Raising kids is a learning process, and (no doubt) there’s a benefit to reflecting on the mistakes we make along the way. But Janet believes we can learn even more when we recognize and appreciate our successes, no matter how inconsequential they might seem to us as the time. Maybe it’s the little bit of empathy we felt as we limited one of our child’s bothersome behaviors. Or a momentary sense of confidence in ourselves as leaders rising above the fray. Or the realization that we could, just that once, let our child’s feelings be without judging them, and then, the increased closeness we felt with our child when those feelings passed. In this episode Janet celebrates YOUR illuminating, inspiring stories, and she’s exceedingly grateful to you for allowing her to share them.
Transcript of “Crying, Screaming, Resisting, Sadness – Your Best Responses to Kids’ Emotions”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
Well, it’s a new year, and it probably seems like all the celebrating is done for a while. But I’d like to propose that we make this year a year to keep celebrating. Celebrating our successes as parents, our wins, no matter how tiny they may be. Those little points of progress where we feel ourselves a little more in a groove of being the kind of parent we want to be, whatever that means to you. It could be different for any of us, right?
And I’m not saying this because I want to put a positive spin on everything, and we should just think positive. Not at all. I mean, I’m not against that, but that’s not why I’m suggesting that we celebrate our wins. I’m suggesting this for very practical reasons. I was thinking about this the other day. We all know that it’s important to make mistakes and for our kids to make mistakes. That is how we learn a lot of things in life. But when it comes to parenting, I believe we learn much more from our successes. Again, no matter how small they are: We paused a little longer before getting upset. We were able to allow our child to have their feeling without trying to make it better right away. We didn’t resort to threats this time; we took a deep breath and tried to stay on our child’s team when we wanted them to cooperate and they weren’t in that mode.
Whatever those successes mean to you, these are like precious jewels that we need to keep in a safe place with us. We need to remind ourselves of them on a daily basis or even on an hourly basis sometimes. That feeling, that moment when it worked, when I was able to do that thing. When I’ve been able to make that little shift and try something, and I had the sense in that moment that it worked. That it felt like my child and I were working as a team, that we were in a relationship, that they felt safe in my leadership. These will serve us much better than those mistakes.
I guess we could call them successes and failures, but I don’t think failure even applies to parenting. There really aren’t parenting failures, especially in these early years. Because parenting is about a relationship between us and our child, it’s always mendable. It’s always possible to shift cycles that we’ve gotten into. There’s always lots of hope. It’s never a fail. It might feel like a mistake or something we could have handled differently, but we can’t fail.
One of the most important things we can feel as parents is confidence in ourselves. That confidence that makes us able to relax and smile and know that these are small people in the world and we can handle this job, we can do this. These wins will remind us of that. Oh, I can do this. This felt right. This is how I want to feel more.
So with that goal of wanting to encourage you to celebrate your wins this year, I’m going to be periodically sharing podcast episodes where I talk about the wins that you’ve shared with me. And today I’m going to do that with successes you’ve shared with me in messages, in emails about letting feelings be. That’s what these several stories I’m going to share today all boil down to.
I’ve talked about it in hundreds of different ways, how to let feelings be and what that means. As a concept this is really very simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy, right? It’s not easy for any of us, anybody I know at least, and it still isn’t easy for me. That’s why I think these successes are major that these parents have shared. So I want to share them with you because I think they’re also very enlightening as to how this idea of letting feelings be, accepting the feelings behind the behaviors, can look and work in practice.
Here’s the first one from, I guess I’m just going to say people’s first initials, C:
I’ve been thinking a lot about holding the distinction between my child’s feelings (and need to express them!) and facts (facts could be anything from the laws of physics to the fact that we are now leaving the house). One thing I’ve found really helpful is to let my youngest child have his feelings instead of trying to verbally persuade him to do/go/stop/whatever it is, and to let my body carry on with the fact that I’m putting on his shoes, that we’re leaving the apartment, that I’m carrying him down the street. So I try to keep my heart soft towards him and keep my body moving calmly to do what we need to do.
Yesterday, my four-and-a-half-year-old didn’t want to leave the house to go swimming. He loves his swimming lessons, but he doesn’t like getting ready to leave the house and he was worried the water would be cold. I assured him that we were going to the pool with the warm water. Then I just let him cry, protest, and say whatever he needed to say while I helped him put his shoes on. I carried him the rest of the way. Then we sat on the bench with his big sister to play twenty questions until it was time for their lesson. He had a great time swimming, and I didn’t get mad at him for being so upset and loud about leaving the house.
