them. To really prepare the self, then prepare the child, and then walk through with that confident momentum. I love your term. Confident momentum is co-regulation in motion. It has a momentum, it has a confident movement to it.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. And it doesn’t have the trepidation. Because sometimes when I suggest to parents that they prepare, they interpret it as if they’re using this warning tone. Well, now I have to do this, and here’s your last kiss. And that’s not the comfortable parent that we’re talking about, that’s so vital to this process.

Wow. You are just a wealth of information and inspiration, and I hope that everybody checks out your website if they haven’t already: compassionatesleepsolutions.com. And your book, The Compassionate Sleep Solution, Calming the Cry. Check that out too. Check out her social media. We’ll put links into the transcript.

And she does this amazing thing: 15-minute free consultations with Eileen. That is huge. So you might want to check that out as well and take advantage. And I love the work that you’re doing and how you’ve spearheaded this work, this role of sleep consultant. You’ve provided a service that is so essential. If we’re not sleeping, everything is much harder.

Eileen Henry: It is. It’s the foundation of our well-being. It really is, to be resourced as parents and human beings. It certainly was for me.

Janet Lansbury: Thank you so much, Eileen.

Eileen Henry: Oh, it’s always a pleasure to hang out with you. Thank you.

Janet Lansbury: Again, Eileen’s website is compassionatesleepsolutions.com, and you can also hear our previous conversation on Unruffled, The Beauty of Sleep.

Thank you so much for listening and all your kind support. We can do this.

The post Toddlers That Won’t Go to Bed (Solutions from Eileen Henry) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Raising Mentally Healthy Kids Means Letting Them Grieve”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about a topic that I guess is controversial, and that is this idea of letting children grieve. I know that letting a child feel something can be misconstrued as we’re just ignoring them while they’re sad and we don’t care, and you’re kind of abandoning them emotionally while they’re upset. It’s weird, it’s that word let. And if we exchange it with the word allow, it can have a different connotation, right? It sounds like, oh, this is kind of a privilege. We’re allowing our child to experience an uncomfortable feeling that’s very much a part of life. And letting them express it to us without trying to change it or distract it or cheer them up or tell them they shouldn’t feel that way, they don’t need to feel that way. That’s what I’m going to be talking about today.

Because, like every feeling under the sun and every feeling in the darkness as well, grief and loss are extremely healthy for us to allow ourselves and our children to experience and express fully, to share. And we could say this is especially important for children because they’re in the building stages of emotional health. They’re building the foundation for these capacities to experience every type of feeling and know that it’s healthy, that it passes, they don’t have to be afraid of it. They can have the feeling of being scared, but they don’t have to be afraid of the feeling itself. So it’s important that we try to do this for them, if we believe this. And when we let children feel even these dark feelings like grief and loss, they receive many vital messages: That sadness and loss are healthy, normal, integral to life. And they don’t feel good while we’re in them, but with support, the support of my loved ones, I learn as a child that I can handle them, and they eventually pass.

Most of us didn’t receive these kinds of messages consistently as children, so that makes it even more challenging for us to shift that cycle and give our child something different. That’s healthier, that builds a sense of security, that frees them. Because if I can feel all the hardest emotions to feel, the most uncomfortable ones, I’m free. I can do anything, right? I don’t have to be afraid of life. I don’t have to be afraid of what’s around the corner and worry that I can’t handle it. I’m learning bit by bit, naturally through everyday life, that I can.

Still, even knowing all this and realizing how positive it is, it’s really challenging for us to give this to our children, right? Because none of us want to hear or see our child upset. And the younger the child, the harder this is for us. Even a few seconds of crying, even being on the verge of crying or being sad, we have this instinct to swoop in and try to protect our child from that feeling, thereby giving them this message, Wow, they want to protect me from something. It must be something I can’t handle, that’s too scary.

So you see, that’s the importance of trying to figure this out for ourselves, how we can do this, how we can start to believe in it and frame it for ourselves as this positive, loving thing to do. Which doesn’t make it pleasant, by the way, but it makes it possible. And whether we’re a parent or a grandparent or a paid caregiver, it feels like we’re doing something wrong if the child in our care is upset. So we want to distract them, we want to make them smile, and sometimes we can sort of bring them out of it. We’ll want to do almost anything in our power to put an end to that feeling that’s triggering our child’s tears.

But think about it: Doesn’t our child have a right to, let’s say, if it’s somebody leaving the room that we love, our parent—that’s one of the examples I’m going to be sharing here. We don’t want them to leave the room. We love them so much that we’re sad when they leave. Don’t we have a right to feel like that? Isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t it show the depth of my love for you, my joy in being with you, that I don’t want you to ever go away from me? That I have feelings when you do? With Magda Gerber’s profound encouragement, I tried hard to embrace this approach with my children, who are now all three adults. I wasn’t perfect at it, by any means. But I could soon see the difference between their much healthier relationship to their emotions and mine, which is still a work in progress.

In one particularly glaring example, my middle child was very close to the dog that we had at the time. Of all three of my children, she was the one that probably most saw this dog as kind of her mascot. She’s a talented artist, and she drew a pen drawing of this dog’s face, this dog’s portrait, and she won an award in middle school for it. She went to college, and I believe it was her first summer coming home from college, and our dog died. Well, first she became paralyzed and then she died. It was very, very difficult, a dramatic, heart-wrenching experience. Not just that she died, but the way that we had to let her go. We were all very sad.

And this daughter, she really kind of fell apart. She was sitting on the floor in the hallway between her bedroom and mine and just couldn’t get up. She was just sobbing, sobbing. And everything in me wanted to come over there and stroke her and grab her and hug her and make her feel better. I was scared. It looked like she might be falling into some deep depression. It was so intense. But everything I knew about this child and about emotional health and what my role was in my child’s feelings: to listen, to hold space for, to be there if she wanted to reach out to hold me or something like that, but not to force myself on her, like I wanted to do. So I sat there next to her for a while, not touching her, just being present. She knew I was there for her. And still, she cried. And eventually I had to get up, and she went on and on. And in her bedroom, on the floor. It seemed like this endless abyss that she was falling into and that I was falling into with her because I was so worried about her.

Well, what happened was after about, I think it was even less than 24 hours, she came out of it. And it wasn’t long after that that she was remembering this dog, and she could laugh at some of the memories. I mean, dogs do bring all this humor into your life as a family. And probably cats do too, I’ve never had a cat. But that’s one of the joys of having a dog for me is they’re funny. They are just so precious and unique and you’re always trying to figure out what’s going on with them. So she had all of these memories, and she was like a different person. She was free, she was light. She had totally moved through it. And I was dumbfounded because I was still going through it in my way. In my slower, not as healthy way, I believe. I was still suffering. And honestly, it took me like a year to get over that dog, or at least several months, before I wasn’t feeling sad about the dog. She moved on. And that showed me so clearly, wow, this is what happens when you’re free to clear your feelings and move through them. It can go away like that. Not always, not with every grief that a child has, not with every child. But I could see the difference. And if I wasn’t already sold at that point, which I was a thousand times over, that did it for me.

And what it reminded me of, too, is that I need to allow myself to feel losses. There’s loss all around us, and I don’t mean to be maudlin, it’s just a sign that we’re living and we’re loving. When my adult children come to visit me, they light my world up, and then they leave and I feel so let down. Not by them, but by the loss of them. I’ll feel myself welling up, and I just try to let myself cry and not distract myself by getting busy on something. Very easy to do with a phone, right? Interestingly, it often happens in my car. I’ve taken my child to the airport or they’ve left and now I’m going out to do some errands, and I’ll be in my car, where I can’t use a tech device or something else as a distraction. And the feelings come up, I’m sad. And it’s okay. I’m going to see them again soon. It just means I love them.

I feel like that when I’m on an outing with a friend or a loved one or any kind of gathering, I feel a little sad when it ends, and sometimes I want to stay too long or I stay up too late because of that. I don’t want to let go. Or even just when everything in my life feels like it’s going really well and I feel ecstatic, there’ll be this little voice of warning reminding me, This is temporary. Now, I don’t recommend that voice at all because that’s a party pooper voice, as far as I’m concerned! But it’s there because I’m preparing myself for a letdown. But again, I don’t recommend that one.

This was actually the very first post I wrote on my blog in fall of 2009. My mother had died a few months before. It’s the very first post I wrote, now there’s something like 400 and something, and then all the podcasts too. All of my content there is free. I wrote this piece that I called Good Grief, and it was about my experience as a teacher in parent-infant classes. We’re all sitting around on the floor in this classroom and we’re observing the children play. And it’s always a fascinating experience for me still, after many, many years of teaching. We encourage the parents to, when they have to go to the bathroom, which is outside of the gated-play-area part of the room, we ask them to try not bringing their child with them and going on their own. And this usually doesn’t happen until the children know us and they know me at least, and they know this place and they know that they’re safe. And they know that their parent will come back because they’ve learned that through the consistency of the parenting that that family’s had.

But what they do—and it’s so beautiful when I think about it, when I’m there in the moment, it doesn’t feel that beautiful—but they get upset a lot of the time. Especially when they’re in that separation anxiety stage, I think it’s eight to 18 months they go through that, where they’re especially sensitive to their parent leaving. They will get upset. And we make sure that the parent tells them that they’re leaving, so they’re not sneaking out. I would never recommend that. Respect is about honesty. We want them to be aware. So the parent says, and makes sure they’re paying attention and they look in their eyes and say, “I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’ll be back.” And then as soon as they get up to leave, often right away the child starts getting upset and the parent I know wants to kind of turn around and run back. But we encourage them to say, “I hear you. Janet’s there for you, or somebody’s there for you, and I’ll be back.” And then the person left with them, which I get the honor of that, gets to practice holding space for that child being there, and it’s very, very hard.

Anyway, I wrote about this in my first blog post. In this case it was a 10-month-old, the example that I used. And this parent walked with trepidation toward the door exiting the parenting class. Then she paused and she asked me, “Should I just go?” And since she’d clearly told her 10-month-old what she was doing, I encouraged her, yes. Then he began to cry. So I approached him and I spoke softly. “Your mom went out. She’s coming back. You didn’t want her to go.” This simple acknowledgement will often calm a child down, but not always. In this case, he sniffled once or twice and then sat patiently, eyes fixed on the door, waiting for his mom to return.

The situation repeated the following week in class. This mom told her son, “I’m going to the bathroom.” And she somewhat tentatively walked out. I mean, that’s another thing we feel, Ohhh, uh-oh. But it’s easier on our child if we are confident, because that instills confidence in them that this isn’t a scary experience. This is a life experience of not getting what we want in that moment, about losing the attention of someone that we adore for a few minutes. And so this time he cried for a seemingly endless minute, I’d say, and I felt the discomfort of everyone in the class, including my own. I offered to pick him up, but he didn’t want that. And so I just stay there, I stay nearby, and I just wait. I imagine myself this witness, this receptacle to something really important that’s happening. That’s how I get through it. Really important, the most loving thing. So then he cried for a bit, then became quiet, sat still for a moment, and then reached for a nearby ball. By the time his mom came back, he was involved in playing. But when he saw her, he cried out to her, because that’s what children often do, right? Hey, you left me! I don’t like that. They’ll often cry more when the parent comes back than they did when the parent was leaving, which is interesting. It’s like they’re saying, Hey, I didn’t give you permission to do that. Don’t ever do that again.

What I realized as I’d been exploring the grief process with my mother and I read this wonderful book, The Grief Recovery Handbook, and then thinking about this experience that’s very common in our classes, I realized this is probably one of the first times they ever experience loss and grief. When their loving parent has to walk away or leave them with another caregiver. In this book The Grief Recovery Handbook, they talk about all the negative messages, the unhelpful messages that we get around grief as adults, still. Oh, keep yourself busy. Don’t think about it. Or, replace the loss. Another door will open. Don’t feel bad. You’ve got to be strong for others. From a very young age, we can get these messages about grief. And what it does is it makes the grief linger even longer and kind of infiltrate into holding us back in other ways in life, undermining our ability to express our feelings, steering us to this incomplete resolution. A lot of explanations around that are in the book. I recommend it.

We can do better for our children by allowing them to have these experiences as they come up. No, we’re not creating them. We’re not trying to train our child to be okay with us leaving by doing this somehow unnaturally. It’s just part of life that sometimes I’m with you. And when I’m with you, I want to be totally with you as much as possible. Sometimes I’m doing my thing and you’re doing yours, there’s those times too. But then there’s times that I leave. I let you know, I’m not sneaking around. You don’t have to worry about me disappearing. I’m always going to tell you, even if you get mad at me. And you have a right to feel those feelings. In fact, I want you to share those with me because that’s a lifetime of you feeling comfortable sharing the hardest things with me: that you’re mad at me, that you’re disappointed in what I did. If we can share that with our parents, we’ve got nothing to fear or to hide.

Another early loss that children deal with is something you’ve heard me talk about a lot: when there’s a new baby born. There’s a sense of loss of that relationship and the family dynamic the way it was. And as parents, we feel that too. I remember feeling that, I don’t know if I’m ready to have another one. I like everything the way it is. And I’m very much the kind of person that I always like everything the way it is, so I don’t like to change things! But life is change, right? And oftentimes parents will say to me, “Well, my child loves the new baby. We’re not having that at all.” But when the parents dig deeper, they find that it may not be directed at the baby, but there’s still some grief there for the preexisting situation. I remember my sister telling me that her son, who’s five years older than his brother, seemed fine, adored the baby brother. But when she brought up, “You know, I wonder if you’re missing all these things we used to do together. We used to go to the park, we used to go to the playground, we would go to lunch together. It’s different now, isn’t it?” And she said for the first time in this experience, the tears came. Even though she’d thought about it that way, she was a little surprised because he hadn’t showed that before. And she was so glad that she acknowledged it, that she helped bring that out into the open so that he could share his grief.

Now I am going to read a question I got in an email from a grandparent that’s around this topic. And it’ll give me the opportunity to give some specific examples for responding to loss and sadness and grief in a way that will help our children to process it in the healthiest manner. Here’s the note:

Hello,

I’m guessing this is not a unique challenge, if a sort of heart-rending one. My 18-month-old grandchild has just started daycare. She had other resources in place, including me. Parents are happy with me caring for her, but wanted something from the daycare experience. I’m not yet clear what. All of that just to say, it’s been hard for me to feel wholehearted in this situation, except for the primary desire for the well-being of the little one. Which all of us share, even if we’re seeing it differently.

My question is about how to talk and be respectful with this grandchild when, though happy to see me at pickup, she’s also sad and confused not to see her parents then. She’ll say, “mama, papa” repeatedly, even while diverting into play and hugs with me. She’s at the age where she truly understands just about all the words, if not yet able to communicate fully with them. Do I just say, “I hear you want to see mama and papa”? Or what? Please help.

I love that this grandparent has reached out and that the whole family has joined in this interest in this little child’s well-being. I mean, what a wonderful nest to be in for that child.

Here’s what I would recommend to this grandparent or anyone going through anything like this or any situation where a child seems to be missing someone, sad about the loss of them. I’ve split this into challenges, because all of this is challenging, right? But here are the specific challenges.

Challenge number one, what we’ve been talking about: perceive this as healthy, positive for this child, even though it doesn’t seem that way. And in this case, it’s so wonderful that this grandparent is self-reflecting that she doesn’t really agree with this decision the parents have made, because that is an important hurdle for her to deal with first. In the interest of the well-being of her child and really the well-being of herself, feeling clear and comfortable about what she’s doing. What I would do is work on coming to terms with or realizing that this isn’t my choice for her, but her parents, who I love and support, and my granddaughter, they need me to feel as comfortable and as settled as possible with this choice that’s been made so that my granddaughter can. Because when we’re ambivalent or unsure about what our child maybe seems upset about, then our child has nowhere for their feelings to land in a safe and solid manner. That’s what they need from us, they need us to be sure. So maybe we’ve made a decision for our child to go to a certain school or a care situation, and maybe we’ll change our mind at some point. But until we have, I would try to bring conviction to that situation so that our child can have a sounding board that’s solid. Because if we’re unsure, if we’re uncomfortable, our child has really very little chance of feeling comfortable with whatever the situation is.

Part of getting to that place of conviction for ourselves might well be, in this case for example, acknowledging and processing my own feelings of sadness and loss about not getting to be the one who gets to spend the day with my grandchild. So once I come to that, as this grandparent, that, Okay, whatever I feel about this decision, it is what it is, and we’re going to go for it, then I would realize that she is going to have feelings probably, because this is a change, this is something new. And there’s loss involved. There’s loss of the kinds of days that she had. There’s loss of some of that time with the parents. There’s a lot of novelty and rising up to deal with new people and new care and people that don’t understand you as well. And it’s a big move. So she needs all the solidity in our support as she can get.

Then, from that place of knowing that her feelings are healthy and normal and positive, and that we are accepting the situation as it is so that she has a chance to, then we want to also realize—and this always was the clincher for me, with other people’s children, with my children, in any situation—know that this is an opportunity for an incredible bonding moment between you. I’ve never stopped being amazed at the bonding power that allowing and supporting a child’s feelings, whatever they are, has. It still blows me away. It’s like this extraordinary gift, this reward that we get for doing this extremely challenging work of holding space, being passive to what is. Trusting and calming ourselves enough to let our child feel, to let the feelings do their healing.

So that’s challenge number one, finding that place of conviction and trust that this is a positive experience, not a fail or something we need to rescue our child from. That’s hard on its own, right?

Two: When we reflect and acknowledge, as this grandparent says, what do I say? We reflect and acknowledge only what we know for sure, which is really just what the child is telling us. We don’t want to make inferences there, jump to conclusions, or make assumptions, because that’s usually more about us and our fears and discomforts. So what this child has said is, “mama, papa” and the grandparent says she repeats this. And the grandparent says, “Do I just say, ‘I hear you want to see mama and papa’?”

If we really get picky about this—and again, the reason to do that is that we can sort of amplify feelings out of our own fear. Oh no, she’s missing her mom and dad, ugh this is bad. It takes us down a road that’s going to make it harder for us to trust and let the feelings be. When we just stay right where she is, not rushing ahead, inferring what she might say, what she might be thinking, or what we imagine the worst that she’s thinking, all she’s saying is, “mama, papa.” So what I recommend saying is what I know for sure, which is, “You’re thinking about mama and papa. You’re telling me what you’re thinking about. Yeah, they didn’t come to get you this time. I did. I got the pleasure.” And then maybe she says it again, and maybe we take that into, “I wonder what they’re doing right now.” But we’re not assuming that she is saying she wants or needs to see them or that she’s feeling sad about them.

Backing that all the way up, just staying where our child is. It’s more challenging than it maybe sounds. And just as the first challenge is so much about our perceptions and feelings, so is this. It’s about what we might be projecting into the situation. And whenever we’re projecting something into the situation, it can interfere with what’s actually going on, and we’re not going to know as much about what’s actually going on. What’s our child really saying there? It’s interesting, right? I find often this very thing, that children will say dada when they’re with mama, or the other way around. And then the parent says, “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll be back,” or “They’re coming back.” Instead, it could just be this really sweet, positive, I’m thinking about that guy, or I’m thinking about that mom that I love. That’s it. And if there’s more, they’ll tell us more or they’ll indicate more. Maybe they’ll cry a little or go unghh. “Sounds like you’re feeling something sad about mama or dada.” That’s where we can go then. And then sometimes children will repeat that.

I’m not saying that’s what’s true in this case, maybe she’s just repeating it because she’s enjoying saying those words and thinking about them. They’re very important people in her life, as is grandma, I’m sure. But she might also be repeating them because she senses this is rattling grandma a little bit, and she’s kind of pursuing that, as children do. What is this vibe I’m getting? That she’s not that comfortable when I say that and she’s trying to reassure me, like something’s wrong. Very subtle stuff, I know. Some people say, why is she making this big deal about all this? I don’t know. I’m a geek about this stuff. What can I say?

Okay, number three, third challenge: Take it as it comes. This grandparent says the little girl “diverts into play and hugs.” So I don’t know if that’s the grandparent trying to divert her, but I sense that maybe this is the little girl diverting into play and hugs, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t divert her so much as just do what I would do naturally, if she was saying mama and papa or not. If that meant play and hugs then I would do that, and maybe it’s the little girl initiating that, I’m not sure. But just know that that’s the way it often goes. And there’s no need to try to get her back on task in talking about mama and dada or talking about that she misses them or something else. That’s not our job. Our job is to trust her process.

Every time we grieve about anything, it’s a different process every time. So trusting this unique process, if she is indeed missing them. And sometimes children are very clear that they are. So we let that be shared for as long as it needs to, if that’s the case. And then if a child moves on, we trust that that’s what they need to do there. And then maybe it flares up again. That can happen, like when a child goes to preschool or to kindergarten and they have to say goodbye to the parent, feelings will just come up. Then the child will get immersed in something else and then they come up again. It’s all good, as my son says. It’s all good. So this could be a process of minutes or a sporadic one of days or weeks or longer. Just encourage it, reflecting back only what your child’s saying.

That’s it, those three things. Simple, not easy. But if we do this, our children can continue to experience loss naturally, learn to deal with loss capably, and know that loss is survivable. And, as I wrote at the end of my post way back when I was starting to blog, “this mindful approach is vital because when we adopt it, far from failing, we are providing the highest level of care . . . and love.” So if that makes sense to you, please know, we can do this.

There’s a whole ton of posts on every topic around parenting, if you want to go to my website and check out topics, or even just do a search online with my name and search words about your topic, I can almost guarantee you that something will come up that I hope will help. And of course, my books No Bad Kids and Elevating Child Care. If you’re like me, you’ll need all the support you can get on these topics. And I really hope that some of mine can be of help.

Thank you again for supporting this podcast. We can do this.

The post Raising Mentally Healthy Kids Means Letting Them Grieve appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

In this episode, Janet shares an easy-to-remember, viable alternative to the strategies, games, scripts, threats, patient waiting, or coaxing we may have unsuccessfully tried in the past (while also explaining why those responses don’t tend to be sustainable). She offers examples through two letters. One parent, who resorts to eventually picking up her toddlers when they resist, shares: “My 3-year-old is getting much heavier, stronger, and faster, so the moments of resistance are becoming more difficult to overcome without struggle, and I don’t know what I will do in a year or two when he becomes even faster and stronger.” Another parent asks: “Is this level of dilly-dallying normal? If so, how should we deal with that? If the gentle ways don’t work, threats don’t work (or even make things worse in the long run), what else can we do?”

Transcript of “Resisting, Stalling, Dilly-Dallying”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about a topic I think many of us can relate to: What do we do when our kids resist all these things that go on during the day that we need them to do? It’s frustrating, right? When it seems like we just can’t budge them or they just seem to push back on everything. From getting out of bed in the morning to getting out the door, sitting down for a meal, brushing their teeth, getting ready for bed, going to school, leaving school. This can even become a pattern that just goes on throughout the day with children, it seems to be getting worse instead of better. So I’m excited to get into that topic, and I have two notes from parents about it.

What do our kids need from us? What’s going on with them? How can we fix this, or at least ease this, so it’s not happening constantly? Because we’re pulling our hair out, right? And really this topic is more than about helping our children to not resist as much. It’s really about helping ourselves, because this is so frustrating. And reading these notes, I can feel myself getting frustrated along with these parents who are sharing with me, I can feel my own stress level rising just imagining what’s going on there. So I get it. And I think—well, I hope—I can help these parents with some subtle shifts in their thinking and their approach.

Here are some of the shifts I’m going to explain: One, simplifying. Minimizing our agenda for kids to what’s really needed, letting go of some things. And then also simplifying by saying less, helping sooner and more readily. Closing those gaps where we’re waiting for our child to do it.

Two, being mentally prepared in regard to our expectations for the possible resistance that we’re going to be facing. Especially if this has been a pattern, we can sort of know, Oh, this could happen, so I’m ready for it. That’s how we set ourselves up for success.

