Episode 334 Transcript
Hello, it is Rachel and welcome to episode 334 of Your Parenting Long Game.
When I talk to most parents who are raising kids with big emotions and I ask them what they’d really like in their homes, how they’d like things to be, one of the most common things I hear is they’d like it to be more peaceful.
So then I often ask, “Well, what’s preventing the peace from happening?” And very often, not surprisingly, what is disrupting the peace in our home is our children’s big reactions when things don’t go well. And often, on top of that, is our reactions to their big reactions.
So, for example, you may have a child who gets really upset when they can’t play the game they want, or they lose a game, and then we get upset with them for having that reaction.
Or maybe you have a child who’s anxious and they struggle with transitions, so we have to change plans to accommodate them, and then we become frustrated with them. They sense that. And that makes things worse.
Or maybe your child gets upset when you ask them to do something, put away their dishes or clean their room. They respond poorly to our request and then we respond poorly to their response.
And the theme underneath all of this is very often, as you can hear, it is emotions and reactions that are controlling our homes.
These emotions seem to have all of the power, but what I would like to do is help you get power back.
That is what Leadership Parenting strategies do. They make sure that your and your child’s emotions do not control you, and they make sure your child’s emotions do not control them.
And there is something you need to know if you want to get, and there’s something you need to know if you want to get to that place, if you want to get power back over emotions.
Because getting power back is understanding this one thing: It is all about the threats. Well, maybe it’s about two things, but they’re both related to the fact that it’s all about the threats.
I will tell you that whether emotions will control situations or not depends on whether A, you see emotions and reactions as a threat, and B, whether you’re able to manage your response to these threats.
So let me give you an example. If you see that your child is not going to bed when they’re supposed to, your brain’s going to notice that.
But here’s the key: How you react to what you notice is determined by whether you see your child not going to bed as a threat or not.
For example, if you know that the next day is a snow day and that they can sleep in, you’re not going to see their resistance as a threat and you’re not going to respond with as much negativity.
However, if you do see this as a threat, if maybe tomorrow is not a snow day and they’re not going to bed when they’re supposed to, and you think threat thoughts like, “This is going to turn into a miserable long night and they’re going to be exhausted tomorrow,” or, “But I have so much work to do tonight, I need them to go to bed!” If you think those thoughts, if you perceive what they’re doing is a threat, you will likely respond very differently.
And here’s the science of why your reaction will be determined by whether you perceive a threat or not. As soon as you interpret a situation as a threat, your brain says “Alarm! Alarm! This is bad!” and your fight or flight response kicks in.
And the behavior that our fight or flight response brings out to “protect us” — in this case, your brain is protecting you by making sure your child goes to bed because you don’t want them to be cranky the next day or because you have so much work — these behaviors that come out to protect us are almost always negative behaviors that make situation worse.
Because to make sure that your child goes to bed so that these bad things won’t happen, you might yell or threaten to take away everything they care about, and all of these things will make the situation get worse.
And it happens because you interpreted this situation as a threat. Your fight or flight response turned on. And your response behaviors, what I call your Yuck behaviors, are negative. They make situations worse. And those Yuck behaviors control the situation.
And of course, what complicates this is that as soon as your negative behaviors come out, now you are a threat to your child.
When you’re yelling at them or threatening them or shutting down, they are now in a threat mode. Their brain is trying to protect them from this threat by turning on their fight or flight response and their protective fight or flight behavior is to refuse to go to bed, or to get angry with you, since you are, in that moment, the enemy, the one who’s trying to make them do something.
And you’re trying to make them do something that is already a threat to them. Because, if you think about it, there are reasons kids don’t want to go to bed.
Often, for example, it’s because they’re anxious.
So now, they are sensing threats on both sides. The threat of going to bed and not knowing how to deal with their thoughts, and the threat of you trying to make them go to bed. They have threats all over, and honestly, when they have all these threats, there are lots of stress hormones being released inside of them, and they’re definitely not going to bed then. And this all started because of threats.
On the other hand, if your child is resistant to going to bed, even if they have big emotions about it, but you’re not threatened by their behavior or their emotions, maybe because, again, you know it’s a snow day, or maybe because you don’t have any work to do that night, then you’re going to approach them with a different energy, with an energy that does not pose a threat to them.
And you’re going to have much better luck influencing them to go to bed because they’re not in a fight or flight protective mode and they’re going to be more open to doing what you’re talking to them about doing.
So that’s an example of how threats control situations.
But I want to give you a little more science about this as well.
If you recall, the “Yuck Curve” is a rainbow shaped curve that represents what happens over time when someone is in Yuck, when their fight or flight response has kicked in and when they’re showing negative behaviors.
Remember, when they’re on the curve, you’re going to see those things like resistance and disrespect, defiance, meltdowns, or shutdowns. But once they travel the curve, the behavior gets so much better.
So we want to think about how do we help a child get through the curve more quickly. But what keeps them stuck longer is when they perceive a threat. Because when they’re on the curve, they’re in fight or flight, and their fight or flight response is scanning the environment to say, “Am I safe?”
If they sense a threat, if they sense that you were trying to make them go to bed, or if they sense that lying down is going to bring up all these uncomfortable feelings, they’re going to stay in Yuck longer.
And those Yuck behaviors are going to get bigger, and they’re going to very likely control situations.
Now the same thing is true of you. When you are in Yuck, your brain is also scanning the environment to say, “Is it a threat?”
If you are telling yourself, “Tomorrow’s going to be a bad day if they don’t go to bed”, or “I have so much work to do they have to go to bed,” you are going to stay stuck in Yuck longer, and you are going to be controlled by your fight or flight reaction, unless you are really good at not being controlled by your Yuck. Most of us are not very good about that.
