Transcript of “Dr. Gabor Maté on Why Parents Matter More Than Ever”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

For most of you out there, I’m guessing that my guest today needs no introduction. Dr. Gabor Maté is a family physician, renowned speaker, with a special interest in childhood development, trauma, and addiction. He’s authored five books, including the classic he co-authored with early childhood icon psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld. The book is Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. And Doctors Neufeld and Maté are reissuing it with a brand new chapter called In the Wake of the Pandemic: Peer Orientation and the Youth Mental Health Crisis. I’m seriously looking forward to discussing the invaluable messages in this book, and more, with Dr. Gabor Maté.

Hi, and welcome to you, Dr. Maté. I’m an enormous fan of yours and it’s really an honor to be able to spend this time with you. Thank you very much for being here.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Thanks for having me. I’m sorry that due to technical issues, the main author of the book Hold On to Your Kids, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, can’t be with us. But since I wrote the book with him and have worked with him for decades, I think I can channel his wisdom here, as best I can. But listeners should keep in mind that it’s his work mostly that we’re talking about here.

Janet Lansbury: I believe in you as a channel for his work, and you have amazing work you’ve done on your own as well. And this book, well now you’re reissuing it because you’ve added a new chapter all about the effects of the pandemic. Which I found surprising, your take on it, because it’s very different from the take that we’re hearing from many about it. So I really hope that you’ll speak to that today. But this whole book, it’s really a unique perspective, and remains a unique perspective, even though it was first written back in, what was it, 2008, something like that?

Dr. Gabor Maté: I think even before then. I think it’s probably 2005 or 2004, something like that.

Janet Lansbury: You’ve also added some chapters about the digital explosion that’s happened and how that affects this issue. I’m going to let you speak about the issues that this book covers and brings to light for people. It was something that I hadn’t considered before reading this. I’ve known the importance of having a relationship-centered approach to parenting, that that’s what it’s all about. That attachment is everything, that it’s key to the way that children learn, the way that they live and become who we want them to be or who they’re supposed to be. And that attachment nest needs to be present. But what your book with Dr. Neufeld talks about is that, actually, this is even more important than we thought because there’s competition. There’s this powerful draw of peer orientation. Can you talk a little about that?

Dr. Gabor Maté: First of all, we have to consider human evolution. And from the evolutionary perspective, mammals, hominids and hominins, humanoid creatures lived in small-band groups, where the children were around the adults all the time, 24/7, from birth to adulthood. And even with our own species, we’ve been on the earth for about 150,000 years, that’s the way we lived until the blink of an eye ago. So for 95% of our existence as human species, children lived around their parents all the time.

It’s like a duckling. A duckling is born, hatches from the egg, looks at the mother duck and imprints on the mother duck, and then follows the mother duck. Not because the mother duck asserts authority or threatens them or anything, just that nature causes us to be attached to our caregivers and to follow their guidance. And that’s the way it’s been for a long time.

Now, in more recent times, kids spend most of their time away from their parents from a very early age on. In the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which basically means that children are deprived of the natural presence of their nature-intended caregivers.

The duckling, if it hatches with the mother duck absent, will still imprint on anything that moves. And that could be a dog or horse or mechanical moving toy, but none of which are designed by nature to bring that duckling up to adulthood.

Our children, spending most of their time away from us, imprint on who they spend most of their time with. Their brain is programmed to imprint and to attach, but nothing in nature tells the brain who to attach to. That’s the job of the culture. So when you have a culture in which kids spend most of their time away from the nurturing adults, they imprint on whoever’s around, they can’t help it. They’re not doing it, their brains are doing it.

That means our kids are now imprinting and attaching to, and therefore getting their orientation from, immature peers. Attachment is like a magnet. It’s got two poles. One pole attracts, but the other pole repels. So when you’re attracted here, you’re pushing away from there. So when kids get attracted to and orienting by and attached to their peer group, they start pushing away from the adult. And now we think they have a problem, there’s something wrong with them, and we ratchet up the authoritarian parenting, all the punishments, the timeouts, all this stuff, which further drives them away from us.

And so what we’ve got here in our society, to make a long story short, is a culturally built-in, normalized, absolutely abnormal situation, where kids are getting most of their influence from their immature peers rather than the nurturing adults. And this results in behavior problems, learning difficulties, a lot of what we call pathologies (which are not pathologies at all, they’re manifestations of abnormalities in the environment), difficulties parenting, frustration on the part of parents, all kinds of other consequences which you can talk about. But in a nutshell, it has to do with the loss of primary attachments to the nourishing adults and the replacement—gradually, but insidiously—by the peer group.

Janet Lansbury: When does this begin? When children are three years old, four years old?

Dr. Gabor Maté: For those kids whose mothers have to go back to work at two weeks, that’s when it starts. Because then where do they go to? They go to poorly-funded, very often, and poorly-staffed daycare centers where there’s not enough adults to really connect with each child. Furthermore, we have this idea in this society that somehow we have to socialize kids. They spent the whole week in daycare and then, at let’s say age three or four, we arrange playdates for them on the weekend where they can be with each other even more.

And so I’m just telling you that so many of the problems that parents are having with their kids, there’s nothing because something’s wrong with the kids or particularly something wrong with the parents either. But because in this culture, the loss of parental attachment has been normalized and even encouraged. And there’s this invisible competition that we’re actually taught to court and to encourage.

Janet Lansbury: So what does healthy socialization look like? I mean, when you say that we’re supposed to socialize, I never consider it that way. I consider that children are naturally socialized. It’s not something that we have to try to make happen for them.

Dr. Gabor Maté: That’s the whole point. Your assumption is quite right. Socialization does happen naturally. But we can over-encourage it, because we forget or we don’t know that child development goes through phases. It’s like a pyramid. And the base and the broadest grounding for that pyramid is attachment to the nurturing adults. And that has to be maintained. These are not phases that we go through, this is a pyramid that we build. And attachment is the basis of it.

The second basis of it is not socialization. The second tier in the pyramid is actually individuation, which means the child develops a deep, entrusting sense of themselves. Now for that, attachment has to be secure. When children develop a sense of themselves, they can then respect the individuality of others and hold on to themselves without having to fit in, without having to mold themselves to the expectations of the group. But if they don’t have a strong sense of themselves, individuation, then they’ll try and fit in with the group rather than being themselves. Then we can see where that leads to. You know what the extreme of that is: gang behavior.

Then the third tier, as Gordon points out, is socialization. So socialization is like the peak of the pyramid. In a healthy sense, it’s based on strong attachments, proper individuation, and then socialization happens spontaneously. We don’t have to make it happen. But we do have to respect the pyramid. And so when we try and push kids into socialization too early, before they’ve individuated, then we’re actually asking for them to just meld in with the peer group.

Janet Lansbury: When parents have asked me, How do I do this? I need to socialize my child. And I point out—because my mentor, who happens to be Hungarian, Magda Gerber, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her, but she used to say, you’re socializing your child with everything you do in your relationship. That’s how they’re learning social behaviors, through you. You don’t have to put them in a group setting. Group socialization is a whole different thing. They’re learning this through your relationship.

Dr. Gabor Maté: As a matter of fact, this is counterintuitive perhaps, and we’re not here advocating homeschooling, that’s not something everybody just can do, for all kinds of reasons. But if you look at the research, kids who are homeschooled, they socialize better later on. Why? Because they have a stronger, more independent sense of themselves. And now they can respect individuality of others and hold on to their own.

Janet Lansbury: If parents are in the position where they do need to have their child be in childcare, then ideally we want them to be able to attach—hopefully not as their primary attachment, hopefully that still remains the parent, right? That’s what we want. But they need to form a secondary attachment with those adults caring for them, so that they have somebody that’s an adult to be attached to instead of prioritizing the other children to be attached to.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah, we’re not saying kids shouldn’t be in daycare. That would not be realistic. A lot of parents, for economic and other reasons, simply have to send their kids to daycare. The question is to recognize what we’ve lost and how to supplant it, okay? So if the kid goes to daycare, the first point is: what the child’s brain cannot handle is competing primary attachments. The child can handle many attachments, but not competing primary attachments. By the way, that’s true of the human brain in general. It’s very difficult even for adults, for example, to be in love with two people at the same time. Eventually the brain goes this way or that way, but it can’t hold on to both.

Now, the child’s brain, being very immature, is absolutely incapable of handling competing primary attachments. So when the child goes to daycare, the parent needs to encourage the child’s attachment to the daycare provider because that doesn’t compete with the parent, but the peer attachment does. So we have to have healthy adult attachments if the child is not going to be with the parent. It’s like Gordon says: in the morning, the parent hands the attachment baton to the teacher or the daycare worker, and in the evening, we take it back. That’s the first point. When kids go to daycare, parents should hang out in that daycare for a few weeks and make sure that their child sees them, the parent, forming relationships with the daycare provider. So that the child then sees, Oh, okay, I can be attached to both of these people. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is, we have to understand how children attach. And the more immature we are, the more primitive—and I don’t mean that in a negative sense—but the more basic our attachment styles are. So the first way that children attach is physically. To the senses, by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling the attachment figure. Smell, by the way, is huge. It’s one of the first things that develops. Babies can distinguish the smell of their own mother’s breast pad from that of other mothers within a few weeks of birth. So the senses are very important to children.

And other forms of attachment, such as being loyal or being important, holding somebody else in your heart, those develop later. You might have friends that you might not see for two years, but you still love them, you can hold on to them. Children can’t do that. Young children, they have to see you, hear you, touch you. Now, what does that mean? If they haven’t seen you the whole day, that attachment relationship has been attenuated. You have to regain it. So when your kid comes home from daycare at whatever age, hang out with them. Not for the purpose of telling them what to do or watching television together or anything, but just for the purpose of reestablishing the attachment relationship.

So in the first place, kids go to daycare: form attachment relationships with the nurturing adults. And most daycare workers need to be trained or understand the importance of attachment. They’re not just physical caregivers providing food and supervision. They need to be attachment figures, number one. Number two, at the end of the day, you have to reconnect, reattach with your kids. Especially the younger kids, but any kids, at any age. So we can deal with the daycare, not by going back to some ideal time when kids are with their parents the whole day, that’s no longer available to most of us. But we can understand attachment and then we’ll follow the guidelines of attachment to make sure that the kids being away from us the whole day doesn’t undermine our relationship with them.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, I love these points that you and Dr. Neufeld made in the book about the four ways to nurture attachment. The first one is when they’re infants, when children are very little, you call it “being in their face.” It’s having that face-to-face. And then that becomes “collecting.” I really like that word to describe it. I mean, I’ve seen all these memes and things saying, children want us to light up when they come into the room. Well, there is something to that. When we’re returning to each other, we want to drop everything. It’s so important that we’re not texting in the car or whatever. We’re present, we’re there. I collect you. You’re somebody big to me. You’re important.

Dr. Gabor Maté: You would do that with a lover, wouldn’t you? You do that automatically. We do it automatically with babies, too. I mean, even strangers. I’ve been on many airplanes where there might be a little baby there in somebody’s arms and the baby cries a little bit. Everybody goes, Aww. We just all naturally attune with the baby. That’s just natural. Babies evoke that attunement/connection instinct in us. The problem is that with the separation from our kids, that instinct inside ourselves is actually softened, weakened. So we actually get alienated from our own parenting instinct.

When some parenting “expert” comes along and tells you to practice timeout against a two-year-old, basically they’re saying to you, Use the attachment relationship to punish the child. The child’s biggest need is that you should be delighted and welcoming and unconditionally accepting. And when you use a timeout technique, you say to the child, I know what your biggest fear is: the loss of that relationship. And I’m going to deprive you of the relationship for a certain period of time. Now, to a two-year-old, five minutes is forever. And so that, not only does the culture normalize alienation of children from parents, it even teaches parents to use the child’s biggest need—for your delight in them and acceptance of them, an unconditional connection with them—against the child, to try and control the child. Which creates tremendous insecurity in children. It makes them conform to your desires perhaps, but what does it do to the child’s development?

We have to collect them, which means gather them in under our wing again. And Gordon says, collect them before you direct them.

Janet Lansbury: It does become less organic as children get older and we think, Oh, they’re fine, or They don’t care, or we’re busy or whatever. And how important that still is with a teenager, with a child at any age. I have three adult children, I still stand up—whatever I’m doing—if they walk in the door. It’s like a huge thing to me, run and hug and so excited. I naturally feel that way. But I think we can get caught up in our work and our lives and forget, especially when children maybe are already gone into more of that peer orientation space and then they don’t seem like they care. But they do, right? They really do.

And what can we look for, then, with our younger children? What are some of the warning signs that, Uh-oh, there could be something going on here? I mean, when you talk about the behaviors that children have when they do have that peer orientation, the behaviors that they have toward the parents, what do those look like with young children?

Dr. Gabor Maté: First of all, let me just say that even teenagers need this. Not just even, but especially. Because it’s such a difficult time. They need orientation. And in traditional cultures that orientation was provided by adults and elders.

One of my sons and I are writing a new book together. I mean, we’re just beginning to write it, so I’m not advertising anything here. But it’s going to be called Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Adult Children. It’s based on a workshop that we do. And all the adults that we speak to, adults in their thirties, forties who still want contact with their parents. They may not want the contact that they have, which is often very troubled, but they want genuine contacts. Never-mind infants, even adults are still looking for that.

So what are the signs when kids are getting alienated from us? Well, first of all, they want to be with each other all the time rather than with us, number one. Number two, with the technology that we’ve very unwisely put into their immature hands, they’re connecting with each other all the time. They will not be soothed by us when they’re upset. They will be more oppositional and resistant to our expectations.

Janet Lansbury: And that part could show up with a child as young as three or four. There’s part of that that naturally happens anyway, but then it can become more of a warning sign if a child is consistently having “behavior issues.” But it’s always a relationship issue when children are having concerning behaviors, it’s usually a relationship issue between us.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah. In our society, more and more kids are being diagnosed with this, that, and the other. And many kids are being medicated to control their behaviors, which is a vast social experiment in the manipulation of the child’s biology and the indication is that it’s not particularly good for the child’s brain development. In fact, on the contrary, in many cases. What we’re actually looking at is we identify pathologies in a child, but actually there’s no pathology in a child. What there is is a response in the child to the environment, and particularly to the loss of attachment.

So there’s a so-called diagnosis called oppositional defiant disorder. I say “so-called” because not only does it not exist in reality, not even in theory can it exist. Now, it describes something. So in that sense, it refers to something real. But to say that ODD, that a child has it, is to imply that the child has some kind of a disorder. But let’s just look at it for a minute. Oppositionality by definition is relational. Can you oppose somebody if you’re not in relationship with them? When I talk about this, I say to my listeners, if you don’t understand what I’m saying, lock yourself in a room by yourself, make sure you’re alone, lock the door, and oppose somebody. And if you manage to do it, please put it on YouTube because we want to see what it looks like. So oppositionality by definition implies a relationship. In which case, why are we diagnosing the child rather than looking at the relationship, number one.

Number two, I mentioned individuation, the necessity for us to become individual beings in our own right. That’s nature’s agenda. Why? Because the parents are going to die. And nature’s agenda is that by the time the parents pass, the child has become their own adult person, individuated, knowing themselves. That’s just nature’s agenda for any species.

At age one-and-a-half, the child starts saying no. What do we call that? We call that the terrible twos. Why do we call it the terrible twos? Because we don’t understand there’s nothing terrible about it. What’s actually going on is the child is developing their own will, and in order to develop their own will, as Gordon points out, they have to put up a little fence against the overwhelming and overbearing will of the parent. And that’s that no that they start saying. If you don’t know how to say no, your yeses don’t mean anything at all. So there’s nothing inherently oppositional about it, it’s just that—Gordon calls it counterwill. Counterwill is just countering the will of another so that you can develop your own.

Now, we can manage that easy enough if the attachment relationship is strong. But if we mistake it for a problem, then what we do is when a child expresses their counterwill, their nature-built drive for independence, we push on them even harder. It’s in the nature of counterwill that the more you push on it, the stronger it becomes.

So who are these kids with the so-called oppositional defiant disorders? Number one, they’re kids who have lost the primary healthy attachment with adults. Now, if you’ve lost a relationship with somebody, you’re not going to heed them. You’re not going to listen to them or allow yourself to be guided by them, because orientation follows attachment. We follow, orient by, those people that we trust and are connected to. If, because of all the multiple pressures in our society, which is not the fault of individual parents, children’s relationships to parents have been attenuated, weakened, then their oppositionality increases naturally, number one. Number two, the more we push on it, the more confirmed and out-of-hand it becomes.

So who are these ODD kids? Kids who have lost their relationship with the parents and who’ve been pushed on too much. And then we say they’ve got some kind of pathology. No, they don’t. What we have to do is to go back to basics and rebuild that relationship with them. Trust me, that oppositionality will melt like snow on a warm day. We’ve seen this over and over again. But unfortunately the tendency in our society is to pathologize children’s behavior, rather than to see its sources and its remedies in the attachment relationship.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

And then the second point that you make about maintaining that attachment is giving children something to hold on to. In the beginning, that’s a body part, that’s very physical, but it soon becomes emotional as well. And just that feeling of, There’s this person that sees me, knows me so well, is always in my corner, and somebody loves me. And I can go out in the world and deal with some of the challenges, knowing that I have this person to go back to, that sees me better than anyone else.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Even in adult relationships, on separation, don’t we give one another little objects, little mementos? Those are something to hold on to. Children need that. So if the kid goes to daycare, give them a picture of yourself. Give them some cherished, not expensive obviously, but some cherished shared object that they can hold on to. So that’s what we’re talking about, is let them take a piece of you to the daycare or to the school.

Janet Lansbury: And then inviting them. The third one is inviting them to depend on us.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah. Again, in this society there’s this belief that we have to push kids towards independence, but we don’t. I mean, a mother bear doesn’t have to push the cubs towards independence. At a certain point, it just happens. And the more secure the child is, the more independent they can become. If you look at these attachment experiments with little babies or little toddlers and so on, those kids that are more securely attached are the ones more likely to be able to play independently and then to come back to the mom or the parent when necessary. As Gordon says, to promote independence, invite dependence.

Janet Lansbury: Right.

Dr. Gabor Maté: That drive for independence is inherent in the child. At a certain point, the child developing in a healthy way will say, “I’m going to do it myself.” So you’re going to tie their shoelaces: “I’m going to do it myself.” That drive for mastery is inherent in a human being. It has to be. So we don’t have to promote it, we just have to provide the security so that it can unfold naturally.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And be that person that says, I mean, unless we can’t possibly do it at that moment, and then we say, “Well, I wish I could but I can’t right now.” But that welcomes them. To say, Oh, you want help with your shoes? You know how to do it, but so what? I’m going to help you with your shoes. Of course, I’m always here for you.

And yeah, I mean, the only thing I was thinking when I was reading that that I would maybe add is just that sometimes we have to honor independence when children do show it. Even as an infant, I want to look over here and notice this right now. That we consider honoring that instead of, Come look at me! I’m the only one here! So when a child does choose it—it’s never pushing a child that way, never. But it’s noticing those expressions of independence and honoring them, not stepping on them. Because one thing I really wanted to ask you—

Dr. Gabor Maté: Let me just quickly comment on that.

Janet Lansbury: Okay, yes!

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yes to what you just said. That’s called attunement. Attunement means being aware of and respectful of the internal experience of the other. At a certain point, the infant may have too much of you looking at them. They wish to look away. You let them. You don’t get anxious, Oh, come back, hey! You don’t try to inveigle them back into relationship with you at that moment, because their need at that point is that it’s become too intense for them and they need to just detach for a minute. If you’re attuned with them, and if you’re not anxious, you’ll allow that to happen. If you’re not attuned or if you’re bringing your own needs to bear, your need to connect with the child to dominate, then you’re not going to honor their experience.

So yes, you have to be attuned with the child, which means sometimes you have to let them look away and do their own thing. Usually it won’t last very long, but you need to give them the space to do that. So it begins very early. And very often parents hover too much in that sense. They should be attentive to the child and be there for the child. But hovering means that you’re bringing your own needs.

Janet Lansbury: And fears often, right?

Dr. Gabor Maté: Your own needs and your anxieties, rather than getting your cues from the child’s experience.

Janet Lansbury: I’m sure you’ve been asked this, you and Dr. Neufeld probably both, but how does your advice in this book stand with all of this research that’s come out about the over-parenting and the stifling of children, and how that’s linked to children who are depressed, anxious, have no sense of themselves, no individuation, I guess.

Dr. Gabor Maté: So for sure. It’s like I just said, it’s—

Janet Lansbury: Lack of attunement, right?

