Episode 384 Transcript
Hello, and welcome to episode 384 of Your Parenting Long Game.
We know that when our kids are upset, when they’re in Yuck, they need something from us.
They need us to be as regulated as we can be so that, as I describe, they can “travel the Yuck curve” and get through the challenging feeling that they’re having.
But what about when one child is upset, but other kids need you as well…when you can’t put all of your energy into regulating yourself for that one child because other kids need things, too?
When that happens, most of us feel like we’re being pulled in multiple directions at once: One child is crying or negotiating or demanding something. Another child may need help with homework. And on top of that, you know dinner still needs to be made and the dog needs to go out.
And suddenly you’re trying to calculate in your mind, figure out who needs you the most.
Many parents tell me that not only is this overwhelming, but there’s also a lot of guilt and worry associated with it.
They’ll say things like, “I know I should support my child. I know they need me, but what about my other children?”
And underneath that question is often a deeper one: “What if I’m letting someone down no matter what I choose?”
This is how so many parents that I work with feel when they first come to me.
And a mom that I’m going to call “Jamie” for this story recently described a situation with her two children.
Her nine-year-old son was devastated because a friend had excluded him from a birthday party. He was crying in his room, and he wanted her with him. At the same time, her six-year-old daughter was downstairs asking for help.
She knew that she usually ended up spending more time and energy on her son, and she felt awful that her daughter might perceive that she was neglecting her.
And as she sat beside her upset son, she couldn’t focus on him because she was thinking about not only her daughter, but all of the other things that needed to be done.
When she eventually did go downstairs to help her daughter, she couldn’t focus on her daughter because she was thinking about her son and, of course, the other things that needed to get done.
She felt guilty sitting with one child.
She felt guilty leaving one child.
She felt guilty making dinner.
She felt guilty not making dinner.
By the end of this, of course, she was exhausted, not even just by the logistics of managing everything, although that’s exhausting in itself.
She was also exhausted because she was carrying the responsibility for everyone’s emotional experience at the same time.
And we do this because this is where our minds go. We think, “If I stay with my upset child, the child who’s in Yuck, will my other child feel ignored?” or “If I leave my child who’s in Yuck, will they feel abandoned?” or “Will the child who’s in Yuck think I don’t care?” or “If I focus on my child who’s in Yuck, will the other child feel less important?”
It’s like we start imagining emotional damage in every direction.
And when that happens, of course, we’re going to go into Yuck, and our brain will see these situations as a threat. Not because these situations actually are a threat (I’m about to tell you why they’re not), but because it feels like they’re a threat.
But if you want to feel less exhausted and less emotionally drained, and if you want to actually handle situations differently, I want you to think about it differently and see why this actually isn’t a threat.
I’m going to explain using an example that might be easier to understand because it’s similar, but you’ll also be a little bit more removed from the situation when you hear it in this way.
Imagine a teacher in a classroom.
One student is trying to hand her their homework that’s late. She is asking the teacher to please take the homework right now, or she’s going to forget to turn it in. The teacher can tell the child is worried.
At the same time, another student needs help with a math problem they’re stuck on, and they’re clearly really frustrated.
At the same time, another child wants to confirm the group they’re in for an upcoming project, and they seem really stressed about it. The teacher can feel how badly that student wants to talk to her to resolve the situation.
All of these children need her in some way. They seem to be struggling emotionally, but the teacher literally can’t help all the children at once.
So who does she pick?
It actually doesn’t matter. She can choose any child to start with, but here’s what she doesn’t do: This teacher doesn’t assume that the other children who she doesn’t start with are immediately being harmed while they wait for her. S
he knows that even if they’re uncomfortable, their discomfort is not harmful. And she knows that not only can they be fine, but they can actually feel more confident and more empowered if she teaches them how to manage their discomfort while they’re waiting.
She knows she can teach them how to handle uncomfortable feelings, and when she does, she knows she can give them a quick glance while they’re in that moment of discomfort to show them that she sees them and that she cares.
