Transcript of “Our Child Won’t Listen”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be responding to a parent who wrote to me. He has three children, but he’s mostly concerned about his oldest, who doesn’t seem to follow instructions and has been acting out. The parents are both using positive parenting, but it doesn’t seem to be effective for them. They’re looking for what they might be missing, and hopefully I’ll be able to give them some ideas about that.

Okay, here’s the letter I received:

Dear Janet,

I listen to your podcast regularly and I’ve heard multiple letters that you’ve read from parents with questions I have as well. And now I have a question of my own.

My partner and I have three children, ages four, two, and almost a month old. My son who is four is normally a very sweet and caring child, and we’ve done the best we can to follow the principles of positive parenting. One of the issues we struggle with is what to do when our son refuses to follow instructions and begins to act out. We don’t approve of timeouts and we don’t spank, but there are times when I feel that calmly talking to him and using the phrase, “I see that you want to do that,” and similar phrases seems to have no effect.

The issue we struggle with often is him not listening at all and ignoring us and continuing the behavior we say we can’t allow, such as pulling his younger sister around, climbing on our back and shoulders while we’re trying to care for the newborn.

What is the positive parenting method of dealing with a child where removing them from the situation, talking to them about the behavior, explaining our expectations, trying to understand their perspective, etc. does nothing, and the attitude and actions continue? Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

First of all, I can’t help but notice that there’s a new baby here. So right away, this oldest child’s behavior, and the second child, if they’re having any behavior like this, makes a lot of sense. And this could have been going on since nine months before the baby came, or close to that, when children get a sense that there’s a big change happening. So even if there weren’t any other stressors in this child’s life at all that he’d be responding to —and obviously there are a lot of normal difficulties that all children go through, changing to a new school, a new caregiver— even if none of those were happening, he has a big reason to be feeling a little kerfuffley in his behavior.

He’s showing that he isn’t able to stop himself even when his dad is very kindly and respectfully speaking to him about it. He’s not able to control when he is jumping on his parents or being rough with his younger sister with words alone. I love this note because it reflects a common type of misunderstanding that positive parenting, or what I call respectful parenting, means that if we say something to a child politely and respectfully, they’re going to stop what they’re doing or they’re going to do what we want them to do. That that will be enough on its own to set a limit or elicit cooperation. And often it isn’t in these early years because children are very sensitive and emotional, and that means they’re impulsive and they don’t have the self-control that, most of the time, we have as adults. Their feelings get the better of them. They feel threatened and they get stuck. Here I am climbing on my parent again. I know I’m not supposed to do this, but I can’t help myself. They get stuck and they need us to do more than talk to them in those times.

I definitely wouldn’t try to reason with a child who is, as children often are, showing us that they’re beyond reason, that they’re kind of gone. They’re not acting out of thoughtfulness and using their minds. This boy, he sounds like he’s very unsettled in these moments. That doesn’t mean he’s like this all the time, I’m sure he’s normally very sweet and caring and all those wonderful things. But it still comes up for children, especially in these situations where his whole place in the family seems to have shifted again. And maybe he hasn’t completely even resolved with the first transition to his sister. And now here we go again, all this attention is going to this baby. And yikes, what have I lost here?

So with these two understandings: First of all, that this boy does have a lot of good reason to be in a bit of an emotional crisis, at times, at least. And two, that our words are not going to be enough and appealing to our children’s minds when they’re kind of out of their minds is not going to work. What can we do? What I recommend is what I sometimes think of as being a papa or a mama bear. Using that part of ourselves that’s ready to give our child that physical help, picking them up, stopping them, putting the object away, helping them move off their sister, from a place of confidence in ourselves. And not being surprised by the behavior, being ready. Because we’ve normalized this for ourself, we expect it.

This is a huge adjustment for the whole family when another baby’s born. I’m sure I don’t have to tell this parent that, or any parent that. And this is especially challenging for the children because they feel this massive change in their relationship with their parents. It’s scary, it’s threatening. And then in the way that they’re viewed by their parents, if we get into a cycle where they know they’re disappointing us, they hear us losing our temper, getting annoyed, and it’s hard not to, right? With the behavior that we see. But that amplifies the discomfort and fear that they have. And yet this commonly, commonly happens. No matter how conscious we are as parents and how committed we are to gentleness, we’re human also, and it’s going to be upsetting if our child is suddenly doing these upsetting things and we can’t seem to reach them. So be prepared and, whenever you can, reach him right away physically, but from a place of being confident about what you’re doing.

What this dad is doing is wonderful. He’s acknowledging, he’s saying things like, “I see that you want to do that.” And talking to him about the behavior, explaining his expectations, trying to understand his child’s perspective. Those are all part of connecting with our child, but they can’t replace setting physical limits. Our children need more. And sometimes with the explanations, it can be a little too much. What’s even more respectful, and these parents are obviously respectful towards their children, is just to briefly explain, “Oops, that’s not safe. I see, yeah, you want to pull your sister around the house. No, I’m going to stop you right there. Mmm, I can’t let you grab her that tightly. And it sounds like she’s saying no, so I’m going to stop you.” And as we’re saying this, we’re gently preventing him from doing those things. We’re putting our hand in between them, we’re taking his hands off of her. We’re helping him when we see that he’s gone over the edge.

If we get into too much explaining in those times, it becomes us trying to reason with him. We start to feel that, and he feels that. And there we’re actually not going to be connecting with our child because our child has just gone to this unreasonable place, and now we’re trying to connect with them in a way that they are unable to, they just can’t get it. At another time, our child can get this, but when he’s in the middle of these moments, he can’t. So briefly noticing and acknowledging the, “I can see you want to do that” part that this dad mentions— wonderful. While you’re doing that, I would already be stopping him. Maybe even stop him before that and then say, “Oh, yeah, I see you want to do that. That’s not safe.” Or “I can’t let you.” Or “I’m going to help you stop.” And each time a child repeats these same actions, say even less. So maybe it becomes, “Oops, nope,” as we’re moving his hand or we’re putting a hand in between the two children.

This dad mentions that one of the options that they’ve tried is removing him from the situation. He says, “What’s the positive parenting method of dealing with a child where removing them from the situation does nothing?” The problem with removing him all the way from the situation is that it’s a little bit of overkill. It comes off as, Ugh, this is just overwhelming. We can’t handle you right now. And that’s quite appropriate when a child has really gone overboard and you can see that they’re just completely gone and they’re wreaking havoc everywhere, then yeah, sometimes we do have to take that extreme approach of, Okay, you’re just not safe here right now. You’re showing me. I see you. I’m going to help you here because I’ve got to go do this and I need you to be safe. But if we use that for these smaller, everyday incidents, then we’re not going to be giving our child the helpful, calming message that we want to give them, and that will help make a change in their behavior, help calm these impulses. Because we’re saying, Hey, we’ve got a handle on this. You’re not throwing anything at us that we don’t, at some level, expect and understand. And, even, we want to see you asking us for help, and we’re going to be there.

Ideally both parents would do this. Children can be very clear in that if maybe one parent is doing it but the other one isn’t, then they kind of keep going to get help from that other parent, almost like they’re training us, right? I mean, on some level, obviously it’s not conscious. They need both their leaders to be solid and comfortable in their role and understanding of the child as much as possible, so that the child can feel safe and feel a little more settled. And then when children are more settled, there’s less of the behavior. So that’s our goal in everything we do. Our goal is a safe, settled child who feels understood and that they can count on us to help whenever they need us, as much as possible.

So climbing on his parents’ back and shoulders. Now, that’s obviously going to be a difficult one to handle in the moment, gracefully and confidently. It does, again, make a lot of sense though. Look at me here. I see you busy with that baby. I’m not comfortable with what’s going on. How are you going to handle me? Those questions are coming up for him, and it’s going to be very hard for us, with a newborn, to receive that with empathy in a way that’s helpful to him. It’s going to be very hard. So we just do our best. But all of these things happen less when we’re taking care of the bigger picture of being the kind of leaders that help him feel safer and more settled. In that actual moment I think I would, with your body, as best you can while still holding the baby, get him off. But if he keeps doing it and there’s somebody else there that can move him away, that would be good. “Oops, I see you can’t handle this right now. So dad will help.”

Another thing I would do, if we need to be privately with the baby, say we’re putting the baby to bed or changing a diaper, and our older children are showing us that they can’t handle that safely, or quietly, in the case of putting a baby to bed, then we close the door. Not from a punitive place, but from a place of, You’re showing me you really can’t be safe with me right now, and I need to do this. It’s a place of confidence that it’s okay to give them that physical barrier when you need to. And I know a lot of parents are reticent about this, but it’s really about the way that we handle it. And then what children often do is they yell outside the door or they bang on the door, and right there, he’s actually having a really healthy release of his feelings about what’s going on, letting some of that fear out. And if we’re doing this from a place of love, not anger and punishment, then the feelings our child has in response, even if they seem terrible to us, are very positive. That’s the release that will, again, help him to feel more settled. But we’ve got to do it with acceptance of him and, maybe not necessarily tons of empathy in that moment if we’re not feeling it, but an overall attitude of empathy towards him and his situation.

Another way to help with this is to, at a calmer time, or before you have to do this activity with the baby, make a plan with him. “I know it’s hard for you sometimes to see me caring for the baby. You want my attention then too, right? That’s what big brothers often feel. Is there some way that we can help you feel better at these times? Is there something special you’d like to do while I’m feeding the baby?”

With my oldest daughter, who was four when her sister was born, this became playing with her dollhouse. She came to that on her own after one or two sessions of yelling outside the door where I was putting her sister to bed. And I just had to move through that as best I could, knowing that if she could share these feelings —or hoping, I should say— hoping that if she could share these feelings, if I’m accepting of them and I’m not mad at her, she’ll feel better. Letting them out will be helpful. And that was how it worked. She decided to go play with her dollhouse. And I know she did a lot of venting with those dolls, I could hear it sometimes because she would play with them almost every day after her preschool, emotionally processing the events of the day.

A plan might also be to say, which I also did with my children, “As soon as I’m done with the baby, it’ll be your time for me to read a book or play something, whatever you want. And I’m looking forward to that. So as soon as I finish with the baby, the sooner we’ll have our time.”

Another suggestion: empower him with a task that he can do to help you with whatever you’re doing with the baby. And even better maybe, ask him as a favor to help with his sister, help occupy her while you’re doing whatever it is with the baby. And right after that, you’ll be there to give him your attention.

But the main message I want to get across to these parents is: don’t be afraid to step in physically. Children need a lot of physical care from us, even when they’re well past infancy. On some level, they can crave it. And it’s not just when we’re hugging and cuddling and doing those things that feel clearer to us as being loving. It’s also in these other moments when we’re using a gentle but firm hand to help him when he needs help. Perceiving it that way and responding with that perception that we have.

I often used to say to myself, and I still do this with the children I’m working with, sometimes I say to myself, Don’t worry, I will stop you. I won’t let you do those things like hurt the baby, hurt or bother me. And that don’t worry attitude, that voice inside my head, don’t worry, help to give me confidence and stay in mama bear-hero mode when my child was showing they needed me.

So I hope some of that helps and clarifies. Also, please checkout some of my other podcasts at janetlansbury.com. website. They’re all indexed by subject and category so you should be able to find whatever topic you’re interested in. And I have books on audio at Audible.com, No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon and an ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.com.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

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The parent of three young boys is struggling to deal with their demands and the conflicts between them. If she accommodates one boy’s wishes, the other two react with an opposing desire, jealousy, and fighting. She’s wondering how to cope with her situation when everything feels like a compromise. “Most of the time I feel like they’re either fighting with each other or fighting over me,” she says. “It’s exhausting.”

Transcript of “More Kids, More Conflict — How Can We Keep the Peace?”

The post More Kids, More Conflict — How Can We Keep the Peace? appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “How Sportscasting Helps Kids Develop Social Intelligence”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I’m going to be answering a question from a parent who really has her hands full. She’s got three kids – 4 ½, 2 and 3 months. She describes the two year old as nonverbal and she’s wondering how to sportscast disagreements between him and his older brother without making false assumptions about what he’s thinking.

Here’s the email that I received:

Hi Janet! Thank you, your podcast has helped me to stay calm in some situations I know I wouldn’t have before.

I’ve noticed that my two boys usually solve their problems faster and better without my intervention. It’s awesome! What I’m hoping you’ll do a podcast on sometime is conflict resolution for nonverbal children.

Out of my three kids, ages four-and-a-half, two, and three months, only one is really verbal and he didn’t even start until he was over two-and-a-half years old. I try to sportscast disagreements between the older two, but it’s hard when I don’t really know what the two-year-old is thinking. I’m hoping you can give some tips, because I’m sure I’ll experience similar struggles with the baby once she starts interacting more with her brothers. Thanks!

Okay, I’m really happy to hear this podcast has helped this parent to stay calm, and also that she’s noticing how her two boys can solve their problems without her intervention. Yes, that is awesome. That’s wonderful. Actually, children do this better without our intervention most of the time because they feel freer to problem solve when they don’t sense we are bringing in our own judgments or agendas. This is also helpful to them in the bigger picture with building confidence in themselves in regard to social engagement and conflict resolution,  because our interventions can train them to believe that they are dependent on us, that they can’t do it themselves. Because we as their influential leaders are unwittingly showing them that we don’t quite believe they can. 

While we think we’re helping, and this is true with a lot of different kinds of helping that we do with children, helping sounds so wonderful but helping sometimes gives the child a message, or often gives the child a message, You can’t do this. You need me to do this for you or to make it work for you. Children build confidence in themselves and their abilities to resolve social conflicts when they are able to experience and feel from us that we believe they can do it.

So whether these are siblings or peers, to foster a feeling in children of being more capable and also allowing them to learn more though their practice, practice, practice, we’ll want to try to intervene in the most minimal way so that they can do the maximum they can do safely. This parent also makes a comment about her child being nonverbal. What she means, I believe, is that he does not have expressive language yet. He almost certainly does have receptive language because children begin learning receptive language from birth, possibly even in the wombs. By hearing us speak words to them and to others, they start to comprehend and internalize language. So, this child likely does have a lot of language, he’s just not speaking yet

With that in mind, what is sportscasting and how do we do this with children that are actually not speaking words? Sportscasting is actually just supporting children in their struggles of any kind. This can be with one child on their own with an object or a project that they’re working on, and all it really is is acknowledging. Acknowledging what we see because we sense that our child would appreciate the clarification or interpretation or a show of our attention and support in that moment. 

Sportscasting was Magda Gerber’s term and I realize it’s maybe not quite as accurate a term as it could be, because “sportscasting” sounds like we’re giving a running dialogue of what’s happening, as sportscasters do during games. And that is not the intention at all. It’s not “now so-and-so is doing this and now they’re doing that,” because that would be interruptive for children, and way too tiring and unnatural feeling for us.

Sportscasting is only recommended when we sense that acknowledging the situation would help a child.

And then it really is just about the facts. It’s actually not about us trying to decide what someone’s intention is, what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking. It’s only what we know for sure that we reflect back to the children. That means, even with the child who is speaking or otherwise communicating, we wouldn’t decide what they’re thinking or what they want. We really don’t know. All we know is that you both seem to want this toy.

So I wouldn’t even make comments like, “He’s still using this” or “He wanted to use this longer.” We actually don’t really know that for sure. Why does it matter that we’re so precise on this? It matters because the whole point of sportscasting is actually not just to give children language and a better understanding of the situation and to help them feel heard and understood, but it is for us to remind ourselves not to project, to really be observant, and try to see from the children’s perspective rather than with our adult lens.

Projection is something that we all do, especially with children, and most especially with children who do not have expressive language yet. It’s wonderful that this parent wants to be careful about that. I would be careful about it with any child because it’s really hard not to do. It’s such an inclination that we all have, to see, “He took that from you” and “You’re sad” instead of, “It seems like you’re saying ‘No, I don’t like that.’”

A lot of times, because we as parents care so much and can tend to worry, our projections will often tend to be our worst fear, or the worst case scenario… which causes us to take it up a notch. “He’s really sad and he needed that and you got that.” 

Innately for children, these kinds of struggles are often more interesting than negative and to be avoided, actually very interesting. “What happens when I do this? Wow, hey, he got that. I think I want that, too.” They’re very in-the-moment. While they often go through developmental stages where they want to hold on to control their environment and react more strongly to “loss” of that control, i.e.,from the latter part of the first year to 15 months or so when they commonly experience separation anxiety and react strongly to surprises of any kind, they don’t have these preconceived ideas of what’s right and what’s fair.

And their open-mindedness – their beginner’s mind – is why they are so able to learn about their world and conflict resolution. They don’t have these ideas that we might have, that can narrow our perceptions of situations. We make quicker judgments about them. It’s marvelous, this openness children have. They can see all the possibilities and they’re coming from a place of not deciding that this other person is being mean or a bad guy or stingy or grabby or anything like that. They’re fluid learners with each other. 

So with this approach, much of our role is restraint, sportscasting responsively with just the facts, and minimally. We don’t need to talk as much as we might think. We can wait until a child looks puzzled or looks at us or appears as if they need some support in what’s happening. If those things didn’t happen, I would just be there and be present. “You two both want this. It’s hard when you’re both holding onto this at the same time.”

Allowing them to have the struggle. Allowing it to be a loud, scary-looking struggle where no one is getting hurt. When we’re able to be there, we’re able to  stop hands from grabbing each other and block hitting or pushing or touching each other’s bodies. They can both hold onto the object, if that’s what it’s about, but not touch each other’s bodies. Then if this is an object that we don’t feel safe about, maybe it’s something heavy, a truck or something that we’re not sure if someone’s gonna get hurt, we could say, “You know, I can’t let you struggle over this. This doesn’t seem safe. I’m gonna need to take this for now.”

That’s okay to do, as well. We’ll need to make those kinds of judgment calls. But beyond safety, I would aim to give them free rein to struggle. That’s what allows them to experience and learn and master conflict resolution. Now, in terms of being preverbal regarding expressive language, I would understand that another positive to sportscasting is reinforcing those words for children and modeling speaking those words.

Maybe encouraging a little bit – again, it has to be from a neutral place, but encouraging the expressive language in the situation. When we see something physical, let’s say the older child has something, the younger child wants it, he’s grabbing it, the older child’s getting angry, the younger child now wants to bite. With siblings especially, these things are also going to happen when we’re not there. After the fact, the challenge is even greater to let it go (block it from happening again) and not overreact to the victim, confirming to that child that we perceive them as a victim and to the other child that they are a villain in our eyes.  