Dr. Gabor Maté: It needs to arise from the child’s needs, not from the parents’ anxieties. So a lot of that stuff has to do with the parents’ fears. We’ve got to take them to this class and that class and make sure they get into the right school. And if we don’t push them academically, they’re going to… In other words, it actually comes from the anxieties of the parent. And it also comes from the sense of the parent that they’ve lost a relationship with the child and they need to overcompensate. So as long as the relationship is healthy and well-attached, you can’t over-hover.

Let me tell you about a study that was done quite some years ago now. They looked at mothers and young children, I don’t know, about a hundred or 200 mothers. I quote the study in one of my books, not in this one. And some mothers, very few, were kind of distant and unavailable emotionally for the children as they interacted. Most mothers were good, they interacted, they played with the child. Some mothers were called supermoms. These supermoms cuddled the kid, extra loving, extra connection, and so on. Attuned, but very warm. Thirty years or more later, the kids most emotionally stable or the adults most emotionally stable, were the children of these supermoms. And what the researcher said is, you can’t love children too much. Now, loving them is not the same as hovering all the time and controlling them.

So the research doesn’t have to do with attachment, it has to do with control and intrusion. And yeah, if you control kids and intrude on them, you’re going to get negative results. But that’s got nothing to do with attachment. In fact, it’s a substitute for genuine attachment.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And do you also think it threatens the attachment relationship and could cause this peer orientation? That if a child feels like, they’re too controlling or they’re trying to mold me. I mean, I think sometimes parents feel like they’re supposed to judge their child, they’re supposed to keep on them. That that is what love is. That they’re supposed to mold, they’re supposed to be on them for everything and make it all happen. And there’s no trust in the child’s nature. And so naturally children can grow up to not trust their own nature, because their parent that they look to never trusted theirs.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Returning, I mentioned this book I’m writing, we do these workshops, my son and I, for adults and their parents. This is what we hear so often from parents. I wish I had left them alone. I wish I hadn’t tried to control them so much. They just needed me to be there for them and be there with them, not to try and direct them all the time. And the residues into adulthood are so negative. So we’re not trusting the child, we’re not trusting ourselves, we’re not trusting nature.

See, children who are connected to adults naturally want to learn from adults. We use this word discipline, but what does the word discipline actually mean? We think it means punishment. No, it doesn’t. Who had disciples? Jesus, for example, had disciples. Not because he punished or threatened them, but because he loved them and they loved him. So then naturally they wanted to learn from him.

So that’s one of the ways we attach, I mentioned the attachment physically. The next way to attach is actually by wanting to be the same as. So when children are well-attached to parents, they’ll copy what the parent does. I mean, look at all the teaching that that saves. There’s a lot of things we don’t have to teach our kids, they just learn it by watching us. Kids who are well-attached to parents will naturally want to emulate the parent, to be the same as the parent. Kids who are peer-attached want to be the same as their peers and behave like their peers and talk like their peers and look like their peers and wear the same shoes.

Janet Lansbury: And as you point out, these aren’t unconditionally loving peers. They can’t be, towards that child. And so the child is not getting the kind of attachment that they need.

Dr. Gabor Maté: No, but they’re getting the only one available to them. And the point is, these parents who think we have to guide and judge and control our kids. No, you don’t. You have to provide the warm attachment relationship. And then you set the guidelines, for which you don’t need to use force because the child who’s connected to you will naturally want to follow your guidelines. So you can back off on the coercive aspect.

There are limits. You’re not going to let a kid run across the street in order to find out for themselves how dangerous it is. You will not allow that to happen. If you live in New York, you’re not going to let your kid crawl out into the winter snow naked. I mean, parenting is a hierarchy, but it’s a benign, beneficial hierarchy.

The problem with peer orientation is it actually flattens the hierarchy. So when kids start looking to each other for guidance and validation, they start resisting the parents’ natural authority. As long as we have that natural authority, we don’t have to keep pushing our kids or cajoling them or judging them or controlling them. They will naturally, literally, fall into line. And by the way, this book has been out now for what, almost 30 years? Published in close to 40 languages. We get messages from all over the world that it changed their whole family dynamics and how they relate to their kids. And things are so much easier now and so much warmer now and so much effortless now. The stronger the attachment relationship, the less the effort you have to make.

Janet Lansbury: Because you’re prioritizing what really works. You’re putting your energy into what actually does help children with their behavior and every other thing that you’re trying to do, if you’re thinking about trying to mold them.

Dr. Gabor Maté: The problem is that by now, we’re talking 2024, by now, we’ve had several generations of parents who themselves were brought up peer-oriented. So to them this looks totally natural. They can’t even see the alternative, even though historically it’s an aberration. Evolutionarily, as I said earlier, it’s simply a blink of an eye. Not even that. And even historically, it’s just a few generations old. But it’s become so entrenched and so endemic in our culture that we take it for granted.

My most recent book is called The Myth of Normal. What I’m saying in general in that book, and I mention the peer orientation dynamic as well, is that things have become normalized in this culture that, from the human point of view, are neither healthy nor natural. And so peer orientation has become so normalized that most researchers don’t even realize it’s there. They just think it’s the way it needs to be. It’s unseen. It’s like a hidden epidemic that’s striking almost every family without people recognizing it. And we’re dealing with the effects of it, rather than dealing with the causes of it.

Janet Lansbury: So you’ve added on chapters about the digital age and then now this recent one about the effects of the pandemic with children. Could you talk a little about how parents can navigate the technology and screens and all of that with a very young child? If you have guidelines for that?

Dr. Gabor Maté: First of all, as a physician, I can tell you that the parts of the brain that are excited by the technology are the same parts of the brain excited by addictive drugs. The dopamine circuits, primarily. As a matter of fact, there’s a technology company called Dopamine Lab. The technology companies hire neuroscientists. I’m not making this up. They hire neuroscientists to target children’s brains in the most addictive fashion so they get hooked on the technology. And if you look at the research on brain scans of children who watch a lot of digital media, that interferes with the circuits of thinking and emotional connection and insight and creativity. So this is serious stuff.

Furthermore, I used to work with a highly addicted population here in Vancouver. One of my medical interests has been addiction. You take a child who’s hooked on technology and try and separate them from technology. You know what you’ve got? You’ve got an addict in withdrawal. The same rage, the same disdain, the same oppositionality, the same outrage, and the same obstreperous holding on to that object. This stuff is addictive.

If I was parenting kids today, I wouldn’t let them look at the screen for years. Certainly I would not let them look at a screen on their own for years. I would not give them a cell phone. I would not give them an iPad. If I watched television with them, I’d be choosing what they’re watching. But mostly I’d stay away from it. And I would stay away from texting and emailing in their presence.

Janet Lansbury: I was just going to ask about that, yes.

Dr. Gabor Maté: I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but believe me, I see it all the time. A parent is pushing a kid in a tram, a buggy, and their parent is on a cell phone. What message are we giving the kid when we’re absent in their presence? So it’s not that I would do without my computer or my cell phone, but I would not be letting them interrupt my relationship and interaction with the child.

And so it’s like everything else. There’s age-appropriate behaviors that are okay for one age, but not okay at another. I mean, it’s okay to have a glass of wine every once in a while, but nobody wants to give a glass of wine to a two-week-old. It’s not age-appropriate. Developmentally, it’s harmful. But there’s no rush. Even if they don’t see technology until age 10, which seems like a sacrilege in this society, they’ll learn it overnight. It’s not that they’re missing anything.

The problem is that parents are so busy and so stressed. Parents are desperate for a respite, and one way to get respite is to plunk the kid down in front of a TV set or to give them a cell phone. Now they’re going to be okay for hours, but at what cost? So while I understand the desire for the parents for a break and respite, and therefore using the technology as the babysitter, it comes at a great cost.

Janet Lansbury: I like that you pointed out that even pushing the pram when you’re not maybe facing the child or if the child’s on your back or front or whatever, that they can sense, because they sense everything about us, that you’re doing something else. Even when they can’t see our face. You know, that “still face” experiment always comes to mind when I think of us being on the phone with the baby there and suddenly we’re down a rabbit hole of something else that has nothing to do with them and how strange that is. But even not seeing our face, they sense that I’m not being collected by this person. I’m not in relationship with this person right now, in that moment.

And this is going to sound extreme to a lot of parents I think out there who have a lot of reasons for wanting the phones, but I believe as you do. And I feel thankful that my children are older and I don’t have to deal with it right now because it is very challenging. And I really do hand it to parents that are able to, not get rid of their phones, but have boundaries for themselves. Especially in those times that are togetherness times, the collecting when we’re in the transitions, when we’re greeting each other, saying goodbye to each other, the meal times.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Not to mention what that constant engagement with technology does to the parent. This last summer, I took a two-week break from digital media. I tell you, I was an addict in withdrawal. I turned the cell phone off. But even having turned it off, I picked it up several times a day, and then I thought, What am I doing? It’s not even on.

Janet Lansbury: How many days did it take you to not be checking it anymore?

Dr. Gabor Maté: The impulse never quite went away, but I never did turn it on for two weeks and I got calmer and more present to life as time went on. So what I’m saying is, quite apart from the impact on our kids, our constant cell phone obsession, what does it do to us? We become more scattered and less present, which then has an impact on the child.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. I wonder if you’d like to talk a little about this additional chapter, and then I promise to let you go.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Thank you. So look, COVID, the pandemic was interesting because it imposed an isolation on a lot of people, a lot of families. And I know there’s a lot of controversy in retrospect about those policies, and I’m not going to get into that. I’m going to talk about actually what happened. Two interesting things happened. On the one hand, the incidents of child abuse went up. More children ended up in emergency wards throughout North America with injuries sustained in home violence. Home violence went up. In some families, drinking behavior went up. On the other hand, in some families it was a godsend. And some parents said, My God, I got to be at home to see my kids’ milestones and I got to interact with them. I learned how they played and I played with them.

So what actually happened was that in families where there was multi-generational, unresolved trauma and fewer resources, emotionally speaking, the pressure of isolation took away from some parents their usual lightning rods, their usual ways of dispersing their stress and their anxieties. They couldn’t go to football games or sports events, entertainment events or to the pub. So the unresolved frustrations and stresses and traumas became expressed in the family. And for those people and for those kids, COVID was a disaster. And furthermore, for the peer-oriented kids, it was a huge loss because all of a sudden they lost their attachments with the people that they were naturally—not naturally, but unnaturally oriented towards, and they were at a loss.

Those families where the attachment dynamics were functional, and those parents who were either economically or emotionally or both resourced enough, this is an opportunity to deepen and warm up and build the attachment relationship with the kids.

So some people think that the COVID experience showed the importance of peer relationships, because look how kids suffered in their absence. Actually what it showed was how unnaturally important peer relationships became, so that in their absence, kids suffered. That’s what it actually proved. Rather than countering our thesis, it proved it. But again, because people took that for granted that it’s the way it should be, they didn’t notice that. They thought it was the loss of the peer relationships that created the problem. No, it was the already-absent relationship with the adults that created the problem. In the absence of the peer relationships, the kids just got more unbalanced, which just shows that the peer relationships had been overemphasized in the first place. So that’s how we understand it. And for us, it just meant we have just doubled down on that relationship.

Janet Lansbury: Wow, fascinating. Really eye-opening, and it makes a lot of sense. It really does.

I just want to say for everybody out there that this book, it will help you at every stage. It will help you to form secure attachments. And it will also help you notice when things might be not going the way that we hope and there’s some weaknesses in our attachment. And it also helps at any age to know how to get it back. As you said earlier, there’s nothing our child at any age wants more—or that we want more—but there’s nothing they want more than to reconnect. They just don’t know how. And we have to be the ones to lead that way back. But it will work, because it’s what children want more than anything. Whether it’s the two-year-old that we yelled at that just wants to feel safe with us again, or the adult child that feels estranged and doesn’t want to go through the rest of their life feeling that loss.

Dr. Gabor Maté: The two major responses we get to the book, some people say, Thanks, this saved our family because now I understand things. But the second interesting response we get is, Thank you, this book validated my instincts. So much of the parenting advice people get actually separates them from their instincts. So that when parents say to us, Thank you, your book validated my instincts. And now I can tell my friends who are telling me to use separation and timeout, “You know what? Here are these experts telling me that my instincts are right.” Now, you shouldn’t need experts to tell you that your instincts are right. As a matter of fact, I’d say in any contest between experts and instincts, listen to your instincts and forget the experts.

Janet Lansbury: Because your instincts know how to attach, that’s a primal thing that we all have. Your instincts know how to attach to your child. Your reasonable advice doesn’t necessarily.

Dr. Gabor Maté: That’s right. But again, instincts have to be evoked by the environment. So anyway, the two responses we get are Thank you, now we see it differently. But the other response we get is Thank you, this validated my instincts.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, I mean this book is so informative and it’s alarming, though. And I could see where you might also get people saying, Oh, come on, that’s hogwash. It’s good to be with peers and it’s the best thing that could happen. But as you two point out, it’s when you come to that peer relationship from a place of you’re still holding on to your parent as a primary attachment, that that’s when it is healthy and works well.

Dr. Gabor Maté: We’re not saying kids shouldn’t play with each other. Children always have, since creation. But what was the context? The context of kids playing with each other was under the watchful eyes of caring adults. I remember growing up in Budapest, Hungary, in the 1950s. We played out in the street with other kids, but there were always parents on the balconies looking at us. And every neighborhood home was a home to all the kids so that we would go to each others’ homes and other mothers would give us lunch or look after us and so on. So that there was a community, a community of caring adults. So it’s not that children shouldn’t play with each other, it’s that that should not be the primary relationship, number one.

And number two, it needs to be in the context of adults being present. So if you’re going to have playdates on the weekend, for God’s sake, be there in the same room with the kids. Don’t have the adults chatting away here and the kids on their own. And adults should always be present with them. So maintain that primary relationship with the adults. Yes, kids should play with each other. No, that should not be the primary relationship.

Janet Lansbury: Because it’s about influence, right? Who’s influencing your child the most? We want that to be us.

Dr. Gabor Maté: That’s right.

Janet Lansbury: It’s such a hopeful book. And that last chapter was just such a beautiful ending, really hopeful and will leave parents feeling not afraid, but that this is normal. I mean, it isn’t normal like you said, but it is the new unfortunate normal and that there’s a lot that they can do to counteract some of the draws and influences. That that really is in our power and that children want it to be and need it to be.

Dr. Gabor Maté: That’s right.

Janet Lansbury: Thank you so much for sharing with us and for this book. Your work is really profound in so many ways.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Thanks for having me.

Janet Lansbury: It’s an honor. Thank you so much. Take care, and we’ll hopefully engage again at some point in the future.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Take care.

***

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

The post Dr. Gabor Maté on Why Parents Matter More Than Ever appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “When Kids Hide Their Feelings and Reject Our Comfort”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about an issue that many of you have asked about over the years. It’s the natural concern that we have when our child seems to be pushing us away when they’re upset or they seem uncomfortable expressing their feelings, even when we make sure to let them know we’re very, very open to that. Maybe we’ve read or heard or listened to podcasts like mine, talking about how important it is for children to feel safe to share all their feelings with us. That we want to cultivate an environment for them where all feelings are allowed—not all behaviors, but all feelings—and how this is a path to their resiliency and emotional fluency and emotional health.

So it’s obviously worrisome when our child doesn’t seem to be following that pattern, that they’re rejecting us when we try to comfort them, they’re trying to hide their feelings. Maybe they’re saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” or running away from us. What does this mean? How can we unpack this and what can we do to make it better? That’s what I’m going to be talking about today.

This time I’ll start with a note that I received from a parent. Some of the specifics in this note you probably won’t relate to, but the dynamic between this parent and her daughter is a common one. This was a message I received on Instagram:

Hi, Janet-

My husband and I are separating. We still co-habit, but I go away when it’s his turn to have them 50% of the time. I’ve noticed when I come back, my three-year-old seems very mad at me. I understand this feeling, but what worries me is the way it plays out.

It seems when she is upset or angry, she is afraid or ashamed of her emotions. She runs and hides, refuses any comfort, tells me to go away and shouts, “Mummy, I want Daddy back!” Today she shut herself in the bathroom and told me to go away if I opened the door. I sat outside, acknowledged her feelings, and let her know I was there and ready to help her when she needs me. The more I spoke, the more angry she was. She eventually just snapped out of it after 20 minutes. She denied hunger and had had a nap, so I don’t think she was tired.

Do you have any advice for helping her to be more comfortable with feeling sad or angry?

Okay, so one thing I appreciate is that this parent really pegs the issue in her last sentence here, that’s a question: “Do you have any advice for helping her to be more comfortable with feeling sad or angry?”

There aren’t that many issues in parenting that we can say, It always means this across the board, and You should do this or that. Because every child is a unique individual, every parent is an individual, our dynamic with each child is unique. That’s why I’m not a fan of categorizing children. I know it’s very popular these days to say that this is this type of child or that type of child. Dr. Mona Delahooke—who I miss so much in these spaces. She had a severe brain injury and she’s still recovering and healing, but she will be back. She agrees with me on this. I appreciate that so much because she is an expert in children that are neurodivergent. And she says as well, let’s approach each child as an individual. Yes, there are some issues children have that are measurably different, but mostly, everybody is a range of things, right? And we can miss so much when we try to adhere to advice that categorizes.

That said, I love that we can say across the board that when children are behaving in ways that are concerning, as in this case, any kind of what we might call “misbehavior,” there’s one thing we can say for sure, and that is that our child is uncomfortable. They’re uncomfortable in some way. It can be very minor discomfort, that, Hmm, they’re not quite giving me a clear answer on this. My parent seems a little uncomfortable, they’re unsure of themselves. So that very minor type of discomfort, ranging all the way to intense fear, trauma, stress, that kind of discomfort.

So when we want to understand and know how to help a child and how to make a difference, like this parent wants to make, what are they uncomfortable about? And why? In this case, she’s uncomfortable expressing her feelings with her parent. And maybe with both of her parents, I don’t know that, but we know she’s uncomfortable expressing it with this parent. And it doesn’t necessarily mean something that the parent did, it could mean the way other people besides this parent have responded to her. But something has made her uncomfortable with being in these emotional states.

Now I’m going to talk about some of the things that it could be, and then I’ll share what I think might be going on in this case with this child, because there’s some clues in this message. But let’s talk about generally what’s going on when children are uncomfortable around their emotions and around us witnessing their emotions.

First, some children are more introverted and more likely to internalize feelings. So, that tendency is there.

Two is the very obvious and severe ways that we make children uncomfortable around their feelings: punishing, shaming children for their feelings, reacting violently or in scary, threatening ways to our child. That makes sense to us, right? When children experience those responses, they’re going to learn very early on that they’re not safe to share their feelings. They need to hide them or stuff them. So I absolutely don’t believe that’s what’s going on in this message, but that’s one of the most obvious ways.

Similarly, if we’re judging, mocking, laughing at our children. There’s been trends that have come and gone where people are sharing that on social media, unfortunately. And no, the child doesn’t know the parent’s sharing it on social media and laughing at them, but they know the parent’s taking a video of them. So that’s obviously not going to encourage them to be open about their feelings.

Then it can be when we’re perceiving these as problematic situations that children need us to address and help them through. And this is where I’m not a fan of the advice to get children to take deep breaths and using calm down jars or other methods to try to help children to calm down. By doing that actively, with all this power that we have as parents—remember, there’s a power differential here. We are so powerful in the way that we respond to our child. In their eyes, we are god-like, especially in the early years. If we’re addressing, with the best of intentions, our child’s feelings with this perception that this is something we need to help them get through and do something about, that can create fear in them in regard to feelings they have that are already uncomfortable. So they’re having the uncomfortable feeling and now my parent’s reacting as if this isn’t a safe place for me to be in myself, that I need to feel better. Well, that can make me feel scared or just uncomfortable with the idea that I’m feeling this. My parent is teaching me that it needs to go away. It’s a problem and I need to do something about it to make it better.

So yes, while it can help children to have a quiet, call it a calm-down place or whatever, but a quiet, unthreatening place to be. Let’s say we’re in a group situation, there’s a calm-down area for a child. We want to approach that not as we’re secluding that child or we’re banishing that child or forcing them to be alone or that now you go in there and you’ve got to feel better. We don’t want to approach it that way, as a problem, but as just a safe place that we trust you to be in while the feelings run their course. In other words, we want this to be a choice that’s helpful to our child, but doesn’t give the message that there’s something wrong here that we need to make better.

