👉 Before we get started- On Wednesday, I’m hosting a live workshop called When You Know Better, but Still Yell, where we focus on understanding what happens in those moments and how to interrupt yelling and repair without shame.

If that sounds supportive to you, you can find more information at reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop.

Now the episode!! You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I speak with Hunter Clarke-Fields, the host of the Mindful Mama Podcast and author of the book Raising Good Humans.

We discussed taking care of difficult feelings including how blocking our feelings can backfire and the role mindfulness plays in accepting and working through our own and our children’s feelings.

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We talk about:

* 00:00:35 — Guest intro: Hunter Clarke-Fields (Raising Good Humans, Mindful Mama Podcast)

* 00:01:00 — Big feelings as the root of so many parenting struggles + why willpower isn’t enough

* 00:04:00 — Hunter’s background: mindfulness, sensitivity, and parenting an intense child

* 00:10:00 — Two common coping patterns: blocking feelings vs flooding (and why both backfire)

* 00:21:00 — Mindful acceptance: what it is + how allowing feelings helps them move through

* 00:27:00 — Reflective listening + “name it to tame it” (why labeling feelings lowers intensity)

* 00:31:40 — Co-regulation in action: a real-life story of staying steady with a dysregulated teen

* 00:38:10 — Takeaways + where to find Hunter + workshop reminder + closing

Resources mentioned in this episode:

* Workshop: When You Know Better but Still Yell Workshop

* Evelyn & Bobbie bras

* Yoto Player-Screen Free Audio Book Player

* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

* Hunter’s website

* Raising Good Humans

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* Website

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xx Sarah and Corey

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Podcast transcript:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Hunter Clark Fields. She’s a mindfulness teacher and parenting expert, host of the Mindful Mama Podcast, and author of the book Raising Good Humans. We focused our conversation today around taking care of difficult feelings—both yours and your child’s.

So often, big feelings are the cause of parenting challenges and friction in our families. Hunter shared some great strategies for how to make these moments that happen every day more tolerable, and even how our lives get better when we learn to accept our own feelings and our child’s feelings.

And don’t worry if you’re like me and you sort of shut down when someone starts telling you that you should have a mindfulness practice. You can use Hunter’s suggestions even if you know that meditation isn’t necessarily in your future.

Interestingly, one thing Hunter and I spoke about is that you can’t stay calm or not yell in difficult situations just by willpower. It’s not just a choice we make—how to react in difficult situations. If you’re listening to this and recognizing yourself, especially that gap between knowing what you want to do and what actually happens when things get intense, I want you to know that you’re not alone.

On Wednesday, I’m teaching a live workshop called When You Know Better but Still Yell. We’ll focus on regulation and repair in real, everyday parenting moments—without shaming yourself or forcing calm. You can find the link in the show notes, or you can go to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop.

Okay, let’s meet Hunter.

Sarah: Hi, Hunter. Welcome to the podcast.

Hunter: Thanks for having me, Sarah. I’m glad to be here.

Sarah: It’s nice to connect. I loved your book, Raising Good Humans. I was going to hold up mine—yours is behind you there. There’s some really valuable stuff in it around being the peaceful parent that we want to be. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do before we get started?

Hunter: Sure. I’m a mom of two daughters and a podcaster. I’ve been podcasting the Mindful Mama Podcast for a long time. I guess I like to talk, and I’m fascinated by people. I’ve been a student of mindfulness for many, many years, and a student of parenting because it was something I was very much struggling with.

So that’s me in a nutshell. I’m also really passionate about Scottish country dance. We used to have paintings and galleries, and I was a passionate painter—so there are lots of different things happening.

Sarah: I love that. Are you Scottish?

Hunter: A little bit by heritage, yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Hunter: Hunter is actually a Scottish last name. My maternal grandfather’s maternal grandfather’s last name was Donald Hunter.

Sarah: Oh, that’s cool. What came first—the mindfulness? Were you already a student of mindfulness when you became a parent, or did you turn to mindfulness when you found parenting to be challenging?

Hunter: Both. I was already a student of mindfulness. I started reading about mindfulness when I was a teenager, because I’ve always been a highly sensitive person. So I would have big ups and downs, and corresponding pits that I would fall into. I started reading about mindfulness, and I kept reading and reading, and it did help to read.

Then, maybe about ten years into my reading journey, I started an actual sitting meditation practice, and lo and behold, that helped a lot more than just reading about it. It really changed things for me. I used to fall into these pits of feeling like the world was overwhelming and feeling like I couldn’t handle life. That stopped happening. I had difficult feelings, but I wasn’t floored by them, grounded by them, or left incapacitated by them. That was a big change for me.

That happened maybe two years before I got pregnant with my first child. I remember being pregnant with Maggie and sitting in a meditation group with my big pregnant belly, patting myself on the back and thinking, “Oh, this is going to be great. This child is going to be so calm. Everything is going to be so awesome because we’re doing this meditation practice.” And it’s like—ugh. Right. Life kind of slaps you in the face and says, “You think you know what’s going to happen? That’s right. No, you don’t.”

Sarah: And the best parents are always the ones who don’t have kids, right? You always think, “This is how I’m going to do things when I’m a parent.” I remember when I was in my twenties, I was a Montessori assistant, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, these parents are so crazy and intense.” I couldn’t understand it. And then I had my first kid and I was like, “Oh, I suddenly get it.” That love—and the triggering, too—that you probably never felt in any other ways.