What this will look like is instead of trying to negotiate with our child or get them to do something—I don’t even like that phrase, “get them to,” because it’s work. It’s us trying to make something happen with our child, and subtly we’re pitting ourselves against our child: I’m trying to get you to, so in a sense, I’m trying to sell you on and make you do this. Instead of what I recommend in regard to everything about parenting: partnering with our child. If we think about it, we don’t use strategies in other relationships in our lives. Well, maybe we do in certain business relationships, I don’t know, but with our loved ones, we’re not trying to get them to do this or that in a healthy relationship. We’re connecting, we’re communicating honestly, we’re encouraging. We’re working with, not against. We’re not using scripts. We’re being open and honest and receiving honestly from the other person as well.

Okay, so with all that general advice, here are some notes that I received:

Hi, Janet-

First of all, thank you. Your teachings about parenting have given me so much more peace and confidence than anything else I’ve tried as a parent. I find that a lot of my kids’ boundary-pushing behaviors lessen over time as we all—me, mostly—calm down.

One question I’ve had for a long time is how to help older kids when they’re resisting. My understanding of the early years is that we give babies and toddlers the opportunity to do what they need to in their own steam, for example, to come and clean their teeth or get dressed or put down the heavy object they were about to throw. But then if they don’t do it, rather than having a long, never-resolved standoff, we just calmly help them.

With my two—my first is three-and-a-half years old and my second is 22 months—this usually looks like carrying them places, as they’re not usually willing to walk or cooperate at all in those moments. I try to do this as you have modeled, calmly and positively. Neutrally, without being annoyed at their resistance. “I can see you’re having a hard time putting that toy down, so I’m just going to help you,” or “It’s hard to stop what you’re doing, isn’t it? I’ll help you come get dressed. I can see that’s really hard for you right now.” Okay, maybe I don’t always say it as perfectly as that, but I try to get somewhere close.

Anyway, my question is, my three-year-old is getting much heavier, stronger, and faster, so the moments of resistance are becoming more difficult to overcome without struggle. And I don’t know what I will do in a year or two when he becomes even faster and stronger. What if I can’t catch him as he runs away? What if he’s too strong to help with getting dressed when he’s refusing to let me put his pants on? He’s already kind of there at the moment. Carrying to help has been the most wonderful way to diffuse the situation when the kids are small and it is still socially appropriate to carry them around. I use it all the time and we are happier for it, but what is the replacement end-this-power-struggle move when the kid is older and I can’t just set a boundary by physically helping them comply?

Also, you’ll want to know that baby number three is on the way, and of course that will be a big factor behind any of my boys’ behaviors over the next few months. This is another reason I’ve had this question as when you’re pregnant, most people will tell you not to lift. But I couldn’t figure out how to go about life without carrying my toddlers when they dug their heels in, so I went back to just lifting them whenever I needed and hoping my inside baby wouldn’t mind.

Any advice for this issue would be so greatly appreciated. I would also apply it to my interactions with resistant kids at school when I go back to teaching primary school one day. Thank you so very much.

Okay, so a lot of little things here stand out for me. First of all, I want to help this parent. She says, “When I stick to it properly, I find that a lot of my kids’ boundary-pushing behaviors lessen over time.” So even this idea of “properly,” and I think later she says, “Okay, maybe I don’t always say it as perfectly as that.” Properly, perfectly. I would love to encourage this parent and all parents to just lose those ideas that there’s a proper, perfect way to do anything as a parent, but especially to help our child when they’re pushing back like this or when they’re stalling or resisting us. And to, again, get more in that mindset of partnering with our child.

Because I’m also hearing in this note that she’s supposed to do this “calmly and positively,” “neutrally, without being annoyed” at her children’s resistance. So it feels like a lot of should here. It’s natural to be annoyed with children when they’re not behaving as an adult would in that moment or an older child would, or behaving as they can when they’re in a different mood, right? They’re not always like this. It’s normal to get annoyed by that. What helps us to feel better and less annoyed is what I was mentioning earlier about our expectation of what our child’s going through, what their behavior could very well be, because they’ve been showing this pattern.

Understanding as this parent does that, yeah, they feel this transition coming on with their mom expecting another baby. And from pretty early on in the pregnancy, children feel that shift. I can remember as a child—I was thinking about this just the other day—I was three when my mom was expecting my younger sister, and I have two older ones as well. I could sense my mother sort of pulling her attention away from me, ever so subtly. I mean, I think I’m a sensitive person, but wow, I remember that feeling that I was losing her. Children feel that, and it’s scary. It’s this shift and you notice it as a child. So I’m sure they’re feeling that, and yes, it will continue after she has the baby, I imagine. But there’s a lot of reason for them to be struggling right now, as this parent acknowledges.

So going in knowing that, I would way simplify. Physically help more earlier, and say much less than what this parent is doing. Because she says she’s saying things like, “I can see you’re having a hard time putting that toy down, so I’m just going to help you.” Maybe that’s something we say the first time our child does that, but we don’t really need to say all of that. When we partner with our child, we can have shorthand, we don’t have to explain all of these things. The fact that she says, “I can see you’re having a hard time putting that toy down, so I’m just going to help you.” I don’t know, I just, as I’m saying this, I feel my temperature rising. I’m kind of, Ugh. Instead of just noticing that. Maybe that’s part of my inner monologue, Oh, they’re having a hard time putting that toy down. But you know what? I’m not surprised because a lot of things are kind of falling apart these days as we’re all in this rocky family transition.

So as soon as I see that hesitation to put the toy down, I’m going to be on that. In fact, I may be on that even before. I might be ready, if I want my child to put that toy down because it’s time to go or do something else or maybe they’re using the toy unsafely. I can kind of see that energy coming or I’m expecting it, and I come close and I say, “Oh, you know what? I’m going to help you out here,” as I’m helping take the toy. So that’s what confident momentum is. You’ve heard me talk about that a lot. This idea that we’re coming in early with momentum to help our child through all these little transitions that they struggle with, especially when there are greater transitions going on. So all these little transitions, I’m going to help close the gaps.

And when we’re there early, we don’t have to resort to picking our child up as much. That’s usually a sign that we’re waiting too long. I mean, sometimes we are going to be a little late to the game and we are going to need to pick them up or that’s going to be the right move in the moment if it’s an emergency or whatever. But coming in early with partnership and seeing them and seeing what’s going on as early as we can, expecting it. That will help us to just take their hand or be ready, not allowing that standoff. What this parent calls power struggle, which is sort of what can happen when we wait or we try to verbalize what we want our child to do or even what we’re going to do, as in this situation. We don’t have to verbalize it to that extent, our thought process. We can just think our thought process and maybe pretty quickly, because we’re expecting this, make that change, give that help, offer that partnership right there. My child needs me, I’m going to help them. I see they’re not able to do these things themselves these days, so I’m going to kindly help.

And then she says, “It’s hard to stop what you’re doing, isn’t it? I’ll help you come get dressed.” We still might say that, but I would say it while you’re already in motion. “Yeah, I know. You want to keep doing that. Here we go. We’re going to get dressed, my love. It’s time.” So simplifying it, starting earlier.

And then, “I can see that’s really hard for you right now.” Maybe we don’t express that because it can get a little—I don’t want to say “shaming” because I really don’t want this parent or any parent to feel even more like they’re not doing it properly or they have to be perfect. That’s the last thing I want. But we don’t need to kind of rub that in and say those words. We can just say, “Come on, here we go.” Yep, I know it’s hard to do this sometimes. So here I am, I’m always going to help you. It’s not a script, but it’s an attitude. It’s a recognition of what’s going on and what children need from us. Then we don’t have to try to battle against what she says is her three-year-old’s getting much heavier, stronger, and faster. So she says, “the moments of resistance are becoming more difficult to overcome without struggle.” So we overcome them by anticipating them and helping out sooner.

And she says, “I don’t know what I’ll do in a year or two when he becomes even faster and stronger. What if I can’t catch him as he runs away? What if he’s too strong to help with getting dressed when he is refusing to let me put his pants on? He’s already kind of there at the moment.” So when a child runs away in those situations, I wouldn’t try to run and catch them because there we’re getting caught up in a power struggle with them and it’s going to be frustrating for us. There’s no way around that. Instead, don’t try to control what we don’t control. Say, “You know what? I’m going to go be in your room with your brother. I’m going to help him get dressed. You let me know when you’re ready. I can’t wait to get you dressed, too.” That’s how we partner with and avoid the struggle. We kind of cut our losses. Maybe this is going to take five or 10 minutes longer, but I’m not going to put myself in the position where I’m chasing after this guy, which only encourages him to keep running and resisting, right? We can help melt away that resistance by not engaging in it. It takes two to be in a power struggle. So we can let him try to engage us in that struggle, but we’re just not going to take the bait.

And, “What if he’s too strong to help with getting dressed when he’s refusing to put his pants on?” So I wonder if she’s approaching that early enough and just, “Come on, let’s do this. Ah, you don’t want to.” And acknowledging, allowing him to have all those feelings. But then if you feel like you’re starting to butt up against him, “Let’s take these pants and we’ll bring ’em in the car and you can change there.” Let it go when it’s not working, like that. With all the love in the world, refuse to engage in the struggle. Either override it or let it go.

So she says, “What is the replacement end-this-power-struggle move when the kid is older?” So I wouldn’t wait until a child is older, I would actually start this right away. It’s not a replacement, it’s partnership. And not being willing to get into a tug of war or any kind of struggle with them or a chase. Rising above it. And she talks about, “when you’re pregnant, most people tell you not to lift.” Right, even more reason to practice that confident momentum, helping earlier, letting go of the things we don’t control.

Now just circling back to one thing which she mentions: brushing teeth. And I know I brought that up. Things like brushing teeth, where there isn’t a “picking them up and making them do that” option. How do we do this without trying to make a game out of it, and we have to figure out a way to coax them and get them there? It’s being honest in the partnership. “You know we’ve got to brush your teeth. That’s something that’s really important. Because I know you like to eat things that get in your teeth and sometimes like to eat sweets. So we’ve got to do this. What can I do to help? How can we do this?” Letting go of it sometimes, because we don’t really control it, and the less control that we have in an area, the more important it is to partner, approach it lightly and politely, with a lot of understanding of our child not wanting to do it. Not just saying the words, “I know you don’t want to do it,” but really getting that. And while other kinds of tactics like play, it can make it work sometimes because to be able to play, we have to be kind of in a light mood anyway. So it does work for that reason, but not in the long term.

What works in the long term is that honesty. “You know you’ve got to brush them. I know you’ve got to brush them. How are we going to do this? We could do it earlier in the evening when you’re not so tired. How about we bring it to the dinner table and after you eat dinner, you brush your teeth? How would you like to do this?” And whether we’re actually talking all about it that much or not, it’s just that idea of, I’m with you and I get it. So that’s the direction I would go for this parent. And the more she does it now, the more our children will want to cooperate with us in the future because they feel that. They feel us with them, not so frustrated by them all the time, which is natural to feel if we’re working at it this hard. So I hope some of that can help this parent.

And here’s another note. It’s long and wonderfully detailed. I thought about editing it, but then I thought, why not just share all the details here? It might be helpful to hear the whole story that this parent’s giving me:

I’ve been following your podcast and reading your book and wondering if you could provide further guidance on a topic my wife and I are still struggling with almost on a daily basis. We have two kids. W is a boy, three-and-a-half years old, and E is a girl, five months old. And the issue we have is with his dilly-dallying on everything, from eating to getting ready to doing his “homework.”

I’ll illustrate with a few examples: Getting ready in the morning. It starts with him refusing to wake up and get to the washroom to brush his teeth and pee. I’ll try various gentle ways to wake him up. For example, tickling him with his stuffy and playing music. When those don’t work, I’d tell him, “We need to get ready quickly, otherwise we’d be late and I’d have no choice but to drive really fast. You don’t like me to go really fast, do you?” Which is pretty much a threat, and unfortunately I’ve had to use this more often than I like, even though I’m aware that this is doing more harm than good. I even often ask him if he wants to sleep longer on the condition he eats his breakfast at the daycare instead of at home. Ninety-five percent of the time, he’ll choose to sleep longer, but most of the time ended up playing right away instead of eating his breakfast first when he gets to the daycare. When even the threat doesn’t work, I’d scoop him up and carry him to the washroom. Often he’d try to wiggle away on our way or when we get there, he’d run back to his room. I’d carry him back, get him to stand up, where his legs turned to jelly.

Next, brushing teeth. I’ve come to the point where I’ve helped him to brush teeth and getting dressed 95% of the time, helping him move along with confident momentum. I’d start with helping him gargle, but because of his jelly feet, some water would spill on his pajamas and hence the next source of meltdown. By now, I’ve gotten used to his crying and wailing while I help him brush his teeth. This initially made me uncomfortable and though difficult, I’ve learned to understand that he feels upset and I should allow him to have and express that emotion.

After he gets dressed, he usually chooses to play for a bit instead of resting or lying down while I get dressed. The strange thing is, by then he’s like a completely different kid, often all smiley. It’s like the struggle just five minutes earlier never happened.

On the way to daycare, I’d ask what he should do when he gets into the room, to which he always recites all the steps. But once we step into daycare, all of those go out the window. He’d run and hide, wanting me to catch him despite my posture, in addition to mentioning it explicitly that it’s not a game. I’d remind him what we talked about, what he needed to do, almost always to no avail. As above, I’d end up getting him ready, taking his jacket off, washing his hands, etc., which gets the quickest result. But I worry by doing that, I’m not setting him up for success because when all of these are happening, to add insult to injury, other kids, some younger than him, often passed by heading to their lockers and getting ready on their own.

Eating. Long story short, he can eat quickly when he wants to, but he often does not. He’d stand up, walk around his chair, etc. We’d be the ones getting anxious and would end up imposing time limit if he’s been taking too long. He’d still dilly-dally and finally would get anxious toward the last couple of minutes because he knew he wouldn’t make it and hence would not get his treat, for example, chocolate. Recently we have started letting him take the lead regarding the portion he wants to eat. We no longer require him to finish everything on his plate. We took careful consideration in terms of portioning, but finally realized we were fighting a losing battle. However, once he starts dilly-dallying, we take it as a sign that he’s getting full and will take away his plate. He still gets his treat, but when it comes to snack time, he’ll need to finish his dinner first before he gets to eat his snacks. Otherwise, he’d game the system, and we have noticed he would eat much more snacks. No bad kids, but boy are they really smart.

When we take his plate, he’d start screaming, saying he still wants to eat. We would say that he started moving around and slowing down, so we take it as a sign that he’s full and that if he still wants to eat, we’ll eat again soon. He’d march to the kitchen and take back his plate. We’d say if he insists to eat again, now versus later, this would be his last chance to demonstrate that he’ll continue to be seated until he’s done eating, because the next time he shows the signs again, the plate is not coming back no matter how much he kicks and screams.

Homework. After dinner, we’d get him to trace alphabets, two letters, 18 times each. Again, he’d dilly-dally. He’ll want to pick his own crayon, he’ll put the crayon on the desk. He’ll stand up to get something, tipping the desk in the process. Crayon would fall down. He’d grab the crayon, put it down on the desk, try to grab something else. He’d finally start to write, but he’d press down too hard, break the crayon, have a meltdown because the crayon breaks, demand we fix the crayon and give him another crayon. This ritual could easily take 10 to 15 minutes. It’s like watching a clown performance for kids with him as the main star.

Again, he can do these two worksheets very quickly in about 15 minutes. However, with all this nonsense at the start and dilly-dally while doing it as well, the whole thing could take 45 minutes. As a result his TV time, which comes next, is cut short to 10 minutes. He’d then scream and wail again when we tell him to turn off the TV.

I know that kids live in the now and there often is a lack of sense of urgency, but is this level of dilly-dallying normal? If so, how should we deal with that? If the gentle ways don’t work, threats don’t work or even make things worse in the long run, what else can we do?

And although we just had a newborn, this dilly-dallying has started before that. We just have less time and energy to put up with it because we have more things to do and an entire additional human being to look after. If we continue to help him do things that he can technically do on his own, are we doing more harm than good in the long run? Can this method/principle mesh well with William Stixrud’s The Self-Driven Child, where the more we do for our kids, the less they do for themselves? And ultimately, with all our efforts in parenting, how and when do we know we’ve succeeded? Especially if the goal is not pure compliance.

P.S. I was raised in a family that focused on academic achievements, so I vowed not to let my kids go through that. That is, until our close friends’ kid didn’t make it to a kindergarten of their choice. Their kid is very bright, so I take it as the failure on the parents’ part that this happened. And it’s exactly because my kid would be considered relatively bright that I do not want to fail him and take it as my responsibility to ensure he’s well-prepared.

Okay. So this parent, as with the other parent, but even more so, is taking on so much responsibility that, in my view, doesn’t belong to them and is making everything harder. This responsibility to get him to eat a certain amount, to get him to do homework at three years old. No early childhood educator would agree that that’s something that a preschooler needs to do or even a kindergartener or first grader needs to do. So that stands out especially to me as something to totally take off your plate as a parent. Not even consider. Because if children want to do this kind of work at that age, they do it. And I’m a believer that homework at any age is between a child and their teacher. It shouldn’t start this early, but when it does, it’s really up to that teacher and the child to make that work together. With all the responsibilities we have and the boundaries we have to make for children, this is way over the top to me. I know other people will disagree. So scratch that off your list.

And then it seems like this parent is noticing that all the negotiations, gentle ways to try to coax him to get up, with his stuffy, playing music, tickling. And then when those don’t work, he tells him, “We need to get up really quickly, otherwise we’ll be late and I’ll have no choice but to drive really fast,” which his child doesn’t like. Or he could sleep longer on the condition he eats his breakfast at daycare. So all of that is way too much for this child to try to process and understand and make choices around. Especially in these transitions of getting up, getting to school, brushing his teeth. Children can’t handle that amount of thought process and choice around these things. They just need us to help them do it, with love and honesty and partnership.

And as this parent sees, it’s not helping him either. He’s getting exhausted and completely frustrated because he’s trying to reason with his child at times when his child is totally incapable of doing that. And this huge transition that’s happening with the new baby, which frames so much of this issue of what this boy’s going through. So that’s a big reason why he’s struggling with all these other transitions and needs help. Not coaxing, not threatening, not demands and complications, but just simple help.

So if we have to get him up in the morning, anticipating, being ready for that. “Here we go, my boy. I’m going to help you up. Oh, you don’t want to get up now. I know. We’ve got to do this bathroom thing. I know you don’t like to do it. Brushing the teeth. Alright, we’ll make it quick. Is there a way we can do it that’s better for you?” Closing the gaps, moving it along. Confident momentum only works when we are totally willing to do it from a place of partnership, which means, Yeah, all your feelings of not wanting to do this, I totally get. You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do that. Not just saying words, again, but really being willing to join our child in understanding that. And just working through it as best we can. Not trying to get him to do it. Putting our arms around him, holding his hand. If he needs to run away, let him run away. He’ll come back if you stay put and just say, “You know, I’m here for you, buddy. I can’t wait for you to come back.”

If we can be in that loving partnership place, children are drawn to us like a magnet. If we’re in that understanding, empathic, partnering, I’m with you buddy place. It’s a whole different vibe and it’s hard for me to get into all the specifics of how this looks in all these situations, but that’s why I’m hoping people listening will just try to embrace this as a whole different view. It’s a view of knowing and seeing and empathizing with, if we can, what’s going on with our child. It could still be frustrating, but when we feel ourselves get frustrated, instead of trying to push through it, let go. Take a moment. Breathe. Think to yourself, Does it really matter if he goes to daycare on time today? Maybe it does.

It certainly doesn’t matter if he does homework at this age, I can guarantee you. Children learn those types of skills not from doing worksheets or repetitive drawing of letters, but through their own play with materials, building the concepts for the letters and numbers, so that they want to be able to express themselves and they want to learn those symbols. To practice these kind of letter drills, it’s like doing the icing without doing the cake. That’s the easy stuff. When they’re ready, they do that. Or they ask for help, they want help to figure it out.

And then the eating. Again, it’s great that this parent has switched to not having him clean his plate because there’s another thing we don’t control that we do not want to take on. We don’t want to take on anything we don’t control, which includes him writing letters and the frustration of the crayon and the whole thing. I mean, as this dad says, it’s like a clown show. Yeah! Why are we signing up for this? It’s obviously something where we don’t control any of it and he doesn’t need it. So, letting that go.

What else? Brushing his teeth and peeing. Just carry him through, get him there, do your best with the toothbrush. Maybe he wants to rinse sometimes, rinse his mouth. If he hasn’t eaten anything in the morning, he might not need to brush his teeth at that age. But the more energy that we expend with the strategies and the tactics, the harder it’s going to be for us to partner with our child, the more distance that puts between us. We’re putting all this effort in, it’s not working, it’s not working. There’s no way we’re not going to get frustrated by that. I mean, we deserve to be frustrated by that.

This is a time when there’s a new baby in the house and we have a toddler or two toddlers. This is a time when we get ourselves through, all together, joining hands, joining hearts, letting our child in on this time. We’re just together as a family and there’s a lot of feelings and everybody’s tired and everybody’s frustrated and it’s hard. So we just do our best. That kind of bonding, I wouldn’t do it as a strategy, but it is a strategy in a way, because that’s how children are willing to do all these things. And they might put up a little, Oh no, I don’t want to. And if we can understand that, it’s short-lived. So I would back all of these attempts way back into just helping him get going and get through it.

It seems like the treats after dinner thing is not working so well right now if it’s becoming this negotiation. I wouldn’t let him get up in the middle of eating. There’s no need a child has to do that. I would say, really honestly, “This is time to eat. Just sit for as long as you want to eat. When you get up, that means you’re done. And maybe the treats aren’t working for us for a while.”

And then let him have those meltdowns, because those meltdowns are really what’s behind a lot of this resistance. It’s like this, I’m holding on, holding on, holding on because I need to explode and be unhappy about something. Which is really just my stress in this situation, my fear and this whole unraveling that I’m feeling about having this baby come into my life and take my parents’ attention away from me. Children do need to melt down around that. So the natural time for him to do that is when you’re being very reasonable about, This is how meals go. We sit. We eat. When you’re done, you’re done. And that’s okay, but we’re not going to hold out that you get a treat if you do this or you get that if you do that, or you get TV if you do this. So approaching those limits that you do have control over, offering them reasonably with love, but from a place of knowing he may need to share with us here. And then when he does, it’s not ridiculous that you’re having this overblown reaction to not getting your chocolate or not getting your TV. This is the venting that toddlers with babies need to do.

So instead of feeling disappointed or that we’ve done the wrong thing, frustrated because he’s not making sense, he could have done this other thing and avoided it and then he could have gotten his treat. Don’t go there. Just welcome that. Roll out the red carpet for him to feel that. Oh, you wanted that TV so much today and we didn’t have time. On his side, but still holding onto those reasonable boundaries.

I love that this dad said, “The strange thing is by then he’s like a completely different kid, often all smiley. It’s like the struggle just five minutes earlier never happened.” Yeah, it’s a symbolic struggle of, Everything’s not going great in my life right now. I’ve got this big crisis going on with this baby, and I just need to be in this mode. It’s not that he’s desperately incapable of doing these things. And that’s what I want to get back to because that’s how this parent finishes is, should he be worried by his child not seeming able to do these things and the parent doing them for him, that that’s going to somehow make him less capable? And it’s actually the opposite because when we realize the kind of emotional crisis that children go through with the addition of a sibling… Oftentimes, maybe not always, but oftentimes they do. And when we realize that, and it’s not, This is how I’m always going to be from here on out. Same with the other child in the first parent’s note. This is what’s going on right now, that I need a helping hand. I’m not at my best and maybe you’re not either as my parent who’s also dealing with it, but this is where I am. I need more help right now. And actually, if you can give it to me with love and staying on my side and my team, then it’s going to even set me up better to accomplish in those times that I can. Right now I’m showing you that I can’t.