I love that C., this parent, talked about this distinction between the feelings and the facts, and also the challenge of transitions. For humans of all ages, transitions can be especially challenging, but even more for young children, right? Getting from point A to point B, that is a time when children resist and they don’t want to do it.
And when I’ve shared about this and about what I call “confident momentum,” which is really exactly what she’s doing here, oftentimes I’ll get questions or comments saying, Well, we don’t have time to wait around letting my child have their feelings. I have to get there on time. I have to get to work. I have to take my child to care or to school, as if letting feelings be means that I’m just sitting here waiting for something to end. But that’s not what I mean. What I am suggesting is confident momentum. So we keep going, but we find that balance that this parent was able to find—and I hope she holds onto this feeling—that she was able to find that balance between having what she calls a “soft heart” towards him as she was keeping her body moving calmly. Being that empathic leader that we all want to be, carrying on while letting kids share their feelings. That’s the key.
Okay, here’s one from K:
I have three children, ages seven, four, and 15 months old. Parenting has shone a spotlight on all my less attractive qualities, namely my lack of patience, my tendencies toward perfectionism, my irritability and low frustration tolerance. I tend to take my parenting fails very personally and feel consistently defeated and guilty.
After only a handful of Unruffled episodes, everything clicked. It was the missing piece I’d been searching to find. Realizing that I didn’t need to control or take responsibility for my kids’ emotions anymore, but simply observe and create space for these emotions, has relieved me of an almost literal anvil of weight on my shoulders. I find myself having opportunities for using this skill of observing and holding space HOURLY [and she wrote “hourly” in all capitals] and it has given me a sense of accomplishment that for the first time in seven years of parenting, I’m not gritting my teeth and begging or yelling for behavior change. Instead, I’m available for all the emotions, the tantrums, and the meltdowns, and I no longer take personal responsibility for them.
I’m more present, more calm, more patient, and happier as a parent. Which is what I’ve been trying for so hard, to be happy when I’m with my kids and not so stressed out by the uncertainty of what emotional thing might happen next and how I can try and control it. Which, as you know, is impossible.
Thank you so much for the work you do. In a short time, it has transformed my whole perspective and my family life.
She really nailed something so important: feelings are not our responsibility. We can’t make our children’s feelings, or any other human being’s feelings, our responsibility. That puts this enormous, impossible, as this parent said, pressure on ourselves. It’s not our job as parents at all to try to make it better. What makes it better is our acceptance and what’s known as co-regulation, which is that I can be okay when you’re not feeling okay. And that’s exactly what this parent sounds like she’s hitting upon.
I totally relate to the anvil on the chest. I can feel that in myself, I can feel how I used to feel that way. That sense of, Oh gosh, this may never end. I may never get out of this. And then what’s going to happen next? My child’s happy now, but I’ve got to go through this process that I think of as riding the waves with our child. Which is not what I recommend, because that’s exhausting. Children’s emotions flow all over the place, they’re very fluid with their emotions. And that can be a very positive thing, actually. But not as a parent if we’re waiting, Okay, I’m going to feel better when my child feels better. We can’t do that to ourselves. So now this parent is having a visceral connection. Anchoring herself, not trying to anchor her child, but anchoring herself and letting the waves flow by. Not taking responsibility, not taking them personally. This weight is lifted.
And parenting is always going to be hard, there’s no question about it. But we make it so much harder on ourselves when we take on this impossible job of being responsible for kids’ feelings. So I’m really sorry that this parent and a lot of us have that thing of being perfectionist and guilting ourselves over every little thing, but I hope that this new attitude helps this parent to put that in its place too. There’s so much less guilt and perfectionism getting in the way when we understand our role, our job description, if we want to call it that, which is not keeping kids happy.
Here’s one from S:
I have a six-year-old son who’s autistic. Like a lot of other autistic kids, he’s hyper-empathetic and can get easily overwhelmed by his feelings. For H., that mostly shows up as big cries. He started kindergarten this year and is feeling self-conscious about crying at school, and I think I’ve taken some of that on, worrying about how his friends will respond to his consistent tears. We often play with friends at the playground after school, and he usually cries during this time in response to frustration, which makes sense after holding it in a lot of the day.
