Episode 380 Transcript

Hello, it is Rachel and welcome to episode 380 of Your Parenting Long Game.

If you’ve ever found yourself bracing for your child’s reaction before anything even happens…

…If you find yourself bracing before you say no, that they can’t have or do something

…you find yourself bracing before the time you have to tell them to leave a house where they’re having fun playing…

…bracing before reminding them it’s bedtime because you know there will be a battle…

you’re probably already thinking in those moments, “I know this is going to be a problem, they’re going to have a big reaction, and I just don’t have the energy!”  

And all of this happens before anything has actually happened, but your body is reacting as if your child has already reacted.

Today I want to talk about why that makes complete sense and what to do instead. Because this pattern actually reduces your influence with your child more than you may realize, and it actually makes the situation you’re bracing for… more likely to happen.

Now again, it makes sense that you’d be bracing early because when you’ve gone through the same hard or uncomfortable moment over and over again — the bedtime battles, or the pushback when you say no, or the resistance to everyday things — your brain starts to note that discomfort, and it tries to protect you from that hard, uncomfortable thing happening again.

Pretty simply, it just encodes that this situation is stressful or uncomfortable, and it prepares you for a battle even before the battle happens.

And what’s interesting is your brain doesn’t just remember what your child did in that moment. Your brain is really encoding how it felt for you.

So it gets ahead of that feeling. It predicts and it braces for the frustration, the helplessness, and the exhaustion of doing the same thing again and again.

So of course you start dreading the situation. You are not reacting to a moment that hasn’t happened yet. You’re reacting to the accumulation of all the moments before it.

It’s almost like you’re walking into these moments on 10% battery. You’ve already used up so much of your energy throughout the day, with decisions and responsibilities and managing everything else going on, that when you’re about to walk into something you know is going to take even more, your brain then says, “Uh oh, here we go!” and it puts you into fight or flight.

And again, not just because you’re predicting your child’s reaction, but because it remembers what this felt like for you in the past, and it’s saying, “I don’t have a lot left to give right now.”

Because when your battery is already low, everything feels harder.

Things that might feel manageable if you’re an 80% battery now feel overwhelming because you only are at 10%. Even small resistance can feel like too much and a short reaction can feel like it’s going to last forever.

So of course you’re going to approach this situation, dreading it. You’re going to approach already being in Yuck, in your fight or flight response, because your system knows what could happen based on past experiences, and it’s trying to protect the little energy you have left.

Unfortunately though, when you’re walking into a situation already bracing for impact, a few things tend to happen.

First, you may try to control the situation more tightly. You get firmer quicker, more intense. So you go in already emotionally charged with shorter patience, quicker reactions, less flexibility and less ability to actually solve problems in the moment.

Or if you don’t walk in like that, then maybe you try to avoid it. You give in, delay, or soften limits because you’re just trying to reduce the discomfort.

That’s actually what you’re wired to do, and it’s what you will do if you go on autopilot. You’re going to walk in fighting…or you’re going to flight. You’re going to avoid.

But as you may or may not realize whether you’re in fight or flight, you are unintentionally sending a message both to yourself and to your child that this moment is something that you can’t handle.

And I have to be honest, this is one of the things I hate most about parenting because I’m not the most regulated person in the world. But the reality is our children are constantly taking cues from us about what situations mean.

So when we tense, brace, or try to avoid their reaction, they sense it even if you don’t say anything.

And what that does is it increases the intensity or the Yuck in the moment for them.

And most of our kids don’t handle Yuck well.

They go into fight or flight, and that leads to more of their Yuck behavior, more big reactions, more resistance, more of what we were trying to avoid.

That happens because they don’t know how to handle discomfort maturely, but the situation now creates discomfort. They handle it immaturely and negatively through those Yuck behaviors.

So ironically, the more we brace for the reaction, the more likely we are to get that reaction.

Let me give you a quick example of what this can look like in real life:

A mom I work with had been putting off changing her child’s screen time limits. Not because she didn’t know what the limits should be, or she didn’t know what she wanted, but because she knew what would happen the moment she told her child about the new limits.

In her mind, it was already mapped out: She knew he was going to be upset. She knew he was going to argue. She knew it was going to turn into a huge thing.

So she delayed it and questioned herself: “Do I really need these limits?”

And she was right. When she did tell him about the limits, when she said, “Hey, we’re going to start having less screen time after school,” her son did have a big reaction, complaining, arguing, pushing back hard.

Now this is where, because she’d already walked into the situation assuming negativity, assuming it would be difficult, she immediately went into fight or flight.

She started escalating and getting defensive, which made him more upset and the situation went downhill.

Now, she and I talked about entering this conversation differently, and in just a moment I’ll share with you some of the tips I shared with her. But the next time she brought it up with her son, yes, she expected that reaction, but she also knew she could handle it.

She didn’t see his reaction as a threat. So the next time he had his big reaction to the same limit, she stayed steady. She didn’t rush to explain more. She didn’t take it back. She didn’t get sucked into his yuck. She simply acknowledged, “Yeah, I know this isn’t what you wanted.”

And honestly, she didn’t have to say anything. All she had to do, and what she did, was she held the limit and she didn’t see his reaction as a threat. And what she noticed was that, yes, his reaction still happened.

