Janet Lansbury https://www.janetlansbury.com/ elevating child care Mon, 18 Mar 2024 19:27:56 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Praise That Encourages Intrinsic Motivation https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/03/praise-that-encourages-intrinsic-motivation/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/03/praise-that-encourages-intrinsic-motivation/#comments Sun, 17 Mar 2024 03:09:25 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22631 We can be our kids’ greatest fans, and they need us to be. How do we praise them in a manner that truly encourages them? We may have heard that “good job!” or “you’re so smart!” aren’t the ticket. In this episode, Janet shares her specific suggestions and a simple way we can find clarity … Continued

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We can be our kids’ greatest fans, and they need us to be. How do we praise them in a manner that truly encourages them? We may have heard that “good job!” or “you’re so smart!” aren’t the ticket. In this episode, Janet shares her specific suggestions and a simple way we can find clarity on what can be a confusing topic.

Transcript of “Praise That Encourages Intrinsic Motivation”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about praise. It’s an interesting topic. It can be confusing because there’s a lot of different advice out there. A lot of it is these really strict do’s and don’ts: don’t say these certain words, don’t do it this certain way. And a lot of those don’ts are actually against our instincts, so that makes it doubly hard to navigate. One thing my mentor Magda Gerber always said is, children don’t need big hooplas. And she recommended that we acknowledge, rather than praise. One thing I loved about Magda was she was all about clarity and simplicity, she didn’t use complicated terms. But she was very exacting in the words she used to communicate; maybe that’s because her original degree was in linguistics.

If we think about it, acknowledge, that’s something that we do that’s really about noticing what our child is doing, noticing what they’re accomplishing. So they have ownership, and we’re just the ones noticing. With praise, we’re more subjective. It’s more about us imbuing what we see—our child’s accomplishment, their activity—with certain qualities. We are giving it a certain value. So it’s more about us than just acknowledging is. Which isn’t to say that we should only ever acknowledge and never, ever praise. Children need a little of both, I think. They want to know what we think sometimes. And one way to be able to discern that for ourselves is to wait for them to ask us what we think, look up at us for that acknowledgement.

But I can understand why Magda emphasized acknowledging over praising. Because she put such a high value—and so do I, I’ve learned the value of it and that it’s really possible for us to nurture it—on intrinsic motivation. And it’s kind of a delicate thing, intrinsic motivation. We can, without meaning to, sort of take that away from our child and make it more about them pleasing others, like us. So we just want to be a little more careful with praise, that’s all. That we’re encouraging our child to still have ownership and not subtly taking that away from them.

Hari Grebler, my friend and associate and my first RIE teacher, she was a recent guest on this podcast in an episode called Every Child, Even a Tiny Baby, Needs Time On Their Own. She has an Instagram page that I love, Hari’s RIE Studio. And she did a post recently, it was just a little video clip, and this was the message on it: It’s okay to be quiet while children are creating. Wow, that’s something kind of surprising to a lot of us. That frees us, right? We don’t have to say something to encourage them. We can just be quiet and honor what they’re doing.

And then she said: When they show you one of their creations, you could ask how they thought to do that. So when they’re asking for feedback, when they’re showing something to us and sharing it with us, then we’re interested in where that came from in them. What made you want to make that? We’re still encouraging the intrinsic desire to make that, instead of labeling it with some kind of praise or qualification of our own. And what that also does is encourages our child to stay in touch with that creative part of them. We’re showing that we value that by asking about it, we’re interested.

Hari also notes: They can get hooked on our oohs and ahs. And why do we ooh and ah sometimes? Because we feel like we’re supposed to, we’re supposed to say something! They’re going to feel discouraged if we don’t talk about what they’re doing, right? That’s a fear that a lot of us have, but it’s not the truth.

The next thing she says: Don’t interrupt them. When children are creating something, just the way that we create or focus on an activity, focus on a skill, we’re in it. And we want to encourage children to be in that flow of what they’re doing. So when we go, Ooh, ah, we’re interrupting that, which makes it a little harder for them to have that longer attention span. They can become accustomed to being interrupted. One of my most popular early posts I wrote is called Baby, Interrupted, and it’s all about that.

Then she says: Never (and I don’t hear a lot of “nevers” coming from her!) never ask them what it is. So, why wouldn’t we want to ask a child what it is? We do want to ask them what it is sometimes, right? Because we’re seeing from this product mentality that we tend to have as adults: You must have been trying to make a thing here. But children, they’re in the process and they’re interested in what it feels like to be painting on this piece of paper, what the brush is doing, what the colors are doing, or whatever they’re working on. They’re interested in what’s going on moment to moment and—especially very young children—they’re not trying to make a finished product. They’re not trying to make something, they’re just making. And they’re into the making of it, openly exploring. All qualities that we want to encourage, right? So it can be counterintuitive for us, but it’s so much more encouraging to not try to get them to zero in on, You have to make a thing here. You have to make something that looks like something, that you can call something, that represents something. You can’t just explore what’s inside you. Big difference, right?

Of course, this is specifically about creative projects, but it really holds true with all kinds of skill development that our children are doing. They’re figuring out a process, and they’re learning. As Magda Gerber said, they’re learning how to learn every time they get the opportunity to do this.

And then Hari says: You could ask them to tell you about their drawing, but that’s even over the top sometimes. Because that’s putting pressure on them. Maybe they don’t have words to describe their drawing, right? Adults that create things can’t always talk about what they’re doing, or they don’t want to.

Finally she says: When I did art with kids at preschool, I would just play with color, abstract, so as not to distract them from their own work. Mostly, let kids work. No need to put up all their work, wait until they think of it. Some children don’t care at all about the piece itself after they’re done. It’s truly the process for them. Hari shares all kinds of jewels like this on her Instagram page.

Most of us have heard that it’s not a great thing to say “good job” or to use terms that represent fixed traits, like, “You’re so smart,” “You’re so pretty,” or “You’re so great at this!” Carol Dweck did the famous study on this where children who were told that they were smart, they would perform far worse on the test afterwards than those who were praised for their effort, who were told, “You’re working so hard to get this.” But being told that they’re smart, it imposes pressure. It’s almost like, I can only go down from here. And they would fall apart and not be able to do their best. Fascinating study.

But before we start doubting ourselves too much, I recommend considering what really matters. And, as with everything to do with our relationships with children, what matters is authenticity between us. When we’re talking about what they’re doing, it’s coming from us truly paying attention, noticing and appreciating what our child does. In other words, it’s all about our intention. Because we could say the perfect words or the words that aren’t recommended. We could say, “Wow, you’re a stupendous artist!” or, “Look at all the colors you’re using!” And either way, if we’re doing this purely to try to encourage our kids, because we feel we need to say something, not because we really mean it, children will sense the difference. And this is how they can get hooked into needing that kind of empty validation. It’s empty because we’re doing it because we’re just trying to come up with something to say that’s going to make them feel good. 

That doesn’t work with other people, right? When we’re just trying to say something to make them feel good rather than really meaning it. When the people that are always authentic with us, when they acknowledge something, that feels amazing, right? Because we know that they really mean it. We want to be that person for our children if possible, and try to prevent them from falling into that trap of people-pleasing and being outer-directed.

Here’s some guidelines that I put together that have helped me in terms of praise:

First, don’t praise to deliberately encourage, acknowledge what you genuinely think, like I was just saying. And, as Hari Grebler said, it’s okay to be silent. Children can feel when we’re genuinely interested and attentive, they have a sixth sense for this. Try to trust your child.

Next, be careful about overdoing it. Big hooplas, as Magda called them, tend to make it more about us than about our child. Big hooplas for going on the potty or for eating that certain food. Those will reveal our agendas to our kids and very possibly get in the way of our child going on the potty and eating that certain food. Because now, instead of doing this for themselves because they wanted to and it felt good to make that autonomous choice, they now realize they’re doing it for us. And young children don’t like being told what to do, neither do teenagers, neither do most children. Yes, if this is truly something rare and extraordinary that you’ve seen them struggle with, they’ve worked so hard on it, you both know that—yes, make a big hoopla then, if that’s how you really feel. But save those for those momentous occasions.

Finally, don’t use praise with the intention of gaining cooperation. I see it as misusing praise. So instead of saying, “Oh, good job, good job, good job,” I would say, “Thank you.” “Thank you for helping me do that, that really helps.” Or, “You’re able to do that now with me, and that’s much more fun for me to do it with you. Thanks for your help.”

But even with good job, there are ways we can say that authentically. It’s when we’re looking into our child’s eyes with that twinkle, we’re sharing something we’re both excited about, and we’re saying, I see you and you did it. Good job. When it really means something. That feels so much better than this sort of automatic stamp of approval that “good job” can often be. Good job, good job, I want you to keep going, keep doing this for me. Children don’t need that, and it can get in the way and have the opposite result from what we’re hoping for.

And then getting back into that intention part of this again. This can be our north star: intention. It just sort of clears everything away. What is my intention and how can I achieve it? I think in most of these examples, it seems like mostly our intention is to encourage. We don’t have bad intentions here, it’s very positive. We want to encourage our kids, we want them to feel good about themselves, to have self-confidence, to know they can do things. That’s what we want, right? So here are some ways that are quite related to what I’ve been talking about, about praise, but these are surprising ways to encourage our kids.

First, don’t try; instead, trust. Encouraging kids is not this active process, as I once thought it was. It’s about facilitating rather than doing. Since, as I was saying before, children feel our presence and they sense our emotions and our intentions, trusting in them as capable, unique, evolving individuals is the most valuable support we can give them. And, as Hari Grebler said, it can be silent.

Second, don’t cheerlead. You can do it! Good job, good job, good girl, good boy! Or coax. Come on, just give it a try! Give it a try. Instead, calm yourself and reflect what you see. There’s that acknowledging. “You’re working hard on that. It’s really difficult. Ah, it’s frustrating at times, right? To try to figure that out.” Or, “You did it.” And now I just have to say, my impulse when I first became a parent was to cheerlead, for sure. It’s what I grew up with. The way my family did things is to go over the top, and I still kind of love that in a way. But I see how it interferes and how with me, it interfered with me being outer-directed, looking outside of myself for validation, not feeling self-confident. I don’t think that was the only reason, but that was part of it.

Kids don’t need as much reassurance as we think, especially if they’re not asking for it. I try not to assume that my kids need to be reassured and reassured that I’m in their corner, that I’m rooting them on. They feel if we are or we aren’t, because they’re so magnificently aware. So they feel more genuinely supported when we’re not trying to push it or sell it on them. I mean, then they can feel like they’re letting us down too, right? When they don’t achieve whatever it is.

I’ve also realized that my impulse to actively demonstrate support for my kids mostly stems from my own discomfort with the possibility that they might become frustrated or fail. In other words, it’s not my child needing this feedback as much as it’s my need to want to give it to her. And so that was a big aha! for me. Calming myself is the best way for me to keep the air clear of the pressure and the urgency that can make it seem way more important than it is to my child. And that’s going to create pressure.

Point three, don’t direct or fix. Instead, be patient, fully attentive (if we’re available to be), providing the most minimal direction needed for children to be able to accomplish self-chosen tasks themselves.

Four, don’t over-sympathize or attempt to actively comfort frustration. Instead, allow it, accept it, empathize, acknowledge feelings. Doing all those things normalizes the experience of frustration. Because it is a life experience, and if we can feel it, allow it to be, it passes, we get through it, and we become used to those walls that go up. It doesn’t feel good, but we know it’s going to pass. Or maybe we need to take a break and come back, or maybe we need to give up on it altogether that time and come to it another day or later when we’re more ready. If we offer too much sympathy and comfort, we can teach our children, without meaning to, that this is a really negative situation, a problematic situation that you need my help with, that you can’t handle, that I need you to feel better.

Five, don’t project your own agenda or your urge to get it done and done “right.” Instead, let go and enjoy the journey. Enjoy the surprises. If it doesn’t work, the child learns from that too. If we can be okay with it, they can be okay with it.

Just to continue on this idea that it’s really not about the words, it’s about our intention, and that that can be our north star in helping us to give children praise or acknowledgements in ways that are genuinely connected. I received a note. It’s not the first one I’ve received with this issue, so I thought it would be interesting to respond to regarding this topic of praise.

Hi, Janet-

I can’t thank you enough for your work. It’s been life-changing to our family, and I wish we would’ve found it sooner. We have two daughters, a four-year-old and a one-year-old. We regrettably didn’t start following your methods until our oldest was about three, but she has a great attention span and plays well by herself.

Lately, however, she’s been a constant look at me, look what I’m doing, watch this, Mom, you’re not looking!, Mom, say good job! (Which we haven’t said to her in years and do not say to her sister.) I know this has everything to do with her younger sister, who is now able to do so many things. But I find myself getting exhausted and not wanting to watch every little thing she does. I also don’t want her to feel ignored. I tell her “not right now,” but that doesn’t seem to stop the constant requests. I’ve tried, “Ah, I hear you want me to watch you, but I’m a bit busy,” but the constantly responding to her requests is just exhausting. I find myself more and more withdrawn and lost in my own mind and needing space the more she requests my attention. Other people in her life say things like, “Good job!” or, “Wow, look at you!” And I just don’t feel like it’s authentic. I cannot control how other people speak to her, but she seems more and more bothered that I don’t speak to her that way.

Any encouragement or recommendations would be so greatly appreciated.

This parent gets that certain kinds of common ways we praise children aren’t authentic. The thing is, though, they are still going to get that input. Either from us, before we started considering the way we use those words, or from someone else—relatives, teachers. And what children do when they hear or observe or otherwise experience things, the healthy thing they do is that they process these experiences out. And often they do that with us, their trusted leaders. They’re exploring it. Wow, people are getting all excited with this praise thing. They’re not articulating it this way in their mind, but, Whoa, there’s this energy around this and I’m going to explore that. What does my mother think about it?

Then, if children come up against some resistance with us around something that they’re processing, we’re either shocked or we’re angry or, in this case, we’re just kind of annoyed because we don’t want her to be hooked into that stuff. And then also, Ugh, she wants me to give her this validation that doesn’t seem authentic. And I don’t want to do it and I don’t have time. But it could have just been that very first time we could have just been like, Oh, uh-oh, she wants me to say good job. Or, She’s all into needing validation. What have I done wrong? Or, This isn’t a good sign. So there’s that little bit of hesitation on our part, that little bit of maybe disappointment or worry. They feel that resistance from us. They’re coming up against some resistance, and that can be curious. So they want to explore it further. What if I ask this every second? Why is she getting more and more annoyed? And that can become a stuck place for them.

I believe that could be what’s happening here. She’s getting this subtle pushback when she requests this kind of empty praise, so she’s getting stuck. That means she’s struggling to get that need to just process this out filled. So what I would do in this case, especially because she’s asking for it, I would give her what she’s asking for without hesitation or reservation. Which we can still do authentically, I’m going to try to demonstrate. And I’m also sure that this parent is spot on in that her child is craving that extra attention and validation because of the rivalry with her sibling. So she’s a little more vulnerable, and then now she’s getting this feeling from her mother that what she’s asking for is this kind of annoying big deal. So then she’s getting stuck there doing it again and again and again, not wanting to be this more annoying child, but that’s where it’s going.

I want to try to assure this parent that she can give that validation while still holding onto her personal boundaries. And the way to do that is we’re giving it with an attitude that’s open, welcoming, encouraging. Generous, if you will, instead of stingy. Like, Sigh, alright, I’ll say good job. “You want a good job? Sure! That’s a great job! You’re doing a great job, I’m sure of it! I didn’t see what that was, but great job!”

So just to go over this, the parent says, “Lately, however, she’s been a constant look at me, look what I’m doing, watch this.” “Look at you? You know what? I want to look at you! I have to do this for now, but I can’t wait to come look at what you’re doing. Can you hold onto that? Just let me do this first.” I didn’t stop everything I was doing to go look at her, but I had an open, welcoming attitude about it, while still having my boundary. Which helps free her from that stuck place. I’m not annoyed, I just can’t do it right now, but I’m excited to do it when I can. She says, “Watch this!” “I wish I could! I can’t wait to see you do it after I do this thing.” “Mom, you’re not looking!” “Oh, I know, I know, but I will be!”

And then, you know what? We don’t have to keep talking every time she talks. We can let it go too, but just not with that tension that I’m guessing this parent is feeling. I mean, I understand why she’s feeling that because what her child is asking for is a bothersome thing, and then she won’t let up. But she will let up, I believe, as soon as this parent lets down her guard about it and lets it be. And when she says, “Mom, say good job!” And the mom says, “Which we haven’t said to her in years and do not say to her sister.” “You want me to say good job? Good job! I’m sure you’re doing a great job.” Or if we do see it, let’s say: “Good job, that is a good job actually!” We’re still not using it the way that we don’t want to use it. We’re using it in response to her wanting us to say it. And there’s no harm in that for her.

This parent says, “I tell her, ‘not right now.’ Or I’ve tried, ‘Ah, I hear you want me to watch you, but I’m a bit busy.'” Even saying those things could be fine, but the way she’s saying them, if she’s saying them with, Oh, not right now, but I will! Can’t wait to! Or, You want me to watch you and I wish I could, and I’m sure you’re doing something amazing. I’m a bit busy now, but I’ll be with you. It’s just a different attitude. It’s an unruffled attitude, it’s a there’s nothing to fear here attitude. Me saying those words to her is not going to harm her. It’s only going to help her move through this and see that there’s no pushback coming her way, there’s no odd resistance here. Nothing is a big deal. And it’s that daily diet of the way that we respond that matters. It’s not the once-in-a-while and the aunts and uncles doing it or whoever else is doing it.

I wanted to share this because I feel like it’s a good example of us getting tripped up in words, with all our wonderful intentions, to say the right words. There’s so much focus on words in our environment around parenting. But we’ll find much more clarity and freedom when we let go of those words, so we’re able to see beyond them to what really matters. And I would love to encourage this parent and every parent listening to believe in themselves and know that, in this case, this parent, she could free herself to do both. She can respond lovingly and exuberantly and affectionately with that empty validation her daughter wants right now, while still holding her boundaries and believing in what she believes in: being authentic. I mean, that’s a great value right there, in my opinion. I’m all about authentic. That’s one of the most important things to me, and I feel like it’s underrated these days, but that’s another story.

Let’s not get ourselves hamstrung worrying about words. We can trust ourselves more if we can also trust our child. Trust their intrinsic motivation, that they don’t need us to babble on about what they’re doing. It’s not up to us to mold certain outcomes for them. We provide the environment and the relationship of authenticity and trust, and these qualities we want to mold for our child will bloom on their own. That’s what I’ve seen with my children, the families I’ve worked with. I believe in that 100%: that trying to mold the outcome will only get in our way. It’s not our role at all. Instead, when it comes to our child’s abilities, be an interested spectator. The most interested spectator. Not judgmental, just interested.