Another one, I guess this is number four, when children get into the habit of pacifiers or even thumb-sucking as a comfort tool that they go to as soon as they’re upset. Now, a child’s need to suck can help them to center themselves as babies and toddlers. Thumb-sucking especially is, I believe, a fine and healthy choice. But as children are passing age two or three, we just want to take notice of how they’re using those tools. And I wouldn’t try to change everything overnight or rip those away from them at a certain age. Maybe dentists are going to tell you to do that, but I’m not. When children are used to something, we want them to actually be ready to let go of that, and then we can work together with them to change that.

But in the interim, what I recommend—and actually I’ve never had a chance to say this on a podcast before—is to notice when your child is going there, to that thumb or wants that pacifier, and giving it a moment. Where we, not in a worrisome way, but we just gently reflect: “You’re wanting to suck your thumb right now,” or “You’re wanting your pacifier right now because you’re sad, it seems like.” Whatever we know happened: “This happened and you seem sad or you seem mad about it. You can always tell me those things. I want to know.” So we’re just opening that door. We’re not trying to force or push that our child has to share with us. Because that’s going to do the opposite, right? That’s going to make our child feel pressured and even more uncomfortable. But just opening that up, I see you and I’m here and I’m not going to judge you or make a big deal out of it. I mean, that part we wouldn’t say, but just show. You can always share with me. I see how you’re using that right now. So just that very light, opening the door for them to share a little bit or share a little bit more. But not stressing ourselves out about it, because that’s the other thing, with all our power, that makes children uncomfortable.

That’s why co-regulation, when we hear that term, it really describes this beautifully. Because co-regulation is both of us together. That means I’m not calming you down, I’m calming myself down so that you can calm down, in your time. Oftentimes it helps in these situations for us to actually take the focus off our child and put it on ourselves. Telling ourselves, I’m safe. I can be calm. This will pass. This is actually the best thing my child could be doing right now, expressing what they’re feeling.

Number five, we can make children feel uncomfortable or pressured when we make An Event out of any hurt or other unhappy feeling. So this is related to the problematic situation, right? But in this situation, maybe it’s not about us actively saying, “deep breaths, deep breaths,” but we’re putting a focus on the situation. And I know this is an impression I think maybe I give sometimes about feelings. Because I often get asked, or parents often comment, that they’re going through a hard time with their child and they have other children and they just can’t work their child through all these big meltdowns that they’re having. And how do they manage? Because it’s just too much.

I think this idea that every feeling our child has is a big event may be why some in the press are doing these articles that are mocking gentle parenting or suggesting that it’s damaging. Now, I still don’t know what “gentle parenting” means because nobody seems to define it. I do know that bashing it seems to be sort of clickbait lately, people love to pile on in comments on articles that are about all the awful things that parents are doing. I don’t think that helps anyone. But I do think that at least part of the reason for that is this misunderstanding that parenting advisors like me think that fostering emotional health means we’re giving this big, drawn-out attention to every feeling a child has, indulging them in that way, putting everything aside while we wait this out. And parents complain, understandably, that this is way too much work on top of everything else that they have to do.

And I couldn’t agree more! Doing work around children’s emotions is not a job I recommend taking on because it’s not possible for us. It’s impossible. And it doesn’t help our children, because making a big event out of an every-day, perhaps multiple-times-a-day, life experience that children have—younger children especially—that’s just going to wear us out. We’re not going to survive that. What I recommend is a letting go. That’s why I say letting feelings be. Let go, let feelings be. Focus on acceptance, anchoring and calming ourselves while the rough waves pass us by. We’re not trying to do anything with them or about them. We’re not trying to stop them. We know they need to flow, so we’re just going to accept them and let them be.

Being an anchor doesn’t mean we have to stand there watching either. It’s an attitude, it’s a conviction in this idea of acceptance. And I can accept from across the room, I can accept if I have to leave the room, I can accept if I need to help carry you into the car or out of the car while you’re having a hard time. Acceptance is an attitude, it doesn’t take work. It does take practicing a perspective on feelings that I’ve shared about umpteen times in this podcast, but I know it’s never enough, because it’s never enough for me to not forget: that feelings are safe, feelings are normal, feelings are okay. When we do make an event, then children can feel everything ranging from pressured to embarrassed. It’s too much focus on them in a vulnerable time, and that can cause them to want to push us away, hide.

That can happen when a child falls down or bumps themself and a parent gets really upset about that or so sympathetic, and we’re running towards our child as if it’s an emergency. That’s an impulse a lot of us have, and it’s a good one to try to get perspective on. Because our tone is always going to set the tone. And children don’t want a big fuss made over them, especially when they’re upset. A good default is to observe, listen, receive your child’s energy first, and maybe all the way through if they’re having a feeling, instead of trying to talk or do something about it. So even if our child falls from across the room, we look first. Maybe we start to approach, but slowly, not running over. “You fell.” And then we see that our child is crying, or maybe they’re not crying, but let’s say they’re crying first. “Oh no, did that hurt? Ouch. You didn’t like that.” With a very small child, we might just go over with them what happened, but in this very reflective way. We’re not trying to talk about it, we’re not trying to say words. We’re just noticing: “I think you tripped on this, right? On this toy. Yeah, ouch.” And then we let it go. And if we’re reading that our child seems to want to hug, then we hug. Mostly we’re just receiving, allowing, and accepting.

Of course, if there’s something we could do physically to help our child feel better, we will. Ideally not in panic mode, making a big event out of it. Because then children feel that too, that it’s too much. It’s too uncomfortable, it’s too much pressure, it’s too embarrassing. They’re the center of attention. And sometimes they can sort of feel like it’s their role to help us feel better, because they sense that we’re feeling as uncomfortable as they are. And it’s hard not to as parents, because we do love our kids and we never want to see them hurt or sad or anything besides happy. But I guess that’s where being brave for our child really can be a positive thing. And just being receivers.

Getting back to this parent’s note, she knows, as she says, that these feelings her child has make a lot of sense. She says, “When I come back, my three-year-old seems very mad at me. I understand this feeling, but what worries me is the way it plays out.” So this parent is sharing, and this is why she shared the note with me, that she’s worried. One thing I can know is that her child is feeling the parent’s worry in these moments. And even that can add to a child’s discomfort and make it harder for them to want to share. Maybe one or two times we noticed they didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so now we’re worried. And our child is feeling that. They just want to have their feeling. They don’t consciously think like this, but Just let me have my feeling! I think we can all relate to that. Sometimes when a partner or a friend or a relative or someone is trying to make us feel better and, Just let me have my feeling! If you’re worried about me, now I have to worry about you and I can’t just feel how I feel myself. So that’s something to look at, possibly.

Then this parent says, “It seems when she is upset or angry, she is afraid or ashamed of her emotions.” Again, this parent, very perceptive, insightful. She’s sensing her child is afraid or ashamed about her emotions. That’s the discomfort that her child feels. Now, why would she be afraid? Maybe because her parent is worried. Maybe because she feels a little bit too much attention around this and that’s why she’s ashamed. Maybe she’s ashamed because she feels the parent is too concerned about this, putting too much attention on it. I’m just throwing these things out here, I obviously don’t know for sure. And I don’t blame this parent for anything she’s feeling. She’s going through it, it’s a tough situation all around.

The parent says, “She runs and hides, refuses any comfort, tells me to go away and shouts, ‘Mummy, I want Daddy back!'” The running and hiding—yes, it could be that it’s too hard to try to contain that parent’s feelings while I have mine, as a child. So I need to just get some privacy with this.

“Refuses any comfort.” I wonder if the dear mother, out of her worry, is wanting to comfort her child, but in a way might be wanting to comfort herself that this is going to be okay. I don’t know that, but I mean, I can feel that as a parent. I can feel, I want you to feel better so I can feel better. That’s often where our wish to actively comfort comes from. And I don’t know what this comfort looks like when she says her daughter refuses it. Comfort in this case will come when the parent lets go a little bit more, lets go of worrying. Because, as she says, she understands the feeling. And the feeling makes sense to me. So it’s safe for her child to have this feeling all the way through, and that’s what she needs to do to get to the other side of it.

She says that her daughter tells her to go away and shouts, “Mummy, I want Daddy back!” That is her expressing her feeling. She’s expressing her anger and her upset feeling there and her sadness, maybe. I want Daddy back! I have to make this transition. Go away! I’m not ready to transition from Daddy to you yet. I need to have this passage of feelings first. So let me have them. Don’t get in my way. Even though the parent is trying so hard to do the right thing, right?

She says, “Today she shut herself in the bathroom and told me to go away if I opened the door. I sat outside, acknowledged her feelings, and let her know I was there and ready to help her when she needs me. The more I spoke, the more angry she was.” Yes. So when our acknowledging and our words make our child angrier or more upset, it’s often because, and I think that’s true in this case, maybe our intention in saying these words, maybe it’s coming out of our worry. Our wanting to work her through this, that this is a problem, that we’ve got to say these things and let her know that we’re there. When our child just needs to not be thinking about us and just to be in herself and her feelings.

And then of course, you’ve got to love this: “She eventually just snapped out of it after 20 minutes.” Snapped out of it. That’s what children do, especially at this age. They do snap out of it, when they’re ready to.

So, in answer to this question, “Do you have any advice for helping her to be more comfortable when feeling sad or angry?” Yes. I would calm myself. Not try to talk, not try to comfort. Know that your child feels your presence, they feel your worry or they feel your acceptance. If we can let go of worry and let ourselves drop into acceptance, let the feelings be, just keeping the focus on ourselves, then our child will feel that safe space to express her feelings. And when we’ve done this a few times around all her feelings, especially these ones that are so triggering for us, right? Because I’m sure this parent has her own feelings she’s processing and navigating about this situation. It’s so hard. But trying to keep that separate and just focus on herself, and let her child have it her way, the way that she does it. Which may be shutting herself away for a while, that’s okay. Trust that it’s a process.

And if we can show, not tell her, that we’re there for her and ready to help when she needs us. Even that—obviously this parent doesn’t mean it that way, but it can be pressurizing. Alright, I’m waiting. Let me know if you need me. It feels, as the child, like we’re getting rushed, like we’re supposed to feel better because our mom is doing all this stuff to try to help us feel better, saying the right things, doing the right things. We just want to feel how we feel. Just leave me alone! It can make sense when we put ourselves in our child’s shoes. And if we can trust more and accept more, she will feel safer to have them in our presence. But I wouldn’t have that be your goal. I would just have your goal be to let her do her thing the way that she does it, and trust that she’s going to come out the other side and feel better, probably snap out of it the way children do.

And that’s our job, we’ve done it. Accepting the feelings and also accepting the way our child is expressing them. Even if it doesn’t look the way that we imagine or the way it is in the movies or the way that looks like this wonderful parent and we have this moment together where we hug. That’s just not the vibe of these feelings right now. Giving into that and just letting go of it is the way.

Just a couple details about separations. Understanding more, again, how much sense these feelings make. This is a big transition for this child, or any child, to let go of one parent and be with another. Even if they’re staying in the same house and the parents are moving back and forth, or if they’re the ones that are moving from house to house. All transitions tend to be challenging for children, just getting up and going from here to there. And now here’s one that’s especially challenging, separating from one attachment figure and embracing another.

This can be easier for children when they feel like their attachment figures are aligned, not separate. But that’s not always the way our lives as parents work out, right? So no guilt there. But it’s something to realize, just to help us even more to normalize what she’s going through. Realizing that this is a natural time for her to express the strongest feelings, and the best thing she can do is to vent them out. And it can help kids if we’re able to give our partner who we’re separated from or divorced from grace, so children can still experience as much as possible a harmonious unit between parents. But that’s not always possible, I know.

Here’s some general suggestions for any parent going through something like this, where their child isn’t allowing them to comfort them or showing them their feelings the way the parent wishes them to. Allow. Allow children to express their feelings in their own immature way. Yelling at us may be a part of that. It’s not personal. Allow children to find their way to calm in their own way and time. So we’re not trying to dictate that for them or affect it in any way. That can be a tough one for us, right? And lastly, allow children to hide or not talk about it or stuff it with their thumb or their pacifier, after we’ve opened up that door for them to share with us very briefly. Don’t impose any pressure at all on what they’re doing, that they have to do it differently for us because we want them to. This is easier when we let go of feelings as some kind of agenda for us, and we’re just available. Within reason, I mean, we’re not going to let ourselves be screamed at in the face or pummeled or otherwise abused. We’re just being available, trusting. We’re calming ourselves, and that is the best way to comfort them or co-regulate, if we want to call it that. Calming ourselves, letting the feelings be. So simple, yet so not easy.

I share a whole section on meltdowns and tantrums and other feelings that children have, whining, and how we can handle that, how we can approach it, how to feel about it, in my No Bad Kids Master Course. You can check it out at nobadkidscourse.com.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope some of this helps. We can do this.

The post When Kids Hide Their Feelings and Reject Our Comfort appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Tantrums, Meltdowns, and Other Intense Outbursts: My #1 Secret for Staying Calm”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

This podcast is called Unruffled, and you’ve heard me share many different perspectives on how to be an unruffled parent, how to stay calm in all different situations. But I haven’t really zeroed in and talked just about my own personal favorite mindset. The secret I’ve used for myself to be able to manage the incredibly uncomfortable, challenging task of facing my children’s intense emotions.

Before I ended up sharing this little secret, back in 2010 I think it was, on my website, and it’s also in my No Bad Kids book, I was worried it was too silly. It felt embarrassing, and that maybe I’d be laughed at. But I was wrong. I think! I mean, maybe people are still laughing behind my back about this, there’s a good chance of that. But I’ve also heard how this advice has encouraged people. I guess there’s a lesson in that, that if something helps you, no matter how personal and silly it might seem, it might yet help someone else.

And that’s also why I love sharing your success stories, and I have one of those to share today. Sure, it’s validating for my efforts when my perspective helps somebody, but I don’t share success stories to toot my horn. I share them to encourage you that if a certain way of addressing or seeing behavior, a certain way of responding to it, helped that family, helped that parent, maybe I could brave that too and it would help me. It gives us more permission, it gives us more inspiration. Oh, people are really doing some of these things that seem scary and hard and it’s working for them.

I’m a fan of Dr. Susan David’s work in her book Emotional Agility. And this is one of my favorite quotes from her: “Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking. Walk directly into your fears, with your values as your guide, toward what matters to you.” And that relates to the little secret I’m going to share about.

Alright, so cough it up already! My silly secret is imagery. And again, if you’ve read or listened to my book, you’ve heard me speak of this. It’s my superhero suit. I imagine myself putting on a superhero suit, with a cape, the whole business. And it has a shield that covers my chest and it allows for all the intensity, the frustration, the anger, rage, or dysregulation that my child has to kind of bounce off of me. It deflects it, so all of that emotion doesn’t get into my heart. I’m safe. I can be in hero mode.

Slipping into this suit also reminds me, and this is from my book, that this is a V.I.P.M., a Very Important Parenting Moment. Releasing these feelings is so good for my child. This explosion will clear the air and lift my child’s spirits. Staying present and calm, sticking with whatever limits I’ve set and being a safe channel for these emotions is the very best thing I could ever do.

Here are some of the superhuman parenting powers my suit provides. You could see these kind of as affirmations. They have been for me.

• I understand that difficult behavior is a request for help — the best my child can do in that particular moment.

• I remember to acknowledge my child’s feelings and point of view. The importance of this can’t be overemphasized.

• I have the confidence to set and hold limits early, before I get annoyed or resentful. And I do so calmly, directly, honestly, non-punitively.

• I know that my words are often not enough. I’ll likely need to follow through by intervening to help my child stop the behavior.

• I’m not afraid of what others think when I need to pick up and carry my crying, screaming child out of a problematic situation, because my child comes first.

• I have the courage to allow feelings to run their course without trying to calm or rush or fix, shush, or talk my child out of them. I might say, “You have some very strong feelings about that,” rather than yelling, “Enough!”

• I move on without resentment once my child’s storm has passed. Rather than feeling angry, guilty, or dejected for the rest of the day, I hold my head high and congratulate myself for being an awesome, heroic parent.

And just to touch on that point about “I’m not afraid of what others think when I need to pick up and carry my crying, screaming child out of a problematic situation”—it did take a couple of times of this happening before I could really proceed with confidence. With those blinders on that are so helpful to us sometimes as parents when we’ve got a lot of input from disagreeing sources or the public or we’re embarrassed, all of that getting in our way. These blinders can help. And we can get those when we practice this, it takes practice. But after a few times or even the first time to a great extent, I did feel that. I started to feel like instead of, Oh gosh, I’m so ashamed I have to do this and my child and what’s the matter with them? Because I knew it wasn’t that my child was being a bad person there. I knew, and I would soon realize, what had caused this. Often it was tiredness, hunger, but mostly tiredness actually, in most of my cases. And kids just can’t show us that so easily, when they’re very young especially.

I began to feel like, I’m actually a model right here. I’m a model for all these people watching, whoever they are, of being a brave parent. Of, as Susan David says, fear walking. I’m walking through it. And it was like I would open up this channel for myself to be in it and to own my benevolent power at that point. And people may have snickered or thought terrible things about me and my children, I don’t know. But I know that it felt right, and that’s all I needed and that’s all my child needed, was to feel the positiveness of this. I mean, I wasn’t smiling and laughing and enjoying it, but I was okay and I was centered and I was doing the right thing. And that always proved true.

So when parents talk to me about what everyone else is thinking on the playground or wherever they are, the relatives, I encourage them to believe in themselves as the hero in those moments. Because they really are. And the more we believe it, the more others will tend to see that kind of glow around us, Wow. That’s not being permissive, it’s not letting our child unravel and continue the behavior with people or hurt someone else or make a scene. Instead, we’re rescuing them from that.

One of the toughest aspects of the job of superhero is that our kids are usually showing us that they don’t want us to be doing what we’re doing. And it’s easy to take this as that they’re mad at us and they’re even madder that we’re intervening. It’s like we’re trying to save someone who really doesn’t want to be saved and that makes it so much harder, right? To have conviction. Many months ago I did an episode around that. I called it When Our Kids Reject Us (A Step-by-Step Response). And I offered the steps and how they applied to the issues that parents shared with me in three different letters. So here are those steps again, but I’m just going to be paraphrasing them.

1. Be prepared, do the homework. Working on our perspective, that’s the homework. How are we perceiving our child’s behavior? Because that’s going to direct our actions and decide our feelings. If we see a hurting child, it brings up totally different feelings in us than when we see what really is a mask on the outside, that seems really mean and ugly and hurtful. And then another part of being prepared and doing the homework is that if this is repeated behavior, we know that something’s up. We know maybe not exactly what’s happening, but that our child is expressing something that needs to be expressed, that they need to express. And they’re not quite getting what they need around that, not quite getting the response that they’re looking for, unconsciously. So that’s all part of the first point, being prepared, doing the homework.
2. In the moment, block the physical behavior as best and as confidently as you can. And confidently means we’re not overdoing it, we’re just blocking as needed. We’re kind of trying to make it look easy if we can. And that comes from being ready for it, because we’ve done the homework. And blocking early. I mean sometimes it’s going to happen anyway, but we’re not waiting until after something happens and then it happens again. We’re ready that next time or ideally, we’re ready before the first time, because we see it coming.
3. If there’s a chance to have eye contact during these explosions, try to be open, soft-eyed, as empathetic as possible. Breathe. Maybe nodding your head ever so slightly. I know this is hard, but it comes from seeing the hurt behind the mean behavior and connecting with that.
4. If there’s a break in their shouting or their screaming, just reflect back what your child is saying. We’re just staying in the moment, acknowledging it right there as it comes. “It feels to you like I’m the meanest person ever.” “You didn’t want me to be the one to pick you up, you wanted daddy.” Or, “You hate me so much right now,” if that’s what they’re saying. “Those are angry words.”
5. Show more than tell. Not talking a lot about, “I can’t let you do this behavior,” especially if it’s repeated behavior. That part goes without saying. We just want to show, without tell, that we’re going to stop them, we’re going to block them, that we can’t let them do the behavior. And for the most part, children already know that this is unwanted, wrong behavior.
6. Let it go. After it’s done, don’t rehash, unless it’s to make some kind of helpful, non-judgmental plan together about how we could do this differently. And the non-judgmental part of that is key. So it’s not, “Well, what are you going to do next time?” It’s really, “This keeps happening. Is there anything I can do? What can we do to make this easier?” That kind of openness makes our child feel safe. And sometimes even just that interaction, that we’re open, we’re not judging them, and we want to help. Sometimes that’s enough that we don’t actually have to have a plan, but just the fact that we’re open to that can be enough for them to feel better and not do that behavior, whatever it is.