Children will read that from us if we’re fawning over or pitying the “victim” who very likely played a part in the conflict that we didn’t see. Children do. Siblings, they master each other. They know that other person very, very well. Maybe even better than we know our children. So, I would try not to take sides, even after the fact because of that messaging that gives to both the children. (But hey, it will happen that we’ll fall into that. Perfectly normal! So if you’re aiming for a neutral coaching vs. refereeing approach, give yourself a break – this is a big challenge!) But in that moment, stopping that child from biting, we can acknowledge/sportscast, “That makes you want to bite.” and then reiterate in just a brief few words: “I can’t let you bite.” 

Meanwhile, your hand is there. You’re holding his shoulder back from his brother so that he can’t bite. You’re making that impossible. 

There you can say, “Looks like you’re telling him, ‘No, I want that.’” Even there, where we are maybe a little bit trying to read what’s going on and maybe we’re not going to be totally accurate, I would say, “Looks like you’re” or “Seems like you’re saying” or “Do you want to tell him?” not expecting that my child’s going to say it right there or do it right there, but just reinforcing that language to remind them and model for them that there is language for what they’re feeling and doing.

That’s it. The hardest part is letting children engage in the conflicts, because it’s going to look gnarly sometimes, particularly for those of us (like me) who tend to shy away from conflicts and others who maybe get emotionally triggered by them. That older child’s going to seem really mean. Maybe for some people it’s the younger child that seems really, really aggressive and at fault. It may be that one child has a more dominant personality. Still, both children flourish and learn best when they feel like we’re on their side. That we are both of their coaches, not their referees. We love them both and both of them have a valid point of view in any situation. That’s basically what sportscasting is. It’s coming from that challenging but hugely respectful, trusting, affirming and unconditionally loving place in ourselves.

I think this parent will continue to see these wonderful results that she’s getting. I really hope this extra bit of feedback helps.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlandsbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. Both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can get them in ebook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com, and in audio, audible.com. As a matter of fact, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

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Transcript of “Balancing the Needs of More Than One Child (with Erica Orosco Cruz)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury, welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m very excited to share a guest with you, Erica Orosco Cruz. I’ve known and admired Erica for many years. We both studied with Magda Gerber. She’s also a RIE certified educator. She’s been in early childhood since she was a teenager and she, 20 years ago, founded Homeschool Garden, which is a childcare center, preschool/kindergarten for children ages one to six years old. Erica’s also a mother and she’s used Magda Gerber‘s approach with her children. I’m really looking forward to hearing Erica share her experiences and wisdom for parents or professionals who want to care for more than one child with respect.

Hi, Erica. Welcome and thank you so much for being here.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Hi Janet. I’m so happy to be here. It’s great to hear your voice .

Janet Lansbury:  And yours, and by the way, congratulations on your 20-year anniversary of the founding of Homeschool Garden. That’s amazing.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  I know, it crept up on us.

Janet Lansbury:  What an accomplishment and I love your mission statement, “To provide a safe environment where parents and children can learn and grow together. We believe that when children are truly seen and heard and parents learn to see with new eyes and listen for what is unsaid, families flourish.”

With new eyes is the way Magda Gerber asked us to see infants. It’s so true, isn’t it?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  It is. I learned so much from Magda. She’s right up there with my grandma as far as mentors and women in my life that really guided me. And yeah, I couldn’t rephrase it in a different way. It’s so clear and it gives people a great perspective.

Janet Lansbury:  So you said your grandmother, does this mean you were raised with this kind of respectful approach?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  I want to say she was the one that truly saw me and she was so attentive to all her grandchildren. Unfortunately, I only had her for the first four years of my life. She ended up passing from breast cancer. But I am proof of how they always say the first five years are so important. She left such a lasting mark in my life that I am the person I am today because of her.

Janet Lansbury:  Was she a primary caregiver for you?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  She was when my mother returned to work when I was one. And she was the matriarch of our family.

Janet Lansbury:  Wow. And then how did you end up starting a preschool and being a consultant for parents and doing these courses that you teach? How did this all come about?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yeah, I don’t think that was ever my intention. I joyfully worked with children since I was 15. I was volunteering in daycare centers and I was a camp counselor and a teacher assistant, various avenues of work in early childhood and I really enjoyed it.

I actually came across the RIE Philosophy, the RIE Manual, in an early childhood course for infants and toddlers. And I was fascinated by it. I had never read anything like it, it was so different from what I experienced, even working in the field already. It was so different from what I experienced and I loved it. As an 18-year-old learning this for the first time, I said: This is great, but you can’t really do this with children.

Janet Lansbury:  What do you mean?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Well, you couldn’t talk to children where they would understand. You couldn’t not teach them. You would have to teach them how to do things, teach them to sit up. It was so different.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, this idea that they are coming into the world as people with their own abilities and can be treated like an aware person. I know it was shocking for me too when I first learned this.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yeah. And so I had that experience in school. And then a couple of years later, as I finished up my education, I was looking for employment and I came across a center that actually had sought out Magda Gerber for some consulting: Glendale Adventist Medical Center. They have childcare onsite for their employees. And I went there for an interview and the director, who was a very tall woman, over six feet, was giving me a tour of the location.

“Here’s our pre-K room. Here’s our preschool room. Here’s where the two-year-old toddlers are. Here we’re going to go into the toddler and infant space.” And it was very reminiscent of Magda Gerber’s space. They had an outdoor deck, there was a door that was propped open that the children could go in and out of.

When we walked in, we both saw an infant about 8 to 10 months old. She was sitting up on her own, and we saw her pick up a leaf and she put it in her mouth. And then what came next is what was so different. The director walked over to her, she squatted down in a kneeling position, and she even tilted her head so that her eyes were at eye level with the infant. And she said, “I saw you put a leaf in your mouth,” and she waited. And then she put her hand out and she said, “I’d like it now.” And the young infant opened up her mouth, stuck out her tongue and the director plucked the leaf off of her tongue.

Janet Lansbury:  Wow.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yeah. What was that? And it was so different. I expected her to run over to the infant, scoop up the infant in her arms and then stick her finger in the infant’s mouth to get the leaf. And that was not what happened at all.

I even asked the director, “What is that? What did you do?” And that’s when she talked about the RIE Philosophy again. And so seeing it in action, I was like, “I want to learn more, whatever that is. I want to learn more of that.”

Janet Lansbury:  Right, it totally stands out as just so different from the way our society treats children and the way that most of us instinctively would treat a baby.

So you studied with Magda and some of the other wonderful mentors at Resources for Infant Educators, and then you started teaching, right? You started teaching parent-infant classes and parent-toddler classes. And then at some point 20 years ago, you decided to start Homeschool Garden and care for groups of children.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes. I had a then five-year-old and two-year-old and had been teaching classes and was looking for a school for them. I didn’t find one that where I was seeing that they were respected, seeing that they were taken care of in a way that I wanted them to be cared for and so Homeschool Garden was born.

Janet Lansbury:  So you decided I’m just going to do it myself.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  I was determined that there was a space for that and that other families are also looking for that as well, and 20 years later, here we are.

Janet Lansbury:  Wow. And this is actually one of the reasons I especially wanted you on the podcast. There are a lot of reasons because you have so much wisdom that you’ve gathered through all this work with children that you’ve done over the years, your own children, how many do you have now?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  I have 4: 25, 23, 14, he just turned 14 and then a two-year-old as well.

Janet Lansbury:  Quite a spread. That must be such an education in itself. And then your Homeschool Garden is a mixed age group, right?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes. Our youngest right now is actually my granddaughter who is nine months old.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh my gosh.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yeah. And then we go up all the way to six years.

Janet Lansbury:  How wonderful. Well, so many parents and professionals ask me, “How can this approach work, how can you respect a baby or respect any age child (the way you talked about respecting that baby with the leaf), when you’ve got twins, triplets siblings, or groups of children? How do you give them that respect? How do you handle their behaviors?”

And what I often don’t get the chance to explain, in fact, I rarely get the chance to explain is that this approach is actually geared for caring for groups of children, because much of it was developed as you know, by Pediatrician Emmi Pikler in an orphanage setting where the ratio was one caregiver to nine babies or toddlers. And most of us, at least as parents, are dealing with a better ratio than that.

Through those respectful care practices that Pikler developed and then Magda Gerber developed further, they had remarkably positive outcomes for institutional care, unheard of outcomes where these people grew up to be typical in wanting to have relationships, wanting to have children, things that just don’t usually happen in an institutional setting. So it works. And you have had all this practical experience putting that into action and developing your own ways of giving attention to all the children and giving them what they need, taking care of their needs so that they can flourish. That’s what I want to hear more about.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Even when we have licensing people come out or physical therapists or people that have a variety of the experience of childcare and different locations, they come here and they sense right away this is different. We are not trying to micromanage the children’s time or what they’re doing. We are really giving the opportunity for them to play freely. And when we have routines like snack or a transition into the program, or a transition of getting picked up, or even a transition to go wash hands, we’re doing that with individual time and respect. And so those visitors, even when we have parents observing, are in awe of how it all flows. And I, 100% attribute that to the RIE Philosophy. The idea of children being an active participant in their care, the safe environment that we create, the consistency of our routines.

I often will tell parents who have twins or more than one child that you have to be even more RIE so that you can create that kind of environment and that flow and ease of being with your children.

Janet Lansbury:  Right, that’s what I feel too. And finding that time for self-care in all of that as well. It’s even more important that you put that oxygen mask on first when you’ve got the challenge of multiple children to take care of.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  And I think something that was very different for me going through the RIE Program as a parent was that I was a single mom, a single mom of two young children. So I got to apply this practice every day. And when I had my second son and my three-year-old was demanding of my time and my attention, okay, how can I be here for both of them? How can I be present? What would that look like?

For me, it’s really about having one-on-one time with each child, even if in a group care setting. If that means that’s the potty break that’s happening. If that means it’s the diaper change. If that means it’s a child who wakes up late and everyone else has finished snack. And so this child has one-on-one time with the caregiver having snack, then that’s how it happens.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, somebody actually asked a question about that on a comment on one of my Facebook posts recently, it’s actually a podcast post “Damage Control When We Feel Like We’re Failing,” and it’s talking about multiple children. So I had brought up the study by Sherry Turkle about the way that children feel when the phone or the tech device takes the parents’ attention at any time, they get a text message and they go or whatever. I had shared a study about that in the podcast. And this parent said:

“What if that something is not your phone, but your other children, because I feel like this happens constantly? I’ve read your words on being present for the “wants something time,” and being there during caregiving moments. And I try, but I’m with one, and there are two other children in a similar state needing help. I’m doing someone’s hair and from across the house, someone else is screaming for me to help them on the toilet. I’m just sitting down to color with one and another has spilled their drink all over the floor. There seem to be so many interruptions that I feel this is the sense that I give to my kids: that I can always be taken away. And on the other side, I try to give “needs nothing time,” (I think she’s referring to “Wants nothing quality time,” Magda’s term)… and make time to be present and play. But what ends up happening is they all try to play with me individually at the same time. It normally ends with frustration because no one is getting what they want.”

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes, I can relate to all of that.

Sportscasting. Sportscasting is huge. “I’m coloring with your sister right now. I hear you’re asking for help on the potty. You may have to wait until I’m done using my red color.”

I always want to be sportscasting so that each child knows where my attention is. I had a three-year-old and a three-month-old and I was spending all my time focused on both of them at the same time, where I didn’t have any individual time with them. And so instead of bathing them both at the same time, I had decided that I would have my one-on-one time with them each by bathing them separately.

So I started with my three-year-old and would bathe him. And at that moment, sometimes my three-and-a-half-month-old would cry and would want attention. And I would remain with my three-year-old as I was sportscasting to my three-and-a-half-month-old, “I hear you, Jacob. I’m bathing Andrew right now. And when I’m done, then I can be with you.”

As my three-year-old started to hear that over and over — that I was choosing to stay with him as his brother was calling for my attention, it then became the three-year-old that said, “I’m okay, mom, you can go check on Jacob right now.” The baby was just outside the bathroom door, laying down on the rug, and the three-year-old was within arm’s reach of the bathtub. But it was the understanding and the empathy that he was developing by me being present and staying with one child at a time.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. They both get a positive message from that. They get the message that even if he’s getting the attention now, I’m going to get my own version of full attention at some point, too, instead of nobody’s ever getting it all the way.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes. And trying to meet everybody’s need at the exact same time.

Janet Lansbury:  Right.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  We have a new child that’s transitioning in. And before I get up and leave the space, I let him know I’m going to be going to the kitchen and getting some dishes and I’ll be back. And he may toddle behind me and follow me in that direction.

When I come back, I let him know: “I’m going to be serving lunch right now. You can come sit down.”

The other children are like, “I want agua,” because we’re a bilingual school, asking for more water. And I’ll say, “I’m helping this child right now. And when I’m done helping this child, then I can start serving water,” sportscasting whose attention I have right now.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes. But what if that other child doesn’t accept this gracefully at all and has the impulse to go and do something destructive with another child or with something in the room or scream really, really loudly? How do you handle it when it’s not easy like that?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  So one of the things I recommend not only to my staff but to caregivers and parents is to have an environment that supports you. So when I am going to the kitchen, I am bringing actually a basket full of every single thing that I’m going to need. We’ve got extra plates, we’ve got the extra napkins, we’ve got extra silverware, extra glasses. Everything is in one space. And so when I put it down near the children that are sitting at child-sized tables and stools, it is again within arms reach. So I can put my hand over it. If a child is like, “I don’t want to wait. I’m just going to grab a glass,” or, “I’m going to reach for the water pitcher,” everything’s within arms reach of me so that I can put my hand over it and say, “I’m not offering that right now.”

And I would repeat, “I’m still helping so-and-so sit down, and then I can serve you water.” And I even point to my ear, “I hear you, I hear you asking for water. I want to remind you that I’m going to help this friend to the table first.”

And I’m pausing. I’m not reacting. There’s not a big reaction from me so I get to set the tone. I’m not going to amplify it. I don’t need to yell. I don’t need to move quickly because I’ve created an environment that supports me right along with Magda Gerber’s example of a safe environment.

Janet Lansbury:  Also I’ve got to believe that the fact you’re not getting triggered, well, it’s a lot of practice, but the way that you’re perceiving that it’s normal for children to do those things…  it’s normal for them to object when they’re not getting what they want. It’s not a bad sign that you’re doing something wrong and that you’ve got to fix something and everybody’s unhappy and that’s going to rock you. It’s a mentality of normalizing a lot of things, our perceptions, our expectations.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes. So as soon as the children arrive, they get either sun hats or beanies, depending on the weather, and a child who’s been here for five years and their routine is the same (we’ve always gotten a hat), I still will remind them, I’ll be touching my head: “It’s time for you to get a hat now.” Just as if it was a child who’s only been here for three months.

So it’s not the expectation of, well, they should know, they’ve been here for five years or we’ve been doing this for three months. It’s with the understanding of, there are a lot of stimuli. And I don’t know if they got the breakfast that they wanted or if the parent that they wanted to see in the morning is the parent that woke up. I don’t know how their day is and I just want to be supportive in any way that I can.

Janet Lansbury:  That reminds me… It’s almost like a literal version of a touchpoint, that you’re giving the children just those little moments. Even that’s a moment of attention that you’re giving solely to that child. It just lasts for one second, but it matters because you’re connecting right there and saying: I see you and I’m here to help you. I’m here to remind you and help you. Not be angry with you for not getting it, but to show you that I’m here caring for you as well.

So it doesn’t take as much energy as I think we sometimes believe it might, to give a child that feeling of being seen and being cared about in a small way.

One of the common issues parents have and I remember this being an issue for me, is that they need to put their baby to sleep, and their toddler, or in my case, it was a four-year-old, is not able to be quiet in the area because they can’t control their impulses at that time. So, therefore, they’re disrupting and they’re making it pretty much impossible for that baby to fall asleep and for you to have a little bedtime moment nursing or whatever it is at bedtime. And then you ask the child to leave the room and then they’re screaming outside the door, crying, and you feel terrible as a parent that you’re abandoning them and neglecting them. How would you handle a situation like that?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Janet, I think it goes back to being able to give the children grace. That’s normal, they’re tired, they’re wanting your full attention. They don’t want you to be separated from them. But I wouldn’t be able to give that grace to the child unless I was giving that grace to myself too.

Janet Lansbury:  Giving yourself that grace of…

Erica Orosco Cruz:  It may not be perfect. I might unravel just as quickly as the other child or it might feel rushed. I might have both of the babies in my arms at that time. So knowing that it doesn’t have to be perfect every day and being able to give myself that grace.

But I want to be able to meet both of the child’s needs. Okay, how can I do that, if I’m thinking about it? Okay, the youngest one I would like to put to bed early so that I can spend the time with my four-year-old or older child. How can I do that? Oh, okay, does that mean that I move up one child’s bedtime an hour earlier, instead of just 30 minutes earlier? Maybe I don’t need to put the child completely asleep. Maybe I just need to feed the child, burp the child, put the younger child in the crib while I go and sing songs, have a cuddle, have a story time with the older child, and then come back to the other child, the younger child if he’s not asleep.

I’m always trying to think of possibilities. What are other possibilities? So that it’s not just, I need to do this, because that rigidity, the rigidity of it has to be done this way or they’re calling me, so I need to go over there, even though I’m being here in this moment.

I remember being that parent: it has to be this way and not giving myself that grace of, I can take a breath and then I can go attend to that child that needs me.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. Or we can have a very messy moment here, it’s not going to be smooth. Which is most of the time, especially if you have more than one child, it’s hardly ever everybody’s just perfectly content. Those moments happen and then you’re wondering, Oh gosh, I’ve got to pinch myself here. I must be dreaming.

I think getting used to that it’s going to be… And also for that older child, that’s the moment where maybe all that envy and jealousy and feeling about having this new child in their life, this new child in the family is coming to the fore right there and it’s spilling over and it’s getting expressed and in a way that’s such a positive, healthy thing.

And we can acknowledge and help someone feel heard, even outside of a door. You can help someone to feel that you care about them and love them, even if they’re not right there with you.

I think that’s another thing with caring for children in groups or caring for multiple children in a family. Yes, it’s nice when a child is having a feeling and we can just drop everything and be just with that feeling. But oftentimes, when there’s more than one child, it doesn’t happen that way, and we have to find ways to accept feelings and encourage children to share feelings with us, without us stopping everything for that to happen.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yeah. Even if they’re on the other side of the door. If you’re going to the bathroom and there’s a two-year-old demanding your attention and the door is closed, you can still, even then, “I hear you, you’re wanting me to be present with you and I’m taking care of myself right now.” Whatever that might be.