Overall, we can stay on track as parents by considering: What do we want? Not just for now, but for the years to come. What do we want? Most of us want honest, authentically and mutually appreciative relationships with our kids. And we hope that they’ll know from the inside out that they are capable, that they are valuable, that they are worthy. Not because we say so, but because we both know so.

I know that we can do this.

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Should We Resort to Using Force? https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/03/should-we-resort-to-using-force/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/03/should-we-resort-to-using-force/#respond Tue, 12 Mar 2024 23:36:26 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22625 Janet consults with a couple who feel at odds with their 4-year-old at bedtime. “She stalls, refuses or delays putting on her pajamas, brushing her teeth, getting in bed, and staying in bed.” She’s also uncooperative in the mornings. The parents have conflicting ideas about how they should handle her behavior and hope Janet can … Continued

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Janet consults with a couple who feel at odds with their 4-year-old at bedtime. “She stalls, refuses or delays putting on her pajamas, brushing her teeth, getting in bed, and staying in bed.” She’s also uncooperative in the mornings. The parents have conflicting ideas about how they should handle her behavior and hope Janet can offer some guidance.

Transcript of “Should We Resort to Using Force?”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be doing something a little different, thanks to a couple who graciously agreed to consult with me here. One of them reached out via email with concerns about her four-year-old’s unwillingness to cooperate with the steps leading up to bedtime and also during morning transitions. The parents wondered if there was a point when following through with limits around bathtime, toothbrushing, dressing should mean using force. And as a couple, they have differing views about this issue. They’ve tried sticker charts, taking away storytime if she doesn’t get ready in time, working with her to help develop a bedtime routine. But none of those strategies have worked out. So they asked if I could share any thoughts that I have.

As is often the case, when I read their note, I had way more questions than I did answers. So I very much appreciate them being willing to share with us here.

Hello, and thank you so much for being here and being willing to share with me and listeners about your issues. I imagine there’s other parents going through similar things, so I really appreciate you being willing to be on with me. I would like to start with your note that you sent me a couple of weeks ago, and here it is:

Thank you so much for all your lessons on parenting and developing respectful connections with my two daughters while holding boundaries and ensuring that my needs matter too. My current challenge is with my almost-four-year-old, who often engages in testing behavior at bedtime. She stalls, refuses, or delays putting on her pajamas, brushing her teeth, getting in bed, and staying in bed. For a few weeks we used a sticker chart and that helped motivate and then that behavior stuck for a while when we discontinued the chart, but now we are back to the same testing behavior. This behavior also happens when getting ready for preschool in the morning.

So my question to you is, how to enforce boundaries that seem like they would require physical intervention within the respectful parenting framework? When she won’t put on her pajamas, do we hold her body down to do so? If she will not go into the bathtub, do we pick her up and put her in, then keep putting her back in each time she climbs out? Do we brush her teeth for her while she tries to keep her mouth shut?

This has been a major area of conflict with my husband, who believes that these actions are part of following through after providing clear limits and acknowledging feelings, while I see them as overly controlling. To me it is really hard not to see it as too physical, and triggers my own history of being held down by my older brother when I didn’t do what he wanted me to do. I don’t want to be so physical, putting on her pajamas while my daughter fights it with her body and screams. But other options we have tried, like taking away storytime if she doesn’t get ready in time, using sticker charts, working with her to help develop a bedtime routine, haven’t worked.

Any thoughts you have would be so helpful. Thank you for your help.

As I mentioned in the note that I sent back to you, one of the reasons I wanted you to come on and talk to me here is that I have a lot of questions for you about what’s going on here. If you don’t mind, I’d like to start with that. Why do you think she’s struggling this way? What do you think could be going on there that makes her want to stall and resist and refuse?

Parent 1: Well, one piece that we’ve noticed just this last week is that we’ve moved up bedtime a bit. And realizing that some of it had to do with her just being overtired, and that’s helped some. It had gotten to the point where she was kicking and spitting when we were trying to help her get to bed, and that’s not typical behavior for her. And so recognizing that she, I mean she’s often going to be tired in the evening, but she was really overtired and that was making it even more challenging. That’s one thought that comes to mind.

Another is that she has an older sister who maybe she wants to be playing with and sometimes the older sister gets to stay up a little later.

And I think another part of it is just the testing part. She can see that I’m tentative, perhaps, in terms of I’ll say, “It’s time to put on pajamas,” and she just won’t answer and she’ll walk away and I kind of don’t know what to do. And I know from reading and listening to your podcast that sometimes that confidence is needed that can help them see that I’m her strong leader. And so perhaps that also plays a role.

Those are some of the thoughts that I’ve had. I don’t know if you have any others.

Parent 2: Well, you nailed the two big ones, which are that she’s probably been overtired and moving up the bedtime over the last week I think has made a big difference. I think a lot of it is sibling-related, dealing with her big sister is a big part of it. I think that her older sister, of course, is further along developmentally and more capable and more verbal. Even though our younger daughter is quite verbal and communicative, she’s not as communicative as our older daughter. So I think it often feels hard for her to get attention, get a word in edgewise, and she’s often using behaviors that are maybe more intense to try to get some of the attention that she’s looking for. And then I think part of it is the boundaries that you were just talking about. I think sometimes the boundaries aren’t totally clear to her.

One thing that I’ll add on to that is that you and I just do things a little bit differently as parents. Like when my back was hurting and it was really hard for me to reach to the far side of the bathtub to do her bathtime, that’s one place where I put in a boundary that I don’t think you have, which is that, “I can’t wash you if you’re on the far side of the bathtub. I need you to be on the near side of the bathtub.” And so she’d learned that that’s a boundary where she can try to test it and see what happens with me. So that’s one place where, to finish a bath with her, I would pick her up and take her out of the bath. But for you, that’s not something that you like doing and it’s not a boundary that you have in your mind. So there’s a difference between the two of us there. Does that make sense?

Parent 1: Yeah, yeah, that definitely makes sense. I think that we do have differences in some of the boundaries. I think she learns some of them really well and then other times I can see that might be confusing to her, to know where the boundary is between the two of us.

Janet Lansbury: Well, I’m hearing a lot of insightfulness here on both of your parts, so that definitely works in your favor as parents and in figuring this out, figuring out what’s going on and what we can do to help. I love that you both nailed the tiredness thing. It’s so all-consuming for young children and they aren’t able to see it coming in the way that we might as adults, where we’re like, Ah, I’m getting tired. And a lot of children have the temperament where they go right into this hyperactive, really unreasonable, dysregulated place. So that’s great that you’re both noticing that element, that you can help her there by starting earlier. I also wonder how old is the older one, your older child?

Parent 2: She’s six. They’re two-and-a-half years apart.

Janet Lansbury: And do they have time together at the end of the day?

Parent 2: Yeah, they do have time together at the end of the day. They often play together really nicely in the evenings for half-an-hour or an hour before dinner, after dinner, before bathtime, before bedtime.

Janet Lansbury: Wonderful.

Parent 1: And they also share a room, they have bunk beds, so they kind of are in the same space at night too.

Parent 2: They also do have conflict between each other and they work on resolving that. There’s lots of the older sister trying to keep things away from the younger sister and the younger sister trying to destroy the things that the older sister is working on. I mean, something along those lines probably happens every day, but they often are able to resolve it on their own, and then of the times that they’re not, they’re often able to resolve it with a tiny bit of observation from one of us.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, that I would say is par for the course, that they have conflicts. And that’s actually the benefit of having a sibling, is that you learn how to work through conflicts with other children and with peers and in all relationships in your life. It’s an incredible gift that they have this kind of relationship. It sounds ideal.

Why is it that you believe, though, that this is getting in the way with bedtime? Because it sounds like, well, your younger one has to go into the bunk bed before her sister does and be alone in there, and then her sister comes in later after she’s asleep. Is that how it works?

Parent 1: There was a period where we separated them because the younger daughter would just kind of scream, not letting the older one sleep. So we tried this for a year and we would just bring our older daughter into our room to sleep until the younger one stopped screaming and then we’d carry her back into the other room when our younger daughter was asleep. It was just a long time of really wanting them to share a room that wasn’t working, in the sense that I think that our younger daughter was getting some attention. I don’t know, I’m guessing that it’s attention, just doing a lot of screaming and yelling, not letting the older daughter sleep.

But that sort of got fixed in the last few months, so we had them in the same room going down at the same time, but half the nights there’s a lot of this testing behavior. And then in the last week, really, after I sent the message, we were like, Let’s put her down earlier! And that’s seemed to have helped some in terms of the intensity of the behavior.

Janet Lansbury: So now she has her own bedtime that’s earlier and she’s going to bed without the sister there?

Parent 1: Correct, yes.

Parent 2: Right.

Janet Lansbury: And that’s working better. That’s interesting. Yeah, the children can sort of play off each other, which does make it harder for them to let go. What all of us want at the end of the day when we’re going to sleep is to be able to kind of let go. Let go of the excitement in life, let go of the dramas that might be happening, let go of how we might be winding our parents up. She sounds like a very intense person, this younger one. I love that kind of child, but it does have challenges. It can be so much harder for them to let go.

Anyway, it sounds like you’ve gotten over one hurdle by figuring this out that she got too tired, which makes everything much harder for her and harder for you. The other part here that I wanted to talk about is, since you sort of know why she’s struggling, stalling, and resisting, so we want to be able to do what you’ve done by acknowledging the overtiredness. Which is kind of fixing this from the inside out by understanding what elements are making it not work, what she’s expressing here that she might need. And then from there, partnering with her. Because even sticker charts, while totally harmless, they’re kind of pitting you against her. That’s how children feel: Here, you get to do this fun thing if you comply with what we want. Whether that’s a sticker chart or storytime, it makes children feel a distance between them and us that can kind of make these matters worse. It just looks and feels a lot different to a child than when we’re partnering with her.

Another part of this, I don’t know if it’s the way that you expressed it in the letter, but it sounds like—and you can correct me if I’m wrong—that you are kind of asking her to do these things, in terms of getting ready for bed or in the morning, and she’s not doing them. Is that sort of the way it’s going?

Parent 1: Yes, I would say that’s correct. “It’s time to get dressed.” And she won’t get dressed.

Janet Lansbury: Right. So what she’s showing is that this is a time when she needs more of a helping her through these transitions. Especially the night transition is the hardest one of all because children are tired, but all transitions tend to be challenging. And getting up in the morning and getting out the door—I mean, I can totally relate to the stalling and the procrastinating and all of that stuff because I do that myself. At this age, though, children often need that parent helping them, guiding them through the channel. That feeling that we’re totally willing to do that. And actually we want to do that, because this is a way that we get to really separate from you when you go to school in a way that feels like there’s a lot of relationship that’s a part of it. And it feels better to us, too, than getting in a battle with her in the morning or at night before she goes to bed, certainly. It can feel better to us to hold on to that I worked with her and I helped her from the beginning.

Yes, she’s four years old and can do a lot of this herself, but there are often periods that children go through with transitions where it’s like they revert back to being a one-and-a-half-year-old, where they really need us to walk them through. And she sounds like she’s either going through that or she’s that kind of person right now. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be doing this forever until she’s a teenager. But for now, I would consider both these periods—the morning and the night—as this is time that you’re going to be connected with her, that you’re going to do caregiving. It’s like baby caregiving with her, to help her get from point A to point B.

Again, it’s that feeling of distance that she has where we’re over here and she’s over there. I want you to do this and you’re not doing it. But what she’s feeling is, There’s a part of me that’s still in independent-mode. Just because you tell me to do something, I can’t do it sometimes. And just be on my side and help me through. I mean, she can’t obviously say that, but that’s often what children are needing. That we are like, okay, it’s bedtime. And you said something about that you developed a routine, so here’s a routine that she hopefully had input on: What do you need at bedtime? What do you need from me? How do you want this to go? And then knowing that no, we’re not going to be able to make a deal that she’s always going to be able to shake on and follow through with. She still needs the backup of, We’re there, we’re taking you through.

That’s how I would approach it, so that right from the beginning, you’re, “Okay, now it’s time to get your clothes on. Here we go. And now we’re going to do this, and then we’re going to do that.” And I’m not saying that it’ll all be perfect and smooth then, but that’s the way I would look at this for yourselves. And you two could take turns or whoever’s available, to give her that 100% nurturing through that time. Okay, so now she’s saying, “No, I don’t want to do that!” The thing is, children often don’t, or they do it a lot less, when we’re in there with this positive, helpful, we’re doing this together, here we go, my love vibe, instead of the it’s time for you to do this attitude. So sometimes that will actually just override. They might still go, “No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to!” But they give in much easier because they’re getting that nurturing that they’re unconsciously asking for.

Parent 2: I think that is great advice. And just speaking for myself, I’ve heard you give that advice on other podcasts and we’ve been doing that and I think it has really helped. It has been great, for me at least, to switch my mindset from I need my daughter to do these things! to, Oh wow, my daughter really needs my help right now. And I remember you saying on a podcast about hard pickups from preschool or daycare, about kids running away: “Just don’t let your kid run away from you. Get there and give them a hug and then stay by their side for the whole time and then your kid can’t run away. And then there’s no conflict there anymore.” Or with these sorts of routines, to switch from saying, Wow, I just need my daughter to do her bedtime routine, to, Oh, my daughter is really tired and she’s only three, so she doesn’t know how to do this on her own and she needs my help. And I think that has made a big difference.

Even doing that, when we go into it and we let her know that the transition is coming: it’s going to be bedtime in 10 minutes, it’s going to be bedtime in five minutes, it’s going to be bedtime in one more minute, take one more moment to do one more thing. Then when it’s bedtime, I say, “Okay, it’s time to head up for bedtime. Do you want to walk or do you want me to carry you?” I will carry her or I’ll hold her hand. And I’ve had a lot of success doing that. Even so, she might start screaming that she can’t walk, and I’ll say, “Oh yeah, you are too tired to walk. I understand, that makes sense. I’ll carry you. I’m happy to carry you.” Sometimes that works.

Or sometimes she screams, “No, I want mama to carry me!” I mean, sometimes we look at each other and maybe mama is free and can pick her up and carry her, but I think this is where I start wondering about boundaries. Because if I’ve told her, “It’s time to go up for bedtime, I’m happy to carry you, I’m here,” is that a place where I ought to be saying, You really had these perfectly good options in front of you and you said no to walking and I’m here and I’m taking the lead in this bedtime, so I’m just going to pick you up. Even though mama’s on the other side of the house and she’s fully capable of taking you upstairs, right now I’m the one who’s doing it. But then that will often become a point of conflict between my daughter and me where she’ll just be screaming for the entire bedtime that she wants mama to do whatever. Does that make sense?

Janet Lansbury: It does, it does. And it’s great to hear these details of what’s going on. So the other thing I would say is, knowing that transitions are very challenging and a time of dysregulation, especially the nighttime one for young children. She’s still totally in that category at age four, four can be a challenging age. Six does get a lot easier by then, but four is still ripe for falling apart when it’s time to do these things. So knowing that going in, I would give her the most minimal choices, if any, and I wouldn’t give her that kind of countdown. Because putting my toddler hat on or my four-year-old hat on, I’m getting wound up by that. One more minute, here we go . . . For a child with this kind of sensitivity, it can be unraveling to feel that warning vibe. I know you don’t mean it that way, you mean it very lovingly, but it can come off as, Alright, here we go . . . and like, I have a feeling there might be trouble here. That’s the way you said it in your voice saying it to me. Maybe you’re not saying it that way to her, but that trepidation feeling.

Instead I’d say, “You know what? In a few minutes it’s going to be time to go upstairs and I can’t wait to do bedtime with you.” That’s the only warning part. And saying it very positively like that and then going up to her, “Okay, come on, let’s go.” Taking her hand, putting your arm around her. You see her starting to stall, “You know what, I’m going to pick up my little baby bear” or whatever, and, “I’m so glad I can still do this!” And now she’s screaming, Mommy, mommy! “Oh no, you want mommy.”

And maybe she can’t hear you from then out, but if she goes there—which again, there’s so much more chance of it when we’re leaving open those choices and all those things that she can’t handle. It’s like, I can’t handle this, I can’t handle that, I can’t handle that. And it’s like one on top of the other and, Now, I’m done. She’s gone off into that dysregulation place. And so if she gets like that anyway, even if you do kind of come in early with this, I call it the “confident momentum” of not giving her those choices and all those pauses and all those places of making decisions that are really, really hard for most young children. Or all of us when we’re in tense periods in our life, and young children still are in their development, there’s so much going on.

Even with all that, if she’s now screaming for mommy, I would see it as, You know what? She’s venting her day right now. I would perceive it that way. And, I’m going to be the hero that doesn’t get flustered by that, doesn’t try to call in mommy.

I would not do that, even if mom’s right there. I would not try to fix it that way because it will help her if she can just let go and be gone at that point. I would just take her up. If she’s screaming, cover your ears or if she’s trying to hurt you or something, say, “You know what? I can’t.” Or don’t even say it. Just put her down and just somehow get her along that way.

When you talk about force, you could call it force, but it’s not the kind that you two are both worried about where you have to hold her down. It’s that papa bear/mama bear momentum that I guess could be called force, but it’s really more when you can’t do it yourself, I’m going to carry you through attitude. And not all these words to her. I wouldn’t try to talk to her about it, especially if she’s at that point.

Then with details like the bath, I mean the bath is optional, really. Bathing is a nice luxury, I think. I mean for me at least! But for her it’s like you could wash her, you could washcloth her back a little if she’s been playing in mud or something like that or wash her hands. And I would do that with confident momentum. “You know what, we’re going to put these hands in here and we got to do this,” and, “Oh, you don’t want to and you want mommy and this is just not going your way!” If you’re going to say anything, just be understanding that she’s falling apart and coming from that place. But a bath should really be a voluntary thing because we want to present it positively. And like I said, I think it is positive.

It’s not make or break that if she doesn’t have a bath—unless she’s been working in a construction site or something—that there’s going to be something wrong with that. It’s just that we want this routine to go, and also maybe she said she wanted to do that. And then you might say, “It looks like it’s going to be too hard for you to be in the bath, so we’re going to skip it this time.” Not mad at her, not, Well, you said!, not going up against her in that way. But really on her side, as somebody that you see is almost like a basket case at this point. This is especially true if she was overtired.