Here’s one of the particular notes that I responded to, which I’ve edited. This is the parent that just this week gave me an update. She says:

Dear Janet,

I feel my daughter is a well-adjusted, wonderfully expressive kid who’s securely attached to her parents. However, five weeks ago, my mother, whom my daughter adores, was in the hospital with emergency surgery. Although my mom had cancer, this surgery came out of left field and for three weeks I was at the hospital every day. I still made sure to spend at least three hours with my daughter daily in a present, attuned way. Still, she knew something was wrong with grandma. She kept saying, “Mommy, hospital, care, grandma.” And I told her where I was going. Plus, she felt her schedule change when I wasn’t there as much.

Then my husband took her away to see her other grandparents for three nights. She’s never been away before and her sleep completely unraveled. She could only fall asleep by falling asleep right on daddy. She’d also never been away from mommy that long.

Then the very next day they returned, my mother died. That was two weeks ago. This came out of left field for my daughter. I never even got to the part where I planned to slowly tell her grandma was really ill. So it’s a shock for all.

Since then, our daughter’s refused to let me put her down to sleep at night. She frequently pushes me away, says, “Go away, Mommy.” This has blossomed into not even letting me pick her up when she’s finished napping or sleeping, demanding daddy all the time and shrieking and tantruming whenever daddy isn’t there. Whereas we used to cuddle every afternoon after her nap, now she sobs hysterically and asks me to leave her alone. I do. I do my very, very best to be nonchalant, but in a loving way, letting her know I’m here for her. Eventually she gets up and wants to play, but seems only to feel truly okay when daddy returns.

She’s never had tantrums before, she’s never preferred daddy before or pushed me away or said, “Go away!” I’ve put her down almost every night of her life. It seems that in some way she blames me for losing her grandma or associates me with the bad feeling she has about it.

She talks about grandma a lot, is very upset about this weird death thing. I’ve been straightforward about explaining that grandma died and her body stopped working and I’m so sorry and we will miss her and be sad and mad, but also still feel her love in our hearts and all of that. We talk about it every day, but only when she brings it up. I follow her lead. I allow her to see me cry or be sad about grandma, but I do shield her from seeing me sob hysterically, things I think would be burdensome to a child. I have tried to really role model a healthy approach to grieving.

And although it’s very painful to be constantly pushed away from my daughter at the exact moment I lost my mother, I do my absolute best to be nonchalant in the sweet way you always role model. Like, Sure, go with daddy. I admit she has probably picked up on my hurt here or there, but I really try not to burden her with that or manipulate her in any way. I understand she’s going through something and I don’t blame her for any of this, obviously. But I really don’t know what to do to make it better for her or to be included in her sphere of affection and safety again.

I responded: First of all, I want to say I’m so sorry for this parent’s loss. As children are, her daughter seems she’s especially tuned in to how her mother is feeling. That can be almost stronger for a child than the feelings they have about the relationship because though they feel the loss, they don’t really yet understand the implications. They don’t have that frame of reference. And so the more that we can be plain and simple and truthful, the easier it is for kids to process it. This parent is showing wonderful empathy and instinct for how she’s caring for her daughter.

A couple of things stood out to me. First is that this parent concludes: “It seems in some way she blames me for losing her grandma or associates me with the bad feeling she has about it.” That part doesn’t ring true to me. To me it feels like this is more about that she senses there’s a lot going on inside her mother, but her mother isn’t quite expressing that to her in the moment. And children, they pick up on this, this whole devastation that’s going on inside this mother. And that can be what’s making them uncomfortable around that person. It’s that the mother’s sitting on a lot of feelings that she’s not sharing and that’s disconcerting.

When she is with her mother, she’s doing this really, really healthy thing that children do so beautifully, which is that they reflect back to us our insides. They’ll put the feelings they’re picking up from us on the outside. So when she’s saying, no, no, no! and has these tantrums and refuses to be with her mother, I would stand tall and face that if you can. I mean, this mother’s going through her own thing. And number one, she obviously needs to take care of herself. She’s being so gracious about her daughter and trying to protect her from these feelings. But maybe the simmering inside of such strong feelings in the mother is uncomfortable for the child.

The way to help her through that is to actually stand by her when she’s pushing you away. And doing those steps that I mentioned. Blocking the physical behavior. If there’s eye contact, being open, soft-eyed, empathetic. If there’s a break in the shouting or the tantrum, just reflect back what she’s saying, just what you know for sure. “You want me to go, you just want daddy, you’re not comfortable with me.” Letting it be okay for her to share that and not shying away from it. I was flattered that this parent said that I role model nonchalant. The way I see it, though, is not so much nonchalant, like I’m pretending I don’t care when I actually do, but as something that I can believe, which is that I’m unthreatened. And then we could say, Ouch, you don’t want to be with me. But you know what? I can hear that. You can tell me that. I’m still going to be there for you.

And then I said, now if it gets too much for this parent, yes of course, let daddy do it. But remember: every time we do that, we’re accommodating. We’re agreeing with our child that, Yeah, you need to be with daddy now and not me. And she’s still going to be expressing these feelings to you in this seemingly mean, awful, rejecting way. That’s going to happen for a little while until she processes it through.

I love how this parent said she’s trying to show her daughter a healthy grieving process, but wow, she’s putting a lot of responsibility on herself. Because a truly healthy grieving process is exactly your unique human grieving process. In other words, there isn’t a perfectly healthy grieving process, so we don’t need to try to make it smooth or right or hit all the right notes. Because each person has a different grieving process with each type of grief that they’re experiencing. And so the healthiest grieving process is just to allow that, to express it, to share it. And I said, hopefully this parent is sharing it with people besides her daughter.

But even with her daughter, the key here is just to say in the moment when it comes up, “I miss my mom so much right now, this makes me want my mommy.” Opening that up a little bit more, because I don’t believe this parent will let herself lose control and get hysterical and scare her daughter that way. And it’s safe for her to open up some space to show her pain so it’s not this mysterious, uncomfortable thing for her daughter. So we’re letting her in, in the moment, just when the feelings come up. “Ugh, I just got a pang of how much I miss my mom” while I’m doing this random thing. That’s how our grief often comes. Some random thing happens that triggers us. So it’s safe to share that. In fact, it’ll bring you much closer to each other, as being honest about feelings does. Always.

Just this week, this parent got back to me, many months later:

Hi, Janet-

I’ve wanted to write you back since you responded to my letter in your show so long ago. I think I kept waiting for a time I could report feeling like a healthy, happy human again. In fact, eight months after losing my mom, the grief is still very intense and I still feel I’m on an alien planet. Losing my mom was more life-changing to me than becoming one. Thankfully, it does not stop me from enjoying my daughter, it only adds a sadness that my mom is missing this incredible kid. Or maybe she isn’t, who knows?

All that said, I never got a chance to tell you that your advice to me, while terrifying, completely worked. You told me to stay the course when my daughter screamed in my arms demanding her father and to show her that I was not going anywhere. I was genuinely scared to try this out, but I did so, the very night I heard your podcast.

The first night she cried for 15 minutes straight, constantly tried to wiggle out of my arms. It was absolutely awful. And then she stopped and we went back to our old ritual. When she fell asleep, I felt like Marlon Brando at the end of On The Waterfront, completely brutalized but triumphant. The next night she cried for about five minutes and then just stopped and we were fine. The third night she started to cry for one second, seemed to remember all was good now, and gave me no pushback whatsoever, ever again. It was actually amazing to see something work so incredibly well so fast. So thank you so, so much, forever.

Lately, my daughter, who is now two years and seven months, is definitely sliding into frequent meltdown mode, being defiant at every turn, and saying no to everything, usually quite cheerfully. “No, I think I will not put on a new diapie!” and instantly going apoplectic when she doesn’t get her way. I feel like I’ve spent almost three years preparing for this moment by listening to your podcast. I set the boundary while remaining totally sympathetic to her feelings. There are some things I can’t physically force, such as making her blow her nose, so I let those go. And sometimes I do just let things go because I’m tired, like I’ll let her run around naked for too long and then she pees on the floor. But on the whole, I feel like your counsel has given me such a concrete goal to constantly practice.

In your message to me in the podcast, you made the distinction between being nonchalant versus unthreatened. This difference is really powerful. Deep down, I admit I am kind of threatened by the intensity of toddler emotion. My first thought is always, Well gosh, if it means this much to you, I relent. Or I fear I don’t truly have the authority. But it is downright palpable the way my daughter ultimately relaxes against a boundary. As an anxious type, it really helps to remind myself that this is a way of protecting her from the anxiety of always getting her way.

Thank you for everything.

And I wrote back to this mom:

I’m thrilled to hear that you are walking through the terror (It’s real, I know!) of facing your daughter’s intense emotions. Laud yourself for showing such courage. I hope you’ll savor these moments when you succeed and savor the experiences of your daughter, as you say, “ultimately relaxing against a boundary.” Replay those moments to bolster yourself whenever you need to be in hero mode for her and know, without question, you can do this.

I’m sorry to hear you’re still suffering in regard to your mom. I believe that somewhere, somehow she’s proudly witnessing the developments in her incredible granddaughter and in you.

And here’s what I wrote at the end of my chapter on being a superhero:

Occasionally (though it’s pretty rare) my superhero perspective even allows me to recognize the romance in these moments. I’m able to time travel at hyper-speed into the future, look back and realize that this was prime time together. It didn’t look pretty, but we were close. I’ll remember how hard it was to love my child when she was at her very worst and feel super proud that I did it anyway.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

And by the way, you may have noticed that my audiobooks are not available at the moment and the paperbacks of both books, No Bad Kids and Elevating Child Care, are going to be re-released at the end of April. I believe you can get them in Kindle still and you can buy some used copies that Amazon is selling. But the reason for this is a positive one. For years, those have been self-published books and Random House is now taking over the publishing of them. And they’re also publishing my upcoming book, which you’re going to hear a lot more about as it gets closer! So, this is obviously thrilling for me and I’m sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to get the paperbacks right now, but the audiobooks should be back on any day now. I just wanted to give you that update, and thank you again for all your kind support.

The post Tantrums, Meltdowns, and Other Intense Outbursts: My #1 Secret for Staying Calm 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.

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

Transcript of “My Toddler Won’t Separate or Warm Up to Anyone Else”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be responding to a question from a parent who says that her two-and-a-half-year-old has always had separation anxiety and can’t get comfortable with grandparents, even the child’s father. This little girl gets upset whenever her mother isn’t there to care for her and seems especially anxious around family members that try to engage her or touch her. This parent’s wondering if there’s anything she can do to help her child become more comfortable in these situations and take some of the pressure off this parent, who feels like she’s the only one her daughter will be contented with.

Okay, so here’s the question I received:

Hi, Janet-

Thank you for all the work you do. I have a question about my daughter’s separation anxiety from me (mom) that has seemed to be present since birth.

I’ve always tried to be respectful of her communication. So as an infant, when she showed distress at being held by other family members, I always took her back or, if I had to leave the room, I would let her play on the floor instead of forcing her to be held by somebody else. My mom said that when she seemed upset, I should say, “It’s okay, it’s just grandma.” But I wanted to respect that she didn’t want that physical contact with someone, as we would with an older child who didn’t want to give a hug to a family member. When she was six weeks and I had to go to my postpartum appointment, I left her with my husband and he said that she screamed bloody murder almost the entire time until I returned.

Now, at two-and-a-half, she still has barely ever been left with anyone but me—only for my medical or dental appointments—and she still does not like to be picked up by other family members. She’s very independent when we are at home or in familiar public places like the library, but at family members’ houses if I go to the bathroom she starts crying anxiously for me, even if she was playing independently up until that point. Unlike other children in the family or whom I have worked with, she is never soothed or comforted by other family members, even her dad, and will only accept comforting from me. If she is already happy and comfortable and I am around, that is the only time she can enjoy other adults. And they have to work really hard to be fun or silly or she wants nothing to do with them. She’s definitely more anxious around the family members who have been known to try to pick her up, such as grandma, than the ones who have always given her space.

I guess I’m wondering if I should have allowed her to get used to being held by others when she was an infant. Was she too young for me to employ the rule of not forcing a child to hug anyone she doesn’t want to? But I’ve never seen another baby who is so bothered by being held by others, so I also wonder if it is just her inborn personality.

Thank you.

Okay. While this in its entirety is a very specific issue this parent is having, it’s common for children to be slower to warm up to other people besides their primary caregiver. And that makes sense, right? They’re used to this person, they’re comfortable with this person, and getting comfortable with somebody else outside of this first person they’ve bonded with or are bonding with requires a little stretch for them. It’s a little uncomfortable. And it’s true what this parent says, that some children are more sensitive to this than others and it’s harder for them. They don’t want the touch and smell of that other person or the way that person touches or holds them. It’s unfamiliar.

And I love that this parent was considering that from her child’s birth, it sounds like. She says to me, “I’ve always tried to be respectful of her communication. So as an infant, when she showed distress at being held by other family members, I always took her back.” Because this parent believes that, she believes the truth, which is that a baby deserves the same respect as an older child.

And now her child is two-and-a-half and is still struggling with this. Some of what the issue is is really not something to be concerned about. The fact that her child doesn’t want to be held by people other than her mother, that’s very understandable. But the fact that she can’t be comfortable when her mother leaves the room and she feels, I don’t know if it’s unsafe or that she’s unsure of what other people might do, but the parent can’t get away at all and is kind of trapped. That’s rough, right? When we feel like we can’t get away for a minute without our child expressing displeasure.

And a lot of parents come to me with that issue, saying their child won’t separate, clings to them, what can they do? And it’s really only one thing that I recommend that it sounds like this parent might not be doing, and it’s something that most of us in this situation don’t consider. We miss it, and actually it’s something that we miss in a lot of areas with our children because it’s kind of a brave thing to do. It’s not something that is practiced in our society and it requires this leap of faith.

If you listen here, you’ve heard me talk about this before: really welcoming those feelings. Really welcoming a child to share that discomfort. And that’s kind of the step beyond the wonderful respect that this parent is showing her child, respecting her wishes, not wanting to put her in situations where she shows any discomfort. This is a step even further that’s even more respectful, because what it is is seeing and hearing and welcoming a child to share. That’s the opposite of what is commonly done, which is what this parent says that her mother does, which is, “It’s okay, it’s just grandma.” That’s invalidating, right? Taking our child away or moving them away from that person is thoughtful, and that’s respecting what we are assuming is their wish right then. But the place that I recommend that goes even further is allowing our child to be in that space with their feelings while they have our full support and that we’re acknowledging them.

And this is also a difference that I talk about a lot on this podcast, which is the really important difference between acknowledging and accommodating. When we accommodate, when we say, Oops, you’re crying or you’re showing displeasure with this person, so I’m going to move you away, that is accommodating. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but accommodating tends to keep our child stuck in the discomfort because what it does is it affirms to our child that we see their discomfort as very valid and something that we need to fix, instead of valid and something that they need to express to us. That’s the difference. Both are saying it’s valid, but one is wanting to hear and know about discomfort.

Because this is a precious thing that our child is sharing with us, especially as an infant. I’m telling you something, and because I don’t have the words, this is the way I’m telling you that I’m feeling something here. This is new, this is different. I don’t know this person. I wouldn’t give my child over to someone and then try to acknowledge the feelings my child has while they’re in that person’s arms. I would not take the step of letting this person hold the baby until I had the sense that the baby was saying it was okay. And I’m going to talk about that whole process, but first, I just want to make this overall point that I believe that if this parent started to welcome all these feelings their child is sharing with her as a toddler now, and not be afraid of them and not let them stop her in her tracks or prevent her from going to do the things she needs to do to separate.

And ideally if the person that’s with the child when mom separates, if this is dad or grandma or somebody else if mom’s going to the bathroom, ideally these people will also welcome the feelings. But again, it’s a counterintuitive thing. I wouldn’t expect that people will be able to do that, but that would be the ideal. That dad could say, “Oh gosh, you want your mom so bad. You don’t want me here with you right now. You want to be with mom, right? She’s the one that usually gives you that bath, she’s the one that usually” whatever it is.

To be able to be in that place with our child, unintimidated by the sharing, in fact wanting the sharing—it’s such an opportunity for bonding. I’ve been in this situation with my own children, with other people’s children. That will level you up each time in your closeness if you can be brave and welcome a child to share. This is true with a preschool teacher or a kindergarten teacher or the new caregiver or the old caregiver on a time when the child is just feeling vulnerable and didn’t want the parent to leave that day. The grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, the friends. I’ve seen the bonding effect that bravely welcoming a child’s feelings has. Really welcoming them, not just saying words, “It’s okay to be sad,” but Yeah, I feel you. It’s amazing what this does, but it’s a scary one and it’s still scary for me after all these years. So getting over that hump is very scary.

And you have to believe in it. I mean, maybe what I’m saying here sounds ridiculous and you don’t believe in it and you don’t agree with it. That’s okay, too. This is what I recommend and I know that it works and it helps and it’s what our children need to pass through these different things that they’re going through.

And when this parent says that when her child is around family members, they have to really do a song and dance and a show to be fun or silly to get her attention, that’s not really fair to those adults. I mean, it’s fine that they want to do that, but that’s a lot of work that we don’t need to do. We can be our genuine self with children if we allow them to go through all the feelings that they have about us.

When I have a new child in my class, people coming to the door, they’re holding their baby, and the baby will look at me. And the younger a child is especially, the more they just look at you so openly, right? They’re looking straight into you, and you can kind of read their feelings of, Who are you? Can I trust you? And I always acknowledge that. I’ll say hello to whatever the child’s name is, “Yeah, you don’t know me, you’ve never seen me before, and now you’re coming into this room with me. Who is this lady, right?” I’ll reflect back that vibe that I’m getting from the child and help them to know that it’s really okay with me and it’s valid for them to feel all those things about a new situation and a new person. And I want to encourage that sensitivity in them. That’s why young children are such great learners, because they are so open and sensitive and that’s a good thing. So I want to let them know, “Yes, I’m sure you’re feeling a lot of things. Who’s this lady? Yeah, you’re looking at my hair. Yeah, I have different hair than your mom does.” Whatever it is, I want you to share it with me.

And I’ll do this if I’m going into somebody’s house. I mean, that’s even a more intimate situation that now I’m in your house and I’m sitting with your parent. You don’t know me. Who is this lady talking to your mom? Setting boundaries with you sometimes, if that’s what I’m modeling in that consultation. Who is this person? I don’t expect you to be comfortable with me. I’m brand new to you.

So with this parent, with the family members and the grandparents, I would do this from the very beginning the next time you’re all together. As soon as your child is expressing something about somebody there, “You’re looking at grandma. Are you wondering if she’s going to want to hug you today? Yeah. Well, grandma’s not going to hug you unless you want it, but yeah, I see the way you’re looking at her.” And of course, if grandma could do this too, that would be incredible, but it’s okay, we can still help bridge that for our child. And also we’re kind of modeling for the other adults there that this person has a perspective that’s valid. And the more we allow it, the easier it’ll be for her to pass through it and feel more trust and feel more comfortable with us. That’s how the process looks.

So then I wouldn’t try to entertain her or get her attention. I would encourage everybody to trust that they’re enough. And if you really allow her to be herself and see her and acknowledge her, understand her as she is, where she is in this process, that will help her to want to come to you. And I’ve seen this happen so many times. If we do a big show, then in a way we’re kind of distracting our child from, it’s not a negative thing, but we’re distracting her from those feelings that she has. And we’re performing in a way that we should never need to have to perform with a child. We get to be ourselves in these relationships. That’s what the deepest kind of respect is. Respecting ourselves, respecting our child.

If I had to get up and go to the bathroom and my child may not be comfortable with these people, I’m not expecting her to run up and jump into their arms. I’m asking them not to approach her because I want them to trust that she will come to you if you allow her to be herself. Now I’m going to go to the bathroom, and now she’s upset and she’s screaming, “Oh, you don’t want me to go. You’re not sure about these people, right? Yeah, you’re used to me all the time. It’s hard for me to leave.” I’m saying that as I’m leaving. You can share with us. We want to know. We want to hear about it. I go to the bathroom, I come back, now maybe she’s yelling at me some more. “You didn’t want me to go. Yeah, you’re still sharing with me. You can tell me all those things.” And at her age, she may have some words she’s saying, so just reflect all of them. Nothing to fear here, nothing to fix. It’s freeing, but it’s scary at the same time. So that’s the key that I hope you’ll try.