It’s so easy as parents, I know, I remember this so much when my kids were little, that you just feel like this is going to be forever, whatever you’re going through. Or this is a bad sign. I remember during the winter season, it’s like, Oh, someone’s going to be sick forever. Children are constantly changing and growing and developing, and they always do show us when they’re struggling, when they need more help. And that’s what both of these children are showing in common ways, which is resisting, stalling. They’re waving little flags. Just help me! Just see me! Don’t do all this talking and trying and working around it. Just help me out here and see me as I am.

And I really hope some of this helps you or at least eases some of your worries about the direction your children are heading in. And thank you so much for listening. We can do this.

The post Resisting, Stalling, Dilly-Dallying appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

(Learn more about Janet’s “No Bad Kids Master Course” at: NoBadKidsCourse.com)

Transcript of “Angry Outbursts, Screaming, and Mean Words”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be responding to two questions I’ve received from different parents. There are a lot of similarities in these issues: These are both four-and-a-half to five-year-olds, intense children, those kind of vibrant, strong, intense personalities, and they both seem to be angry, screaming, saying unkind things to their parents and siblings. And these families express that they’re feeling desperate, that they’re doing something wrong, this isn’t getting better. What can they do?

I’ve got to admit, I feel a little humbled in responding to these dynamics expressed in emails, because it’s complicated, right? And how can I really know what’s going on there? I can only do my best based on the many other families I’ve worked with and what I know about child development and behavior, what it means, what we can do to make things better for ourselves and for our children. And so I’m going to do my best. Just having this feeling today like, Wow, this is a lot to try to take on. I’m game, though.

Here’s the first question:

Dear Janet,

I don’t know what I expected motherhood to be, but it’s a million times more challenging than I would’ve dreamed. I have two beautiful daughters. One is turning five tomorrow and one is two-and-a-half. They’re both very spirited, fierce, vibrant souls. I’m writing today in regards to my oldest. I can’t help but cry as I type this because I’m feeling so very lost and confused by this current season we are in—and I hope it’s just a season.

I consider myself a pretty aware and rational person, and I’ve tried to adopt your approach through your book No Bad Kids. Recently, my five-year-old has become extremely mean and angry towards me, my husband, and my youngest. She can also be super sweet, but this recent shift has me at a loss. We do our best to remain calm, but she’s calling us names, a lot of “meanest mama, stupid, I don’t love you,” etc. But the tone and attitude behind it feels deeply angry. She seems like she’s very intentionally trying to be hurtful. I don’t understand where it could be coming from. It seems mostly triggered by her being told no and not getting what she wants.

I listened to a recent podcast you did about being the sun and rising above difficult behavior, but I’m equally struggling because it doesn’t seem like she should be able to get away with treating us and her sister this way. Perhaps that is some of my childhood being triggered by it, as you’ve mentioned. Is there a way to approach and handle this aside from only telling her it’s not okay to talk to people in that way? We don’t discipline her or give her timeouts, but I feel there has to be something I’m missing.

I’m so terrified of parenting the wrong way. I hope I’m not letting too much go. At this stage, I’m also terrified of what she’ll be like at another five to 10 years from now if this type of anger and hurtful behavior is already surfacing at four to five years old. I’m trying my very best not to take it personally, but it does make me feel incredibly depressed. There’s a fair amount of consistent screaming in our house when I feel they should be happier. They have an extremely loving home. Both parents are pretty patient most of the time. Maybe my expectations for their behavior are too high. Her teacher says she’s amazing and we don’t receive any reports from school, so I know she’s only this way with us.

I’m desperate to learn any tips or approaches for this period. Lately I’ve been trying to focus on remaining calm, making light of things, but I’m shocked at the level she’s taking things.

Thank you so much for your time and guidance.

So I did write back to this parent with a couple of questions. My first question to her was, “Do you have a sense of what might have caused this shift? Any thoughts about what’s going on with her and what might’ve changed recently?”

She said:

When reflecting on the past few months, there are a couple of things I’d consider big events. First, she is no longer napping Monday through Friday in her preschool since she’ll start kindergarten next year. She does typically nap at home on Saturday and Sunday. When she moved up to this class in September, we saw an immediate change in her behavior upon pickup. Evenings were, and still often are, very difficult. She tends to immediately break down and go into full-on screaming tantrums over small things like being asked to wash her hands. I attribute this to no nap.

Secondly, I potty-trained her sister the first week of October. That caused her sister to become much more attached to me than she already was. My husband and I used to take turns with bedtime, switching every other night. But I was putting her sister to bed every night until this past week, when we made it a point to reinstate the every-other-night routine. I was concerned my older one would feel I was choosing her sister over her.

They are both very ONLY MAMA. Her sister also has very intense tantrums involving a lot of screaming, which I know can be hard on the older one at times. I find them more forgivable because she is two, versus my older one who will be five in mere hours. Other than these two events, nothing else has changed in her routine.

And then I asked her, “Can you tell me a little more about how you’ve been handling responding to her behavior? Examples?”

She wrote back:

Honestly, until this past week, I would break more. After listening to your podcast about not becoming triggered, making light, etc., it really resonated with me and I’ve made a point to try my very best to use this approach. But again, it’s only been a few days. It’s actually a huge learning and growth opportunity for me personally. I realized this while reflecting upon it in my own therapy session.

Some examples may include yelling once being pushed to a certain point, saying things like, “Why are you acting this way? This is not okay.” If she was fully screaming and becoming physical, one of us may take her to her room and stay with her in it while she screams. I’ve gotten very emotional, cried in front of her. If I have ever yelled at her or behaved in a way I know is not okay, I always apologize, every time. She has also apologized to me as well, so I know she’s hopefully seeing the repair aspect.

My husband and I are so drained by her behavior. I’m praying I’ll be able to continue this steady “rise above” approach and hopefully in time see a shift back to my sweet little girl. I know she’s in there, but lately there are times I feel like I don’t know who she is anymore. Maybe that’s the evolution of children and parenting.

Thanks a million.

Okay, just to respond to this part first. “I know she’s in there.” Yes, she’s absolutely in there, that sweet little girl is in there. And that’s a really important idea to hold onto throughout all of this. In fact, because our perceptions are so important, our perceptions of behavior and our child and what they should be doing now and what’s going on with them and what’s our role in discipline, just responding to their behavior—all of those are dictated by our perceptions. And that’s why I focus so much on that. Because our perceptions of any situation decide how we feel.

I would never ask a parent or expect a parent or expect myself to change how I feel and just decide, I’m not going to feel upset by this behavior. I’m not going to feel worried about this behavior, or angry at my child for acting like this. That’s an impossible thing for us to do. But what we can do, and what I recommend strongly, is working on our perceptions of them. Which means knowing that that sweet child, with all the things we love about them, that sweet little baby that we gave birth to, is in there. That’s who they are. This other stuff that’s going on is a shell that they’re kind of trapped in or they keep falling into being trapped in. All these unpleasant things are not the actual essence of our child.

And something that can really help across the board—this is something that I did for myself that really helped me—is practicing in your mind. So it’s not just in the situation with your child, where it’s so easy to get triggered into taking things personally. But practicing in between times as much as we can, maybe when we’re just alone having a moment or having our own thoughts. I know we don’t get many of those as parents of young children! But when we do, seeing a little movie in our minds of this behavior that we’re seeing, this ugly, unattractive, maybe scary to us behavior, seeing beyond that to that child that’s in there. That vulnerable, immature, probably scared child behaving like this. Because, really, most of the behaviors that they have, the angry behaviors, they boil down to hurt, fear, or some other discomfort.

So practice seeing that behavior that we don’t like and then seeing beyond it. As if we had a special camera that could take away those layers and see what’s inside, like an X-ray. Seeing that sweet heart of our child, all those loving ways that they’ve been with us, that vulnerable child. That’s who’s there, that’s who we need to try to hold in the front of our minds. Because that’s the child that we can respond to in a manner that really does heal their behavior and end it, making our lives easier. That’s the child we can find our way to empathy with when they’re acting horribly. That’s the child that we want to bring forth, obviously. So focus on the person in there that you want to see. Practice that. That’s the key to, if we want to call it being unruffled, a calmer, happier, more capable parent, even when you’re going through these tough spots.

I also want to agree with this parent that she is in a season. This is a season. And there are a lot of reasons here for her child to be dysregulated and off. Switching to a different class where you suddenly don’t have that same routine and you’re not getting your nap. And the fact that this child naps on the weekends, wow, that’s a big sign that she still needs naps. Children need them especially when they’re in challenging situations like a preschool setting or a daycare setting. That drains even more of their energy than being at home on the weekend. So if she’s sleeping on Saturdays and Sundays, imagine how much she actually still needs that sleep during the week.

But I’m not suggesting that this parent change the school situation, just that she understand this incredible tiredness that her child is coming home with. That will help this parent expect what she’s getting, which is an intense child who’s totally exhausted. It’s not going to be a pretty sight, it’s not going to be great behavior. She can barely function.

Therefore, our response is to just try to get her from point A to point B, allow her to explode all the way, and not take it personally, not be offended by it. Not feel like there’s something wrong that we’re doing here or that there’s something bad about our child that is going to show up. As this parent said, “I’m terrified of what she’ll be like in another five to 10 years with this type of anger if it’s already surfacing at four to five years old.” Well, there will be less of it when she’s older because she won’t need the same kind of sleep that she needs at this age. She’ll be a little better able to self-regulate. Especially if her parent keeps in this direction she’s going, which is seeing that little girl that’s inside, still there, totally exhausted, can barely function, and needs her parent to understand that and just try to help get her through as she slowly, gradually adjusts to this sleep schedule.

And it sounds like this family has two intense daughters, so that makes it doubly hard, right? But that is the way that children this age show their tiredness. They blow up, they explode, they say unkind things. And it can seem like, as this parent said, “She seems like she’s very intentionally trying to be hurtful.” So that’s where we are mistaking dysregulation and exhaustion for intentional mean behavior. It may come off like that, but that’s not the intention. The intention isn’t really to hurt others, it’s to share her own discomfort. And maybe she has felt judged for her behavior. That would be normal for us to do, right, as parents? So that just creates more of the sense of, I’m alone, it hurts, it’s scary. I’m being annoying. She’s been paying more attention to my younger sister. My mother’s annoyed with me. But I’m not being annoying because I want to or I want to hurt her. I’m being annoying because I’m overwhelmed.

And this parent is worried. “I’m so terrified I’m parenting the wrong way. I hope I’m not letting too much go.” I don’t think she’s letting too much go, but I know it feels like that when her perceptions are still the way it’s easy to see for us as parents, which is reasonably. Why is she acting like this? She’s intentionally trying to be hurtful. She’s treating her sister this way. She shouldn’t get away with it. She thinks it’s okay to talk to people this way. In truth, she doesn’t believe it’s okay to do any of these things. She needs us to help her stop, which isn’t usually telling her to stop. It’s usually letting it go, commenting on it a little bit like, “Wow, those are hurtful words you’re saying. You’re really upset. Seems like you didn’t want your sister to do that.” And acknowledging separately the sister’s feelings: “She’s saying hurtful things to you, you don’t like that. Yeah.” So we could acknowledge that they’re hurtful words, but not trying to correct impulsive behavior. Because what that does is it tends to put a wedge between us and make it harder. Harder for our child, therefore more of the behavior, and harder for us to connect with them. It creates that distance.

And the interesting thing, both of these notes from parents have exhausted daughters. Exhausted. And I just remember—I mean it seemed like it only just changed a few years ago, and my children are all adults now—that this tiredness thing, it gets away from us so easily. Because children are just so much more prone to exhaustion and dysregulation from that, to the point where they cannot function. I remember about a year ago, I got an interesting note from a parent. I don’t think I was able to respond, but she was saying how appalled she was that it was her daughter’s birthday and I think her daughter was five or six. And they’d had this amazing party, it had all gone really, really well, with all her friends and neighbors. And then the next day she thought, Wow, I’m going to give my kids a treat and take her and her brother over to their favorite place, which was kind of a parkour setting, I think, as I remember. And this parent couldn’t believe it, that they behaved appallingly. And I can’t remember the details, but they were rude to her, they were mean to her. And here she was bending over backwards after she’d thrown this birthday party. Now she’s giving them this other incredible treat. She was so offended by their behavior.

Understandably, right? Because when we’re on the inside, it’s really hard to see. But from my outside view I could say, Well, that makes sense. Because how exhausting was it for these children, especially the child whose birthday it was, to have a birthday party that went really, really well. So it’s not only negatives, like hard changes that kids make, that tire them out. It’s these really positive experiences of excitement, of pleasure, stimulation. They’re down for several days after that usually. And that’s important to know as we’re coming into the holidays. It’s a time for exhaustion and it will get away from us if we don’t keep reminding ourselves of how different children are in this way and their needs, how much more sensitive they are.

So yes, I believe this parent that they have an extremely loving home, that they’re patient most of the time. But the other thing she said is that she does blow up sometimes. And that’s nothing to feel ashamed of, or that we’re doing something wrong. It happens. The thing about it, though, is that children will, if they sense that that’s there, they can keep unconsciously kind of pressing us towards it. Because they can sense something building in us that’s uncomfortable, that’s making them feel uncomfortable and kind of anxious. And oftentimes children with this type of temperament, they can’t help but push us beyond our limit because they know that’s possible. I don’t know, it’s a hard one to explain, but it’s a very common thing that children do.

So what that means is that if we have exploded, then our child will be venting that with their own explosions. Maybe a couple days later, but they absorb it and then they discharge it. So in a sense, every time that we lose it, we’re kind of adding more times that our child’s going to be screaming as well. That’s just something to know. That’s us being reasonable about ourselves and the situation, even though it’s an unreasonable situation from our child’s point of view. They are not in a place of reason. But we can be and we can objectively say to ourselves, Okay, well, I scream sometimes so it makes sense that they’re reflecting that back. They’re getting that out of their bodies. That’s a good thing.

So, getting to this parent’s question: “Is there a way to approach and handle this aside from only telling her it’s not okay to talk to people in that way?” The way to approach is working on practicing our perception, seeing that child inside. And when she does say things, we don’t want to ignore it, that’s not natural, right? But we want to respond to it from a place of understanding that it’s her lashing out, sharing her snarls and her hurts with the people she’s safest with.

Another interesting thing is, in both cases, the children are doing great at school, no problems there. So this is the dynamic that we want. It should relieve us even more that this is okay, this is a season, this will pass. I can help it pass through my perceptions and my perceptions will guide my response. As an example: Yikes, alright, I’m picking her up from school. It could be very rough. There’ll be lots of explosions. That’s okay, I can handle this. I’m not going to take any of it personally because I’m expecting it. She’s going through something. And this will pass, this will get better. It’s not a bad sign about me, my parenting, or about my child and their future.

Not only can we get through this, but we can get through this with a closer connection instead of getting through this and creating more distance between us. And that’s what we all want, right? That closer connection. That’s very, very possible. Even if we make a bunch of errors and yell and do all of that, we can still end up in that place of closer connection if we keep practicing our perceptions. Which means letting go of the fear. Everything’s going to be fine with this family. I believe her that they have this incredibly loving home.

And she says, “Maybe my expectations for their behavior are too high.” It’s not necessarily even too high, but it’s different. We can’t expect reasonable behavior from children dealing with these dysregulating things like development, siblings, changes at school, and, number one, tiredness.

She says, “Lately I’ve been trying to focus on remaining calm, making light of things, but I’m shocked at the level she’s taking things.” So, focusing on remaining calm and making light of things. If that’s what our focus is, we’re not addressing ourselves from the inside out. That’s what we do when we practice the perception and then we actually feel calmer about this behavior, expecting it. For this child, in this situation, this makes sense. So I can remain calm. I’m seeing through to that child inside. I know the rest of this is just shell and things that are happening on the surface. That’s not her. And making light of things. Yes, I can treat things lightly, but honestly, like her words to me or her behaviors or the screaming, if I am expecting this. And maybe my partner and I talk about it, Oh, okay, we got to go pick her up. Are you ready? Okay, we can do this. We high-five and yeah, now we can approach it lightly. And from there we won’t feel like we’re trying to be something. We’ll just be being honest.

That’s what this work is about. Because this parents says, “I’m shocked at the level she’s taking things.” But that’s the thing, she’s not taking things to this level, her shell person is doing that. It’s just all blast on the outside, it’s not deep, intense feelings on the inside. If this were an adult acting this way, yes, maybe this would be an indication of intense anger. But with children at these ages, everything feels more intense and then the situation and the tiredness only heightens it. So when she says angry words, when she says, “meanest mama, stupid,” I wouldn’t say, “It’s not okay to talk to people that way.” I would say, “Ouch. Oh, you don’t love me right now. That hurts. I still love you and I want to know more about that, even. How you’re just not liking me right now.” It’s safe. And then with the screaming, just nod your head. Yeah, wow, whew. Yeah, that’s strong stuff. You’re not making fun of it. We’re not trying to make light of it, but we’re also not just ignoring it like it’s not there. Because then children do feel alone in that way, that they’re in this shell and they can’t be reached and we’re not going to try. So, respond. But just from that place of getting it.

And the names, she’s not trying to hurt. She’s doing this really immature way of sharing her hurt that we can see through. It’s kind of sad and silly, right? And this parent’s saying she and her husband are so drained by the behavior because they’re taking it personally. They’re taking it literally. They’re seeing it as worrisome. It’s that concern and that worry that’s going to drain us, and we don’t want that to happen because we need every bit of energy we have as parents. Perception will prevent us from taking things in in a way that drains us.

Here’s another question:

I write in desperation and heartbreak. I’m lucky enough to be the mother of three perfect children, a four-and-a-half-year-old, a two-year-old, and a nine-month-old. Unsurprisingly, it is the oldest that I’m writing about.

She’s a wonderfully funny and intelligent little girl, but her behavior is becoming hard to bear. Overall, she still seems to be struggling a lot emotionally with the transitions she’s had to face, which manifests as abject screaming and rage coupled with sadness.

After school pickup, the pattern of behavior is the same. As soon as we have left and the tiniest thing is not right, the screaming and shouting begins. Everything is catastrophic. This continues at home and during bedtime. The shouting is either indiscriminate or directed at me or her little sister. It is so loud sometimes that the baby becomes distressed and starts crying and I have to move her out of the room. Mornings are also particularly bad, screaming-wise.

On paper, the problems are obvious. She has two siblings in two years, started school, and we have just moved house. She clearly has a lot of anger and frustration with us she still has to process. But the main reason I’m contacting you is that there has not been any improvement in the last two years, despite all of our efforts. It is now becoming mentally debilitating to be screamed at every day, and I have started to lose my patience. She has also started to say worrying things like, “I’m not going to be your children anymore” through her tears.

This morning, for example, she climbed into her carseat and there was something on her seat, so she screamed as loud as possible. Both myself and my husband shouted and told her to wait and ask for help. “There’s no need for screaming!” I shouted. (This irony is not lost on me.) “Can you wait and ask Daddy for help? Have you ever known Daddy not to help you?” I continued. She stopped immediately and shook her head and then waited for my husband to sort out her carseat. We then proceeded to school in silence and we didn’t say goodbye. She will carry this with her all day now, shouted at by mommy and daddy and no goodbye kiss. Not great prep for a four-year-old to navigate the rest of her day, whatever it may throw at her, without us by her side for reassurance and guidance. I cried all the way home and while feeding our baby. I’m failing as a person and as a mother.

And as I’ve said, the main sticking point is that there’s been no improvement. I’ve read every book and podcast by you and Tina Payne Bryson, in addition to others, such as Siblings Without Rivalry. We have patiently implemented these strategies, such as allowing and acknowledging the feelings, including accepting her when she says that she wants her sister to go away and that she doesn’t like her. We have worked a lot on our authenticity in this area. We reinforce the idea that it’s okay to cry and be angry. We draw the line at screaming full-force in either of her siblings’ faces. In these situations, we move her away and, when she’s calmer, acknowledge her feelings, but explain it’s not okay to be that loud so close to the others. We carve out one-on-one time whenever possible, read stories, and tuck her in every night. Cuddle, tell her how much we love her all the time. As we have lost our patience more frequently, we do always make a point of apologizing unreservedly and repairing.

I’m at a loss as to what to do next. This situation is untenable for everyone and I now worry about our younger children living with frequent screaming. She frequently shouts and says unkind things to her sister, and as much as I try not to see her as a victim, it is hard not to worry about the effect it has on her emerging confidence.

It is also important to note at this point that I think she’s often crippled with tiredness. This has been an ongoing theme for a long time and we’ve tried to tackle it with consistent early bedtimes, insisting on lunchtime sleeps at weekends, quiet times, screen time limited, and reducing extracurricular activities, but it remains a factor. I’m currently on maternity leave and so I’m around for her as much as possible when she’s not at school. My husband is incredibly loving and supportive to all of us and diligently adopts the various strategies suggested by yourself and other experts you have suggested. He also works from home a lot, so is there to help out when needed, including all bedtimes.

We would be so grateful for your take on all of this. I sometimes feel that in our quest for healthy mental wellbeing and emotional intelligence, our desire to make expression of emotions okay has gone too far and she has missed the opportunity to start to learn to control her behavior. If you have any time at all, please would you help us to walk the fine line between emotional expression and age-appropriate self-control?

Okay, so I also reached out to this parent to ask for some examples and here’s what she shared:

Thank you for replying. We’ve been thinking a lot about the most helpful examples to explain. Like I’ve said, tiredness plays a huge part in her behavior and always has, which probably explains why the screaming often, but not exclusively, occurs at the beginning and end of the day. But I don’t believe it is the whole story, and she clearly has things she needs to process.

Example one: On the way home from school in the car the other day, my oldest was holding a toy which she dropped on the floor and therefore couldn’t reach from her carseat. All three children were in the back and she immediately started screaming and then kicked the back of the seats full-force. As we were on a quiet road, I stopped the car briefly, turned around, and said, “Oh, you dropped something. It’s annoying when that happens. We’ll look for it when we get out of the car.” As always, trying to keep my tone even and genuine. She stopped screaming but continued to cry and whine until we were home.

It usually helps her mood after she has had an outburst, especially if I sit there and nod and offer her a cuddle, like she does have things to release. However, the frequency and ferociousness of the outbursts makes me think we need to help her deal with her feelings in a more refined way.

A slightly different reaction she may have is shouting threats, such as when the other night she asked me to help her with a game she was playing, putting pieces into the right holes. I put one piece into the wrong place and this frustrated her endlessly. “Mommy, I’m not your best friend anymore and I’m sending you to jail!” she screamed. This is a frequent threat leveled at myself and her little sister if something is not right. I let this one go and went back to whatever I was doing. She continued her game on her own.

This parent talked about their play together:

She’s always very dominant with her sister as well. When they do play together, I hear, “Do this, do that. No, no, no, not like that. Give me that thing. Go over here,” etc. And her sister will diligently follow or get bored and wander off. Again, I don’t know when to step in. I fear if she gets used to playing this way, her peers will not be as forgiving as her sister.

And then she gives one more example:

The following example demonstrates a slightly different, less favorable approach I have used more and more in the last couple of weeks, probably due to feeling more worn down. In the car on the way home from school yesterday, she again dropped something, which immediately elicited a screaming response. I said in an even tone, “I don’t want to hear any more screaming now.” She did adjust her volume somewhat and continued to moan in a more measured way. On arriving home, she entered the house first and then immediately ran back screaming because she couldn’t find something. While taking my shoes off, I again said, not in an angry voice, but probably stern, “What have I said about screaming? Tell me what you want in your normal voice.” She then did talk normally, and then I then helped her.

A few minutes later in the kitchen, she seemed happily walking around in a circle, singing a tune and playing with a toy. I couldn’t help but wonder on observing her that at this point she didn’t seem too bothered that instead of always acknowledging her frustration, I had simply directed her to a better behavior. She didn’t seem emotionally stifled, just a normal child playing while waiting for dinner.