Janet Lansbury:  Right and unplugging that thing in us that’s like, I can’t relax. This again comes from expectations and perceptions of what it means when children behave like this. It’s not a bad thing that’s going on. It’s not a negative thing. It’s very healthy for children to feel: sometimes I don’t get what I want. My life is a flow of feelings and it’s not this static — I always feel a certain way. I always feel calm and happy or just calm and settled. It can be ALL those things. And that’s healthy for children to experience. It happens naturally when we, as you said, kind of prioritize one child or even ourselves sometimes.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  And when they’re receiving the focused attention at some other part during the day, I can even bring that: “I remember when you were pounding on the door when I was in the bathroom and here I am, I’m all yours now. We can go and read your story. Now my time is with you.”

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. “And that was so hard for you. I could hear how hard that was. You didn’t like that.”

Another practical example people need help with is let’s say… Well, actually I did a post recently, just a little post on Instagram, about transitions and helping a child to leave something, like the park. It could be also leaving daycare or leaving childcare or school or some other situation or a play date with a friend. The child is having difficulty in that transition as children often do. They’re getting overwhelmed and they’re getting dysregulated. And how can we respectfully help them to get from point A to point B? They’re not usually able to be given a lot of choices then or whatever. They’re not in a reasonable frame of mind and they really need help. So I had a post about this and somebody said, “Well, what if there are two children and they’re both running in different directions when you try to help them. What do you do if everybody’s running away?”

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Again, creating that safe environment for yourself, a supportive environment.

So if I have two children and there is a possibility that they might run in different directions, I maybe bring a wagon to the park so that I can corral them into a space, so that I don’t have to carry two children out of the park.

I also like to talk about routines and consistency. So one of the things that we used to do with my children when we would go to the park is that: “Before we leave the park, we will go on the swings. And when we are done with the swings, then we’re going to go to the car.” So they may ask for the swing earlier in the park visit. And I would remind them, “We do that before we leave.” And so they would go off and play again.

And then when I was getting ready to or it was time for us to leave, “Okay, we’re going to be getting ready to leave so I can offer the swing now.” So they got into the routine of Oh when we go in the swings, that means we’re going to leave, and it would be pretty much smooth sailing.

So again, when we take a group of children to the park or another visit: What kind of cues can I give them? What can I let them know? So when we start to put our shoes back on, that’s going to be time for us to leave, and we’re reminding them of that as we arrive at the location. “When we get our shoes back on, we’re going to be leaving.” And shortly before we’re leaving, “Okay it’s almost time for us to get our shoes on. And then we will be leaving right after that.”

So lots of physical cues. If I’m at a friend’s house and my children have come along, “When I go get our jackets from the other room, it’ll be time for us to leave.” “When I put my dishes on the counter, it’s going to be time for us to leave.” So I’m trying to give them physical, not only visual cues, which is super helpful.

And then there are times where they’re tired and they’ve had tons of fun and they don’t want to leave. Now you’re dealing with a tired child who might be throwing a fit. You can give them all the cues and they’re still not participating. So it’s, “You may walk to the car or I may pick you up and take you to the car,” pausing and waiting, giving them every opportunity that you can, that they will participate. And then it’s, “I see that you’re not walking, so I’m going to pick you up and carry you to the car.”

Janet Lansbury:  I love that idea of the transitional activities, sort of like a bedtime routine, where once the child is in that activity, they’re already feeling themselves getting ready to leave, or they’re feeling themselves getting ready to go to sleep because they’ve associated that activity with the next activity or the next situation that’s going to happen. That’s brilliant. I actually haven’t heard of that before and I love it.

Erica Orosco Cruz: There have also been times where we’ve had an “after RIE class.” So a class for children that are over two years. And I remember we were wrapping up class, the volume was going louder and the parents are in the class going, “Oh no. How is this going to unfold?” The children were running around in the indoor space. And I got out a box of silks and I just slowly folded them. And the energy slowly shifted into much calmer. Some of the children started joining me. But it’s so much about being the calm in the eye of the storm of just being present and slowing down. I don’t need to raise my volume. I don’t need to stand up and lift my arms. I don’t need to react to what’s going on in front of me. I just need to know where I want to go. “Do I want to bring the energy down? Okay, I can do that. How can I do that? What are the tools that I can have? Is it sweeping? Is it raking? Is it something that I can do, repetitive and calming as well?”

Janet Lansbury:  Do you ever get wound up and you feel like: Okay, I’m getting wound up. What am I going to do? I’m going to breathe, or whatever it is. Do you have a self-dialogue that you do at all or imagery?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  I even talk it out loud with the children. Say they’re moving their bodies precariously on something. I might go, “I’m watching. I’m not sure about that. I may come closer.”

So it’s not even in my head, it’s just something oral. And I’m saying it out loud and they’re like: Oh, what does that mean? She’s watching, what are we doing that’s bringing her attention to it?

Or I might say, “I’m coming closer,” when I’m getting behavior that’s out of the norm and screaming and amplified and they’re having a good time, but I’m not sure about it. So I’ll go, “I’m not sure. I’m going to come closer.” And so I’m checking in with them, but I’m also checking in with myself. Is this something I’m okay with? This is something I’m not okay with. Well, let me get closer. Maybe I can be closer and feel more comfortable with what they’re climbing on.

We had a parent that came in and was volunteering, but was very fluent with the language that we use: “I’m not sure, I’m coming closer.” And I remember at the end of the day, one of the staff members says, “She’s not sure about a lot of things.” And I thought that was so great because at least she was vocalizing it for uncertainty with the children and with the staff. So I was happy. That made me laugh.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. It’s always better to put it out there because children are feeling that, they’re feeling that trepidation or that discomfort a little bit in the person. And then it’s kind of scary if they don’t hear somebody put words to what’s going on with them. So, it really helps to calm children even just to be that honest about what’s going on with us, cluing them in. It also helps model a process for them, for themselves: I’m not sure about standing on that rock. So let me think about it. Okay, I’m going to try putting one foot up. Not that they would verbalize that, but they might internalize that kind of dialogue.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes. And its familiar language. So even the other children might say, “I’m not sure about that,” when they’re referring to another child.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. I love that. That’s so great.

What else do I want to ask you about… What about the conflicts between children? What about when they’re using unkind words or being unkind or they’re being physically unsafe or maybe they’re fighting over toys? What kind of responses do you have to those things?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  I feel like it’s the same responses when we’re in a RIE class and it’s infants exploring each other’s bodies and things like that. And the same thing with the preschool or a child who has a whole lot more language. One of the words that we use often is “ouch,” if we see something that’s rough or hear something that’s rough, or if it’s unkind words. So we come closer, we sportscast, “I saw that you were both holding onto it. Ouch, that’s rough when you’re pulling on someone’s hair,” or “Ouch, that was rough how you said, give it to me.”

So we are still sportscasting, even with children who have a full round of language because they still are centering on themself and what they desire instead of really looking at the other child who may have that same desire. And so that’s where the sportscasting still comes into play. And it’s so helpful, especially with siblings who have varying degrees of language and comprehension of what’s going on.

Janet Lansbury:  But you stop some of the behaviors, right?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes. We are definitely putting our hand in there to make sure everybody’s safe. We intervene if there are children that are being rough with each other, or if they’re being rough with an object, like a toy, or even — we have some chickens here — if they’re being rough with themselves even. We’re intervening, putting our hands in the path where they could do harm, and still continuing the sportscasting. “I may hold onto that car, I see that you’re both pushing. I’m going to make sure that you’re both safe.”

Janet Lansbury:  But you’re allowing them to resolve the conflict if possible by themselves. And at what point would you decide that they can’t be in this conflict or they’re not able to be here right now, or I need to pull them aside, how would you do that?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Sometimes we will stop the harm from happening. And then it may be, we can be in that space with them and see how it unfolds. “Okay, I’m going to have you stay close to me, but you’re still going after that person. Okay, I’m going to have us move into a different space.” So that there’s a clear boundary of what’s okay and what’s not okay. Yes, it’s okay to struggle over a toy or want to be sitting on the same stool or to have conflict is natural, but to be forceful with someone’s body, that’s a hard boundary.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely. But you’re still not judging the child as a bad child or shameful or anything. Yeah-

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Definitely not.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s the key to so much. Our reactions are what make certain behaviors repeat or make things a “thing.” Like children running away from us when they’re supposed to do something, it’s often because of the way that we’ve reacted to that in the past or the way that we’ve been judgmental.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Here on site with the staff, it’s like okay, what is that behavior desiring? Is that child wanting to play with those children? We see them knocking down a structure that the other children built with blocks, but does that need mean that they want to be playing? Okay, how can we facilitate that? What is behind the behavior? What is the need that’s trying to be met?

Janet Lansbury:  Right. And sometimes it’s the opposite. This child is trying to get some space if it’s too stimulating for this child to be this close to these children. So they’re pushing, hitting them.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  You can’t discover that unless you’re observing. Because if you’re in it and you’re like oh, I’m constantly having to stop this child from pushing friends away from them. And you’re not observing… Okay, what happened before? Okay, what was happening earlier in the day? If you’re not trying to figure out through observation what’s unfolding, then you’re not going to be able to see it. And then I would say, then you would move towards the labels or you would get frustrated or you would say: Oh, not again.

Janet: Lansbury. Yes, and that’s such a cornerstone of Magda Gerber’s approach: sensitive observation of children and it really makes a difference. I’ve noticed when I’ve been able to go into a preschool because a parent maybe asked me to assess their child for something. I’ll be the one that gets to observe because the other teachers are sometimes busy and I’ll see everything — how things went down and what really happened. And you learn a lot about each child just in a short amount of time. It’s really, really powerful.

But how do you do that if you’re the parent with a bunch of children? How do you carve out that observation time? You learn to not get involved in their play for one thing, so that becomes observation time.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  And then you get curious. Okay. I was putting the groceries away and a child said something to me, but I continued to put the groceries away, and then all of a sudden there was spilled milk on the floor. Oh, did I miss that opportunity where they were asking for help pouring the milk? What could I have done? Could I have set the groceries aside and maybe the child could’ve helped with the groceries away and then I could have served milk?

It really goes to the curiosity that children instinctively have, that we often lose because we’re just trying to find the answer.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. So it’s not really observation in the sense of the way we do in the classes, which is where we’re actually sitting and observing. We’re reflecting more on what just happened, so that’s another way of learning the way observation teaches us.

We can also learn by actually being open to… which always has to start with self-compassion and non-self-judgment, I think. But reflecting on: Oh, there’s a reason this happened with my child and the reason is not my fault, I’m bad or that they’re terrible, that I’ve done a terrible job with them, that they’re not a good person. None of those are ever the reason. The reason is something else. So to let go of all those other things so that we can love ourselves and have peace with ourselves enough to be open to what it really is, I guess, is what you’re saying.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  That’s what I call grace, to give yourself some grace.

Janet Lansbury:  I love that. Wow. What a gift you are.

So you consult with parents, you coach parents, all of that information’s on your website and you have online classes as well?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  We do. We have online classes for parents, we weekly come together. And what we receive, Janet, is like when we were in class with Magda, the decompression of: Now I get to reflect.  Or, where can I fit in this observation time? Or as Magda used to say, “What are your three wishes?” And by asking that question, it really opens you up to: What is the possibility? How could this be different?

Being a mother is no easy feat. Being a caregiver of multiple children is no easy feat, but when we have a love and a curiosity for it, it gives us a lot of opportunities to be able to shift, to try different things.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. What do I need? I feel like you’re saying. That’s what Magda was saying. She was saying, “If the good fairy could come and give you a wish or three wishes, what would they be?” And what she was saying was: Think about what you need.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Yes, because we teach ourselves first. So if we’re frustrated or tired or not taking care of ourselves, that’s what we’re modeling for our children.

Janet Lansbury:   This is wonderful. Thank you so much, Erica. I’ll be linking to all your information in the notes of this podcast. And then in the transcript, which will be posted on my website. I wish you had been my preschool teacher and I may have wished you were my mother too, at some point. You exude that grace that you’re talking about, you really do.

Oh, there’s this video of you, if it’s still on YouTube of you helping your son brush his teeth, and goodness, that alone, is worth a million words. Is that still available?

Erica Orosco Cruz:  It is.

Janet Lansbury:  Okay, great. I’ll include that in the transcript as well. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And you have a beautiful day. I’m thrilled you’re out there helping so many people, so many parents, so many children to give themselves grace.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Thank you. This went by so fast. I’m so grateful that we got to do it.

Janet Lansbury: Me too. All right, take care, my friend.

Erica Orosco Cruz:  Bye.

Please check out the wonderful resources Erica offers at http://homeschoolgardensite.com

And HERE’s Erica’s toothbrushing video on YouTube, it’s worth watching!

Also, please check some of my other podcasts on my website janetlansbury.com. There are 200-and-something of them at this point and they’re all indexed by subject and category so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And I have two books, they’re available at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in eBook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com, and in audio at Audible.com. Actually, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

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

The post Balancing the Needs of More Than One Child (with Erica Orosco Cruz) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Dealing with Judgmental Comments about Our Parenting”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I have a question from a parent. I received it in an Instagram message, and she and her husband are concerned about what she calls the “outside noise” of grandparents and other family members, putting their two cents in and speaking to her children in a way that seems shaming and is the opposite of what this parent is trying to do. She’s not worried about being criticized herself, but she worries this will affect her children now and possibly in the future.

Here’s the question I received:

I find that when my parents or my in-laws are around, they tend to speak up about the ways my children behave and our parenting. For instance, if my oldest daughter throws food on the floor, my husband or I will say, ‘It seems like you’re letting me know you’re done eating. Thank you for letting us know,’ and we will promptly remove her food and let her down. In the silence between removing the food and placing her down, I have noticed one of the parents will say something to the effect of, “We don’t throw food. That’s not good.”

This also shows when my oldest and youngest have some sort of conflict. My husband and I tend not to intervene, unless there is some sign of hitting or danger. We try to let them figure it out for themselves. Our parents however, will immediately intervene and say something to the effect of, “You have to share with your sister. That is not how a big girl behaves,” or, “Hey, that’s not very nice.”

I have said to them on various occasions that this is not how we handle these situations and that I’d appreciate if they take our lead, as opposed to jumping in all the time. They see how my husband and I respond, and sometimes acknowledge how patient and good we are with them, and other times will say we’re being too soft and letting them walk all over us. I don’t particularly care about their opinions of our parenting. What I do care about is the confusing, sometimes negative, shaming mixed messages that seem to be happening and how it will affect our children now or down the line. I do talk to the kids about it after the fact, and at times in the moment, but I’m worried about the long-term mixed messaging.

I obviously cannot control the actions of other people, so it seems like I’m just hoping that eventually, my and my husband’s actions will show the parents that the old-school mentality that they’re coming at the children with is not only not what we do, but also ineffective. Any advice that you could give on this topic would be most appreciated. Thank you so much.

Okay, so I was drawn to this comment and this issue because, you may have noticed if you listened here that I like going into topics that have layers, and I see a lot of layers here. The first one is that she is concerned about what she calls the “mixed messages” and how this will affect their children now or down the line.

She’s not really asking what she can do about this outside noise, and I think she realizes that there’s not a lot she can do in terms of trying to change other people. Something I try to help parents realize is when it’s so out of their control, it’s not worth our precious energy.

I did ask this parent when I messaged her back the age of her children, and she said her daughter is just turning three and the younger one is 10 months, so these parents are in the thick of it, very draining time, probably the hardest period of their life as parents because they have a toddler and they have an infant. Those ages are hard and the dynamic between the children is challenging as well. So yeah, she’s doing the best kind of influencing, which is modeling. She and her husband are modeling the way that they would like others to treat their children.

And then it sounds like she has spoken to the grandparents a couple of times. And it’s so hard to change the way we, ourselves perceive these common situations with our children. I mean, imagine as grandparents, it’s really, really hard to change at that point, and the grandparents have to be open to wanting to see a new way. I’m always blown away because a lot of grandparents follow my work, and when I hear from them, I congratulate them. I mean, to me, they are above and beyond because they are being so egoless to be open to: Well, hey, maybe there’s some things that I did with my children that weren’t the best. Maybe there are ways that could work better, that I could see differently.

I hope to be like that myself someday. I hope to be still an open-minded learner as a grandmother. Most people, they’re excited about being grandparents, they love the children, they want to see them raised well, but they do often believe in old ideas, the way that they were raised. It’s very hard to break out of that and see differently. Which is what these parents are doing, shifting some of these dynamics, so that’s so laudable.

But for the grandparents, I wouldn’t waste your energy trying to change them, and I strongly believe, and I’ve seen over and over again that we are by far the most formative influence on our children. The primary caregivers have the most influence. These other people in our children’s lives can be influential, but not in such a formative way, not in defining “self” for our child. We have a much bigger part to play in that, and so the way that we respond to our children will always be way more important. The other thing is that something Magda Gerber used to say, which is, “Parenting is about letting go.”

That means that we are allowing our child to experience other points of view, other influences. Gradually, we are letting go of control of the environment for these people. If you’re like me, it is not a comfortable thing to let go, but this is the job that we have. It’s not to keep our children in whatever we perceive as a perfect bubble and protect them from other people’s opinions and other input.

I know that I had an experience with my father-in-law that was so much milder than what this parent is dealing with, and I was just a nut because I was so excited about what I was learning, how my perspective was changing, seeing everything with new eyes, seeing my baby, seeing how capable young children are. I was seeing it all with new eyes, and my father-in-law, he was just, out of love, doing something, and I said I wish he hadn’t done that.

It really hurt his feelings. I think he’s forgiven me by now. I mean, that was over two decades ago, but it was because I wanted to create this perfect bubble with all the exciting things that I was discovering, and I didn’t want it to be hindered in any way.

So if you want to hear about the story, you can read it on my website. I’m not trying to clickbait people to my website, but I don’t want to get into the whole thing here. It’s called “Accepting Grandparents’ Good Intentions,” and I’ll link to it in the transcript.

I only share that to say I do understand that these parents are working so hard. It sounds like they’re doing beautifully, and here’s this noise coming in, this outside noise that feels like it’s spoiling everything and it’s going to influence my children for life. I don’t believe it will. I would let go of that.