And when this parent says, “she’s definitely more anxious around the family members who have been known to try to pick her up, such as grandma, than the ones who have always given her space,” you might even bring that out into the open, too. “I know grandma tried to pick you up before and you weren’t sure if you were ready, so now you’re not sure if she’s going to try that again. It’s okay. I talked to grandma and she’s going to wait because she knows that you will want to come be with her at some point when you’re ready.” Just something like that. No secrets here, no unsaid things, no things we’re afraid of, things we’ve got to fix, things we’re worried about. Putting it all out there. The more you do this with your children, the more freedom you’ll feel and the closer you’ll all feel.

It’s like the way sometimes when we can say something to a partner about something we’re unhappy about in the relationship, and the person accepts that or hears it. Maybe they don’t agree with it, but they hear it and they still accept you and seem to still like you and want to be with you. How much more do we love that person after? How much closer do we feel? A lot of us weren’t allowed to express anything remotely negative or not what people wanted to hear and still feel accepted. That’s why it’s so scary, I think that’s one of the reasons. So there’s a lot that this parent can do right now.

I also want to speak to her comment where she said, “I’m wondering if I should have allowed her to get used to being held by others when she was an infant. Was she too young for me to employ the rule of not forcing a child to hug anyone she doesn’t want to? But I’ve never seen another baby who is so bothered by being held by others, so I also wonder if it’s just her inborn personality.” So yes, I agree it is a sign of her inborn personality, that she is on the sensitive side. And I also agree that she shouldn’t have forced her to get used to being held by others when she was an infant. That’s not what this is about. “Was she too young for me to employ the rule of not forcing a child to hug anyone she doesn’t want to?” Absolutely not.

But interestingly, this idea of accepting all feelings that children have, it seems to be becoming almost a mainstream idea, the way there’s so much acceptance and talk about this idea of letting feelings be. And that was not the case five, 10 years ago. So that’s a wonderful thing, right? That we’re realizing that feelings need to flow, and that’s the key to everything: Our child’s behavior being understood and helping them to move through it. And improve their behavior, if we want to see it that way. For them to have emotional fluency, social-emotional intelligence. To feel close to us, to feel wholly accepted. This is wonderful progress that we’re all making. And maybe I’m imagining that it’s becoming mainstream because it’s very much around in my world, but even if it’s a little more in that direction, it’s wonderful.

The interesting thing, though, is that this idea, for most people it starts somewhere in the toddler years, this idea that children have feelings to express and need to express them. It’s still uncommon for people to consider that an infant has this need. And that’s what’s quite different about Magda Gerber’s approach. And one of the things that stuck out for me so strongly when I heard it from her was that even a baby has a right to cry. Now, if we don’t quite think of a baby as a full-fledged human being quite yet, that maybe we think of them as this more simplified state, then we will maybe only be able to imagine that allowing a baby to cry is abandoning them, letting them cry it out, not caring, forcing them to. Not something that we are intimately involved in supporting. So that’s an idea I would like to bring forward here.

Because this parent is certainly right in that she shouldn’t force the baby into someone else’s arms and try to force them to get used to it. But what the parent did, and what most people do is, she just thought, Uh-oh, she’s saying no, so I’m going to avoid this situation. Instead of hearing all the in-between. What’s in between accommodating our baby in the situation and forcing them to be in an uncomfortable situation or leaving them to have uncomfortable feelings or distress. Never ever, ever do we need to do that. The truly respectful, loving place is in between, where we’re curious about what our baby is sharing, and we’re not assuming that we have to fix this, that allowing it is some kind of abandonment or not caring about what our child is feeling. It’s the exact opposite. It’s noticing the nuances of what they’re expressing. And babies cry to express a lot of nuance because they don’t have those words to say yet. Now, obviously, we don’t want the baby to get to a point of deep distress If we can help that.

Here’s the process that I recommend. So here I am, here’s grandma. I’m holding the baby. Grandma says, “I want to hold the baby,” or reaches out for the baby. Of course grandma wants to hold the baby, right? I stop. I maybe gently put my hand on grandma, or I somehow gently block and I turn to my baby in my arms. I make sure the baby can see grandma, and I say, “This is your grandma. She would like to hold you right now. What do you think about that?” And I hold my baby up a little closer towards grandma, and I check it out with my baby. I read her body language, I look in her eyes, I see if she’s showing comfort or trepidation. And if I see any kind of trepidation, I say, “It looks like you’re not sure yet. That’s okay. We can wait.” But then let’s say grandma’s reaching out and my baby starts to cry. “Oh, that’s not making you comfortable, right? This is a different person here. It’s your grandma. You’re going to get to know her very well, but you’re not ready for her to hold you right now.” Something like that.

And what this does is it takes us down a path of acknowledging instead of accommodating. So our child gets this message as early as possible that they’re allowed to have a process of getting comfortable with people. It’s not about you’re either comfortable or you’re not. It’s this in-between. Where are you now? What are you saying? What are you noticing? We can talk about all of it. And I know there’s some people that are going to think, well, how could you do this with an infant? Mostly, they’re people that haven’t ever tried it. So try it, if you want to. Because there is some truth in what this parent’s saying about if she could have allowed her child to start getting used to people earlier. She could have, and that’s the way. Through acknowledging, through being open to and bravely willing to accept and put words to what our child is feeling.

And if we don’t know, we say, “I don’t know. I’m not sure if you’re ready. Hmm.” Maybe grandma reaches out, “Let’s see. Let’s see how this goes.” And then the baby starts crying, “Oh no, it seems like you’re not ready yet. You don’t want grandma to hold you.” And then even with grandma holding her right there, I’m still there in close contact with her, letting her know that if she looks at me with those scared eyes, yes, I’m going to take her back. But it’s possible that she just wants to express, This is so new. This is all brand new. Who is this person? They hold me differently than mom does. Consider that there’s a lot more to what our children feel from the time they’re born than extreme things. Total distress, I can’t handle this!, and Okay, I’m fine with it. When we simplify babies that way, we can both get stuck in these kind of patterns that may have been created here, this very loving way of accommodating. It’s easier to start considering welcoming a child’s feelings as early as possible. And it’s helpful for us too to know that, Oh, there’s nuances here. Every cry isn’t an emergency that I have to fix.

And when I’m caring for my child’s specific needs, they’re crying because they’re hungry or tired, even then we’re of course filling the need, but we’re also acknowledging, “My, you’re in a very big hurry. You want to eat right now while I’m getting my pillow, while I’m getting comfortable. Yeah, it’s so hard to wait sometimes when you’re hungry. I’m glad you’re telling me that. I always want to know what’s going on with you.” Those messages. Or, “Oh gosh, I think you may be getting very tired. We did a lot today.” Or, “This person’s brand new to you. You never saw him before. It seems like you’re saying no, you’re not quite ready for him to be this close right now. Thanks for letting us know.”

That kind of openness goes a very long way. I mean, it lasts all the way through our kids’ adulthood where they can tell us all the hard things, all the uncomfortable things, the things that are happening right now between us, even. It’s powerful because we’re taking care to want to know, instead of giving them that message subtly, lovingly, that we don’t think they can handle this situation at all, even in stages, so we’re going to protect them from it. That’s accommodating. Or telling them, Shh, don’t feel what you’re feeling. It’s okay. It’s just grandma. Don’t feel what you’re feeling. Don’t share what you’re sharing.

If any of this makes sense to you, try it, and please let me know how it goes. And for this parent with a two-and-a-half-year-old or any parent, a parent with a teenager, it’s never, ever too late to start bravely accepting the feelings. Never too late.

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 My Toddler Won’t Separate or Warm Up to Anyone Else appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Caring for Our Children and Ourselves in Tragic Times”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about caring for ourselves and our children in times of crisis, like this crisis that our whole world seems to be in right now. And I hope what I have to say also applies to crises in our personal life, in our communities. How do we care for ourselves while caring for the greater suffering of others? How do we find our way when it’s all so overwhelming? I’m no expert, so I can only humbly share what I’m learning from others who are, and what I’ve discovered for myself that helps me, and also some specifics for helping our children.

So, the reason this is very focused on us is because we are our children’s number one, as their parents or caregivers. When we become parents, we take on an enormous responsibility that challenges us to our depths, brings us lots of pain, but also enormous joy. Our power and influence over these younger people is undeniable and it’s unrelenting. It’s a job that only we can do, we’re it. We’re their baseline, always. The baseline for our children’s well-being is ours. That can be daunting, I know. And as I brought up in the intro, I know some things about caring for children; I don’t know as much about caring for ourselves, and I’m learning. So I’m going to share what is helping me and also what I’m learning from people who are experts on this topic.

And on that note of learning from others, I’m learning that I have to be discerning about the input that I’m receiving. And when we’re taking in information and perspectives, to keep the focus on feeds that feed us, feed our spirit rather than draining us. And maybe that’s not being on media at all. There’s so much misinformation, so much rage and hate. So whichever perspectives we’re letting in and giving our attention to, I’m learning that for me at least, it’s important to keep checking in with myself and keep assessing: Is this fueling my empathy and compassion, or is it draining it? It’s really okay to not be glued to the news 24/7, especially if we’re caring for young children—which I’m not anymore, my children are adults. Still, I’m creating boundaries for myself around the sources that I follow and I’m limiting the times that I check in. And, as you all know better than I do, we can still support a particular voice, a person, or a page by following them and then muting them, maybe, and checking in when it works for us. So, I’m learning to use the media, not look away from it, but use it in a manner that I can digest and that helps me to be in the place that I want to be for the people I care about, so that I can be of service in some way.

And then I recommend also focusing on what we can do, who needs us most, which is our child, and accepting those limitations. Our priority has to be this job that only we can do, which is raising a secure child, raising a compassionate problem-solver, and a future peacemaker. This is the biggest gift that we have the power to bring to the world.

So, focusing on that, and then from there, are there ways that we can be of service?

Children, they give us this gift in all challenging times, times of crisis, this gift of the mundane. They still have all their ordinary needs and feelings. They still need to cry over—seemingly, comparatively—small things, they still need to play and laugh and be silly with us. They still benefit from the reliable daily routines that we’ve developed with them. So I would try to allow for this healing gift and welcome it. It’s good for us, and it’s good for our kids. Yes, it’s normal to feel guilty for the many privileges in our lives, the privilege of our life, the privilege of our safety. And sometimes, yes, our feelings of guilt are a sign that there’s something more that we can do and want to do, there are changes that we can make. But guilt alone doesn’t affect us or anyone positively. It drains, it hurts. So what I try to do is—and I have a lot of guilt, believe me—I try to turn my guilt into gratitude and, from there, empathy and compassion. I don’t always succeed at that, but that’s my aim.

And speaking of sources that feed us, I want to share some very wise words from one of my favorite sources, which is Susan David. She’s the author of Emotional Agility, she’s been a guest on this podcast, and she has a newsletter that I could not recommend more, it’s at susandavid.com. You can sign up for a free newsletter. And here are some thoughts that she shared this past week. I’m just taking an excerpt, so this isn’t the whole piece. You’ve got to go sign up for yourself to see it. Now I’m direct quoting her:

So how do we protect ourselves—and our ability to be compassionate—in a world that seems to be asking more and more of us each day? It’s crucial to recognize that “empathy fatigue” or “compassion fatigue” does not arise from having “too much” compassion or empathy. In fact, when we reduce empathy or compassion in the face of exhaustion or burnout we’re likely to actually perpetuate burnout rather than reduce it, because we numb our natural tendencies to connect and commune with others.

So instead of trying to blunt our inclination towards empathy or compassion, it can be helpful to think about how to enhance emotional regulation skills, including self care, setting boundaries, and recognizing what is within our sphere of influence and what isn’t. Remember that in order to maximize our compassion for others and reduce our risk of burnout, we must also show compassion to ourselves. None of us can do everything for everyone. None of us can eliminate pain from the lives of the people we love. But all of us can do something, and accepting our own limitations is integral to a compassionate life.

So, none of us can eliminate pain from the lives of the people we love, but we can connect. We can connect with them to bring compassion to them and ourselves. So if you’re blessed to have people in your lives that do need you, maybe even outside of your children, people for you to be with, commune with them, especially in times like these.

Here are some other things that I do. I cry. Lately, I’m crying at least once a day. And it’s so interesting to me that I still experience this moment of resistance. It’s like this little wall of resistance, this voice saying, Oh, don’t do this. It’s going to make you feel bad. Don’t give into this. But yet, just as with our children, it never does. It releases something that allows me to feel a little bit better, a little clearer, a little more connected to my humanity, vulnerable and therefore open to others. I mean, I’m a crier. If you’re not a crier, then maybe there are some other ways that you can allow yourself to release your feelings. In healing ways, not ways that actually end up making us suffer more like when we’re enraged and then we feel guilty about that or regret that. We have to keep caring for ourselves, loving ourselves. It’s crucial for caring for our children.

Now, how do we talk to our children about our feelings? Like, say we are crying. And how do we talk to them about what they may be hearing or seeing? First and foremost, listen. To their perspective, to their questions, their feelings. Then, to the questions they have, offer honest, simple, age-appropriate responses and explanations. “You see me crying. I’m feeling sad because people are fighting and hurting each other, and I wish there was something I could do to help them make peace.” Another gift of being able to be honest with our children is that it affirms us, it helps us get our center and express how we’re feeling.

And saying, “I’m feeling sad,” it’s this small adjustment from saying, “I’m sad.” That’s a tendency that I still have, to have the feeling be almost my identity in that moment. But this is something I also learned from Susan David, to give yourself that distance as a person from the feelings. It’s a perspective that helps us remember that feelings pass through us, they are not stuck places. They have a beginning, middle, and end, as Magda Gerber said. So right now, I’m feeling sad. Susan David even says sometimes to say to ourselves, “I’m noticing that I’m feeling . . .” Even giving it a little more distance so that we can not only have a healthier relationship to our feelings, but understand them. It takes that little bit of distance to understand it instead of being just totally absorbed in and overwhelmed by it.

And then with children, we always want to do what I’m always harping on in this podcast: encourage them to express their feelings, or not. Maybe they don’t have what we would expect as feelings about a situation. Just encourage them to express it in whatever way they do, or not express it if they haven’t processed it enough yet. And of course, if we are in or near danger ourselves, we want to remind children with as much confidence as we can muster, “I’m here to keep you safe,” along with welcoming their feelings.

And we can model for our children, with them and with others, small acts of kindness. Here’s more from Susan David’s newsletter. She says:

The beautiful thing about compassion is that it’s a practice we can all develop. One way to become more compassionate is to notice moments in your daily life when you’re inadvertently withholding compassion. It’s easy to get so stuck inside our own heads that we miss opportunities to care for ourselves and others. We move through the world on autopilot, failing to realize the small ways we can contribute: taking on an extra household chore to support an anxious spouse, calling a lonely friend who just moved to a new city. These simple gestures may not feel heroic, but compassion doesn’t require us to be heroes. It just asks us to be aware of what we can do for others while honoring what we must do for ourselves.

And now I’d just like to end this with a prayer for the Middle East conflict by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby:

God of Compassion and Justice,

We cry out to you for all who suffer in the Holy Land today.

For your precious children, Israelis and Palestinians,

Traumatized and in fear for their lives;

Lord, have mercy.

For the families of the bereaved,

For those who have seen images they will never forget, 

For those anxiously waiting for news, despairing with each

passing day;

Lord, have mercy.

For young men and women,

heading into combat,

bearing the burden of what others have done and what

they will be asked to do;

Lord, have mercy.

For civilians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, that they

would be protected and that every life would count and be

cherished and remembered;

Lord, have mercy.

For the wounded, and those facing a lifetime of scars,

for those desperately seeking medical treatment where there

is none;

Lord, have mercy.

For medical and emergency personnel, risking their own

lives to save those of others;

Lord, have mercy.

For those who cannot see anything but rage and violence,

that you would surprise them with mercy, and turn their

hearts towards kindness for their fellow human beings; 

Lord, have mercy.

For people of peace, whose imagination is large enough to

conceive of a different way, that they may speak, and act,

and be heard;

Lord, have mercy.

Mighty and caring God, who promised that one day, swords

will be beaten into ploughshares, meet us in our distress,

and bring peace upon this troubled land.

Amen.

Thank you for listening. We can do this.

The post Caring for Our Children and Ourselves in Tragic Times 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 “Meltdowns That Keep Happening, Even When We’re Doing Everything Right”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I have a question from a parent that I received in an email, and she’s an amazing parent, clearly. She’s wondering what to do when she’s responding to her child’s upset feelings in all these wonderful ways, and yet he’s still having these extended meltdowns that end up making her upset. She says it’s breaking her heart. I would love to help her understand some nuances that might be missing here and how she can easily shift into a role that will, I feel sure, help him have shorter meltdowns and less meltdowns.

Okay, so before I read this note, I just want to comment that I try to choose topics and questions that I not only think will interest listeners, but that first and foremost interest me in terms of responding. Being able to share things that I haven’t shared exactly before. I’m just a person that doesn’t like repeating myself, I know that it can be helpful to do that. And also I’m very intrigued by the subtleties in our responses to our children. So not the broader strokes, but the finer strokes. So that’s what this response is going to be about. This parent is doing everything sort of by-the-book, the way that I put it out there—at least I can see how it seems like that to her. So I’m really looking forward to getting in here. She’s provided a lot of details, which is really helpful.

I actually had another question that was in a similar vein to this, but there really weren’t a lot of details. And what I did was I replied back, could the parent please take a video of these episodes with her child so that I could see for myself some of the nuances that are happening between them? I know that’s not easy to do, setting up a camera when we’re going through something with our child, but that can be extremely helpful. It’s why I love doing in-person consultations the most, because it’s all there right in front of you and you can really get a handle on what’s happening.

Okay, so here’s this parent’s lovely note. The subject line on this email is: Please help, desperate parents here.

Hello, Janet-

My husband and I both implement gentle, respectful parenting at home with our three-year-old son, who is very intelligent, verbally expressive, and perceptive. My interaction with my son today brought me to tears, as I felt completely helpless. I’ve been feeling that way lately during some of his huge 30-minute to hour-long meltdowns, and many of them seem to relate to control and power struggles where he tells me or my husband to do something.

Today he told me to put on his pull-ups for him. He’s very capable of putting them on himself and has been doing so daily for several months. To which I responded with, “Yes, putting those on can be tough. I’m here for you if you need help. Can you show me, what’s the first thing that you do when you start putting them on?” His voice became angry as he firmly told me that he wants me to put them on. Long story short, my refusal to put them on for him led to screaming and hitting me in the face with his pull-up diaper.

During this whole 45-minute episode, I offered empathetic words like, “It’s okay to feel mad. Big feelings are tough, but I love you and I’m here for you,” and offered hugs if he wanted them. I mostly tried to sit quietly with him during these moments because talking too much makes him more angry usually. He also gets very upset if I try to do something else, like get ready for his classes and appointments, even after showing empathy, which has made leaving the house very challenging lately. The really difficult thing is, despite teaching and demonstrating that all emotions are normal as long as we maintain gentle hands, he refuses to acknowledge his feelings. I’ll say something like, “You seem frustrated or mad at ___,” or, “Are you feeling mad, frustrated because ___?” And he would get even more angry and yell back, “No, I’m calm!”, even though he’s clearly angry.

We’re perplexed as to why this happens since we’ve been so keen on demonstrating that feelings of all kinds are healthy and normal. We are very mindful about maintaining structure to his day, especially around meals and afternoon nap time, and not overstimulating him with too many to-dos. We also offer safe, age-appropriate choices whenever possible, like his choice of outfits, shoes, meal items, etc., to empower him with decision-making, as well as get him involved in jobs like mopping, setting the table, etc. My husband and I spend a lot of quality playtime with him as I’m a homemaker and my husband immediately takes over when he gets home and on the weekends, but there’s also plenty of independent play time for books, Legos, and blocks, his favorite toys.

Anyway, coming back to today’s episode after all of that background info, the reason why I ended up in tears and feeling absolutely helpless is that as these intense and long episodes linger on, I start to feel myself losing my calm, usually around the 45- to 60-minute mark. I feel the anger and frustration inside myself intensifying, and I know that I can’t maintain the calm much longer. I need to be alone for a minute, but my screaming, irate child does not allow this. This is the moment when I will likely end up screaming at him because I literally can’t handle his screaming at me any longer. And then I feel the weight of the guilt for yelling at him when I know that I, the grown-up, am supposed to be his calm when he has big feelings.

Sorry for the long-winded message, but I am at a loss. I feel like I’ve exhausted my bag of tools. Are meltdowns of this length and magnitude normal? I’m definitely not trying to prevent tantrums, but I feel lost as to what to do during these intense episodes that seem to go on and on with no end in sight. I’m trying my best to be a connected parent and I don’t want to lose my own temper during these moments, but it’s a challenge that I sometimes fail at.

