Episode 340 Transcript
Hello, it is Rachel and welcome to episode 340 of Your Parenting Long Game.
I’ve talked about this before on this podcast, and I’ll talk about it again, I’m sure, many times in the future because it’s often a daily experience as we are raising kids with big emotions: So often our kids’ reactions seem disproportionate and illogical, and it often seems like these disproportionate and illogical responses happen out of the blue.
We don’t necessarily know when to expect that they’ll get irritable or annoyed, and so it can often feel like we’re walking on eggshells around them. But honestly, walking on eggshells around your child with big emotions is not good for you and it’s not good for them.
So of course, I always want you to understand what’s under their seemingly random behaviors, because for many of them, like the one I’m going be talking about today, once you do really see what’s going on… even if it’s not necessarily logical, it’s predictable and there’s something that you can do about it to make it better.
So today I’m specifically going to address situations where a child’s reaction can seem really negative, and you’re not exactly sure why. Often this reason that we can’t sense or see, our children very much can sense.
And that is when there is an energy mismatch that a child with big emotions feels and reacts to.
So let’s get a little bit more practical. Here are some signs that that may be happening.
Maybe you have a child and when you wake them up in the morning, you try to be cheerful. You try to say, “Hey, good morning,” and they become more cranky and irritable. It doesn’t really seem to make sense.
Or maybe someone around them is making a noise and they get disproportionately angry, maybe even disrespectful. Maybe their brother or sister is singing or dancing or moving around and they become really, really angry and rude to their sibling.
Or maybe something really good happens. They tell you that they got an A on a test and you tell them that you’re excited, but they get annoyed with you.
Or here’s also a baffling one that happens very often with kids with big emotions… Because you have probably heard the advice that when they’re upset, you want to stay calm. But here’s the baffling part. Sometimes when you stay calm, it just makes them more upset.
So again, their responses seem very negative, often disproportionate, and almost always illogical. So I want to tell you what is going on here.
I will tell you that people who feel things strongly, who tend to have big emotions, are very sensitive to energy. I can tell you I am a textbook “highly sensitive person,” and I can sense someone’s energy from really far away. When I was a child, I often told my parents that I didn’t like a teacher I had or a coach that I had, and they’d ask me why. They’d say, “What did this teacher or coach do?” And it wasn’t necessarily something they did, and it wasn’t even something that I could verbalize at the time.
Their energy was just energy I didn’t necessarily like, and I couldn’t really say more than that. And I can see this in one of my own daughters. I remember when she was younger. She had a swim coach that she really didn’t click with, and so after she started telling me that she didn’t like her teacher, I started talking to her teacher and I could immediately tell why she was struggling with this teacher.
It’s just an energy. And being able to feel this energy is an amazing thing. There are a lot of positive qualities in this. But it does often create these “energy mismatches” that they experience.
And when they experience a “mismatch,” meaning they’re in one type of energy and someone else is in a different type of energy, it is very uncomfortable for us and we experience it as yuck.
And of course, most kids with big emotions don’t have mature coping skills. So when they experience this discomfort or Yuck, and they haven’t mastered the skills to manage that feeling effectively, you see their irritability, their anger, their annoyance, their disrespect.
Now I’m going to tell you a little bit more about why this actually isn’t as foreign as you think.
I’m about to give you examples of where you probably experienced that energy mismatch too. And of course, I’m going to tell you what to do about all this. But first, I do want to remind you that if you’re listening to this episode and you can’t jot things down and you want notes but you can’t, I do have a summary of this episode as well as the examples I’m going to talk about in a free resource that you can find on the show notes for this episode.
And on the show notes, you’ll also find other free resources that will help you as you are raising a child or children with big emotions. All of that is on my website at Rachel-bailey.com/340.
But for now, I want to tell you why this mismatch isn’t as much of a mystery as you might think it is.
Because you’ve probably experienced these mismatches as well. For example, sometimes you probably need quiet or you need people to stop touching you, but your children are being really loud or they’re touching you a lot. You probably sense a huge discomfort in those situations.
