Janet’s guest is Dr. Tina Payne Bryson. Her new book “The Way of Play” (co-authored with play therapist Georgie Wisen-Vincent) illustrates how playing with our kids in a receptive manner for even just a few minutes each day helps us to better understand them, while also encouraging their development of social skills, emotional regulation, resilience, and self-confidence. The guidelines Tina and Georgie offer in “The Way of Play” help make connecting through play easy, natural, and fun as well as richly effective for learning and bonding. As Tina explains, “The temptation can be to take over the play or be too instructive or didactic, to think we need to teach all kinds of lessons. But what’s really powerful, as we follow our child’s lead, is to be able to dive into their world.” Janet and Tina do their own deep dive into all of these topics and more. Then they both respond to a letter from a parent struggling with her 4-year-old’s aggressive behaviors.
Transcript of “Play That Builds Skills and Bonds Us (with Dr. Tina Payne Bryson)”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson is a legend in the parent education world. She’s the author and co-author with Dan Siegel of many of the most popular parenting books out there: The Whole-Brain Child, No-Drama Discipline, and many more. She’s also one of the warmest, wisest, and most generous human beings I know. So it’s an incredible treat, to put it mildly, to be able to host Tina on Unruffled for the third time.
This time she’s here to discuss her latest inspiring book, The Way of Play: Using Little Moments of Big Connection to Raise Calm and Confident Kids. In this book, she and her co-author, play therapist Georgie Wisen-Vincent, offer powerful, effective ways to connect with our children to help them process their emotions and develop their self-regulation skills and so much more, through their child-led play.
Hi, Tina. Thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s always such an exciting part of my calendar when I see your name. I’m just always so glad to talk to you, whether we’re recording or not. You’re a highlight of my month.
Janet Lansbury: Likewise! I have to say, I’m always honored to be able to talk with you and to just hear you share your wisdom. You have such depth and so many incredible insights to share. And of course, you’ve authored and co-authored with Dan Siegel so many classic, enduringly helpful books for parents already. What made you want to write this particular book focusing on play? Which is my all-time favorite parenting topic, by the way.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Yes, oh my gosh. And we need so much more of it, don’t we? Not only as adults, but our kids need more of it too.
I’ve written so many, and I was tired. I raised three kids and I started an interdisciplinary center called the Center for Connection and I wrote all these books with Dan and I was just feeling like, Ooh, I need a little rest. So I hadn’t planned on writing another one.
But Georgie Wisen-Vincent, my co-author on this book The Way of Play, is an incredible play therapist who’s trained my team at the Center for Connection. She and I have worked together for a number of years. And so she takes the child-led play therapy lens and then was combining it with my interpersonal neurobiology neurodevelopmental lens and pulled together this kind of parenting curriculum around how to play with kids.
Because what we hear over and over from parents is, I know how much play is important and I don’t like doing it. Or, I don’t know what to do. I can sit on the floor, but then what? And we know it’s such a powerful way for kids to build resilience and skills. Parents often think about play as a way to just pass the time, but it is so much more incredibly rich. She sent me this parenting curriculum and I said, “Georgie, this is a book.” And so then the two of us got to collaborate and come up with these strategies to help parents think beyond how we think about play.
Typically, we think about play as a child playing independently by themselves or with siblings, friends, cousins. So it’s just child play. And then there’s very adult-directed play, where they’re on a team or there’s a board game and you’re following the rules. But there’s something in between that. And there was really only one other book ever written about it that we could find, and that’s Lawrence Cohen’s beautiful book called Playful Parenting, which we love.
But this book is focused on parent-child play, or it could be educator-child play, but it’s the idea of what happens when we are following the child’s lead, but we are joining with them in the play in a really engaged way. What can happen and how we can do it. That’s why we decided to write the book together, to really guide parents in how to use play as something not just to pass the time, but as a really rich way to join with your child and know who they are.
And the reason we called it The Way of Play is because play really is not only a way of being with our children, not just something we do, play really is the way to know our children in deeper ways. To understand what they’re kind of trying on and working through. It’s also the way to a deeper connection and relationship with them and the way to helping them build the kind of skills that will serve them the rest of their lives. So how could I not say yes to that?