Brushing the teeth, you do the best you can. The pajamas, I mean, if she has to sleep without pajamas, it’s not the end of the world. But I think you’ll find it’s easier—I mean, you say you’re already finding it easier that she’s not overtired, but I think you’ll find it easier when you approach it as, Okay, I got to get you dressed. That’s my job, and I got to do this. And we’re not annoyed with her, because we know she’s not in her best mind right now and she just needs help. She just needs us to get her from point A to point B as best we can. It’s not purposeful behavior that she’s doing. And then I think you’ll find there’s less of it.

I wanted to talk to your partner here about her feeling tentative because that is, as you both realize, that is also getting in the way. And understandably. I’m so sorry you had that experience as a child. A lot of parents that I work with have trouble with being physical in the way that I was just describing. Having that confidence to start early with momentum, to see your job as heroic, and there are physical aspects of that. If we’re tentative, then we’re leaving open all those spaces, we’re going to keep giving her those kinds of choices. Oh, you don’t want me? Okay, daddy, and, Okay, are you ready for me to do this? Instead of, You know what, I’m going to do this. I know I’m doing the right thing, I know I’m caring for you, that you’re showing me you need my help, and I’m happy to do it. It’s not the same as going up against you. I’m overriding some of the difficulty that you’re having, is really the way it is.

Parent 1: Yeah, that’s helpful. I think it’s some of what you described as putting pajamas on, the bathtub, those sorts of things, being voluntary, I think sort of trying to better understand that piece. Because I think there are times where we can come in with that more positive attitude and catching it earlier and it works. And other times where she just hides under the bed or hides behind furniture. I think she can kind of feel her power in terms of the pajamas, getting the pajamas on. And so I guess I wonder if in that situation when she’s—I’m using the word fighting, but that’s not what I mean—where she’s just really having a hard time or testing in those moments, would that make sense to let that go? Or would you say that’s important to get her pajamas on?

Janet Lansbury: That’s interesting. I don’t disagree with you saying fighting. But what you said is so key, about the power. So yes, she’s unconsciously trying to understand also, besides feeling not her best self and kind of a mess, she’s trying to understand and reckon with, in a way, the power that this has with her parents. That when she hides, now you’re frustrated or however you’re being or mad or trying to get her out of there. So what we want to do with that is not give it power.

That’s what I meant about cutting our losses sometimes and letting go of certain things. I mean, it’s not like I can give you a set plan. It’s a feeling that you have with her of she’s trying to get you wound up by something—again, I believe on an unconscious level—and you’re not going to do it. You’re not going to take the bait because you see beyond. Going under the bed, it’s so silly. So am I going to get annoyed with that? If I have this agenda, I’ve got to do this and she’s got to have the pajamas and she’s got to have the bath, that’s going to set me up to be annoyed when it’s not going my way. But if I’m just like, I’m going to do the best I can to help my little girl, and I’m not afraid of touching her and picking her up and doing all those things. Because it is loving, especially if I’m acknowledging.

If she’s screaming for mommy and daddy’s taking her and if you’re like, “You want your mom, you don’t want me,” knowing it’s not personal, then it’s so compassionate. It’s so loving. There’s nothing even remotely abusive or wrong there for her. She’s feeling that hero come in and take care of her.

But yeah, when she’s doing that kind of silly stuff, I would say maybe, “Okay, I’m going to go file my nails and let me know when you’re ready for the book because I’m happy to read it for a few more minutes.” Very positive, very you’re not going to get me with this stuff. And that will give you confidence when you realize you’re the one that actually has all the power, not her. She doesn’t want to have the power to annoy you with these antics, and she doesn’t have to if you don’t give it to her.

Parent 1: That feels really powerful. I could just feel myself, I have to get these nine things done to get her in bed! I think that’s where she gets the power. You’re absolutely right that I am like, Okay, now how do I convince her to put on her pajamas? And now how do I convince her to brush her teeth? And if she doesn’t, I have to make her do it. So then I’m trying all the tricks. We can’t read a book, or you’re not going to get to say goodnight to your sister, all the things. I’m pulling them out because she has to get the pajamas on. But if she doesn’t have to get the pajamas on, then okay. If she doesn’t have to brush her teeth. I mean, hopefully she doesn’t not want to brush her teeth every night, it doesn’t get to that. But I don’t think it does. The other day that came up and we were like, “Oh, okay, you don’t have to brush your teeth to go to school today.” She’s like, “Oh, I want to. I don’t want cavities.” And so she still did. I think that’s just really powerful to take the air out of it all by recognizing none of it has to get done.

Janet Lansbury: Right. I love that you had that experience where she wanted to brush her teeth! What does that tell you? I mean, everything, right there. This is about your dynamic with her. That’s all. And so what she’s feeling when you’re putting this really intense agenda on yourself. I mean, look what you’re doing to yourself. You’re kind of making it impossible for you to be a confident parent right there. No. Own your power.

You don’t have to tell her and talk her into things. Say, “Okay, here’s your clothes. I’m going to put this on.” You really can’t do it? Don’t do it, then. Maybe there’s ways that you can practice with her during times when she’s not having difficulty like this, where you come in very positively with physical touch. I mean, I’m sure you do have this. You just put your arm around her right away, you’re not tentative about touching her, that you have to ask her permission for everything or whatever. I mean, I know that that’s out there. You’re not one of these people that anybody should worry about making a child do things and breaking their boundaries physically. You’re the other direction. But children read that as, She can’t be the leader. I don’t want to be the leader, but I’m kind of stuck here trying to get her to be the leader. It’s not a comfortable feeling for her.

Parent 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There’s definitely a place for picking her up and helping her and coming to it from that perspective as her leader and helping her through things. And letting go when it starts to feel like a power struggle. That feeling that I have in my body is a cue that, Huh, maybe this thing isn’t necessary. Maybe she doesn’t have to eat a banana before she goes to school. Let that go. If she doesn’t want to eat breakfast, then she doesn’t want to eat breakfast. I can let go of all those things.

Janet Lansbury: And you can take it in the car and, instead of that disappointment in her, say, “You know what? We’ll bring it in the car. Tell me if you change your mind.” If you don’t mind her eating in your car, but if you do, don’t do it.

You’re not willing to engage in a power struggle. You’re just not. Not because you’re afraid of it, but you’re just too big for it. You’re way too big for it, both of you. You’re not going to stoop to that with a four-year-old. And that’s what will give her heart so much relief. That she’s not in charge of these things, that she doesn’t have to make all these decisions, that her little antics don’t throw you off your game, you two. That’s the main thing that she’s looking for here, I think.

Parent 1: Yeah. I feel like I have a new approach that’s going to really help the evenings feel. I think you’re right, there’s a sense that, Here comes the bedtime routine . . . How is it going to go tonight? So hopefully I can shift that mindset, because I’m sure she feels that too.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. And if you’re feeling that, this girl’s feeling it for sure. It’s like seeping out of you, that trepidation. And it’s a really typical thing, you’re not unusual, that we go into these things where our child, maybe we’ve had difficulty before and now, “Alright, five more minutes until your bedtime. Okay, it’s time.” Like we’re almost asking for trouble, right?

Parent 1: Right.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. Even though of course we don’t really want it, but that’s how it can feel.

I think it’s also wonderful that you also have the connection now that you’ve made between your childhood experience and the tentativeness that you feel. Keep exploring that, maybe writing about it from a place of that feeling, of how it felt. So you’re not writing a story about what happened from this kind of objective, distant place, but you sit down with that feeling of how that felt when your brother was doing that, and you just write from that. Ah, I’m scared, whatever comes from that. That can be a helpful way that I learned from Elisabeth Corey, by the way, who I’ve had on my show. Do you go to therapy or anything like that?

Parent 1: I have at times. I’m not in therapy right this minute, though. Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: Well, just keep in mind that that may need more healing for you to be able to put it in its place and not let it interfere with this important role that you’re taking on.

Parent 1: I think the challenge is actually sometimes more just like when my husband has to help her put her clothes on. I kind of trust myself in those moments, but I think the conflict comes when I’m watching him put her pajamas on. That’s more of when the conflict arises within me, is kind of watching that and probably putting a lens on it that’s more related to what happened to me when I was a kid. He’s just trying to get her pajamas on, and in my mind, I often intervene in those moments. And not just in my mind, I intervene and I tell him to stop because that’s what comes up for me. And so I think figuring out how to allow him to parent in those moments. I mean, I certainly think it impacts me. I think in terms of how it impacts our parenting overall. It’s more in just my intervening in those moments when he’s having to be the confident leader and take those steps that it ends up being a challenge for us.

Janet Lansbury: Well, I would just keep your sense of humor about it if you can. What both of you are doing here, exploring this, is the way that I would recommend. Because it’s like, let’s say you’re building a wooden box and you have this lid and the lid’s not going on. We wouldn’t try to force it, force it, force it on. We would look and see what’s going on here that’s making this not go on. So that’s what we want to do with children, even though obviously they’re not wooden boxes, much more complex than that. But that’s the way we want to be as parents. We want to go from the inside out, helping our child with the issue that they’re having.

In this case, I think overtiredness, way too much power, getting people wound up, and maybe too much of a strict agenda on things that, really, we don’t have the power to force that easily. Like to make someone sit in a bath and enjoy it or to make someone get their clothes on or brush their teeth when they’re holding their mouth shut. So where we don’t have power, we really want to lean into mama/papa bear, loving, loving, loving relationship. And way above her struggles and tests and all the things that happen when she’s not at her best self.

Parent 1: That’s super-helpful. Thank you so much. I feel kind of relieved that I have a plan that feels a lot more doable than I had before. Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: Good. And if she starts screaming for one of you when the other one’s having their time with her, don’t other person come bail her out. Because then that can be that accommodating thing of, I really can’t do this, and you really do need daddy or you really do need mommy right now. It’s better then to just kind of face the music and carry on, knowing that you’re being a hero.

Parent 2: Can I ask a couple follow-up questions?

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Parent 2: Since we’ve got you on the line, and normally I just have to listen to your podcast and then guess how it applies to our particular circumstance.

Janet Lansbury: Of course.

Parent 2: So yeah, I hear what you’re saying about if she is screaming at my wife that she actually wants me to do bedtime—it happens in both directions—that that’s not her decision to make, and we’re both capable parents and either one of us can do it. We don’t need to acquiesce to that. What about this morning when she was screaming at me that I was sitting in her seat at breakfast and she wanted me to move? I mean, am I acquiescing to some unreasonable demand? I mean, I can go sit somewhere else.

Janet Lansbury: But why would you?

Parent 2: Is that me being flexible? Or am I being too stubborn if I say, “No, I was sitting here already, I’m just going to sit here,” knowing that she is going to scream a lot right next to me as I’m sitting there eating breakfast if I don’t get up and move. I mean, she ended up screaming a lot about other nonsense this morning.

Janet Lansbury: There you go, that’s your answer. She needed to scream about something. I’m really glad you brought this up, because that’s a sign that there are some places where you’re kind of letting her have power that she cannot be comfortable with, and then it’s bleeding over into these difficult situations like bedtime as well. Because when there are things going on in one area, it always makes everything harder, especially the transitional times, which are already the hardest.

It’s an unconscious power play on her part. Yeah, of course you could get up, but for what? Of course you could get her a different color cup that’s right there, but you already brought that one with the water in it. The way that you respond matters, no matter what you do. So you could sit there still and say, “No, I’m going to sit here. You can’t tell me what to do.” Or you could be like, “Well, that’s really interesting. You’re giving us the seating arrangements. I’m pretty comfortable here. This is where I’m going to stay.” With that comfortable, confident attitude, instead of responding as if she’s making a serious request. And then she will scream anyway. And I love that you noticed that in a way. I mean, I’m sorry you noticed that!

Parent 2: It’s hard not to notice.

Janet Lansbury: I know. I’m sorry that happened, I guess I should say. But that tells you right there, she was going to find something to scream about. And by me doing this totally reasonable thing, which is staying where I’m sitting and not jumping up for the four-year-old pointing their finger at me, she gets a chance to.

And she also gets this incredible message that her parents are just not going to fall for that stuff. We’re just not going to take the bait. And she doesn’t have to worry that we’re going to take the bait. Because underneath what she seems like she wants is her wanting us not to do that, her wanting us to not give her all that power, that she can be the boss of all these adults. Because she’s only four and she knows that’s trouble if she’s the boss. Who’s going to take care of her?

Parent 2: Can I ask another follow-up, though?

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. I hope it’s along the same lines, because I love it.

Parent 2: It’s along the same lines. I know I’ve heard you give people advice that when your kid is screaming, if they’re actually screaming in a way that is bothering you, you can tell them that. So part of what I was thinking at breakfast this morning is that of course I can stay in my seat, but I know she’s going to start screaming. And then if she starts screaming at me, I can tolerate that for like a minute or two, but then I’m not going to like it anymore and I’m going to want to leave. And I’ll tell her like, “Oh wow, that noise that you’re making, that’s really loud. That’s actually bothering me, so I’m going to go somewhere else.” And then it’s like she’s gotten the thing that she wanted anyway. So she does have a lot of power, you know? She can scream and I can’t stop her from screaming. And I can white-knuckle it and tolerate it for as long as I can, but I’m still a limited human being. I can only take so much of my kid screaming in my ear before I want to go sit in a quieter room to eat my oatmeal. You know what I mean?

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. So putting your hand over your ear doesn’t help enough, it sounds like.

Parent 2: I guess I could do that in between bites.

Janet Lansbury: As much as possible, we want to try to do the most minimal thing, because that shows that we’re not bothered. And ideally we see this as a kind of ridiculous thing that’s going on here and that we’re not going to play into it. But if that’s really hurting your ears and you can’t take it anymore, I would say, “You know what? I feel like going over here.”

And then, no, she hasn’t gotten what she wants there. Or she has actually, but it’s not what we think she wants. So we think she wants us to get off that chair. But what she wants is to know her leaders are unruffled, she wants to know her leaders can totally handle anything she throws at them. So you not sitting there is not her getting what she wants. But your attitude about eventually moving or not moving is going to give her what she wants, which is an answer: You know what? You can try all these things and you’re not going to blow me off this chair. I may choose to get up, but you don’t have the power to force me. It’s that little subtle adjustment of you owning your power and seeing the ridiculousness of this and the need that’s really behind it, which is, Dad, don’t play into this with me. Don’t let me be this kind of boss-child instead of the little tiny girl that I am. So it’s the way that you do it. Does that make sense?

Parent 2: That does make sense. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s really helpful. Thank you.

Janet Lansbury: So making it your idea. “Oh, you know what? I’m going to go over here. I’m going to bring this in the kitchen because I have some things to do,” or whatever. I mean, I guess maybe it’s acting a little bit. But have there ever been other people in your life, like when you were a kid or something, that just were trying so hard to annoy you and bug you and get a rise out of you, and you finally realized, if I just kind of not ignore them, but ignore the bothersomeness of this, they stop.

So ignoring them is different because that’s actually a kind of aggressive response of, I’m just going to ignore you for doing that.

This is, Oh gosh, here she goes. Oh well, I’m just not going to give this thing power. It’s so silly. I’m going to get up because I want to.

Parent 2: Sounds really helpful, and I hear what you’re saying about it kind of being acting, but also just saying the line of dialogue out loud kind of forces you to go along with the scene. So that is good.

Janet Lansbury: It’s acting yourself into believing it, or it’s even better when you just really believe it. When you really see this as not this tremendously annoying child this moment, but this silly, tiny person that is not really asking for you to get off the chair, but asking for you to not be wound up by her.

Parent 2: Yeah, I think that’s really helpful advice. I’ve been using your advice along those lines during bedtimes when she’s just totally overwhelmed, overtired, completely fallen apart, saying out loud, “Oh wow, you’re having a really hard time. I love you. I’m here to help you.” That has really changed my attitude about what’s going on in those moments. And I think sometimes she’s so deep into her tantrum that I don’t know if she’s hearing me at all or, if she’s hearing me, I don’t know if she’s actively processing it at all. But it still helps me.

Janet Lansbury: Good.

Parent 2: And my wife can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’ve seen a change in her over time as I’ve shifted that attitude and the words that I’m saying to her in those moments.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. Another one you could say to yourself is, This too shall pass. It’s all good. My son always says it’s all good to everything, but she’s venting away. It’s all good.

Parent 1: I don’t think we realized how much of our power we were letting her take. I think this is just really useful for getting a bigger picture outside of my own brain of what’s actually going on, than how I was seeing it. Super helpful. Thanks again.

Janet Lansbury: It’s my pleasure. And that’s the key: that zooming out, having somebody else to talk to about it so you can see the bigger picture. And then when you step away from her, you can see how tiny this person is. Do you ever go out on the street and think, How did she get so small? We thought she was huge in our minds!

You two are doing an incredible job. Kudos to you. All of this self-reflection and self-awareness that you have is really going to continue to inform your relationships with these two people that you’re raising.

Parent 1: We’re lucky that we ran into your materials.

Parent 2: We really are.

Parent 1: I don’t even know. I sometimes think, what would I be doing if I hadn’t run into your stuff online? Who knows! But we are just really grateful that you are around and you’re so good at explaining it in a way that makes it clear and understandable. And providing the language at times. Sometimes “I won’t let you do that” is so helpful. Just those little things, that you just have a gift of putting things succinctly in helpful ways. So thanks for putting that out into the world.

Janet Lansbury: It’s my pleasure. And thank you so much for your kindness and again, for your generosity in being here and sharing with all of us. Bye.

Parent 1: Bye.

♥

Janet Lansbury: And thank you all so much for listening and for your kind support. We can do this.

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Tantrums, Meltdowns, and Other Intense Outbursts: My #1 Secret for Staying Calm https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/03/tantrums-meltdowns-and-other-outbursts-my-1-secret-for-staying-calm/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/03/tantrums-meltdowns-and-other-outbursts-my-1-secret-for-staying-calm/#respond Tue, 05 Mar 2024 05:18:35 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22616 How do we stay unruffled when our children are anything but? It’s never easy, but in this episode Janet shares the personal mindset that has helped her most, and gets SO much easier with practice. She also shares a success story from a parent who is walking through her own fears to be the parent … Continued

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How do we stay unruffled when our children are anything but? It’s never easy, but in this episode Janet shares the personal mindset that has helped her most, and gets SO much easier with practice. She also shares a success story from a parent who is walking through her own fears to be the parent her daughter needs.

