Episode 337 Transcript
Hello, it is Rachel, and welcome to episode 337 of your Parenting Long Game. I actually want to start this episode with a little bit of a confession. When I need a brain break, I turn to celebrity news. This may stem from the fact that when I was a little girl and my grandmother, this sweet but very intellectual lady, she used to take me to my dentist and orthodontist appointments, and after the appointment was over and we were driving home, she would tell me about the People magazine articles she read while she was waiting for me, and she would dish about celebrity gossip.
So I still love celebrity gossip, and I know way more about celebrities lives than I should.
Well, recently I was reading something, and there was an article where Kylie Kelce was talking about something related to parenting.
Now in case you don’t know who Kylie Kelce is, she’s the wife of Jason Kelce, who’s a former player on the Philadelphia Eagles. I’m originally from South Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. My family is still there. And the Kelseys are pretty well known there, so I do hear a lot about what Kylie and Jason are doing.
And because she was talking about parenting, I was really interested because I always love hearing others’ thoughts about parenting. Although it sort of surprised me that I was in such strong alignment with what she said, I absolutely was in strong alignment with what she said.
She was talking about something that she would never do as a parent — this trend that’s apparently happening now that she’d never follow. I guess there are some parents doing this: When they have a birthday party for their child, they request gifts for their child’s siblings too.
Now, I’m not sure if she was just talking about family birthday parties where they’re asking grandparents to also bring gifts for siblings. I’m not really sure about the big picture, but whatever the situation was, I personally agree very strongly with Kylie that this isn’t the most appropriate request –that we don’t need to ask people to bring gifts to siblings of the birthday child as well.
And I don’t agree so strongly because I judge everybody else’s parenting. Despite the fact that I teach parenting strategies for a living, I honestly don’t judge other people’s parenting. I don’t feel like it’s my job to judge others’ values.
My job is to provide information and I want parents to take my information in or not based on whether it aligns with their values.
But the reason I feel so strongly about what she said and not bringing gifts to the siblings of the birthday child is because there’s an implication there that the child who’s not getting a present should be given one so they feel better.
And to me, that implies that children can’t handle feelings like disappointment and frustration and that we need to avoid those feelings at all cost.
And I’m especially worried about this because I’m raising and I work with parents who are raising kids who feel things strongly. And I fear that saying that the sibling also needs a gift reinforces the belief that children are weak and need to be catered to. And I worry that people will think this especially of children who feel things strongly. I don’t want that message to be reinforced.
Because I know with certainty that being able to feel things strongly is a strength. I also know that those who feel things strongly do not need to be catered to.
Those of us with big emotions just need to be understood and given strategies to help us make sure that we can respect our feelings without letting those feelings control us.
So even a child who feels disappointment and frustration strongly can be at a sibling’s party and not receive a gift. These children just need people to not judge their big feelings. And they also need someone to teach them how — like literally give them specific strategies — so they know how to manage the feelings so they’re not controlled by those feelings.
Now, I’m going to go deeper into this, but first, let me remind you that if you want more information about this episode or how you can get support if you are raising a child with big emotions, all of that is on the show notes for this episode at rachel-bailey.com/337.
So now I’m going to rewind a little bit and reinforce my statement that I believe that feeling things strongly is a strength and I’m going to use some examples from my life.
I am a highly sensitive person, almost textbook highly sensitive, so I do feel things really strongly, and I know it is the fact that I feel things strongly that leads to the reality that I have amazing close relationships.
I’ve really close relationships with my current family, with my family of origin and with my friends. Now, I don’t have a lot of friends, I’m going to be honest. I have a few good friends, but they are really strong relationships. I have such fulfilling conversations and experiences with them. I build these amazing memories with my friends and my family that I will never forget and that I am always grateful for.
My ability to feel strongly also allows me to get people and genuinely not judge others. I can make people feel safe and loved and I love that about myself. Similarly, I can sense when people need me… and I’ll talk about boundaries in a moment, but most of the time when someone needs me, I am there and I love that about myself, too.