So this is so complicated because humans tend to see others’ Yuck behavior as a threat. It puts them into Yuck, which brings out their Yuck behaviors, which creates a threat for the other person.
This is what I call the cycle of Yuck. It’s all based on threats. And this is when emotions and behaviors and reactions tend to control your home.
So Leadership Parenting strategies teach you how to reduce the threat, and they also teach you how to handle it more effectively if you are in fight or flight. So you’re not yelling at your children or threatening them, or doing things that make them perceive more of a threat.
We teach this to ourselves, and then absolutely we also teach this to our kids. We teach them to notice when they’re feeling threatened, how to reduce the likelihood of a threat, and how to handle it more maturely when there’s a threat.
And this is when we get control back over our homes. This is when we have more peace.
Now, I teach lots of strategies for this in my Leadership Parenting academy, but I can tell you one way to reduce the threat is something I call “Expect and Plan.”
So one of the things I have parents do is notice the threat simply by recognizing areas where they tend to lose their cool or be controlled by their own emotions.
And then I have them decide how they want to handle that situation going forward based on their values, because that is when we get power back over what’s happening around us — when we can respond from our values, not when we are responding to a perceived threat.
So I’m going to show you how I used all this to help a parent recently who was having trouble at bedtime. So this is a dad of a daughter who kept getting out of bed every night and he wanted to get things done at night.
So I started with helping him understand what to expect.
I asked him, “What do you want to happen in these situations?”
And he said, “Well, I want my daughter to stay in bed once I put her to bed.”
And I asked him then, “Does that usually happen?”
He said, “No, that doesn’t usually happen.”
I said, “Okay, what usually happens?”
He said, “She gets up at least five times.”
So I said to him, “Okay, expect that she’ll get up eight times. That way when she does get up, your brain can say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s number four. I knew this would happen.’ That in itself reduces the threat when you know it’s going to happen.”
Now the next step of this is to make a plan for what he would do when she got up those hypothetical eight times.
So the plan we came up with was during the day he would give his daughter a strategy that she could use when she was anxious. We happened to use a strategy of his daughter calming down her own stuffed animal.
He practiced that strategy with her during the day so that she felt comfortable with it. And she knew that when she felt the butterflies in her belly at night, she could talk to her stuffed animal and tell her stuffed animal why everything was going to be okay.
So they practiced that during the day.
Then, he and his daughter came up with a code word that they could use at night, which was his reminder to her to use her strategy. Their code word happened to be “bunny” because the stuffed animal she was using was a bunny.
And he told her ahead of time, “When you come out of your room, what I’m going to do is I’m going to use the word bunny and then I’m going to stop responding.”
So at this point, he expected she was going to come out and he had a plan. He knew all he needed to do was use the word bunny. He also knew that because he had gone over the strategy with her during the day, that she had a strategy and that she would actually be okay.
So what we’re doing is we’re reducing threat after threat after threat.
His brain knows what to do and his brain knows that his daughter is going to be okay because she has a strategy for herself.
And now, when his daughter came out of the room, he used his plan. He recognized that it was going to happen. He used the code word. And he knew that his daughter might push and push, but he just maintained his own plan, which was something that was in his control. (That also reduced his threat, that he wasn’t waiting for his daughter to change so that he felt better, but he was focusing on what was in his control.)
So the dad starts to follow this plan and he said he actually felt less of a threat by the second night. It was so much easier for him to deal with it. He didn’t see his daughter coming out as a threat.
He said it took his daughter three or four more nights to stop coming out, but eventually because he was predictable, she did stop coming out.
It really helped to reduce her anxiety that he was so predictable and that she had a plan for what she would do when she was anxious. So we were reducing threats all around and that’s why this “worked.” I always say to parents when something works, it’s because we’ve met a need. We met the need for both of them to reduce the threats.
And as a side note, one more threat reducer we took. Even before we started, I did talk to the dad about the fact that this process may take a little while, up to a week or two.
And I wanted him to know what to do about his work that he had to get done at night in case it took that long. So he made a plan for that as well. He decided to move the work he was doing at night to another time so that during the little while it would take for the situation to resolve, he didn’t have that other threat of, “Oh my gosh, I have to get stuff done!” in the back of his mind.
Now these plans were all tailored to his threats. He managed his threats, and the emotions and behaviors related to this situation no longer controlled his home.
The threats we experience will be unique to us and we may need different strategies to get through them. This is actually why I’m so interactive in all of my programs, not just when I’m working one on one with a parent, but in my Leadership Parenting Academy as well, so that parents can figure out exactly what it is that they need to be successful.
Because when you find that strategy that tells your brain, “I knew this would happen,” it reduces the threat and you don’t go into fight or flight.
And when you tell your brain, “I know what to do,” it reduces the threat and then fight or flight doesn’t even kick in. You aren’t controlled by it and you get control back, which honestly helps your child feel better as well.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, it’s also possible to go into fight or flight and not be controlled by your fight or flight response, but that is a topic for another episode.
For now, just recognize using these strategies makes you a Leader Parent so that you are in charge, not the emotions or behaviors or the reactions in your home.
That is what you get with Leadership Parenting strategies. And that is Long Game parenting.
And I really do want you to imagine what it would be like if you were in control instead of emotions and behaviors and reactions. Imagine what your day to day would be like if you didn’t have all the drama in the mornings and the afternoons and the evenings.
Imagine what the interactions among family members would be like. Imagine all the things that you could do that you’re not now currently doing because you’re worried that emotions and behaviors and reactions do get so big that it’s embarrassing.
If you want to know how to make these changes in your home, there is more information about the Leadership Parenting Academy on the show notes for this episode.
There you will also find a free resource that summarizes this episode as well as other resources that will support you as you are raising a child with big emotions.
You can find all of that at rachel-bailey.com/344. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you again soon.