What it might influence is how the children feel about those particular people. So when they get older, as they grow and they have choices about: Do I want to spend time with that person? Maybe they won’t if they feel judged and shamed by them. Maybe they won’t if they feel that person has such a critical eye on them. That’s unfortunate and it is a loss, but these people’s comments are not going to be defining for your child. And they do come out of love and this old-school way of thinking that a lot of people still have — that you see behavior you don’t like and you get rid of that behavior. You use whatever power you have, scolding, shaming, punishment, anything to just get that behavior to stop.

But what’s more effective is to understand the why, understand where that behavior is coming from so that we can help children to alter it, because we’re providing the answer to that question that they’re asking or the need that’s missing for them.

But there are people, and yeah, it’s an old-school way of thinking that this is our job. We’ve got to make them stop. We’ve got to tell them it’s wrong and bad. And you know what, it kind of works, But what happens is that we, as children, internalize all this shame and feelings of distrust for ourselves, and that we’re wrong and we have these bad parts of us, and that just doesn’t help us to flourish as we could in life, and can create a lot of problems. But on the outside, we usually do stop the behavior, because we’re so afraid we’re going to lose the affection and goodwill of these people that we need so desperately.

Another painful part of this that these parents are probably experiencing with this outside noise is that they’re realizing, maybe for the first time: Oh, this is exactly how I was treated by my parent.

Sometimes it’s very obvious and we remember it, but other times, it can be: Whoa, this might be why I have so much shame. This might be why I don’t really like myself a lot of the time. Maybe we never quite put it together, but now we’re seeing it right in front of us. That’s another layer here that is very understandably uncomfortable for these parents. But again, I would really love to relieve them that they can let go of this.

Yes, of course, if something becomes abusive, absolutely, set your boundaries around that person being around. That’s not what I’m hearing here. It sounds like typical old-school shaming stuff. That might mean you don’t want to leave your child in this person’s care for a long period of time. You have to make those decisions. But I would try to proceed with confidence and letting go of, rather than fear and trying to control people, because again, that’s just a terrible drain on our energy.

Another layer here is when we do get feedback like this, even if it’s from people who have a different way that we don’t agree with, if it’s repeated or if it’s given to us by more than one person, there is sometimes a bit of truth there to look at. There is a message.

This mom says that “the grandparents sometimes acknowledge how patient and good we are with them, and other times will say we’re being too soft and letting them walk all over us.” I would consider why they’re saying that, because it may be that these parents are trying to shift these cycles, and it’s a new frontier, right? They’re reading and they’re educating themselves, and they’re doing all these incredible things, being the best they can be out of passionate love for their children. But it’s not like a new suit you can just put on. It’s a process of transitioning, getting comfortable with this different way of seeing. And sometimes what happens is we’re so reticent to be judgmental, that we’re not confronting at all, and therefore, we’re not giving children exactly what they need. So I would certainly take that into account that there might be some truth in this.

It’s like maybe we’re in a public place and our child is running all around, screaming. We realize: Uh-oh, he missed his nap, and he’s so overtired and he’s just not himself. We’re understanding the cause of things. Other people are seeing this unruly child that doesn’t have any boundaries. Both of them are valid points of view, and maybe we can learn from that.

Maybe there is a boundary that I need to set or set earlier. Maybe we should have made sure to hold his hand, knowing that he hadn’t had his nap so that he couldn’t go running, and maybe we should have shortened this trip or not done it at all.

The examples that this parent gives, the first one is if her oldest daughter throws food on the floor, “My husband or I will say, ‘It seems like you’re telling me you’re done eating. Thank you for letting us know,’ and we will promptly remove her food and let her down. In the silence between removing the food and placing her down, I’ve noticed one of the parents will say something to the effect of, ‘We don’t throw food, and that’s not good.'”

So I’m wondering because this child is turning three… I’m wondering if this is common for her to be throwing her food down. Because in my recommendations that I give, I do say to let children know that “you’re showing us you’re done eating, so we’re going to put the food away,” but we obviously don’t want this to become the way our child shows us they’re done eating. It’s usually something that happens maybe a couple of times, and then once children receive that boundary, then they don’t keep doing that.

But here, this child is maybe repeatedly doing this. I don’t know. I’m just going by what I have here, so I could be misreading this. But what’s missing for me in this description and what may be missing for this grandparent to feel less likely to need to comment herself, is some acknowledgement, some noticing that this child is still throwing her food. Why is this going on? That’s what I mean about the possibility that maybe these parents aren’t quite confronting in a person-to-person way what’s going on with their child.

And this is also a thing that happens when people like me try to give scripts or strategies to do things. I do those sometimes, and people complain that I don’t do them enough, but I don’t like to push them. Because a script can put us into this automatic performance mode, like actors that aren’t that great. I mean, the great actors, they know that the script is just something you memorize and you get out of the way, and then you are in the moment as a human being with other human beings. The words are the least important thing. And even your actions are not as important as your motivation for them and what you’re feeling, and what’s going through your mind moment to moment.

I was never that good of an actor when I was acting, but that’s what the good actors do. But when we’re reading a script, it can take us out of that moment where… I kind of wanted to say when I read this, I wanted to say to the little girl, “Hello, why are you throwing food still? Come on. We don’t want you to do that.” Seeing her. Because I wonder if that could be why she’s still doing this at three years old.

It could be that her parents are so thoughtfully and politely giving her a boundary around it, but maybe they’re not quite noticing their daughter there that’s throwing food on the floor.

We hear a lot now about something really important, which is that we all need to feel seen, that this is a way to promote secure attachment with our young children. We let them know that we see them. And these are some of the most important times for children to feel seen, when they’re doing things they know we don’t want them to do, and now we’re doing it again.

So I would consider freeing yourself of the script and being in that present moment, seeing your child, “What’s going on with you?,” looking at them in the eyes and saying, “Where are we here? We’re throwing food. Trying to get our attention this way? We don’t want you to do that,” something.

I know another thing, and I’m guilty of this, helping parents avoid saying “no” too much, because children do drown it out if we’re, “No, no, no, no” to everything. But it’s really okay to be direct and say, “Come on. No, we don’t want you to throw food. Stop throwing food.” It’s obviously better if we’re not dysregulated or not angry or annoyed, or we’re not being overly stern about it. We can be very light, but I would still connect to let them know that you’re noticing.

Again, I’m wondering if the grandparent felt like, “Wait, maybe this child thinks it’s okay to throw food,” so that’s why they said something like, “We don’t throw food. That’s not good.”

This parent says a couple times that she’s worried about the mixed messages that seem to be happening. I don’t really see these as mixed messages because they’re both messages on a theme with an intention. The theme is: we don’t want our child to keep doing this behavior. So it’s not like an alternate message, it’s just a more shaming, judgmental way to approach changing the behavior, and less understanding of the cause.

I’m sure this little girl at age three, she’s known for quite a while that it’s not good to throw food down, that they obviously don’t want her to do this, so I don’t think that is going to be a great surprise or shocking to this girl. The, “We don’t,” I don’t recommend that because it’s not connecting as well as, “I don’t want you to throw food down.”  So, “We don’t” or when we’re talking about ourselves as “Mommy,” “Daddy,” those aren’t as connected.

Then, with her sibling, the why of this… Well, the deeper why is pretty clear to me, because this is the issue that parents most reach out to me about, that yeah, there is a toddler and there’s a baby, or theirs a four-year-old or a five-year-old or a six-year-old, and the new baby, or the new baby’s becoming one. And this a really hard adjustment. It does make you, as the older child, want to be … You just want to be in conflict because, you could adore this baby, but their very existence is a painful, painful reminder of the loss of all that one-on-one focus on you. So yeah, it’s going to be hard, especially at these children’s ages, to be graceful with that sibling.

I do recommend what these parents are doing, which is that they don’t intervene, unless there’s a sign of hitting or danger. But I would still notice. I would still see your child there, so that you can help her feel understood, so that you can help her feel you’ve got her back.

And if she’s doing something repeatedly, like the baby picks this up, and now she takes that away, and now the baby picks this up, and she takes that away, and now she’s got this whole pile of stuff on her lap that she doesn’t really want, but she’s just taking away from the baby… If something like that starts to happen, I would stop my child and say, “I know you don’t want her to have anything right now. I get that. I get that, but I got to stop you. You can give her some things that you’re okay for her to have.”  Or, “I’m not going to let you take this one away too,” or, “I’m not going to let you touch her body like that,” even if it’s not dangerous, but she’s manipulating the baby in certain ways. “I’m going to stop you there.”

It’s gentle, respectful, noticing, acknowledging, and limits, but it’s helping our child to feel: You know, you’re not alone in this. We’ve got your back.

That will help this to start to calm down too, which means you’ll get less noise about that. I mean, for me, it’s way more understandable that this behavior is continuing. It will sometimes continue at every stage of development that that baby gets to, where now they’re crawling, now they’re starting to walk. It can be another layer of discomfort for the older child and this baby, becoming more and more of a person in their eyes, more of a rival. And the old-school way is: we don’t consider that, and we just get mad at you for things that you’re doing because we don’t understand them, and they just look bad on the outside. They look not nice. Whatever this grandparent said. “It’s not how a big girl behaves.”

So every time you’re using “big girl” or “big boy,” tends to be shaming our child into something. Even if we don’t mean that, that’s what we’re doing. And for all children, there are times they want to be a bigger girl or a bigger boy, and other times they don’t want to be the big one. They want to be the little one that’s getting all that nurturing, and holding, and different kind of attention.

Again, kudos to these parents for all the work they’re doing. What you’re seeing in your own parents is showing you how much work you have done and are doing. Try to see it that way with gratitude for what you’re learning, and then maybe being open to this other next step of connecting a little more, seeing a little more, letting your child know that you see and you know that they’re doing something they know they’re not supposed to do, that wink across the room, whatever it is. And stopping your child early when they’re getting caught up in a pattern.

She says, “I obviously can’t control the actions of other people, so it seems like I’m just hoping that eventually, my and my husband’s actions will show the parents that the old-school mentality they’re coming at the children with is not only not what we do, but also ineffective.”

Yes, exactly, and I feel like you’re almost 100% there for them to actually see it. And it’s grandparents. It’s not their primary caregivers.

The grandparents may still go on with a lot of this noise. I mean, it’s really par for the course for all of us, and it’s not just grandparents. But I think you’ll get less of it as you gain confidence. Not that your goal is to make it go away, because we really can’t control that, so back to where I started with letting go of what we don’t control. The Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

We can work on developing ourselves, because we’re all on a journey and there may be a little more you can do here.

I really hope that helps. And thank you again for all the support, listening to my podcast and reading my books. I really, really appreciate that.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. There are many of them, and they’re all indexed by subject and category so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. Both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in eBook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play or barnesandnoble.com, and an audio at Audible.com. Actually, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

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

The post Dealing with Judgmental Comments about Our Parenting appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “How to Help Your Child Engage More Successfully with Peers”

Hi there. This is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I am doing a mini-consultation with a parent who is concerned because her son seems to be misfiring in social situations, not engaging appropriately and, therefore, being rejected and disappointed. I try to offer her some advice as to how to help him on his social learning journey, which is a complicated journey for all of us.

Okay, here’s the note I received from this parent:

I’m having a very challenging time watching my son repeatedly — and in different situations — have the same challenges with his peers. Whether at preschool, a play date, 1-1, or with small groups of friends, he is wanting play with the other kids, but seems to engage in an unwelcomed way. Then the others don’t include him and he gets sad and frustrated.

For example, he was with 3 close girl friends. They had a great play date, then as they were all coloring on their own separate papers, he was putting his paper on top of theirs or coloring on theirs. I let him know he needed to keep to his own paper because his friends had asked them to keep off their paper, but he repeated it. When the behavior stopped, he was sour and the girls just simply didn’t want to include him. He got sad and frustrated, saying the house was bad etc.

This sort of thing plays out in different ways. On a walk with a friend, with her mother and myself present, he was climbing on rocks and having a great time leading his friend into nature. When she stopped wanting to climb on the rocks, he started speaking negatively and saying, “you want to come on this rock, NO you can’t!”… and things like that.

As a mom my heart breaks because I see him struggle to make a “best friend”. It seems like the kids at preschool click with at least one other person really well, and I just don’t feel like he does. At least, I don’t see it.

What can I do to help him? I remember you saying once on a podcast that sometimes they’re simply not ready for certain situations. I’d love to stay home and home school him but his energy all day everyday for me is challenging, and I want to enter work in the next year (my husband works full time). So I’m feeling a little stuck and confused and wondering what I can be doing to help him?!

Okay, now here’s this parent. Hello, how are you?

Parent:  I’m doing really good today, thank you.

Janet Lansbury:  Good. So, I read your question about your issue about your older child, and I want to see how I can help. One of the reasons that I thought this would be good to do as a consultation is that I have a lot of questions for you that I couldn’t answer, and that’s often the case for me, by the way, that even if somebody gives me quite a long description like you did I have many questions so that I can picture better what’s going on.

So, the first question I have is, how you respond in these situations? You say that you feel a bit heartbroken, or concerned, and I’m wondering what you actually do, and say, to him when he’s having difficulties and having these reactions?

Parent:  I responded so many ways. I’ve been very inconsistent, because I think I’m just learning as I go with what I can do in the moment, pulling on resources of what I’ve learned, mainly from your podcast, or other books.

This really is something that’s been going on for a long time, like a year. His sister was born when he was almost three and as soon as she was born we just, of course, saw a different energy in him, a lot of, I would say, more energy. He became really hyper, and really loud, and I have an understanding of all that. He was probably like, “Hey, look at me, I’m still here.” So, it quickly turned into, of course, me feeling, and narrating, either internally or to other people, “This is my wild child. It’s a lot of energy, I can hardly handle him.”

Most recently how I’ve been handling it is I wrote you a specific situation, just to summarize out very quick… Basically he was with three other girls, they were drawing and he kept putting his paper on top of theirs, and they were moving away and he would follow. It started escalating, everyone was getting frustrated. He was frustrated he wasn’t included. They were frustrated that he kept going into their space. And so, there was a breaking moment where like a girl slapped his hand and screamed. So, I just picked him up and I took him to the kitchen, which was like 10 feet away, and at that time I knew he was tired. So, I just said, “We’re going to go now. I can see you’re tired.” I just peeked my head back in and said, “So good to see you all. We’re going to go now.” I tried not to shame. That was like a decent moment. We got in the car and I could just tell he was relieved, he was so happy and nice, and he wasn’t fussing.

But I have been guilty, like so many parents, of totally losing it, raising my voice. This is something I really regret that I think I’ve — I’m done with, but when he wouldn’t listen to me I’d grab his arm firmly and like, “You need to stop doing XYZ.” It’s often to his sister at home. So, as you can see, I respond in like a lot of different ways, and I’m kind of coming to you because I want like a blueprint of how I can be consistent in a positive way towards him.

Janet Lansbury:  Okay. So this is good. You gave me that one situation but you also said that this is the dynamic that keeps repeating itself with other children.

Parent:  Yeah. He had been in preschool last year at this preschool two days a week, a very sweet Waldorf preschool. There were 12 children. This year with COVID there was six children, or more like four, so it was a small group. I can’t say exactly what was going on there but every day that I went I would get a little taste that the same dynamic was happening there. I can go into that now or later.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, we can go into it later, because I want to start with this understanding that you do seem to have, but maybe you haven’t had enough encouragement to really help him with his process around having a sibling. So, as you said, he changed, and that is pretty par for the course, because it is usually the first, maybe the biggest, trauma that young children have where their life is totally changed. It’s very scary for them in terms of: where is my place in the family now? It’s not as simple as him just saying: Look at me, I want attention. It’s really being quite dysregulated a lot of the time.

When you see that hyperactivity, that kind of manic behavior, he’s in a dysregulated state in those times. When you’ve gotten impatient with him around that —  you’re human so please be compassionate towards yourself, this is a hard transition for parents, as well, but it is very, very difficult for children. What happens is, then he absorbs those feelings from you. What that does is it gives him more feelings that he has to process out, that will come out through this manic behavior, through not listening, doing things that he knows aren’t going to help him in that moment, like the way he’s behaving with peers.

It’s really a situation where he can’t help himself, he’s just going to this irrational place. What you describe with his peers it’s irrational. In his thinking brain he knows better, and he doesn’t want to be that kid doing those things, that gets rejected, but he’s going there because these feelings just keep coming up for him.

So, the best thing that we can do generally, and this is true for almost every issue that parents bring to me and it’s why it’s such a theme in my podcast and in my writings, he needs to process the feelings that are behind this behavior. That is the ultimate goal that will help him feel better and, therefore, behave more pro-socially with his peers, and with you, and with his sibling, and everyone.

His sister is 1-1/2, you said. This also tends to be a difficult time in that the younger child seems more of a person to the older child, therefore, more of a threat, more of a rival. Before that they can kind of say: Oh, well, this is a baby, or this is a crawling thing, and she’s cute, and my life is still changed and it’s really, really scary. But now this is a real other person.

Of course, we see that ideally right away that this is a person, but your child will start to feel it more when the younger one is walking, maybe starting to talk more. So, that’s another big scary thing that he needs to process out.

Whenever children have behavior that’s disruptive, or challenging like this, or difficult for us as parents, it is emotionally driven, almost always. So, we want to help him to process out these feelings.

Then, we have to know that when we do lose our temper, which is going to happen, we try to make that as rare as possible by perceiving this correctly, which is that he’s not just being a naughty kid right here, he really is out of control. Even in these little moments with his sister where he’s not being nice, or he’s maybe lashing out at her, or lashing out at you, if we know that then it helps us to feel less threatened about it. Whoops, there he goes, I’ve got to help this guy who’s got some feelings going on, popping out today.

If we have that attitude it’s going to help us to feel better about it. If we’re thinking like: Oh, my kid is just so unpredictable and behaving awful, and doesn’t know how to make friends, and we’re heartbroken, then that’s going to make it harder for us. It starts with us feeling comfortable, which we get from the perspective of what’s really going on here. Every time that we allow him to process some of the feelings safely — we’re not getting mad at him for it, we’re keeping him safe, we’re maybe taking him out of situations, but I would do that rarely (we’re going to get to that), then it helps move it forward. It helps the feelings to get processed out.

Anyway, that is what is at the root of what I want to talk about with you, and that’s why I wanted to ask you how you felt in these situations. You said that you felt heartbroken and that stuck out to me, because parents say that a lot, “This breaks my heart.” What I know right there is that the child is feeling your discomfort around the situation, too, and it’s making it hard for you to give him the chance to process the feelings in all of these situations.