Janet Lansbury: Yes. And what you do in the book is you’re helping parents become mini-play therapists for the time that they can give to this. Helping our children, like you said, there’s all these skills that they’re learning through play that are crucial, that they can learn from playing on their own as well. And there’s also this therapeutic element, that it really helps kids work through all the new and strange situations they might have faced. Things that are going on with them, concerns they have, fears that they have, all these different emotions that they’re going through. Play is such a powerful way for them to understand what’s going on with them and process it. So you’re helping parents help them to make that happen.
There’s so much in this book. It’s also very helpful for parents who want to play with their kids. They get home from work or they’re getting back together after their kids were at school or something, and they really want to connect through play. But like you said, they don’t know exactly how to do it in a way that’s not intrusive, in a way that really supports our child to gain all these benefits from play.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: The temptation when we play with our kids can be to take over the play or be too instructive, too didactic. We think we need to teach all kinds of lessons. But what’s really powerful is, as we follow our child’s lead, whether it’s we’re on the floor and we’re actually playing or in playful moments like when we’re in the car, and it doesn’t have to be hours and hours, it can be five minutes, 15 minutes, even just an interaction.
I sort of think about, it’s like nonverbal is an infant’s first language, and then they start developing vocabulary in words and they start being able to use their words. But in terms of the sophistication of communication and primary language, play is one of their primary languages. And so we really do get to dive into this world where, if a toddler is trying on what it feels like to be in control or to boss people around or to try on even a mean tone of voice or things like this, it’s such a fun way to join in with them while we build these incredible skills, including emotional regulation.
Janet Lansbury: And what you just said right there, it’s like you’re demystifying the behavior for yourself as a parent and taking the threat out of it. A lot of what children do, a lot of these behaviors that we don’t like are them, as you say, trying something on. Maybe trying something on that they experienced from someone else. Checking it out and exploring it, the way that children do, that can be a form of play. And I think if we see it that way as parents, then we can do as you say, which is, what’s your term again?
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: “Chase the why.”
Janet Lansbury: Chase the why. And right there, even just the fact that we want to chase the why is going to help us with our child’s behavior because they’re going to feel accepted. They’re going to feel us interested instead of mad at them about it immediately. And from there they can feel like, Oh, I can share with this person. They’re interested in me and they’re on my team and they’re not going to turn against me with all the things that I do.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: And that they can, as we say, try on some of these maybe even a little bit more aggressive behaviors or things where they’re being really bossy or things like that without getting in trouble because it’s all in the context of play. One of the ways we can think about play is that play and threat states are incompatible. Basically if any mammal is in a state of threat, if there really is a danger there, play is not going to happen. So when play is happening, it’s a protective factor against really reactive states, but it is also sort of the opposite of these reactive threat states. So when kids are playing and it’s fun, it’s a way for them to titrate something that might be frightening or overwhelming in smaller doses that feel safe enough and fun enough that they can tolerate them. It’s actually one of the ways they build resilience.
For example, you and I both live in Los Angeles and we’ve obviously been swimming in the destruction and devastation of all the L.A. fires. And so a lot of kids are playing scenarios out related to the fires. We see this with all kinds of adversity that kids face. What they’re doing is they’re building firesafe walls to put around houses and they’re kind of putting in different endings, but they’re doing it with the symbolic distance, which is a term out of the play therapy literature, a symbolic distance of it being play. So they’re doing it with cushions and other kinds of things, they’re not actually out looking at the burned homes.
I remember my son Luke, who’s now a college student, telling me recently and sharing with me this thing he had written for one of his college classes about when my grandfather was in hospice and was dying. Luke was in the car with me on the way home from visiting him. Luke was probably five or so at the time. And I said, “Luke, do you feel like you got to say the goodbye you needed to say?” And he wrote this beautiful story about how he said yes, and then he went upstairs and got his Lego guys out and he kept reenacting death scenes. And he says that it was in that reenactment that he remembers starting to understand death in a deeper way. But it was Lego guys, not actually grandpa, that he was watching.
So it can give them the opportunity to have some symbolic distance. It’s about the thing, but it’s not the actual thing. That allows them to have these microdoses of experiencing difficult things, but in a safe enough and fun enough context that their nervous system gets to experience it within the context of safety. So it kind of widens what they can tolerate in terms of difficult emotions and adversity over time.
