Episode 323 Transcript
Hello, it is Rachel and welcome to episode 323 of Your Parenting Long Game. One of the situations that we deal with on a regular basis when we’re raising kids with big emotions is that they melt down when things don’t go their way… even if you never told them that things would go their way!
So maybe they wanted to stay up later to do something. You never confirm that they could stay up later, but when you remind them that they have to go to bed, they get really upset, mad at you, telling you about how unfair things are for them. It’s like they imagine things will go a certain way in their mind, and if it doesn’t go that way, they can’t handle it.
And this affects you. Addressing meltdowns takes time, it takes energy, and it affects others in the family. So, of course, you want your child to be able to think to themselves, “Okay, I have to go to bed. I’m bummed, but it’s not that big of a deal,” rather than freaking out.
But you probably want a little bit more than just their ability to handle situations on a case by case basis. You want long lasting peace of mind, knowing that your child is able to handle things not going their way in life… because inevitably things aren’t going to go their way in relationships, in school, in jobs, in really any area that they face.
And it is possible to help kids recognize that things not going their way isn’t a reason to melt down. But for them to get to that point, they have to see that things not going their way is less of a threat or a problem. And it isn’t something they naturally know how to do.
The good news is that this is something that they can learn to do.
But let’s start with where you probably are right now. Again, maybe you tell your child that they have to go to bed because it’s a school night and they melt down. Or you tell them that you’re not going to buy them a game that they’ve asked for and then they yell and scream about how they never get anything they want. Or maybe your family decides that you’re not going to go to the restaurant that they want to go to and then they sulk for the rest of the evening and refuse to talk to anyone.
So you’re probably thinking, “Do they know how much energy I put into giving them things that they do want? They can’t get one thing and it’s the end of the world. How will they be able to handle life?”
You’re probably feeling worried that they’ll always make a big deal out of these things. You’re frustrated that you can’t figure it out.
And maybe you’re even feeling resentful that they take so much energy and guilty that you aren’t a parent who can handle this and motivate better responses.
But you’ve probably tried a lot of things, and nothing seems to work to help them handle the fact that things aren’t always going to go their way. You’ve read how important it is to connect with your child, so you’ve tried to connect with them about it. Talk about how hard it is when they can’t get what they want. But that doesn’t seem to do anything.
And you’ve probably also heard from family members or others who have seen your child melt down, and these people have implied that your child is acting spoiled and you just need to be harder on them.
So you’ve tried to be harder on them, telling them that they have to learn to live with the fact that life isn’t fair, but lecturing them and punishing them when they act like that, that doesn’t seem to work either. And maybe because you felt stuck and confused, you’ve even used the “strategy” of not really addressing their meltdowns at all.
But you know the drama affects other people, and you don’t want to give up on this. You want to make sure they don’t melt down every time things don’t go their way.
And I will tell you that the reason these strategies don’t work is because these strategies don’t work. They are actually examples of Band Aid parenting where we’re trying to address the behavior on the surface, these meltdowns on the surface, and make them go away without addressing what’s beyond the behavior.
And I want to explain a little bit more about what’s going on under the behavior and why logical strategies tend not to work. And it’s really about the science. So you could probably recognize that a meltdown, when your child gets angry or says that life is unfair, or they’re disrespectful to themselves or someone else, any of these meltdowns happen when a child is in yuck and they’ve gone into fight or flight. Now, the fact that your child is already melting down means they are currently in fight or flight.
Now, to get out of that place and to return to better behavior, they have to feel safe, right? Because the fight or flight response happens when they sense danger or discomfort. So to get out of fight or flight, they have to feel safe, they can’t feel threatened. But when you tell them in that moment that their response to what’s happening is wrong, when you tell them that they can’t melt down or they’re acting spoiled or they shouldn’t be like that, or when you simply do whatever you can to try to get them to stop, all of that only creates more of a threat for them. It creates more yuck, so they stay in fight or flight longer, and the situation gets worse, not better.
So let’s look at a more specific example of this through both a parent’s eyes and a child’s eyes. Let’s say you tell your child that they can’t have a game they asked for and they start to melt down.
If we’re looking at the situation through your eyes, a parent’s eyes, you’re probably thinking, “Why is my child so upset? It’s just a game and he has to learn to handle hearing no. I can’t give him everything he wants because he’ll become an entitled brat. He needs to learn that things won’t always go his way and that he can’t always make a big deal. Everyone around him will be annoyed if he makes such a big deal. What if it starts affecting his friendships and other relationships and other areas of his life?”
