Episode 327 Transcript
Hello, it is Rachel, and welcome to episode 327 of Your Parenting Long Game. So many parents, when they come to me, say they’re walking on eggshells around their children. Understandably so, because they don’t want to set their child off, and they don’t always know what’s going to upset their child.
They also tell me that if their child does get upset, it creates so much drama and takes so much energy to deal with it. So today I want to suggest a way of looking at dramatic situations that will help you get unstuck from them more quickly, so that you don’t have to dread your child’s big emotions, and you do know how to get through them if they happen.
Let’s talk about for now what goes on during a moment of drama. Let’s say you ask your child a simple question, like whether they finished their homework, but they respond something like, ” Yes, leave me alone! Why are you always nagging me?”
Of course, all you done was ask an innocent question.
So you’re thinking, “Why are they making such a big deal out of this?” And at the same time, you’re probably thinking “That was so disrespectful. I can’t let them get away with that!”
So you say to them, “Hey, I just asked you a question. Do you want to try responding a little bit more respectfully?”
Then they blame you saying, “I wouldn’t have to act like that if you didn’t bother me all the time! Why can’t you just trust me?”
Of course you feel like you have to defend yourself. So you say, “I do trust you, but I’ve seen that… and then you give them all the reasons that you have to nag.” They get more defensive. And that simple question created so much drama.
Now, your drama may look a little different.
Maybe your child is worried about something, and you try to tell them not to worry, and they get more upset. Or maybe you’re asking your child to get off of their device, and they try to negotiate, and when you don’t give in, they explode. But whatever the initiator of the drama, you probably live in a world where one small thing can become a big emotional deal.
Unfortunately, whether we realize it or not, we perpetuate this cycle of drama.
Now, if you’re like most parents, you’re probably right now thinking, “Great! Another thing I’m doing wrong.”
But that’s not why I’m telling you that you may be perpetuating this cycle of drama. I’m telling you because if you are impacting the cycle, that also means that you can change this cycle.
And I want to tell you how. In fact, I’m going to teach you a specific drama reducing strategy called turning the faucet down, which is really another strategy to increase your influence with your child and diffuse drama more effectively.
Let’s talk about what I mean by turning the faucet down by using a metaphor of, you guessed it, a sink. Let’s think about how we want a sink to work. We want the water to come in, the water to go through the sink, down the drain, and go out, no problem. And we kind of want the same thing for our kids. When something happens, we want that input to come in through the faucet, get processed, move on. We want them to handle situations and move on.
But things don’t look like that for kids with big emotions. What’s usually coming into their sink is yuck. Imagine there’s this green gunky stuff coming in, and not only do they have green gunky stuff coming in, their drain is clogged. They have yuck coming in, but they don’t have the skills to process that yuck effectively, and that’s why their drain is clogged.
What happens is lots of yuck coming in, it can’t get drained, so their sink starts to overflow. The overflow is what you see in their negative behaviors, moods, and attitudes.
So when you talk to a child about their homework, their sink was already really full and then they get even more upset and they become disrespectful or they yell or they shut down or they melt down. Those are all signs that they had a lot of yuck coming into the sink and they weren’t able to drain it appropriately because they don’t have mature coping skills.
But what happens is we react to that sink being overfilled. We react to their behavior, mood, or attitude that is a symptom that their sink is overflowing. That is a symptom that they have more yuck than skills. And then we get stuck in the cycle because all we are doing is just adding more Yuck to a sink that is already overflowing.
It doesn’t work, because when we do that, we are turning up the faucet of Yuck. We’re just pouring more Yuck into their sink. We’re reacting to their reactions, there’s more yuck coming in, and they still don’t have the tools, so there’s more overflow, and that’s why that cycle occurs.
As you know, the first step of the long game method is to become a powerful positive influence, and turning the faucet down instead of turning it up is how you get there. I will explain how to do that, but for now, I want to tell you how you know if you are turning that yuck faucet up.
There are a few symptoms.
If you see your child’s negative behavior, mood, or attitude, and you do anything you can to try to make it stop, you’re convincing them or trying to control their behavior, you are turning the faucet up.