Thank you so much for any advice or words of wisdom that you can offer.

Okay, so there’s a lot here. Even as I’m reading this again, I’m seeing a lot of interesting little details. To me, they’re clues or little clues as to what is going on here. Why this parent’s responses—her very caring, thoughtful responses—are kind of misfiring with her child. She says in the beginning of the note that he’s a very intelligent, verbally expressive, and perceptive child. So yes, he’s reading really everything that she’s feeling and her intentions as much as hearing her words and seeing her actions. So as many children do, and especially children that are extra-perceptive, they’re tuned way in. So it makes it harder on us to pretend anything, even a little bit.

And I know that sometimes it can help to try at calm and then see the results of that, and sometimes that helps us to actually be more calm. But really, calm is an inside job. It has to come from the inside out. It has to come from our perspective on what’s going on with our child, our trust that it’s safe for him to be as mad as he needs to be at us, and that there’s nothing threatening there on our end. That we can welcome that as the big people we want to be for him. And that feelings pass. Obviously it’s daunting if it feels like there’s a 30-minute to hour-long meltdown. I would say that if that’s happening often, that it is a sign that there might be some adjustments we can make. It’s not typical for children to do that. So it seems like he’s giving a clear sign here that he needs a little tweaking in the parent’s approach. And part of it, I believe, is the way this parent and many of us tend to perceive calm.

What calm really is in these situations is that openness we have, that our child feels, to whatever they’re going through and really connecting with them where they are in that way. That’s what’s calming for a child. If we’re trying to practice being calm from the outside in, a child like this especially will tend to feel that and it won’t calm them. It feels almost like we have a little glaze between us of distance, that our child can’t quite be seen and heard through. But that’s a very typical kind of transition state for us as we’re working towards being calm from the inside out. So it’s a positive part of the process. Still, we need to go that extra distance and I’m going to try to explain how to do that based on what’s going on with this parent and child.

And believe me, nothing I’m going to say here or ever is meant to be critical of parents, most of whom—at least the ones that I hear from—are incredibly thoughtful, engaged, respectful, working so hard at this. And I have nothing but admiration for them or any of us that are trying to do this job. So I’m only intending to be helpful, not critical. Though I am going to go over the clues that she’s given me and offer alternative suggestions.

So when this parent says, “Today he told me to put on his pull-ups for him,” and she says, “He’s very capable of putting them on himself and has been doing so daily for several months. To which I responded with, ‘Yes, putting those on can be tough. I’m here for you if you need help. Can you show me what’s the first thing that you do when you start putting them on?'” And then she said, “His voice became angry as he firmly told me that he wants me to put them on.” So it’s wonderful that he’s able to put them on himself. And I think sometimes we can get caught up in, as parents, that if we do something for a child that they can do themselves. That word can. The definition of that in this instance is not, are they able to do the actions ever, but are they able to take those actions now, in this moment? Sometimes they’re not, because they don’t want to. And they have a reason, that they’re probably not aware of, that they just want us to do it.

And I could see how this parent would be concerned. Her child, she said, seemed “to relate to control and power struggles where he tells me or my husband to do something,” so I can see where she feels like, I don’t want him to be controlling me and bossing me, having me do things just because he says so. That’s a valid point. But in this instance, it’s not a big deal. He’s not asking her to go sit in a different chair or get him a different color this or that, something that is a bit unreasonable. He’s asking for a kind of caring, momentary interaction that he just wants. So I would look at, Is it really important that we make sure he do this, even though we know that he can? Or is it more important that I go the other direction, and I’m so willing to do it because I love caring for my child?

Maybe you have to be a parent of grown-up children like me to see how nice it is to be able to help children with their clothes, pull on their pull-up, help them on the potty, put on their pajamas, give them a bath, even if they’re able to do things themselves. Those are caregiving activities that children do tend to crave at different times in their life. And I don’t know what’s going on in the greater scheme of things here with this family, but it’s often when there’s something new happening or something where, just do that little caring thing for me, please. And I know he didn’t say please or ask very nicely maybe, but I would just shrug my shoulders and welcome that and not make a big deal out of it.

Because the way it can come off to a child when we suggest that he should give it a try is that we’re pushing back, we’re invalidating his wish there. Obviously this parent does not mean to do that, but sometimes we can get so caught up in helping our child to achieve and do things or to make sure they’re not bossing us or trying to take control over us in ways that aren’t healthy for them, that we just maybe make a little too much of these small things.

And the other part of this is when we say something like, “Can you show me, what’s the first thing that you do when you start putting them on?” It’s a little bit tricky. It’s not direct and totally honest, which would be to say, “You know what? I know you know how to do this and I don’t want to put those on for you. I want you to do it.” That might come off more direct in that moment. And I was thinking about how this would relate—if we can use an adult example, I know children are not adults, but the kinds of interactions we have with them and the kinds of feelings back and forth can be quite similar. These are human dynamics. So the adult example I thought of is if I said to my friend or my partner, “I don’t feel like driving now, can you take over?” and then they respond, “Start the car and see how that feels.” I would feel a bit invalidated, right? I would feel like you’re trying to get me to do it, even though I said I don’t want to.

So of course I would not do everything that he or any child says, but I would in this case say, “Sure, I’d love to.” Or if I really didn’t want to: “You know what? I don’t want to do that right now. I’ve got my hands full or I’m busy,” or maybe I don’t need to have an excuse. “I just don’t feel like that. Sorry, you can be mad.” That’s a little more connected. So to connect, it’s best to be honest and direct. It’s also best to stay in the now, which is almost always where children live, right? Rather than analyzing or giving an overview. That feels like a bit what this parent does when she says, “It’s okay to feel mad. Big feelings are tough, but I love you and I’m here for you.”

And she said she offered hugs if he wanted them. So going back to the adult example with the car and me not wanting to drive at that moment, and then after I got mad that they tried to get me to drive anyway, and this friend or partner says, “It’s hard to feel mad like that. I’m here for you.” It feels a bit more avoidant, right? Instead of, “Gosh, sorry, you really wanted me to drive and I pushed back on that and I tried to get you to do it. I get why you’re mad.”

When we want to give those messages that it’s okay to feel mad feelings and we love them and we’re here for them, those work better—just as they would with an adult or older child or older person—when we show, rather than tell. By meaning it, by allowing our child to have those mad feelings at us and us not trying to do anything to calm them down, make them stop, analyze them, go over the situation. That’s how children know, they learn deep down it’s okay to feel mad. And that we’re there still, sitting with them, and we’re not offended and we’re showing that we’re still caring and being there for them. Offering hugs can be great, but it can also come off as, Okay, I want you to feel better, so let me hug you right now. It can come off that way, if that’s what we’re feeling.

So I guess overall what I’m trying to say is that what matters in these situations is not the words we say, not the actions we take, but how we are feeling. Because that is what our perceptive child is feeling from us. So it can help to really look at our intentions: What is my intention when I ask my child to do the first step of this activity that they don’t want to do? What is my intention when I’m saying that feelings are tough and I love you and I’m here for you and offering a hug? What is my actual intention there? Oftentimes, if we really connect with this—and believe me, I feel this still, and it was definitely my MO in the beginning when I was first trying some of this with my oldest daughter and then the children I worked with—my intention, if I was honest, was I wanted to make this go away. I mean, not them, but the feelings. I wanted to calm them down, make sure they know that everything’s okay and everything’s going to be all right, and they don’t need to be mad at me. And I’m their friend, I’m on their side. But those were coming from my own discomfort. They weren’t coming from that place that I was talking about in the beginning of the true calm and the true way to calm someone else, which is to trust, This is going to pass. You get to feel this and you’re going to feel better on the other side. I know it. Instead of, I’ve got a responsibility here. I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to make this work. I’ve got to help you feel better. It’s going on and on. I feel stuck and now I want to scream. I really do, because nothing I’m trying is working.

And that’s because we’re trying to get something to work instead of making our sole goal connection, with what’s going on between us right now. Accepting, rolling out the red carpet for those feelings, wanting them to get expressed in their full force all the way, because that’s how children move through it faster. When they go to the heights and the depths of the feeling, they move through it faster and they clear it, they get it out of their system. So it’s not going on and on and it’s not flaring up constantly all day long or all week long. It’s a productive sharing for them of whatever’s going on, which is not about a pull-up, I’m sure, or any of those specifics. It’s some other emotional process he’s got going. That’s what we want to try to trust.

So when we’re connecting, we want to try to be honest and direct, stay in the now. And then the third way is to validate by only reflecting back what we know for sure. And this next part was a clue for me what might be going on with this parent. She says, “The really difficult thing is, despite teaching and demonstrating that all emotions are normal as long as we maintain gentle hands, he refuses to acknowledge his feelings. I’ll say something like, ‘You seem frustrated or mad at ___. Are you feeling mad or frustrated because ___?’ And he would get even more angry and yell back, ‘No, I’m calm!'” So there’s your answer: he’s mad. That’s why he’s saying, “No, I’m calm!” in the way that he’s saying it. The feeling behind that is he’s frustrated or mad. And I’m not sure the way this parent was saying “you seem frustrated or mad,” but the way that could work is if she was really looking at him in the eyes and nodding, “You seem so frustrated about that. Yeah, that’s so maddening, isn’t it?”

And then we don’t have to ask him why that is because we know what he’s given us in the moment, which is, “You wanted me to put those pull-ups on. You wanted me to do that for you. That’s what you wanted.” In a way that’s actually easier than trying to get into a kind of analytic lesson about feelings or having him try to connect with his feelings in these times. Even as adults, we don’t connect with exactly what we’re feeling when we’re in the heat of it. It’s later when we realize what it was. When we’re dysregulated like that, we’re not able to consider words like frustrated. Especially at this age because his prefrontal cortex, like all three-year-olds’, is underdeveloped.

And her son’s kind of sensing the emotions churning up inside of her. He’s sensed, probably way before she does, when she’s on her way to blowing up at him. And when we’re feeling those things as parents, yes, she’s got a brilliant instinct to move away. But when we feel that and we can reflect on it later that we felt those feelings rising in us, it’s usually because we’ve been making these efforts that are not paying off to try to use power that actually we don’t have: the power to make him pull his pull-up on if he doesn’t want to pull his pull-up on. We can do it for him, but we can’t make him do it. So that energy we’re putting into that is wasted for us.

I feel this parent trying so hard to do what she’s learned to do with his feelings, to try to reflect back and help him name his emotions and all these things that she said they’ve been working on. They’ve been working on a lot of this, so she’s invested in it, but all that effort is not paying off. And that would get any of us screaming when we’re trying so hard to do all these things at once. She’s also putting a lot on herself here: She’s got to teach him about emotions, make sure he does these skills, she’s got to be the perfect calm presence. It’s a whole lot.

So ease up, keep it simple. Just connect by being honest and direct, trusting that the feelings are safe for him, and validating by only reflecting back what we know for sure. Really believing that the feelings are safe and okay, in our heart of hearts. Reminding ourselves that it’s really okay for him to feel whatever he feels. It’s not my job to fix this.

And she says, “He also gets very upset if I try to do something else, like get ready for his classes and appointments, even after showing empathy, which has made leaving the house very challenging lately.” So yes, another place to consider our goal and intention is when we’re showing empathy. Why do we want to show empathy? What is our intention? Ideally, it’s to let him know we accept and we want to connect with him that way. We accept his point of view and welcome the feelings to be expressed. We’ll be able to achieve those goals. And this can be while we’re doing something else. But it won’t work unless we’re genuinely accepting and connecting, welcoming those feelings. And then when we do need to help him out the door, then it’s extra-important that while we’re moving him along physically, we’re fully accepting his side of things. That’s what I call “confident momentum.”

I hope some of this helps, and I want to thank this parent again for trusting me with this story of what’s going on with her. I know she can do this. So I hope she gives herself a break, and trusts her son and herself a little bit more to get through this rough patch.

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 Meltdowns That Keep Happening, Even When We’re Doing Everything Right appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Raising Motivated, Self-Confident, Less Stressed Kids in an Age of Anxiety (with Dr. William Stixrud)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m pleased to host Dr. William Stixrud. He has a wealth of experience and wisdom to share from his decades of working with families as a therapist for children with learning and mental health challenges. He often sees the same client from childhood through adolescence and adulthood, so he’s able to see the results of his practice.

He’s the co-author, with his associate Ned Johnson, of two popular books: The Self-Driven Child, which to me feels in many ways like the perfect counterpart to the ideas I share for caring for kids in early childhood and how they might translate to understanding our role as parents with grade school, middle, and high school age children. I love this book and I’m looking forward to reading their recently published follow-up offering, What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. I’m hoping Bill will share his secrets for encouraging our children’s healthy motivation and their and our sense of control, which, as he believes, is the key to mental health. I’m excited.

Hi, Bill. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. William Stixrud: Thanks for having me, Janet.

Janet Lansbury: Well, I just adored your book. It’s so compatible with the kinds of messages that I try to give to parents as well, so it was wonderful to experience how this looks and feels in your work with children who are mostly grade school and older. Right?

Dr. William Stixrud: I would say that, yeah. I test kids, I’m a neuropsychologist and I test kids for a living, and I test kids from four to about 40 or so. But mainly I see school-age, middle school, and high school kids.

Janet Lansbury: And you work with them and their parents as well?

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, I do evaluations and then I tell parents what I learned, I tell kids what I learned. And probably most of the kids I follow over time. So I’m seeing a lot of kids now that I tested initially 20 years ago.

Janet Lansbury: And did they come to you because they have issues or concerns?

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, I see kids primarily because they’re having learning problems or attention problems or emotional problems or social problems, and I try to figure out what they’re good at, what’s going right, and what’s going wrong and how to help them.

Janet Lansbury: And you’ve written this book, The Self-Driven Child, a bestseller, with Ned Johnson, who is, what is your connection with him?

Dr. William Stixrud: Well, we became friends probably 10 years ago, maybe 12 years ago. Somebody introduced us and said, “You guys think so much alike.” And we’re very different. I’m 20 years older, I’m a neuropsychologist. Ned is the Washington, D.C. area’s test prep guru. He has a big business helping kids do better on standardized tests. And he realized that the way he does it is very similar to the kind of things that I’ve been lecturing about for many, many years. And we started lecturing together about motivation and about how too much stress affects kids’ brain and their development.

And we realized as we worked together that we saw we had two major concerns, and one was this, what people are calling an epidemic of mental health problems in adolescents and young adults, but also in the last several years in kids from five to 11. And then also so many of the kids we see have what we considered to be unhealthy motivation in the sense that either they’re obsessively driven, they’ll sacrifice anything to get into the most elite college. Sacrifice their health, their friends, and their family. And other kids who do as little as possible, don’t seem to have any kind of internal drive.

And we realized that there’s something that connects these two things, that points to a cause and a solution. And what we concluded was that what connects these two things is a low sense of control, because a low sense of control is at the root of all the mental health problems. I mean, think about it. If you’re anxious, your thinking’s out of control. If you feel depressed, you’ve got no sense of control. If you have substance use problems, your life is chaotic. So we realized that that’s the key to mental health.

And also every place we looked, Janet, to try to understand how do kids, little kids, grow up to be self-motivated, all the arrows point in the direction of autonomy. They have to have a sense that this is their life, and they aren’t continually being forced to do things.

Janet Lansbury: And they don’t have these areas that are free and clear for them to be autonomous.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right.

Janet Lansbury: That downtime and self-directed play, it’s everything, right? It’s therapy for them. It’s how they learn, it’s how they practice taking on different roles.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s so interesting. Two of my granddaughters, their mother was very strict about very limited technology, virtually none for the first few years. And all they did when they were five years old is play. They’re 10 and seven now, and whenever they have a minute, they play, they make up games. They go to the dentist, they come home and they play dentist. That’s the way that mammals have always learned to be adults. As you said, that’s the way they manage their feelings. That’s the way they try things out. That’s the way they learn how what they do affects other people.

Janet Lansbury: And I think on the parents’ end, it can be hard. I mean, there’s all this peer pressure to have your children in classes from the time they’re infants and have these schedules during the week where you have these scheduled events and you can’t really have that kind of play that you’re talking about and that I promote also, which is about good periods of time each day where there’s really nothing that children have to do. And I think if children aren’t used to that, then it can be tough for them to kind of wind down into that space. So that can be tough for parents sometimes, but it’s really everything.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s huge. I agree.

Janet Lansbury: It’s interesting what you said before, how you saw the two different ways that this manifested, this feeling of lack of control. That it manifested in obsessively wanting to try to keep control, in terms of, I’ve got to keep achieving, I’ve got to keep doing, I’ve got to keep holding this all together and keep on this track, or I can’t handle what happens if I feel like it’s falling apart, and then the other end of it where they kind of give up and say, What’s the point? I can’t control anything, and so I don’t want to do anything.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, yeah. The more I’ve been thinking about and lecturing about and writing about this sense of control for, I guess about six or seven years now, it’s a really, really powerful construct. The research on anxiety problems, it looks like they’re all rooted in low sense of control. Same thing with depression. And the research is looking at cognitive behavioral therapy, which is probably the most effective approach for treating children’s anxiety and mood problems. The reason it works is it increases their sense of control. And again, every place that we looked to try to understand how do kids develop that healthy self-motivation, that drive to develop themselves, and as they get older to realize, I need to develop myself to provide useful service to this world. That’s the kind of way that I think about developing kids’ motivation, is that healthy self-drive to develop themselves to have something useful to offer this world.

Janet Lansbury: And that starts with them getting a chance to connect with themselves and see who they are, which goes back to the play thing. From the time that they’re babies, they can feel a sense of agency about, Do I want to reach for this ball or do I want to suck my fingers, or do I want to look over here at this corner of the room where I see a shadow that’s interesting? Allowing them to have those kinds of options gives them this sense of, This is what I like to do.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yes, yes. It’s so interesting that some years ago I was reading the work of this guy named Reed Larson who studies adolescent development, and at one point in his career, he was looking at how do young children turn into self-motivated adolescents and adults? And he said, it’s not through dutifully doing their homework every night. It’s through what he called the passionate pursuit of pastimes. He described that flow experience, that experience of flow where you’re actively engaged in something that you’re interested in or that’s fun for you, or trying to solve a hard problem where it’s not so easy to be boring and it’s not so hard that it’s wildly stressful, but it’s kind of in your sweet spot and you’re working hard to figure it out, to solve something, or to beat somebody for competing.

And so the idea is if a three-year-old is building a little fort out of Lincoln Logs or playing with Legos and building something, they’re really concentrating on it, they’re really focused on trying to make it right. That experience shapes the brain in a way that develops that intrinsic motivation, that self-drive. And so it wasn’t through somehow doing what’s expected of me, what other people are telling me to do. It was through that passionate pursuit of pastimes. And we can start, as you said, by respecting that they may have different tastes and they may like some things and they may see something differently than I do. And respecting that individuality I think is really healthy, at the same time that we’re helping them be part of a family and part of a community.

Janet Lansbury: You made a really good point in your book, and it’s a question that I’m asked often about, “Well, if you’re allowing children to play as they wish and you’re not trying to engage them in focusing on certain kinds of learning that you think they should be working on, in the early years especially, then what happens when they get to school and they can’t focus?” And you made this great point that my mentor, Magda Gerber, used to also make, you say: “The best way to motivate him for the things you think he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. And for my co-author and me, our north star in thinking about motivation is self-determination theory, which is one of the best supported theories in psychology, developed about 30 years ago. And the main idea is that to develop that intrinsic motivation, the drive is coming from you, you have to have three needs met: one’s for a sense of competence, and one’s for a sense of relatedness, and a sense of autonomy. And I think that when we respect autonomy, that kids feel respected and it really helps our relationship with them, and those two things. And as we foster competence and we point out, “Gosh, look what you just did. Six months ago or three months ago, you couldn’t do this.” You foster that sense of competence, that they can develop skill. These are the most important ways that I know of for us to build that kind of healthy self-motivation in kids.

Janet Lansbury: Well, that reminds me of another quote that I wrote down from your book. You talked about competence: “It’s an internal rather than external barometer of accomplishment (growth mindset—you’re getting better). Remember that you can’t develop competence for them, and any attempt to do so will just undermine their own motivation.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Makes sense to me.