Janet Lansbury: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve seen my children do this kind of thing too, and seen children in my classes that have played out things that you’re not exactly sure, but you’re feeling like, Oh my gosh, this is something meaningful to this child. I remember this one child—I mean, this is kind of a really apparent one—but she kept taking this baby doll and pulling it out from under things. And her mother had given birth to her sibling, and I don’t even know if she witnessed the birth maybe, but that one was really obvious. But a lot of them are much more subtle.
It just reminds me of being an actor in improv where they say, you just say yes. You don’t say, no, I’m not going to do that. We just want to say yes as parents. Yeah, let’s do this, instead of, Don’t do that. I think a lot of times too, parents can worry if their child is playing roughly with a doll or a stuffed animal or something that looks like you shouldn’t treat a baby that way. What do you think about that?
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: I love that you brought that up because I think it’s so important that we don’t overinterpret children’s play either. We can’t assume that how they’re playing is saying anything about their character or whatever.
I didn’t really grow up around a lot of boys. I had a sister and I was the oldest of like 24 cousins and most of them were girls and I didn’t live close to the boys. My neighbors were girls. So I had these three boys and I bought them baby dolls and high chairs and vacuums and those kinds of things, wanting to have them try on nurturing. And I would hand them the baby dolls and sometimes they were really nurturing with the baby dolls. And then other times they would try to see how much force it took in a door to collapse the plastic head. And so we could easily say, Oh my gosh, my child is demonstrating sociopathic behavior. But it’s likely that they’re demonstrating proprioceptive force and gravity and other kinds of things, or just being funny.
So yes, it’s true that while sometimes what we say in the book is that what children can’t say, they play. And that is true, but we don’t want to overinterpret.
When we see aggressive behaviors in play, it’s an incredible opportunity. And this can lead me into a couple of the strategies that we talk about in the book. Let’s say they’re being too rough with the baby doll. This would be an incredible opportunity to do a strategy that we call “bring emotions to life.” And there are kind of two ways to do it. One way is, as the narrator of the play, to bring emotion in. And if you can introduce empathy, “Oh goodness, that baby is wondering what’s happening. Does that baby need a hug?” Or to say, “I wonder if that hurts the baby’s head,” that kind of thing. So we could bring in some empathy. Or, “Wow, you have a lot of things that you’re doing with that baby doll. What else could you do with baby doll?” And you could bring in some of these emotions.
And I want to tell you about the other way to think about bringing emotions to life in just a moment. But I want to specifically talk about another strategy that I would think about for this more aggressive play is to not let it frighten us, to stay curious, and to know that a lot of times, vigorous, aggressive movement is releasing nervous system arousal, just like laughter or crying or yelling does. Aggressive or more forceful movements release stress for kids.
And so much of the time we can shut it down. We can be like stop it or don’t do that or that’s too rough. And of course, we want to keep everybody safe. But assuming everybody’s safe, it could be an incredible opportunity to do this idea of dialing intensity up or down. Let’s say they’re hitting you with a sword and they’re hitting you too hard. In that moment we could say, “Oh, that’s really hard. Can you practice medium?” or, “Let me show you medium.” And so basically what they’re having to do is practice dialing back intensity or dialing back aggression.
Or let’s say they also maybe hit you really hard. You’re playing pirates, you’re now on the ground and you’re like, “Oh, you got me. I don’t know what I should do now. Should I walk the plank or am I in Davy Jones’s locker?” or whatever. So you can bring emotions into that moment, but you can also help them practice dialing that aggression up and down so that they learn how to put their brakes on it in different ways.
Janet Lansbury: What is the benefit of, because I remember this in your book, what is the benefit of saying “medium” instead of “Softer, softer! Do it less,” or whatever we might want to say?
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Well, “softer, softer” would be great too. And especially if you’re a pirate, use the pirate voice, that kind of thing, that could do it just as well. But it’s really the idea of helping them dial down or dial back up, so that they have a whole range of intensity and they can practice putting their brakes on different things. So “softer, softer” would be great too. Or, “Oh, that’s a 10, can you make it a five?” or whatever. The words don’t matter as much as really the practice of it.