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

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • I understand that difficult behavior is a request for help — the best my child can do in that particular moment.
  • I remember to acknowledge my child’s feelings and point of view. The importance of this can’t be overemphasized.
  • I have the confidence to set and hold limits early, before I get annoyed or resentful. And I do so calmly, directly, honestly, non-punitively.
  • I know that my words are often not enough. I’ll likely need to follow through by intervening to help my child stop the behavior.
  • I’m not afraid of what others think when I need to pick up and carry my crying, screaming child out of a problematic situation, because my child comes first.
  • I have the courage to allow feelings to run their course without trying to calm or rush or fix, shush, or talk my child out of them. I might say, “You have some very strong feelings about that,” rather than yelling, “Enough!”
  • I move on without resentment once my child’s storm has passed. Rather than feeling angry, guilty, or dejected for the rest of the day, I hold my head high and congratulate myself for being an awesome, heroic parent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Janet,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi, Janet-

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for everything.

And I wrote back to this mom:

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

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

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

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

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

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

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We Don’t Like Upsetting Our Kids https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/we-dont-like-upsetting-our-kids/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/we-dont-like-upsetting-our-kids/#respond Wed, 28 Feb 2024 22:45:45 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22607 Do you sometimes say “yes” to avoid your child’s negative reaction? You’re definitely not alone! None of us wants to upset our kids, and when faced with that option, we tend to second guess our boundaries: Should I keep playing this game even though I’m busy, tired, or not in the mood? This week, Janet explores … Continued

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Do you sometimes say “yes” to avoid your child’s negative reaction? You’re definitely not alone! None of us wants to upset our kids, and when faced with that option, we tend to second guess our boundaries: Should I keep playing this game even though I’m busy, tired, or not in the mood? This week, Janet explores the reasons we doubt ourselves, particularly when it comes to personal boundaries, how to overcome our hesitancy, and why our kids really need us to.  

 

Transcript of “We Don’t Like Upsetting Our Kids”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

I love this topic I’m going to get into today because it very much relates to my personal struggles as a parent and the perspective shift that I needed to eventually work on to be able to overcome them and why that mattered. It’s the difficulty that many of us have with setting a boundary that our child resists or gets upset about. With my people-pleasing tendencies, this has been a big one for me. And while I can’t say that I’m completely cured of this, I’ve come a very long way, and I’m going to share how I’ve done that.

First, here’s an exchange with a parent who I very much relate to and appreciate. We had this exchange in Instagram messages, actually. Which I’m unfortunately not always able to respond to, but in this case, the timing worked out for me and I got on the hook. Here’s the first message I got:

Hi, Janet. I hope you’re well. I was wondering if you could help. At parents’ evening, I was told that my daughter (who started school six months ago) is emotionally dysregulated, that she cries over small things such as not being able to finish her work for the next activity or wanting to explain her ideas during focus time when she should be writing.

At home she is not displaying this. We have always let her let out her feelings, and she has become good at doing this. I usually have been calm and held her emotions. I have struggled with boundaries. Not the usual ones, such as lifestyle expectations, crossing the road safely. These are all fine. It’s been the boundary of demand that she puts on me, such as wanting me to play characters for extended amounts of time, so much that I had to say no characters at the dinner table or out of the house. And when she’s tired, she’s been controlling and wanted things a certain way. At times, I’ve adhered to that controlling behavior.

I wrote back:

This reflection you’re doing about boundaries may be the key. Why do you think it is that you cave to her demands? What do you fear about disappointing her in those situations?

And she wrote back:

Thanks, Janet. That’s a great question. Two things which I’ve never put into words before: When I cave into those demands, it’s not always obvious to me. Especially with playing characters, it’s how we entertained ourselves in the pandemic. I might get a sense of irritation, like, She’s asking too much, but I’m not always aware enough to see it for what it is, which is her calling out for a boundary, I guess. I think I’m a people-pleaser and avoid conflict. I think I fear hurting her feelings? I can happily say no to buying her things in a shop, though. Also, I don’t always feel I have the capacity to deal with the fallout when caring for her one-year-old sister.

Funnily enough, today she wanted to play characters before we entered the house. I said, “No, that’s the rule, no characters outside.” She didn’t want to come in, so I gently picked her up and took her inside. That went well. She had a little cry, but it felt like the right decision not to cave in. I think it reassured her. Where I struggle is the alarm bell that tells me that a boundary is needed now. I don’t always hear it, or if I do, I’m good at ignoring it.

So I wrote back:

Well explained! Yes, it sounds like you aren’t accustomed to sticking up for yourself with loved ones if you fear it might upset them and they might reject you. If that rings true, I can totally relate. And I would try to consider this an important step to figure out in your journey, gradually. Maybe consider what it’s like to have someone play with you or do anything that they’re not really into. It’s not a great, clear feeling, right? It’s not satisfying or truly enjoyable.

And she said:

Yes, it’s the rejection. I think I was probably brought up with conditional love, which is why it’s been so refreshing to allow my daughter all her feelings and so helpful to have you out there guiding parents through this different way. But I’ve never reflected about it so specifically like this, Janet. Never been brave enough to have the conversation. When you write about it like this, I can see how healthy it is to try to get those boundaries in because they matter to my daughter and will benefit her more in the long run, and even the short run. Thank you so much for sharing that with me. I think my goals are: Have a sheet up on the wall at home, a script for me to say if she’s being particular and what to look out for. Set a limit for character play. If I know the parameters, it will mean I can implement them. So I’ve set myself homework.

And I said:

Sounds great. And keep in mind that any amount of character play is not your job. It’s not our job to entertain our kids and, as you’ve noticed, it can create a kind of dependency. Also, without us meaning to, our ideas tend to take over our child’s, so they’re not getting the opportunity to freely and thoroughly explore their own imagination. I’m only sharing this to hopefully encourage you to give yourself permission to say a loving no. And you don’t need perfect words, just conviction in yourself as a fair and loving leader who isn’t afraid of your girl. We are teaching kids how to get along with others and how to take care of ourselves and emotional intelligence. When we’re honest about our feelings and say no when we feel no, it’s far from selfish. It’s heroic, truly.

And she wrote back:

Oh, that’s interesting. The character play is very much led by her. It’s almost in the realm of drama therapy, where I feel that her fears and feelings come out. However I agree that a sort of dependency is occurring and it hadn’t occurred to me that this type of play wasn’t really what she needed. In the past couple of days, I’ve already been saying no more and it feels good. I’m working towards reducing it down to once a day—which might sound a lot, still, it’s progress for us. I’ve just been reading your article How Our Boundaries Free Children to Play, Create, and Explore, and it’s sort of blown my mind a little bit. My daughter also enjoys the laptop. She’s not on it every day, but what will she be freed up to do if I say no to characters and no, sometimes, to laptop? It’ll be nice to see what’s inside of her, not just what she does when she’s stuck.

And I’ll just add that that article she refers to, How Our Boundaries Free Children to Play, Create, and Explore, that’s actually a transcript from another podcast episode. And it is about how these boundaries that we can perceive as negative in some way are actually so freeing for our children.

So then I wrote back to her and asked if I could please use this exchange in a podcast. And several days later she wrote back and said:

Yes, of course, especially if it can help other parents or carers who’ve been stuck in a similar cycle. Two days ago I said no characters, and we did none all day, and there wasn’t the major fallout I’d imagined. She was tearful and cross a couple of times and tried to encourage me in, but I explained that it was too much for her to be in control and that I’m her mummy. So she can just relax and play now.

It has been like the scales have fallen from my eyes. My daughter looks different to me somehow. I think because the power balance has shifted, she seems younger and calmer. I was told that she was often tearful at school and I saw her being particular at home, wanting things a certain way. It was giving me concerns. My daughter is five, and I was worried that I’d messed things up and it was too late, that the path was set. I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t have a clue about what needed to change. It took some reflection with your support and the courage and understanding to make the change. It’s a hard thing for me to accept that I was the problem, as I see my errors as a rejection as opposed to being part and parcel of being a human.

Boundaries are so clear to me when they’re physical things like brushing teeth, it’s not okay to hit, cross the road safely, but this boundary was an emotional one and I just couldn’t see it. I can’t thank you enough. The impact of our conversation will last long into the future, and this girl has a more confident mummy now, and she can go back to being little again. Thank you.

Wow, thank you to this mummy and she really articulates her whole process so beautifully. I can’t say how much I appreciate this.

I want to touch a little more on what gets in our way. Often it’s old feelings, worries, fears that we’ll get rejected if we assert ourselves too much. Maybe we felt that significant others’ feelings were our fault and that our behavior—meaning us, in the way a child thinks of that. When we scold a child for being bad, they take this as that they are bad. So as the child, we might believe that we’re making people feel a certain way, and that’s scary and guilt-inducing, and we have to be careful, right? Whenever we’re stuck and concerned and it feels like maybe there’s a cycle that’s continuing that we don’t know how to stop, looking into our feelings around boundaries is often the key.

And here’s another parent who wrote a comment on a post that I put up on Instagram about being stern and how setting boundaries with confidence is not the same as sternness. Sternness doesn’t really project confidence. It’s overkill. If we think about the feelings behind when we’re stern, we’re usually not feeling on top of it but under it. So we force it a bit. And that’s why it doesn’t work as well as really projecting confidence as a leader. Children are sensing what we’re feeling, that we’re not comfortable. So I put up a post about that and this wonderful parent who often comments on my posts, and I love that, she wrote:

This is something I’ve been having to work on. And in most situations, it honestly feels uncomfortable to me to set boundaries. I overthink the perfect words and then get so confused about what to say or do whenever I know my child is stuck and needs my help.

And I replied:

Great that you’re getting to this. “It honestly feels uncomfortable to me to set boundaries.” That’s the key right there—exploring why you are so uncomfortable, what you’re afraid will happen, what you might lose by upsetting your child and sticking up for yourself. Figuring that out and making peace with it is the answer. Realizing that our children need us to walk through those fears for them. This is far from selfish. I would dig deep on this with yourself, ideally with a counselor or therapist. Because the words we say matter very, very little. It’s all about how we feel when setting and holding the boundary. When we are stern, it usually means we’re uncomfortable or unsure of ourselves and trying to compensate. That’s why it doesn’t work as well.

This parent, as I said, often leaves comments and they are very focused on words. So I felt like this was such a gift that she’s gotten to this place of recognizing that really she could say any perfect word in the world and her child would still sense her discomfort, because it’s there.

Of course, none of us want to upset our children. We never want to upset them, right? But here’s what helped me, focusing on these things that I do want and that most of us do want.

One, we do want to teach them about self-care and boundaries in relationships. This is the most profound way that they learn that: through their relationship with us and our self-care and boundaries. So it’s not just respecting their personal boundaries that teaches them that, not handing them over to the adult who wishes to hug them, but it’s ours also that instill this.

Two, we do want them to succeed with peers and other adults, to be liked. Because they know how to respect and not overstep other people’s boundaries. We’re teaching them that.

Three, we do want to avoid unwittingly adultifying our kids. Giving them unsettling responsibility and power over us, making them responsible for choices that are really ours to make. So I don’t mean this to the extent of adultifying a child that’s seriously harmful or abusive. That happens, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about our children deserving the freedom and the messy emotional fluidity of childhood. And when we’re tentative around that, their feelings, and maybe afraid of them, it interferes with that. As that first parent shared about her daughter, she said, “My daughter looks different to me somehow. I think because the power balance has shifted, she seems younger and calmer.” That’s big, right? And don’t we all want that for our children? The way to get there isn’t always what we think. It’s doing this hard thing. Standing up for ourselves, being personally honest with them. And not loving it when they’re upset, but not fearing that either. Facing that music.

Four, we do want a free and clear, honest relationship, rather than one where there’s resentment or annoyance on our end. That means sticking up for ourselves, not giving into demands that we aren’t really into.

Five, we do want emotional health and resiliency for our kids. They need to vent these emotional roller coasters they’re often riding, particularly in the early years and in adolescence. Getting upset about our reasonable, honest boundaries is the organic, therapeutic way children do that. And they learn that the feelings are normal and healthy and that they pass and then they feel better. And that starts with us knowing that and showing them that, because that’s what we believe. And these feelings are not really about their need for us to play characters or do that specific thing. It’s a bigger theme that they’re expressing. Reminding ourselves of that is how we’ll be able to do this.

And knowing that this is a priceless message that we can give our kids that will help them function in their world. They’ll know that they won’t always get things their way and that they can be disappointed for a time, but soon they’re going to feel better. And they can live with it. It’s not a scary, strange, overwhelming situation for them. It’s life. Sometimes things go my way, sometimes they don’t. And I can handle both. I prefer them going my way, but I’m not tied to that, because I know I can make it through the other situation as well.

And the last point, we do want the profound bonding effects of welcoming our children to share uncomfortable emotions. You’ve heard me talk about that a lot, and many of you have experienced it and you’ve shared that with me. The safety we can provide another person by accepting and allowing them to feel however they do, even if we are the cause of their disappointment or their anger.

So for all those reasons—and there’s six there, and there’s probably more if I think about it—we might be encouraged to work on processing our own discomfort. Which can indeed be a lifelong, continuous process. But any step we can make towards that will make the day-to-day of our job as parents easier and set every relationship in our life in a more positive, authentic, trusting direction. We’re worthy.

And now I thought it might be helpful to share what’s actually a follow-up question that I received in regard to a podcast I did a few weeks ago, Coping With Your Child’s Possessiveness. Because this also relates to the idea of upsetting our children by setting limits. And sometimes it can cause us to be tentative, which doesn’t help our child as much as when we can proceed with confidence. Knowing that yes, they may get upset, but that can be a natural—and even I would say a healthy—reaction to our boundaries.

Here’s the message. It was on Facebook, actually, where I posted Coping With Your Child’s Possessiveness. And the parent said:

The day after listening to this podcast, my three-year-old got very upset about his new baby brother wearing the same diapers that he wears. My husband picked them out without thinking. He tried pulling it off of him. So I tried to remember what you said and replied, “Oh man, I know that’s so hard seeing him wear the same diapers. I can’t let you take those off him, though,” while as gently as I could trying to release his grip. I hope that was the right way of going about that.

I also know you said it’s okay to allow them to take a few toys, but if it seems they’re stuck to kindly stop them. However, what if it’s a teething item in the baby’s hand and they shout, “I want that! It’s mine!”?

And here’s what I responded:

Yes to this, well done!

Where she says, “‘Oh man, I know that’s so hard seeing him wear the same diapers. I can’t let you take those off of him, though,’ while as gently as I could trying to release his grip.”

I added:

You can be firm, though. With that wonderful empathizing you’re doing, removing his hand as easily as possible will come off as love and care. Too gentle can come off as tentative, which won’t be as helpful to him. And regarding the teether, no, I wouldn’t allow him to take that away from the baby. So do the same: acknowledge and firmly, kindly block or remove the teether from your older child’s hand.

So yes, sometimes we can feel, Aah, I want to do this so carefully, and that projects our own discomfort in a way, or our lack of conviction in what we’re doing. And it kind of prolongs the interaction for our child, instead of doing the kind thing and just taking it out of their hand. And again, that idea of empathizing is what makes this a loving interaction rather than an overly strict, harsh interaction.

For more about boundaries and our children’s feelings and responses, for more encouragement, more examples, more demonstrations, please take a look at my No Bad Kids Master Course, because I’m able to offer some video demonstrations, some of them are with children. Many people have told me that this has been a game-changer for them, so have a look. And my books (No Bad Kids and Elevating Child Care) of course are available on Amazon. We’ll put the links in the liner notes and in the transcript of this podcast. Thank you to these parents for allowing me to share their comments and our exchanges.

And please know: every one of us, we can do this.

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Toddlers That Won’t Go to Bed (Solutions from Eileen Henry) https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/toddlers-that-wont-go-to-bed-solutions-from-eileen-henry/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/toddlers-that-wont-go-to-bed-solutions-from-eileen-henry/#comments Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:52:55 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22577 Eileen Henry is a pioneering sleep consultant who for decades has helped exhausted, concerned parents guide their infants and toddlers to more restorative sleep. As Janet’s guest this week, Eileen shares her wisdom and detailed suggestions in response to emails from Unruffled listeners struggling mightily with their toddlers at bedtime. A one-year-old seems to get increasingly wound up … Continued

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Eileen Henry is a pioneering sleep consultant who for decades has helped exhausted, concerned parents guide their infants and toddlers to more restorative sleep. As Janet’s guest this week, Eileen shares her wisdom and detailed suggestions in response to emails from Unruffled listeners struggling mightily with their toddlers at bedtime. A one-year-old seems to get increasingly wound up as bedtime nears, escalating to biting her mother. A 23-month-old refuses to nap. An almost 3-year-old won’t separate from her parent at any time of day, calls “mommy, mommy” whenever her parent leaves her side, making bedtime impossible. Eileen offers her experienced perspective, warm support, and actionable advice. “Sleep is not a problem to be fixed,” she believes. “It is a skill to be learned.”

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

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

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

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

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

Eileen Henry: Always a pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any tips you could offer would be so greatly appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any insight, wise words, and tips gratefully received.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eileen Henry: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Janet Lansbury: Thank you so much, Eileen.

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

♥

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

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

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Raising Mentally Healthy Kids Means Letting Them Grieve https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/raising-mentally-healthy-kids-means-letting-them-grieve/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/raising-mentally-healthy-kids-means-letting-them-grieve/#respond Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:42:23 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22569 Most of us wouldn’t consider it part of our job to allow the small children in our care to grieve. And yet, our lives are filled with losses—some are significant, most are minor. The way we process feelings of loss can have profound, lasting effects on our mental health and overall quality of life. In … Continued

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Most of us wouldn’t consider it part of our job to allow the small children in our care to grieve. And yet, our lives are filled with losses—some are significant, most are minor. The way we process feelings of loss can have profound, lasting effects on our mental health and overall quality of life. In this episode, Janet shares how we can encourage our children to experience and express loss in the healthiest manner from the very beginning, starting with the first type of loss our babies experience: momentary separation from a loved one. Our response can provide them the messages and experience they need to learn to deal with loss capably and, most important of all, know loss is survivable.

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

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Coping with Your Child’s Possessiveness https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/coping-with-your-childs-possessiveness/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/02/coping-with-your-childs-possessiveness/#respond Sun, 04 Feb 2024 21:10:00 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22560 “Mine! No, he can’t touch that!” Does this sound familiar? No worries. In their early years, children commonly go through phases of possessiveness that can seem totally unreasonable and extreme. They may want everything their sibling or peer shows interest in and try to take it. They refuse to share. In this episode, Janet explains why this … Continued

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“Mine! No, he can’t touch that!” Does this sound familiar? No worries. In their early years, children commonly go through phases of possessiveness that can seem totally unreasonable and extreme. They may want everything their sibling or peer shows interest in and try to take it. They refuse to share.