Janet Lansbury: Me too. But it’s very powerful actually, because I think that a lot of times as parents, we’ve put that on our job description that we’ve got to help them achieve this and help them achieve that, and it really can create a lot more anxiety in us and isn’t helping.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. It’s so interesting because anytime a kid tries to do something, whether they’re two years old, they try to do something or they’re three or four, and they can’t do it, and they try again and they figure it out, it changes the brain, it develops the circuits in their brain to when something hard happens, to cope and to feel confident they can cope. Because when you’re dealing with something hard, even something that’s stressful, what happens —unless you’re just overwhelmed— what happens initially is that your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that can think logically and put things into perspective and calm yourself down when you’re stressed, your prefrontal cortex activates and leaps into action. And when the prefrontal cortex activates, it dampens down the stress response.

So we want kids, ideally even when they’re little, as much as possible, with our support, to solve their own problems, to deal with the stressful things they handle, but also just when they’re playing— the kid is trying to get a Lego construction together and it’s frustrating for him and he eventually figures it out, that’s what builds competence. And if we pointed out to him, “Man, you just stuck with that incredibly. A lot of kids would’ve given up.” You made those just kind of off-hand comments, in my experience, those are the things that really structure in a kid’s brain: I’m a competent person. I can learn, I can get better.

Janet Lansbury: And when they do need help doing the smallest thing, if they say, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” “Hmm, well, what are you trying to do? Where are you trying to put that one?” Asking questions, but keep bouncing the ball back to them, just being an emotionally supportive person. And it’s hard to do. It’s kind of like an art, to be able to give that minimal intervention.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s true. One of the things I used to do, Janet, when my kids were little, if they get frustrated, “Daddy help me with this,” I’d say, “Well, I’m going to look at my watch here, and if you try for a minute and a half to figure out on your own and you still can’t do it, then I’m going to help you, but I want to give you a chance to figure it out.”

Janet Lansbury: Oh, that’s a good idea.

Dr. William Stixrud: And then if they still couldn’t get it, I said, “Well, I wonder what would happen if you tried it this way.” That kind of suggested way as opposed to telling them what to do.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, you can always break something down into steps and just give them the first step. I remember my son had to draw a picture for a book report, and he had to draw a picture of this wolf and he said, “I can’t possibly draw this picture.” I think he was maybe in third grade. And I said, “Yeah, I mean it is hard to draw pictures. What do you want to draw first? Which part of it do you want to draw first?” And he said, “The nose.” And I said, “Okay, what shape would the nose be? How would you like to draw that?” And it was amazing. He made this pretty cool picture. I was so proud of myself, because it was an experiment on my end. But to see how that worked with an older child.

I work a lot with the younger children, I’m used to doing it with them, and it’s amazing. And they don’t naturally have this feeling like being stuck is a bad thing. That’s something that we can unfortunately influence them to feel more when we’re worried they’re not going to finish it or get it, or that we’re starting to feel for them, Oh gosh, maybe they can’t do it and I’ve got to help. I’ve got to rescue. And then they start to pick up from us that anxiousness and receive that same sense of urgency from us and see that, Oh gosh, this isn’t a safe place to be, just in the middle where I’m not getting it.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. And as you said, it’s hard because we’re mammals. We evolved to soothe and protect our young. And in our second book, we talk about this research of a person by the name of Jessie Borelli. She studies what she calls parental overcontrol. And she has a study where these kids are in a room with some kind of computerized puzzle and they’re trying to put it together and the moms are in the room and the moms are only given one instruction: Don’t help. And they’re measuring the kid’s heart rate and the mother’s heart rate. And so the kid starts to solve this puzzle and it looks easy, but it’s much harder than it really is. As he starts to get frustrated, the kid’s heart rate goes up. Mother intervenes and says, “Honey, try it this way or this way.” Mother’s heart rate goes down when she is doing something that gives her a sense of control, but the kid gets more stressed as the mom gets involved.

Janet Lansbury: Wow.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah. So I think it’s not that we don’t want to be supportive. It’s not that we don’t want to help our kids. It’s just that we don’t want to jump in. I did this exercise, I did it with a parent educator some years ago, where we thought about, Well, let’s say your second-grade girl comes home and she’s crying because everybody in her friend group got invited to a birthday party and she isn’t invited. And what we asked the parents to do was to ask themselves, Whose problem is it? Because the way that we’re wired, it’s so hard to do that. It’s hard to resist wanting to start soothing or, That’s okay, I’ll call the mom. And just remind them that we can listen, we can try and understand, but if we jump in and solve it for them, we deprive them of that opportunity to solve it themselves and to shape that brain, this experience of going into coping mode.

Janet Lansbury: And it makes it harder for them the next time because they feel dependent on us for making them feel better.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Janet Lansbury: You talk also in your book about the concept of the non-anxious presence. What are some of the keys to being able to be that for our children?

Dr. William Stixrud: Well, can I just mention how I got to this idea?

Janet Lansbury: Please.

Dr. William Stixrud: When my daughter was just turning two, her language was coming along really well, but she stuttered and she started to stutter really badly, and she went for a couple days where she didn’t talk. And I’ve never been more panicked in my life, Janet. I’m thinking, Oh God, if she doesn’t talk, she’ll never get better. She’ll be teased the rest of her life. And a couple days later, basically her mouth caught up with her brain and she just stopped stuttering. And I realized that all of our fear as parents, it’s about the future. It’s about, They’re going to get stuck in some ways and never get better. So that was a really formative thing for me was realizing that all our worry, all our fear, it’s about the future. That kids are going to get stuck.

And my experience is, if we as parents don’t get highly anxious and too involved, kids, they go through stuff and they grow out of it. The other thing was when I used to do therapy, I’d sit with parents and one of the parents would start to cry and they’d say, “I just want him to feel good about himself.” It struck me many years ago, I said, “Well, I think it would be easier for us to help him feel good about himself if we weren’t worried sick.” And then somebody introduced me some years ago to this idea of a non-anxious presence. I love the idea. I love the term, and I didn’t make it up unfortunately, but I was introduced to it. And somebody at an independent school in Washington, D.C. asked me to do a program with parents on how to become a non-anxious presence.

And I never quite thought about it in terms of parenting that exact way. But then I realized if you’ve got an infant who’s crying and wailing, it’s a lot easier to soothe them if you stay calm. If you’ve got a two-year-old who’s having a tantrum in a store, it’s a lot easier to handle if you stay calm. If you’ve got a 16-year-old who’s coming home and his girlfriend just dumped him, if you can stay calm, you can be much more helpful. And we know that kids are certainly much more stressed now, much more fearful. It is like the message that young kids get is, Be very afraid. As they get older, it seems to be be very afraid, given how many kids are so anxious and fearful.

Janet Lansbury: And you’ve really seen that rise in time?

Dr. William Stixrud: Oh, yeah. I see it in my own practice, but the statistics on it are just mind-boggling. The surgeon general now calls the status of mental health in adolescents the defining public health crisis of our lifetime. And I think for parents of young children, there’s so much we can do to strengthen them. And I think in part by, if we move in the direction of being a non-anxious presence, we help kids in just dozens of ways. For example, if a little kid falls in the playground and we go, “Oh, oh, are you okay?” Kids learn to react to things that happen to them in part by watching how their parents react. And so, many kids, they fall on the playground and they look to see, Should I cry? Am I okay? If we stay calm, it’s different than if we’re, “Oh, honey, are you okay?”

And I’m not saying if something’s really bad, we shouldn’t be nurturing. We want to be nurturing to our kids. I think in our first book, we quote this book, it’s something with a magical character, and he says to this group of kids, “I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe.” And the kids say, “You did something much more important. You helped us feel brave.”

And part of the way I think about this non-anxious presence is not being overly emotionally reactive and not being burdened by excessive anxiety or worry and being able to communicate that courageous attitude as opposed to a fearful one. There’s a lot of things that you could worry about in this world, and I’m not saying we should never worry. Worry helps us stay safe in many ways, but ideally if what we communicate is, Yeah, that makes me anxious too, but I know I can handle it and you can too, it’s a very powerful way to help kids develop confidence that they can handle stuff and also to communicate that courage.

I’d love any thoughts about what I just said, and then I’ll tell you some of the ways that we think about encouraging parents to move in that direction of being a non-anxious presence.

Janet Lansbury: For me, when you said courageous, that really hits home for me because I started to imagine —and this was when I had to take my upset first toddler out of a grocery store or someplace or when I had to do anything— I would see myself, and I’ve talked about this, the parents that listen here probably have heard me say it, but I would put on a superhero suit in my mind to be confident for you. Because I’m very sensitive, I tend to take on everybody else’s mood. So if my child’s afraid, that affects me too, and then I’m sure I affect them back.

And I would imagine, if you were a fireperson coming in here to help somebody that had to jump out of a building, you would be very confident for them. You would know that this is the most important thing, that you weren’t panicking and that you weren’t afraid, and that you believed that they could fall into that net and they’d be okay. So I take it to that level. I really needed a lot of work. And what I found is it’s easier for me to be courageous for my child than for myself.

Dr. William Stixrud: And my co-author, in our second book, his twin brother is an EMT, and what he does, he goes into situations, an emergency situation in a family, and he says, “I think we’re under control here. You don’t have to panic. Should I let you know if it’s time to worry?” Just model it. Because when we wrote our first book, The Self-Driven Child, one of the things we emphasize is the research on what’s called stress contagion. The idea that stress is contagious. I mean, if you’re around a really stressful person, your brain picks it up and it increases your stress level. As we were researching our second book, I learned that one of the mantras of the Navy Seals is “Calm is Contagious,” and it’s contagious because all emotions are contagious. And that’s part of the reason why I encourage parents to move in that direction of being a non-anxious presence in your family, because then what you do is you communicate, you infuse calmness into your family and your kids feel it.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. And so how else can parents do that when there are so many concerns, especially as parents? There’s a lot of concerns in the world, and then there’s concerns as parents, which magnify everything.

Dr. William Stixrud: One of the things we talk about, I think in the introduction to The Self-Driven Child, is that most human beings are living in the safest time, in the safest place in human history. And many of our fears as parents are related to this 24/7 news cycle and the fear that parents have of young children, like, being abducted. It’s all based on that, we get these alerts. And it turns out that the rates of child abduction are extremely low, except for if parents are divorced, one parent will take a kid without the other parent knowing it. But the perception of danger is much greater than it really is. So that’s one thing.

What I ask parents to do is to take a long view, in the sense that most kids turn out fine. And because I test kids who are having problems and I’ve followed kids for 40 years, I know that in the vast majority of kids, even the ones I see that are having problems, they turn out fine. In fact, I got a Christmas card two years ago, Janet, on the outside it said, “You were right.” And I opened it up and it’s a picture of these three young adults with their spouses, and their parents had written, “They all turned out great.” These are kids who I evaluated at various points starting in probably the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, and I hadn’t seen any of them in 10 years. And I just got an email from a mom who I saw, whose kid I saw when she was eight, who’s now like 38, and she had autism. And mom’s just saying, “She’s so great and doing so great.”

So just take a long view and remember that all our worry about our kids, it’s about, Something’s happening now, oh my God, this is not going to get better. And it’s because a low sense of control is the most stressful thing you can experience in the whole world, that if a kid has a problem and we don’t know how to solve it, it’s very stressful. So we kind of work on ourselves as you did, Janet, to experience more of that kind of inner calm so that we can radiate that calm to our family. We train ourselves to remember that if I don’t get stuck, my kid’s not going to get stuck, that we can take steps to solve these problems. And that usually they turn out really good.

Janet Lansbury: So if our children aren’t going to feel that sense of control unless we feel that sense of control, we can maybe derive our sense of control from that visualization or belief, that trust, that my child probably will be just fine and get through these things. And you know what? Our job as parents is not as complicated as I think we can make it. Just like with the news cycles, there’s so much parenting advice out for people now, and it’s overwhelming and it can sound like this is such an intricate thing. Something that we’re putting out there to try to help —the various parenting advisors, like me— it can make it appear as if, Oh, there’s so many details we have to get right. And really those are just supposed to help you if you’re stuck, maybe. But it’s not that complicated.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s really not.

Janet Lansbury: And you and I, that have adult children, can acknowledge that. I have three adult children also.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah. I remember my son had tics and learning disabilities, and I worried about the tics and about being teased and that. I realized that the most important thing that I can do to help myself is to work on my own fear, my own anxiety, and realizing that my fear was all about as he got older, if his tics were terrible, that that might affect him negatively somehow. And he’s a PhD psychologist, he’s a very successful, wonderful human being, beautiful wife, beautiful children. And yeah, I had a lot of worry, but I realized that I was more upset than he was, and I just worked at it.

What I realized is that if I see kids are going through a hard patch, that if I see it as, This is part of their path and I’m going to help them through it, as opposed to thinking, This is a disaster! That perspective of accepting where kids are. If we think about the idea of unconditional love and unconditional acceptance, arguably the most important thing we can do for our kid is to let them know we love them immeasurably, no matter what they do or how hard they try or how they behave. This is one of the ways that we do it.

Janet Lansbury: And if we look back on our own lives, how many rough spots have we all had? And how positive were those for us?

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. Before we started recording this, you mentioned this experience I talk about in The Self-Driven Child where, when I was in first grade, I cried the whole first week. I’d never been in a situation where I didn’t know anybody, none of my friends from kindergarten were in my first grade class, and I was kind of a little bit on the anxious side anyway. And one day the girl sitting next to me said, “Ms. Ward, Billy’s crying.” And she said, “He’s going to be fine.” And I realized, she’s just modeling this non-anxious presence and communicating confidence that I could handle it.

Janet Lansbury: I love that teacher, she should get an award of some kind. And how simple that is: She believed in you. She believed in you, and that feels good.

Dr. William Stixrud: I know. And there’s this new program, this brilliant program out of Yale, for helping kids with anxiety. The acronym is SPACE. It’s Supported Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. And one of the main things that parents are taught to do is to express empathy. “I know this is really scary for you.” And then, “But I’m a hundred percent confident that you can handle it.”

Because what we do, because we’re mammals, what we do when kids find something stressful, we try to protect them from it. If a little kid is afraid to go into the bathroom by himself, we go in there with him, that kind of thing. And it turns out that when we make that kind of accommodation to a kid’s anxiety, it just makes them more anxious. And so what we’re taught to do is to eventually not make those accommodations. But the first step is you express empathy. “I know that going into the bathroom by yourself makes you anxious, but I’m also a hundred percent confident that you can handle it.” Which requires us to manage our own anxiety and then to communicate confidence that you can handle it so that we communicate that brave, courageous attitude.

Janet Lansbury: That’s so important, I think. But again, it all stems from the trust that we have in, I guess in ourselves as parents, and therefore towards our children. You said it well in your book: “It takes courage to trust a child to make decisions, to trust in a child’s brain development, to ignore the pressures that cause us to protect our kids from themselves, or to be overly involved in their lives. It takes courage to face our fears about the future. It also takes humility to accept that we don’t often know what’s in our kids’ best interest. It takes a change in mindset to focus on ourselves—our own emotions and attitudes—as an extremely important element of our child-rearing.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, I like that. Five years later, I still like it.

Janet Lansbury: I like it too. But then you also say: “As hard as all of this is, the harder route by far is trying to control what we really can’t.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah. In the book we talk about some postulates of motivation, and one of them is that you can’t make a kid do something against their will. And I think that knowing that, knowing you really can’t make another human, even a little kid, you can’t make a little kid do something. Your kid, you need to get in the car to go see grandma, and they’re refusing. You can pick them up and put them in the car, but then they aren’t getting in the car, you’re putting them in the car. You really can’t make somebody do something. And when you make peace with that, that if theoretically I really couldn’t make him do something, you make peace with that, you realize, Well, that’s not my rule. It couldn’t be my responsibility to always make him do the right thing. And for me, the older I get and the more I see that something that looks like a disaster leads to something really good, I get more humble about knowing what’s in a kid’s best interest. And inclined to take that attitude that this is your life and you get to figure it out and I’m going to help you.

We talk about the idea as parents being a consultant of their kid rather than their boss or their manager, their homework police, who’s always running their lives. Because our goal is for kids to be able to run their own lives before they leave home. And that’s what I’ve suggested to parents of young children, is think about, you aren’t going to start turning over the keys to your five-year-old, but the idea is, let’s move in that direction. For myself, I’m going to move in the direction of a non-anxious presence who can support my kid in making wise decisions, practice making decisions for themselves, learning from their feedback, who can trust my kids. I can say, “I have confidence you can solve these problems.” That’s my role. And the kid’s role eventually is to figure out who they want to be and be able to run their own life.

And I say that because I was giving a lecture about The Self-Driven Child in Houston before the pandemic, and I happened to mention the most elite high school in Washington, D.C. and a woman came up to me afterwards. She said, “I’m a therapist at The Menninger Clinic here in Houston,” this really good mental health clinic in Houston. And she said, “We know this school in D.C. really well, because so many of the graduates get into the top colleges in the country, but as soon as they get a B, or as soon as they realize that everybody there is as smart as they are, or as soon as they ask a girl out and she dumps them, they can’t handle it. So they take a medical leave of absence and they come here for treatment.” And she said, “To the one, they just don’t have enough experience making their own decisions, solving their own problems, running their own life.”

And I gave a lecture recently and this guy came up to me and said, “I just finished my doctoral dissertation on promoting autonomy in two-year-olds by, ‘Do you want to do it this way or this way?’ Start out by giving them a limited number of choices.” So you’re coming back to that treating them respectfully that you mentioned earlier.

Janet Lansbury: So for the parents that listen here regularly and know my work, they know that a lot of what this podcast ends up being about is how to actually set limits with children and have those boundaries for them and all of those things, which are to me in a different category than what you’re talking about, but not completely. We still give children choices with things that we have to help them do, like getting into the car seat, for example. “Do you want to be the one to go in by yourself?” But we do have to take charge of them, because if we don’t that creates the kind of stress that doesn’t help them to function either.

Dr. William Stixrud: As we say in The Self-Driven Child, this idea of being a consultant, it doesn’t mean that the kid’s the boss of the family. We see this as squarely in the tradition of what’s called authoritative parenting, as opposed to authoritarian or laissez-faire. And in authoritative parenting, we’re the guides of the family. We’re the leaders of the family, and we work out limits with kids. And ideally, when our kid’s, say, three or four, we sit down and talk about limits so that they’re kind of agreed-upon and everybody knows and they feel fair. We want to minimize the extent to which we’re forcing limits when we’re mad, go to your room kind of thing. But if little kids have too much freedom, as you said, it just makes them anxious. They can’t have that. Kids with laissez-faire parenting, where there’s very few limits, very few family rules that are enforced, it makes them really anxious because young people, they need to feel that my parents are in charge.

And ultimately, from that position, we treat them respectfully and know that the way kids become good decision-makers is by practicing making decisions. And the way kids learn to treat other people respectfully is by being treated respectfully. And so we can give kids choices, we can give them freedom, but we don’t let them walk all over us. They aren’t the boss of the family. They can’t do anything they want. It’s a delicate balance, but it’s doable if we realize that kids need limits and it’s really good to treat your kid respectfully. Like he or she is a human being who has a mind of her own. And it’s also true that when we treat kids respectfully that they’re more likely to go along with us. When they feel loved and appreciated and enjoyed, they’re just more likely to just go along with us and not fight us.

Janet Lansbury: Because we’re on the same team. And they know that, they feel that. The way I see it and teach it, again from infancy, so there’s sort of two areas. Even though we want to give children choice when they can handle it, sometimes they can’t in the boundary-type situations or situations in their care where they really need us to take the lead. But then there’s this whole other area of play, learning, that’s theirs, that belongs to them. And the more we support that while staying in our lane and not trying to micromanage it and decide what it should be, the better.

Dr. William Stixrud: I love that. It makes complete sense to me.

Janet Lansbury: That’s how I learned this, and it just felt really clear. I’m a person that needs things to be very, very clear in my mind to be able to even try to do them.

Dr. William Stixrud: And I really feel like my major mission, and certainly one of the reasons that I wanted to write The Self-Driven Child, is to help parents feel that it’s safe. It’s safe not to worry about your kid all the time, it’s safe to feel that you can trust your kids a lot of the time. It’s safe to feel that you aren’t supposed to know who they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to be like or what’s always right for them. You couldn’t know because when something happens to a kid, do you judge whether it was good or bad the next day or five years later or 10 years later? Certainly one of the most important experiences of my entire life was the first time I went to graduate school, in English literature. I went for 20 straight weeks and I didn’t turn in a single assignment because I was just so anxious and insecure. I work with a lot of underachievers and I say, “Twenty weeks, I turned in nothing. Top that.”

Janet Lansbury: I have nightmares about that.