Parent:   Yeah. I have so many things I want to say, but I do think it’s valuable to mention to you that the heartbreak for me was so strong when he was away from me at preschool versus if I’m in a room with him and I’m seeing this occur, and I can observe what’s going on. I do know that when I pick him up from preschool and I’d see … I don’t know if I mentioned this to you, but a child, for example, ran up one day and was just like, “I’m going to so-and-so’s after school and you’re not invited.”

And there had been many weeks, if not months, of just me knowing that he didn’t really connect with anyone at school. Same thing, he would go there, maybe get overexcited, or be in a manic place, instead of knowing how to, and maybe that’s a silly thing to say, I don’t know if kids know how to play with each other so well at four. But he would come into a play scene a little bit more destructive and then that would steer people away.

I mention this to you because I think he did absorb so much of my heartbreak, and I maybe made the mistake, I don’t know if this is a mistake because my heart’s always been very open to homeschooling, and then with COVID it’s certainly a very comfortable place for me to imagine now. But I did have that talk with him.

He asked me every day… he doesn’t want to go to preschool. He’d wake up and say, “I don’t want to go,” and that’s when my antennas went up. I’m like, “What’s going on at preschool?” A few moms texted me saying, is my older son okay because my son’s telling me that they don’t want to play with and so on and so forth. There was a narration happening coming back to me. So, my antennas went up.

Before, I was just coming up with a story like: Oh, he just is still acclimating to a group setting without me.

We’ve done this back and forth exchange emotionally of like, I’ve given him the freedom, basically, to not go to school and to do homeschool. And the teacher told me at the time, “Don’t have that conversation with him because he’s the child and you’re the parent.”

This is so tied into it, and it’s really where I’d like your advice, as well, because I don’t know if I’ve done a power game with my son. He certainly, I think, knows that I’m the parent, and I really do feel like I have the boundaries and I make that part of it, but I do feel more confident with him interacting with kids like in my nest still, and I just don’t know if that’s part of needing to let go. I just wanted to add that piece in there because I think it’s an important part.

Janet Lansbury:  So, you’re saying that when he would say, “I don’t want to go,” you would say, “Okay, you don’t have to go?”

Parent:  I always had him go. We had a discussion and it was really around COVID, because the preschool took a break. In my mind I was thinking I always wanted to homeschool you, so we can certainly do this at home and we’ll figure out a way. To be honest, it was never convenient for me because my younger would lose a nap every time I take him.

So, a lot of things made sense, and I felt like he was young enough, but I don’t want to be holding him back from something that’s really developmentally appropriate for him, if school is. I just have a lot of questions about it all. Knowing that he was never clicking with anyone, those are my words, but it’s like the feedback I got from other parents, and a little bit with the teacher when I’d see her handle situations, he never got that one-on-one. Instead, there was like a general statement of, “We’re all friends here and we’re kind to one another.”

I could see my older son in the moment kind of suffering because he didn’t know how to deal with something. Then, I thought: Uh, yeah, we can just work on this at home together.  It just seems like it might be appropriate to work on this for some months, or a year, until I see that he’s starting to do better in social situations.

Janet Lansbury:  Okay, let me just go through this what I was thinking as you were talking. So, when you first said that he doesn’t want to go, it’s good that you had him go anyway. It’s common for children to not want to deal with a transition. Even if things are going okay at school they will often say, “I don’t want to go,” and feel like that. Right there is like a moment where, as a parent there’s many moments in the day like this, especially when you’ve got issues between siblings, and things like that, that you can have the boundary, which it sounds like you had. “We are going to go,” but at the same time help him to process feelings.

It’s like a golden opportunity. So instead of seeing it as: Uh-oh, he doesn’t want to go… “Oh, you don’t want to go and we’re making you go. Yeah, you can share that with me and I get it! It’s okay to feel that way.” All those messages. You don’t have to say a lot. If you’re perceiving it as: Oh, here’s an opportunity for him to process, that’s what’s going to ultimately help him.

So, this choice to keep him home I think is a fine choice right now, especially if it’s not that convenient for you to take him to school, and he’s having difficulties. But, the work at home — that’s what I want to help you with. Because we can’t control what happens with children in another setting when we’re not there, but you can do a lot at home to help him to succeed with other children — the way you respond to everything that he does through the day, the way that you are confident about your boundaries and, also, very welcoming of whatever feelings he has, whatever feelings in however way he states them.

So, if he hates his sister, if he wants to hurt her, of course we stop him from hurting her. We say, “I can’t let you hurt her, but you’re really feeling angry right now about her. You’re not liking her right now,” or whatever. We want to welcome the feeling, otherwise he’s kind of stuck in it all the time, and he’s bringing that into social situations with other children.

So, that’s the work to do, and I think it’s a fine choice to keep him home if you’re comfortable with that, to give him that chance to process some of these feelings with you at home.

But I want to talk also about things like… Let’s just take the situation that you brought up with the girls. So, children can learn social skills at a very young age. Now, I’m assuming that you don’t have other signs that he’s not neuro-typical, or have you ever had him assessed, or anything like that, or have you seen reason to?

Parent:  I’ve never felt reason to. He seems very typically functioning, yeah. Highly emotional, I would say he’s highly emotional, highly sensitive, yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  So, highly emotional, highly sensitive. What does that mean? More than the average child, he needs to process his feelings. All children do, but this guy has more feelings because he’s taking in everything. He’s absorbing. So every time that you’ve ever yelled at him, or whatever, this change in having a sibling, and all of that, not to feel bad about it, it’s just to inform you so that you feel more welcoming and positive about the feelings however they show up.

So, let’s take the specific example of he’s playing with the girls. So they had a play date. They were coloring and he was coloring on theirs. So you let him know he needed to keep his own paper, which I think he knew, but he was showing that his emotions were getting involved in that situation, that he was not in his reasonable brain right there.

So, they asked him to stop, he repeated it, and then when the behavior stopped he was sour.

I think it’s fine that you kind of intervened in terms of telling him about that. But generally I would do as little as possible. This is how children learn to be with other children. They learn through experience of what works with other children and what doesn’t. So, they need to have those natural negative consequences sometimes. They don’t want to play with me when I do this.

If you could see that…  I know it’s heartbreaking to all of us when our children aren’t succeeding in a situation, or it seems like that they’re not getting what they seem to want. It’s really important for him to have those feelings of disappointment.

So when he reacts, when he gets frustrated, those are the emotions that he’s bringing into the situation that are now available for him to express and process.

It’s not even really about that specific situation so much as the emotions that he’s bringing into it. He’s kind of setting this up on some unconscious level that he’s going to get rejected so that he can relieve some of his frustration and fear around everything else that’s ever happened in his life. This is what I mean about the processing — that it’s the most important thing you can do.

So, when he gets frustrated and he goes off… Instead of just getting him out of there I would take him aside, but with a lot of welcoming of the feelings. Even if what he did was absolutely ridiculous because he wasn’t in a reasonable place, it was emotionally driven. “You wanted to draw on their paper and they didn’t want you to, and we wouldn’t let you do that. That makes you really upset.”

Letting him know that you feel safe about him feeling those feelings and you feel comfortable, which, of course, has to start with you actually feeling safe and comfortable about it. That’s the hard part. That’s why I talked about that first.

So, your perception of it. Then, helping him to feel those feelings that he wants to feel. He’s setting it up on some level so that he can process this out.

As parents we commonly do this, we get in the way because we love our child and we’re heartbroken. We don’t want to see them disappointed so we fix it, or we just take them away, we don’t talk about it, or we discourage him from the feeling instead of leaning into it.

Parent:  So, he doesn’t like any more… He used to be really open to me like gently holding his hand and like, “Let’s just go check in about this,” or “Let’s go talk,” in a different space where it’s more quiet. Now he doesn’t really. He’s four and a half, he doesn’t want his body touched in moments like that where it’s high intensity for him. So, is that conversation where I welcome his feelings and say something like, “Yeah, you’re really wanting to touch their paper,” or whatever comes out in the moment, is that like comfortably said in front of the other children, or do I try and bring him into the space where he can be on his own with me? If he’s welcoming, of course, we go together, but if he’s resistant what does that look like?

Janet Lansbury:  It’s better if you can just stay there. What it does is it helps normalize and show more acceptance than if you say, “Oh, let’s go over here.” If he was out in front of a whole bunch of parents and people when you know he’s going to go off, you might want to help him to have a more private experience. So, it would be better to stay there. Maybe you’re blocking his hand if he’s lashing out physically at somebody or trying to scribble all over their drawing, to help contain that from happening, but you would be, “This is really frustrating for you. You’re not getting what you want here,” whatever it is. Just saying one thing maybe, but having that attitude of: Yeah, you can share all this stuff that’s in you with me. I’m comfortable. In fact, I want you to share it.

Because if he can share it he doesn’t have to act on it. That’s really gold — when children can process these feelings safely with us. So, that would be the ideal.

Maybe even allowing the girls to deal with him, that would be another option, which would mean that I’m not telling him what to do, that he’s just hearing it from those girls. Then, when he gets frustrated I’m there to acknowledge it and encourage it, that he shares that safely.

That’s what I mean about — as little as possible I would intervene, and not try to tell him the reasonable thing which is, “Yeah, they don’t want you drawing on their paper.” He’s showing that he’s not in a reasonable space. So, it doesn’t really help that much.

Parent:  I feel this awful sensation in that moment to be this harmony keeper and be like, “And, girls, we include everyone.” I feel like that’s probably not … I think I should probably just remain my focus on my son, right?

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. So, believe me, we all have that impulse as parents, I think, but it does get in the way. Because then he learns that: Oh, I can’t handle things and people come in and run interference for me and try to make it all better. That’s not helping him learn how to be with other children at all, it’s doing the opposite. It’s making him feel like he can’t and that things have to be smoothed over for him, that it’s not safe for him to feel disappointment and things that go on.

Exactly what he needs to do to learn how to be with other children is to feel all the feelings of being rejected, being disappointed. And not having you throwing out a safety net, or trying to fix it for him in any way, but really allowing him to fail in this learning. Just like with any learning. Children have to struggle with it. They have to have all the emotions. It’s like anything that we try to do in life, or we try to learn, or any project that we have. This is a very complicated one, this social stuff.

Parent:  That’s a big takeaway for me, allowing him to fail. I feel like I definitely even recognize that I have been trying to shield him, and I’ve known it doesn’t feel right in me. I’ve even thought: Oh, just keep him home and he can avoid all this.

Janet Lansbury:  If you keep him home to avoid that’s not going to help him. If you keep him home because you want to actually help him process stuff in a way that …

Parent:  Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: … is where you have more control. Or you’re going to actually help him to process this by responding in the way that I’m talking about. You’re not going to bail him out.

Yeah, that’s exactly why he’s struggling, actually. Not to make you feel bad, but just for you to know that you have the power to help him change, you really do, and he can do this. What he needs is to feel all the feelings around social situations and to know that it’s safe for him to not get what he wants.

Sometimes it starts with your own boundaries with him. When children are having difficulties socially seeing other people’s boundaries, like with the girls, it’s because they haven’t had enough experience to feel their feelings around their parent’s boundaries, that their parents haven’t been confident enough.

Parent:  Whoo, yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s why I have a post The Self-care Parents Need Every Moment, I think it’s called, and it’s about how self-care isn’t for us, it’s really for our children. Our boundaries are what help our children to learn about other people, and their boundaries. That’s the only way they can do it. And then their own experience with other children.

So, that’s the work to do at home if you’re going to homeschool him. You can do this, it’s totally in your power. Nothing is too late, you haven’t messed up, or anything like that. You can switch this. But it’s important to have your eyes open to what’s going on and what he needs to be able to pass through this and, thus, to process and learn from every experience that he has.

Parent:  So, for example, in the moment, it happens at home a lot, when I am going over to him and helping him in the moment and then his little sister comes over with big energy and I’m trying to give that energy to the older.

Janet Lansbury:  What’s the energy that you’re giving? Because what I’m talking about doesn’t really take energy, it takes acceptance, and allowing, and giving space. It should not be taking energy.

Parent:  Okay, so say the situation with the girls when I go over and sit next to him and I say, “I see you and-”

Janet Lansbury:  I wouldn’t even do that. I mean at 4 ½ I wouldn’t go sit next to him when he’s with the girls.

Parent:  Oh, okay, …

Janet Lansbury:  No, yeah.

Parent:  … but when there’s conflict?

Janet Lansbury:  When there’s conflict I would be some distance away, unless you think he’s going to hit them or something, then I would come closer. The more you intervene the more children feel that they can’t do it themselves, that it’s not safe for them. So, that’s why I was saying, ideally, I would not be running any interference for him, or telling him what the girls said, letting it be between them so that he gets the experience, and they get the experience. It’s actually good for them, too, to see: what do you do when someone’s not listening to you?

If you see something escalate towards somebody getting hurt then you would come in.

Parent:  Okay.

Janet Lansbury:  But you would still encourage the conflict instead of discouraging it.

So, anyway, what else were you going to say about that?

Parent:  Well, I was just going to say…  So we’ll pull from a different example. When I am with him in a moment and his sister comes over, say, in a moment I’m trying to talk with him… but anyways his sister just comes and takes my attention. Not that I’m giving it to her, but she just comes in with like maybe a screaming, or crying, and I’m trying to talk to my older son. I’m just wondering, because that happens a lot, and internally I feel sad when I’m trying to work with my four-year-old on a behavior, or talk to him about a behavior, and it’s already a heated moment… So maybe I shouldn’t be talking with him in the moment. And then his sister comes over and I just feel: Sorry, and I can’t even talk to you. I can’t give you that energy the same way that I used to.

I think that’s where I’m sad. We used to have this uninterrupted bond where we could talk and now there’s this little tiny, adorable, but loud human who wants to be a part of it. I just feel like he’s always not receiving enough, or I feel he has sorrow and maybe that’s part of everything. I’m always divided.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, he does have sorrow, maybe, and it needs to be okay for him to feel that, and she has whatever feelings she has.

So, firstly, I wouldn’t be talking to him about a behavior. And the only reason I corrected your words there was because that’s a common misconception — that we have to work children through something, talk them through something. Helping them process emotions is very passive, and it’s more about allowing. It’s very accepting.

So, whatever the behavior was, your hand is there to make sure it stops, or whatever. You put the item away if he’s using it unsafely, but you’re letting your shoulders drop and you’re as relaxed as possible, maybe nodding your head. Maybe that’s all you’re doing.

Then, this other person comes up and you’re like, “Yeah, you got upset, too.” And then you turn right back to him and you’re just there for both of them, accepting.

So, it’s not like: Oh, my gosh, I was doing important work here and this person interrupted me. It’s just: Oh, now we’re all going to have a therapy session.

So, you’ve got to take the pressure off yourself because it’s not helping. That’s what makes him feel like: Okay, this isn’t safe for me because my mother has to talk to me about it and work me through something.

Janet Lansbury:  No, this is life that happens all the time and to be very normalized ideally. It’s that: Yeah, sometimes friends won’t let you play the way you want with them, and then they don’t want to play with you when you act like that. Sometimes your mom makes you stop doing something and you feel terrible about it for a few minutes. It’s normal, and it happens all day long. That’s life for young children.

And it sets us up really well for the rest of our lives where we know that life isn’t smooth. You have 20 million different feelings in a day but they’re all important and safe to have. Nothing somebody has to rescue me from, or work me through, or do anything about. So, yeah, it’s the way that you’re perceiving it, and you’re putting this responsibility on yourself that isn’t yours and isn’t helping.

This other example that you gave about climbing on the rocks and he started speaking negatively… I would allow him to do that. Because he’s not saying terrible things to hurt, he just saying, “You can’t, you can’t.”

So, right there I would just be calmly in my place as long as children are physically safe, and I would say something like, “Wow, you really didn’t want her to do that.” You’re saying, “No, you don’t want her to do that!”

I’m not telling her what to do, I’m just acknowledging him and welcoming him to share that frustration, fear, whatever is there. It’s probably a lot of things bundled into one.

All I’m seeing is that he’s saying he doesn’t want her to come on this rock and that he’s kind of setting it up meanly like, “You want to come on this rock and you can’t.”

Parent:  Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  He’s expressing that feeling of, I don’t know, trying to exert some control, or something, over somebody else. He needs to see that doesn’t work, and he needs to be allowed to feel that way, as much as he needs to.

Parent:  He told me later in the car he said, “I was so mad she wasn’t climbing with me anymore.” But in the moment I didn’t know that, and to be honest I was mortified because here was my excited four-year-old wanting to play. That’s the way I see it, and speaking quite, in my opinion, rudely because he had the tone, “Stop it.” Very powerful, very sharp, and to be real with you, like as I’m walking with this other mom, to be honest I felt embarrassed. I was just like: Wow, your daughter’s being really calm and mine is like thrashing on her a little bit.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, but it’s better to show her. You’d be surprised how okay other parents feel when they see you not going to let him push her off the rock, you’re not going to let him do that, but you’re there comfortably allowing him to express what seemed like mean, or ridiculous feelings, or whatever. I think the parent will be okay with that. Maybe they’ll think, “Wow, this guy he’s really got a strong temper,” whatever, but you can explain that later.

What’s more important is that you’re going to help him to get better at this. The only way to do that is to accept whatever he’s feeling and actually go 180 degrees from where you are now, which is actually that you even want him to share how incredibly horrible it is that this girl didn’t do what he wanted, the full extent of that feeling of not getting what you want from another person. So, you want him to share it to the hilt.

Parent:  That’s in the moment that’s it happening?

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. But you’re a ways from that now, and that’s why I was saying, maybe, even just for yourself, to reign in the social a little while so you can just work on it between him and his sister, and the other things that come up for him. Work on not trying to change his feelings in any way, in fact wanting them to come out in full force. That’s what’s going to help him.

That’s basically… My advice for every consultation I ever do is something around this same idea — it’s about the feelings. Children need to express every single feeling. We can’t make the feelings go away. They’re going to still come popping up again and again if we don’t let them play out. The best thing we can do to make a child feel safe is to actually encourage them to play out, show that we’re so comfortable and see this is so healthy and normal that we actually want them to be their craziest selves with our calm control around it. So, it’s this counterintuitive thing, I know.

Parent:  Okay.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s what going to help. And I think for yourself when you see it working you’ll feel more comfortable with it. It’s hard at first, and mostly like meditating on this perspective: Wow, the feelings are actually the best thing that could happen for him, whatever they are, and me accepting them. Just really perceiving that differently is the hardest part.

Parent:  I have a question, and it might be just a repeat of what we’re talking about.