I’ve also asked my husband to separately give his take on things, and this is his reply: Often when my daughter gets home after school, she can appear very tired. When in the bath she can scream and shout if her sister takes something she is holding or wants to play with. I try not to always take the item away from her sister and return it, but instead acknowledge that it can be frustrating when you’re playing with something and it goes. When time allows, I take her out of the bath and sit and give her a cuddle and try to ask her how she feels. “Were you upset because your sister took your toy? I understand. That can be frustrating.” After a moment, she’s calm. But often the bathtime/bedtime routine for three kids continues in a busy manner, not allowing for any time of prolonged calm.

And then another example, he says:

I often get up and make the kids breakfast, and our oldest can be very demanding and wanting to make breakfast, to the point of if I have gotten a bowl out already, she can complain and, in rare occasions, shout/scream because she wanted to do it. I allow her to make the breakfast when I can and guide her. But if she’s at the point of being too upset to actually complete the activity, I step in and gently but assertively take over while saying something to the effect of, “I can see you’re telling me you’re tired and need some help.” Sometimes this is fine and she sits in her chair and carries on with her breakfast. But other times it may just make her more upset because she didn’t get to complete the activity.

And this parent says at the end:

We have not had any negative reports of behavior from her previous nursery or her new school. And we have inquired often.

Right. So, as you can maybe hear in this note, there’s a lot of similarities to the other situation, but these parents, they seem to have been working at this a lot longer and trying to do the right thing. Which they are doing. Again, though, the answer here, well, it’s twofold.

The answer is in our perceptions, which means understanding the why. That’s part of our perceptions. And it sounds like these parents are not quite a hundred percent there, and I want to encourage them, just as with this other family, to even practice this a bit more and believe in this a bit more. For example, when this parent says, “She comes out of school okay, gets in the car, waits for something to not be right, and then screams.” So it’s just this really subtle little wrinkle in the way this parent is seeing, this idea that her daughter is consciously waiting for something to go wrong. This parent says the screaming eclipses things. Well, it’s this tiredness that’s eclipsing everything. And I would try to understand that tiredness is really the trigger for these other things.

As this parent says, there’s been all these transitions—a new home, two siblings in two years. This is big stuff. So the why is pretty understandable. Tiredness, which makes everything harder. Transitions, which are very, very challenging for young children and often at the source of their dysregulated behavior. Sibling issues, one of the hardest transitions for children to face and very hard for these parents as well, juggling the three children, the new baby. So it’s understandable that they don’t have a lot of bandwidth to try to empathize with their daughter and try, as they say, so hard to be even in their tone and to be authentic. What I want to encourage is they consider this work on perceptions instead of working on their tone and being authentic. Because this is the way to be authentic and have the tone. Maybe not all of the time for sure, especially when you’ve got three little ones and a new baby. But more often than not—and children don’t need it to be all the time, they just need it to be a little more than half the time for them to start to be calmer and know that we are on their side.

The way for them to feel that is for us to be on their side because we’re seeing past this shell, this screaming person that just goes off at the drop of a hat, after school especially and in the morning. Sounds like she’s not a morning person, I can relate to that. Tired in the morning, tired after school, new baby, another sibling that’s two that she probably still feels a lot of rivalry with. It’s all par for the course. And it’s very, very challenging for us to keep holding open that perception of the child behind the shell, the hurting that causes that, the hurting that causes that screaming, the feeling that this child has that she’s a minefield, just so easily touched off. It’s tough, right?

And I find it so interesting, the difference this parent felt with the third example that she gave. I believe the reason that seemed to be more effective and help her child to move through it was that this parent was actually authentic then. Which I’m wondering if she really wasn’t—again, this is not something I can know just from reading these thoughts the parent shared with me—but I have the sense that in these previous examples. Well, there’s the one where the parents were both shouting. And so that goes back to that other message I was giving to the previous parent. That just adds more to what our child has to discharge from us. And again, it’s okay. We forgive ourselves and we just know, Okay, we’ve added a few more screams because we’ve lost it today. Nothing wrong with us for doing that, but that’s going to be the result. So okay, now we understand this is going to happen and we can expect it.

But this way that this parent describes responding to her daughter, she says her daughter was holding a toy that she dropped on the floor and therefore couldn’t reach from her carseat. And that “all three children were in the back and she immediately started screaming and then kicked the back of the seats full-force. As we were on a quiet road, I stopped the car briefly, turned around, and said, ‘Oh, you dropped something. It’s annoying when that happens. We’ll look for it when we can get out of the car.’ As always, trying to keep my tone even and genuine.” So besides this being a lot of work for the parent to try to keep her tone a certain way, I would consider that, from her child’s point of view, there’s a real distancing effect of her parent not saying, “Ouch, that hurts when you kick me like that. Don’t do that. And you want your toy. I get that.” Something that’s, I don’t know the way this parent talks or relates to her, but that sounds real, that sounds authentic.

And we’ll say those things when we really are in that frame of mind, with our perceptions in order, or when we’ve practiced them. That’s the kind of thing that we might say, because we’re not trying to say the right words, we’re not trying to get the right tone. And that’s what my whole podcast is about trying to help parents with: getting to be authentically unruffled with your child, getting to be your authentic self, the freedom of that, the comfort in that. And seeing how that works. When we’re not threatened by her kicking the back of our seat, but we’re annoyed by it. Ouch. That we don’t like that. We understand why you’re doing this, but we’re not going to act as if it didn’t happen.

So when this parent says that she thought it almost worked better when she said, “I don’t want to hear any more screaming now. Tell me what you want in your normal voice, please.” It feels to me, putting myself in that child’s shoes, that now she’s feeling responded to by her parent saying what she actually feels. And that is comforting for a child. And as children get beyond two and three and they’ve absorbed all kinds of language around feelings at that point that we’ve offered each time, asking them questions, “Are you feeling frustrated?” So we’re not assuming, but we’re asking and we’re bringing those words up. We don’t need to keep saying a lot of words to an older child. If we’re really authentically in that relationship with them, we can say, “Oh, oh no, it fell. Oh, you hate when that happens.” We don’t have to go through a whole explanation about what’s going on.

I’m not saying this parent is doing this, but maybe they’re saying more words than they need to. And they’re saying it from a place of trying so hard to do the right thing, which I really appreciate and will take these parents far because that intention is really all that matters to being the best kind of parent. And these parents are both very intentional in this work that they’re doing. I just want to help try to make it easier for them and clearer for them.

The bossy behavior with her sister totally makes sense. And it’s fine, as long as she’s not hurting her sister. Children learn to stick up for themselves or move away, like this two-year-old is doing. And that’s more helpful to them than a parent defending them or getting involved in it. Because what the parent getting involved in it does is tell that younger child, I don’t think you can handle this situation with your sibling. Now, if they’re getting verbally abused or physically abused, obviously we would stop it at that point. Say, “Oh, I’ve got to stop you there. You could say that to me, I get why you need to say those things sometimes. But not to your sister.” But still knowing that it’s going to happen. And we’ve made it clear to the younger sister and the older one that that’s not acceptable and we don’t believe it’s true.

The description of the dad’s responses, it sounds like—and I don’t know, again, I could be imagining this, but I sense that he’s a little more comfortable with the behavior than the mom is. Which makes sense, she’s dealing with three children all day. But that’s where we want to get to. We see through this, we see beyond this. No, we’re not going to jump to get you something when you scream at us. That’s where we have our boundaries. We’re taking care of ourselves in this relationship. But we know that, again, this is a season and this will pass. And what we want to do is keep being connected to each other.

Just to go over some of the tips I want to give both of these parents:

Perceptions. Practice those movies in your mind. Seeing beyond, seeing the child inside the shell, the shell behavior.

The why. Why the shell? In both these cases, there are a lot of reasons. And even if you can’t figure out the reason with your child, know that there is a reason and the reason is not that you’re a terrible parent, that you’re doing something wrong, or that they are a doomed child in some way. And if you’re overwhelmed and you feel like you really need more assistance, talk to a professional, in your area ideally. Someone that can come and be with you in person and help you that way.

Tiredness. Boom, the main reason that children go off and behave in ways that we don’t want them to. Too tired. We often don’t see it coming. These are all under the heading of why. Which our perceptions will help us to focus on and react from. React from their why so that we can empathize.

Transitions. Siblings, getting up in the morning, coming home from school, bathtime, all of those are transitions. And the evening transitions, the after-school transitions tend to be the hardest. That’s why I did a podcast called End of the Day Crazies with Kids. It happens, even without any other element happening in a child’s life.

And then I would say, parents getting touched off. That’s true in both of these situations. Parents getting touched off to worry, to get offended. And it can happen from our own childhood experiences, very common. It also happens because we are more reasonable people as adults, and we are less tired people as adults usually. Well, maybe the one with three kids is more tired than most of us, but compared to a child, we are less sensitive around those things and we have a whole lot more self control. But then when we do get touched off, that adds more discomfort to our child and therefore we’re going to see more of the uncomfortable behavior. That tends to be the cycle that we get caught up in with children when things are going in the way that these parents say that they’re going. We can stop this cycle by, even just some of the time, working on our perceptions and calming ourselves that way. Putting these behaviors in their place in our minds and hearts, seeing them for what they are: immature, overwhelmed expressions of hurt. Yeah, they can look really angry, but they usually boil down to fear and hurt and tiredness. And none of these are things that we can’t handle, if we believe in ourselves.

I believe in you, and we can do this.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

The post Angry Outbursts, Screaming, and Hurtful Words appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “When Parenting Partners Don’t See Eye to Eye (With Melina Gac Levin)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m welcoming Melina Gac Levin to the podcast to speak on a topic near and dear to many of us: How do we parent together when we see differently? When we have different views on topics like discipline, eating, manners?

Melina is the founder of Pueblo, parentpueblo.com, which is an educational and consulting organization born out of her experience as a mother and parent educator. She says, “As a Latina immigrant mother, raising two children with a white Jewish-Italian co-parent, Pueblo is the support I hope for when I’m looking for advice. A company that sees us, that understands the joy and challenges of raising multicultural children, and that provides advice that can weave our different perspectives together.” She believes that each of us has a unique culture and family history that is integral to who we are as parents, and that self-knowledge and reflection are keys to empowered parenting, whether we are a single parent or seeking common ground in partnership with another.

I’m looking forward to this conversation. Melina, thank you so much for wanting to be on the show, and welcome.

Melina Gac Levin: Thank you so much for having me. I’m such a big fan.

Janet Lansbury: Oh, thank you, that’s sweet of you to say.

I am so interested in your work, and it reminds me of a lot of the issues that I’ve tried to help parents with, but probably without the skill that you have. When we were sort of going back and forth about putting this together today, I brought up the idea that you help parents with differences in culture, like ethnic backgrounds, and oftentimes I’m trying to help parents who have just come from a different family culture. And you quite eloquently said, yes, there’s micro and there’s macro, and both of those come into play and make our lives harder as parents. Because we need to have teamwork, if we have the luxury of having another parent. We need to lean on each other and have it work and not have it be another issue besides dealing with our child.

Melina Gac Levin: Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: I love the work that you do. Can you tell us about it and tell us about how you got into it and what some of the common issues are that you help parents with?

Melina Gac Levin: Of course, yeah. And thank you so much for saying that. One of the things that I really loved about our exchange before this conversation was getting to this place of understanding how there’s many layers to culture. And so I talk about working with multicultural families and that looks very different for different families. You mentioned the ethnic background can be a part of it, it can be religious differences. And then, as you mentioned, it can also be these small things where it’s just this difference in family culture in the home that you were brought up in. And sometimes even people with similar ethnic backgrounds have these cultural differences from where they were raised and in these sort of more micro ways. But it does influence our perspective, right? Our culture is hard to see until it’s contrasted against something else.

And so when I’m working with families, that’s one of the things that I see often is a lot of assumptions being made by me, by families, by everybody, because we’re working with who we are and our own lenses. And so one of the primary things that I try to help families do is to become conscious of how our cultures are shaping how we even think about our children, how we think about ourselves, how we think about our roles. And that’s all happening in the context of our homes, which in the case of multicultural families, there’s multiple cultures interacting with each other. And then also in the culture of our greater homes. So our city, our environment, that’s also adding other understandings of how we should be as parents and how children should be. And all those things come together and we have to make sense of them if we’re going to work together to collaborate to raise a child.

And that’s really what Pueblo does, is that we take this premise that we have these multiple cultures that are in interaction with each other, and they can all be honored together. And that that’s going to look different for each family. And that we need to layer that in with some information about child development and what we know about how children develop and what they need.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And the way you just explained it, it sounds like a lot, right? It sounds like, how do we even know? Do we see this coming? Let’s say that we’re partners with someone before we have children, do we notice then? I guess we do notice that we have different outlooks on things and we have different ideas of what even building a home together, just the two of us, should be. So are there signs there that we can notice that will help us to be able to partner together as parents better? Can you talk a little about that?

Melina Gac Levin: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting because for me, my own family is multicultural. I myself am multicultural. I have a Chilean father and a Puerto Rican mother. I was raised primarily in the States. And then my family with my own children—I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old—is also multicultural. My husband has a very different background from me. And even though we knew that going into having kids, and we’d been together for about a decade when I had my first daughter, we had so many shared values that I don’t think we really realized how it was going to show up in parenting. I think we actually went into parenting feeling like we were very much on the same page. And it wasn’t until there was a baby in front of us that we had to make decisions about and that we both cared a lot about that suddenly we realized, Oh, actually there’s some differences here. We don’t see eye to eye on everything.

And that was one of the inspirations for this work, for myself, was experiencing this in my own home and realizing there are things I’m going to have to let go of a little bit. And then there’s things that are actually important to me to hold onto that are different for him. So actually for me, it caught me by surprise. Even though ethnically, religiously, and in many ways we’re very different, it still caught me by surprise. And I’d been working with parents at this point. So it’s funny to me to think of myself as being surprised by this, but I was.

Janet Lansbury: No, I honestly think that that is probably the model. I mean, I think that’s how it is for a lot of us. It makes so much sense because when we’re together as a couple, we’re so much about being together and sort of molding ourselves to that other person a little bit. While still holding our own, but we’re all about joining as two. And now here’s somebody else that we both have to take care of. And it totally makes sense that that’s where we go, Oh, wait a second.

Melina Gac Levin: Yeah. And it’s easy, for example, to agree, We both want to raise a good eater. That’s something that came up in a consultation recently. So it’s easy to agree on that when neither of us really knows what the other person means by that. I think for a lot of families who are coming into parenting, and we think we see eye to eye because we think my goal is this sort of more abstract thing. But once you get into the specifics, if for one person a good eater means more of an intuitive eater who eats when they feel hungry and what they would like, and if for another person it means a child who loves vegetables, that’s very different. That’s a very different definition, right?

Janet Lansbury: And for somebody else, it means that you clean off your whole plate.

Melina Gac Levin: Exactly. And so I think in many cases we come in thinking, Oh, we’re on the same page about this. And then the baby’s there and you’re like, Oh, wait a second.

Janet Lansbury: What they thought was normal “good eating” is not my normal.

Melina Gac Levin: Exactly. And that’s where that information about what we know about how children develop also then comes into play and can help us make sense of a situation.

Janet Lansbury: So when you work with families, can you talk a little about your process with them in terms of, let’s just bring up the eating example, or any one. I also want to hear about some of the common areas that parents tend to have issue with.

Melina Gac Levin: Eating is one of them. Sleep is another one. And that was actually one of the places where I entered into this work in my own personal life was through sleep. And that’s something that I think comes up early and then continues to come up, unfortunately, throughout your child’s life.

Janet Lansbury: And is one of the most stressful areas. So that makes sense too that it’s fraught with emotion.

Melina Gac Levin: Exactly. Everybody cares about sleep. So I work with families in a few different capacities. One of the ways is through these courses that you mentioned, some I have for taking before the baby arrives and then some after your baby arrives. And the before-baby courses are really important for starting these conversations before the stakes feel higher and everybody’s a little bit more elevated, you’re more sleep-deprived, you’re having to learn a lot of things. And so everyone’s in a more heightened emotional state. But if you’re doing this leading up to the baby arriving, there’s a little bit more space to step back and there’s a little bit less urgency, I find. So I really recommend families start with those courses.

And then another way that I work with families is through individual consultations. These are usually Zoom calls where we talk through a specific question that’s coming up for parents, a specific tension. And sometimes that’s once and sometimes that’s once a month in a longer-term capacity as we work through what it means to collaborate and what it means to raise a child together in a way that honors both cultures and both parents.

And then practically, what that might look like, to go back to this idea of sleep. So for example, in our case, I brought my baby home and we had her crib set up in our room because the AAP says have the crib but have it in your room. So we did that and I felt very confident that my baby was going to sleep in her bed, we were going to sleep in our bed. And then she didn’t like her bed and all of a sudden we were thrown into this place of, What do we do? My sense in that moment was overwhelmingly that I needed to support her and to nurture her and to be there for her. And if she cried, I was going to go to her. My husband’s sense was much more that she needed to learn independence.

And that in my family, and in many other families that I work with, is a real point of tension, this sense of, how do children achieve independence? Is that a value that we hold or not? It’s important to some people and it’s less important to others. It’s rarely at the forefront of my mind. It’s often at the forefront of my husband’s mind. And so the way that that manifested in sleep was his really strong desire that she should sleep in her own space and be able to put herself to sleep. And my sense that this didn’t really matter to me and I’d rather be there for her if she was upset and I would be the one to help her as opposed to her needing to help herself.

We really couldn’t figure out what to do at that point. And of course, because the baby was there, we were super sleep-deprived and I did what I tell all parents not to do, which is I did the 3am Googling and the 3am rabbit holes of, This is going to be terrible. This is going to be perfect. This is the solution. And eventually we found a book that claimed to be scientific and evidence-based. And that appeals to both of us, that’s a shared value that we have is this desire for a scientific understanding of things. So we basically outsourced our decision to that book and we’re like, This is what we’re going to do because it’s close enough to what he wants to do and it’s close enough to what I want to do that we can kind of try. It didn’t work. So then we were back at square one where we had to come together and have this discussion with each other.

One of the things that was interesting in our case is that we also had the example of my sister-in-law who had recently had a baby also. And she’s married to an Indian-American man, and they were co-sleeping, which is something that neither of us really had considered. I remember looking at them and thinking, Well, it seems to really be working for them. So my husband and I came back together and were talking about it, and it seemed eventually the place where we realized that we had a lot of commonality was this desire for all of us to get the most sleep possible. Suddenly that really rose to the surface. A sort of shared common ground was we both just want to sleep as much as we can and this baby needs to sleep as much as the baby can.

And we brought in this layer of understanding about independence and how children become independent and that they’re not necessarily born independent. So I think the fear that my husband had that if she was going to be in our bed, she would be in our bed forever fell away. And then at the same time, it addressed my own real concerns at that point, which was something that is not cultural but got layered in, which was that I was about to return to work and I was breastfeeding and really needed my supply up.

So all of these factors layered in together drove us to try co-sleeping. And we ended up co-sleeping with my first child until she was about three and then stopped, and it’s been a whole journey. But it’s not at all the solution that I would’ve assumed we would come to, and it’s not actually a cultural practice that either one of us has. But it was the thing that we landed on that felt like it allowed us to have both my desire for her to be really cared for, and especially with the nursing and also with being able to be right next to her, and it also still allowed for him to have that sense of, well, she will get towards independence. And we had an understanding, even when we began co-sleeping, that this wasn’t a forever thing.

Janet Lansbury: Right. So you’re saying bed-sharing?

Melina Gac Levin: Yes. So we began bed-sharing with her and it ended up working really well for us. We actually bed-shared with my second from the beginning.

One of the things that I think is interesting about this is that for some folks, the practice that they land on is something that is based in their own culture. Something that they grew up with or something that they bring from their own family. And for some of us it ends up being something totally different, but that honors the underlying values and concerns that we have.

And that’s where a lot of the work that I do with families is. I don’t think co-sleeping is for everybody. And I don’t think sleep training is for everybody, and I don’t think it’s for no one. I think for some families that’s the exact right solution and for some babies. But families have to get to that place through dialogue and collaboration and understanding both what their babies need and what their own desires and goals and values are.

Janet Lansbury: So it was this experience, though, that you say on your website was what inspired you to do the work that you’re doing now with parents. And can you talk a little about the process? One of the things I’m thinking is how hard it is as parents not to shame and blame the other parent or be shocked. What do you mean? Why would you think a baby could be independent? Or, No, we don’t want to bed-share! So is what you teach in the before class and in your consultations that you do, is it more about general relationship, talking to each other, conflict-resolution type stuff, or is it different than that?

Melina Gac Levin: There’s a layered approach. There’s the information piece, so both the before-baby classes and then the year one classes, there’s information that’s provided about how children develop. And that information is heavily researched, it’s vetted by some folks that I work with, a pediatrician, a neuropsychologist, some educators, and it’s based on scientific research and my own academic research and looking at ethnographies and what we know about how children develop in the first year. Because I do think that having that baseline understanding is important. If you know that a 10-month-old has no impulse control, then that’s really important to know even if your goal is for them to eventually not hit. So it’s important to have that understanding of what is actually happening for an infant and what are they capable of and what is beyond them at this point and how do they get there?

Janet Lansbury: A hundred percent, yeah.

Melina Gac Levin: And a lot of it is skill-building. So all of the classes have really strong frameworks around how to communicate and how to approach some of the questions that we explore. In part because the goal is for families to start really listening to understand each other. That I think is the hardest thing for many of us to do, is to try to listen to a partner. Especially when we have really, really strong feelings about our child and about how we want them to be in the world and who we want them to be and what kind of world we create for them. It’s very loaded for all of us because we care. And so it becomes really hard to listen to someone who seems to want something different from us in that moment, sometimes something very different, and to try to listen to understand what’s underneath that. Is there a fear underneath that? Is there a desire that we can relate to? Because once we can really understand the other person, and if they can really understand us, then we’re able to start seeing, Okay, there’s actually things that we both want here. There’s actually some overlap. And that’s what I try to build on.

Janet Lansbury: Exactly. And also, that fear is understandable. Just the way children’s fears, they might at first seem irrational, but then, Oh, that’s understandable. No wonder you are worried about this, or no wonder you are reacting that way. Because that’s really touching something off in you that’s scary about this person that we love more than life itself, right? This child.

Melina Gac Levin: Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: So the fears make sense, I think. What I notice in the parents that I work with is that it does get maybe even harder after the infant stage when, in terms of the way that we discipline, for lack of a better word, and feelings and the way that we respond to those things can be a difficult place for parents to come together. And I often work with parents who struggle with this. Are those other big areas that you’ve noticed?

Melina Gac Levin: Yes.

Janet Lansbury: So it’s food, for sure, food, sleep, and then feelings, discipline strategies, behavior. Because there’s a lot of fear around that, right? A lot of fear around, My child is going to be a terrible person, or My child is going to be somebody that can’t handle their feelings and they’re just going to sink into deep, deep depression.

Melina Gac Levin: Absolutely. And once kids hit that toddler stage, I notice a lot of zooming out and projecting into the future. So we see toddlers doing things that are very appropriate for a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old. But I think for many of us, myself included, it’s hard not to project and think, Oh my gosh, but what if they’re 10 and speaking to me that way?

Janet Lansbury: I better put a stop to this now!

Melina Gac Levin: Exactly.

Janet Lansbury: And also I think that’s because that’s when a lot of people start to see there’s a person there, they really connect with that. Oh, this person is talking to me. The baby was a different thing, people sometimes see it as. I don’t.

Melina Gac Levin: Neither do I.

Janet Lansbury: I mean, I did before I learned all about this. I did. I think that’s the cultural view for a lot of us, is that they’re this adorable, less-than-people thing. But then when they start talking and walking and they’re in our face, yes, it’s really hard to remember. And a lot of my work is about that perspective on how tiny they are. And they seem so huge to us. Even in my classes, because I sit on the floor observing the children a lot of the time, and the toddlers especially, they seem so gigantic. And then after class I’ll be out on the street going to my car and I’ll see the parent walking with that child and I’ll think, No, that can’t be that same child that I saw in my class. That was such a big dynamic character to me. This is just a little tiny person.