In this episode, Janet explains why this behavior actually makes sense and what we can do to help kids pass through these phases readily and in a healthy manner. She illustrates by addressing a question from a parent about his 5-year old’s incessant impulse to protect his territory and possessions from his baby brother. While he and his wife try to maintain an understanding, respectful approach to the behavior by acknowledging his feelings and his space, they’re perplexed by their son’s demands which seem unreasonable and often nonsensical. Worse, he can act aggressively toward his sibling, which is alarming. Janet offers specific advice and verbal examples for handling “mine” and other controlling behavior between siblings and peers.

Transcript of “Coping with Your Child’s Possessiveness”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be responding to a parent who asked about their child’s possessiveness. And one sort of general bit of advice that this reminds me of is that a wonderful way to figure out what’s going on with our children and what they need from us and how to help behavior shift, or at least understand it, is to imagine ourselves in our child’s shoes. Reminding ourselves that our young children are new to the world, everything is fresh. They don’t have these preconceived notions about not sharing, possessiveness, stealing, all of these things. They don’t understand what any of this is. And this is to their benefit, actually, that they don’t have all these judgments in their head about how other children are supposed to behave, how they’re supposed to behave.

Yes, they need our guidance, for sure. But if we can guide from a place of that kind of empathy or imagination—really, it’s us imagining what it’s like to have this fresh perspective that they have—that’s how we’ll be able to be truly attuned to them. To really see them and help them feel the comfort of being seen.

So with that introduction, here’s the question I received in an email:

Dear Janet,

Lately, my wife and I have been struggling with how to maintain a respectful approach when our 2.5-year-old protests our six-month-old playing with or even touching anything that’s not explicitly designated for him.

Whenever the baby touches, say, the wall or the kitchen table or the basket of clothespins, his older brother yells, “No, that’s my wall!” or “The baby’s too little to play with that. He can’t play with that!” We strive to stay unruffled and acknowledge that he doesn’t want his brother to touch those things. And also let him know that the wall or table or whatever it is is for the whole family and that the baby’s actually old enough to play with clothespins (they’re the plastic, non-pinching sort). Our older son usually accepts this with chagrin, but in another few moments, it’s a new protest over a new item.

Sometimes when he discovers the baby touching something, he’ll run over and attempt to pull the baby away physically, his lips pursed with aggression. We intervene as quickly as possible and restrain him, saying, “I won’t let you hurt your brother.”

We’ve drawn a line for his own toys, acknowledging that they’re indeed his, and that he has a reasonable expectation that the baby not touch them if he doesn’t want him to. When the baby begins to roll eagerly toward one of his toys, we coach our son through moving the toy out of the baby’s reach or taking it to his play space we’ve partitioned off so that he has his own refuge from his brother. But we don’t want to have to allocate every single toy as for one boy or another. And nor can we readily abide our son’s continuing expectation of the baby’s less-than-equal role in the family. But more than anything, we don’t want to set our son up to resent his little brother.

Any advice you can offer would be great.

Okay, wow, these parents are being extremely respectful and sensitive and they have a lot of empathy. Really they’re doing a remarkable job, and I love that they’re being so considerate of this situation.

Here’s what I would add: When their son says these things, I would keep in mind something that I guess could probably be the title for this podcast: trust the feelings. What I’m hearing here is something that I experience with toddlers in my classes and when my own children were little. I hear a lot about this from parents that I consult with. And that’s, by the way, the reason that I choose certain questions. I choose them because they bring up a theme or a question that I’m hearing about from lots of other sources, messages in social media, parents I work with in consultations or in my classes. I realize that these are common concerns, and so it seems that they would be good to share on the podcast.

I have to say, I kind of love that this boy is going to the extent that this parent is saying he doesn’t want the baby to touch the wall or the table. Because this makes it so clear to me. It makes it so clear that this is totally beyond reason. I mean, there’s no question, right? It doesn’t make sense. And what that means is that it’s not going to make sense. That these are feelings, not facts, that he’s expressing about the situation. That he has a baby brother, and the baby came and took over his whole life and changed it with his parents. And moved him a little bit out of being the center of the family, which he was used to. And that can be very scary and painful. So he doesn’t really want him to be here in certain moments. Just don’t touch the wall. That’s my wall. This was my whole house, these are my parents, this is my everything. And here’s this baby wanting to touch things, and it’s representative of how he’s invaded my life.

And often this also happens in classes with children and their peers. If a child has a baby at home that the parent has added to the family, then it’s very likely that I’m going to suddenly see a change in their behavior, that they become more possessive with other children. They’re in that holding on mode because they feel their place in their home slipping away. So they’ll say mine!, they want everything that every other child has, sometimes. And do they really want those things, those particular things? I don’t think so. I think they want to express, I’m feeling scared or worried or unsettled. I’m wanting to control things. I’ve lost control of what I knew of my life the way it was.

This can also happen for developmental reasons. When children are toddler-age and other children come to their house and they don’t want those children to touch everything. It’s not that they’re showing that they’re mean, selfish brats. They’re showing that they’re experiencing a feeling of feeling out of control of something that they’re used to having control over: their home, their toys. Now somebody else is here and I’m losing control. And if we recognize how quickly and completely toddlers are developing these first three years. Children develop more in the first three years than they do in all the rest of their years of life put together.

So this is a time we can have that impulse to want to hold onto something, anything. Everything’s changing, without even having a new baby in the family. A toddler’s life can feel like, Gah! I want to hold onto things. I need anchors. And that’s why they need us so much to be an anchor and, if possible, not to be reactive along with them. They also benefit from having a predictable routine, which is not too much stimulation, not a new class every day. They’re most comfortable in what we might consider boring, predictable, routine days. Why? Because there’s something there they can hold onto.

My point is that there are a lot of reasons that children feel like this, and rather than judging them, as we might want to in these moments, or trying to talk to them about what’s reasonable, what makes sense, No, this is not your toy, and This is the wall that holds up our house, it’s everybody’s wall. I can definitely understand the urge to want to explain those things, but that’s not really addressing what’s going on here. What’s going on is our child just wanting to say, I want this. I don’t want him to have it. This is mine. I want to hold onto all these things and have them all.

So to help our child feel more comfortable and satisfied and healed, expressing these feelings, all we have to do is actually what this parent is doing, which is acknowledge him. Acknowledge that he doesn’t want the baby to touch those things. That’s it, that’s the perfect response. We don’t need to explain what’s reasonable, and what I strongly believe that this child already knows, which is that the wall or the table or whatever is for the whole family, the baby is indeed old enough to play with this type of clothespin. This is the tendency that comes up for most of us. As parents, we want to explain it, the way we would to an adult or an older child. Let me tell you what’s true. And it feels like if we could just convince him and reason with him, he’ll see what a silly thing that is to say. But it’s silly because it’s an impulsive, emotional thing to say. I believe even as adults, we can say things we don’t really mean because we’re expressing a feeling in the moment. Well, younger children do this a lot more. So I would just stick with acknowledging, welcoming him to feel like that.

And then, because he’s let us know that he may decide he’s going to push his brother away from that wall or take his hand off the wall or do something else physical, we’re ready to stop that. So as we’re saying, “You don’t want him to touch the wall,” we’re ready to calmly intervene if we need to. And then if he tries to do something physical with his brother because he doesn’t want him to touch the wall, that’s when we say, “You really don’t want him to touch the wall, and I can’t let you move his hand. I’m not going to let you stop him,” while we’re blocking him with our hand. “But I hear you. You don’t like him touching that.” And if the baby’s expressing something then, that’s healthy. We acknowledge that too. That’s it. That’s all we have to do.

The other benefit of this: not only does our child get to express what they need to express to us and have us accept it in a non-judgmental, totally accepting way, the way that they really can feel heard and understood and not judged. We’re not only giving them that, but we’re also not winding ourselves up. Because when we’re trying to reason with someone that isn’t expressing reasonable things, they’re expressing these flashes of emotion, unreasonable things, we’re going to wind ourselves up. Because it’s a frustrating enterprise, right? It’s not going to get us anywhere. That’s also what I love about this experience that this parent shared. They got to see that it doesn’t help, because what did their son do? Well, they say he “usually accepts this with chagrin, but in another few moments, it’s a new protest over a new item.” So yes, that’s what makes it so clear that it’s feelings, not facts.

One of the many reasons I love children this age is because they’re so clear that way. It’s so over the top, right? Some of the stuff that they say that we know it’s not meant to be a reasonable truth. Young children are very uncomplicated. They just need to express it. So if I can’t express it with you here and you’re just not getting it and you’re not hearing me, now I have the impulse to keep trying to express it in another way, to do something else. You’re not letting me express it. And again, the more unreasonable these comments are, the more we can feel certain that they’re using this as a self-therapy, which is what children do. They’re not thinking consciously, I need to tell my parents that I don’t like this baby in my house. But that’s what their unconscious is telling them to do.

You may have heard or read somewhere that when toddlers say, “Mine, mine!”, mine means a lot of things that it might not mean to us. It means I want it, I like it, I need it, I feel like having it, or I don’t want him to have it. It doesn’t mean that my parents bought this at the store for me. Children aren’t thinking of it that way. They’re very in the moment with the feeling, and they’re saying it to express something in that moment. They’re not saying what’s true factually, but expressing something.

So continuing with the details from this note, sometimes when their son discovers the baby touching something, “he’ll run over and attempt to pull the baby away physically, his lips pursed with aggression.” There’s that guy getting into my stuff and he’s taking over my house. He’s taking over my parents. I want to control this guy. Which is also the reason children want to take all the toys away from a baby. It makes a lot of sense, right? This baby ripped my life away. Maybe if I just control every single thing he does, then I’ll feel better about him. He won’t be a threat.

Children feel this. It’ll flare up at different times for each child in different ways maybe, but it’s kind of a grieving process. And the way we grieve about any given situation has its own life and its own process. For example, we might go to our friend’s funeral or our family member’s funeral, and we’re not even crying then. And we wonder, should we be crying? What’s wrong? I don’t feel sad right now. But then maybe some random thing happens, we see something, we hear something. And suddenly, we’re bawling. This is how children grieve this loss, this change in their life. There’s this new person sort of pushing them aside. The feelings come when they come.

That’s why parents will often share with me their concerns that, just randomly, the older child is lashing out at the baby. It doesn’t make sense. No, it doesn’t make sense. And that’s why I encourage parents to try not to judge their children in these situations, because they are grieving and they’re doing it in a very immature, messy way. And yes, they need our help not to do wrong things, but if we could let the little things they say and those feelings that don’t make sense go by and just acknowledge them, they get through it more quickly and without the resentment that this parent says they’re worried about.

So if they’re just taking toys a few times, I would allow that, if it’s not this rampant thing that the child keeps doing. And then I would stop them to help that child, whether it’s with a sibling or a peer, that’s when I would say, “You want that one too, that he’s holding? I’m going to stop you here, because it seems you’re kind of stuck doing this again and again.” Without judgment, we help. But him expressing things like, “I don’t want him touching this or that,” we can let that go by, just validating.

But when he’s running over there, yes, I would try to get over there. I don’t know that I would run unless it was really an emergency. Because coming closer with that calm response, just walking over there at a nice, brisk pace maybe, and trying not to run unless it’s an emergency, helps us to demonstrate a more accepting, calm, non-judgmental attitude. Instead of telegraphing, Wow, you’re doing something really urgently terrible here that I feel I can’t handle unless I stop you immediately! Even if we don’t mean that, that’s kind of how it comes across, that my parent isn’t confident in their leadership here and that I’m doing these really terrible things.

And the tone that’s helpful to create is more of a calm, safe tone. Hmm, I’m going to see. I don’t want you to touch him that way. That’s a little too hard. And then blocking accordingly. So if there’s just a bit of something going on, if it’s not hitting or totally grabbing in an unsafe way, if he’s just maybe touching his hand a little roughly, then I probably wouldn’t even say, “I won’t let you hurt him.” That’s sort of saying the obvious, right? At that point, I would just say, “Hmm, that’s a bit too much.” And I’d have my hand there. “I see. You don’t want him touching that at all. You’re not liking him touching that. Hmm, yeah, that’s a bit too hard. I’m going to need to stop you there. You didn’t like that. You didn’t want him to do that.”

So those kind of things show that we’re not perceiving everything as this big emergency. We’re projecting that calm confidence that can be so important and helpful to our children. And to us, because the more we’re in that zone, the more we see how helpful it is and the more confidence we feel in ourselves, and therefore, it can become a natural way that we have with our children. It’s all about the way we’re perceiving this. Hmm, he’s getting into a little bit of trouble there, I better go help. Instead of, Ugh, there he’s doing it again! I got to stop him.

And then maybe if they really need to be separated because our older child keeps going back and he can’t stop himself and he gets in a rage, or he’s just so lost in his impulses, dysregulated, then yeah, then I would separate them. But whenever possible, I would do something much smaller, the least thing. Do less, because that gives the message that we’re not freaked out by his behavior.

This parent says “We’ve drawn a line for [their son’s] own toys, acknowledging that they’re indeed his, and that he has a reasonable expectation that the baby not touch them.” Yes, so that’s good to do. And I think it might help to say more like, “If you want to keep those things away from him, here’s a way to do that.” Maybe making less of a deal about these things are yours and these things aren’t yours, which can kind of feed into that possessive behavior without us meaning to. Again, because this logical part of the situation, that’s really not what this is about.

And that will help with what this parent mentions later in the note, which is: “We don’t want to have to allocate every single toy as for one boy or the other. And nor can we really abide by our son’s continuing expectation of the baby’s less-than-equal role in the family.” So there it feels like the parents might be veering a little bit into trying to keep things so equal at this point. And the truth is, with children, everything isn’t equal. I really love how this is expressed in Siblings Without Rivalry, that wonderful book. I kept it on my bedside table for years. One of the perspectives that it gives is that everything isn’t going to be equal with siblings, but everyone’s going to get what they need. So if you need 10 Ps, our older child, and the baby only needs two Ps, that’s how it’s going to be. It’s not, Well, he got this many, so he has to get that many. I found this idea to very much resonate and be true and helpful.

This baby was born into a very different situation than his older brother was, with all the excitement and the bonuses of having a sibling. But there’s also some, I don’t know, I guess I don’t even think a baby thinks of it that way, but maybe negatives to that, or some things that there’s just less of. There’s less time alone to be the one with all the toys, maybe there’s less one-on-one time. But the trade-off —and the baby doesn’t know any different— is this amazing day-to-day social experience with somebody else, this exciting person. Many of us have noticed that our babies, they know the difference between a child and an adult, and they’re much more interested in the children a lot of the time. They kind of light up. And if toys are taken away from the baby and we haven’t made a fuss about it or been too judgmental, then it’s really not a big deal to them. Most of them don’t mind it at all. Nobody wants the stuff as much as they want the attention of the other child or the attention of the parent.

And yes, seeing it this way also helps us because it makes for a lot less work for us in terms of, Okay, this is yours and this is yours, and Who had it first?, and all of that stuff. That can be hard to decipher at times, especially when we’re talking about children playing with peers. That’s not our job. Nor is it helpful to our children as they’re learning social behaviors, constantly being the police or the referee that’s in there. And instead really trusting a lot more that children can figure these things out a lot of the time, maybe not to our perception of how it should be, but to their liking, to something that satisfies them. But yes, if something’s nonstop, he keeps taking every toy away from the baby, then I would say something light, a little tip, and maybe stop him. “You’ve taken a couple of things. Let’s let him keep that one.” Not in a judgmental way. We’re still on both of your sides and we’re just coaching both of you to navigate this relationship.

That’s the way that we get this wish that this parent expressed. It’s the same that I certainly had and I believe all parents have. We don’t want to set our child up to resent their sibling. This is the way to do that. We understand that you’ve got these impulses. We understand they’re not reasonable. We’re going to stop you when you get too out there with them, because we’re on both of your sides. That’s how we give our children the opportunity to really develop a mutually respectful relationship and help our older child to not resent a sibling. Or resent us, or feel that we don’t understand and that his feelings are wrong and that he needs to somehow correct them. None of us can correct our feelings. We can work on our behaviors, the way that we express our feelings, but the feelings are just there. We just have them. They don’t make sense a lot of the time.

Again, I often see these situations with not just siblings, but with peers saying, “mine, mine!”, taking toys. And as parents, we want to say, “Well, no, that actually is not yours,” and we want to make sure that they get this right. But what’s even more important is to trust them to just vent the feeling, the momentary feeling. I’m holding that, I don’t want him to hold that. That’s all they’re saying. They’ve got that. It looks interesting in their hands. I want it. And when nobody has it, when it’s available, it’s often not as interesting.

This is similar to saying “share” to a very young child. They don’t really know exactly what this means with friends. We can explain “share” by using it in our behaviors with our children. Here, let’s share this umbrella so you don’t get wet. Or, I have some extra carrots here. Would you like me to share them with you? Or, Thank you for sharing those with me. That’s how children learn to share, not by it being demanded in situations where it means giving something up that they want.

Know that most of these awkward behaviors are impulses. They’re not reasonable thoughts that they’ll understand that they shouldn’t do if we just talk to them about it more. And the more out there the behavior is, the more you can trust that. Again, helping our children feel safe with all their feelings is really all we have to do.

I hope this is helpful. And there’s a lot more information about these ideas and many, many more on my website and in my books, No Bad Kids and Elevating Child Care. And in my No Bad Kids Master Course, if you really want to deep dive. That gives you the complete picture and helps you internalize this approach. Go to nobadkidscourse.com.

Thank you again for listening. We can do this.

UPDATE: A parent shared how she’s using the advice in this podcast and I thought our exchange might be helpful:

Parent: The day after listening to this podcast, my three year old got very upset about his new baby brother wearing the same diapers that he wears. My husband picked them out without thinking🥺 He tried pulling it off of him so I tried to remember what you said and replied, “oh man. I know that’s so hard seeing him wear the same diapers. I can’t let you take those off of him though” while as gently as I could trying to release his grip. I hope that was the right way of going about that. I also know you said it’s ok to allow them to take a few toys but if it seems they’re stuck to kindly stop them, however, what if it’s a teething item in the baby’s hand and they shout “I want that! It’s mine”

My response: Yes to this, well done! “oh man. I know that’s so hard seeing him wear the same diapers. I can’t let you take those off of him though” while as gently as I could trying to release his grip.” You can be firm though. With that wonderful empathizing you’re doing, removing his hand as easily as possible will come of as love and care. Too “gentle” can come off as tentative, which won’t be as helpful to him.

Regarding the teether, no, I wouldn’t allow him to take that away from the baby. Do the same… acknowledge and firmly, kindly block or remove the teether from your older son’s hand.