That’s what you’re thinking. And it makes sense. So then you probably in response to your thoughts, say something to him like, “You need to learn to handle ‘no.’ It’s just a game. I don’t want you acting so entitled.” That’s likely what would go on for you or another parent, how you’d think about it and what you do.
But let’s look at this same situation through a child’s eyes, through a child who’s just been told no, that they can’t have a game they wanted. Here’s likely what they are thinking. A child is thinking, “I really wanted that game. All of my friends are playing and they’re telling me how awesome it is. I’ve been hoping and hoping for weeks that I could finally join in with them. Why don’t my parents care at all about what’s going on for me? So many things in my life stink. I just want to feel good every once in a while. I know they tell me that I need to handle no more calmly, but how am I supposed to do that? I don’t know how to do that. I just know I hate this feeling and I want it to go away.”
So with this in mind, you can probably see how just telling them that they need to stop, that they need to learn how to handle the word no, that doesn’t help a child who is struggling in this way, a child who doesn’t know how to deal with feeling left out and uncomfortable, a child who doesn’t know how to regulate themselves and calm down more easily.
The responses we usually give, based on what we’re thinking, they don’t work. Again, when our kids are melting down, if we’re not addressing the real problem that they have –this big discomfort inside– we are not going to change the situation. When we tell them they shouldn’t feel the way they feel or act the way they’re acting, it doesn’t help. It’s ineffective and they don’t know how to do what we’re asking them to do.
And I will tell you that this approach of trying to get them to change their behavior without seeing the cause of behavior or teaching them how to do something, it impacts them in longer term ways as well.
When we tell them they’re wrong, and they need to change, and we’re punishing them for not changing, it makes them feel more helpless. Again, they’re hearing that they should be calmer, but they don’t know how to do that. It’s like telling someone they have to do an algebra problem without teaching them how to do algebra and making them feel bad for not knowing how to do it instead of teaching them how to do it.
And when we just tell them they shouldn’t feel the way they feel or act the way they act, that makes them doubt themselves and their experiences. In that moment, they are upset and we’re telling them they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be acting that way. They shouldn’t be feeling that way. So when we tell them that, they learn not to trust their own feelings.
They actually learn to fear their emotions, because now what they’ve learned is when they feel a certain way, people are going to get mad at them and their emotions become dangerous to them and that causes even more of a problem. It doesn’t foster resilience, it fosters fear.
So what do we need to do instead? Instead what they need is someone who respects what they’re going through, that being told no creates a huge amount of discomfort for them. And they need someone to teach them how to see things not going their way as less of a problem or a threat.
Remember, this is not something they do naturally.
Now they also likely need help knowing how to handle their yuck more maturely when they experience yuck. But in this episode, I’m specifically going to focus on a formula for teaching your child how to see a situation as less of a threat.
This formula is called “The Adaptability Formula” and you can use it to teach your child to see situations as less of a threat or a problem.
There are actually two steps to this formula and they’re pretty simple. The first step is to strengthen flexible thinking skills, and the second step is to practice flexible thinking skills.
Let me explain why these steps are important.
Again, kids with big emotions do not naturally have great flexible thinking skills. Their zone of comfort is pretty small, so they want things to go a certain way to keep them in their comfort zone. If a situation brings them too close to the edge of their comfort zone, their brain senses it as a threat. Our job is to increase that zone of comfort so they don’t see things not going their way as dangerous.
And we do that first by strengthening their flexible thinking skills using engaging activities.
This is very different from telling them they need to think flexibly. We’re actually strengthening any skill that they do have, but we’re doing it in an engaging way.
And doing it this way is very important for two reasons. First, if we just tell them, “You need to be more flexible when I tell you no, just hearing that puts them into Yuck, and when someone is in Yuck, the part of the brain that learns new skills and uses new skills is inaccessible. So causing Yuck reduces motivation and it reduces a child’s ability to use the strategies that you’re teaching. So you actually want to teach them in a positive way, not just by lecturing them or threatening them.
So when you use engaging activities, they actually instead start to associate flexible thinking positive feelings rather than negative ones.
So one example of an engaging activity that requires flexible thinking skills is an activity called Fortunately, Unfortunately. And the way this works is you make a statement, any statement in the world that starts with either “fortunately” or “unfortunately.”
So it could be “Fortunately it was a sunny day.” Now the next person says “unfortunately…” and negates what the first person just said. So, “Unfortunately I see rain clouds.” The next person says, “Fortunately I have an umbrella.” The next person says “Unfortunately the umbrella is broken.” And you go around and around with these statements.
Now it’s ideal if you can play with an odd number of people because then the same person isn’t saying fortunately or unfortunately each time, but don’t worry if you don’t have an odd number of people. Even if you have two people, this will work you and your child.