Janet Lansbury: I just thought the idea of “medium” was interesting because I hadn’t really heard that before and I just thought maybe that is received better by a child than “Do less” or “Soften it, stop” or “It’s too rough.” It’s going to the positive instead of turning off what they’re doing. It’s saying, Let’s do medium. This is an interesting place that you could be with this.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Yes, and I think sometimes if we say “softer” or “that’s too hard,” then it feels like we’re putting the brakes on in a way that’s more about changing their behavior or stopping the play, whereas “medium” is like we’re adjusting the play. We try different things with different kids at different times, and sometimes they work better than others. But that can be really helpful too if you have a kid who’s being rough with a sibling or being too aggressive with a pet.
The other piece of bringing emotions to life that I wanted to mention that could also be helpful when we’re talking about all of these things, including emotional regulation or being too rough with pets or siblings or parents is—so I think about my four-year-old, he loved to tie knots. One of his favorite ways to play is he would tie a rope onto a doorknob and then he would tie the other part of the rope onto the top of a castle or a ship or something. He loved action figures. And he would have his guy on the castle and he would hand me the action figure and take it to the doorknob and he would say, “Okay, you’ve got to get this guy down to the ship or down to the castle, he’s got to go down the rope.” So my guy’s supposed to zip-line down the rope onto the castle. I could easily just say, “Okay, I’m coming!” and I could go zzhhh and make a noise or whatever. I’m really just engaged, I’m following what’s going on, and I could have my guy slide down the rope. That’s great, it’s super-fun play, my kid would love it.
But it’s also an opportunity to bring some emotions to life here. And so what I would love to do instead is to say, “Okay, I want to come, but I’ve never done this before. I’m not sure I can do it. I’m kind of nervous.” Now what I’ve done is I’ve taken a situation that I’m unsure about—and keep in mind, my four-year-old was a kid who was a really slow-to-warm-up kid, who was really tentative about new experiences. So here I am using words like, Oh, I’m not sure. I’ve never done this before. I’m kind of naming that felt experience of trying something new that I’ve never done before and that I’m nervous about it.
The play now has stopped because I’m not doing what he asked me to do. So now for him to continue the play, which he wants to do, he has to come up with a solution to an emotional problem. Now he has to come up with an idea. So he says, “Don’t worry, I’m sending a guy up for you. He’s going to show you how to do it.”
Now, nothing magical happens in this moment, Janet. It’s not like my kid now has this tool that he can use forevermore. However, when they have repeated experiences like this, it now can generalize to the idea of, Hmm, if I’m not sure about something, if I have somebody with me, that maybe makes me feel more confident to do it. So he sends a guy up and I’m like, “Thanks for showing me the way. I’m still a little nervous, but I’m going to come with you.” Then our guys go down together.
I know this is a tiny little micro-moment, but when we think about what is emotional regulation—and I love Dan Siegel’s definition of emotional regulation, which is the ability to monitor and modify our emotions. And that makes sense, like if I’m thinking about temperature regulation, I would notice that I was hot or cold and then I would modify that in some way, take off a sweater or put on a blanket, etc. So when we’re talking about emotional regulation: monitoring and modifying. Well, the way kids get there is through many, many experiences while development is unfolding of having someone model that for them, for them to try it on themselves.
And so in this moment, I’ve now kind of given an externalized example of monitoring my character’s state: I’m nervous, I don’t know if I can do this. And then asking for help and then going with a buddy. This lays out kind of a practice of emotional regulation.
I know it’s a tiny moment, but when we take an opportunity like that to bring emotions to life, whether it’s with the baby doll that they’re being too rough with or an action figure. Or maybe your kid hits you too hard with the sword and then you’re on the ground and you’re like, “Oh, shiver me timbers, my whole body’s hurting now,” that kind of thing. When we bring emotions into it, we’re giving them an incredibly rich experience of then being able to know and understand and be able to name their own internal experiences in the world.
Janet Lansbury: I totally see that. And also just by going through that with them and bringing up this idea that you might be afraid to go down the zipline or whatever, you’re normalizing that whole experience of, We’re all afraid. That’s not something just you have, my child, that worries you because you feel like you’re wrong for even having it maybe. But this is just a normal part of doing something hard. That there’ll be a voice in you saying you can’t do it and you’re too scared.
They get that too, just from every one of these, every time they’re able to experience something like this themselves. And have you as a parent maybe walk them through it that way, acknowledging them through it.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: And it really then implicitly communicates, We share our feelings with each other, we share our problems with each other. Those are the kinds of conversations we have in our home.
Janet Lansbury: We all feel like that, that’s just human feeling, human behavior.