(Excerpted from my Facebook page)

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How an Angry Mom, Hating Parenting, Found “Immediate Success” https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/01/how-an-angry-mom-hating-parenting-found-immediate-success/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/01/how-an-angry-mom-hating-parenting-found-immediate-success/#respond Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:05:19 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22555 A parent writes that with her firstborn, she had listened to Janet’s advice and used many of her parenting methods with great success. To her surprise and relief, motherhood was relatively easy, and “I had friends comment how amazing I was as a mother.” After the births of her second and third child, however, things deteriorated. … Continued

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A parent writes that with her firstborn, she had listened to Janet’s advice and used many of her parenting methods with great success. To her surprise and relief, motherhood was relatively easy, and “I had friends comment how amazing I was as a mother.” After the births of her second and third child, however, things deteriorated. Tantrums, fighting, screaming, hitting, throwing, and all the typical toddler behavior. Gradually, she found herself yelling, threatening, using time-outs, and even spanking. She says she felt terrible and hated her life. As a veteran with 4 deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, she says ironically, “That life was easy. Being a mom is hard.” Recently, however, she remembered “Unruffled” and the experience she had with her firstborn. She started devouring episodes and says that it all started coming back to her. Her letter describes how she adopted a new perspective and applied Janet’s methods and advice immediately—with miraculous results. “It has been an amazing shift in the household ever since I have adopted this approach… so many more hugs and them telling me they love me.” Janet uses this parent’s hopeful letter to illustrate how small alterations to our interactions, and especially our perspective, can transform our relationship with our kids and bring the joy we deserve to the parenting experience.

Transcript of “How an Angry Mom, Hating Parenting, Found Immediate Success”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be sharing a note I received from a parent, the subject line, “Immediate Success,” and she details what she did to break out of this pattern that she was in that wasn’t working. She was doing all kinds of things as a parent that she doesn’t believe in, that she didn’t want to do. Feeling angry. She says, “I defaulted to anger and to what I’d seen my parents do.” And then she made a shift, which she talks about. Now her children are telling her they love her and she’s feeling worlds better about their relationship, herself as a parent, and their days. I’m excited to share this note with you and also offer some commentary on why I think what she did is helping.

And the reason I thought this would be a wonderful thing to share today on my podcast is that I’m often offering examples of what to do differently, but to actually hear from a parent what she did differently is, I think, much more powerful and will be much more helpful to you.

So here’s the note I received:

Dear Janet,

First off, I just have to say, wow, thank you. I’m not normally inclined to leave feedback either positive or negative on things. However, I just had to let you know the impact you have had on my 4-year-old, 2-year-old, and 11-month-old, and me this last week. I will never go back to the way it was before.

Here’s the story. I had listened to some of your podcasts and read some of your blogs before my first was born. I remember thinking how great it sounded to parent with this style and wanted to implement it. I did, of course, do things as you and others recommend throughout the beginnings of my daughter’s early life without much effort. Telling her I needed to change her diaper before doing so, giving her a heads up on things to prepare her for transitions, etc., And it was pretty easy going for a while. I had friends comment on how patient I was and how amazing I was as a mother. It felt really good to hear those things because I had no experience with children prior to having one, so I was worried I would be a terrible mother.

Then I got pregnant with my second. My daughter was about 10 months old at the time. Things were still going pretty well, until she was about 16 to 18 months old. She started throwing tantrums and exhibiting behavior that people would call the terrible twos, and I began to worry because she wasn’t even two yet. Why is she having such strong feelings already? I really struggled with this because I have a pretty flat affect and I was the good kid in my family, because I saw with my older sister what happened if you didn’t toe the line. Don’t get me wrong about my parents. My sister was a hellion and I just wanted nothing to do with it. I had a very loving home and my parents are my best friends. And I want that so badly for my children, to have that kind of strong relationship with my husband and I.

Fast forward to the present and the situation that brings me to this email. I now have baby three, which will be turning one next month. And your teachings had all but gone out the window due to the stress of strong emotions from my toddlers, fighting between the two toddlers, my son not being nice to his baby brother and saying that he doesn’t like him. Tantrums, screaming, hitting, throwing, and everything in between. I have spent so much time in the last four years being so much angrier than I ever wanted to be as a mother. I defaulted to that, I defaulted to what I had seen my parents do. I had tried timeouts, spanking, and on a number of occasions yelled to where the crying and screaming that set me over the edge went up to a higher decibel of noise.

I couldn’t handle it anymore. I felt terrible and thought terrible things about the fact I had these three beautiful children, but I hated my life. I was in the military for 15 years. I went to Iraq and Afghanistan four times, lost friends, been blown up, can’t hear very well—and I wanted that life back. That life was easy. Being a mom is hard.

Last week as I was driving home with my children asleep in the car after a visit to my parents’ house that didn’t go very well, I thought, Enough is enough. This isn’t working. By the grace of God, I remembered Unruffled and immediately started devouring the podcasts on the drive home. It all started coming back to me on what to do. So as I got them in the house and put them in their beds asleep, I knew I would give your way a shot, starting fresh in the morning.

It has been a life-changing difference in just one week. Sure, there’s still sibling infighting going on, some mild tantrums here and there, and my son still likes to pick on his baby brother. But everything has just been so much calmer and happier in the house, especially me. I have been happy. The toddlers have been saying “I love you” so many times throughout the day that I know they can feel how much different it is in the house. I’m here for them and I’m on their side now.

The biggest testament to the success of the switch was on Sunday. We go to a traditional Latin Mass Catholic church that is an hour away from our house. Sundays are so hard. I don’t think I’ve been able to pay attention in church since my daughter became mobile, and then it has gone progressively downhill since then. I knew that Sunday was going to be the test to see how much this has helped. It was a miracle. Sure, I still didn’t get to pay attention in church, I was still having to manage the children by giving them snacks, making sure they were staying in the pew, and doing stuff all parents have to do in church to keep the peace. But it wasn’t an absolute fight. I wasn’t angry with anyone. It was just calm direction.

I can’t even describe properly the change that has come to our family without writing a novella to you about the last seven days. Bless you and all that you do to save us parents from ourselves and help us to be the best we can for our children.

So here’s what I wrote back to her. I basically wrote back that I do want the novella! I said:

This news is so wonderful to hear. Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to share with me. I’m wondering if you’d like to share more about what you’re focusing on or doing, what shifts you’ve made specifically that are helping you. But no worries at all if you’re too busy. If you are open to allowing me to share your story (anonymously), it can sometimes help parents a lot to hear how others are using this approach and making positive shifts. Please know that either way, I’m so grateful to you for making my day—or month, rather!

And she wrote back to me that she’d be happy to do that, but not right now, she was too busy. And then eventually she wrote:

Dear Janet,

Sorry for the delay in response. Some of the shifts that I’ve made with my toddlers:

  1. Instead of saying things like, “Knock it off,” “Don’t hit so-and-so,” “Don’t take that toy from the baby,” and other such demands, I’ve really worked on rephrasing it to things like, “Hmm, seems you really want that toy. I won’t let you hit so-and-so.” “Wow, seems like you’re really upset.” And it’s really helped me defuse the situation before I get angry.
  2. Another example that had just happened this morning with my 11-month-old. I’m guilty of doing whatever it takes to stop babies from crying. That normally means picking them up and holding them, nursing, changing diapers, etc. Mostly picking them up and holding them if I know they don’t have other immediate needs. This morning I was trying to do something in the kitchen and my son was playing with a couple of trucks when all of a sudden he started crying. Normally I would pick him up, but instead I looked at him and said, “I hear you. What is it that you need from me?” I sat down on the floor with him and waited. He crawled over and handed me a truck. I said, “Oh, you didn’t want to be picked up. You wanted me to play with trucks with you. I’ll try to be better about responding to your needs in the future.” We sat on the floor and played trucks for quite a while.
  3. Another example this morning with my toddlers. They were scratching each other, leaving really bad scratches, something they had never done before. I tried things like, “It seems you really want to scratch. I can’t let you scratch your brother.” Then time would pass and another scratch would occur. Finally feeling a bit defeated but determined to avoid my old ways, when my four-year-old daughter asked to be on my lap, I talked with her. “It really seems like you want to scratch your brother. I don’t understand what’s going on. Can you maybe tell me about it?” This is where I figured she wouldn’t really have the words to explain anything, but I was open to whatever came next. She said, “Yeah, there’s a lot of snow outside and we’re inside. That is why I’ve been scratching.” My response: “Wow, thank you for telling me. I’m sorry I didn’t understand what was going on earlier. Let’s get all our snow clothes on and go outside and play while the baby’s taking a nap. When he wakes up, we’ll come inside. So let’s be quiet and hurry up and get ready so we can play longer.” Immediately, the shift in attitude was clear and happy again. Phew!

It has been an amazing shift in the household ever since I have adopted this approach. I’m more open and honest with them about stuff too, thinking that maybe they can handle my emotions too. For example, “I need you and your brother to go play in the living room while I finish making dinner. I’m getting really frustrated with you guys leaving toys right here that I end up tripping on.” Sure, there’s probably a better way to go about that, but it’s better I get it out that way than letting my feelings escalate to where I yell at somebody or something.

There have been many instances prior to this switch in approach where my son or daughter would say, “Dear God, make äiti happy. Amen.” Äiti is the Finnish word for “mother,” and it just breaks my heart that these little people are trying to pray away my frustration. Since taking on this approach, they haven’t said that once. Instead, there have been so many more hugs and them telling me they love me.

I know I have a long way to go. There are a lot of times that I’m not sure exactly what I should say in the moment. It will get easier with time, I’m sure. Eternally grateful.

So one thing that seems amazing to me just off the bat is that this parent was able to make a shift so quickly. Because that can be hard to do, right? We get set in our ways, our children get set in theirs, and even if we have an idea of what we might try to do differently, it’s hard to really keep the focus on doing that. So kudos to this parent for so many things, and especially for sharing all of this so that I could share it with you.

And now I want to suggest three things that are definitely all related that I notice that she’s doing differently, that are helping her to make this shift.

First, she’s seeing beyond the behavior. She’s noticing, she’s seeing in. It can be so challenging to see past those icky behaviors our children are showing us, right? We just want to snap back or say, “Stop doing that. What are you doing? Cut it out.” But the problem with that is it keeps us stuck on that level with our children and can create more and more distance between us. And more discomfort for everybody, which means more behaviors like these. When we see beyond, to the cause of the behavior, and consider the why, we get ourselves unstuck from that judging, correcting place that’s on the surface. That’s how we make a difference.

And with this parent, she said, “Instead of saying things like, ‘Knock it off,’ ‘Don’t hit so-and-so,’ ‘Don’t take that toy from the baby,’ and other such demands, I’ve really worked on rephrasing it to things like, ‘Hmm, seems like you really want that toy. I won’t let you hit so-and-so.’ ‘Wow, seems like you’re really upset.’ And it’s helped me to defuse the situation before I get angry.” So she talks about this as rephrasing, which is definitely what she’s doing. But what she’s also really doing is speaking from a place that represents a mind shift in her and in her perception in the way that she’s seeing her child. She’s shifting to a place in what she’s saying to being open to the feelings, to the point of view of the child, and by doing so, dealing with the behavior at the source, at the cause level. And that is the only real way to solve or change any dynamic that’s going on with our children and us.

What happens if we work on making this shift at the perception level of what behavior really signifies and what our role is in stopping the behavior, if we want to look at it that way, or certainly changing the dynamic, that will free us from this need to have to feel like we’re searching for words and rephrasing. Though sometimes it does help to start the way this parent explains that she is—although I think she’s doing more than rephrasing here, I think she is changing her perspective—but when we shift our perspective to even go a little in that direction, the words come to us naturally. So that’s the direction to keep going in. And it’s okay to go from the outside in, with words, but the real change and the most effective change will come when we keep working on that perspective, which is what I talk about all the time in this podcast.

The second response that she’s offering here that’s helpful is actually wanting them to express their feelings, to share those feelings however they can, and acknowledging them. And this is also something you hear me speak about all the time on this podcast. The reason I do so is that it’s countercultural, it’s counterintuitive for us to do this. As she said, “Another example that just happened this morning with my 11-month-old. I’m guilty of doing whatever it takes to stop babies from crying.” So I don’t see this as any reason to feel guilty, but that is a pattern that a lot of us are encouraged to start with babies, that they are somehow this sort of slightly different species or this different stage of life where their crying just needs to be stopped. And all of it is expressing a need for the parent to do something other than listen. And while that is true, a lot of the time with babies, it could be this automatic response that we give. There are times when they really just need to share.

I’ve seen this in my classes. This new person came in the room. I don’t know this person. Another parent coming in the class, let’s say, a new parent that they haven’t been exposed to before. And they’re coming and sitting near me and I feel their energy. Some children are very sensitive to that. Or, Ahh, I’m overstimulated. It’s all too much. Everybody was talking, or we went out to a restaurant or to a market. Babies are very sensitive to that. So there are reasons that they cry other than, I need something right now. And yes, they do need something, but sometimes what they need is just to share that, to discharge it, to unpack it with us.

If we can start seeing babies that way, it will help us to make a seamless transition—or a more seamless transition, at least—to the toddler years, when there are tantrums and meltdowns and whining and all kinds of expressions that children just need to share, without us jumping to fix them. There’s nothing wrong with picking up a baby, for sure, or picking up a child of any age, but as this parent realizes, that’s not always the answer. And having that mentality that we’re supposed to do that can make it harder to adjust and not be this fixer. And the fixer of feelings is going to get worn out with a toddler, for sure. Especially toddlers that are a little dysregulated like these seem to be, with all the transitions in their lives and maybe absorbing the feelings, the anger that the parent has had. That’s normal to do. Children absorb it, then they vent it out in all these different ways. So ideally, they need to be allowed to, right? The feelings, right from the beginning, right from our baby’s birth, the feelings are healing.

Also, often, the feelings are the key to all these behaviors that are going on with our child on the outside, the ones that we want to get mad about, right? I mean, it’s normal to. Those feelings are what’s driving the behavior. And the ability to reason—which young children have, babies have—it often takes a backseat or it doesn’t come along at all when there are feelings. So letting feelings be, welcoming them, rolling out the red carpet. You’ve heard me say all these things. Yes, it’s hard to let children have their feelings. We all want to fix them as soon as possible.

This is especially common, even often advised, with babies. Just pick them up. And one of the problems with that, besides that it’s not encouraging our child to communicate nuances to us, is that we’re perceiving all their crying in a kind of black and white manner, as one-note. And also, again, encourages these reflexive habits in us. It’s harder to try to make a transition than it is to work on perceiving feelings as nuanced communication from our baby’s birth. Wanting to know what they’re saying, being attuned, wanting to understand so that we can respond accurately. This is the beginning of developing an attuned relationship with our children. Acknowledging doesn’t mean giving in to what our child wants in that moment.

And one little note for this parent: I only want to encourage her, but also add that as she gains confidence in the benefit of her children expressing the feelings, how healthy this is even when it sounds really bad to us, she’ll be able to brave the next step. Which is not trying to fix them another way by giving our child exactly what they say they want in that moment if that’s not convenient for us, if that’s not what we want to do. Because that’s not always going to be possible or sustainable. Maybe we don’t want to play with trucks at that moment. That’s valid, and it’s not as positive for us or our child to do things for them just to please them. It’s a quick way to depletion, to resentment, to more frustration. And it’s less practice getting somewhat comfortable (we’re never going to be super comfortable) being in disagreement with our child. Having them be mad at us, disappointed in us, frustrated because of us, or even just frustrated if it isn’t because of us, to allow that to be. We all need practice with that, again, because it’s countercultural, counterintuitive, the hardest thing that we do as parents. But this is really what’s helped her to make the shift.

Now I think she’s going to be ready soon to take it even further to, Oh, I don’t have to please my child after they’ve communicated to me, either. Just that communication and me accepting it and acknowledging it has a bonding effect, is giving my child what they need. They don’t need me to say yes all the time. What they need is for me to be honest, actually, and say yes only if I really feel yes, from a place of genuinely wanting to do it, not yes, because I can please you and I will.

Now the third thing. Again, these are all very interrelated, as you can tell. From this open, accepting, nonjudgmental, undemanding place this parent has found: explore. The example she uses is:

Another example this morning with my toddlers. They were scratching each other, leaving really bad scratches, something they had never done before. I tried things like, “It seems you really want to scratch. I can’t let you scratch your brother.” Then time would pass and another scratch would occur. Finally feeling a bit defeated but determined to avoid my old ways, when my four-year-old daughter asked to be on my lap, I talked with her. “It really seems like you want to scratch your brother. I don’t understand what’s going on. Can you maybe tell me about it?” This is where I figured she wouldn’t really have the words to explain anything, but I was open to whatever came next. She said, “Yeah, there’s a lot of snow outside and we’re inside. That is why I’ve been scratching.”

So from an open, nonjudgmental place, this parent wants to understand. She’s going beyond the behavior, seeing the communication, that there’s something here that’s being said. So this open, accepting, nonjudgmental part is really important because it isn’t going to be helpful, it’s not going to work if we say this differently. Like, “Why are you doing that?,” with judgment. So we have to work on one and two: First one, seeing beyond the behavior, and two, wanting children to express their feelings and point of view, to share them however they can. So those two elements have to be part of us exploring. Or else it’s not exploring, it’s criticizing, shaming, lashing out at. All those things that can be reflexive for us to do, but they don’t help, as this parent has noticed. What she’s doing does help.

I love that she said, “This is where I figured she wouldn’t really have the words to explain anything, but I was open.” She was open. And children surprise us when we’re open to them, when we believe that they probably know more than we think they know. That they probably do understand way more than they can say. And in this case, she was able to express it, too. Beautifully, actually. So that right there is the response, what this parent did.

Here again, I just want to lovingly caution this parent that her relief in making her child happy with the snow, going out and playing in the snow, it’s a little bit part of what she mentioned earlier about doing whatever it takes to stop her babies from crying. I don’t think she should feel guilty about that, but it’s something to look at, because she does that with this outdoor play and with playing with the trucks. So that’s where I recommend she keeps heading in that direction, into normalizing all the strong disappointments that her children need to express in a day.

In times like these, especially as the parent has shifted some things in only a week, there’s going to be some carryover that children need to vent from this change. Even though it’s such a positive change, right? But still, there are feelings, there are feelings about every kind of change. So all the more reason for this parent to trust herself and what she really wants to do. And that the feelings are the healing, and it’s not up to her to stop the crying. Often we will disappoint children in the moment by giving them what they need in the bigger picture, a safe place to vent and to feel accepted. It’s an opportunity, if we look at it that way.