But it didn’t spiral the way it usually did because she was not in fight or flight and she was not adding more intensity to his reaction.

Her son was still upset, but the moment didn’t get bigger than it needed to be.

And as we worked on this over time, she stopped dreading these moments as much because she wasn’t walking into them thinking, “This is going to be the worst thing ever and I can’t handle it”. She also didn’t walk into them thinking, “I have to make this goes smoothly.” She walked in thinking, “This might be hard and I can handle it.”

That changed the energy and the length of these interactions and these moments. So the goal is not to convince yourself that these moments are going to be easy. The goal is just to change how you enter that moment.

Instead of thinking, “This is going to be a problem. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t handle this, you want to shift to, “This might be hard and I can handle it. I know what’s in my control to do in this situation, and that’s what I will do.”

It’s a very different energy. You’re not denying reality. You’re just removing the sense of threat from the situation.

And that matters because when something doesn’t feel like a threat to you, you don’t escalate it. You don’t rush to fix it. And you don’t get pulled into it in the same way.

And instead of reacting to what used to be your anger or your anxiety, now they’re reacting to your leadership, to your regulated energy, and they travel the Yuck Curve more quickly.

So I want to share a few practical tips that I shared with this mom. And these are a little bit more generic. (Whenever I’m working with parents, I go more deeply into their situation.)

But here are some generic actions we talked about:

First, catch the moment before you go in and notice what you are thinking. Instead of saying, “Oh, here we go, I can’t handle this,” just adjust that slightly. You’re not going to think this will go perfectly, but instead think, “this might be uncomfortable, but uncomfortable is not dangerous. I can handle this.”

Second, and importantly, separate your child’s reaction from your responsibility.

A big reason we dread these moments is because it feels like if they react, “I have to do something…I have to fix it…I have to make it stop…I don’t have the energy for this!”

But what if their reaction isn’t something you need to eliminate?

What if it’s something they’re just learning to move through, and what if it actually doesn’t take much energy at all? Because you’re not trying to stop them. You don’t need to stop what they’re doing or actually do very much at all.

And that can remove a huge amount of pressure on you.

It can make the situation take a lot less energy for you.

The third tip is to anchor to what’s actually in your control. When you’re bracing yourself, your brain is focused on, “How do I stop this from happening?”

But stopping it from happening, stopping your child’s reaction, is not actually in your control.

What is in your control? How you think about what they’re doing, how you show up, what you say, your action. And you knowing what is in your control is where your confidence comes from.

When you walk into a situation knowing, “Here’s what I’m going to do if they have a big reaction” and you follow through, you’ve been successful.

You can’t control your child, and when you try, it doesn’t work. You’re going to feel helpless and you’re going to waste energy. Instead, decide outside of the moment (when you can access your values) how you want to respond, and when that response is in your control, you can always follow through.

And my last tip for you, if possible, is to reframe this situation as practice for both you and your child. Instead of seeing these moments as problems to get through, see them as an opportunity to practice.

Your child is facing something uncomfortable, and this is what teaches them that they can handle discomfort.

At the same time, you may be facing discomfort, so this becomes a shared moment to both see that you can handle discomfort…that discomfort is not dangerous.

The situation isn’t going to be fun, but the situation is going to be where growth actually happens.

It’s a little like going to the gym. The reps aren’t easy. You don’t look forward to them. But they’re what build strength and the more reps you get — both you and your child — the more capable and confident you become, over time, that you can handle discomfort.

And the ability to handle discomfort is associated with everything you want for your child. Because they’re going to face challenges and friendships in school and things not going their way. They don’t build the ability to handle those challenges when things are going smoothly. They build it in these moments.

These moments that might feel uncomfortable. But that’s exactly where they’re learning to handle discomfort. And the same is true for you.

Every time you enter one of these moments without bracing, you strengthen your ability to lead through hard situations instead of getting pulled into them.

Now, of course, as I said earlier, when you do brace yourself, that’s a normal human reaction on autopilot.

Of course you start dreading your child’s reactions before they happen because you’ve lived through those moments over and over again, and your system is trying to protect you from feeling that same exhaustion and frustration again.

But since you want your child to handle discomfort… and you can become better at handling discomfort…you don’t have to be on autopilot.

You can make plans to handle these situations and the less overwhelming they will become for both you and your child. Remember, you don’t need to stop the reaction. You just need to change how you walk into it.

Notice what you’re telling yourself. Notice what you’re making your measure of success. Know that it’s not your responsibility to change what your child is going through and reframe this as practice for both of you.

Now before I wrap up, I want to tell you about something free that I’m going to be doing because one of the things that parents brace themselves for is children’s negativity — when our children are focusing on the one thing that went wrong in a situation…maybe they had fun at a party, but complain about the ice cream flavor… or when they’re negative because they focus on the one thing that could go wrong, assuming that no one will play with them at recess, even though you know people ask them to play.

Our kids’ negativity is a big trigger for many of us, and it’s also very common in kids with big emotions.

Parents ask me often what they can do to help their kids think more positively (or at least less negatively). And I’m going to be doing some free workshops on this topic where I will explain what is going on, why they’re so negative, and why the things we normally do, don’t work.

For more information on those free workshops, check out the show notes for this episode at Rachel-bailey.com/380.

Because I’m all about teaching you leadership parenting strategies and improving your parenting long game.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.

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