Or maybe you’re in a really, really bad mood. You just had a really bad day and you get in the car. Your phone immediately connects to Bluetooth and a song pops on, and it’s a really happy, upbeat song. When you’re in a bad mood, hearing that happy, upbeat song is like the worst feeling in the world. It’s cringey at that moment. That’s an energy mismatch.
Another example that you may have experienced is maybe you’re telling a friend or spouse something you’re worried about. Maybe your child is struggling a lot with friendships lately, and you’re really worried and your friend or your spouse minimizes it and they say, “Oh, you don’t have to worry. All kids go through that.”
Well, when you are really worried and they’re minimizing it, that is a mismatch between where they are and where you are, and it doesn’t feel good. When you sense this mismatch, you can almost physically feel it. Not only do you not feel understood or supported, but it just feels really uncomfortable in your body.And remember, kids with big emotions feel this discomfort more quickly and they feel it more strongly.
So I want to go deeper into those less logical reactions that your kids might have that I described a little bit earlier in the episode. And I want to tell you what’s likely going on for them.
I mentioned that your kids might be getting up in the morning and you’re really cheerful and they get more irritable.That’s because they are in a sleep state, they’re in a tired state. And when you come in chipper, that is a complete mismatch from where they are and it’s very hard for them to handle.
Or if they overreact to a sibling making noise or dancing around, they’re likely in a state where they need less sensory input and the person around them is providing more sensory input. That’s a mismatch for them. They go into yuck, and they probably have an ineffective reaction.
Or as I mentioned, maybe you are happier than your child is when they got an A on a test and they get annoyed with you. This is because they’re in a state where they may not really care that much and your emotions are bigger than theirs, and kids with big emotions have a hard enough time with their own emotions. They don’t really want to deal with your emotions as well, even when it’s a happy emotion. Believe it or not, that still takes people with big emotions, energy to process. That is a mismatch for them.
And lastly, the example I gave was where you are staying calm when your child is upset and they get more frustrated.And that’s a huge mismatch for them because if they think something is seriously bad, maybe you just told them that they couldn’t go to their friend’s house and they’re really upset, but you’re staying calm, what that says to them is that you don’t get how bad it is. They’re feeling really bad, you don’t feel really bad, and that is a mismatch for them.
Now, this may seem like you have to be psychic. I promise you don’t. I’m going to tell you how to deal with this, but first I want to give you one more example of a family I worked with where there was a mismatch that really stumped the dad that was trying to get support from me. So this dad was really struggling with his daughter, and when I met with him and his wife, they were telling me that their daughter always preferred her mom to her dad.
The daughter would always say, “No, I want to do this with Mom,” or she would resist doing things with the dad, and neither of them really got it because he tried hard to connect with her. But she still preferred her mom.
So I asked them to tell me generally how their days went, because as a sensitive person, I can pretty much sense what is going on and why kids become frustrated with one parent or another.
And as they were telling me about their day, I picked up on a few things.
Their day did often start with that typical morning mismatch. The dad wasn’t waking up his daughter, but she would come downstairs and she’d still be a little bit groggy and he’d say, cheerfully, “Hey sunshine.” And then when she didn’t have a positive reaction, he would say, “Ooh, someone’s tired.”He was trying to be positive and connect with her and be silly and engaging, but it wasn’t the time for her. This was actually a double mismatch. First, he was cheerful when she came down. And second, when she was already irritable, he was kind of making light of it and saying, “Ooh, someone’s tired,” and she just couldn’t handle that.
Another example of a mismatch was after school where she came home. She had expended a lot of energy at school, and he would tell her that she needed to immediately do her homework. He thought he was doing her favor, that if she got her homework done after school, they could have more fun in the evenings.
In reality, what she needed was a break, and she felt that he didn’t understand what she really needed, and that was an energy mismatch, and that was a huge withdrawal from their relationship.
They also had sort of an opposite problem in the evening. At night, she had a lot of energy and he would get frustrated, understandably so, because she wasn’t calming down. Now, what was going on for her is she did have a lot of energy. She didn’t know how to calm her body. She just knew that he kept getting frustrated with her. So there were a lot of mismatches here, and she just thought her dad didn’t get her, and so she tended to withdraw from him.
One solution I worked with them on, I want to share with you now, which is very simply to match the energy where your child is. Eventually you’re going to teach your child how to manage this on their own. But it does start with us working with our child to figure out where they are and what do they need.