But yeah, it’s very easy to project into that stage and project into the future, like you said.

Melina Gac Levin: Definitely, definitely. And I do think it’s funny, children do have that quality of being giants and infants at the same time. You look at your sleeping toddler and you can see the newborn and then all of a sudden they wake up and you see this huge being in front of you. They sort of shapeshift, almost. I used to think of it that way when I would see that with my children. I was like, But you were just a baby and now I can’t not see the teenager in you.

Janet Lansbury: Exactly.

Melina Gac Levin: And it’s very hard to navigate that and to hold that perspective. So I am working on building out some toddler classes, but I wanted to start with before baby and with that first year in part because I do feel like it’s a time where these skills can be practiced. And it feels a little easier for many parents to practice and build these skills of how to collaborate and how to compromise, which is really what a lot of this is, before you do get to that place where you’re thinking about discipline. And so it’s almost like it’s a muscle that you’re building because by the time you get to those conversations, there’s more heat to them. We really care how our children turn out. And that’s a good thing, and it’s a hard thing.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, the stakes are very, very high.

I have a question from a parent that seemed to serendipitously come to me as I was getting ready to speak with you. So I thought, hmm maybe she would like to speak to this question. Would you mind?

Melina Gac Levin: Great, absolutely.

Janet Lansbury: Okay:

Hi, Janet-

I am currently separating from the father of my four-year-old. We are from different countries and have no common language with our son. I speak my mother tongue and his father does the same. English is reserved for the parents, so our son understands a bit but doesn’t speak it.

We also do not have common parenting approaches, as the father uses shaming as a discipline technique. Whenever my son has a different view, a complaint, or doesn’t want to comply, I can hear the father shaming him, asking him how old he is, if he is a baby, and sometimes even asking him if he is normal. The father has enormous difficulty dealing with our son’s cries or whines and will almost always order him to shut up and stop screaming. They are cries, not screams, but he feels them as screams and reacts very negatively. I can see how my son is hurt by these comments, and I also feel devastated by it. My son will redirect his rage mostly towards me, and I try to contain it. He will hit, bite, and tell me that I don’t know anything or that I’m a baby.

That’s okay. I’m learning to handle it more and more and your advice has been plenty helpful. But I want to help my child to cope with these shaming strategies that are not in my power to change. Now that he will be living in different households and share custody, I feel it is crucial that I support his loving bond with his father, but also build the trust inside him to foster his self-confidence without undermining his father.

I write to you to kindly ask your help for me to better navigate this.

Melina Gac Levin: What a beautiful question. There’s so much there.

My first thought and my first reaction to hearing this question is how incredible this mother is for being able to hold all those perspectives at once. You can hear her understanding how this feels for her child. She mentions how hard it is for him to feel shamed. And she holds on to how devastating it is for her to see this play out. And she also has this understanding of the father’s perspective too, right? The child isn’t screaming, but “he feels it as screams” are the words that she uses. So there’s this ability to hold these three perspectives, these three realities at once, that I think is really, really powerful.

My sense in terms of ways to support her child, and I think she mentioned he’s four right now.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Melina Gac Levin: So this is a really little guy, but if we think about it sort of over the long term, helping her child develop that ability, that reflective functioning of being able to understand the different perspectives in the room. So that he can both honor his own truth while knowing, Okay, my father’s having this different experience, without internalizing that being about himself. So it’s this ability to sort of hold onto the, Okay, he’s having a hard time with something. That doesn’t mean that I’m a bad child or that I am a baby.

And the power that this mother really has is in being able to model that understanding that she carries. I mean, she’s modeling it right now, even in asking this question. This understanding of the separateness of those experiences, even if they impact each other. Of course, his dad saying something is going to impact this little person, but being able to know, Okay, his reality is not the only reality, I think is really protective, especially over the long term.

I also noticed something in this question that is very common, which is she mentions the child saying a lot of those things back at her. So the father calls the child a baby and then the child calls the mother a baby. And I think that’s actually very common. We see that with a lot of children as they’re trying to make sense of something in their world, they’ll throw it out at their safe people.

Janet Lansbury: Exactly.

Melina Gac Levin: To try to make sense of it, to try to understand it. And I think holding onto that understanding that, Okay, he’s trying to make sense of this. This is something that was said to him. Then I would encourage this parent to consider, what is the voice she would want her son to be saying in his head when those things get said to him? Because if he calls her a baby and she says to her child something like, “That’s terrible,” or “Don’t say that,” then that gives that child the information that that’s a bad thing to say or that’s a horrible thing to say, and maybe it just amplifies the shame. As opposed to saying, and this will depend on what feels right to this parent, but I’m imagining myself saying something like, “I know I’m not a baby.” What is it that we want him to know about this situation? “I see that you’re very upset, but I know I’m not a baby.”

Janet Lansbury: I love that you noticed all the empathy that she has here, for all those perspectives and for the way that her child needs to offload the phrases and the words and to understand that too. And yes, I think you’re absolutely right too about helping him with the voice and what that means. And if we just say, “Oh, that’s terrible. Daddy shouldn’t do that,” that doesn’t help our child, who still feels, Daddy is a god to me. So besides shaming, it’s very confusing. And they also identify with both their parents. So, This is my dad. That means if my dad’s terrible, then I’m terrible too. Children can’t separate that out.

That’s why I love what you were getting at, which is to help their child understand where that kind of reaction comes from. So whether this husband was in her life still and they were going to be parenting together, or whether it’s going to be separate as it sounds like it is now, I would say to her son: “Sometimes daddy says those things to you.” Maybe even when he’s saying it to her, “You’re a baby!”: “Daddy says that sometimes. It’s really hard for Daddy to hear you cry. That’s just something that’s hard for him. It’s not hard for me, and it’s a normal thing to do. Everybody cries. But it’s so hard for him because maybe when he was a little boy, he wasn’t allowed to cry like that, and so when you cry, it feels like you’re screaming right at him. So that’s why he says those things.” I mean, maybe simpler than that with a four-year-old, but you can speak to that a little.

I used to do that with my kids, even when they had friends that were unkind or something. I would say, “What do you think makes them want to be unkind? What do you think makes them want to say that? It’s because they don’t feel good inside right then. They’re not coming from a happy place inside them.” And just giving them that basic information so that they can start to have the perspective. And then it’s still going to be hurtful for their son, but at least he can separate it out as a vulnerability in his dad instead of a fact about himself or something his dad actually believes about him. That’s another thing she could say is that, “I know that your dad doesn’t believe that about you. He thinks you’re amazing.” And not that she has to build him up, but just people say things they don’t mean when they’re really uncomfortable. And kids can kind of relate to that because they do it too.

Melina Gac Levin: Of course, yeah.

Janet Lansbury: And then they know, Yeah, oh yeah, I do that too. Then in a way that helps take them off the hook as well. Not that they should get away with that per se, but I mean it helps them to understand that we understand why you’re saying that to me.

Melina Gac Levin: Well, it normalizes a very human experience. And often we think of gentle parenting or these sort of more mindful approaches to raising children as about raising children who are more compliant in some way or easier in some way or able to self-regulate more easily. These are all things that I’ve certainly encountered from families that I’ve worked with. And the reality is that everyone still gets upset sometimes and that it’s not about compliance. So I think really normalizing these experiences goes a long way for children, and these emotions.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, and you could even say, “Just like when you want to lash out at me when you’re not feeling good, sometimes even adults do that.”

Melina Gac Levin: One thing that I want to point out is that it’s really incredible to be able to offer him that insight into why these things happen. And that at the same time, it’s important to acknowledge his experience, the child’s experience, as equally valid in those moments so that it doesn’t become about fixing his father.

Janet Lansbury: Exactly. Yeah, thank you for the balance on that.

Melina Gac Levin: And that’s what I think this mother is doing so wonderfully in this email, at least, is talking about the validity of all of these experiences. Yes, he has a hard time. And it’s not okay for him to say that to you and it hurts when he says that.

Janet Lansbury: Exactly. Not just, You should feel fine about this because here’s why. I mean, it’s a normal tendency to have and that’s another way of invalidating, right?

Melina Gac Levin: Exactly.

Janet Lansbury: Well, don’t feel like that because look at him. He’s got it worse. If we’re always hearing that, right? How can you be down? Look over there. Yeah, so you’re absolutely right. I’m so glad you brought that up.

Melina Gac Levin: And that’ll look different at four than it does as this child continues growing, but the root of that can start now.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. These things that we might say, I would have it come from that place—and this is a hard thing that I struggle to express because it’s very easy to demonstrate in person when it’s happening in a class or in a home consultation. It’s that even when you’re acknowledging feelings, it’s not something that we’re doing from this other place. It’s going to work best and feel best and be most helpful if we’re doing it from that place of, You’re hurt, I feel you’re hurt, and here’s some things I want you to know about it. But not, Here’s some reasons you shouldn’t feel hurt. I’m doing it from that place of connecting with your hurt or your anger or whatever you’re feeling. So it comes from that. It doesn’t help to say, Oh, I understand you’re upset that we didn’t do this thing. It’s like, Ahh, yeah, you’re upset that we didn’t get to do it. It’s got to come from that connected place, or it’s not going to feel connecting to our child. It’s not going to feel like they’re really being seen, and it just feels like we’re trying to explain it away or something.

Melina Gac Levin: There has to be authenticity.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And that our overall feeling is, I’m not trying to change what you’re feeling. I’m just sharing from that place of accepting what you’re feeling. So I guess that’s the difference. But yeah, it’s an easy one to misinterpret.

I also always want to tell these parents too, that a child having one person like this, with this parent’s incredible generous spirit and incredible empathy and insight, that is such a gift. And it’s okay if everybody’s not at the same level and it’s okay if the other parent has a different journey.

And another thing I’ve noticed is that, and I’m sure you notice this too, but when I work with parents beyond just a note like this, but I’m really working with them in a class or I’m in a consultation with them or I know them in person, you see how they are kind of balancing each other out in some way. You see how they’re complementing each other. Even when they’re in their rough patches, they’re helping the other parent see, Well, maybe you’re not noticing this part. I see that so much, that parents, they’re actually bringing something helpful to the situation no matter what. A helpful perspective. And the answer is kind of like how you found with sleep: it’s somewhere in between. It’s not this one’s or that one’s exactly, oftentimes.

Melina Gac Levin: Yeah, and I think that you’re right. I think that most of the times when I’m working with families, and really all of the time, both parents are bringing lots of strengths to the table. And it’s really helpful to start from that place of strengths, understanding what we’re contributing and what we can learn from each other, even if those things aren’t necessarily something that we might do ourselves. I think that there’s something important about having an approach where we’re communicating and collaborating, but I don’t think that that means that every parent in a family has to be parenting the same way all the time.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, you said that better than I did, but yes, that is true. Because oftentimes people will come to me and say, Well, I’m doing all this hard work and I understand this, and this other parent is kind of undermining the whole thing, or they’re not doing it. But then once we get beyond the surface and we start to hear from that other parent, we find, Oh, wait, but they’re seeing some things that you might not be seeing. It never ceases to amaze me how, I don’t know, there’s a destiny for these parents that they’re finding together.

Melina Gac Levin: For sure. And the thing that gives me the most hope and that I find the most sort of joy in working with multicultural families is that if we can find those places where we really see each other and we see our differences and we see them as not just negatives but as strengths, and if we can work together across difference to care for someone, that’s incredible. If we can raise a generation of children who can work together across difference because that’s what’s been modeled in their homes. And to care for each other through collaboration and compromise, even when they don’t see eye to eye with another person. I can’t imagine a more important goal.

Janet Lansbury: Well, you’re doing this work, so…

Melina Gac Levin: I mean, that’s what drives me, is this vision.

Janet Lansbury: I love that.

Melina Gac Levin: Thank you.

Janet Lansbury: Well, everybody, please check out Melina’s work at parentpueblo.com. And all the amazing workshops that she has, the depth that she brings to this work, it’s quite impressive. And thank you. Thank you so much for sharing with us today.

Melina Gac Levin: My pleasure. It’s such a joy to connect with you.

Janet Lansbury: Likewise. Alright, bye.

Melina Gac Levin: Bye! I don’t how you end, I just realized.

Janet Lansbury: I don’t either. Awkwardly!

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post When Parenting Partners Don’t See Eye to Eye (With Melina Gac Levin) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “When Our Kids Are Afraid”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about fears, our children’s fears. We can sort of divide them into two general categories: One is these fears that seem so irrational, and it’s almost hard for us to relate to them and understand them. Those are the types of fears that I’m going to be specifically addressing with the parents that have reached out to me in this podcast. But I’ll also be touching on fears that children have as a result of being exposed to something not age-appropriate, something that would scare any of us. Our process in both of these cases, in helping our children to work through their fears and make sense of them and come to grips with them, is quite similar in all of these cases, and I really hope this is helpful.

As I said, there are really two categories of fears: The seemingly irrational fears that don’t really make sense. They can be about things that seem very small and would not be scary to us as parents. And then there are fears that are unfortunate that our child has to be exposed to or experience. Not to blame ourselves, it happens. Both of these types of fears are challenging in different ways for us to deal with. The notes I’m going to be responding to are about childhood fears that are on the irrational end of the spectrum.

But let’s briefly talk about these what I’m calling non-age-appropriate fears: news images and events or other media that children are exposed to, like scary movies, medical interventions that are scary and uncomfortable, fears that we have that our children are picking up on. The challenging thing about these kinds of fears is that, for one, we may also be afraid, and it’s very hard to overcome that and try to be brave for our child to be able to help them process their own fear. And also we might feel a little guilty in some cases that our child got exposed to these things, or that we allowed our child to be in the position that they got exposed to them. Their reactions can be heartbreaking for us. And obviously we want to try to shield our children from these kinds of images and events as much as we possibly can, but it’s not always possible.

To give you a small example from my experience as a parent, one of my children—I won’t say which one—was about four years old, was at a neighbor’s house, and the older children in that home were watching an R-rated movie. It was very scary, it was a scary movie. And my child saw an image that just terrified them. And what happened was, this neighbor was quite close, so my child would walk over there, and I hear my child running down the street, screaming. And this is a child that did not do that kind of thing very often, they were quite mellow in their responses to things. When the child came in and told me what had happened, what they’d seen, I just felt terrible, and I felt so sorry for my child that they had to be exposed to that. And to hear them scream was really, really hard. Even though I had learned that was the best thing for them to be able to do, to yell and scream that terror that they felt.

And that right there is the key to all of this. Those of you that listen here will not be surprised that I’m saying this, you can probably guess. This commitment that we try to make—we’re not going to be perfect at it by any means—to let those feelings be, to welcome them, roll out the red carpet for our child to express that. Even though it breaks our heart, even though it makes us feel maybe guilty or that we did something wrong, the best thing we can do is encourage our child to feel what they feel. And, hopefully, not let it trigger our own feelings, so that we can be that safe person that our child can land their feelings with, even when it’s excruciating for us. So that’s the key in all of these cases I’m going to be talking about. And it definitely can be aspirational. It’s something to try for, not to be perfect at. It’s a direction that we want to try to head in and feel secure in, that this is the right thing. Because, as I said, it can feel like the hardest thing for us.

And here, besides screaming or yelling or expressing their fear that way, are some of the ways that children will naturally process fear. We want to try to encourage these because they’re nothing but healthy.

First, they play about it. Maybe this looks very inappropriate to us, like they’re being mean to their doll or their stuffed animal. I would try to trust and let that be, that if our child is behaving that way, that they need to be doing that, that they need a safe place to express that and process what they were exposed to. Now, if they’re taking this out on a sibling or a peer, we will want to intervene. I would try to do it as nonjudgmentally as possible, so that we’re not discouraging our child’s process. So maybe we say something like, “Hmm, I’m not comfortable with you talking to your sister that way, so I’m going to ask you to take a breather. Find another way to play.” So we’re not blaming our child, getting on their case so they feel that we’re kind of against them. We are just being reasonable and setting a limit that way. And, of course, if a child continues and maybe they need more of our help, “You know what? I’m going to have you hang with me for a bit because yeah, I’m just not comfortable with this.” But if this is with the doll or a toy or some other inanimate object, even if it seems alarming, I recommend letting it be.

The second major way that they work through fears is they bring it up repeatedly. They keep bringing up that situation, that thing that they saw on the street when we were walking, the way they observed somebody talking to somebody else, that movie. This is so healthy for them, and it shows that they are in the middle of a positive process, incredibly positive. So this is a good sign, not something that should alarm us more. Why can’t they get this out of their mind? Well, this is how they do it. As with other things that we can observe our child learning, they’re repeating it, repeating it, repeating it. So welcome that when they bring it up, “Oh yeah, you’re thinking about that again. You want to talk about what happened again.” Go through it with them, responsibly. “Yes, that did happen. You saw that, we did that, that happened to you,” or whatever it is. Help them by repeating the story with them.

An alternative that we don’t want because it’s not quite as healthy and might be a sign that children are not getting what they need from us, is that the fear seems to get worse, it builds. Even though the situation has ended, it seems to be becoming more intense. That’s a sign that maybe they need more of this acceptance that I’m talking about, more of this encouragement to share. And another thing, they could start generalizing that fear to other things. So it’s like it starts to spread for them. That’s another sign that they maybe need more encouragement from us to express what they feel in however way that they do it, as long as it’s safe.

Now, what about the fears that can seem totally irrational to us, even ridiculous? Oftentimes, if we can get out of our own heads and think more like a child, even these fears do make sense. And oftentimes, also, they’re metaphorical. They’re representing a sense of feeling out of control, or a loss of control, or other kinds of loss that our child feels. And there are a lot of these in a child’s life, not only situationally for young children, like when there’s a move or the birth of a sibling or discord between parents, other feelings of change and loss, but also developmentally, as they grow and develop, there’s a sense of newness and a loss of the old.

I remember a toddler in my class who one day brought in some plants, they weren’t flowers, but stems with leaves on them. And when one of the stems broke, she was inconsolable. And the parent said she’d been like that lately whenever something broke, anything. And the parent was in the early stages of pregnancy at that time, and that could be playing a part in this. But it could also be the child’s own feelings that they’re growing and the world can actually look different to them one day to the next, they’re growing so rapidly. There’s a lot of vulnerability in that, not wanting things to break, not wanting something to not be the same as it was because so much else is changing. So we want to try to trust that our child has a right to those feelings, as well as the ones that are really obviously warranted in our view.

Okay, so now here are some notes from parents that will help me explain more of the specifics of helping kids through their fears:

Hello, Janet-

My five-year-old son has an extreme fear of getting his feet dirty. The only time he is barefoot is in the bath. He puts socks, shoes on immediately. When he was three, he got tar on his feet at the beach. I calmly said, “That happens,” and cleaned it off as soon as we got home. Ever since he hasn’t gone barefoot, so much so that he wears water shoes in the pool or beach. If his feet get dirty through his socks, he screams with terror until I clean his feet. My husband and I are exhausted by this. Advice?

So here’s one that I can actually understand because I’ve had tar on my feet. I jog on the beach barefoot and I get tar on my feet, and it is a nasty thing. You have to put strong cleaners on to get it off, and it kind of spreads around if you don’t get it off. It’ll stick to your socks, it’ll stick to your shoes. It’s not a good feeling. So I could see that being a very unpleasant thing.

And I’m wondering what these parents might’ve done besides calmly saying, “That happens,” and cleaning it off. I mean, that’s great to be calm, it’s good to clean it off as soon as you get home. But I wonder if, and this is what I would suggest to this parent, if they’re making room for encouraging him to feel what he feels about it, to feel that discomfort. “You really don’t like getting that tar. I understand. It doesn’t feel good that it sticks onto you like that, and it’s hard to get off. You don’t want that to happen again. I get that.” Validating his fear that way. Which isn’t the same as saying, “I’m afraid of tar too, and I don’t want it anywhere near me.” So it’s not that we’re joining in his fear of it, but we’re validating, we’re connecting and understanding, or at least wanting to understand, that he feels that way.

So, when she says, “he screams with terror until I clean his feet, even if they get dirty through his socks,” that would be a time, at this point, that I would—it’s a weird thing to say take advantage of—but, I would welcome. You really don’t like this, this is just scary for you. And maybe we’re not saying those exact words, again, but just that willingness to allow him to scream and not see this the way that we often do as parents, as, Oh, this is a problem. I have to fix this. This isn’t okay. That’s what tires us. She says her “husband and I are exhausted by this.” Well, that can happen when we feel responsible to change that feeling that he’s having.

But that’s not our responsibility, nor is it helpful to this child, or any child. What’s helpful is to know that all feelings matter to a child and they’re all safe for us to allow. We don’t have to try to go up against them and fix them and make them better. Let it go. Let them be. Just nod your head, know that the screaming will pass and the screaming is the way it will pass. But when children can’t do that or it’s not welcome or they feel that we’re annoyed with them and frustrated that they’re feeling like this—all understandable—then they can’t process it. They can’t express it. They can’t move through it to the other side. So with our best intentions, we make it harder on ourselves, actually, by not giving way, by not allowing for that just to be his feeling about it.

And then from that place of welcoming all his feelings, because he’s five, you might ask if he wants to draw how he feels when his feet get dirty or sing a song about it. Or maybe ask if he wants to practice being dirty with a bucket of mud and then washing it off. But I would only suggest those things as possibilities, very openly, because again, that key will be to encourage his feelings to be.

And it sounds like this parent is doing this, but I would suggest not working to avoid natural situations where his feet get dirty. If he’s comfortable with the water shoes, that’s fine. That’s something that’s helping him to feel more autonomous in the situation. But I wouldn’t do any unnatural thing to avoid his feet getting dirty. That would be accommodating his fears, which is essentially when we try to avoid them. And that feels to a child like we’re agreeing with them, we’re agreeing that he can’t handle getting his feet dirty. And as I said, it sounds like this parent is already understanding that. She’s not avoiding places where he might naturally get dirt on his feet.

So that’s it, letting him scream even when it seems totally unreasonable. Okay, here’s another note from a parent:

Hi, Janet-

My two-year-old has had a fear of balloons for about six months now, and so many family events feature balloons (not at my own house, of course). If the balloons are secured to an arch or something, she can simply avoid getting close. But sometimes they’re bouncing around on the floor and her cousins start playing with them. And my daughter, when she sees those freely moving balloons, starts screaming and kicking and seems in total panic mode. She has told me that she remembers her cousin popped a balloon once, and I’m guessing that is where the fear comes from.

This cousin, who’s also two, loves balloons and has a fit if I try to put them away. I want to let my daughter process her fear, but I also don’t think it’s fair to leave her screaming in fear in front of the whole extended family. I would rather let her process at home in more privacy. We (me and the two-year-old cousin’s mom) have tried to ask the cousins to just pick one room to be the balloon room, so my daughter can easily avoid that room. But the other toddlers have trouble following that, so when nobody’s playing with them, I just hide them away.

I don’t want to be enabling or giving power to my daughter’s fear, but I just don’t want to make her have to do all that processing at a big family event. What are your suggestions?

This is another fear, like the tar on the feet, that I could actually relate to, because I don’t like when balloons pop. It makes a really loud noise, the balloon sort of disappears, and yeah, I can see where that’s uncomfortable. But I think like a child all the time, so. But yeah, that makes sense. And I love that this little two-year-old was able to express to her parent where this is coming from, which is she experienced it and she didn’t like it. And so of course, I’m wondering how this parent has reacted all the way through to her daughter’s feelings about the balloons. I’m not sure if she was there when her cousin popped it the first time, but I think she’s spot on that this is where the fear is coming from. And she said, “this cousin, who’s also two, loves balloons and has a fit if I try to put them away.”

So how does she help this girl? I think that’s also a wonderful instinct she has, that she doesn’t want her to be falling apart in front of everybody, that she deserves privacy when she’s having that kind of panic. But this also sounds really uncomfortable for the parent that she’s trying to navigate all of this, and Let me put these away because nobody’s here, and the whole event becomes about balloons for the parent as well. That’s uncomfortable, right?