But she could also walk to another student knowing that they do not need to be completely dependent on her to handle their hard feelings.
So let me get a little bit more specific.
Let’s start with a child who’s trying to hand her their homework. If the teacher doesn’t have confidence that this child has the strategies to handle discomfort, she might think, “Oh, I have to talk to this child right away because she’s worried she’ll forget to turn in her homework, and we don’t want that to happen. She’s already an anxious child!”
And of course, that’s going to make this teacher want to jump in right away. Or she could teach the student how to soothe herself, and the teacher could remind herself, “I’m going to give this student a signal that I see her, and then remind her to use the strategy we discussed that teaches the student how to calm her worries when they pop up.”
So instead of worrying about this child’s worry, the teacher can recognize this student can handle the worry, especially when she knows there’s someone who cares, but that person doesn’t need to immediately jump in to fix it.
Let’s move on to the child who needs help with a math problem who’s clearly frustrated. Again, the teacher could panic about this. She could say, “Oh, no, if I don’t help him with this problem right now, he’s going to hate math even more. I need to go to him right away!”
But if she’s thinking that, she’s going to be torn between two students who are both in discomfort — the student who wants to hand in the homework and the student who might and the student who might potentially hate math if she doesn’t immediately help him.
Or this teacher can teach students strategies, and then in that moment when the student is frustrated with his math problem, she can remind herself, “I will give that student a signal that reminds him to try that strategy we discussed (that tells you what to do when you’re stuck on a math problem).”
Now, I think you’re getting the pattern here, but I still want to move to that third child who wants to confirm the group that they’re in for an upcoming group project.
This teacher could think, “Oh my goodness, now there’s a third student, and I have to balance and prioritize whose discomfort is most important.”
Then in that moment, she has to calculate whose discomfort is biggest, who’s going to be damaged the most in the long run.
Or she could teach her student strategies and empower them. Then she can remind herself in the moment when that student is asking about the group project, she can remind herself, “I can let this student know that I’m absolutely going to get to her and remind her how to reduce the stress while she’s waiting for me to get back to her. “
This teacher doesn’t actually need to prioritize who’s most upset and she doesn’t need to take on the emotional burden that she believes these students may be carrying.
She can empower them to know how to handle this discomfort. That’s actually part of what kids need to learn. Not just reading, not just math.
They need to learn how to handle discomfort even if the situation doesn’t change to bring them immediate relief.
So even if the teacher can’t immediately answer their question, they need to know how to handle that feeling. Immediate relief can’t always come, and we need to teach our kids how to handle that.
And of course, family life works the same way.
When one child needs you, the other child doesn’t necessarily need immediate access to you.
What they need is a plan. Maybe the plan is: Go do something comforting for you, like read a book or lie in bed, while you’re waiting for me.
Or: While you’re waiting for me, write down what’s bothering you, and then we can talk about it together and work through it together.
In my programs as I work directly with parents, I help them determine what these plans are and how to communicate them with their kids so their kids actually feel more empowered and more capable…not more neglected.
And this plan, no matter what it actually is, matters because it shifts a child who’s waiting from feeling helpless to feeling capable. It reduces Yuck instead of adding more.
Without a plan, waiting may feel like “no one is going to help me,” or “my parents like my brother or sister better.”
But with a plan, waiting feels like “I know I can handle this feeling.” and these hard situations become opportunities for children to increase their zone of tolerance, to be able to tolerate more discomfort…not because they’re being “ignored,” but because they’re being empowered.
Now, I do want to add one more piece to this as we think about maybe we have to prioritize who needs us first.
We often assume that the upset child, the one who’s in Yuck, is the one who needs immediate attention, and that’s actually not always true.
Sometimes the child in Yuck can wait and use a plan they’ve created to soothe themselves. When they have that plan, all they need is a look from you, an acknowledgement that you see them, and the knowledge that you will return at some point to talk to them about it.