In recent weeks, I’ve noticed myself trying to distract him or saying things like, “It’s okay you’re upset, but you’re going to miss out on time with your friends,” to try to quickly move him through it. I was reading through some of your posts this past weekend and was really trying to sit with the idea of letting the feelings be. Earlier in the week he had a big cry at the playground because the big kids were using the swings and he hadn’t been able to get one. And I caught myself trying to just get it over with and looked at him and said, “I’m sorry. It probably feels like I’m trying to fix your feelings.” He looked at me like a light bulb went off and even punched me lightly in the chest—spontaneously, not aggressively—and said, sternly, “I do not like that. Don’t fix my feelings. You shouldn’t do that.”
I honestly had no idea that he was aware of that dynamic, but it was clear afterward that I’d given language to something that he had been experiencing and was unhappy about. It was such a reinforcement of the idea that kids are receiving the messages underneath what we’re saying and the importance of allowing them to feel how they feel without trying to change it.
Wow, huge. And this parent really speaks to that challenge of trusting kids to feel all the things. It’s so hard, especially if we have a child who we feel is extra-vulnerable or extra-sensitive, or has that empathy that she describes in her son. It’s even harder to let them have the feelings, because we know that they’re feeling them, maybe feeling them deeply. So to trust that that is actually even a positive attribute in our child, not something that we have to try to make up for or protect from. Amazing, brave parent. And wow! That she and her son were able to speak to that issue is very remarkable.
Here’s D:
Just yesterday, my two-and-a-half-year-old randomly had a real big wobble on the way back from the playground. We live about a five-minute walk away and it took me 25 minutes of stopping and starting to get her home, while she was screaming and crying and had just gone so over the edge. When I got in, I was a bit rattled. It had come from nowhere, but I thought it was probably due to it being late and her being overstimulated from the park. We quickly put her straight to bed and she didn’t resist.
This morning, she woke up. I went into her room and said, “How are you feeling this morning?” She said, “I’m okay, mummy. I just needed a meltdown.” I’m really proud of how comfortable she must be to have those feelings.
Wow, right?
Here’s one from A:
I have a four-year-old son, and when I discovered your work a couple of years ago, it truly reshaped the way I parent. I wanted to share my deeply meaningful success story with you.
This past Saturday was my birthday, and throughout the day he kept getting tipped off-kilter by small things. It boiled over in the late afternoon. We were trying to play a game and he began making completely unreasonable demands and crying when I refused to oblige. I brought him away from the table. This caused an even bigger reaction. He was getting louder and starting to become violent. I knew he needed to just really let it all go, so I scooped him up and brought him upstairs so he could melt down.
By the time we got in the room upstairs, my son was in full-blown distress, crying, screaming, yelling mean things, and trying to be violent. He started banging on the door and crying, “Let me out!,” and it was like an instant flashback to my childhood. When I went ballistic like that, my parents would put me in my room and hold the door shut while I struggled, cried, and I wouldn’t be allowed out until I had calmed down. I’m sure they were just overwhelmed and didn’t know what else to do, but it was quite unsettling and isolating as a child. But here I was in the room with my boy, letting him know his feelings were not only okay, but welcome. That realization felt really affirming for me and gave me all the strength I needed to weather the rest of the storm with him.
Eventually, as always, it passed. He calmed down and we had our reconnect moment. We left the room and went back downstairs and moved on with our evening. He had successfully cleared his backlog of emotions.
So again, very challenging to trust this. What she did, though, is she trusted the buildup and kind of realized there was a backlog there, then let the storm happen. Beautiful example.
Okay, here’s M:
My son, three years and 10 months, recently started using a pedal bike. He loves his new bike. I decided it was time for the unused balance bike to find a new home with some other family. I arranged for another mom to come pick up the old bike from our porch. I did mention it to my son that his old bike would be leaving. I talked about his new bike and how it would be nice to pass his old one along to a new child. He listened, but didn’t say much.
We were outside drawing with chalk on our driveway when the mom pulled up. We waved from a distance and then my son saw her pick up his old bike and put it in her car. Immediately, my son starts screaming in a very frantic voice, “That’s my bike! That’s my bike!” I started reiterating what I heard him saying, “That’s your bike. Your bike is leaving.” He was so distraught. He began saying it was his favorite bike and he didn’t want a new child to ride it. He completely collapsed into me. I sat with him curled up in my lap for a good 10 minutes in our driveway, just rubbing his back as he cried and repeating his verbalized feelings back to him as felt appropriate. He quieted down and we sat together in silence.