So, his cousin is someone that we see often. She’s my sister’s daughter and she is two, and she’s very verbal, and she is just experimenting, but they go on this “stop it” rampage with each other, and I think that happens often. And her mom does an approach that’s very much like, “You go to your room.” I just would love a tool from you that I can practice just to make it easy for me, since it’s something that happens every time we see them, and it escalates, and it’s just purely emotional. I think it’s just curiosity. I see them get into the emotions pretty strongly.

Janet Lansbury:  They’re both venting beautifully there, it sounds like.

Parent:  They really are.

Janet Lansbury:  That reminds me of some kind of like therapy session. It’s some kind of … With adults there’s so much baggage by that point that maybe it’s not safe for them to go there, I don’t know. With children it’s so available to them, the emotions, and it’s so therapeutic and great for them to yell at each other and have a big conflict.

You can’t control what another parent does, so the most I would say is like just, “Maybe you’re not comfortable with her being in that conflict but I’m really working on getting comfortable with him doing it, so I would see it positively.” Again, you can’t control what somebody else does, but I would let whoever know that you’re comfortable, and you’re trying to encourage him to share the feelings.

Parent:  It’s so funny because I feel that so much of what’s coming up for me is like: Geez, what’s my family going to think when these two cousins are going at it, and I’m just… Not passive, I’m not saying that’s what you’re saying, but just aware and accepting. I feel that a lot of my hesitations come from a place of how I’m going to be perceived as a parent, and I think that’s where I get stuck a lot, and I start doing things that you’re told to do as a parent, how you were raised. Get that kid under control is what I’m thinking right now with my family when he was younger.

I think I allowed my son to be him, and I was so supportive and I was so good at that, and now that he’s bigger and coming up with more things to process and to feel, I really have to say that this conversation’s helping a lot, because I think that I just thought I had to be harder on him, or I wrote down on a piece of paper to ask you, “Like how do I help him make friends?” It’s just not my job to do that.

Janet Lansbury:  Right, but this is where you help them, you help them to process all the feelings and to fail. That’s how you help them make friends.

And you have boundaries, strong boundaries yourself that he gets to feel however he wants about and it doesn’t intimidate you. It doesn’t bother you, because you know every feeling children have at this age is usually loaded with all these other things. Everything is like a mini therapy session for them. It’s really good that way.

And I was just going to say one thing about being with other people, if you’re with people that are really looking down on you and him you can still take him out of the room for his own privacy. You can still remove him if you feel that everybody’s being judging on him, or whatever, without tamping it down. But if he feels you going into the like, “Oh, come on everything’s going to be fine and we’re going to not feel what you’re feeling right now.” If you’re going with that attitude, no. It’s like insulting when you feel the way you feel and someone’s saying, “Oh, it’s okay, Janet, don’t be angry. They didn’t mean to.” No! I just feel this way! So, that’s what he needs.

Again, it’s a big process of changing perspective for you, and then some practice. The more practice you can get at home without these other people around the more comfortable you’re going to be. Because, actually, he’ll do it less when you’ve worked on it at home. So, it really is about the homework. You have a lot of power to help him process all this stuff at home, and the more that happens the more consistently, the less he’s going to need to take it out in other situations.

Parent:  Okay. Gosh a million thank yous.

Janet Lansbury:  You’re so welcome. Touch base with me at some point and let me know how it’s going.

Parent:  Okay. Thank you.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you for sharing with us.

I hope some of that conversation is helpful.

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 both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can also get them in e-book at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or Barnes & Noble and in audio at audible.com. You can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

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Transcript of “My Daughters Weigh In on Respectful Parenting (with Charlotte and Madeline)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today, I’m very excited because two of my most favorite people in the whole universe are my guests on this show, and these are my daughters.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been getting requests to hear from my children. What did they think about their upbringing? And I thought that was a good idea. And it seemed like there was a possibility for this to happen over the holidays. So I put out a question on my Facebook page, asking what people would like to know from my children if they were to do an episode together. I was floored by the enthusiasm and all of the wonderful questions that people had.

Then my daughters had the thought that it would be better to do this without me in the room. That seemed like a good idea to me. So that’s what they did. So they’re kind of doing a takeover on Unruffled for this week.

I just want to say a couple of things to preface this. One is that we are undoubtedly a privileged family in many ways. However, the majority of points that my daughters bring up and that I share about, I truly believe can apply to families in every situation if they value these ideas.

Another thing I want to mention is my daughters bring up RIE, which many of you may not know is an acronym for Resources for Infant Educarers. So that’s R-I-E, but it’s pronounced rye, like rye bread. This is a nonprofit organization founded by Magda Gerber. It’s also used as a name for her philosophy (or perspective) on early childhood that is the foundation of everything that I teach.

So with that, here are Charlotte and Madeline.

Charlotte:  Hi, I’m Charlotte. I’m 28 years old.

Madeline:  I’m Madeline, and I’m 24 years old.

Charlotte:  We have a younger brother, but he couldn’t be here today.

Madeline:  Our mom gave us some questions that people asked on Facebook. We’ll get to some of them and use that as sort of a guide to our conversation. But overall, we will just be discussing our experiences being raised by RIE parents, I guess.

Charlotte:  Here we go.

When, if ever, did you become aware of differences between the way you were parented compared to your friends or peers? Did you have any thoughts on these differences at the time? What’s something you noticed your parents did differently than others that you’re thankful for or didn’t like?

Well, I think I definitely was aware in a school setting, as far as being able to choose activities that we wanted to do. We were never made to do anything. I think that’s pretty fundamental to the philosophy, but we were never made to take a piano lesson. Everything was totally, organically had to be our idea.

Madeline:  And we did take piano lessons.

Charlotte:  And sometimes our idea was to take piano lessons, and it would be for three weeks, and then we’d be over it, and then we didn’t have to take them anymore. I think actually, maybe there was a moment of try to persevere a little bit, but for the most part, we were allowed to do whatever hobbies we wanted to. And so I think Madeline was interested in mad science. So she got to take mad science.

Madeline:  Yeah. I feel like we got to explore a lot of different interests, which helped us gain a ton of new experiences, even if none of those ended up carrying… I still now, if I’m doing the crossword, I know some of the music answers because I took music either in school and a little bit out of school, and I learned certain things that add to my knowledge of the world. But at the time I was like, I don’t want to do this anymore, and I just sort of threw that away. But I still gained stuff from it and at my own pace.

Charlotte:  Yeah. I have friends now who say pretty confidently that looking back, they wish that their parents would have forced them to do the violin or some sport because now they would be really good at it. I strongly feel totally the opposite. It’s much more important to me than my parents raised me in a way that fostered the sense of: we trust you to choose your activities and pursue-

Madeline:  On a day-to-day basis-

Charlotte:  Your passion of the day.

Madeline:  … as well. Yeah. I feel like I’m one of those people who says that sometimes, kind of jokingly, but like if I actually think back and evaluate, do I wish that I magically had some skill? Yeah. But that totally discounts all of the time that I would have had to spend doing something that I didn’t want to do instead of being able to explore stuff that I did want to do.

But something that we’ve talked about recently is that when you’re a kid, you don’t really know how other kids are parented. You can go to a kid’s house, and they have different foods. They have different toys and stuff like that. But you don’t see the differences in the parenting until you’re older, and you can talk to them later about like, “Oh, what were your parents like when you were younger?”

Charlotte:  Yeah. Whatever is in your household, you consider normal for a long time. I don’t know that much about how the brain develops, but there’s got to be a critical period for when you start comparing yourself to others.

Madeline:  It seems like middle school. I remember in middle school, all of a sudden everything was like… I was self-conscious in a bunch of different ways that I wasn’t before then, including what was at my house and what other kids had and stuff. But before that point, which is arguably the more important part in terms of the philosophy that our parents use, before that point, it’s not something that you notice every day. You don’t see other kids with their parents enough to understand what’s going on in their household, and you don’t care.

Charlotte:  Yeah. If you go over for a play date, you think of it more as like, oh, Catherine’s brand is to have a bunch of Cheez-Its there, or they always have this particular game. But you don’t feel that you’re less than because you don’t have that in your own house.

Madeline:  Yeah. So I don’t think you have to worry about your kids comparing themselves to other people in preschool. No child is that aware of those things or self-conscious about those things.

Charlotte:  Yeah. All right. Next question.

Madeline:  Next question.

Did we ever feel that we had been left out of something when we witnessed other parents play with their children in a non-RIE way, since we had not received that style of engagement/attention? This is this parent’s fear when not taking over and leading their child’s play.

This is a no brainer for me. No, not at all. Again, like what we were just saying, I think when you’re a young kid, you don’t really notice those things. And there was never a point when I was younger where I was like: ooh, I wish my mom would come and tell me what to play right now. Is it nice to be available for your child if they need another person to play with on their terms, with their rules?

Charlotte:  Yeah, let them be able to find you.

Madeline:  Right.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Anyway, it’s not to instruct anyone on how to be a parent, but to answer the question. Honestly, if I can think back to being a child and seeing the parents that really… I can remember specifically being in one of those clay pottery places, Color Me Mine or something, where you’re given a raw pot that you can paint however you want, and then it gets fired, and you have this lovely pot to take home or to give as a gift, and you can use whatever colors you want and paint however you wish. And I remember being there with my mom who was letting me do whatever I pleased on this pot, and looking at the table next to us, and there was a parent — it was like a very stark contrast. This mother was literally holding the daughter’s hand to help her paint a beautiful butterfly. And then finally the daughter just like gave up on trying to do anything on her own, having her own autonomy. So she kind of just lost interest. And then all of a sudden it was literally just the mom creating this piece of pottery.

And from what I can remember, my reaction was kind of like… this is dark. This mom is really intense. If anything, seeing a parent who was really obsessed with being a part of their kid’s play when I was able to kind of do my own thing, I looked at that as a bit much. I never felt, oh, I need more attention.

All right, next question.

Did they go through a rebellious period where they shut you out?

Madeline?

Madeline:  I definitely did, in high school, especially. And I think some of it was just some mental health stuff that I was going through at the unfortunate cross section of time in which a kid is even more naturally predisposed to start shutting their parent out. So it was sort of a combination of factors. But yeah, I definitely did. But I think the comfort that I had during that time was I knew that my mom wasn’t going to be offended by that in the longterm. She was never going to hold that against me. She maybe mentions it now, and we look back and laugh together.

I knew that when I was ready to come back and have conversations with my mom and be present and kind, then she would be there and ready to have those moments with me too. She was never going to hold against me the fact that I wanted to just sit in my room and ignore them all day or just be kind of mean or whatever. I knew that I was always going to be welcomed back in, which I think is really important because it’s totally natural. So many people that I know had that same phase with their parents, and not every parent is willing to take themselves, their personal feelings out of it and say… I know this isn’t about me. It’s about what my kid is going through right now. So let me just be there for them from afar where they want me.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Not trying to force it out of them.

Madeline:  Because that just leads to further pushing people away.

Charlotte:  Yeah. It’s like a rebellion, it feels like it’s like a long-term version of a tantrum.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  And you’ve got to let it happen.

Madeline:  Exactly.

Charlotte:  And play itself out.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  My only rebellion was that I wanted to dye my hair dark once, and my mom let me do it all by myself. And then it turned out striped.

Madeline:  And she regretted it.

Charlotte:  I regretted it. My mom didn’t.

Madeline: She learned her lesson.

Charlotte:  There’s my stripey haired daughter.

Madeline:  Next question.

Do we notice differences or similarities between us and peers in terms of handling hard situations or being able to navigate issues or feelings?

Charlotte:  I just feel that, maybe in comparison to my peers, let me say since high school, I have always had a really positive relationship to my emotions at every end of the spectrum. And I guess respected them in the same way that my mother respected them as a the kid, meaning if I am really in sadness, if something, if someone’s broken my heart, or I’m disappointed, and I have a regret or something, instead of trying to stifle it and push it away, I really do like to feel it. Because I do have a sense that if I don’t feel this thing, it’s just going to stay there bubbling under the surface, and I’m not going to be able to get through it.

So I’ve had friends who described trying to stifle their feelings, or repress them, or make an urge to make them go away, which I just really have never felt. It’s not great to feel sad or mad, but I really tried to feel them so that I can get through them. And I know that on the other hand is probably incredible happiness that can come through as long as I give time to the negative feelings.

Madeline:  I totally agree with that. I definitely have been taught that it’s okay to be sad one day, because most likely, nine times out of 10, I’ll wake up the next day with some distance and feel a lot better. And I just had to have a sad day, and that’s just what had to happen. And I feel like our parents gave us a lot of space to have that when we were younger.

Charlotte:  How do you feel that when you hear from friends about their upbringings? Do you feel grateful for the RIE approach?

Madeline:  I definitely do. I think anytime I talk to my friends about their parents and how they grew up, I can’t think of a single time where I have thought: man, I wish my parents were more like yours. Almost always, I’m like, I’m glad my parents weren’t like yours. I’m so lucky to have the parents that I did and to have been raised the way that I was. It’s hard to go all the way back to the core RIE stuff of infant and toddler and know really how that was different from my friends, but definitely the slightly older years that I do remember, there definitely feels like there’s a difference. And I always do feel like I come out on top in the parenting comparisons.

Charlotte:  Yeah. There were definitely times where I was frustrated maybe in the moment with, I don’t know, not being allowed to see a movie or something, but in the long run now, in hindsight, I realize everything actually was pretty perfect. And above all, something that I am grateful for is the relationship that this approach has fostered between my mom and I. And I feel like looking back everything that she did, every decision she made, her parenting style just totally above everything has made us have a really copacetic, mutually respectful bond that’s really special.

Madeline: Yeah. I agree with that. I definitely have a stronger relationship with my parents than a lot of people who I know and a lot of my peers in the long run. Even though I did have that moment of shutting them out and everything like that, it is now something where I feel like I can come to my parents with anything, and they will always be there for me. And if they need anything from me, I’ll reciprocate. Like there is definitely that mutual respect that is shockingly rare. And I don’t realize how rare it is until I talk to people my age.

Charlotte:  Yeah. I think that the trust element was really powerful. And I guess I always felt, and this has got to be since I was an infant, that my parents trusted me to make my own decisions. And of course-

Madeline:  They don’t let you drive off a cliff.

Charlotte:  Yeah, that can go totally overboard as being totally permissive. In no way, permissive. But just kind of through every phase of life, respectful and trusting that our instincts were at least a little bit right or just part of the process of our evolution as a human being. That’s something that’s really carried through and now has just fostered this great dynamic that I’m so, so, so grateful for, and I feel really stands out amongst my peers.

Madeline:  Great. Next question.

How do you think your relationships with your parents and siblings have evolved over time?

Charlotte:  Well, we touched on the relationship with our parents, and as far as how it’s evolved. It starts out being… a parent really has to parent because they have to make sure you don’t-

Madeline:  The safety net is a little tighter when you’re younger.

Charlotte:  Yeah. They have to make sure you survive. But then over time, we were then able to make our own decisions.

And I think you can touch more on our sibling dynamic. We’re all four years apart.

Madeline:  And so we all had phases of being really close with one of our siblings. Maybe you didn’t with Ben, the youngest, as much.

Charlotte:  No, I had it with you where you were my little doll.

Madeline:  So I had a phase first of being very close with Charlotte and playing together a lot. And then she got older, and then Ben got older, and so I could then play with him. And he was my-

Charlotte:  It’s like be the boss of them.

Madeline: Not baby doll. But when you’re an older sibling, you get to be a little bit the boss of the other.

Charlotte:  Madeline and I basically exclusively played school where I was the teacher.

Madeline:  Yeah. And I tried to do that with Ben and be the teacher, but it didn’t work as well. So we just sort of played with toys and went outside, and I don’t know, whatever. So I had moments where I was closer with Charlotte, and then moments where I was closer with Ben, and then moments after that where I just wanted to be close to nobody. And I think that there were conflicts during those times, but our parents never involved themselves to the extent of saying, “well, now you have to say, sorry.”

I think with my younger brother, I had a lot of conflicts with him where it would sometimes involve tackling each other, and someone would be in tears, mostly just for the drama of it, not because we were hurt. Of course, if we were hurt, that would be something different. But we had really some intense moments, and I never felt like I was forced to be sorry about it. I think I felt sorry about it when I realized, oh my gosh, what just happened with my sweet little brother? And because I was given sort of that moment to realize what had happened and feel bad about it naturally, rather than just being told, “well, now you have to say, sorry,” and it feeling super surface level, I was able to realize the impact that I was having on this other person who was smaller than me.

Charlotte:  Rather than being forced to save face just to soothe your mom. It can be terrifying as a parent to see your beautiful offspring mid tackle, but just trying to smooth it over and to force both parties to apologize or just to make nice is kind of…

Madeline:  Yeah. I feel like at the end of the day, the core of it is that I got to choose whether I liked my little brother or not. And at the end of the day, because he was my little brother, and he was sweet and fun, and we had so much fun together, I chose to like him. And now I adore him, and I think he’s the coolest person ever. But there were many moments where it might’ve seemed like I didn’t, and my mom could have tried to sort of selfishly say, “say sorry to him, say sorry to him.” And that wouldn’t have been genuine, and that would have fostered some sort of resentment. Whereas, because I was able to have the moment of naturally coming to that conclusion of feeling bad about something mean that I did to him, I was able to actually forge a genuine relationship with him that is now great because it got to be organic.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Next question.

Do we feel intrinsic motivation instead of doing things to seek approval?

Hundred percent.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  This was something that, in school, friends would talk about, “oh, my parents are mad at me for getting a bad grade.” Or, “I have to do this because my parents.” or, “They’re helping me with my homework.”

This was just totally foreign to me. And finally, as I was in high school, I was just fully aware of the situation being very different in my household than it was with my classmates, because my parents didn’t know if I had homework or not. They didn’t ask me. They kind of let school be my own territory. And whether or not I wanted to do an assignment was completely up to me. They realized that there are enough forces in effect at school, in that landscape, that you’ll be punished for a bad grade, and you’ll be rewarded for a good one within that context.

Madeline:  To be fair, we went to a school that was very academically…  that was placed in high importance. And it’s not in all schools, but in the school that we went to, it was. And so there were already forces at play that would make you want to do well. But in terms of our personal experience, I totally agree. And I think that our younger brother would also agree. We’ve all been very self-motivated, and we all want to do well. But I agree that I don’t really know why, besides just, we know that we can, I think. I knew that I was never going to be punished or rewarded either. I mean, I had friends who were paid for good grades.