Dr. William Stixrud: But my point is, so after the second quarter, I hadn’t turned anything in, so I flunked out. And I felt like my whole life had gone up in smoke. And it took me about a month to realize it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. No way should I have been an English professor. I always felt like an imposter, I felt out of my league, and I wanted to do something with children. Most of my professors gave me incompletes. This one flunked me, so I couldn’t go back. And I prayed that I’d meet him and be able to thank him. But honest to God, Janet, two years later, I’m walking on the campus of the University of Washington where I’m taking some classes in education, and I see this guy and I go up to him and I say, “You probably don’t remember me.” He didn’t remember me, but I said, “You flunked me two years ago and it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. Thank you.” It was a very satisfying experience.

But the point is that if we see what kids are going through as part of their path to figure their lives out, and our job is to support them and help them and, as you said, to provide structure and direction as necessary, it’s just a lot easier.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. It works better for us, it’s easier, it’s less stressful when we stay in our lane and let them do their work and we do ours and trust everybody to do their job.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s safe to do it. And I have great confidence in this as you do, because I walk this walk with my own kids, and I have two wonderful adult children who grew up with no academic pressure at all, and both have PhDs. And this approach of really fostering a sense of control, as they get older playing more that consultant role to help them figure out who they want to be. The three questions that I ask to think about my relationship with the kids is, Whose life is it?, Whose responsibility is it?, and Whose problem is it? And I want to remember that I don’t know who they want to be, it’s their life. I want to remember that I don’t want to take responsibility for something that’s really a kid’s responsibility, like doing their homework, for example. And also that I don’t want to solve problems that they’re capable of solving themselves.

Janet Lansbury: And you share so many incredible case studies. And you have a whole chapter on navigating learning disabilities, ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders and how your approach can work with children that have those challenges.

The other thing that you said is the enjoyment factor. So not only is it easy for us when we’re not trying to do jobs that aren’t going to work for us because they’re not our job, we’re not as able to enjoy the unfolding of the person because we’re so busy worrying about if they’re measuring up in this way or that way. And you offer these points around being a non-anxious presence: “Make enjoying your kids your top parenting priority. Don’t fear the future.” Maybe easier said than done, but we’ve got to put trust out there, right?

Dr. William Stixrud: Yes, yes. The enjoyment piece. When I used to do therapy, starting about 35 years ago, I did a lot of therapy with parents. And what came to me is that, let’s set our highest parenting priority as simply enjoying your child. Because when you enjoy your child, she experiences herself as a joy-producing organism as opposed to an anxiety-producing or an anger-producing or a frustration-producing organism. And it’s not that we have to enjoy every second, but the idea of just being spontaneously enjoyed, that’s how people have a sense of, “I’m likable.” And so what I’d do with parents is we’d work backwards: Let’s make that our goal. What’s keeping you from enjoying your kid most of the time? And it may be some behavioral thing, it may be something in the marriage, maybe some pressures at work, maybe insomnia and said, let’s work on these things, with the goal being to enjoy your kid, so your kid starts to see himself as a joy-producing organism.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And it also can be because we’re trying to do right by our child, putting them on the team or whatever, and now we’re dragging them to practice because they don’t want to go. And it’s impossible to enjoy your child that way. But what I remember is when I could observe my children playing —which they allowed me to do about to the age of five, and then they didn’t want me to anymore— but their ideas. And I just remember one time my daughter, she was waiting for me, I was teaching actually, and she had to come that day. And I see her over there, she was using paper clips, something that was there, and she was making people out of paperclips and they were talking to each other, without even bending them or destroying them or anything. She made up this whole story with paperclips. And it’s just that kind of stuff that children do that’s so cool. And we can really see who they are and their imagination and interests and all of these things. It’s so much more interesting.

But anyway, I’m going to finish your list here: “Don’t fear the future. Commit to your own stress management. Make peace with your worst fears. Adopt an attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance.” What is that, nonjudgmental acceptance?

Dr. William Stixrud: Well, I think most parents buy the idea that it helps kids to feel that they’re loved unconditionally. And I think what that means is kind of warts and all. That it means that we accept them and we love them and we approve of them, even if they’re having a hard time, even if they’re trying to figure stuff out. And so this nonjudgmental acceptance just means that, if they’re acting badly, we’ll intervene in some ways. But we take the attitude that we aren’t judgmental, we don’t give them the idea, You’re a bad kid, or This is unacceptable to me, kind of thing. That we deal with them respectfully and say, “This isn’t working.” Or, “I don’t let people talk to me that way, I’ll see you in five minutes.” And find ways of dealing that’s respectful to the kid and gives the kid the message, I can handle your strong feelings. I can handle your bad behavior.

Janet Lansbury: Because we know there’s a reason they’re acting like that.

Dr. William Stixrud: Exactly.

Janet Lansbury: It’s usually about what’s going on inside them. It’s hardly ever really about us. So we don’t need to take offense.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. Part of the goal of becoming a non-anxious presence is that when we’re calm, we’re much better listeners, we’re much better able to convey empathy, to express empathy for kids. We’re less controlling.

Janet Lansbury: And we’re much more able to solve the problem or figure out the issue because we’re not under stress, yeah.

Dr. William Stixrud: That’s exactly right. Just recognizing that once you’re stressed or your kid is stressed, you can’t think clearly. Don’t bother trying to teach a lesson, or don’t try to tell your kid something that you really need to get their attention. If you’re stressed and they’re stressed, they really can’t hear it, because we evolved to respond instinctively. So the prefrontal cortex that can think logically and rationally, basically it gets shut down, because the last thing you want to do if you’re being attacked by a wooly mammoth is to stop and think about it. So, recognizing that when we start to feel stressed is not the right time to lecture our kid or to try to teach him something, we say, “I want to talk about this. I want to help you with this. But I’m a little stressed right now. I’m going to take a walk or I’m going to go into my room for a few minutes. But I’m going to come back and let’s work this out.” This non-anxious presence is a powerful idea. And it’s a goal.

Janet Lansbury: And it’s a goal moment-to-moment, I feel like. It’s not like, Oh, I got it. I’m the non-anxious presence forever. It’s something that we are constantly just trying to keep in our mind the importance of. And we see when we do it that it really, really helps. It helps calm that person down. It helps them pass through it. It helps them figure things out and not get stuck in our stuff.

I could talk to you all day long, gosh. I’m fascinated by all these topics that you’re an expert on and I would love to have you come back another time and we’ll go over one of these other topics. For now, I want to thank you so much for speaking with me today, sharing all your knowledge. As you say, “We think of chronic stress in children and teenagers as the societal equivalent of climate change—a problem that has been building over generations and will take considerable effort and a change of habits to overcome.” And that’s what you say in your book and wow, that’s scary. But we can all be taking steps in that direction.

Dr. William Stixrud: The idea is if we want a calmer world, a more peaceful world, then we work on that in ourselves. There’s so many things that we can do to make lives better for ourselves and our kids, and we can model for our kids really taking good care of ourselves when we work on our own stress management. Whether that’s with exercise or meditation or yoga. We model for our kids that I take care of myself so I can be at the top of my game. And I think, what more can we do?

Janet Lansbury: Not much, but try to enjoy our kids. Even as they get older too. I am having just as much fun, if not more, with my adult children as I did with my little ones. And I love working with little ones. That’s why I do it.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s true. And I love being a parent at every age. I loved raising teenagers and having young adults is just fabulous. It’s a great role.

Janet Lansbury: Same. Alright. Thank you so much.

Dr. William Stixrud: My pleasure, Janet.

Janet Lansbury: Alright, you take care.

Dr. William Stixrud: Okay, you too. Bye.

Janet Lansbury: Okay, bye-bye.

Dr. Stixrud is the founder of The Stixrud Group, a member of the teaching faculty at Children’s National Medical Center, and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and co-author with Ned Johnson of The Self-Driven Child and What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home.

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 Raising Motivated, Self-Confident, Less Stressed Kids in an Age of Anxiety (with Dr. William Stixrud) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “How to Connect with Your Upset Child, Even When There’s More Than One”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I have a question from a parent who wonders how she can connect with her children when she has two of them and there’s only one of her and they both seem to be needing her attention. I’m going to talk a little bit about what connecting with our children when they’re upset and in need of our attention actually looks and feels like.

Here’s the question I received:

Hi,

I’ve been reading more about respectful parenting and I have a question. If I’m interpreting it correctly, when I can tell my four-and-a-half-year-old son is feeling disconnected from me due to his behavior —whining, acting out, etc.— I should focus on connection to prevent power struggles and escalation of his behavior. I’m just wondering how to focus on the connection right there in the moment when I’m by myself with an 18-month-old as well.

My four-and-a-half-year-old likes to connect by climbing onto my lap for a cuddle, but my 18-month-old clearly gets jealous and starts squealing, ear-splitting, not possible to tune out, attempting to climb on me, hitting his brother, etc. If I pick him up too and cuddle them both, then he pushes, hits, kicks his brother, who then retaliates. Instead of properly focusing on connecting with my four-and-a-half-year-old, I’m trying to console/fend off my 18-month-old. My 18-month-old refuses to be redirected or distracted by anything. I’m just unsure of how to make this work with two children when I’m by myself the vast majority of the time. Partner works long hours.

Okay, so I chose this question because she brings up so many important points that I want to address. These are common, nuanced misunderstandings and misconceptions about the respectful parenting approach that I teach. And it’s easy to have those, even if I was the perfect communicator of this approach, which I’m not.

Yes, in a general sense, a child who is whining or acting out, etc. is in a place of disconnection and they do need us to connect with them. But what does that look like, and then what does that look like when we have another child or multiple children there as well, and they seem to need our attention? How do we connect with all of these children at once and how does that connection actually look with each child?

This parent gives the example that her four-and-a-half-year-old likes to connect by climbing onto her lap for a cuddle. Now, I’m not sure what has gone on before that and what the behavior or the feelings are that cause them to want to climb into her lap. But first I’ll say that the way to connect with children is not necessarily to give them what they seem to want on the surface in that moment. That is not what it means to connect with an upset child with this approach. When children are upset and behaving erratically or they’re even just whining, they’re not in that logical, rational part of their brain. They’re in the emotional centers of their brain. They’re just in their emotion, and the things that they ask for or demand or want in those states aren’t logical either.

And when it’s out of those feelings, often it’s just a part of expressing that feeling. When they’re wanting to tell us what to do, they need this, or they need another one of those. These are feelings, not facts. So when it’s out of these feelings, what connection is about is really just holding space and supporting those feelings to be expressed. It’s not to try to offer a solution to make the feeling stop. True connecting is seeing what’s really going on with our children, which isn’t always easy because we get touched off by their behavior and the emotions that they’re expressing. We can get easily overwhelmed.

So what I try to work on with parents is to perceive as accurately as possible, to see what’s really going on beneath the surface when our child is going to these places. And to recognize it as early as possible. Recognize that these behaviors that our individual child commonly displays aren’t reasonable requests. It’s more that they’ve just gone to a place that they need to ride out, with our support. And what our support is in those times is really mostly emotional support and acceptance. And out of that acceptance can come acknowledging: “Oh, you want this and you want that, and now you want to sit on my lap.” And if that’s something that the parent can’t comfortably do in that moment, she’s juggling things on the stove or she’s otherwise busy with something, it doesn’t work for her to cuddle right there, then I would cuddle a different way: with my emotional connection with my child. Which means seeing them, seeing and hearing what they’re saying. You want to cuddle and I can’t, and that’s so hard, isn’t it? It’s frustrating. You really want to be with me. Not necessarily even saying those words or any words, but looking at our child with that acceptance, welcoming their feelings while we keep doing what we have to do as the adult in the room.

Ideally, we can pause and give them that moment, but we don’t even have to pause. We can actually connect while we’re doing something else. Connection is in the way that we accept. It’s the way that we’re looking at our child, making that eye contact with that soft, accepting gaze. Calming ourselves, that’s a big part of this. Seeing that dysregulation our child is experiencing, not blaming them, not getting personally offended by what they’re doing. Understanding that this is just a place they’ve gone for now and it’s bigger than they are and it will pass.

But now let’s say that cuddling with our child is a good idea, right then. It’s something that we can do and we want to say yes to our child’s request. That’s lovely. Now, what happens if here comes her other child, who she says clearly gets jealous and starts squealing, ear-splitting, not possible to tune out, attempting to climb on her, hitting his brother, etc. What’s happened there? Her 18-month-old is venting some feelings of his own. He’s going into an emotional state. Oftentimes, a child’s feelings tap into another child’s feelings, giving them the opportunity to vent as well. And this is actually a form of empathy. You’ll see babies crying when they hear other babies cry or when they hear their older sibling upset. It doesn’t mean that they’re having some deep sadness. It’s a reflexive response and it’s kind of a nice thing that they’re joining with their sibling in those feelings.

And now her 18-month-old, he’s not going to be behaving reasonably either, and he starts squealing. Yes, it is ear-splitting, but the important thing here is that we don’t try to fix those feelings. We don’t follow that impulse that we all have as parents to comfort those feelings away, to console them away, to make them better. This mother says, “I’m trying to console and fend off my 18-month-old.” Consoling. Now, that’s a word that sounds very active on the parent’s part, to try to change something, and that can’t be our role. We don’t have that power, and that actually isn’t as connected —or I would say, even as loving— as seeing, accepting, allowing the feelings. What’s known as co-regulation. I’m not regulating you, I’m staying regulated along with you so that you can come back to that state. And now let’s say the 18-month-old comes over, and I’m still cuddling my four-and-a-half-year-old, and I acknowledge, “Ah, now you want me too.” And I’m looking at him. “You want to get up here too.” But I wouldn’t give into that because both children need the message that when we’re there for them, we’re there for them. We’re not going to move them away to make room for the other child because the other child is demanding it. And we can still connect with that 18-month-old, but trying to please both of them, as his mother shares, pleases neither child.

And it’s not our role in the situation. Again, connecting, it’s not about pleasing our child with what they’re saying on the surface. It’s about seeing in and allowing our child to be where they are in that moment, even encouraging our child to be where they are in that moment, because the feelings are not logical facts. This isn’t a deep need that our younger one has to be on our lap when the older one is there. We have to believe that, I know it’s hard. But our 18-month-old might behave that way after we’ve spent the entire day cuddling with them while the older one was in preschool. And now we give five minutes to this older child and the 18-month-old still complains, maybe. He has a right to, but what does that tell us? Hopefully it tells us that it’s not about getting what they seem to want in the moment. It’s venting. It’s an emotional release that’s super important. Maybe that child has been holding onto some control of getting his way with his mother and getting stuck there, instead of letting go and releasing some of that toddler angst.

Toddlerhood, it’s a very emotional time, and four-and-a-half is an emotional time too. It’s another stage of growing towards more autonomy and all of the push-and-pull feelings that go along with that. Both of these children, even if there weren’t any other stressors in their environment, have lots of reasons to vent feelings. And if this parent, like a lot of us do, has been trying to console or make things better, rather than rolling out the red carpet, supporting those feelings to be expressed, then there can be a buildup. And children, in this healthy manner that they have, will keep pushing up against us to —on an unconscious level— find those ways to vent. They’ll keep trying to release those feelings.

And that may be what the 18-month-old is doing here, pushing up against a limit that he needs to be able to let go of. Connecting with him is seeing that, seeing that he doesn’t actually need to be on his mother’s lap at the moment. What he needs to do is be in that place of frustration, be in a place of I don’t control everything and this feels awful, that kind of letting go. The way this could look would be, I’m cuddling my four-and-a-half-year-old and here comes my other baby. Oh shoot, you want to be here too, and I’m with your brother right now. That’s so hard. You don’t like when that happens. Again, not saying those words. I say a lot of words in these podcasts because I’m trying to demonstrate an attitude towards the feelings, an accepting attitude. And not accepting with sadness, but with, You have a right to the power of those feelings! I’m not trying to throw cold water on them and I don’t feel sad about them. I want you to feel heard.

Being that leader that still holds onto what I’m doing, the choices I have to make in these situations. Which is, in this case, I’m giving cuddles to this child who asked me first. I’m not going to erase that because his brother wants it as well. And she’s giving this older child some really, really important messages about his worth, about him getting to be prioritized sometimes. He’s already given up his parents to the birth of this sibling and now there’s this rival there and somebody else that he has to share it with. He can’t be expected to share every moment, so it makes sense to me that when she does allow the 18-month-old on her lap, wanting to please him too naturally, then there’s kicking and then the brother retaliates. Yeah, of course he does. It’s hurtful to never get to just have your mother to yourself for a moment because she wants to please your brother as well. So this is where it will help us to rise up to this job and be that person that can say no, even to an 18-month-old.

When she says that he attempts to climb on her and hit his brother, the 18-month-old, I would have your hand there firmly, not even letting him start to climb, if possible. Being very firm in a loving manner, being on this physically. So you’ve got maybe one arm around your four-and-a-half-year-old, and then maybe you have to take your other arm and your hand to hold off this 18-month-old, putting your hand up to physically block him. So we’re not even letting him start to climb up. And if he does get a chance to climb up a little, you gently but firmly help him down again, holding him off so that he can’t get up there or hit his brother or hit you. Be on this in a preventative manner if possible. Strong, convicted in your choice here. As a parent, that’s what both these boys need in this situation, a confident leader.

And other times this scenario may be reversed and it’s the 18-month-old whose right to be with his mother and have her attention at that moment is protected. Yes, of course we’re not going to really be able to pay full attention when there’s another child there screaming about it, but it’s that message that we give each time that makes this kind of rivalry not happen as often. Because children know that we’re not going to let them battle that way for our attention. That we’re strong and confident. We don’t feel it’s our job to please everybody and to calm down every emotion and try to make it better. That’s an impossible job for us as parents. This would be true with twins, with multiple children, in a classroom. We have to be the leader that displeases people, knowing that it’s really healthy for children to be in that situation and to vent those feelings.

So, trying to let go of the squealing, but I would fully prevent him from hitting or climbing on you. Holding him off firmly, not feeling like, Oh, I’ve got to let him get up and now I’ve got to get him off again. Being as preventative as possible physically. This parent says, “I pick him up too and cuddle them both.” So I recommend absolutely not doing that. I would stay focused as much as she can on just being with her four-and-a-half-year-old, letting his feelings be in the comfort of her arms, not trying to console the 18-month-old. When she says “fend off,” that sounds like maybe she’s letting him get too far. We don’t have to fend off when we’re confidently on it from the beginning, not even letting it start.

At the same time, we’re encouraging those feelings that the child has. Connecting with him by allowing his frustration, encouraging him to share that with you. Not feeling responsible for it, definitely not wanting to fix it. Understanding that it’s actually not just about this specific situation, that he needed to be on your lap. That is simply what touched him off. That’s what it means to connect, it’s a mindset. Obviously, she’s not really getting to focus on connecting with her four-and-a-half-year-old when this is going on, but maybe the next time or in a couple of times, because she’s being so clear with both of them so they can both receive this important message.

She says, “My 18-month-old refuses to be redirected or distracted by anything.” Right, and that’s actually healthy on his end because redirecting or distracting are really the opposite of connecting in this situation, and children feel that. Distracting a child from what’s happening, it can only be disconnecting. It’s literally saying, What you’re feeling isn’t happening. Focus on this and don’t feel what you feel. Don’t be where you are in this moment. I don’t recommend distracting a child no matter how young the child is and disconnecting that way. And redirecting is, again, in this situation, saying, Ooh, don’t want what you want. Don’t feel what you feel. Why don’t you do this? And that’s also putting the onus on us to try to fix it and make it better. I’ve got to do something to change this! But that can’t be our job because it’s not a job that’s going to work in the short- or long-term, and it’s not really going to be what the parent wants, which is to connect with her children.

In her final sentence, she says, “just unsure of how to make this work with two children.” What I would like to help her reframe is what “making it work” looks like. What connecting looks like. It’s not, Okay now I’ve made it work and everything is smooth. Unfortunately, it’s not that. Having young children is emotionally messy for them, and that’s why our attitude towards and perception of emotions is so crucial to ours and our child’s wellbeing. And we can do this with one or two or 12 or a whole classroom of children all venting together. Teachers can encourage at the beginning of the preschool year, for example, when several children are having a hard time with separation, Ah, you too. Ah, you all miss your moms and dads so much right now. It’s so hard to say goodbye. Yeah, it’s okay for all of us to feel sad. It’s like a group therapy session where our only role is encouraging and empathizing, not trying to make it all better. I suggest that actual thing all the time in teacher trainings and they think it’s bizarre when I suggest it, but it works. And it takes the pressure off of us. It takes demanding the impossible off of us.

I hope some of that helps. Also, 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,

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

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