Suddenly, he sat up and asked if he could draw his old bike. I picked up a piece of chalk and together we drew a stick figure of my son riding his old bike. He chimed in a couple of times as we drew, asking me to add little details he remembered about his old bike. He then asked to draw his new bike. We drew a picture of his new bike right next to the old bike. He walked away and came back every couple minutes to look at the drawing of the old bike and repeat things like he was sad his old bike went away and he missed his old bike. He was very solemn. I sat and watched and listened.
Finally, he turned to me and said, “Thank you for drawing my old bike. It made me realize it went away. I’m okay now.” Then he ran off to play, full of laughter and smiles. I was blown away. It was such a beautiful moment of really witnessing him moving through the entire range of grieving. I feel such a deepened connection to him that we were able to walk through that together.
Wow, this was a masterpiece that this parent experienced with herself. Not pushing back on his feelings, even though, how easy is it for us to go to, Come on, you have a new bike! What’s the matter with you? Or even to be feeling that inside ourselves and thinking that and judging our child for their feelings. It’s very, very challenging not to do that. This parent managed it and was quite rewarded by the whole experience.
And even his ability to find a therapeutic way to move through the feelings, and that came from him. That only happens when we allow for that space and we’re not in a rush. We really give our child that time and patience so that they can be on their slower speed and find the answers. It’s so amazing that she was able to do that, and he did it beautifully. And then she stayed patient and she stayed right where he was in those feelings, not trying to urge him forward in any way. Really remarkable.
And yes, the deepened connection, that is one of the gifts. Whenever we let feelings be, we deepen our connection. And oftentimes we’ll feel that in real time, we’ll feel that sense of closeness.
Okay, here’s one from K:
Tonight I went through a long fit with my 25-month-old. We got back Sunday from visiting her grandparents, and the adjustment seems to have been a lot for her. I started with her, acknowledged that she really wanted to have both new toothbrushes from the pack, and that it upset her that I wasn’t going to give her the other. The doubt kept growing that maybe I was being too hard or unreasonable or I’m not doing it right, or that I was more cry-it-out, less respectful parenting in that moment.
Then she took a big breath and asked to be picked up. She gave me a big hug and asked to do some coloring. I had that feeling that you describe, I think in No Bad Kids, about how close a moment you can have from being present with your child in a bad time and how much it can mean to feel like you supported them instead of just stopped them from crying.
Yes, so another moment to hold close to our hearts and remember how capable we are and therefore to trust ourselves more. My thought about the specifics on this is it’s a reminder to trust that it’s not about toothbrushes. It’s not about toothbrushes, it’s not about these little specifics. But it can be hard to trust in the moment when all we have to do is give her another toothbrush, right? We can give her both and maybe she’ll stop. So it’s very easy to get caught up with that, because we so want to please our kids. And reminding ourselves that it’s always about something more when it seems like these superficial things.
Here’s one more, it’s from R:
My daughter is three. Recently I lost a friend in tragic circumstances. I’ve found that grieving while looking after a young child is very complicated, because my daughter obviously has her needs and her routines.
This morning I found myself thinking of my friend and welling up. My daughter looked over and I said, “I feel sad just now because I miss my friend.” And she said, “It’s okay to feel sad.” I was honestly blown away. She has only just turned three. It took me until I was in my thirties to accept emotions in that way.
A few days ago, my daughter was really sad because she couldn’t do something she wanted to do, it wasn’t safe. I empathized and stayed present. After a while she said, “I’m not sad anymore.” I was raised to feel as though it was not okay to be sad or angry, that I had to put a smile on, that distraction was the way through. I’m so glad I’ve been able to change that for us both.
That story is a reminder of not only the challenge of letting feelings be in ourselves and our children, but why it matters. It matters because we’re giving something to our children here, something that maybe we didn’t have.
And so many of you out there that listen here, I want to say like 75% of you, are healing and shifting generational cycles. Not necessarily that there was severe trauma or big things our parents did wrong per se. It’s little things like this, that were once very accepted, maybe. That we should hold our feelings in, that we should just think positive and carry on, with the stiff upper lip. And then we realized as a generation, hopefully, that those don’t serve us. We can have more self-knowledge and teach our children to have that too. To trust that voice in them, to trust their feelings. They’re all safe to have and healthy to express.
The cycles that we’re shifting and healing is just another reason to celebrate ourselves this year. And I really hope you will, because I promise every one of you that in our own way and time, we can do this.
♥
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