Charlotte:  Yeah, my parents didn’t even get that excited if I did that well.

Madeline:  No, they sort of matched our level of excitement. So if we said, “Shoot, I got this grade, and I’m not that happy with it.” Then they would be like, “Oh, that’s too bad. But it’s not a big deal.”

Charlotte:  Because I think parents who would say, my kid is not doing well in this class, therefore I need to get them tutored in it. And they need tutoring because they need to get to this level. I think a lot of that comes from they feel like they’re failing if their child isn’t doing well. Maybe it’s just not the right time. Yeah. And I think forcing it, forcing it, forcing it is just another thing that probably breeds resentment between child and parent.

Madeline:  Yeah. I think school is the most clear example of intrinsic motivation.

Charlotte:  Yeah. And it’s something that can’t be taught.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  That’s what I read about in a psych book once. “Can’t be taught.”

Madeline:  All right. Next.

Someone said, they know it’s beneficial to limit screen time, but they’d love to hear the long-term benefits and our perspective on that.

I think the first thing that I’ll say is that screen time now is so different than screen time when we were kids — 20 years ago, I guess now, we were kids — because now screens are actively trying to take your child’s attention, whereas when we were kids, it was basically TV and movies. And then as we grew older, I think in a middle school-

Charlotte:  Computers got in the mix.

Madeline:  People started to get smartphones, and that’s something where the device is actively trying to get you to use it more. So it’s a lot more difficult to keep your kids away from it now. But that being said, it goes back to what we said earlier, which is that what is normal in your household is what kids see as normal. Our normal was we got to watch movies on the weekends, and we didn’t get to watch TV unless we were home sick. And so-

Charlotte:  I still feel sick when I watch TV. If I watch TV during the day, there’s something psychosomatic — I become sick. So that’s conditioning.

Madeline:  And I can’t just have TV on in the background because-

Charlotte:  I must engage with it. Because it was not put in front of us as a distraction or as something that would keep our attention while our parents could… I’m assuming while we were watching a movie, they did get to have some much needed “them time.” But that was never posed as a means to an end. It was just a nice little treat that we got to have. But TV, because it was something that we got to watch so rarely, to this day I have to actively engage with. I can’t just tune it out. Instead of being desensitized by watching so much TV, I’d say I’m super sensitive to it, I guess.

Madeline:  Which I don’t think is a bad thing, for the record. I think, at the time, did I wish that I could watch more? Maybe, because it felt like such a treat. It was like sugar in a way, in terms of, you want more because it’s exciting, and it tastes good. But it’s nice to keep that tasting good, and not for it to turn into this bland thing that doesn’t mean anything.

Charlotte:  Of course, it’s harder and harder these days because we now have phones –

Madeline:  Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. It’s like phones now, it’s totally a different game.

Charlotte:  Which you can constantly engage with and is more personal and is a whole other realm. It’s a screen, but it’s something that you’re engaging with actively.

But as far as how little we watched TV as kids, I can say a longterm benefit is if I have a moment of pause, and I have nothing to do, the last thing I think of is turn on the television. It’s ultimately, maybe I end up doing something a little more productive or more introspective.

Madeline:  Yeah. And in the moment too, if when we were bored as kids, we’d be running around the house going, “I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored.” And our mom would be like… “hope you figure that out, here’s some ideas if you want them, but none of them are going to be TV.” So we weren’t able to just pacify with TV. We had to figure out other ways of spending time, which I don’t know how that can possibly be a bad thing.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Friends who had households that were really overstimulating… We would have friends who had the new… because there were also video games, which we didn’t have. We never had.

Madeline:  Until we were older.

Charlotte:  Yeah. I never had one though because I was the first one.

Madeline:  Because you weren’t that interested anyways.

Charlotte:  I asked for a Game Boy every Christmas for four years. It just never came from Santa. It never came. It was Santa skipped over that line every time.

Madeline:  Well, I got a Game Boy when I was older because it was much more prevalent then, and I could make a three point argument why I ought to have one.

Charlotte:  I would just sneak it on the list and never got it.

But friends who came and had these awesome involved video games at their house, when they would come to mine, they would be, I think the word was thrown around, “I’m bored.” They were bored because they were used to being so overstimulated. But once they got in the vibe of the Lansbury household, and I showed them our playhouse, and I started involving them in a really, really, really upbeat game of house, they wanted to come to my house all the time.

Madeline:  Yeah. No, that’s true actually.

Charlotte:  Because it’s actually more fun, and you can sustain it for longer. You don’t get bored.

Madeline:  That’s true. I would go to my friend’s house who would have TV on all day, and I would get bored there. And there was nothing that I could do because my friend just wanted to keep watching TV. Whereas when they came to my house, we wouldn’t be allowed to do that. And so we’d have to play with dolls all day. And we could spend hours, and I would never get bored. So it’s just sort of a different-

Charlotte:  It’s not a mind-numbing experience.

Madeline:  Yeah, exactly.

Charlotte:  Anyway, that was a long answer. One more.

Was your mom always unruffled?

Madeline:  For the most part, I think. There’s never been a point where I feel like my mom lashed out at us for any reason, even if we were lashing out at her, which I think is what that comes down to really.

Charlotte:  Or when we’re in a state of stress, becoming stressful also.

Madeline:  Right. I’m sure that there was moments where she didn’t feel unruffled, but she never took it out on us, which I think is the important thing and the hard thing to do in that moment. But yeah, when we were having a tough moment, she would at least appear to me to be way calmer than I was when I was flailing around or whatever.

Charlotte:  Yeah.

Madeline:  And I think that that’s good. I do feel like even now, if I am having a really, really hard time, I do feel like my mom is that source of stability, and my dad as well. They’re both people who I can go to because, growing up, they were always the person who I could go to who would be calm and able to help me with an issue.

Charlotte:  Yeah. And I think I’ve been able to model that in my relationships as an adult. They’ve always let us feel the feeling, throw the tantrum, not get all worked up if we were in this high state of arousal. And I, now, in my close relationships, I’m able to model, I suppose, an unruffled approach when it comes to trying to manage other people’s feelings.

Our parents, when we were in a higher arousal state, they would, I think, not become very flustered or would just let us sort of feel those feelings and get through this blackout state where we’re so worked up that we can’t behave like ourselves or say anything that we actually mean. And as adults, everyone has their own version of little tantrums. And I’m always hyper aware of the fact that when a person’s in that state, I can’t trust anything they say, and that it’s something that they have to go through in order to come out on the other side. And so I try to practice my mom’s unruffled approach in my adult life. It usually works.

Madeline:  I think that’s all of the questions that we have ready to answer. So…

Charlotte:  Thanks for joining us. This has been fun. Thanks for letting us be guests-

Madeline:  Unruffled takeover.

Charlotte:  … on our lovely mother’s podcast.

Madeline:  Hopefully you liked us. Otherwise, you’ll never listen to another one again, but…

Charlotte:  No hate mail.

Madeline:  We probably missed stuff, but…

Charlotte:  Yeah, you can always throw us a follow on Instagram. Just kidding. I think that’s it. Hope you all are having a wonderful start to the new year.

Madeline:  Thanks for listening. Be safe, everybody.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you so much, Charlotte and Madeline. It means a lot to me that you were willing to do this.

I also want to say that I was pretty surprised by my daughters’ conviction and effusiveness in some of the points that they made. What surprised me the most, actually, was this last question. Am I unruffled? Was their mother unruffled? And honestly, I would have thought my daughters would have said something more to the effect of, “well, my mom’s human, like anyone else. And most of the time, she was calm, but she had her moments, like all parents do.”

But they didn’t. So what this tells me is a couple of comforting things.

One, that our children’s memories tend to be forgiving. And two, we don’t need to be calm all of the time. We don’t need to be perfect. If we can embrace a respectful unruffled approach the majority of the time, that’s all that matters. Parents don’t need to be on their game at every moment, especially if we repair, we come clean with our children and admit our mistakes.

We really can do this.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category. So you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can also get them in e-book at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or Barnes & Noble and in audio at audible.com. You can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thanks so much for listening.

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Transcript of “Don’t Miss the Secrets Your Children Need to Share”

Hi. This is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be responding to a question that I received in an email about how to respond to a toddler’s verbalizations about hurting her baby sister. But I want to flesh out this topic a little to discuss all the overtures of children communicating to us and how important it is to respond and encourage children to communicate, beginning with the sounds and cries that a baby makes. These can be opportunities, and we don’t want to miss these.

I’m going to start with the note that I received:

Hello, Janet. I have a toddler and a newborn. My toddler is two-and-a-half years old, and she’s having a pretty normal time adjusting. She swings between affection for her sister and aggressive behavior. Your advice on siblings has been so helpful to me and my husband. I think we’re doing a decent job supporting them both, keeping our babies safe while acknowledging our toddler’s feelings. I’m hoping you can help with something I haven’t seen addressed in any articles or podcasts.

My daughter, a few times a week, says to me some version of this: “I hit Hannah. I bite Hannah. When Hannah gets bigger, I’m going to knock her down.” She’s often smiling and nonchalant, like she tells lots of other stories. Her sister’s never around during these times. Sometimes she adds at the end, “I say, ‘Sorry, Hannah.’ I kiss Hannah and snuggle her,” but not always. I’m not sure what to say.

When she’s with her sister and acting aggressively, we are diligent about being present and calm, and physically stopping the behaviors without judgment or fanfare. We will say something like, “You want to hit your sister right now. I won’t let you.” When she tells the story, I just say something similar. Sometimes I will add something like, “Being a big sister can be hard sometimes,” or “Ouch, that hurts,” but said without much emotion. Does that make sense?

I often wonder why she’s telling me these stories and if she’s asking me for some help that I am not giving her. Perhaps there’s an opportunity since she’s calm to convey something more, though I’m not sure exactly what.

I know you are busy. I hope you can help. Thank you for reading.

Okay, so one of the reasons I love this note is that these parents sound like they are 98%, at least, in the direction I would recommend. It’s so wonderful that they are normalizing for themselves their two-and-a-half-year-old’s aggression towards the baby, because it is so normal and expected for these impulses to get the better of a child that age, when her life has been turned upside down. As this parent so lovingly acknowledges, being a big sister is hard sometimes. It’s scary and it’s hard to contain. Sometimes children will go up and they’re so excited. “I want to touch the baby,” but you can see in them that they’re kind of vibrating with this energy that’s out of their control. That’s often when they will do these aggressive things. Not that they’re mean children or that they want to hurt people or want to hurt the baby even, but it can be a very scary time when your parents’ focus has shifted from you to this other important new person. It’s just that feeling of fear that makes them lash out.

The parents are handling this valiantly it sounds like to me, and prioritizing the relationship with their older daughter, which is the key to her passing through this period of transition without internalizing a lot of shame and uncomfortable distance from her parents. She says they’re being present and calm, and physically stopping the behaviors without judgment or fanfare. Yes. We don’t want to make a big deal out of these things. She says, “We say something like, ‘You want to hit your sister right now. I won’t let you.'” Yes, that’s exactly what I would recommend.

But then what this little girl is doing in these moments that the parent’s asking about is so, so incredible. Two-and-a-half years old and she is articulating that she has these feelings about her sister, and she feels safe to share them with her parents. This is a golden opportunity and it sounds like this parent is almost there to being able to help both her daughter and herself benefit from this sharing that her daughter’s doing.

I’m going to talk specifically how I would recommend handling the, “I hit Hannah, I bite Hannah” comments. But first I just want to talk a little about this challenge that we have to engage with our child as a person from the beginning, ideally, to realize that children are communicating from day one, and they’re very candid. This is one of the many reasons I love working with children in these early years. They put it all out there. They do share what’s on their mind.

When children do this beginning as infants, as parents, it might be hard for us to see and receive that this is communication. For example, with an infant, our priority, ideally, isn’t to make the crying stop, but to explore and try to understand it as best we can. We won’t always understand it, but making that effort so that it encourages our child to keep sharing with us.

From the beginning, we want to encourage any and all communication, because we want our child to be a confident communicator, to continue to be throughout life, of course, and using language and connecting that way. It’s such an important human thing to do. We want to give them those messages right away that we hear them and that we want to understand what they’re experiencing, what they’re sharing with us.

This can be especially challenging with infants for a few reasons.

One, if you’re like I was before I learned this approach, I would’ve thought if somebody asked me, that I saw my baby as a person. But honestly, I didn’t. I saw my baby as kind of this extension of me that was maybe the beginnings of a person, but not actually a person.

Also, as parents, crying and any kind of sound that doesn’t sound happy that comes from our child, triggers us and rattles us. That’s what it’s supposed to do, because that’s how babies are going to get their needs met. The tendency can be to intervene too much, too soon, and not see this as nuanced communication, that it isn’t just this one note thing that we’ve got to put out. I know that this is an issue for other people besides me in the beginning, because I get asked, “How long should I let my baby cry before I pick them up?” Or “Is it okay for me to let my baby cry? What’s the right response?”

When we actually see a person and know that this person is communicating all kinds of feelings and thoughts, then we want to engage. We want to, as my friend Lisa Sunbury says, enter into a conversation with our child.

Our baby makes a sound that sounds unpleasant, and we want to respond immediately or as soon as we can. But that doesn’t mean we swoop them up, or move them, or put something in their mouth. It means breathing through our discomfort that we might want to fix immediately and receiving. “Wow, I hear you. What are you saying? What are you telling me? I’m not sure. Oh, I think you’re really hungry. Are you telling me that?”

With a baby I was recently working with, he was nine months old, he’d gotten up from his nap and he was crying and crying and he wasn’t hungry, his mother didn’t think. But he was touching his tummy area where the top of his diaper was. We weren’t immediately picking him up, giving him food, or trying to do something to make him stop. I was asking him, “What’s going on? I hear you.” One thing I noticed is he put his finger in his mouth a little. I said, “Do your teeth hurt? I wonder if that’s bothering you.” His mother said that indeed he was teething, but he kept touching this area of his tummy. When I touched it as well, I noticed that his diaper was quite tight at the top. So, I said, “Is this really tight for you? Maybe that’s uncomfortable.” The mother loosened the diaper and sure enough, that’s what was going on. We were able to find out, is what I’m saying. Person to person, as if this communication is something that we want to figure out and be as accurate on as possible, and that means not rushing to do something.

That means also this freedom that we have. I don’t have to have the right answer, which I know as a new parent… I was so overwhelmed and I just wanted to be doing something right and I felt like I was doing everything wrong. But if we’re okay with not having the right answer and engaging with this baby as a person that’s communicating something, then we have a better chance of figuring it out, and we have a much better chance of encouraging the communication, because the child is feeling like their efforts matter and their efforts might actually get the true need filled.

So the importance of this continues, and then maybe starting around eight months, children might do this wonderful thing, which is point as they’re babbling or saying the beginnings of words. They point. This has been shown to be a very important development. It’s paving the way for expressive language. Of course, children have other ways of doing this, too. There’ll be a sound outside and they’ll look at you. It’s saying, “Do you hear that, too?” But then they actually point. Then they’re giving you even more information about what’s going on in their mind, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they might want or find interesting or need.

And this is all, right from the beginning, nuanced communication that deserves an open, thoughtful, nuanced response. But again, I realize that can be hard to do, especially when children aren’t saying words yet. It can feel somehow easier to simplify things for ourselves. Oh, well, he’s pointing at this. I’m going to get it for him, or whatever it is, instead of engaging in this back and forth communication. Sometimes it just means waiting longer, but I’m staying engaged and I’m letting you know that I hear you and I want to figure out what you’re saying.

So when children look at you and they babble or they point, or even they just look at you and there’s something going on, responding back, trying to figure out what they’re saying, “Oh, are you telling me about that sound? I hear that, too. That bird is really close, isn’t it? It’s very loud.” For children to feel understood and connected with this way is so encouraging and confidence-building.

And it can be fun for us, too. It takes bravery to be more open and not have the snap answer and fix things. It really does. It can feel good to be that kind of parent, to practice it.

By no means am I saying: Oh gosh, every little thing my child does, I’m supposed to respond. Absolutely not. This isn’t what that’s about. But oftentimes this is right in front of us. We’re there. We’re playing with our child, or we’re watching them play, or we’re hanging out with them. We’re doing a task together. It’s right there for us. Those are the opportunities I’m talking about. I’m not talking about every whine or every sound our child makes that we need to respond.

So now in this case, this little girl is sharing her feelings quite beautifully, and her mother really wants to know how to respond to this. The answer is: just be in it with her, detail by detail, with what she’s sharing.

For me, my default response is, “Wow.” That may not work for everybody, but what that does for me is it helps me to stay open and curious. It gives me time to slow myself down and not try to jump in with the “right response”. It helps me to receive.

So when this girl says, “I hit Hannah, I bite Hannah,” I would say, “Wow, you’re telling me that you are thinking about hitting Hannah or biting Hannah. Is that how you feel sometimes, that you want to do that? I know you’ve done that in the past. Sometimes you feel like doing it and you do it. How does that feel? It’s kind of uncomfortable, right? To want to hurt somebody.”

Right there, I’m not expecting, just as I’m not expecting with an infant who’s crying, I’m not expecting that I’m going to get, boom, this clear answer back. But I’m demonstrating to my child that I am open and I really do want to know, and that there’s nothing they can’t share with me. I’m interested in every thought that they have and every feeling that they have. I want to know more about that. I want to know them intimately. So that’s what that is about, more than I’m going to get the answer. But sometimes we do get more of the answer that way. We have a better chance of it if we’re able to go there with them.

She says, “When Hannah gets bigger, I’m going to knock her down.” Wow. Where is she getting this interesting idea she’s already envisioning? I don’t know if a parent said something about that to her, or if knows an older baby who’s standing up and she’s aware that could be coming, but that’s very, very interesting to me that she’s already thinking ahead. Wow, that’s wonderful imagination.

So she’s articulating her feelings. She feels safe to share her feelings. She’s using her imagination about what’s to come. To that, I would say, “Wow, you’re thinking about when Hannah gets bigger and you’re going to knock her down. Would she be standing then or walking, and you would feel like knocking her down, you would want to hurt her that way? Thank you so much for sharing that with me. I want to know what you’re thinking.”

I wouldn’t feel the need to keep saying, “I won’t let you do that,” or “Don’t do that,” or shutting that down, because usually, children, they know that part. That’s why they’re sharing these “naughty” things with us. They know we’re not going to let them do those things. But if you want to, I would do it in a way that reassures her. “If you feel like doing those things, if you want to hit your sister, you can always tell us that. We’re going to be there to help you stop.”