I am wondering if this parent could lean more into understanding and relating to, and therefore validating, those feelings about the balloon popping. When her daughter told her that this happened, that would’ve been a moment to say, “Oh, you really didn’t like that, and now it makes you afraid of all balloons, right? That they might pop any second and make that loud noise.” Sometimes we feel as parents that we shouldn’t say those things, those truths about what’s going on. That, Oh gosh, if I talk about all of this, it’s going to make it worse. But it never does. It helps a child feel okay for how they feel, that they have a right to feel that way. And they don’t have to be afraid of the feeling of being afraid because that doesn’t seem acceptable with my family. “That can be scary, and it’s scary to you. You don’t like it. And that makes you not even want to have fun with balloons because you’re worried that’s going to happen any second, right?” I would be sure that you’re reflecting with her that way.

And then when you are in this situation, I would let her know ahead of time so that she feels as much autonomy in this situation as possible. I would prepare her from this place of joining her, being fearlessly on her team. “We’re going to this party with your cousins, and there may be balloons there.” And maybe you know if there will be, because you’re in touch with people, and you could say, “There’s going to be balloons. And when those balloons pop, I know it’s very, very scary for you, right? You get so upset. You don’t like that popping sound, and it seems like you’re afraid that’s going to happen. The way that balloon just breaks and disappears, yeah, it’s so scary for you.” And then I would also say, “If you want, you can sit on my lap while the balloons are out. Or we can just keep moving to another room, if there’s balloons. We can do that, or you can stay with me and when you get upset, you can tell me about it. I want to know when you feel scared. You can always share that with me.” I believe if this parent isn’t already doing it to this extent, that this will help a lot. And maybe she’ll end up sharing with you at home about the feelings more if you open up that conversation, saying all those things that she could be feeling.

And then if she still has an emotional response while she’s there, just calmly take her, with that kind of head nodding, accepting, Yeah, there’s that scary thing. You don’t like to see all those balloons around you. Taking her aside to another room and then welcoming her to share, wherever you are. And I believe that if you really lean in and allow this all the way, and join her in this teamwork of getting it, understanding that she feels this way and that it really makes sense to her, at least, she’ll move through. But it’s like children, sometimes they just don’t really feel seen and heard and safe in what they’re feeling a hundred percent, because it throws us off-balance. And then it’s harder to be that for them. So lean into her right to be terrified by balloons. Don’t try to make it better. Trust it, and it will pass.

Okay, one more:

Hi, Janet-

I’m running into an odd thing with my two-year-old. She’s recently developed a fear of a woodpecker specter whom she imagines is some kind of monster that threatens her, the family, the car, etc. She wakes up in the middle of the night after having nightmares about it. Over the last few weeks, my husband and I have both spoken with her, telling her that we will keep her safe, that the dog keeps her safe, that the house is a safe space, etc. We talk about how woodpeckers eat bugs and do not hurt humans. And we watched a few nature videos together of non-threatening woodpeckers. There’s a woodpecker in one of her books, and she asks us to read her that book all the time. In the book, the woodpecker surprises/scares a baby owl who is sleeping. We also can hear a woodpecker outside the house most mornings, something she was excited about initially, but now is afraid of.

Is there something we could do to make her feel a bit better? I keep circling back to my husband’s love for scary movies. Do you think she wants us to read the book with the woodpecker in it because she likes to be scared? Do you think I should hide the book? Should we just ride it out? Thanks for your help.

Okay, so I’m not sure about the timing of all of this, but I’m getting the sense that this little girl became frightened because of this book that she wants to keep reading. So there’s that repetition, that’s what that’s about. This woodpecker surprises and scares a baby owl who is sleeping. This maybe isn’t a bedtime book for that reason, and so I would maybe focus on reading it to her other times of the day. Just, “We’re going to read that one in the morning, but let’s read a different one now.”

This definitely sounds like the kind of thing that could spur a fear and even create nightmares. Because whenever children see or hear things that surprise them, that disturb them in some ways, yes, that touches off all these feelings of what we don’t control in life. Young children especially feel that lack of control. That’s why they can get caught up in all kinds of controlling behaviors.

Movies and videos of any kind can be a little more scary than books even, because they’re designed to surprise and stimulate. And with all the editing that goes on, they can definitely be the source of nightmares and fears. So for that reason, I’m not sure I would recommend watching videos about it, although I like the other things this parent is doing. The videos can be disturbing very easily, without us even realizing it. And if a child is having an intense response like this to something that happens in a book—which happens, this happened with my children as well—then imagine something that she has much less control over, like a video or a TV show. So that’s just something to keep in mind.

And what this girl is doing, again, is very, very healthy. Children have this remarkable process for healing, and this is what she’s doing. She’s trying to sort this out for herself by asking to hear this story again and again. And they do this around all kinds of things that disturb them. They will naturally work on processing the experience so that they can understand it and work it through their systems. So really our job is just to help that along, to encourage this healthy process that our children have, which in this case she’s doing with repetition. So, being willing to read the book as many times as she wants, whenever we’re reading books. I mean, we don’t have to become a slave to reading it to her whenever she wants, but just knowing that this is really healthy for her, when we can do it.

And also that our feelings will matter a lot in this situation, as they matter in every parenting situation. So if we’re concerned—and all these parents were concerned enough to write to me—there’s a pretty good chance that our child is picking up on our concern, and that can actually get in the way. I mean, it’s normal that we do that, but it can get in the way by giving her the feeling that her process isn’t safe and okay, like we want her to believe. This digestion that she’s doing of the experience. Children always need our own comfort in the situation as a baseline. If they don’t have that, it’s harder for them to get comfortable, maybe even impossible. And then they can’t do this work that they’re so good at doing. So, calming ourselves, knowing our children are working on a process. This girl’s healthy, this is what children do.

And it’s very common for children at this age to start having fears, all the way through age four and maybe even five or six. And one of the themes behind this kind of fear sometimes is the power a child feels in themselves, which can be kind of scary if we’re not being as clear and comfortable about boundaries or when we get upset or worried when our child is upset. Those kinds of things can make our child feel even more fearful around the power that they have, so they can project that into these different fears and nightmares. And the thing to know about that, again, is that this is normal for development and that having clear, comfortable boundaries with children is always a good idea. It’s really the most loving thing we can do.

So, what this girl’s process sounds like it’s looking like is she needs the parent to want to go over the book with her again as much as she wants, and really have this exploratory attitude, this open attitude. Maybe we’re looking at her when she’s looking at the book and we could say, “Looks like you’re puzzled about that baby owl, or you seem like you really don’t like that that happened with the baby owl. That was disturbing, right?” So we’re in acceptance and we’re just allowing her to bounce her thoughts off of us. And being that open, nonjudgmental person that I’m recommending in all these cases, this is something to try to practice throughout our life and relationship with our child. Because it’s the key to us getting to hear their innermost thoughts, for them to share those fears with us, which we always want them to do, right? We’re getting to hear what’s going on in their minds and hearts.

So in the case of the car, I would allow her to say that she sees the monster in the car. She feels like it’s out there. And I would acknowledge: “You really feel like there’s something out there that could come in. That’s really uncomfortable for you. We have a safe car.” So I would definitely say those reassuring things like this parent is saying, but then focus even more on acknowledging her side. And then every once in a while, yes, also say, “We will do our best to keep you safe. We have a safe house. Woodpeckers don’t normally do those kinds of things.” Those kinds of statements will come more naturally to us, but this other part of letting them feel what they feel is going to be harder for us. And equally, if not more important, that focus on exploring and welcoming what she’s feeling.

And also exploring solutions with her so that she can feel more autonomous in this process. It’s one thing for us to say, Don’t worry, we’ve got all this covered, but maybe there’s an action that she wants to take. “Would you like to close the curtains?” In the case of that boy with the fear of the dirt on his feet, “Would you like to wear your water shoes?” And in this case with the woodpecker, “Would you prefer to get in the car and sit on this side? We can move your car seat over.” If those things are an option, whatever it is, we can explore with our child how they would like to do it, what would make them feel more comfortable. That’s not the same as accommodating. This is empowering. That can also help her to feel a bit better.

So in all of these cases, we can really understand where the fear is coming from, it’s clear. But sometimes we won’t know where children get it from, and then it’s harder to be open, knowing that it came from somewhere. The best thing for our child to do is to cover every aspect of it with us and share with us, with us just bravely going with them on this journey, from that place of maturity that we do know that they’re safe, and we believe that, and we know that they’re doing something very, very healthy. So I don’t think in this case it relates to the husband’s love for scary movies. I don’t think she’s loving this. I think she’s wanting to overcome this and understand her own feelings about it, that she is scared of this woodpecker and that it could surprise and alarm a baby owl in their sleep. She’s trying to understand it, figure it out. And so I definitely don’t think she’s ready for scary movies yet. I don’t think that’s what this is about.

And this parent said, “Do you think I should hide the book?” Definitely not. “Should we just ride it out?” Yes. That’s what I’m saying is, ride it out. Be that open place. See this as a gift in your relationship: You’re getting to hear her innermost thoughts. You’re getting to help her problem-solve. You’re showing her that you’re a nonjudgmental place for her to share whatever with. It can be the wildest thing in the world, you’re not going to judge her or say, Oh, come on. Don’t be afraid of that. It’s just this. Just is one of the words that’s commonly used to invalidate. Whenever we say, It’s just this, it’s just a dog, it’s just an owl, it’s just a woodpecker. Look how nice the woodpecker is. None of that is helpful.

And yeah, it is a phase. And so in that sense, letting the feelings be, riding it out. But as her anchor, not riding these ups and downs along with her, that doesn’t help her to feel as safe. But we don’t want her to ride it out without our support. And believe it or not, the long view on these is that they are precious bonding experiences.

So, in summary: One, welcome the feelings, whatever they are. Two, encourage children to process these feelings in their way and time, through play or repetition, etc. Three, if possible, let children make choices that give them a bit of control in the situation.

I really hope this helps. 

And please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

And now, at last, I have a online course! Learn more at: NoBadKidsCourse.com.

Thank you so much for listening. We can do this.

The post When Our Kids Are Scared appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Encouraging Kids to Be More Assertive”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about a topic that parents bring up a lot, and always have, in the classes that I’ve taught. Interestingly, when there’ll be children who are maybe one-and-a-half that are taking toys from each other, it’s often the parent of the child who’s not the taker, but the takee, who gets the most concerned. Because their child isn’t standing up for themselves, they’re just letting these things happen. They’re not being assertive. And we all want our children to feel confident and assertive, right? That’s going to help them in their life. As somebody who hasn’t always felt very assertive in life and has slowly built that trait for myself, I really do understand the concern. And so I’m going to be giving feedback to two different parents who brought their concerns to me in emails about their children’s assertiveness.

First I want to talk a little about assertiveness. It’s, I guess, a character trait, and we’re all born with the potential for a variety of character traits, but some more than others, right? Some of us have natural assertiveness, we’re born very assertive. Others are not. But it’s something that we can all grow into with this essential aspect in us. And that aspect is self-confidence. And, interestingly, both of the parents in these notes bring up self-confidence along with assertiveness that they want for their children, that they’re not seeing right now, and it’s concerning them.

So what helps children to feel more assertive? There are people in life who are very assertive that aren’t necessarily as self-confident underneath it all, but I would say all people who have healthy self-confidence have the ability also to be assertive. Maybe it’s not this big, cocky assertiveness, but it’s a quiet ability to say no, have boundaries, stick up for ourselves. So oftentimes, and in both of these cases, the key to helping our children feel more assertive is to fuel their self-confidence. And the way to do that is this word you hear me bring up a lot: trust. Trust in them.

Here’s the first note:

Hi, Janet-

I hope you’re doing well, and thank you for your wonderful advice. It has been immensely helpful in my parenting journey so far. I have two children, an elder son who is five-and-a-half and a daughter who just turned 18 months. I have followed RIE principles since almost the beginning, with a lot of challenges, basically around setting boundaries and seeing the right perspective, what you call a different kind of lens. Anyway, I would say on a scale of one to 10, I have followed up to seven.

However, I have recently noticed that my son has been struggling asserting himself. I thought that having followed RIE, this should come naturally to him, but it hasn’t. He travels to school on the bus and has been facing some kind of bullying by other kids. Once by an older kid he was sitting next to who was hitting him and roughhousing in the name of play, and a second time by a child his age who was also hurting him and fighting him. Both times he did not come home and tell me immediately, he told me much later in the day when somehow the topic of the bus came about. I asked him why he didn’t tell the bus monitor and said, “Why don’t you push the kid off?” I know both times my response was not very attuned, but I did later try to acknowledge his feelings.

I was left wondering, Why is he not asserting himself and sharing things that happen with me immediately? What is it that I need to change? I want him to always assert his boundaries and be confident enough to do so. He’s in a traditional school that praises good behavior and kind of shames bad behavior, so that’s another disadvantage. How should I help my son in such environments in a way that he can be confident, assertive, and feel good about himself?

Many thanks.

I also forgot to mention before I started that in both cases with these notes, and with something like developing assertiveness, this isn’t a quick fix situation. We can’t say just the right words to our child that’s going to turn this around suddenly. It’s a slow evolution in our child’s development that we really can’t even rush, but we can fuel it. We can fuel it by fueling their self-confidence and not doing things that defuel their self-confidence. I know that people that listen here are probably used to this, that most of my suggestions are not going to bring a quick resolution to the issues that parents and children are facing, unfortunately. Sorry, I wish I could. But just like humans of other ages, children are not simplistic beings. They can’t just flip a switch and be something different. It takes time. And that makes it even harder for us to do what I’m suggesting, which is trust.

So in this case, with this boy, there could be two reasons that he’s not telling his parent right away about these incidents on the bus. One could be that this isn’t a huge deal to him. A lot of times when children are going through things socially, maybe it’s a little disturbing, but they’re also sort of interested in, Wow, I’m getting this attention, or What’s going on here? So this might not be as much of a crisis as this parent worries that it is.

And of course, if she has any doubts, and maybe I would just do this prophylactically, I would, instead of talking to your son about what he should do, I would suggest some other ways to handle giving him feedback and helping him process the situation. But what I would do is go to that bus service or the school or whoever’s in charge of this, and not make a big scene that this is bullying because we’re not sure if this is really bullying. It sounds like some out-of-control behavior, but I wouldn’t jump immediately to bullying. But I would let them know and say, “Really, it seems like there needs to be a little more supervision on the bus.” And if the bus driver can’t do it, because they’re obviously busy, maybe they can have some student volunteers assigned that are already on the bus to monitor the other children. To just keep everybody safe, and when there’s roughhousing, to stop it when it starts. Peer leaders are often the most effective. So I would consider that if you have a serious concern that your child may be getting hurt or getting bullied or that he’s upset about this, that he feels out of control, that he feels alone and he needs that support. I would absolutely do that on that level with whoever’s in charge of that situation.

But getting back to your son— So what we really want is our child to be able to stand up and say, “No, this is not okay!” And that’s such a hard thing for children to do with peers. It really is. We could have a very confident, assertive child who still struggles with that, because peers are so important to them. They’re trying to figure it out, they want to connect with each other, they want to be liked. And there’s nothing weak about that. It’s part of their learning, their goal is to connect with other children. So it makes sense that to tell another child no or to have a strong boundary with them is the hardest thing. And it doesn’t mean that he’s not an assertive person or a confident person.

So the fact that he’s not telling her right away could be that this isn’t a big deal for him, but it could also be that he’s concerned about her reaction. And it sounds like, without meaning to, this mom did the normal thing, which is react. Hey, why didn’t you do something? Don’t let them do that to you. What her son feels from that, and he may have anticipated that she might’ve responded this way, is that his response to whatever happened on the bus, she’s without meaning to, kind of judging it. He feels judged that he didn’t do the right thing. Why didn’t he push the guy off him? Why didn’t he tell somebody? Very hard things, again, for a child to do with peers. And then he feels that his mother feels he didn’t do the right thing either. So that does the opposite of fueling him with confidence.

And the fact that he has an 18-month-old sibling means it’s likely he’s been judged around his behavior with that child as well, possibly, because that’s a common thing that happens. It’s really hard not to judge as a parent when your older child is showing aggression or just dislike towards the baby or having other behavior that’s around that change. Oftentimes they feel a lot of judgment around those behaviors, understandably. But it’s hard for children because they already are coming from a vulnerable place. Which doesn’t mean that this is a problem that we can’t turn around, at all. It’s just to be aware of.

So, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to tell her because maybe he sensed he didn’t respond in the way she would’ve wanted or that he would’ve felt judged. And what we want to do for him—and what this parent wants to do—is the opposite: to help him feel trusted in his process of handling these situations. The way to do that is to take an interest in his point of view, instead of judging it. Being open to, Oh, you’re telling me this. How did this make you feel? What did that feel like?

Now, where this parent is now, she may have to try to dial back, because her child knows that she’s maybe already disappointed in him on some level with the way that he’s handling this. The way to dial it back is just to be a sounding board for a while. Before you give any kind of advice, I would only stick with—and really meaning it, so not kind of leading him with, “What did you think about that? You should have thought it was bad,” but really open to, Ah, what was that like? And since she has also said these words to him that he may have felt judged by, she might even dial it all the way back with an explanation and say, “I know that I told you you should do this or that before, and I was thinking about that and I don’t know the right thing to do. And I really trust you. You have a good sense of yourself and you have a good sense of what’s right or wrong. So I’m not going to give you more advice of what to do. I want you to be able to explore it with me.” Maybe not all those words, but that kind of attitude, so that we’ve put it all out there. Yes, I jumped to telling you you should have done it this way or that way, and I realize that and I’m taking it all back. Let’s start again at square one. I just want to know how you felt. And maybe this won’t even happen again for this child, but if it does, that’s where I would bring it up.

And in other situations, too. That trust in him, taking an interest in our child’s point of view instead of judging it, it helps them to feel safe to open up to us. Which judging them doesn’t, of course. And out of that, not deciding what he should feel, he might have a different perspective. Like I said, maybe that’s a good sign that he didn’t report this right away, maybe it wasn’t a big deal to him. How did this make you feel? And then when she’s dialing it back and saying those things about, “I know I gave you this advice and I told you what I thought you should do, but I actually trust you more on this,” she might add, “And if there’s something you can’t handle, please let me know right away and we can figure it out together.”

We want to try to trust and respect our child’s ways of managing conflict with their peers, rather than giving them ours. Because children have a better sense of this than we give them credit for, but they can feel so overrun by us, right? And our opinions about it. So, that openness. And then when it starts to feel right that he’s sharing more with you, giving open-ended feedback, like, “I wonder what would happen if you said this, or you just turned away and put your hand up, or you might want to try this.” Just offering, very gently, very openly, “I wonder . . .” Considering this as working together with him, trying to take his lead.

And again, not expecting quick results. These are long processes. The same with other kinds of character traits. It takes a lot of trust in them and the space and time for them to come to these situations with that vital aspect, which is self-confidence. My instincts, what I’m choosing to do, or what I’m choosing to not do yet, is where I’m at right now. And it’s okay. And maybe he will find his own way that isn’t our way of setting a boundary, even. Maybe he’ll find a way to break the ice with these children and be their friends. Some children use humor. Give him the space and time to find his way.

It’s very challenging as parents, I know. I’m talking like it’s easy and I know it’s not. And I love that this parent cares enough to say, “What is it that I need to change?” I would just say, let go of the judging, trust him more. He’ll get there, I promise. And maybe he’ll have ways of dealing that really surprise you. That’s happened to me.

Okay, so here’s another letter that’s around the same topic but a little bit different:

Hi, Janet-

On many occasions in your podcast and book, you’ve touched on how to work through tricky situations with sibling dynamics, establishing boundaries, connecting with my kids one-on-one. The list could go on forever. You’ve really helped me navigate this exciting and fulfilling parenting world.

However, I have a question for you, and this is regarding friend dynamics. My daughter, who is in second grade, has a good handful of friends that she enjoys playing with. She has some wonderful, healthy friendships, and I feel so happy for her. And I see the happiness she gets from her friends, too. However, there’s one friend in her class that she plays with who has been recently diagnosed with anxiety. This friend constantly makes our daughter unhappy at school, either by bragging, bossing her around, excluding her, tattling on her, little digs. Sometimes this leads to tears or my daughter saying she had a “thumbs down” day at school. They are in class together, have lunch and recess together. It even happened during summer at camp. These little interactions happen at varying times during the school day. And from what I understand from my daughter and other parents is that this particular kid does it to other girls as well.

My husband and I try our best to be mindful of her friend’s diagnosis and ask our daughter to be patient, give this girl grace, but also create her own boundaries. We’ve coached our daughter to stand up for herself and establish her boundaries. For instance, “We can’t be friends if you’re going to talk to me like this. Your words are hurtful. I don’t feel the same way as you do. We cannot play together if you are excluding so-and-so.” The friend responds with a burst of anger, stomps off, and our daughter feels like the situation is unresolved and feels sad. Occasionally the friend will apologize, but the next day something else will happen.

I’m doing my best to give my daughter the chance to work through this on her own, but something comes up at least once a week and she says she wants a friendship break. I don’t blame her. I recognize that she can somewhat create a boundary for herself, but it’s hard to avoid someone that you spend all day with. I’m at a loss on how to navigate this situation. I want my daughter to feel safe, free to play with friends, and feel confident that she can navigate tricky social situations and not be affected by this behavior. But I also recognize that, while she is a confident, smart, loving seven-year-old, she does not have all of the tools to respond to her friend or other similar social situations.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

So yes, this girl does sound confident indeed to me. And how wonderful that she has some great friendships and knows how to have healthy friendships, and she knows what that feels like. And this friend with the anxiety isn’t her only example of what friends can be like. So that’s great, right?

It’s interesting to me that when this parent says, “The friend responds with a burst of anger, stomps off, and our daughter feels like the situation is unresolved and feels sad.” So I’m sensing—I could be totally wrong on this—that if her daughter was just trying to avoid this person and this was just a big pain for her, she could do that. She wouldn’t feel sad. I think she feels sad for a lovely reason, that she wants to try to have a friendship with this girl, she wants to try to connect with her. Maybe she does see beyond the bluster of the behavior, and that’s what’s making her sad, for this girl, that it’s unresolved. Because if she didn’t care, she wouldn’t care if it was unresolved. She could just work on ignoring the person, right? So I think she’s wanting to learn some really important things here. Maybe not consciously, but she’s staying engaged with this girl, that she wants to learn from this.

So going back to what will help fortify her, it sounds like she’s on her way. And even the fact that she says she wants a friendship break—yeah, she wants a friendship break because she considers this a friend, but it’s a friend that is very, very challenging and she wants a break from that. So when she says things like that, I would encourage, “Yeah, of course you do. You’re trying really hard with this girl and she’s difficult for you, right? She’s hurtful. It doesn’t feel good, but you’re kind of sticking in there with it. And I really admire that.” I would tell her that. And getting back to fueling her with the self-confidence she needs to keep moving in this sort of direction. I think she’s already well on her way, and this parent says she is self-confident. We want to trust in her. And that’s what I was speaking to, the idea of trusting that it’s not that she can’t say no or navigate this girl, even. It’s that she’s feeling the challenges of it, and that’s not a terrible thing. It could be seen as a very positive learning process. So I would try to trust in that, and taking an interest in her point of view instead of judging it.

That’s where we have to be careful though, because, just like with this other parent before, the parent of the boy on the bus, it can be a delicate thing to give our children direction in these situations. It works better usually when we’re more open as a sounding board to hearing what they think, and then maybe gently guiding them with, “I wonder what would happen if . . .”

And it sounds like this parent, with the best of intentions, she asked her “daughter to be patient, give this girl grace, but also create her own boundaries.” And they’ve coached her to stand up for herself and establish her boundaries, for instance, “We can’t be friends if you’re going to talk to me like that.” But even the way this starts out, they asked her to give this girl grace. That’s a beautiful sentiment and a message we want to give children about other children that have struggles or anyone that has struggles, is to try to understand and have compassion and give them grace.