Another thing that’s related to the fact that I feel strongly is that I am pretty insightful about what I need. And I give myself what I need. I have very healthy boundaries, and I’m surrounded by people who respect those boundaries because of the way I assert them. And this includes my kids. They respect my boundaries. And although I will say I certainly have weaknesses as a parent, this is not one of my weaknesses. I am able to set boundaries that my kids respect.
And this quality actually gave me something when I was younger that you probably want for your kids. Because I was able to sense things really strongly and set boundaries, this helped me to stand up to peer pressure when I was an adolescent. Because I always knew when something felt sort of off – hello, that’s my being highly sensitive! – and because I set boundaries, I avoided a lot of issues that other kids got mixed up in because I was able to use my sense and my boundaries to make healthy decisions that served me in the long run.
Sure, I did a few questionable things along the way, but in general I could tell when something was not going to be good for me and I did not follow in that path.
Now I’ll say one more thing about sensitive people that actually does not apply to me. A lot of sensitive people are also very creative. I happen not to be the most creative person, but I am in circles with a lot of people who are sensitive and creative. And a lot of the kids whose parents I work with on a daily basis in my job, they’re also very creative.
The research shows that when someone is creative and when their voice and when their creativity are encouraged, they have so much more joy and satisfaction in life. Being able to be creative is also such a self-esteem boost.
So there are many more reasons that I think being sensitive really is a strength in life.
If you are raising a child with big emotions, who tends to feel things strongly, they have the ingredients for a happy life. And they don’t need to be catered to in order to take advantage of this.
What is it that they need?
Well, a lot of what they need is what you’ve heard on this podcast, because what they do need is what I teach in the Long Game method for raising kids with big emotions. It’s the Leadership Parenting strategies that I teach.
So first, what kids need to do is feel respected and understood. We have to understand that for sensitive people, our nervous systems are different. We truly do sense things more quickly and more strongly. We’re not reacting disproportionately to a situation. We’re reacting in proportion to how strongly we feel that thing.
So if your child has a big reaction because they didn’t win a game, that’s how strongly they’re feeling the disappointment.
I will say that when I’m really tired, my natural reaction is to be very, very irritable. That’s how strongly my body reacts to being tired. Or when my daughter is herself in a state of chaos, I feel her energy very strongly. And if I’m in the vicinity of that energy, my sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and I sense it immediately and feel almost as strongly that chaos as she does.
So one of the first things we need is this understanding, this need to be understood, not judged. We don’t want to hear things like, “It’s not okay to be so irritable when you’re tired.” We want to hear things like, “No wonder you’re irritable because you are tired.”
If you want your child who feels strongly to be able to set their own really healthy boundaries, they need to respect what they’re experiencing, and that starts with others respecting what they’re experiencing.
The other thing that they need in addition to being understood and not judged is they need to know how to not let their emotions control them. It’s one thing to know that our nervous system is very sensitive. It’s another thing to know that that’s not an excuse for negative behavior.
For example, let’s say I do sense my daughter’s energy very strongly. If that feeling controlled me, what would happen is I’d react and try to get my daughter to stop acting the way she was so that I felt better. Spoiler: If I do try to get her to change so I feel better, it does not go very well.
But when my emotions don’t control me, here’s what it looks like: I recognize and respect, “Ah, yes, my nervous system is sensing something. But I don’t have to react to it.” What I do instead, the action I take is to focus on regulating myself, and reducing the threat of that feeling. (If you’re in any of my programs, you know what it means to reduce the threat of a feeling so that it does not control you.)
So when I feel that my nervous system has sensed something, I don’t immediately have to try to control her. I can choose what action I take next.
My feeling, my urge that I have when I’m in Yuck does not have to control my actions. I can decide what my actions are. But very honestly, I’m often not deciding in that moment. I’m deciding outside of the moment, practicing it, and then it becomes more natural in that moment.