The key is that this requires a child to think differently than the last statement. So they’re required to think more flexibly and change their perspective or point of view. And because this is a fun activity, and it can get really silly and there can be a lot of laughter. Now they’re associating flexible thinking with positive situations. Now in my programs, I also have a lot of other ways to engage them in flexible thinking skills, but this is a really good place to start.
Now, once your child has practiced these engaging strategies, the second step is to practice these strategies in situations that are not threatening to them. Again, you don’t want to go to a situation where they’re being inflexible: “You need to be flexible when I tell you no.”
You actually want them to practice with other situations, for example, a character in a movie or in a book or on TV, or they can even practice with you. So if you say something like, “Hey, this is what happened to me. Let’s play the fortunately, unfortunately game because I got really upset by this and I need to see it differently.” When you’re asking them to coach you, it is a lot less threatening. And just like I said before, we want them to associate flexible thinking with positive feelings.
Telling you or other characters what to do helps them practice these skills, but it doesn’t threaten them. And when they’re able to apply these skills to other situations, it actually helps them feel more capable. So not only are they gaining practice with these skills, but they’re gaining confidence as well.
And once you’ve done these two things, once you’ve used engaging activities with them and once you’ve practiced on other people, then you can absolutely talk to them about how to apply it to their situations. But once they’ve already started to think positively about these strategies, they won’t be as resistant because they’ve associated these strategies with with positivity and with their own capability.
So what happens after a child starts to feel more comfortable with these flexible thinking skills, I want to look at this through their eyes again. Remember that situation we were looking at earlier where they couldn’t get the thing they wanted. Now, when they’ve practiced these skills, here is more likely what they’re thinking. And notice how this child is going back and forth in their mind because they’ve been taught how to do this.
So a child may think, “I really wanted that game. I’m pretty sure my friends will still be playing it in a few weeks though. Maybe I can talk to my parents about saving up my own money to get it. Oh, but my parents don’t seem to care how badly I want it. But wait, in the past, I’ve talked to them about things without getting upset, and they’re more likely to listen to me. I’m going to at least try that.”
So you can see how they are going to the negative and seeing it as a threat, but then talking themselves out of that.
The child keeps shifting in their mind, the “unfortunately” to the “fortunately” and they stop seeing things not going their way as a threat.
Kids don’t naturally know how to do this. We generally don’t naturally know how to do this either. Both kids and we get stuck in this spiral when we’re thinking negatively of going down that road of seeing everything as a threat, instead of being able to get ourselves out of it.
We need to teach our kids how to do that.
Because it is hard to see a child melt down just because they don’t get their way, especially when you know you already give them so much and you know that they’re going to be told no and not get their way in the future. So it’s tempting to just get frustrated and assume they’re being spoiled, or that they won’t be able to handle life, and to sternly insist that they need to learn that things won’t always go their way, or to punish them for having certain reactions.
The problem is that just telling them that they need to be more flexible, or punishing them for not having an appropriate only makes them doubt themselves and their experience. In that moment, you’re telling them their feelings and experience are wrong or bad, and you’re not teaching them how to do better. Or, if you have tried to teach them, you’ve done it when they or you were in a state of yuck and your teaching only becomes more of a threat.
Our desire to control our kids negative reactions impacts how they feel about themselves and it impacts how they feel about you. You lose your influence and you negatively impact the relationship and your child still hasn’t learned to do something different in the future.
But when you use the Adaptability Formula, when you strengthen their flexible thinking skills and practice their flexible thinking skills, they eventually realize that being flexible makes them feel better.
So not only have they increased their zone of comfort so they can handle things not going their way, but they now know through experience that they can handle things not going their way because they have in the past. That boosts their resilience and that boosts their confidence.
It can also increase your peace of mind because you know that the next time you tell them they can’t get a video game, instead of melting down, they’ll be able to work through it. And all of that happens when you go beyond behavior to address the cause of their behavior and give them what they need to succeed.
That is long game parenting and that is what going beyond behavior to foster resilience is all about.
If you’d like to know how to do this for your child, how to go beyond their quote unquote dramatic behavior to raise them to trust you, trust themselves, and handle challenges with confidence, I’d love to have a chat with you. You can go to the show notes for this episode to sign up for a beyond behavior roadmap call. You’ll also find some other free resources to support you as you are raising children with big emotions. All of that is all of that is at rachel-bailey.com/323.
And as always, if you enjoy this podcast, I’d be really grateful if you would subscribe, rate, and review. That allows me to keep coming back to you and to reach other parents who want more peace in their homes and peace of mind. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you again soon.