But I wonder if this girl wouldn’t have done that anyway, and maybe it would feel more trusting and confidence-building for her if we didn’t give her that instruction. And I know this parent already did, but I’m just saying for the next time. Or even to dial it back and say, “We said that we want you to give her grace and that we want you to stand up for yourself and have boundaries. But I think you’ve got all these instincts already, I feel like. And so I don’t think we need to tell you that stuff. We’re just here for you to share. And if you want any thoughts from us about how to handle things, let’s talk about that. But we trust you, the way you’re navigating this. It feels like you know what you’re doing.” Or, “How does it feel?” Even better, maybe.

That’s what I mean by trusting, not judging. It’s not this heavy thing, like either of these parents are judging their children in some negative way, at all. But even assuming that our daughter needs our help to do things that she’s not actually requesting, that can feel a little like, Oh, my parents are trying to steer me in this direction, so that’s the direction they think I should go in. It’s this very, very subtle form of judging. Nobody should feel bad about it. It’s just a way of actually practicing that very challenging thing for us, that trust. And taking an interest in her point of view. What is that like? How is it to be with her when she does these things? What do you feel like doing? What do you feel like saying? But very openly, not steering, not with an edge of how we think she should feel. Hard to do. Kind of a fun challenge in a weird way, for me at least. But we’re not going to be perfect at this. And so it’s just awareness, just stuff to try.

So, not deciding what she should feel, not deciding that she needs to stand up for herself in the way that we think she should and have boundaries. Because children having boundaries or handling challenging situations, which is the way they build a lot of confidence, not by us telling them wonderful things about themselves, but the fact that they can face adversity. Which both of these children are doing, they’re facing adversity. That’s how you build confidence. But we don’t want to undermine that by saying, You need me to tell you how to do this, because they might handle adversity their own way.

I would dial this back with this girl too, and just be a sounding board from here on out. And maybe even say, “I know we said these different things you should say to her, but that doesn’t seem like it’s working. She’s just getting mad. What do you want to say to her? How do you feel?” And maybe instead of saying, “Your words are hurtful,” she might say, “I feel hurt” or “Ouch!” Or one thing you might offer is when she asks you to play, but she wants to exclude other children: “I wonder how it would be if you just said, ‘Thank you, but no, I’m not going to do that.'” Instead of commenting about what the girl’s doing, just talking about herself, using only “I statements.” And not expecting that she’s going to be able to change this girl, because I doubt very much it’s in her power or anyone’s power. So I don’t think bringing these realities to light for this other girl is really going to be effective. It sounds like it’s not effective, because the friend feels judged and responds with a burst of anger and stomps off. But the way the friend responds can’t be our child’s responsibility. That’s why I would suggest maybe she just says less and not to expect this girl to take things gracefully because it seems like she’s not going to. And that’s okay, not everybody will. But that’s what having boundaries is. It’s being okay with other people’s reactions to them.

So we want ideally to fuel her self-confidence, respecting her ways of managing conflicts with peers. “What do you feel like saying when she says that?” And then giving the most open-ended feedback, when it’s time for that. “I wonder what would happen if you . . .” And then, just as I was saying with the boy on the bus, if your child feels really brought down by the situation, or maybe she’s feeling stuck—to me, it sounds like she’s handling it really well. “I just need a break from this friend.” “Yeah! Yes, you do. You can say no thanks to her.”

Just to reiterate: It’s a slow process. We’re not going to see immediate changes. But it’s a practice for us as parents that really applies to so many things, so many areas of their development and their learning. Trusting them, so that they can have that self-trust, which is where all of these positive character traits spring from. Taking an interest in their point of view instead of judging it with ours. Not deciding what children should feel. They might have a different perspective, and that’s a good thing. Their perspective is where their self-confidence and assertiveness is going to come from. Dialing it back if we need to. Being a sounding board first and foremost, and most of the time respecting children’s own ways of managing conflict with peers. Being open to them, rather than assuming that ours are the best way or the only way. And when feedback is requested, or we’re really able to be in that open sounding board place, gently giving open-ended feedback. “I wonder . . .”

These are ways we can fuel our children, fuel their evolution, their development. This magical thing: self-confidence. We can’t give it to them, but we can help fuel it. I really hope some of this helps.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

And now, at last, I have a online course! Learn more at: NoBadKidsCourse.com.

Thank you so much for listening. We can do this.

UPDATE: The parent who asked about her son on the bus kindly shared this update:

A big thank you for responding to my email below. I heard your podcast on it and as soon as it popped on my iPhone I was like this is what I was looking for. I did not know you were actually addressing my concern. I can’t thank you enough because I have to say this concern has been on my mind ever since.

As I was listening you I just couldn’t help but notice how on point you are regarding my son even though you haven’t met him. Yes, even I felt somewhere that it wasn’t a big deal for him and he was not negatively affected with the roughhousing and hitting. He is a highly sensitive and intelligent boy so I believe he understands the kids quite well. 

I also felt he was putting it before me to check how I would react. And my reaction was not the ideal. You are on point that he needs a sounding board, which I haven’t been, to be honest. 

I can’t thank you enough for the immensely great work that you are doing free of cost. I wish you all the good things in life. I will follow your advice and keep updating you with our progress.

The post Encouraging Kids To Be More Assertive (Includes an Update) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “How to Be Strong Enough to Make the Really Big Changes”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I have some questions from parents. I love this first one’s subject line because it really describes what this is going to be about: “How to Be Strong Enough to Make the Really Big Changes.” So what can we do as parents to be able to bolster ourselves to make changes with our children that we know that they’re going to object to strongly? This can be anything from certain habits that we’ve gotten into with them that we want to change. Maybe less TV, more independent play, that’s what two of these are about. But it’s really about anything, any kind of change that our family has to make, that our children are not going to be on board with of their own volition. How can we do this? So that’s what I’m going to be talking about and I really hope what I have to say is helpful.

Here’s the first email I’d like to address, and this is the one with the subject line, “How to Be Strong Enough to Make the Really Big Changes”:

Hi, Janet-

I’ve been listening to your podcast on and off for a few years, and I really like a lot of your ideas, although I don’t know how successful I’ve been at implementing them with my kids, now three and five. One noticeable success is just the really basic feelings acknowledgement: You really didn’t like that, huh? Sounds like such a tiny thing, which means that when it stops what looks like is going to be a full-on tantrum dead in its tracks, and my three-year-old just sniffs, nods, and hugs me, it really feels like magic. It’s the bigger things that feel impossible, the stuff where you have to set a boundary and hold onto it through the initial reaction.

There are so many things we do that we know aren’t great in the long term, but they feel like the only way to get through the day in the short term. Where do we find the energy to cope with an actually increased difficulty level for a little while in the interests of making things easier later? For example, TV. I know my kids watch too much TV, but when their dad and I are so tired and the alternative is personally being climbed on, whinged at to actively play, it feels like we’re just not strong enough. Plus, a lot of the time, the only thing that will get the kids to stop messing around and get in the shower or whatever is the threat of not letting them watch TV the next day.

Even though I fully believe that changing our strategies and habits will improve our lives and relationships, taking these steps is so hard that I find myself just doing the usual thing and beating myself up about it, instead of doing something different.

Your podcast/blog backlog is truly impressive, and I feel like I’ve barely made a dent in it, so if you’ve given advice in the past on forcing yourself to make these changes and stick to it, I would really appreciate a link.

So I think a lot of us can relate to this, in terms of these habits—they do make our lives easier, but there’s this gnawing sense of maybe guilt that we have that it’s not really good for our children, and we’re kind of getting stuck in this guilt cycle. I feel guilty that we’ve let you do this, and that we’ve gotten into this thing of threatening no TV if you don’t do this or that. These don’t feel like our best parenting moments. And I’m not judging it, I’m just describing the kind of mind frame that a lot of us have around these things. And now when I try to say no, I am saying it kind of guiltily because I’m kind of beating myself up for letting you do this so much in the first place, and I don’t feel very strong because I feel guilty and bad. Now you’re pushing and you’re pushing and I can’t handle that, and then that makes me feel more guilty. As this parent described, she says, “I find myself just doing the usual thing and beating myself up about it, instead of doing anything different.” And really that’s the hardest part of this. If we could make these decisions and feel good about them, that would be a lot easier on us. But when we’re doing things and beating ourselves up about it, that’s impossible as a parent. It’s impossible to feel good and proceed with confidence and be those confident leaders.

So, a different setup here will really help. If you feel this is an important, right change to make, then the first step can be starting a new day, letting go of that past and making peace with it. We were doing it this way and now we’re going to do it this new way, because this feels right. And we’re going to give ourselves a big pass for whatever we did before this. I mean, this is such a challenging job, being a parent, because the stakes feel so high, it feels so important. It can be hard to see clearly. We all get stuck in patterns that we want to change, whether it’s relational patterns or patterns with the kind of things that we allow or don’t want to allow, or using threats or punishments. Whatever it is, everybody’s had their version of it or is still having it. So we can model for our children and be kind to ourselves by letting ourselves move on with a clear conscience. That’s not just for us, that’s for our children, so that we’re able to be what this parent describes as “strong enough.” And I want to talk a little about what strong means in this situation, too.

But yeah, we’ve got to let go. The past is the past for all of us in this world, especially parents. We deserve to give ourselves permission, and our children deserve for us to give ourselves permission, to end the guilt cycle for whatever we’ve done or haven’t done. If we feel we’ve done wrong by our children, it’s always a good idea to make amends. Bring it up, even if it’s years later, and say, We were giving you this ultimatum that if you didn’t do something, we were going to take away your TV, and we don’t want to work against you like that. We were kind of desperate because we really were tired and we needed your help. But we trust you. We’re all on the same team here, and we can let you know that we need your help and we want to work with you, not against you. I’m not saying to say all that, but that kind of mentality going into this. Even when we’re setting limits with our children, or especially then, we want to do it from a place of, that we believe we are helping them and we are doing the most loving thing.

I want to go over some of these challenges, though, that we’re up against. Our children’s discomfort sets off alarm bells for most of us. Even if we’ve been working on, dwelling on, and practicing a healthier perspective— which is what I try to do here and what I try to do for myself in my personal and professional life—disappointing them, feeling like we cause their upsetting feelings. I mean, it’s hard enough when they’re upset and we don’t feel like we’re the cause of it, it’s hard enough to allow for that to happen. But when we feel like we’re causing it, because we’re saying no or we’re telling them they can’t do this certain thing, that can feel impossible, right? So, understanding the peak of this challenge, it’s a tall order. Not expecting this to be easy.

But what helps us get beyond it? Knowing how healthy it is, for one thing, for our children to express every kind of feeling. It’s not fun for us, it’s not fun for them, but it’s so healthy for them to whine and cry and scream and complain when we’re doing our job, when we’re doing these reasonable, respectful things. Because they’re offloading all kinds of stress when they do that, all the pressures and the feelings of control that they were holding onto that weren’t healthy for them, they’re getting to vent those feelings. So reframing this from the most impossible thing because they’re mad at us to the most loving thing, that we’re giving them this organic opportunity just through our relationship and through honesty and respect and caring about them, we’re allowing them to feel whatever they feel about it. And that means they’re going to feel better on the other side of it.

Her experience with acknowledging isn’t really giving her the practice, because she said it’s working like magic. It’s not really giving her the practice of knowing that even if that acknowledgement didn’t stop her child from feeling something, that her child was going to feel better at the end of that feeling. It’s absolutely not as easy to trust that something that feels like it’s going to go on forever will stop. But that trust is what makes it stop. The same way that that acknowledging it can make it stop faster sometimes—sometimes, not all the time—but what that is is leaning into, Yeah, you get to feel mad about this. You get to feel bad about this. We’re doing that same thing there that we have to do with a longer meltdown. It’s really the same process, but we’re just not going to get as quick a result, so it’s harder.

We want to remind ourselves how healthy it is for our children to have all these kinds of feelings about everything and share them with us. This is not something to feel like it’s a problem, like we did something wrong. Actually, we’re doing something very right there by welcoming our children to feel whatever they feel. These things that they’re getting upset about, these are done in our child’s best interest. And I have come to believe that, on some level, our children know this. Even when they’re yelling and whining at us, they sense that we’re doing those hard things, which are much more loving. It’s much more loving to say no because we care about them than it is to say okay, shrug our shoulders, feel guilty, feel deflated, maybe feel grumpy with our children. That would make sense as part of that, right? Feeling frustrated, not liking them as much. That’s not as loving as saying no and allowing them to yell at us.

So, where the strength comes from is this perspective on their feelings, on our role, which is not to please them in every single moment, but to see the bigger picture. That’s what parents can do that children often can’t. They need us to do that part. So this is totally our job. This is on track, not off track. Nothing to feel wrong or guilty about, because we’re going to turn the page and we’re not going to dwell on what we did in the past. Today is today.

The strength that this parent is looking for is conviction. Conviction in what we decide is best for our child. And we’re seeing ourselves as heroes for making these hard, uncomfortable decisions out of passionate love for our children, because that’s what we are doing. And we’re seeing that those guilt loops, those are a trap that we can avoid with this antidote: conviction. And it’s not conviction in ourselves as some authoritarian leader, that whatever I say goes, it’s really conviction in our children that they are worth this effort. And this is heroic. Again, it’s not about strength in terms of forcefulness. It’s being clear, having that quiet belief that we can do this, that quiet conviction in our love for our kids. That’s where the strength comes from. That’s how to be strong enough. This most challenging part is the conviction. Once we have that, the rest is a lot easier.

It can help to help our children feel a part of the plan, whatever it is, a part of the change. So it’s not just, I’ve decided this and you’re going to do it this way. We’re sharing with you that, in this case, we are worried that there’s so much TV going on. We know it’s getting in the way of you doing other things that would be more therapeutic for you after school, that I know you don’t want to do. So we want to join with them that way, connect with, Yeah, you want to watch TV all the time. It’s easy, right? We can just sit there and watch it, it’s entertaining, it’s fun. And we’re okay with that at these designated times, that maybe you’d work on with your children. But at this age, you could probably decide we’re only going to do it on weekend evenings or something like that. And the rest of the time you can lie around, you can whine, you can tell us how mad you are, how much you want that TV. But this is going to be better for you, and we totally believe that. So bringing them into it is communicating that way, honestly, about what’s going to happen.

And then also, What would you like to do instead of TV that we can put out for you? We’re not going to be available to play with you because we’re getting dinner ready or we’re relaxing. We’d love to watch you. What would you like? Would you like Play-Doh? Would you like to draw? We have a craft box. You can make a fort. Or if you give us ideas, we’ll get that there for you because we know it’s hard when you’re used to watching TV. So, How can we help, how can we make this easier? And maybe they don’t have any ideas and they just want to hold onto the TV thing. Well, we’ve done our best. We’ve tried to bring them in and we’ve communicated to them honestly, we’ve done this all as a team here, we’ve told them about our decision. And from there, that’s where they need the healing of the feelings.

For this parent, she says, “How do we find the energy to cope with an actually increased difficulty level for a little while?” So I talked about that. Making peace with your children’s feelings, letting go of your past, no guilt going forward. Every day is a new day. And the positiveness of them sharing all these feelings, because it’s something they have to pass through to get to the other side. And what’s on the other side of it? The other side of the disappointment and the lethargy and the boredom—the other side is ideas, creativity, initiating activities that will feel good to them at the end of the day, better to them than these hours of TV. And it will build their confidence.

But she says they have another obstacle now because when they set the boundary, there’s a boundary within the boundary. So they’re saying, you’re not going to watch TV. And then she says that they get “climbed on, whinged at to actively play with them.” So, don’t let them start to climb. If they whinge, let them whinge, let them whine. It’s not at you. It’s releasing something for them, it’s positive. But if they start to climb: “You want to climb? Nope.” Put your hands there very firmly, keep them away. “We’re not going to let you climb. I know, you want to play with us, you want us to play with you. We’re not going to do that right now. We love you. We’re not going to do that.” Not a heavy thing, not an angry thing coming out of us, ideally, but that quiet conviction.

So yes, there’ll be boundaries within the boundaries, where essentially the children are really checking out, Do they have the strength to be our leaders? Do they have that conviction that we need to be able to let go of this? Because if they don’t, and it sounds like the way this has been going is the parent kind of collapses back into guilt and she’s not able to be strong when they’re climbing on her, and that leaves her children stuck continuing that. They don’t want to be doing that either, they would much rather be playing and enjoying themselves. But we have to release them through our conviction.

And when it comes to the threats of not letting them watch TV the next day, I would bring that up and say, when it’s time for getting in the shower or whatever, I would say, “Let’s get in the shower. Oh, you don’t want to. Come on, it’s time.” From that place of, We’re a team. We’re here because we care about you and we want to take care of what’s healthy for you. And if it’s something like a shower and they’re not filthy dirty, we might let that one go because that doesn’t have to be a firm boundary for them. They could have the choice and that might help them come to that better. Or, “Would you like a bath or shower?” or, “Should we just wash your face with the washcloth?” Letting them participate in that, so they feel a part of it. We’ll find that when we communicate as a team this way that we don’t need to use threats, and that the threats actually put a little wedge that’s going to make it harder the next time, as this parent realizes. She’s very perceptive about herself and how she wants to do the things that are hard right now to make it easier later.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen. And maybe it starts with this big boundary around the TV, and that will show her and her partner that they do have the strength, when they rise into those heroic roles. Because they’ll see that their children will go through this and it’ll be very noisy and it will feel impossible in the moment. Then it will pass. And I bet that they find them playing together and doing something that’s really valuable. Or maybe it doesn’t look valuable, but just the fact that they’ve moved on is going to be amazing, and it will happen.

Here’s one more, and I also love this subject line, it’s “The Unlearning”:

Hello, Janet-

I know full well you may not have a chance to read this, let alone respond. Still, I’m called to write to you if only to seek the tiniest bit of hope. My son is an adventurous and playful 16-month-old. He is so, so attached.

When I recently turned to RIE practices, they took such a hold in my being because they resonate so truly. I deeply regret not finding this parenting work sooner, as I feel in so many ways I’ve failed my son in not fostering his independent play. I know this type of play is intrinsic and in the capacity of all children, but I can see how I’ve stunted his ability to enjoy it at this stage. I find so many of his challenges are linked to this: quick to be frustrated, angry, anxious when I’m not in his presence, wanting so badly to be playful and social, but being restless without me being there.

I’ve been working intentionally the last month to be clearer, firmer in my boundaries as a parent, and allow him plenty of opportunities for free play led by his own curiosities. But doing simple daily tasks like cooking and cleaning have become so hard, let alone when I try and sit near him and read a book while he plays. This is true whether we are at home, on play dates, or in a toddler and caregiver activity. I feel I’m stumbling and in the process feel myself losing the joy of parenting. I don’t want that for him or me.

If after all this time I’m seeing only the tiniest shifts and continued deep frustrations (I know this will take much, much longer, but it’s hard each day), what can I be doing differently? How can I continue to get out of my son’s way, trust his abilities, trust my leadership, and help reignite a love for independent time and play?

With so much gratitude for your work.

Okay, so the reason I love this title is that it is unlearning, but I’m not sure if this parent means it the way that I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about it unlearning for us about our children’s feelings. Which again, is what most of my podcasts seem to be about. “Continued deep frustrations”—I’m assuming she means his are getting to her. She’s losing the joy of parenting. His unhappiness is ruining her happiness. It feels like she’s stuck, like he’s never going to change and she’s uncomfortable. So this is another form of a guilt cycle. She doesn’t say that I feel guilty, but she says, “I deeply regret not finding this parenting work sooner. I feel in so many ways I’ve failed my son in not fostering his independent play.” So that is weighing her down and making it impossible to have conviction and to face his feelings in a confident, welcoming way.

I mean, this happens to us, and it’s similar to what’s happening with the other parent. So yeah, that guilt thing—whatever she did in the past, she did with the best information. None of these parents are anything but very loving and caring, and really these are just minor issues in the scheme of things, very minor. But we just bag on ourselves so hard, don’t we? Because this job is so important to us, we care so much. But that hurts us and hurts our children. So for both of those reasons, not hurting ourselves and not hurting our children, move on. Start a new day. It’s all different today. I can be this person who believes in saving him from a joyless parent. That’s heroic, right?

The way we save him from a joyless parent is welcoming his frustration, holding those boundaries, not expecting him to accept them gracefully, carrying on when we need to do the simple tasks. And if he’s right there on her and she doesn’t have a gated-off kitchen or gated-off area for him near there, then just keep going. Show him that you welcome him: “You don’t want me to do this. You really want me to stay with you and I have to cook your dinner.” Where’s the guilt in that, right? If we think about it objectively, we’re doing our job. We’re doing all of this for him. So it’s heroic to allow this soul who can’t bear to be without his mother’s attention for a moment, he feels. He’s so in love with her, he’s so passionate, that he just can’t let her go. But this isn’t a sad story, it’s a love story. It’s love that he has for his mother and the time with her, and How am I going to let her go? And the love that she has for him, knowing that she has to help him let her go. He can’t be the one to do that. And she does it through believing in his right to feel those depths of feeling. She’s there for him, she’s not abandoning him. She’s just separating in reasonable ways to do the things that she needs to do.

So she says, “doing simple daily tasks like cooking and cleaning have become so hard, let alone when I try and sit near him and read a book while he plays.” Sitting near him and reading a book while he plays, that’s probably a little advanced for where she is in her process. She can get there. But I would work on the things where you can really feel conviction that you’re doing the right thing, not those kind of things like, Oh, it’d be nice to read a book, but can I really have conviction in that? We want to start small. We want to start easier with the things we feel sure about, the boundaries that feel more certain. It’s not safe for him to be in the kitchen under your feet, and you have to do these things. There’s every reason in the world to see this as an important boundary that’s in his best interest, that you can feel secure with and conviction in.

So that’s what I think is going on here, because she says she feels she’s stumbling and she’s losing herself and losing the joy of parenting. Going along, like the other parents with the TV, they’re just not feeling good about it. They’re beating themselves up, which is weakening them. And they deserve better, they deserve to feel strong and confident and like heroes for what they do out of passionate love for their children. The hard things that we do. Children give us this incredible practice at standing up for ourselves, being taller people with confidence.

And then a way, in this case, to help him feel a part of this is to be clear. “This is when I’m going to be with you. This is when I’m going to make dinner or do these chores. I know it’s not what you want. I know you want me to be with you all the time. And you know what? I wish I could, but I can’t. I need time to do other things, too. Take care of you, take care of the house, take care of myself.” That is the best way to bring him into this, just that honesty, that clarity. Because there probably isn’t a way that he can choose how to handle this, at 16 months. He will get to choose what he does, what he plays with, and maybe his choice is to stand there crying the first few times while you’re doing something. And ideally, we can accept that as what he’s doing in his time. He gets to choose that, we can’t choose for him that you’re going to play happily over here while I do this. That’s not part of setting a boundary. Setting a boundary is giving him his full right to disagree with our boundary.

And believe it or not, all of these types of exchanges, when we do them with respect and honesty and we aren’t afraid to say all the things about how mad he is and how much he wants us to still play with him, this brings us closer. Our child feels safer and more trust. They can feel more comfortable in their role as the child, not having to make all these decisions and tell people what to do. It actually increases our connection. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.

And thank you to all these parents for sharing with me and for supporting this podcast. I really appreciate it, and I really hope some of this helps.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

The post How to be Strong Enough to Make the Really Big Changes appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Mean Words, Aggressive Behaviors, Stalling, and Other Signs Kids Need Our Help”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Those of you that listen here regularly know that I like to cover several emails or questions that share a similar theme together in one podcast, because I want to try to be as helpful to as many people as possible. In this case, I actually have two categories that all these parent questions fall into: One of them is back-to-school, issues surrounding or that happen around going back to school. The second one, probably more important, is ways that children show us that they’re uncomfortable on some level and what can we do to help them. I’m looking forward to getting into this.

All of these notes I’m going to read are about children showing signs of discomfort, different ways that children do that. But before I read any of these, I’m going to share two ways that I recommend helping our children when they’re uncomfortable. And then I’m going to talk about how these two points apply and how they look in each of these situations.