There is a strategy that I teach that we can use to respect our emotions while still making sure our emotions don’t control us. It’s called the “power behavior” technique. I call it the “power behavior” technique because we are getting our power back from our emotion, or what I call our Yuck Urge.
And this technique is about shifting from “I feel a certain way so I have to act a certain way” to “how can I act the way I want to act even when I feel a certain way.” So let me give you some examples of that.
Remember I said that I’m very sensitive to being tired. But I don’t say “I’m tired, so I can’t be respectful.” What I do is I shift to empower behavior and I say, “How can I be respectful even when I’m tired?”
So for our kids, what this would look like, we would teach them that we don’t want to say, “I’m mad. So I’m going to yell at my brother.” We want to teach them to say, “How can I stand up for myself respectfully even when I’m mad at my brother?”
Or another example, we don’t want a child to say, “I don’t feel like cleaning my room.” We want them to be able to say, “How can I clean my room even when I don’t feel like it?”
So you can see we’re not necessarily trying to get kids to change how they feel. We’re teaching them to feel what they feel, and take positive action anyway.
And yes, there are strategies, and I teach these strategies, for how to make children less likely to hate cleaning their rooms to begin with. But sometimes, they’re still going to hate the thing they have to do, and they need to learn how to do it without that discomfort or yuck controlling them.
And this brings us back to that sibling who doesn’t get a birthday present. We can respect how disappointed they’re feeling without getting them gifts to prevent that feeling.
So we can say to a child who doesn’t get a gift, “It’s hard to watch your brother or sister get those gifts, isn’t it? Because they look like a lot of fun and you wish they were yours.” And then you can say, “Since you won’t be getting gifts, let’s talk about ways you can handle that feeling that does seem really hard right now.”
Or honestly, if your child doesn’t like to be validated or they don’t want to talk about their feelings, you don’t have to bring up feelings. You could say something like, “Since you won’t be getting gifts today, can I just sit with you here while you’re watching your brother open his gifts?”
That way you’re providing emotional support that they may need as they are feeling the difficult feeling.
We’re ultimately teaching our children something like this: They are in the driver’s seat, not the feeling. Their feeling can, from the passenger seat, suggest where they should go and what they should do, but ultimately, it’s your child’s foot that is on the gas, your child’s hands that are on the steering wheel.
They make the final decision and they have the power to do that once they learn strategies to know how to do this. We can’t assume they know how to do this because very honestly, they don’t.
But that is what Long Game parenting is about and that’s what Leadership Parenting strategies teach our children. We learn how to be an influence that respects where they are, and then we also learn the strategies to teach them how to handle their discomfort without being controlled by their discomfort.
But it’s important to start with respecting their feelings instead of trying to make those feelings stop or go away. So we want to say to our kids, “It’s okay to be disappointed” versus “You shouldn’t be disappointed because you’re going to have a birthday party too, and your brother deserves to have a birthday party.”
We don’t need to try to convince them out of their feelings. We want them to understand their feelings.
Because when people who feel strongly are told that they shouldn’t have their feelings, and they try to shut them off, they don’t just shut off the hard feelings, they shut off the good feelings too. They dampen their ability to be so perceptive, and creative, and empathetic. And they dampen their ability to have a deep connection to their world.
When we teach them to respect their feelings and not let their feelings be in the driver’s seat, they can use their strengths to contribute. They can use their strengths to contribute to a lot of meaning in their own lives and in others’ lives.
When they learn to respect their emotions without letting those emotions control them, even now, as children, they can be amazing friends. They can be amazing siblings because they can support their siblings in a way that only family can. They can be amazing students because they’re very perceptive to what’s happening around them.
And later, as they get older and they’ve learned to respect their emotions without letting their emotions control them, they can become amazing artists, and teachers, and doctors, and vets, and advocates, and world leaders.
They have the strength inside of them to do that. You can foster that as a Long Game parent using Leadership Parenting strategies.
Again, if you want a summary of this episode or you want to take the next steps in supporting your child who feels things strongly, those resources will be on the show notes for this episode at www.rachel-bailey.com/337. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.
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