I love how this parent shares her process and the way she frames it, that she’s starting with changing the words. At the same time, it really does seem that rephrasing is helping her to understand and feel this new perspective. And to answer what she says at the end. “I know I have a long way to go. There are a lot of times that I’m not sure exactly what I should say in the moment. It will get easier with time, I’m sure.” I want to say yes, it will get easier. And she will know what to say if she keeps practicing wearing this lens with those three elements, this relationship lens. It’s a relationship between two whole people who both have needs and wants, one of whom is much newer to the world and more open and easily overwhelmed by their emotions and expresses them impulsively. So these are not two people on an even plane in terms of ability and maturity, far from it. And that’s why they need us so much to see them, to help them express all their feelings in safe ways. To show them, through these opportunities, what an unconditionally loving, respectful relationship between two people with sometimes opposing wants looks like. And it doesn’t unfortunately look like pleasing our child at our own expense. We matter too. Our child needs us to, even when we’re displeasing them.

I promise this parent and everyone listening that with practice, this will become our lens and guide us throughout our children’s lives. Once it sticks, we never lose it. Sure, we might get sidetracked by our own feelings and stress levels and priorities for a while, but we can always readily find our way back. We can do this.

And I have one more thing to share with you. If you’re sometimes confused or aggravated by your toddler’s behavior and you find yourself pleading, manipulating, or bribing, threatening or punishing your child. It doesn’t feel good, right? Maybe you end up yelling and then feeling guilty or just breaking down in frustration. I get it. If you want to learn how to remain more calm and present, not faking it, but feeling it, even during your child’s most difficult behaviors, the No Bad Kids Master Course is for you. If you’re exhausted by all the parenting tips and tricks and quick fixes, and you want a more fulfilling, effective way to relate to your child, this course is definitely for you. And if you want to build a lifelong bond with your child based on love and mutual respect, if you want to learn to really enjoy and take pride in your parenting, let’s go. I promise you, we can do this. Go to nobadkidscourse.com.

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Every Child, Even a Tiny Baby, Deserves Time On Their Own (with Hari Grebler) https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/01/every-child-even-a-tiny-baby-deserves-time-on-their-own-with-hari-grebler/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/01/every-child-even-a-tiny-baby-deserves-time-on-their-own-with-hari-grebler/#comments Mon, 22 Jan 2024 04:09:22 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22547 Do all human beings, even our babies, need time to themselves—freedom to make choices, initiate activities, think their own thoughts? In this episode, Janet and her special guest Hari Grebler say “yes” and explain why. Hari, a Magda Gerber proté​gé, was Janet’s first parenting teacher. Thirty years later, Hari continues to introduce parents in her parent-infant … Continued

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Do all human beings, even our babies, need time to themselves—freedom to make choices, initiate activities, think their own thoughts? In this episode, Janet and her special guest Hari Grebler say “yes” and explain why. Hari, a Magda Gerber proté​gé, was Janet’s first parenting teacher. Thirty years later, Hari continues to introduce parents in her parent-infant classes to a new perspective—inspiring them to trust and become more attuned to their babies and to develop safe play spaces for them to freely explore at home. Hari and Janet discuss how this works and why it matters—not only for our children’s healthy development (and even their sleep!) but for our mental health. Hari also addresses some of the common misunderstandings that can get in our way.

Transcript of “Every Child, Even a Tiny Baby, Deserves Time On Their Own (with Hari Grebler)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today it’s my great pleasure to host my very first parenting teacher and mentor, Hari Grebler. Hari’s parent-infant class, there’s no other way to say it, it changed my life. Gave me a whole new way of seeing, brand new direction, that eventually led me to train with Magda Gerber and find my passion in life, which is sharing this approach that’s made parenting so much richer and enjoyable than I could have ever imagined.

Hari studied with Magda many years before I did, and she still shares her wisdom and her encouragement about listening to and trusting our babies in her parent-infant classes. But recently she began sharing more online, on Facebook and on her Instagram page, Hari’s RIE Studio. For those who haven’t heard me mention this, RIE stands for Resources for Infant Educarers, which is the nonprofit educational organization Magda Gerber founded in 1978.

I’ve asked Hari to share with us today about a core element of Magda’s approach: developing safe play spaces for our babies and toddlers that help us to encourage their play beginning as early as possible. You’ve heard me refer to these as “yes spaces.” And first we’re going to discuss why nurturing play, beginning even at birth, matters to our children and to us. No one understands and can explain this better than Hari.

Hi, Hari.

Hari Grebler: Hi, Janet.

Janet Lansbury: This is such a treat getting to speak with you. As I introduced you, you didn’t hear that part, but you were my introduction to my passion in life. I can’t imagine why it’s taken me so long to have you on the podcast because wow, you are such a wealth of information and inspiration to me, to so many people that you’ve mentored. And thank you, I want to start by saying that.

And I love the work that you’re doing on your Instagram page, which really stands out to me. I mean, it’s interesting, you don’t have a lot of followers yet, but you are the one that’s out there saying really important, unique things. And I don’t find that on a lot of the biggest pages, there’s a sameness. And you are coming in very boldly with this perspective that I think is much needed. So I want to encourage everybody to follow you. And just, thank you. I have loved the content that you’re putting out there and the ideas that you’re sharing.

Hari Grebler: Thank you so much. That’s really sweet. I wanted to say when you were saying that about being bold, I mean, look who our teacher was.

Janet Lansbury: Magda Gerber.

Hari Grebler: So she was very bold.

Janet Lansbury: She was.

Hari Grebler: She said what she thought and we could say what we thought as well.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And she was kind.

Hari Grebler: Yes, she was.

Janet Lansbury: She wasn’t trying to be bold, but she just was because she was fearless.

Hari Grebler: And she really believed. She was the ultimate baby defender. My friends call me that sometimes. They’re like, “Uhoh, watch out! Here comes the baby defender.” Probably happens to you too.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, but you don’t do it defensively. You do it with such love for babies and care for the people that are taking care of them. Just like with Magda, it’s not that you’re trying to be controversial or abrasive. You’re just saying these truths that people don’t understand, and that will make our lives so much easier as parents when we do understand and embrace some of this perspective.

What I want to talk to you about today is creating a safe space for our children to play in safely and freely, without interruption if possible. And all the benefits of it and how we start this from the time that children are just a few weeks old, that we start creating this space and cultivating this time for them. Do you want to talk about some of the reasons it’s important?

Hari Grebler: I want to say this: When I had my first child, I noticed how much that he played from the very beginning, like in the hospital. And I remember saying that to a friend, a mom, and she said, “God, I never thought to put them down. I wouldn’t have even known if they wanted to play because I never put them down. I didn’t know I could.”

Janet Lansbury: And how did you recognize this? This was before you were introduced to Magda?

Hari Grebler: No, I taught for years and years and years before I had my own children.

Janet Lansbury: That’s right, I forgot that you taught long before you had your own children. Because if we don’t know that’s possible, how are we going to notice it, right? We’re not. I didn’t notice it until I started taking your class and then working with Magda and realizing. Well, actually, I realized the very first time I went to your class with my baby who was three months that, wow, there is so much going on there that I wasn’t giving any space to or allowing to happen with my daughter. With her thoughts, with her interests, her deciding what activities she wanted to do, which were just basically lying there and looking around on her back. But how we don’t know that, right?

Hari Grebler: I mean, I learned and studied. And I think when people come to my class, I just have to remind them that there’s no way they could have known this, because it is so counterculture. What Magda did and what Dr. Pikler did, it just really goes against the grain. So no one should feel like, Oh, I should have known that. Well, why didn’t I see that? Oh, a good mom does this. It’s not true. And I feel like what’s great about our classes is that we talk about not moving into automatic, not just doing what they’re doing and what was done to us and what we see everybody do with babies. That’s what people do, we just kind of do what we see everybody else doing. So I think RIE really helps you step back and notice. And how do you notice? Creating the safe space from the start is what helps you notice.

And also having the permission to put your baby down in a safe, cozy place. And there’s a progression. We don’t put an infant on the floor to play. There’s a progression to that. First, a cozy bassinet where they could play. And then they can move to a crib when they get too big for that. And then after the crib, that’s going to be around three and four months, and they can move to the floor, to a safe space that you create. It starts right from the beginning that we have to start a rhythm.

And that’s the other thing, babies that have grown up this way have this inner life. They discover what they love, they discover themselves, they discover their bodies, like their hand, What can I do with it? And that’s a really big deal, I think.

And I never can explain in my classes how my kids have always, how they wake up and go play, and I’m still asleep. And people sort of think I’m just lucky, but I’m not. I worked hard at that. And you probably had that too. And to this day, my kids are teenagers, they want their time by themselves in the mornings or whenever. The oldest one wants it all the time.

Janet Lansbury: And it’s such a strength to have that capacity for being with yourself, tuning in to who you are. Interestingly, I am also reading a book by Sherry Turkle called Reclaiming Conversation. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. It’s about technology and how that’s affected children growing up with empathy. And the part that I’m reading is all about nurturing our children’s capacity for solitude. She says this “is one of the most important tasks of childhood, every childhood. It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent. You don’t need them to be anything other than who they are. This means you can listen to them and hear what they have to say. This makes the capacity for solitude essential to the development of empathy.” I really thought that was interesting.

Hari Grebler: I love that, I want to read that.

Janet Lansbury: It’s really worthwhile so far, and this is only the first section. “Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations,” she says. “When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free.” And interestingly also, she said, “today young people become anxious if they are alone without a device. They are likely to say they are bored. From the youngest ages they have been diverted by structured play and the shiny objects of digital culture.” So there’s that element to what she’s sharing.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, the bored part, I take issue with all these posts about boredom. So many of them show, like, a field or a lake. Why don’t we just let kids be bored? But we’ve created it. The adults are annoyed by it, right? But we’ve totally created it. It’s just like giving a kid a pacifier and then deciding that, Well, now you don’t have it anymore and I just take it away. And I don’t consider your emotional state, let’s say.

Janet Lansbury: Right, and the dependency, yeah.

Hari Grebler: The boredom thing is all about this… And then it also is about devices later. But before that, even. It starts so early where they don’t have a safe space. The child’s always getting interrupted, let’s say. No, you can’t do that. And no, you can’t do that. They have to move them away. So they can’t really get involved, it’s hard.

Janet Lansbury: Right. Or, Let me stimulate you, like I thought I was supposed to do with my baby. Because again, we don’t know that they can do anything on their own. We don’t know they’re capable of anything.

Hari Grebler: Right. And the stimulation is either talking to them constantly or showing them things or going places. And even going places, to activities, from really early ages. Sometimes people call me and I’m like, I used to have this question on one of my forms a long time ago. And I’d ask them, “Do you take any other classes?” And some of them, at eight months old, were in five classes. And I just said, “Could you wait and take my class when you don’t have so many classes?” So kids, they don’t have a chance to play free and safely, and they have a lot of activities. And then one day they wake up and they’re saying, “What are we doing today?” And it annoys everybody. “I’m bored. I’m bored.” Because they’ve gone to all these classes that have activities, not just gone and played outside or gone to the park to play, right? But they’ve gone places where there’s everything there and like you said, stimulation.

Janet Lansbury: And they’re just reacting and responding to it instead of creating it. Yeah.

Hari Grebler: It’s not fair to the kid. And also there’s a lot of kids that don’t have a yard. A lot of kids can’t go outside and all that. And I think that’s another reason why it’s crucial to set up a really great space for them to have for themselves. Some kind of playroom or playspace, if you have the space.

Janet Lansbury: Absolutely. And something interesting about this too is this idea of tuning into yourself and being with yourself and comfort with yourself. Studies show, and Magda knew this a long time ago, that it’s nurtured by not just leaving your child alone. It’s not about being alone, solitude could be with people. But it’s being allowed to be in yourself, in your own thoughts. And that it’s actually nurtured through this relationship of just what Magda said, the “wants nothing quality time.” Where I’m with you in your play space, and I am just observing, learning all this stuff about you and discovering you. And you’re knowing that you can flex your imagination and be yourself completely, with not losing my attention, with not losing me, my presence. And that’s actually how you nurture it, and that’s how it’s different than loneliness. Healthy solitude is a feeling of joy.

Hari Grebler: And the adult witnessing their babies playing independently can bring so much joy to the adult. And the knowledge of what their child likes, how long they play, are they tired. The other thing is you’re going to know their cry, you’re going to know what that means. And a lot of parents that I talk to, they don’t know that. And I feel like one of the ways to get to know your baby is exactly what we’re talking about, is creating this space. And where we coexist in that space or beside or close by or we have things to do. And sometimes we’re there, really just focused on them. But sometimes we’re just in that same area, let’s say. I mean, I remember as a parent, I’m doing some things, sometimes I would bring laundry in. Sometimes I was also getting things done, and there were times where I was just sitting.

But the simplicity of it is that you get to see so many signs, like when are they tired? And you don’t have to wait until they’re yawning and rubbing their eyes. After a while, you actually really know that they’re tired. They’re playing, playing, playing, and all of a sudden things aren’t just going their way so perfectly, right? Because people are looking more for that physical sign, a yawn or like I said, rubbing the eyes. But it’ll be more subtle. Did you experience that too?

Janet Lansbury: Yes. Because I didn’t like what you said about we don’t understand their cries. That was totally me with Charlotte, my first baby, that I brought to your class. That was another area where I felt, I am a terrible parent because I don’t know what these cries are. All I know is that I want them to stop right now, immediately, and they’re ear-splitting and they’re making me feel terrible. So it was very much my problem. Her feelings were my problem to fix, instead of really something that I could learn about her. And so it took actually a lot of time, because she was my first, it took time in your classes and learning about Magda’s work to be able to calm myself enough to start to see and discern.

But it was helped along by being able to observe her with all these other subtle things she was doing in your class, and see that she had thoughts, that she was nuanced, that she wasn’t just this one-note, simplified being. That she had all these levels and different things going on with her that were fascinating. So it’s about seeing them as this full human being, a person that’s not just a needy thing that we have to fix.

Hari Grebler: And I like what you said. You say, calm yourself, and I always say, get quiet inside. For me, automatically, just being with the babies, I just empty out. I don’t know, it’s just a thing. It’s always happened for me. I’m just right there, right present. I think that’s partly why I do what I do.

Janet Lansbury: I think it’s a practice though, that you, probably, because I do that too now.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, but I did that. I was always like, it just helped me. Well, before I started teaching, I taught nursery school, so I already had this experience with kids. And that’s what I loved about it, I always felt very present because you know me— personally, I’m not that quiet, I’m not that calm. I’m pretty impatient, I’m pretty hotheaded. Right?

Janet Lansbury: I guess. You’re not a picture of serene, no.

Hari Grebler: No. And nor was Magda. It just wasn’t like that. I mean, we are who we are, and that’s fine. And my kids know me, they do. But when they’re little babies, it’s so important to set ourselves aside, to quiet ourselves down. And like you said, calm ourselves. It really is. Or we won’t know anything about them otherwise.

Janet Lansbury: And we’ll get stuck doing a bunch of things that aren’t helping.

Hari Grebler: And nobody feels good. They’re just going through the motions. I had a funny experience with my son. I noticed he would suck two fingers on one hand and then two fingers on the other hand. Same two fingers, but some right, some left. And one day he sucked, I don’t know, it was either the right or the left, and I thought, Oh, he’s tired and I’m going to nurse him. Because he’s going to go to sleep and he might get hungry. It’s not really his nursing time, but I’m just going to do that. So I went into the bedroom, went to nurse him, and he moved off, pulled off and put his other hands in his mouth and leaned back to go into the crib.

Janet Lansbury: Wow.

Hari Grebler: And then he went to bed. And I called my mom and said, Is that even possible? And he did that a lot. And it really taught me, I can’t work on automatic. I used to call him the all-knowing head, you know what I mean?

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Hari Grebler: Because he can’t move his limbs so much, but he could go, like, Get me in the crib! with his head. He did. So bizarre. Anyway.

Janet Lansbury: Wow. And that was something unique to him, that your daughter—

Hari Grebler: Oh, yeah. She did not do that.

Janet Lansbury: Your daughter didn’t do the exact same thing.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, she did other things. Yeah, they were totally night and day. But I got to witness that because of what I learned and how I could be in that moment and how he became more important, at times in the day, than me.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. I would notice with my second that, when you were saying they get tired in the play space, that’s normal. And they start to whine a little or fuss and tell you that they’re tired or they’re just showing you those signs, those early signs, which hopefully we get, like they’re kind of spacing out all of a sudden or whatever. But what Madeline would do was fall asleep in the play space, if I didn’t catch it very, very early. Especially if it was at my little outdoor play space that I had, she would fall asleep. But it just looked so blissful to me.

Hari Grebler: Heaven.

Janet Lansbury: It was like falling asleep on the beach when you’re lying out, having a good time, and you just fall asleep.

And so I tried to take a movie of her going to sleep because she would do it also in her bassinet. She would turn her head sort of from side to side. She was not expressing any discomfort, but to my previous lens, it would’ve looked like, I better put her to sleep now. She’s turning her head, and maybe that’s not good for her, or something. But she was calming herself. And I tried to get it on video, and every single time I tried, she would outlast the battery of the video in how long she went. She would just keep going. And again, she wasn’t stressed out at all or showing anything like that, but it just would take her longer. And I finally thought, okay, this is too private a moment. I’m not supposed to capture this, so forget it. I’m just not going to try. Because she would always outlast me in her process.

Hari Grebler: I love that because that’s what they want to do: enjoy their process, if we could just give them opportunities. And I feel like that gets so misconstrued out there. I did an Instagram about it and I said, what if we did give them these little micro-opportunities to fall asleep when they were ready? To play first, but not meaning that we have to let them cry or be alone.

Janet Lansbury: Right. You’re opening up space for what they actually want to do.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. What they can do. Can I give you one example of that?

Janet Lansbury: Yes, please. Because I honestly think that all of this has to do with the play space. Learning to observe and just allow our child to be who they are and how that helps everything. It helps their sleep, it helps their learning for sure. It helps their imagination, helps them develop this sense of self and ability to be alone with themselves and all of those things. So this is just another thing, but yeah, tell the story.

Hari Grebler: So when we came home with our baby, I thought to myself, wow, our baby, he’s heard Shlomo and I talking all these nine months. They hear you, we talk so much. And I thought, let’s put him in the bassinet. And we did, we put him in the bassinet. And then I invited Shlomo, here’s a chair, and I laid on the bed, and we just chatted. And within the chatting, he just sort of played. And then he got tired and fell asleep. And I didn’t do it to make him sleep or to get him tired or anything like that, but I just thought we could just be together like this. He could be there, we could be here, he can hear us. And then I feel like from that moment, he loved to play with that around him, us talking or people in the room, but not focused on him. I don’t know if you remember falling asleep in the car and people are still talking, when you’re little.