I think one of the challenges is always to not just allow our child to lead the beginning of the play, but to keep bouncing the ball back to them to lead. And I love that you admitted that you and Georgie both like to go in there and fix it and how that can interfere with our child’s development of resilience. When we don’t allow them to be in the problem enough, when we’re trying to put a nice bow around it and put a happy ending on it right away.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: You are such a leading voice around that whole idea. You’ve helped me so much around that. I will say, my boys are now 25, 21, and 18, and I still have to be really intentional about that, Janet. Because I’m a person of efficiency and I like things done well. Especially when my kids were little and I could take the string cheese wrapper off quicker than watching them struggle. And now when I’ve got a suggestion for how they could do something better or faster or more efficient, instead of letting them figure that out. It’s really something I still work on.
And I think this one strategy in the book that we talk about, “scaffold and stretch,” is what I feel like you talk about all the time. This idea of allowing them to sit in the struggle, which is actually when they make strides. As they struggle, that’s truly where self-esteem and competence and confidence comes from. This idea of allowing them to, if they’re about to give up or they’re really frustrated, to not just fix it, but to maybe be the coach. Hmm, what should I try first?
The example in the book is a little kid who is like, This robot’s broken, throw it away!, or getting really mad about it. And the parent can say something like, Let’s see if we can be a robot doctor. What do you think I should try first?, or, What do you want to look at first? Expanding their ability to tolerate the frustration of not being able to fix it immediately by us being present, but really allowing them to continue to keep working on something and sitting in the struggle and making strides. So I appreciate you so much, because I feel like you have made such a voice in that area of helping all of us not over-rescue or too quickly rescue. I mean, do you feel like that’s something you still talk about all the time?
Janet Lansbury: Yes, because I actually don’t have that issue. I have other issues, but I don’t have that issue of wanting to jump in. I really like the challenge for myself to allow and wait and to figure out what the smallest thing is and try it. And I’ve seen how it works so many times that it’s become very self-fulfilling for me. I see how it works in the short term and in the long term.
But I think what you’re bringing up—thank you for saying that, by the way—what you’re bringing up that’s also really great about your book is that we learn through doing this kind of play with our child and observing them and attuning to them, like you said, we learn so much about ourselves. So it’s not just something we’re doing just for our kids, to understand them better. It’s actually for us too, for personal development and to get another window into ourselves.
I really love this one point that you made because I just haven’t heard this said, and it’s kind of obvious in a way, but it makes so much sense. You were talking about children’s sensory profiles, whether kids can tend to be more sensory seeking or sensory avoiding, and you talk about how this affects us as adults, as well as with our children. And just generally as a parent, you wrote:
Family life can be loud, chaotic, smelly, and really overwhelming. When we reflect on some of the times we were less patient as parents, we come to see that our impatience and reactivity may have been primarily from sensory overload and feeling overwhelmed. What a great thing to learn about ourselves and to notice our sensory gauges so that we can tend to our own nervous systems and give ourselves what we might need, like some quiet to feel more regulated.
I just thought that was a brilliant point. I mean, we talk so much about the triggers and the things that come up for us with our children’s behavior, but then this is a big part of it too, and maybe all of it, in some cases. That we’re losing it because we are sensorially overwhelmed.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: I wish I had learned that lesson earlier. And just as an aside on that idea, all of us as parents at some point are going to think, I wish I had known this earlier, or I wish I had done this differently, or feel some guilt about something that we did. And I honestly feel like if we never feel those things, that’s actually not good. Because if we are feeling those things, it means we’re continuing to grow and evolve and learn and reflect. And if we never feel those things, it means we’re probably not reflecting and we’re not growing. So I’m sort of celebrating that feeling that I’m having right now as I’m saying that I wish I had known that earlier.
When I think back about bedtimes, putting all three of my boys down or even just two of them, and how I would get really impatient at times. I’m still using that language. I think at the time I felt like, Oh, I was not very patient, and I’m actually a really patient person. But now when I look back, it was totally sensory overload. And had I known that when they were little, I could have navigated those things differently by getting my own sensory needs met.
But the other thing that’s really interesting is lots of times a parent and child are not a good match in terms of their sensory needs. And I see this all the time clinically, I’ve learned a bunch of this from working with the occupational therapists on my team. You may have a kid who’s really sensory seeking, so they love to crash into their parents and jump on them and climb on them. And then you may have a mom who’s really sensory averse to tactile input. So then you have this child slamming into you and climbing on you and it really ruffles your nervous system. This is so important, to really understand how we all have different sensory preferences and that at times it might not be a great fit for our child.