If when they are having a negative behavior mood or attitude, you end up having a negative behavior mood or attitude also, then you are turning the faucet up.
If nothing seems to work in that moment and you feel stuck, then you are very likely turning the faucet up.
What we need to learn how to do is turn that faucet down to stop adding more yuck. We need to let that sink go, we need to let all that yuck that’s in the sink go down slowly through the drain, which it will do, even if it’s clogged, it will slowly go down the drain. And that’s really what it looks like to let them travel the Yuck curve.
If you’re not familiar with the Yuck curve, I do have a free resource that discusses what the Yuck curve is and how understanding it helps you address negativity in the moment. But the important part about the Yuck curve is that even when a child senses that they’re safe, it does take time for them to move beyond this behavior, just like it would take time for water to actually go through a clogged drain.
So again, if you want to know a little bit more about the yuck curve and what this all looks like, please head to the show notes at rachel-bailey.com/327, and there’s a free resource about the yuck curve as well.
For now though, I want to give you some examples from a child who has a big reaction when their parent asks them if they’ve done their homework. I want you to see what’s going on from their perspective. And I want you to see what it’s like when a parent turns up the faucet versus when they turn down the faucet and how this can impact a child’s behavior.
So again, this is a letter written from a child whose parent just asked them if they did their homework and here’s what it’s like for them when their parent again turns up the faucet.
This letter may start, “Dear whoever will listen, I just had a bad interaction with my mom. She asked me if I’d finished my homework, and I know I shouldn’t have reacted like that. The thing is, I have a really hard time with my homework. It’s not even that my homework is necessarily hard, although sometimes it is, but it’s just that it takes so much energy to get started and to get through it.
I keep getting distracted and it’s so hard to pay attention when all I want to do is anything else. And honestly, I already spent so much energy dealing with school and my friends. A lot of the time my friends lately will play without me and I feel like I don’t fit in, but I don’t know what to do with that.
So I’m just already spending so much energy dealing with things that I don’t like to do. So in that moment when mom asked me about my homework, I was trying so hard not to think about things that were upsetting me. And then she brought it up and I just couldn’t handle it. You know, I know I should act better when that happens, but it’s so hard to do.
And then she got mad at me for getting upset. I know I made it worse, but I don’t know what else to do. How do other people deal with this?”
You can see that what was really going on for this child was this child was struggling to begin with and not handling that struggle effectively.
And then when the parent came in and got upset with their reaction, instead of understanding that their reaction was a symptom of something else, the faucet got turned up.
Now here’s an example of what it might look like if a parent were turning down the faucet.
And it’s important to recognize they’re not letting him get away with anything. They’re just letting that yuck slowly go down the drain in that moment.
So here’s the letter from a child whose parent turns the faucet down: “Dear whoever will listen, I just had an interaction with my mom. She asked me if I’d finished my homework, and if I’m being honest, my homework was the last thing I wanted to think about in that moment. So I know I was rude, but I asked her to back off.
It wasn’t just that I was mad at her. It was that she was bringing up something else that made me so mad that I knew I couldn’t get away from, and that was hanging over my head. But instead of yelling back at me, my mom was quiet for a couple of seconds. Then she asked what was wrong.
If I’m being honest, I was still really upset, so I told her how annoyed I was that she kept asking me when what I really meant was that I was annoyed that I had to do my homework and I couldn’t get around it.
She didn’t say much. She just let me get it out. She didn’t try to fix it. She didn’t get mad because of how I handled it. And I guess because she didn’t get more mad, those feelings eventually sort of burnt out. And although I definitely still didn’t want to do my homework, when she waited a little while and then asked if she could help me make a plan to get my homework done, it didn’t feel as awful.
It was like I’d gotten rid of all of those annoying feelings and could think straight again.”
Again, what our kids really need for us is to stop addressing the symptom, that they have a lot of yuck coming in and no skills to handle that yuck. This is not an excuse for their behavior. But they do need us to see that they’re overflowing and they need us to turn down the faucet instead of turning it up. So we’re not adding more yuck, and then with time, they will become more regulated and their behavior will change.