So the first way to help is by not taking it personally. That means recognizing that this is a sign of my child’s discomfort. They’re not doing this at me, even if it seems like it’s at us. They’re showing their immaturity, as young children, in the ways that they manage stress. These are about our child, not us. They’re not our fault.

And yes, this is easier said than done because we are people in this relationship with our children and we care so much. We’re trying so hard, it is hard not to take offense or take it personally. But the problem is, when we’re not recognizing what’s going on with our child as their discomfort or their discomfort is making us uncomfortable, our child has to then reflect back our feelings, our discomfort, which can obviously exacerbate everything. So not only is it about our child being uncomfortable, but now it’s about us being uncomfortable and that making our child more uncomfortable. It can become a vicious cycle.

So that’s number one: working at that separation between us and our child that will help us to see them more clearly. When they’re babies, we can do this by practicing observing them, taking that little step back to try to see them with a little more objectivity. We’re never going to be completely objective observers, we’re always going to be inclined to project. That’s okay. And as children get older, of course it’s harder for us to just sit there and observe them like we can a baby, so it’s more of a mental challenge to separate ourselves. To see them as people going through their own stuff that’s not our fault.

And the second way that we can help children is to do something else that’s kind of counterintuitive for most of us: encouraging our kids to keep expressing it, sharing it, getting it off their chest, offloading it, however we want to look at that. Sharing these feelings with us their way, in their way and time. It’s seldom going to happen that we can say, “Hey, tell me more. What’s going on with you?” And our two-year-old is going to say, “Well, actually, I feel like this and that, and this is why I’m acting like this.” I mean, they don’t know themselves what’s going on with them more often than not, and even if they do, they struggle to articulate it, especially in the moment. They’re just feeling it, they’re just reacting, they’re just processing it. So this can’t be encouraging them to express it to us our way. It’s got to be encouraging their way, which is, as I often say, letting feelings be. And anyway, I’m going to explain how that looks in each of these cases.

Oftentimes, too, part of this encouraging is for us to say those quiet parts out loud. And I know that expression is often used as a negative, that people are sharing ugly thoughts out loud. But in this case, it’s very, very positive and healing when we can say those things that maybe we’re afraid to say because we feel worried that’s going to somehow make things worse. The opposite is true: The more we speak to the truth of what’s going on, the more helpful it is for our child as they’re offloading and processing these feelings.

So, (1) not taking it personally, and (2) encouraging kids to keep expressing it.

Alright, the first note I’m going to share is actually a little success story. It came as a comment on another podcast episode called “My Child Is So Mean to Me” and here’s the comment:

Yes! I’ve just been going through this with my extremely strong-willed four-year-old. [And she put a sad face.] Janet, your podcast was so timely. Today, my son wanted absolutely nothing to do with me, and acted as if he truly despised me. It was really hard not to take it personally, and if I’m honest, my heart was aching. I looked at him through your lens, before bedtime, and it completely shifted my perspective. Turns out he was upset that I can’t go into his preschool class with him (it is only three hours twice a week), and also upset that I’m smiling more at his three-month-old brother than at him (mostly because he’s been so hurtful and defiant). He even demonstrated my “half smile,” and said that it’s not a real smile. I thanked him for telling me, and reassured him that I love him, and that he makes me very happy. So thank you, thank you very much for your insight.

This is an example of the difference it makes when we put on that lens that it’s not a reflection on us, that we’re not taking it personally. I love her honesty here, that her heart was aching and that she felt despised by him. How easily we can fall into that, even as big, mature adults. So we can imagine even right there how challenging it is for a child when we are angry or annoyed or frustrated with them. Always normal to feel, but it can help even then for us to share those quiet thoughts out loud: “You’ve noticed I’ve been so short with you.” Or, in this case: “I haven’t been smiling at you all the way and I’ve been smiling at your brother more. That’s because I’ve been hurt by some stuff that you said and I’ve been taking it personally. But I realize that’s not what it’s about. It’s about you starting this preschool class and you want me to be there with you and here I am, home with the baby while you’re gone. That doesn’t feel nice, right?”

I’m not saying to say that in the moment when he’s saying something unkind to us or pushing us away, but at some point when you are more settled, that could be a very reassuring thing for him to hear. Oh, I’m not imagining this half smile. I don’t have to worry about that, that that half smile means I’m not loved. Putting it out there. And also recognizing that these kinds of behavior —when children reject us, when they’re defiant, they’re acting out to get our attention— all of those are very typical signs of discomfort. And because this child is four, he could really express himself, which is wonderful, right? A younger child can’t even do that much, so it can take more reflection to figure out what’s going on. It’s not going to be as easy as with an articulate four-year-old.

Okay, so now here’s a question. And this first one is, on the scale of discomfort, this is a more minor one:

Your books and podcasts have helped me tremendously in the past years as a new parent. I have a question regarding upbringing. We’ve tried as much as possible to practice respectful parenting, allowing my kids to have their emotions, let them grow and learn at their own pace, without being judgmental. This has really worked well and we saw our kids, especially the elder one who’s currently turning six, blossoming into a confident child. Sincere thanks from us.

However, we really found it challenging when my daughter started attending kindergarten when the teachers are using a more traditional approach and making fast and judgmental comments on kids. We were able to balance it initially and use it as an opportunity to teach her and see this as a different environment, therefore, good exposure for her. This was until the English teacher was changed, and she often uses very harsh words on kids. She will call her student stupid, etc. She’s shouted at kids, she would complain and lament a lot in front of the kids. Unfortunately, we are in the graduating year and changing school isn’t an option.

My daughter has started using the word “stupid” on her younger brother. May we please seek your advice on how to handle this? Thanks in advance.

And this note comes from a parent in Malaysia.

So the child is showing signs of discomfort by saying this word to her younger brother, she’s now calling him stupid. And the discomfort here is easy to understand, right? Even when we’re not on the receiving end of a teacher’s judgmental comments and yelling, it’s very disconcerting. This whole atmosphere of being judged is uncomfortable for any of us, especially a child.

Now, the reason I said this isn’t one of the bigger kinds of discomforts is that it’s not coming from the parents, it’s coming from a teacher. Which is still going to be uncomfortable, but not to the level of discomfort of having her parent yelling at home and being judgmental. We have the most powerful influence, so that can be reassuring—that our child is processing something, we can help them do that, and it’s easier for us to see here that this is not about us. So, easier to understand.

This parent doesn’t say what she’s doing about it, but her daughter is actually doing the perfect thing, which is she’s offloading what’s going on by bringing it home. Unfortunately, on to her brother. I don’t know exactly how this parent is reacting, but a normal reaction that we would have to this is, “Don’t talk to your brother like that. Come on, you can’t say that to him.” We push back on it, we get a little alarmed by that. We’ve got to make sure to let her know that’s not okay. But the thing is, she already knows that, she already senses that. She’s just trying to get this out of her system. And children do this when they’re exposed to uncomfortable things, they bring it home and they process it out. Whether that’s some kind of media they were exposed to or they observed something scary happening somewhere. Their job and our job, if we’re up for it, is for them to offload it with us.

So this is actually a great opportunity for this parent. She already did a lot of the work by explaining that this is a different environment. “You’re noticing that this teacher’s very judgmental and she has a short temper. Yeah, it doesn’t feel good, right? It doesn’t feel safe to be around that.” Instead of following that reflex that we all have to say, “Hey, don’t call him stupid, he’s not stupid,” or “Poor guy. You don’t want to be called stupid, do you?” Oftentimes children do know that it’s just a word, but we kind of fuel it with more, without meaning to, because we get offended for our child. Children, they’re so intuitive, they tend to see through it.

Which doesn’t mean it’s okay for her to call her younger brother stupid, though. In the moment, when her daughter says stupid on her younger brother, here’s how I would recommend intervening: “Hmm, now you want to call him stupid because you hear that kind of stuff at school from your teacher. I can’t let you do that with him. But I get that, I get you wanting to call everybody stupid. And it feels icky, right? That your teacher’s doing that kind of thing.” So, we can remind our child that something’s not okay while still holding them close to us. I don’t mean physically holding them close to us in this instance, but that idea of, I see you. I know why you’re doing this. I want you to do this, but don’t want your brother to be on the receiving end, if possible. But I’m not going to make a big deal out of it because then you and I are going to get stuck in a thing. I understand where this is coming from and why you’re doing this and it makes sense. I’m not saying to say all this to her, not all those words, but that kind of attitude. It’s okay, she’s doing the job, she’s doing what she’s supposed to do, bringing it home to us. So I would try to see this as very positive, a good sign.

Okay, here’s another one:

Hi, Janet-

I listen to your podcasts on a daily basis while I’m driving my kids to and from school, and it honestly has changed my whole perspective on all things parenting, and I truly believe I have become a better mum because of you.

There is one sticking point, however, that I’m finding myself in with my eldest daughter, who is six years old, and we can’t seem to move past it. She seems to lack any sort of intrinsic motivation when it comes to getting herself ready to leave the house. She’s more than capable of doing it all, but always needs me to ask her more than a handful of times and to keep reminding her: “It’s time to brush your teeth. It’s time to wear your clothes now. We will be late for school if we don’t get ready soon.” And she’s constantly getting distracted by her toys and wants to play while she should be getting ready.

I listened to your podcast with William Stixrud and I have also read his book, The Self-Driven Child, and I believe that I have perhaps been too involved and thus my daughter believes that it’s my job to do all these tasks for her or to at least be the one pushing her to do them. I was giving 95% and she would only give 5%. So this morning I tried taking a small step back and telling her that I trust that she knows what she has to do and I trust that she doesn’t want to be late for school. I told her I’m here if she needs me for the tricky parts.

She ended up moving so slowly and spent most of the time playing with her toy cars, so much so that she ended up being 15 minutes late to school. I am at my wit’s end and I’m really at a loss with what I can do to help her motivate herself.

I responded back to this parent via email:

Thank you for all your kind words and support. I’m thinking of responding via a podcast episode if that’s okay, but I have a couple of questions: One, how many children do you have and what are their ages? Two, can you describe in detail what you mean by doing 95% of her school preparation, her 5%? I would love to try to help.

And she replied:

Hi, Janet-

Thank you so much for your fast response. That honestly would be amazing if you could, it would help so much to get your take on this and some advice. I have two daughters. One is two years and the eldest is six years.

When I say I am giving 95% and she’s giving 5%, I mean this in regards to the amount of effort that is put in during the morning. I’m also referring to when William Stixrud explained in his book that the more effort we put into something they should be doing, the less they tend to put in. So I find in the morning, I’m the one that’s reminding her to brush her teeth, use the toilet, get dressed, and generally try to speed her along so we can get to school on time, and she doesn’t seem to have any intrinsic motivation to do this for herself. It’s a tricky situation as school, of course, is a non-negotiable and we can’t be late on a regular basis, but at the same time I really want this motivation to get dressed and get there on time to come from her.

Thank you so much for your reply.

So this is also kind of minor discomfort, I would say. Her daughter’s showing that she’s having a tough time in the transition of getting out the door in the morning. Very common area in which to be uncomfortable, especially for young children, in those transitions. And she has a two-year-old sibling who, I forgot to ask that, but who may be staying home with her parents. So she’s got to go off to this school, maybe it’s a new class. For whatever reason, she’s having a hard time and she has been for a while, I guess, and her mother’s been on her, on her, on her.

Now that can be just a frustrating waste of our energy when we do that. And yes, our children can get, as William Stixrud points out, they can get used to their parent being on their back for things. William Stixrud talks a lot in his book about homework and how kids really need us to stay out of that, which I totally agree with, not be the one having to nag them to do homework. And with this as well, it would be nice to encourage her more to do this on her own. But I think what might be getting this parent a little stuck is that she is now kind of, I guess you could say, taking it personally. She’s feeling like she did something wrong, and this is a sign that she did something wrong, and uh-oh now she’s got to fix it. She’s taking this on herself. When, in fact, there are a lot of six-year-olds who aren’t used to their parents nagging them to get ready that have a hard time, for a lot of different reasons.

And that’s what I would focus on here, for this parent. I would just notice, My child is having a tough time with the morning transition, very normal, instead of kind of wasting all that energy trying to nag her and push her. I don’t know about anybody else, but that’s the stuff I like least about parenting. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to repeat myself, nag, and I kind of refuse to. It’s much easier and more helpful to her if we just step in and give her a helping hand, instead of trying to get her to do something. So even with intrinsic motivation, we can’t make that happen. We can step back and encourage it, but it’s not going to be an overnight process. There’s going to be a transitional period. And it seems like this parent maybe felt, Oh, I’ve got to change this and I’m just going to change it all and let her do everything. And she’s showing that she actually does need help, because she’s getting distracted, she’s maybe kind of stalling, she’s getting stuck.

So instead of seeing this as, Uh-oh, I’ve got to do a different job here, I would take that in, that prompting her and prompting her isn’t helping her. But I would still help her. I would just say, “Oh, you know what? You’re playing with your toy. Come on, we’re going to go put your clothes on now. You can play with that toy when you get home. We’re not going to do that now.” Very lovingly, just give her a helping hand. And use this time to give her some of that physical care that she may be missing as the older sibling. Maybe we help choose her clothes if she’s getting stuck there and we help her, “Let’s put your arms up. We’re going to put this over your head.” And we set out a little time to do this. Not letting her stall. “Looks like, yeah, of course you want to play this now, I get it, but this isn’t the time. If you get all dressed and I’m here to help, maybe there’ll be time, but no, I’m not going to let you do that.”

So, very loving limits and what I’ve often called “confident momentum.” Which isn’t fast, it’s not pushy, it’s just noticing where our children are getting stuck. And when she does that, when she welcomes it, she’s helping her do it. I believe that is what will help her feel that connection that she needs, in a tough time, to move through. And this doesn’t take that much more time, it probably takes less time than trying to prompt somebody repeatedly. And it’s certainly less stressful for us when we kind of give in to somebody needing a helping hand.

And then, while we’re helping her, that’s when she’s probably going to express the feelings that she has around these transitions, and maybe it’s about her sibling too, or things she’s worried about that are going on at school. Not that she’ll necessarily articulate them straight out, but she’ll say, “No, I want to play. I want to play.” “Yeah, I know, it’s so disappointing. It’s frustrating! But, you know, this isn’t the time.” So even if it seems like the most ridiculous feeling, that she shouldn’t have at this point in her life, usher it in, welcome it in, while you’re giving her the help that she needs. And from there she will feel more motivated because she’s not being nagged to, she’s doing it because she wants to, because she feels that she doesn’t have to, and it’s a choice that she’s making. And we’re not going to give her the option of missing school or having to show up late, because that’s much harder for her too, to show up late.

But this is different from doing homework, which I really would leave between her and her teacher. Hopefully she doesn’t have it yet, in kindergarten. But when she does, I wouldn’t sit down and do it with her. That I would let go of. But this is really a typical time when children do need our help: in a transition. I hope that helps a little bit.

Here’s another one:

Hi, Janet-

I’m writing today about my almost four-year-old. He is a deeply observant and emotional child, always filled with questions, bringing things up from conversations he’s overheard us having. Meltdowns are always welcomed, and I can see the visible relief they bring to him afterwards.

Lately though, it feels as if his feelings are “stuck” inside of him, leaving him in this state of dysregulation where he may hit or push his sister out of the blue, destroy something randomly, pull things off of shelves and walk away, throw toys aggressively, or even try to bite me. When I try to address him, he looks at me blankly, far from his usually sweet countenance, and I struggle to help him move past the state he’s in. I acknowledge the feelings, hold firm boundaries, and I’m ready for a meltdown, but rather, the feelings just seem to remain.

A big issue we’ve been dealing with for quite a while comes at preschool pickup. For almost a year now, he’s attended a wonderful small, primarily outdoor-based preschool led by a loving teacher who also practices your principles. When I arrive, his face grows very serious. I immediately acknowledge him and ask about his day and offer a hug, but while I try to speak with his teacher, he usually takes to suddenly taking a toy from one of his classmates or trying to destroy something in the garden or knocking something down. These behaviors had only been restricted to this moment, he wouldn’t behave like this during the day, but recently he scratched a classmate during the day. When I later asked why he would do this, he stated it was because she wasn’t nice. He randomly pushed a boy at the playground recently —so uncharacteristic— and he claimed the same thing, that he wasn’t nice.

I’m truly at a loss for how to help him past whatever it is that’s causing all of this, and my best efforts don’t seem to be giving him what he needs. My patience is definitely wearing thin, particularly as he’s started to harm other children.

I will add I’m newly pregnant, seven weeks, but definitely having a hard time physically, which I’m sure he can see. I have to figure there’s a correlation between this and what behavior we’re seeing. We haven’t told him or his sister that I’m expecting yet. We’re hoping to wait for the first ultrasound so we can have the picture to show them, but that isn’t for another month.

The sister is two years old, by the way. Okay, so I wrote back:

Thanks so much for your kind words, I would love to try to help. I have a couple of questions for you if you don’t mind. Can you describe what you mean by addressing him at preschool and how you are responding when he hits or pushes or throws toys, etc., with his sister and at preschool? Thanks.

And she wrote back:

When I arrive at preschool, I come up to him and get down at his eye level, ask him how he is, and offer a hug and tell him it’s good to see him. If I then try to speak with his teacher, this is when he typically takes to doing something destructive to the space or even harmful to a classmate. Up until this last week, he never behaved like this during the school day itself, the teacher reported he was always very go-with-the-flow and cooperative.

In calm moments, I’ve tried to come up with a way for him to communicate with me that he’s having a hard time at pickup— coming to hold my hand, putting a hand on my leg, etc., but nothing has stuck. When he tries to hit, throw, etc., I try to block or stop what he’s doing and typically get down to his eye level and express that I can tell he’s having a difficult time and that I’m going to prevent him from hurting himself, his sister, or breaking our things. Lately, he’s taken to biting me more and I’ve had to more strongly hold him back to prevent him, while I express to him that I’m going to keep him and I safe. But he’s growing stronger and I’m growing more tired. In moments where I’ve missed being able to stop him, if, for instance, he’s hit his sister, I check on his sister and issue her an apology and then offer him the chance to apologize, which he rarely takes, and then we try to move on.

I feel myself losing so much of the patience and calm I once had with him, and I’m yelling more, feeling disappointed in myself and very out of touch with my son. One other thing that has become a major sticking point: he has taken to unbuckling his car seatbelt while we are driving as well and refuses to put it back on. We’ve tried every approach to this: ignoring, calmly asking, regularly stopping to rebuckle him, I’ve yelled—but it continues to happen. I know he is absolutely leaning into my discomfort around this.

Yes, so another very perceptive parent with, as she describes, “a deeply observant and emotional child.” And here’s where I think this parent may be getting stuck in kind of taking this personally, taking this on herself. She notices that when he can have a full meltdown, that he feels better, but he’s not having a full meltdown here. He’s getting stuck in an angry, aggressive, defensive mode. And she’s trying to help him out of that, help him through this. She says, “I struggle to help him move past the state he’s in.” Well, that can’t be our job, helping him move past the state he’s in. He has to move past the state he’s in, and the way that he can do that is if, instead of this parent trying to make something happen here, and I understand she’s alarmed, right? It’s alarming when our children are suddenly acting in an uncharacteristic manner and hurting other children. It’s alarming and it’s a very, very common sign of discomfort.

And what could he be uncomfortable about? Her deeply observant and emotional child is noticing, as she says, she’s “newly pregnant, but definitely having a hard time physically, which I’m sure he can see.” So imagine a sensitive, emotional child, very observant. Something’s wrong. It’s clear, something’s wrong with his mother. What is this about? He can’t get a handle on it. And because he can’t get a handle on it, it becomes huge inside of him. Disconcerting, to put it mildly. Scary. Maybe I’ve done something. What’s going on? What have I lost here? I lost the way my mom used to feel, the way she used to be around me, the kind of energy that she had for me. So when we can stop trying to manage or help with the behavior, which is, I mean, this parent has wonderful instinct, obviously very attuned to her son, but not feeling her best. So it’s kind of the perfect storm for her to get stuck when she’s alarmed by his newer behaviors. But all of these are about him and his discomfort. And in this case, it seems pretty clear that he’s uncomfortable about her not sharing what’s going on with her.

So a couple of things here. Not taking it personally. Noticing, Wow, this guy’s really out of sorts. And when we note our child is going through something or we see that they’re uncomfortable, their behavior’s showing that loud and clear, maybe then we would choose not to talk to the teacher right then because he’s uncomfortable. And this is also an end-of-the-day transition, when children are the most tired. And now here he sees his mother, she says, “his face becomes quite serious,” like, There she is, and there’s something going on with her and she’s not telling me. And I’m scared, I’m filled with dread. It reminds me of everything that I’m feeling. So one thing I would consider doing is not leaving him then, helping him through this transition. When she stops to say hello, be ready for him to have a hard time. Help him get to the car and just help him out of there. Help him through that transition with confident momentum, but giving him what he needs at this time, which is her, her full presence.

She doesn’t have to talk about the pregnancy yet if she’s not ready. We get to decide that as parents. However, I would say the part out loud that you haven’t said maybe, which is: “You’ve noticed that I’m really tired these days. I get a little sick to my stomach. You notice that, right? It’s nothing to do with you. It’s something I’m going through. I’ll be back to myself again soon. But yeah, I should have told you this before, because I know you know me so well.” It will help him so much to know. Just as when we’re going through anything in our own lives with our relatives that’s affecting us, our children feel that. And if they don’t understand what’s going on, it becomes a big issue to them, a big, uncomfortable, scary thing. So clarify that for him. That will help a lot.

And then, instead of wanting him to have the meltdown and trying to get him there or trying to get him to come through this, I would try to receive the feelings as they’re coming. “Oh, that makes you want to hit. You want to bite, you just want to lash out right now. I’m here to stop you.” When I ask this parent what she does, she says she tries to block or stop what he’s doing. Yes, that’s what I recommend. “Typically get down to his eye level.” When possible, but he’s a four-year-old guy and she can look down to him sometimes too. “Express that I can tell he’s having a difficult time and that I’m going to prevent him from hurting himself, his sister, or breaking our things.” That, especially with a child this age, I would show more than tell. Not make a whole big deal out of it, just be like, “Oops, there it came back again.” Maybe you even end up having a little nickname together about the impulse. “There’s that upset guy again. I’m here to help you, I’m here to stop you.”

We don’t have to get into the whole I can’t let you do this to your sister and all that. I mean, because he does know that. So really just helping him in the moment instead of trying to make a bigger lesson about it. That’s often what we’re trying to do when we think about why we’re saying a lot of words around behavior. Just seeing it, welcoming the impulse without welcoming the behavior. And as with the other parent or all the parents, holding him close, figuratively, instead of being alarmed by it. Which we can only do when we see this is him, going through something, and what does he need? It’s not our job to fix, it’s just our job to welcome him to share it while helping him not do the behaviors that are harmful.

And with unbuckling the carseat, obviously there’s not a lot we can do about that, but his overall sense of, I see you. I’m here to help you. I’m not judging you, your behavior. I really get it. That will help him stop doing that too. And in the moment you could say something like, “Oops, I see that you wanted to unbuckle your buckle. You’re showing me something there, aren’t you? You’re really not comfortable with what’s going on. I want to know more about that when we get home, but for now, can you please put your buckle on?” I mean, there’s ways that we can deescalate the tension around that because it’s the tension that kind of feeds the behavior.

And maybe he won’t do it right then, but he will eventually. He won’t need to demonstrate this rebellion when he feels that you welcome his rebellion, you welcome all these feelings, in the way that they’re coming up. What gets us to yelling, which never feels good, is that we’re trying to manage behavior in a way that we really don’t have the power to manage it. But we do have the power to help him feel seen and be able to express what’s going on with him in the ways that he can, the ways that he’s doing it.

I really hope some of this helps all these parents. And thank you all so much for sending in your notes and trusting me to give you feedback. It’s an honor.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

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