And let’s say that’s my situation and I don’t like kids climbing on me and it really makes me stressed out and then I snap or something like that. If I know my kid needs lots of crashing into and climbing kinds of things, I’m going to get a big cushion and I’m going to have them push against the cushion and I’m going to push back. I’m going to create these environments that allow my kid to get their sensory needs met while protecting my own sensory profile.
I think that’s such a great chapter, the dialing intensity up and down around this. And we had five or six different occupational therapists read that chapter and really work with us on it to make sure we were getting it, because it really is something that is super instructive for us to understand ourselves and our kids.
Janet Lansbury: That’s so great. And I think also on a practical level, just in the moment, this awareness that we’re going to gain by observing our children’s play and noticing what they’re doing and what kind of child they are and what their sensory needs are, we can stop that behavior as early as possible. So we see our child running towards us with that energy and we put our hand out so that we’re not waiting until we’re already snapping. We’re putting our hand out, Whoa, I’m going to slow you down. That’s pretty quick to be coming at me. That thing of being prepared, it really, really helps. And we only get that when we have a deeper understanding of our child.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Totally. And that would be a great opportunity to play “red light, green light” right then in that moment. That would be a way you could be prepared. If you know your kid comes running at you and you know you may not be able to do it, you can practice the red light, green light, yellow light or Simon Says or something like that in the moment. So that you can basically stop them from slamming into you, but it’s done as a game and fun and playful and engaged. Joining with instead of working against.
Janet Lansbury: Right, which will just make it work better. I don’t think we should feel as parents like we have to make it all fun, and we’re allowed to be genuine and be real. But it’s probably not going to happen again if we can handle it calmly or, like you said, in an upbeat mood, not letting it get to us.
On this note, though, about kids being kind of aggressive, I actually have a note that I received from a parent. Would you mind responding to it?
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: I’d love to.
Janet Lansbury: Okay, great.
I’m reaching out for help. I’m writing this after a particularly harsh evening with my four-year-old, which made me feel horrible and drained.
A bit of background: We are a Montessori family since birth. My son, who is four years old, also attends a Montessori setting since he was eight months. In the last year and a half or so, we’ve been facing lots of challenges with our son. He seems to have shifted from a gentle and rather easygoing child to a very aggressive kid. I don’t even remember the twos as so hard or full of tantrums, but now everything feels like a power struggle.
I want to believe I’m leading with confidence, but maybe my tone, which can get stern, is not conveying it. He regularly goes into a fight or flight when we set a limit or a reminder of one: wash hands, pick up something you dropped on the floor, use a quiet voice, etc. He can flip in a second and start scratching or hitting. When I tell him, I can’t let you hurt me or dad or our property, his response intensifies and gets worse so that we have to be physical in trying to block him or hold him or take him to a room to isolate him. I try to stay with him so it does not feel like a timeout. But it is hard when I’m on the receiving end. And being physical with a lashing-out, strong four-year-old can be difficult by itself.
I know he is a proprioceptive seeker, so we try to have rough play and give him some input to meet his sensory needs. And when I ask him during a more relaxed time why does he do this, he says, “I protect myself from you because you tell me not-nice things.” I interpret this as his inability to accept the boundary.
I’m just struggling to get to him. I see the sweet little boy with the good heart underneath all this behavior. And I try not to judge it, as I know there’s an underlying cause. I think mainly he’s tired, as it tends to happen in the afternoons. But at the same time, I need to hold our boundaries and also get to a point where these behaviors don’t become a norm, without becoming an authoritarian parent.
And, as you’ll probably ask, we’ve had all the possible life changes in the last year: moved a house and got a new sibling, who is 10 weeks old, and started longer days at the children’s house [which I guess is the school]. So I know this is a lot and I try to be compassionate, but I can’t let him hit me or his sister to vent out.
I am aware he feels safe to do so, which is positive because he knows my love is not conditional. But tonight was too harsh and I was so agitated. I read him his bedtime story, but refused to cuddle as I felt I needed space. I feel so bad about it and wonder what did I do to turn my sweet little boy to an aggressive child who feels a need to protect himself from us?