So they can think, “Oh, my parent or caregiver knows I’m upset, and they’ll be back. They always come back.” A child in Yuck doesn’t automatically become helpless because they have to wait.
In fact, one of the most important things children can learn is “I can be upset and help soothe myself while I wait for more support… if that support is even needed.” That’s resilience.
Many parents think we’re protecting our children by making sure that what our kids seem to want is met immediately, but that can be very depowering for children.
What builds confidence isn’t always that immediate help from us. What builds confidence is your confidence that they can handle discomfort plus the strategies they learn to know how to handle discomfort. And then they know “I can handle this feeling.”
The problem is when we see situations like this as dangerous or as a threat, our own Yuck starts rising. And when our Yuck rises, we can’t think clearly And we panic more, which creates more panic for our kids.
The irony is that the more pressure we put on ourselves to help everyone immediately, the less we’re helping everybody. And we also send a message to their nervous systems that discomfort creates chaos. And that’s not what we want them to believe.
We want them to know that we and they can handle discomfort.
So let’s go back to Jamie, that mom with two children. Remember she kept asking herself, “Who needs me most right now? My child who’s upset about the party or my child who needs help with homework?”
But that question wasn’t helping because every answer made her feel guilty.
So she learned to handle situations like this differently.
First, we discussed how to bring up and teach her children a plan to handle their discomfort while they waited. Again, this is what I teach parents how to do inside of my programs.
And then in the moment, she started to ask a different question. The new question was, “What do I think I can realistically handle best right now?”
Notice the difference. She wasn’t asking who was most important.
She wasn’t asking “Who will be damaged if I choose wrong?”
She was asking, “Who can I handle the best right now?” Because she knew that when she was at her best, she could help her kids the best. Importantly, she also knew that the child who waited would not only be fine, but they’d get a chance to practice the plan.
So again, she asked, “What can I handle best right now?” Maybe she had the capacity to sit with her son for a few minutes. Maybe she had the capacity to help with homework first. Maybe she needed to finish dinner because she needed to get her mindset first she could even help her kids.
There wasn’t a perfect answer. What mattered was that she was making the decision from a grounded place instead of a Yuck-fueled place.
So in the example I’ve been talking about, Jamie checked in with herself and knew she’d feel better if she worked with her daughter first.
So she said to her upset son, “I know this is hard. I’m going to help your sister get started with her homework, and then I’ll come back and sit with you. In the meantime, remember your strategy for when life feels really hard.”
Now, neither her son nor daughter became magically happy all of a sudden when she did that, but that wasn’t the goal.
But something else happened that was really important for all of them. She stopped treating their discomfort as an emergency. She stopped assuming someone was being harmed because they had to wait, and because she became calmer, the entire situation became calmer more quickly.
So one of the most powerful shifts you can make as a parent is recognizing that not every hard moment is a threat.
Your child being upset is not automatically a threat.
Your other child having to wait is not automatically a threat.
A complicated family moment is not automatically a threat.
In fact, these moments often give children opportunities to practice skills they’ll need for the rest of their lives, skills like patience and flexibility, problem-solving, waiting, and handling disappointment.
They’ll also learn to trust that support is coming even when it isn’t immediate, and then when it’s not immediately there, they don’t panic.
And of course, when your Yuck comes down, that’s when your influence grows… not because you fixed everyone’s feelings immediately, but because you stopped seeing the situation as an emergency, and you stopped communicating to them that it was an emergency.
And when children feel that from us, they learn that they can handle hard things too.
That is how you build your parenting long game.
And of course, I have multiple resources for you to help you in this journey.
I have a free workshop that can help if your child does tend to focus on the negative in situations like this.
I also have a free resource that talks about your child’s zone of tolerance, and if you want to know more about the programs where I teach you how to empower yourself more and empower your kids, I also have a link on the show notes where you can speak to me about which program might be best for you and your needs.
You can find all of this on the show notes for this episode at rachel-bailey.com/384.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.
FREE RESOURCE: Does your child have a narrow zone of tolerance?