Now, of course, the long-term goal is to teach them these skills so the drain isn’t clogged to begin with. But unfortunately, when we try to get them to use better strategies in the moment, or when we get mad at them for not having better strategies, which is essentially what we’re doing, we lose influence, not only in the moment, but we lose influence later, when we try to bring up the skills and strategies.
So instead of going straight to clogging the drain, we have to address that yuck first. It’s almost like if a plumber came to see about a clogged sink, they wouldn’t try to clear the drain without turning off the faucet first. We have to do the same thing.
In my signature “Beyond Behavior” program, I teach that we actually start to improve situations by addressing our yuck first. Because we cannot be in a powerful positive influence when we are in yuck. Then I say we move on to their yuck because they can’t do anything different if their faucet is on. And then we teach skills. They will learn these skills when we are a powerful positive influence.
And there’s a cost to not doing it this way. When we don’t do it this way, when we go right to skills, or we just turn up the faucet and increase their yuck, we cannot calm a child down when we are making things worse.
We simply create another layer of yuck, and then the faucet is stronger next time. So next time you ask them about homework, or next time they have to do their homework, they have even more yuck going into the situation.
When we are constantly turning the faucet up and reacting to their behavior in the moment, they don’t trust us because they feel like we’re against them. That means when we try to turn the faucet down, it’s going to take more effort on our part.
Now, if you are feeling stuck and exhausted and hearing this seems overwhelming, I want you to remember this. You have a sink too. You may have a lot of yuck coming in and your sink is going to overflow.
So that’s why you’re trying to get your children to change. Of course you do need to address the yuck coming into your sink as well. This is a process that can be taught. This is not a process that takes years and years. This is a process that when you follow it in this order does make a long-lasting difference and will help you get unstuck.
Because when you see their behavior as a symptom and you turn the faucet down, when you learn to regulate yourself, you can help them regulate and teach them skills.
When you become a powerful positive influence, you can calm your child down more quickly. That means you’re spending less time in dealing with emotions, not just emotions from your child, but emotions from the sibling who is witnessing all of this happening. And emotions from your spouse, who’s getting even more upset as you are trying to diffuse things.
When you turn that faucet down, you spend more time enjoying your family than working on all of these emotions.
When you know that turning the faucet down starts with you regulating, your child sees what it is like to regulate. That means that in the future when something doesn’t go their way, maybe you tell them they can’t have a sleepover even though they really want to, they now have a picture in their mind of what it looks like to actively calm yourself down.
And think about how much relief you’ll feel as a parent when you see them actively calming themselves down.
When you learn to turn that faucet down, your child releases a feeling of yuck instead of adding to it. That means that when things don’t go their way, that is not just another thing going wrong in their life that is building inside of them and will come out later the next time you ask them about their homework.
And, of course, when you learn to turn that faucet down, you are a powerful positive influence. And there are huge benefits to your influence. Not only do you learn to feel less helpless, but you can find relief and peace in knowing that you’re giving them and they’re open to learning from you what they need to be successful… what they need to be successful in their relationships and what they need to be successful in their own well-being.
This is long game parenting. So let’s stop turning the faucet up when we see behavior and stop reacting to that behavior. Let’s stop adding more yuck to the sink.
Instead, we need to go beneath the behavior, turning down that faucet, understanding how your regulation can help them travel the yuck curve and process those feelings more easily. Turning down the faucet works so much faster than trying to get them to change.
I have resources to help you here. You’ll find more information about the Yuck Curve and how to help a child through their big emotions in the moment. And if you’re ready to take action and learn more about becoming a powerful positive influence, turning down the faucet and giving your kids what they need to be more resilient, even when you’re not around, there will be a link also to apply to my Beyond Behavior program where we can make these changes that last.
All of those can be found on the show notes for this episode at rachel-bailey.com/327. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.
FREE RESOURCE: What to do when your child is having a big emotion – The Yuck Curve
Talk to Rachel: How to get more peace in your home and in your mind