Any thoughts or help will be much appreciated.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Oh my goodness. Well, I would love to hear your thoughts too, Janet, but I will say, what an intentional mom, right? She’s very thoughtful and even the details she gives show how much thought and care she gives to her parenting. And she’s right, four-year-olds can be freakishly strong when they are physically aggressive. And she’s also right that she cannot let him hurt the baby or herself. So what do we do?
Of course, there are so many things happening here. Having a new sibling and going to school for longer days is a big transition and moving a home, those are sort of all big, huge transitions for a four-year-old. And we can just say in and of itself: a four-year-old. A four-year-old is so amazing because they’re so brilliant and they have incredible motor abilities and they have such amazing ideas. Their judgment and their emotional brakes are still developing in big ways, so it can be a really tricky combination.
A couple of things I want to say. The first is John Gottman, who’s a couples researcher, says that you want five positive interactions to every one negative interaction as a couple. So this mom is feeling frustrated too because it’s feeling like there’s a lot of negative interactions. And so what comes to my mind around this is really focusing on connection and cooperation. It sounds like this mom has thought a lot about special time and connected time, but it sounds like they’re having a lot of challenging negative interactions. So if we could bring in more playfulness and more snuggles, more connection time, that could be really, really helpful in this little guy feeling connected, which also can be very helpful with cooperation.
And then the other piece is, again, around playfulness and cooperation. Janet, you’re so right, we don’t have to make every moment an effing puppet show to get our kid to comply or to help them cooperate. But it can be so much more fun and effective than the battles. So what I would say is when mom is setting a limit, if she could use playfulness and silliness. I told someone the other day whose three-year-old continued to be rough with the dog no matter what mom did, I was like, can we make him in charge of being the dog’s protector? So it’s a little bit of a shift, giving him some ownership over something, having him be in charge of something where he’s having difficulty with the boundary and setting the boundary. If he’s feeling aggressive, do a keep-it-up game with a balloon or help him move his body in other ways that are more effective.
The other thing I want to say is that it’s okay if mom just sets the boundary and he gets upset and she is just present with him while he is upset. We don’t have to avoid children feeling upset, and we can just be the confident leaders that allow them to feel, with our presence. And I think you probably talk about this too, Janet, I think people get confused about what co-regulation is. So remember I defined regulation as the ability to monitor and modify. So co-regulation is the ability to monitor what our child is experiencing and needing and then modifying to help support them in those moments. And that’s how they develop those skills.
I think a lot of times people think co-regulation is like you use this super calm voice that’s almost robotic and sounds creepy to me. Authentic co-regulation can have a lot of energy in our voice and be really like, Oh buddy, you’re so frustrated! You’re so mad! I’m right here with you while you’re feeling that. Protecting your body, keeping a pillow or something safe between you and your kid. But I think it’s okay if he feels and you allow him to feel and you’re there with him while he feels it and rides the wave. We’re waiting for development to unfold.
I think around all of these transitions, he probably needs more positive reps and connection with you, even if that’s just one or two minutes a day with silliness, with laughter, maybe a little bit of rocking or snuggling.
And one other thing that may not relate, but I’m just thinking about how this has been so helpful repeatedly, is after a new baby comes into the family, sometimes three-, four-year-olds will pretend to be a baby or they’ll whine or they’ll be like, I want to be the baby, or they’ll want a bottle or whatever. And a lot of times the grown-ups then say, “But you’re the big brother, you don’t need a bottle anymore!” But if we can be really playful and be like, Oh, are you my baby? Let’s get you a bottle! And swaddle him up and bring him a bottle, snuggle him and laugh together about how silly that is. It’s actually this beautiful way that meets needs and is silly and playful too. So you can lean into those needs, stay curious, and then just be as playful as you can. That can help shift the pushback on the boundaries.
What do you think, Janet? Any thoughts?
Janet Lansbury: I always zero in on what you were saying about the feelings. This parent reminding herself, I mean, she’s got a 10-week-old, she’s got to be just totally drained. It sounds like she’s home full-time, so she’s totally drained by that. And then to have her son be upset and acting this way is really, really hard.
But I feel like he’s got so many reasons that he needs to vent a lot, a lot. That’s what happens when there’s all those changes. That just means more feelings. And how do children get their feelings out? They get them out with this behavior that kind of fills them up inside and then just have some boundary against it so that it can release and let it all go. And so if she could see that as something that is really positive that he has to do, so she’s not afraid of it and not feeling like it’s a failure.