Janet Lansbury: Oh yes, I used to love that. Or in the house just relaxing and sleeping and you hear the voices. Or my parents would be having a party, a gathering, and you’re kind of like, Ahhh.

Hari Grebler: Exactly. And I call it a micro-moment. There could be so many of those because it’s a process. It’s not like, “Oh, does your baby sleep through the night?” No, it’s not that. It’s discovering what it is together and not alone.

Janet Lansbury: And being open. Being open to your baby’s abilities that they’re showing you, not what you’re trying to make them do.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. I feel like so many things have gotten, they took the fun and the beauty out of them. So sleep is a sound machine, a blackout curtain. It’s at a certain time, a certain way, or it’s being held or being wrapped. Even that, right? Even both extremes are still these automatics, to me. And all I’m asking is, just give a little micro-moment in between these things. And Magda didn’t really talk about that. It was something I sort of discovered, just about us talking and him being there and feeling comforted by our voices and our presence. But it doesn’t also mean that I have to be holding him all the time for him to feel secure.

Janet Lansbury: Right.

Hari Grebler: Hearing the sounds of the home is comforting. That’s what I’m saying about taking the beauty out of sleep. Let’s make it so quiet. Let’s put this sound on. Let’s make it so dark. Wrap them this way. Let’s wrap them that way.

Janet Lansbury: Right, it’s a totally adult-directed process that’s just a chore. It’s just another chore that we have to do in the day.

Hari Grebler: And they can watch me wash the dishes from their bed. They can hear us talking. They can hear a party or whatever it is. So anyway, that’s just my little rant, my micro-rant.

Janet Lansbury: Well, I wrote down here something that you said about observation. Well, first of all, I love this comment that you make, I guess it’s one of your central quotes that’s very Hari and I love it: “Babies are worth getting to know.” I love that. And then you say in another post, I think it is: “To observe. Clear your head, step into the present. What can my baby do? What does my baby want to do? Can I detach and sit simply? It is a practice that we all can learn.”

So I think we’ve talked a lot about the beauty of the space, why it’s so worth doing. What do we do? How do we make the space?

Hari Grebler: Because you saw that post of the safe space, I got a question, a really good question. What to do with the baby before the play area? At what age do we start this play space and what should they do before? And that’s such a good question. Then I just wrote back, there’s a progression of the play area. The first play area would be the bassinet because it’s warm, it’s cozy, it’s inviting, and it holds the baby. They can only last so long in a bassinet, and then I would move them to a crib with a firm mattress. The baby should never be on a cushy kind of sunken-in thing, although it looks nice.

Janet Lansbury: No, definitely not.

Hari Grebler: It’s hard for them to move. So then it would be the crib. And then there could be a playpen or, around three to four months, when they start being interested in the world and other objects, that’s when I would have them come down to the floor. And the floor space evolves as their capabilities grow. The rule of thumb is they always need a bit more space than they might actually use. And we do that so they can be inspired. Inspired to move a little farther, inspired to go get that over there.

And it’s always better if a small space gets bigger than taking a big space and making it smaller for the baby. So if a child has already crawled all over the house, it’s harder to then make a smaller space. Not impossible, but just more difficult. So that’s the progression of the physical part of the space.

And you can take a piece of your living room, a bedroom. I personally took my living room/dining room. We have a little, little house, but that was one room. And I was able to gate my kitchen. That’s something real crucial in RIE, but a lot of people don’t want to do it. Magda used to talk a lot about gating the kitchen. Well, why would we gate the kitchen? Well, there’s accidents that happen, but also so we can go and do something fully and focus on. So when we go in the kitchen, we can cook. We don’t have to, Oh, there’s someone over here or rolling over here, or I’m worried about that and I have to tell them what to do. And it’s not like they can never come into the kitchen, when you have time to show them around. So I love the gated kitchen. I really think that helps.

The reason I did my dining room/living room, I wanted it to be like a family room/playroom kind of place where we gather. I could be on the couch and my children could be playing. And my room changed more than 50 times. I mean, that’s how much I’m about the kid. I’m not saying people should do this or everybody should. I’m saying this is what I did because I’m a total nerd in that way. I really wanted to put all this into practice, because I had been doing it for so long. I wanted the space, I wanted them to be able to crawl and do all the things that they did and I wanted to watch and I wanted to be comfortable.

Janet Lansbury: So what if people aren’t able to gate off their kitchen, which a lot of houses, unfortunately, that is difficult. I mean, I was able to gate off our kitchen and have a gated-in space, but I had to have these bookcases, very heavy, like standup bookcases, that I attached a gate to, and I had to form a space within this bigger space in my family room. Probably you would know how to do all this better than I did, but it worked for us.

Hari Grebler: That sounds perfect.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. And so interesting, it remained the place—way after the gates were gone and all that—that remained the place where the child wanted to be playing or reading or whatever. They really bond with their—actually, I think it’s bonding with themselves, but within the comfort and familiarity of those spaces.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. I mean, my kids loved their room and I really let them do anything they wanted, practically. I think what you did was perfect. And that’s what I always say. If it’s a big space and you can create it like a little room within a room. Outside, we did it once with a gate to the couch. I didn’t want them when they were really tiny to get into the small flower garden I had. So I had a couch and then I gated that from there. So there’s so many creative ways to do it.

Janet Lansbury: But you agree, I’m sure, with Magda that establishing those parameters are important before the child’s able to move through them. Because then that’s just part of their play space. People say, Oh, it’s a jail and stuff. It is if you treat it that way and like, Okay, now I’m going to put you in this place while I go do something. Instead of, This is part of our routine. Every day after we do this, this is the time that you usually spend in there. I mean, it doesn’t have to be every day, but most days this is what we do. And as Magda said, a matter of course, it’s just a matter of course. And you still might not like when I leave and go do something, but you know underneath it that you’re not being abandoned, you’re not being punished. This is your space and it’s freedom for you, actually. And then children do, I mean, I’ve seen that with my own eyes that children totally believe that.

Hari Grebler: Definitely. When I was in Hungary, when I went to the Loczy to visit, when it was the orphanage, I had studied for I think about 10 years before I went there, and then I went there and studied. What I noticed was the way we learned about doing the caregiving and being fully present for the caregiving, for babies, the more the same it is, this is how they don’t get bored. How they really have that inner life and count on it. I have to say, even in the morning, if I get up and my daughter’s up, she’s just like, “I need to be alone.” You know, if it’s too early. She needs that thinking time.

Janet Lansbury: She’s how old now?

Hari Grebler: Thirteen. She’s not happy to see me. She’s happy to see me other times. But in the morning, they’re really used to having space in the morning. And why it is is because we had a rhythm, a very, very strong rhythm. And that was: you wake up, you care for them, you change their diapers, maybe get them dressed or maybe not, feed them, nurse them. And then you’ve given them so much, and this is what I saw in Hungary, which is by the end of that caregiving, they don’t want you to talk to them anymore. Those babies, they’ll look away, they’ll put their fingers in their mouth, whatever. It’s like, Okay, I’ve got everything I need and now I go to the floor to play.

And then what I saw is when they pick up those toys, and I know you’ve seen it too, is they really see what they’re looking at. They look at the object the way they were just looked at, if that makes sense. And it was beautiful. I was just so blown away by that. And understanding what it means to be filled up, to then be able and have the desire to do what you want to do.

And I think I must’ve learned it in Waldorf, this idea of breathing in and breathing out. The breathing in being the caregiving thing where you’re asking them and telling them and expecting cooperation. And then it’s this, Ahhh. I go down to play. No one’s talking to me. I can play with this or that and any way I want to. And no one’s going to interrupt me. So there’s a balance to what we’re talking about. One cannot happen without the other. Independent play and wanting to be in your play space can’t happen if you don’t feel filled up.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And I was also thinking when you were saying that, as slow as we try to maybe aim to be with the caregiving time and talking to them and listening to them and having that be a mutual experience, when they get to play, time goes even slower. When we’re alone in our thoughts, that’s when we can really slow down to our pace and commune with that. I mean, I crave that. I’ve started doing where I don’t go on my phone until after I’ve done this whole bunch of things in the morning where I’m just on my own in my thoughts. I’m kind of doing things and then I meditate. But I’ve put off just looking at my phone right away because I need more of that time, with the work that I’m doing right now, to get ideas, to have more space. I mean, I really couldn’t get enough of that, personally. Really, I want to go to the phone. I want to go to the distraction like anybody else, but I’m just doing that for myself, to fuel myself.

Hari Grebler: I think that is exactly what happens when we create this space for the baby. We give it to ourselves. It’s a gift as a parent that you give yourself. Here, I gave you everything during this time I was just with you, and now it’s your time to do this and my time to do this. And when they can know and expect, because you do it the same every time. That’s why I think that’s so important. I mean, I don’t want it to sound like, Oh, I can’t ever deviate, because of course you can. That’s life. But when they’re little, it pays for both, for the child and the adult. It’s a gift for both. Oh, I can go into the kitchen by myself to make something, right? I can take a shower because I know they’re completely safe and content.

And sometimes people say, Oh, they don’t want to be in there anymore. They don’t want to be in there anymore. You have to commit to the space. That’s really important. You have to commit. And that means when they’re needing you more, let’s say, go be with them. Go be with them, but don’t bring them out of the space. So that’s the mistake people make. They don’t want to be in there. I take you in my arms, I take you into the kitchen. I cook, I’m stirring. It’s interesting. You like being up. And then when I put you back in your space, it’s not as satisfying anymore.

Janet Lansbury: And even if we’re in the space with them and they’re kind of struggling, first maybe seeing, just while I’m sitting here, I’m going to hold you in my lap. Instead of, okay, we’re getting up. Every time there’s something wrong, now you’re getting lifted up and changed.

Hari Grebler: Or sat up.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah.

Hari Grebler: That’s what a lot of people… they start getting fussy in their place, and when you do that, you sit them up, you can get maybe 15 more minutes of play. But usually they’re just tired, if they’re used to this. That’s what I was trying to say before. If you don’t do all the things and you commit to this simplicity, it’s sort of raw because it’s just you and them, right? There’s not a swing or a this or a that to fall back on, in a way. You can even lie down in their space. They can even crawl over you on those times.

Janet Lansbury: Oh, I do that. Yeah.

Hari Grebler: Right. It’s fun, you can get your little massage.

Janet Lansbury: What you were saying about setting it up for ourselves… It may seem like this is such a chore or I’m being so giving, having this connected caregiving time, but this is what’s going to empower us, empower our child to be able to be separate. And then yeah, when they’re expressing things, I mean, this encouraged me to leave my fix-it mode that I was in with my first. I want to find out what they’re expressing. I don’t want to just try to change it. I want to know what’s going on here. And that takes a little longer and takes us not making those rash moves to just pick them up and rescue them out of the situation or whatever.

Hari Grebler: And when you really come down to it, there’s not that many things that the baby could be bothered by. They could be hungry, they could be tired. And you’re going to start to see what that tired means to your baby. Hungry, you’ll think, oh, I fed them. And yeah, they probably are, let’s see. Or maybe they want their diaper changed, they’re not comfortable. Or their clothes aren’t comfortable, even. Sometimes it’s bunched up and that could bother them. So you can always check those things. And then things get more simple. Kids are able to eventually let you know what’s bothering them.

Janet Lansbury: Because they know you want to know and they understand that’s your interest because it is.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, they’re valued in that way. And a lot of people say, Oh, well they’re just getting bored now. And no, I don’t accept that. I just don’t. That’s an adult idea. So then you do all these other things, and then that’s the way we create them needing to be set. Because once you start sitting your baby up, they’re not satisfied anymore laying down. It doesn’t take that much, too, for that to happen.

Janet Lansbury: But just so people know, and I know you know this, you can change anything. If you’re aware of what you’ve done and what it’s caused and what’s going on and you want to change it. Maybe you don’t want to change it, that’s fine. But if you want to, all you have to do is understand that they’re going to express, Hey, why aren’t you doing that thing anymore? And they have a right to. Try to welcome that.

And I always admit, or encourage the parent to admit, Yeah, I was sitting you up and you’re used to that. You’re probably wishing I would do that right now. But I realized this is healthier for you. So you can tell me how much you wish I was doing that and how mad you are at me. That’s okay with me. I always want to know how you feel. That kind of attitude. You don’t have to say all those words, but that welcoming and honesty about, Yeah, of course, not just, Oh, shh. It’s okay. I’m not doing this anymore and now we’re going to do this. Really owning it, because otherwise they feel almost gaslit.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. I want to add to that, too. So if I was going to change a habit, and I do believe wherever you step into these ideas is the perfect place, just like you said. You can change, it’s not like a make it or break it situation. But if I did do something like sat them and then I decided to not sit them because I learned, I would start out like that, on the back, let’s say. But if the baby got too upset, I would also not stay in that. I don’t want them to get too upset at first. But I would always start like that. So then the next time I would start again like that on the back, I would start again and again and again. And leave a little bit more time and a little bit more time.

Janet Lansbury: While you’re communicating with them. And then picking them up and holding them in your lap and not just swooping them up.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, all the things you said. I just want to add that I would do it little by little. So if I was going to change something about sleep, let’s say. I would start out the way I would like it to go, but they were used to something else. Okay, we do that something else, but start out first the way I want it to go. Little by little, longer and longer, for them to get used to it without them having to be too upset about it.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah.

Hari Grebler: Because we did it. It’s just like, okay, I’m a cigarette smoker, let’s say. I’m not, but let’s say, and then somebody just takes it from me and they decide I’m never going to have one again. And they decide how it’s going to go.

Janet Lansbury: It’s like the boredom thing, yeah. Okay, now you’re going to be bored.

Hari Grebler: You need to collaborate with me now a little bit. I need a little collaboration, a plan, how this is going to change. I can’t just change on the spot because you who gave me the cigarettes in the first place are now going to take them away. No, it’s not fair.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, I feel like it’s more, and maybe this is what you’re saying, but with sleep especially, I feel like it’s more being aware of where I want this to go. Because maybe in the beginning it’s just easier for me to do it this way, but I’ve always got my eye out: This is how I want sleep to go, because this is what I need and what we’ve decided for our family, and this is what I would like to happen. And so I’m going to keep being open to that direction, but not necessarily trying to even take a step there in the beginning if I’m not ready and I don’t feel like my baby’s ready. So it’s not like I have to start doing incremental things, but just knowing. And being open to what my baby can do, which that observation in the play space, again, teaches us.

I also just wanted to comment, you had talked a long time ago, wonderfully, about the physical thing of setting up the play space from the time that they’re infants and how that starts in the bassinet. And I would say also, especially based on my own experience, Charlotte, she first played in your amazing class that changed my life. My younger ones, I had to be open to them being able to do this, entertain themselves, and notice when it happened. Like you said in the hospital with your boy. In the bassinet one time, I came and she was waking up and she wasn’t looking towards me or anything, so I didn’t say, “Hi, time to get up!” She was looking to the side and I just let her look and was careful not to say anything, because I was holding space for this to happen. And with my son, it happened on the changing table, that we were going through it and I was helping him. And then all of a sudden he sort of looked off and he was just doing something, thinking something. And I let it go on for a while because I didn’t have to rush and be somewhere anyway, but I thought, Oh my gosh. So we want to notice those, so we can encourage them. It’s so easy to squash it all and not let it happen.

Hari Grebler: That’s called collaboration.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Hari Grebler: I’m doing something that needs to get done, but you’re interested over there. So I’m going to stop for a minute and be interested with you. It’s beautiful. Sometimes I’ll do snack, and you’ve done it a million times, and everybody’s looking at something else. And I don’t say, “Here, well, doesn’t anybody want some? Oh, here I am with the banana.” I look at what they’re looking at. We can all be so interested in it. It’s such a beautiful moment that it doesn’t need to be filled. And that is a collaboration.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And it’s also noticing that play happens all the time, if we want to call that play. It’s happening anytime.

Hari Grebler: It’s true. Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: So I also wanted to share, this is another one of your posts on Instagram. You say: “What do I mean, don’t introduce your child to boredom?” This is what you were talking earlier about boredom, I guess, and these are the ideas that you shared. It’s all about what we’re talking about today. “Let life unfold slowly and naturally. Don’t think you have to entertain them. Do age-appropriate outings, once in a while. There’s no rush to show them all the things. Let them notice and you can notice what they notice. Give them time to have their own thoughts. Give them plenty of time to putter around.” And then you say, “It’s unnecessary to rotate toys. It’s okay to bring a new one in here and there. It’s more a matter of providing open-ended.” There you go. That’s great advice right there.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, thanks. It sounded good how you read it. You read it too nicely. I’m like, I’m so intrigued.

Janet Lansbury: Who is that genius?

Hari Grebler: I know! Who wrote that? It’s just so nice, you know? I want people to see how sweet this is and simple it is.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. All this sort of simple wisdom that helps our children, helps us. And we only did the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the benefits of this. I really hope people will follow your Instagram page and your website, which is Hari’s RIE Studio, harisriestudio.com, and you can discover all the resources that Hari has to offer and be eye-opened by her perspective, which is just very sharp and unique. I don’t know, I think it’s a breath of fresh air personally, and I love it. So keep it up.

Hari Grebler: Okay! Thanks, Janet. This was really fun.

Janet Lansbury: This was really fun. Thank you so much.

Hari Grebler: Thanks for asking me.

Janet Lansbury: Bye.

For more on play, there are a ton of resources on infant play and toddler play on my website, janetlansbury.com. So please check those out under the topic category “Play.”

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

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Resisting, Stalling, Dilly-Dallying https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/01/resisting-stalling-dilly-dallying/ https://www.janetlansbury.com/2024/01/resisting-stalling-dilly-dallying/#respond Sun, 14 Jan 2024 19:17:18 +0000 https://www.janetlansbury.com/?p=22540 Kids can wear down our patience when they seem to resist or stall us with everything we need them to do—even when we’re only asking them to move through the predictable routines in their day like getting out of bed, going to or leaving school, brushing their teeth, and so on. The constant pushback and … Continued

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Kids can wear down our patience when they seem to resist or stall us with everything we need them to do—even when we’re only asking them to move through the predictable routines in their day like getting out of bed, going to or leaving school, brushing their teeth, and so on. The constant pushback and struggle make it feel impossible to stay unruffled.

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

Transcript of “Resisting, Stalling, Dilly-Dallying”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi, Janet-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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