You start with this simple technique called where are they and why? You start to notice where your child may be irritable or cranky in situations, and you ask yourself, “What level of energy on a scale from 1 to 10, do they seem to have in that moment?” (1 being they’re really low energy, 10 being they’re really high energy.)
And then you ask yourself, “How do I know?” This is going to become part of the solution as well.
So let’s go back to how this dad use this with his daughter. He noticed that in the morning she was at an energy level two, and he knew this because she was quiet. She was more slow to move in the morning. So he noticed she was at an energy level two.
Then after school, she was at an energy level, three or four, he said, and he recognized this because she didn’t really want to talk after school. All she wanted to do was either go outside and play or play a game in the house. So she was at about a three or four.
And then we talked about the evening. He said in the evening she was probably at an eight or a nine because she was dancing around and being silly. She had a lot of energy at that moment. So now that he was able to see what her energy level was and why, what I taught him to do was match that energy level.
So in the morning when she was at a level two, he started to become more quiet and slow like she was. In the afternoon, when she was at a three or four, not wanting to talk about her day or necessarily do something that required a lot of focus, he started to let her play instead of insisting that she do her homework.
And at night when she was at a level eight or nine, instead of telling her to calm down immediately, he actually got to her level of eight or nine – not because he was dancing around or moving, but he put on music and let her have a dance party for a few minutes.
Then he started to decrease the speed of the music. So he started with a really fast piece of music, and then he started to slow the music down and asked her to dance in rhythm with the music, and that helped her calm her body down. In this way, he was matching where she was, but he was also showing her how to calm her body down for bedtime.
So again, this strategy is: Where are they and why?And then you go there with them.
Now of course, figuring this out may be different for different children. You may not see it as easily. I help parents identify mismatches all the time. That may not be so obvious, but listening to this right now, maybe it is obvious for you where there are mismatches for your child.
And of course, as always, we are also going to teach our children how to do this for themselves. We do have to start where we are helping them learn about themselves and what strategies work for them. So the next step and the most important step is to teach them how to recognize this on their own and to manage this on their own. We want them to recognize energy mismatches and what they should do.
For example, I actually have to manage my energy a lot. I learned when my kids were young and they were often loud and chaotic that I needed space between the end of my workday and going to hang out with them.
I’ve worked from home since they were young, and what would happen when they were really young that didn’t go well, is I would come out of my office and they’d be playing around and whoever was watching them, whether it was my husband or someone else was watching them and they’d be jumping around, really excited with that person and that was a really big mismatch for me. I needed quiet. I needed time to decompress, and I would see this mess around me and these kids jumping around, and I would be really irritable and cranky, and they didn’t understand why. And what I finally realized pretty early on was that I actually needed space to decompress before I went out and said hi to them.
So I would take 5 or 10 minutes, I’d put on my headphones. I’d either listen to really quiet music, or I just put on noise canceling headphones and do something that relaxed my nervous system. I gave myself a little bit of a sensory deposit before I went to say hi to my kids. I’ve always continued to do this and it makes a huge difference. I understand this about myself. I don’t expect my kids to change, for me to feel better, just like your kids can’t expect everyone around them to change, to make them feel better.
But it does have to start with us helping our kids recognize what is going on for them and what they need to be successful.
What happens when we do this and when we start to understand energy mismatches is there are fewer big reactions in our home. We yell at them less for their big reactions, and then they don’t internalize that there’s something wrong with them. When we are yelling at them for their big reactions without understanding the mismatch, they feel like there’s something wrong with them and they start to question and doubt and dislike themselves.
But when we talk to them about the mismatch and they understand themselves, they start to become aware of who they are and what they need, and they feel more confident and they have healthier self-esteem. What all this translates to is less fighting in your home. More confidence in you and your children, which means you also can worry less and regret less.
All this happens when you use leadership parenting strategies like understanding the mismatch and what to do. This is long game parenting.
Now, again, if you want a summary of this explanation and the examples that I talked about, there’s a free resource for you on the show notes for this episode at Rachel-bailey.com/340. There are also some other resources because I’m really committed to helping you as you raise a child or children who feel things strongly.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.