If we can encourage our child to share their feelings in the moment when it’s happening, then we can stop them.

Again, they don’t need us to keep replaying that message: what you’re doing is wrong and I’m not going to let you do it when they already know that. What they need is: You need help with this and you’re sharing. Thank you. Don’t worry. I’m going to help you. I’ll be there. This parent already has a great connection with her daughter clearly, but this would even take it that one step further.

This parent says, “She says it smiling and nonchalant, like she tells lots of other stories.” Yeah. It’s smiling, nonchalant, but it’s still: I’m admitting something to you. What do you think about this? She wants to know. Again, it’s so beautiful of her to share.

“Sometimes, she adds at the end, ‘I say, ‘Sorry, Hannah. I kiss Hannah and snuggle her.'”

Sometimes she does that. So That’s beautiful as well. I wouldn’t jump to, “Oh yes, that’s the right thing to do, and you’re always going to do that.” I would still receive that delicately. I mean, that’s another thing. If we come in with a big opinion, whether it’s positive or negative about what a child is sharing, it does shut it down. It does make it harder. What matters is that she’s sharing it.

To that, I would say, “That would be so kind of you to apologize. Sometimes we all do things that we wish we hadn’t done and we want to make it better.” She’s saying she feels all these different things for her sister, which is how it is with relationships, especially sibling relationships. Children feel a whole variety of things about their sibling. They love them. They’re annoyed by them. If that all can be okay with us, but we’re there to let our child know that we’re going to help them with the physical stuff or things that get away from them, then there’s much less of that, interestingly.

The more we welcome all aspects, every feeling — the darkest ones as well as the brightest ones — the less scared children feel; the more confident they feel, and secure, safe, and closer to us.

So the right response is the hearing, wanting to understand, staying on our child’s side, and most of all, welcoming; welcoming those secrets to be told, welcoming children to share their insides with us. It’s precious. We all hope our children keep doing this. There’ll be phases in life when they don’t as much, but we can maintain this kind of relationship with our child where they do tell us all the hard things and where we can assure them that those things are normal to feel.

I hope some of this helps. Thank you so much to this parent for her kind words and for sharing with me.

By the way, if my podcasts are helpful to you, you can help the podcast continue by giving it a positive review on iTunes. So grateful to all of you for listening.

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. Both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon, Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting and No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame.  You can get them in ebook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com and in audio at audible.com. You can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the LINK in this transcript.

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

The post Don’t Miss the Secrets Your Children Need to Share appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Sibling Strife – When Your Child Keeps Hating On Her Little Brother”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m responding to a question from a parent — she has a five-and-a-half-year-old who she says has never recovered from the arrival of her brother, who’s now three and a half. She says since he was born, she’s, “Subjected him to physical violence and verbal taunting which continues to this day.” And she often says she hates him. She’s concerned about her daughter and her son, who she feels is very hurt by this behavior. She says, “Waiting for emotional maturity and impulse control to develop does a disservice to both siblings who are looking to me to provide a compass through the storms.”

This parent is looking for some advice, strategies, anything to help.

Okay. Here’s the note I received:

Hi, Janet. I’ve been following your amazing parenting principles since my oldest daughter, now five-and-a-half was 12 months old. Your respectful parenting philosophy resonates deeply with who I am and who I want to be as a parent and you have honestly saved our family’s sanity at times not to mention our precious relationships.

My daughter is a bright, strong willed child who would not let anyone near her, but me until she was 18 months old. She had severe separation anxiety and was often dysregulated on a hair trigger. Her tantrums, several times a day would last from 45 minutes up to two hours and sometimes left her so exhausted, she would fall asleep on the floor where she had pounded her fist only a moment before.

She has never recovered from the arrival of her brother, now three-and-a-half, when she was 22 months old. Since he was born, she has subjected him to physical violence and verbal taunting, which continues to this day. She often says she hates him.

We’ve tried all your techniques and I’ve poured through all your articles and podcasts for help with this issue. She has been to two child psychologists consecutively who have tried to assist her with managing her emotions appropriately. My blocking interventions are sometimes not quick enough to stop her hands connecting with her brother’s little face or body. I try extremely hard to remain calm and not fuel the behavior saying, “I won’t let you hit, that hurts.” But the bullying behavior persists and persists no matter what I do or say.”

My partner and I have both worked from home since the kids were born, so they see us all the time and both get a lot of one on one attention, even more so now that we are homeschooling due to COVID-19. Her brother is a gentle, loving, and forgiving little boy who sometimes cries to me that, “K hurts me.” It breaks my heart. I am at a loss as this has been going on for years now, and I’m concerned this is doing damage to my son.

When an incident happens, I of course go to my son first to comfort him, but I also look at my miserable older child who is clearly distressed and does not want the mystifying negative feelings she experiences as a result of hurting her brother and upsetting her parents.

I do not believe in inauthentic forced apology, so I wait for her to calm down and then we have a cuddle while I try to reflect back her frustrations with being a big sister and explain that I understand she must feel sad and angry sometimes. We then discuss other ways she could express her anger rather than hitting and unkind words. But she often blocks her ears or runs away at these suggestions.

Both my children are in pain and I need some new strategies. Waiting for emotional maturity and impulse control to develop does a disservice to both siblings who are looking to me to provide a compass through the storms. Any additional advice you could provide would be so gratefully received. Thanks.

Okay. So I hear how hard this parent is trying to help her children get beyond this behavior. This is obviously a very committed parent.

And it also brings up for me the realization that, even with all these details that she’s provided, it is very challenging for me to really visualize how this parent looks in action, interacting with her children. And that is a struggle that I have with written notes, even with phone consultations. I’m still trying to picture what the dynamic between the parent and child actually looks and feels like.

And that’s why my favorite way of all to help parents is to do in person consultations which, of course, are not as convenient and are harder to arrange. But then I can actually see almost immediately what’s going on, and I’m able to help parents make a shift. Sometimes even a video of parents interacting with their children is helpful. And even when I’m talking to parents on the phone, sometimes their child will come and interrupt and I’ll be able to get a glimpse right there of how this parent sets boundaries and responds when their child is wanting them and the parent can’t be there for them. It can be so illuminating.

So having said all that, there are a lot of details here, and I’m going to do my best to intuit what’s going on. But as always, there’s a lot of guesswork and I may not be completely accurate.

What I’m hearing is that her daughter is, to start out with, quite sensitive, right? Strong-willed and sensitive often go together. And this parent says from the beginning, her child would not let anyone near her but this parent until she was 18 months old. She had severe separation anxiety.

So what that tells me is it sounds like this family maybe accommodated these feelings, which is of course, a normal thing to do when you have a child that little and they’re saying, “No, no, no.” I’m going to cry unless this person’s there. It’s understandable to want to make that happen for them.

But what that actually does is prevent the child from processing those feelings. It also communicates to the child that we agree with them, in a sense, that they can’t be okay with anyone else, but us. That may not be what we intend at all, but that’s what children take from it. So it makes those feelings even stronger. Maybe there’s some fear that gets attached to them. If I don’t get what I want, I’m not going to be okay. And so it makes our child even more, in this case, dependent on and needy for her parent.

What I would recommend if possible, with this or any kind of fear or feelings that a child has, is to not try to accommodate it, to continue normally. “Sometimes your other parent is going to be the one to do this with you.” Maybe even: “This other caregiver or your grandparent is going to do it, and you can have strong feelings about that.” We want to hear those. We’re okay with you expressing that. In fact, we want you to express it. We’re not going to change things or try to avoid this in any way.

I’ll often hear from parents who say things like, “My child won’t let me not play with them.” Or, “My child won’t let me ever leave their side or go to the bathroom on my own or stop nursing.” And what that tells me is that the parent is not comfortable with the child having the feelings they need to have around those experiences. The feelings are the healing.

And then severe separation anxiety… So children sometimes go through a period of separation anxiety or stranger anxiety, but this isn’t to be taken as it’s going to traumatize our child if we leave. It’s a sensitivity that they have, usually during this period between around eight months to 15 months. It’s sensitivity as they’re making steps forward in development and maybe walking and they sense some more separation between us. This other part of them wants to hold on and not let us go.

So it’s kind of a push-pull. We want to be sensitive to it, but we don’t want to accommodate it. So we’re not going to take an extra-long amount of time away from our child or do it more often than we need to or want to, but we still have to do it. We still have to separate and let those other people care for our child or whatever it is, or even allow them to be alone for a couple of minutes while we’re doing something.

And then this parent says that her daughter had tantrums several times a day lasting “from 45 minutes up to two hours leaving her so exhausted, she falls asleep sometimes on the floor.” And I don’t know, this is maybe the way the parent remembers it or is presenting it. But if this girl was actually spending hours of the day upset, I would want to check out if there might be physical issues going on there, she might be in pain. She might have sensory issues that we would want to look at for why she’s so dysregulated. So those kinds of things… that maybe this parent did check out. Because that goes beyond the realm of typical, to have a child spending that much of her day in tantrums.

But the typical ones that a child does have, we can help by holding space for them, being a safe person around them, so we’re not getting upset ourselves. We’re seeing this as healthy venting. We’re just keeping our child safe and being the safe presence for her to pass through the storm.

And that’s an experience that’s so helpful and important for children to have. That is how they build resilience. They’re getting all these messages through us basically doing nothing but calming ourselves and being a safe presence, and trusting that it’s okay for our child to go to these places. They’re getting all these messages: Wow, storms come and then they pass. And I’m okay not feeling good all the time. I can have really uncomfortable feelings and they pass. Those are things that children need to learn experientially.

And also these feelings could have been coming up for this child when the parent was expecting her brother. So she was sensing, even at that young age, a little bit of distancing and a little excitement around some change that she can’t really understand or put her finger on, and that’s frightening. So that may have coordinated with her having some of these tantrums. Again, healthy feelings to express and to get out of her body.

And then this baby arrives. Now, she has feelings that children have: loss, fear, betrayal, anger, and rage sometimes. And a lot of it comes down to fear of what they’ve lost in the relationship with their parent. And then that can get validated for them when they start to behave in these ways that are unpleasant for us as parents. Physical violence, as this parents says, verbal taunting, which she probably wasn’t doing at 22 months old, but maybe the physical lashing out. It’s very, very challenging for us as parents to see that for what it is, to see that as a manifestation of our child’s emotionally traumatic experience of losing their parent to this other child and feeling the shift in their relationship.

And for a child that’s intense like this little girl, that’s going to be a very, very strong experience for her. And she’s showing that through the physical acting out. She’s showing that.

So anytime behavior is continuing like this, what we can learn from it as parents is that there’s something my child needs that they aren’t getting yet. And actually what this little girl is doing that’s very, very positive is that she isn’t suppressing it. At least not all of it. She’s still putting it out there.

What we don’t want is for a child to internalize, just feel the shame and bottle the feelings away. But this girl is putting it out there. She hasn’t been frightened into hiding them. And that’s wonderful. That means this parent is handling these situations in a way that isn’t pushing her daughter away.

What I am hearing though, is that this parent is doing a very normal thing that I totally remember. I have three children. So I’ve been through this transition to another child a couple of times. Plus, I, myself am a middle child. So I have that experience as well. What I’m hearing is this parent, she’s shifting between empathizing with her daughter, especially what she says at the end about how her daughter is clearly distressed and does not want the mystifying negative feeling she experiences as a result of hurting her brother. So she’s empathizing, but at the same time, she’s slipping into judging her, which is distancing and doesn’t help us to get what we want, which is our child to stop doing this. Because it creates even more fear and discomfort when a child feels that their parent is judging — the parent is not liking them in these moments that we see her as a bully. This parent has used that word. And that she’s “subjecting him to physical violence and verbal taunting.” Subjecting him sounds very intentional, and what I want to help this parent see is: This poor girl, she’s so uncomfortable that she’s lashing out and acting in a way that she does not want to act.

It’s challenging to be able to stay on our child’s side in this situation, or any situation where they’re behaving in ways that we don’t like, and that make us feel bad about ourselves as parents. It’s invalidating for us to see that go on. It’s scary for us. But as scared as we might be, children are frightened many times over, and lost. So what they need is for us to be that safe presence, gathering them in, bringing them close to us. Maybe not physically, but through our attitude of empathy.

“Sometimes you get so mad at him, right? Just everything he does, you don’t like. But this is not okay, you know that. I’m going to stop you. I can’t let you do that stuff.” That’s the way that I would acknowledge her feelings, very in the moment like that.

And instead of saying, “I won’t let you hit, that hurts”… Yes, I would say that the first time maybe, or the first couple of times. But right now, the important thing is “I won’t let you.” I’m going to stop you whenever you do this stuff. Don’t worry. I’ve got you. I’ve got your back. You’re safe with me. That kind of subtext.

I’m not saying to say all those words, necessarily. But even this thing of “that hurts,” they don’t need to keep being reminded of that. And I was practicing saying it for some reason, “that hurts, that hurts.” It’s actually very hard to say that without being a little angry or annoyed. It’s hard to say those words like, “Oh, that hurts, I can’t let you.”

So maybe the words are even almost the same, but the attitude of this girl needs my help, she’s still stuck in this, and I want to join with her and show her that I’m there for her. And what will help both of her children is to feel more of that sense of security and self-confidence, because when children feel that, then they usually act out of the best part of themselves. When they feel accepted by us, when they feel we’ve got their back — that they are safe when they’re doing these wrong things that we don’t want them to do, we’re not judging them, we want to help them stop, we want to help them not continue this.

The way that we respond to the younger child matters a lot as well, for two reasons:

One is for that younger child to feel confident in the situation.

Number two, because the older child is witnessing and experiencing us responding to the younger child. And the way that we do that gives our older child messages.

The common thing to do is rush into rescue that younger child. That’s understandable, right? We see somebody seeming to be victimized and our heart goes out to them and we feel sorry for them, and we want to comfort them and make it all better. But that actually doesn’t help that younger child as much as us stepping it back so that we’re not projecting all of this pity and that you need to be rescued. And this is so sad what just happened.

It’s so easy to project in these situations onto both children that this person is a bully, and this one is a victim. We want to be really careful about that.

Instead, you come in, you try to stop your older daughter. So, “Oops, I can’t let you do that.”

And then you’re looking at your son and he’s looking sad or he’s looking, maybe not that sad, just a little baffled. Whatever he’s showing you, take a moment to take that in. Don’t rush over. Give him a chance to come to you, if he needs you. Staying neutral is more helpful to both children because they don’t feel judged. They don’t feel either pitied: You poor thing. You can’t handle this, and this is crushing you. And: You’re just a mean brat.

So if we see that our son is very badly hurt and it’s an emergency, that’s when I would go all the way up to him. And I still probably wouldn’t even pick him up, because we swoop in to pick him up… that’s a normal thing that happens with the younger child. Then he feels helpless and the older child feels like a real rat, right? All their worst fears are being confirmed, that I’m the bad guy now and my parents eyes and love this guy better. That’s exactly where the behavior is coming from, those feelings.

When we judge, it might feel like a very small thing we’re doing, but it can have a huge impact. And that’s why so many of us as adults maybe have difficult relationships with our siblings, still. It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a lot that we can do as parents to shift this. And it’s all about judgment, actually, when we see these conflicts happening and how we treat each child around the conflict. So this is something we can do at any time. Change the messaging by working on what we’re seeing and then acting out of that perception.

This younger guy, he may be more capable than we give him credit for. You can be there with all the empathy in the world for both of them and at the same time, neutral and receptive.

Let’s go to some specifics here. This mother says, “So I wait for her to calm down and then we have a cuddle while I try to reflect back her frustrations with being a big sister and explain that I understand she must feel sad and angry sometimes.” So that’s good. Even better just to be open to it in the moment (I know that’s hard) and not to make a lesson around it, even talking too much about it.

It’s just like… she slipped. Her impulses got the better of her, and she went there. She went to that fear place, that rage place. It’s not something that we really need to go over of why that happened. It’s always better just to be open to it in the moment.

Then when this parent says, “We discuss other ways she could express her anger rather than hitting and unkind words.” She says, “She often blocks her ears or runs away these suggestions.”

So yeah, that’s always a sign that the child feels judged. I mean, I can relate to that. I don’t want to hear it. You’re going through this and it’s just making me feel worse and worse and it’s not helping bring anything. If I could have done those things, I would have. I actually know I wasn’t supposed to hit. I know I wasn’t supposed to call those names, but I did it. I slipped and I don’t want to hear you talking about it.

I can relate to that.

So that’s a sign that she’s feeling judged. You’re seeing her as somebody that just needs to hear, again, that she’s not supposed to do those things. And that’s seeing her as more mature emotionally than she is, way more mature — seeing that she can be on top of these feelings, which she just can’t right now. She’s showing you that she can’t. She needs help. Right now, she can’t make a different choice in those moments. She’s not even making a choice. It’s just coming over her.

Then I would actually let go of the thing about the words right now because — one at a time, right now. I would just focus on the physical behavior that’s harmful. Because a lot of the time, the younger child sees through those words more than we realize, sees the unhappy child saying that, sees that this is what she does. They don’t often take on those words as labels that they believe about themselves. Especially if the parents are not treating them in that way. They don’t really take those words to heart. What they see is that this person is angry. This other person that I love, my sister, is losing it.

Verbalizing the words can be a healthier way of her expressing herself and preferable to hitting and hurting him. For a child her age, over the age of three or four, words are how she’s going to do it. Finding those words that just say exactly how she feels that help her get that fear out, help her get that anger out.

It’s not like you’re going to love those words, but I would let go of that and just help her with the hitting right now, while you’re going to help do some re-messaging here.

So, I know these aren’t exactly strategies as much as perception, but that’s what matters most, the way that we see. And the way that we see will dictate the way we actually feel. So we’re not pretending that we’re okay with it. We see it for what it is, which is: Oh, that poor girl. She needs my help stopping her.

And this guy, he’s kind of gotten into this victim thing with her. And I want to empower him a little more by doing less so that he can express more and share more with me.

If he says these things like, “K hurts me…”  She says, “It breaks my heart.” And that’s a little bit of her projecting here. Maybe that she’s failing in this. She’s absolutely not, in my opinion. And even though this has been going on, she can work on this and make a change very quickly.

If he says, “It hurts me,” or if she says something about him, just take in the feelings. Respond, “Oh, that hurt. What does it feel like?” You want to know about those feelings. You want him to share those feelings instead of letting them stab you and bring you down. Those are incredible openers that children give us for connection and intimacy.

I hope some of this helps.

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Thanks again for listening. We can do this.

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