It’s so easy for us as parents to feel like failures when our child is upset at all or unhappy. And it’s the exact opposite. Especially in a case like this where a child has so many reasons to have feelings. We could do all these things and maybe not break down very much—although I would!—but children can’t. They’re really healthy that way, they need to get it out. That’s healthier. So to try to make that mental shift for herself, that she allows for more space for that to happen.
I also love what you said about having the calm response. And I think of it like, what if I came up to you and I said, “Oh my gosh! Somebody just held me up and they tried to steal my car and I got away!” And you just said, very calmly and monotone, “That was really scary.”
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: It’s disturbing!
Janet Lansbury: I don’t feel very seen, I don’t feel heard. I don’t feel like what I said was valid to you, the way I acted. You’re so right that we can’t turn into the robots that are kind of self-protective for us. We have to really try to make that mental shift.
I love that this parent sees the sweet little boy under there. I mean, that right there is the key to everything. So this sweet little boy is hurting, he’s hurting and he’s had to make so many changes. And every change represents a loss, a loss of his afternoon at home when he’s now at school longer, a loss of his other home, a loss of his parent’s full attention. It’s loss upon loss upon loss upon loss.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: And I think it’s interesting that she knows that it typically is in the afternoons. So that could be, like you’re saying, loss. Normally, I got to go home a few hours before now. And so he may be holding it together all day, social politics at school and sensory overload at school. There may be a lot also in that longer day that kind of overwhelms him. So when he comes home, his tank is empty. As Mona Delahooke would say, a really low body budget, he’s spent his body budget. He may be more vulnerable at those moments. Even noticing that there’s a particular time that it happens more can allow her to say, okay, what could we do differently that would allow us to kind of shift and be more proactive around that? I know it’s really hard with a newborn baby.
I remember a parenting educator that I love, even with her second-grade daughter, when she would get home from school, she was so dysregulated. She had some underlying sensory challenges and so being at school all day really taxed her. They started having these battles every day in the car on the way home. And what mom started doing was really just not talking a lot in the car, leaving a snack and a drink in the car and getting home. And then mom would spend about five or 10 minutes just rocking her. This was a second grader. It would regulate her nervous system and they would have a great rest of the day. So I would say in that afternoon period, what is something you could do proactively? Is it, let’s make sure we’re outside?
I think there’s also something to say about what works best for mom. What do you need to get through the day, too? What makes it workable so that you’re less reactive as a parent?
Janet Lansbury: Yes. I mean, the way she took care of herself at the end, where she’s like, I can’t do a cuddle. But then the problem is that she felt bad about it, so that’s like lowering her fuel. If she could have done that without beating herself up about that and just knowing that her child would be unhappy, but in that unhappiness would be all of these losses that he’s sharing. Seeing that as positive, that she has her limits, she takes care of herself, and that he has feelings about that.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: With those kinds of moments, we can always the next day say, “We missed our cuddle last night. Let’s have one now.” But I think too we have to remember he’s had lots of bedtime cuddles, and just because we have a night that goes wrong or doesn’t go the way we wish it had or we felt like we could have handled it better in the moment, I think those judgments are not very helpful. And just because you have a kid who is really aggressive right now given all of these losses, doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.
Janet Lansbury: Absolutely not.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: It doesn’t mean that you’re failing in any way. It means you have a child who is safe to express feelings and you are all in a period of transition right now. You can trust all the deposits you’ve already made in terms of connection and relationship. And also to trust development. That as development unfolds, he’ll have greater and greater capacity and he’ll adjust to these changes as well. And as your baby gets older, you’ll be sleeping better at some point. So all of it’s really okay.
Janet Lansbury: Yes. Wow, this has been so helpful, and I highly recommend everybody check out your book The Way of Play. And thank you and Georgie for creating this book. I think it’s really going to help a lot of parents find a way that can help their child and bring them closer to their child, which is what we all want, of course. Thank you so much for sharing.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Thank you so much. It’s always so much fun to talk with you. And as I always say, I’m such a fan of you and your work, and I just am excited that you’re continuing to do stuff to support parents.
Janet Lansbury: The feeling’s absolutely mutual. You take care.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Thank you.