Hunter: Yeah. And there are so many other factors as well. I remember taking Maggie to her Montessori preschool and dropping her off with a teacher I’d become friends with and got to know and love. I would get her in the door, turn around, and just cry out of relief to have three hours where I wasn’t “on”—where I wasn’t there to take the intensity of this child.

Sarah: For sure. So it sounds like at least your older daughter is on the more intense side of things.

Hunter: Yeah. She’s a lot like me. She’s very highly sensitive. She was always very intense from the beginning. Her birth was intense. Her babyhood was intense. Everything is intense about her—very sensitive.

And about a year and a half into her being born, I realized I needed something to help me weather this intensity: the anxiety, her emotional storms. I was getting myself to the YMCA, and I got her to tolerate—just barely—the YMCA childcare. But I was like, “I need more.” I needed to really turn to my mindfulness and bring it back, because it was so triggering for me.

Sarah: Wow. I’m glad you found it, and that you’re sharing it with everybody else. When you were talking before about big feelings being a challenge in your life—managing the feelings, I guess is a fair thing to say—that was actually one of my favorite chapters of your book: “Taking Care of Difficult Feelings.”

I was hoping we could focus on that today, because I think so much of our parenting struggles come from difficult feelings—either our child’s difficult feelings, or our own difficult feelings, or both. I love how you frame working with those feelings.

You talk about two common responses to difficult feelings that are the flip side of the same coin: blocking and becoming flooded. Can you talk about those two responses—what they are, what they look like, and how we might notice if those things are happening? And to be clear upfront: those are the things you want to move away from—either blocking or becoming flooded by difficult feelings. So maybe ground us in what those are first.

Hunter: Sure. I think blocking is something a lot of us are familiar with. That’s the “Don’t cry, go to your room,” right? It’s basically the instruction to not have those feelings. So we’re blocking those feelings out in some way.

And like anything, it’s not completely black and white. Sometimes there are times in life where it’s helpful to block feelings temporarily. We know that. But in general, we try to avoid feeling our feelings, because difficult feelings are uncomfortable.

So we block them. Blocking can include: I remember the chocolate stash in my pantry was pretty robust when Maggie was little. It can include drinking. It definitely includes the phone and the scrolling as a way of blocking our feelings. Anything we’re doing to distract ourselves or stuff down and not look at those feelings. Shopping. Doing things to distract ourselves.

Sarah: Or being too busy, too.

Hunter: Yeah. Over-busyness is certainly one—the endless to-do list. The sad thing about over-busyness is that we’re rewarded for that so much in our society. We’re rewarded for getting things done and productivity. And for women, it can be like being a good girl or being a strong independent woman is to get stuff done and to be busy.

And yet it has this insidious side where, especially with our feelings, we’re pushing through. We’re not feeling our feelings. We’re training ourselves to not be present. We’re training ourselves to always be in the future.

The sad side of that is: when we’re always in this to-do list—“I’m gonna go, I’m gonna do, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna do”—then we think, “Oh, I’m gonna get to our beach vacation and I’m gonna be really present with my kids.” And then you can’t, because you’ve trained your brain and your heart to always go and do. It feels unbearably restless to stop when you finally try to stop.

So blocking can look like all of those things.

And then the flip side is: the blocking builds up. You block and block and block. It becomes overwhelming. You have no tools to deal with and process these feelings. You’re just trying to push them away, and then suddenly they’re overwhelming. You drown in them. You’re completely flooded by them.

Flooding can look like completely drowning in sadness, misery, shame. It can also look like anger—your temper. There’s a bunch of stuff coming out that you can’t stop, because you’re completely flooded by these feelings and you have no way to deal with them.

A metaphor I like is that the feelings are like a big hamburger—a big juicy hamburger with cheese, and it’s gooey and disgusting. You’re eating this big emotional hamburger, but you have no digestive system because you’ve tried to shove it away. And then when you can’t, it becomes a big, disgusting mess. That’s my disgusting metaphor for not having the tools to digest and process those feelings.

Sarah: Do you ever listen to Anderson Cooper’s podcast? I can’t remember the name of it now. I know who he is, but it’s about grief. He has a podcast about grief—it’s called All There Is. It’s a really wonderful podcast. He talks a lot about how he never processed the grief of his father dying, and then his brother dying. And then his mother died, and he realized he’d gone his whole life without processing any of this grief, and it had really robbed him of the ability to feel other things.

Like joy. He’s a father with a couple of young kids, and it wasn’t until he started to process his grief that he was able to access the other, more beautiful emotions. And I think that’s— for people like me, where I admit I have a hard time feeling my feelings sometimes—I try to remind myself: you have to feel the hard things to also feel the good things.

Hunter: Yeah, it’s true. There’s the research by Brené Brown, and it comes out pretty unequivocally that you can’t selectively numb. You’re either numbing everything, or you’re feeling your feelings. And if you’re feeling your feelings, you’ve got to be able to process it.

For me, I was never unable to feel my feelings. I felt everything too much. I was never able to block out much. So I felt like I had no choice but to learn how to process these feelings. And when Maggie came along, the thing that was coming out for me was my temper.

I felt very ashamed of it. This is exactly how I decided not to parent. My brain, my choice, my willpower was that I would be this peaceful parent, gentle—and I was not. I was scaring her. I was aggressive. I was loud. I could see I scared her multiple times, and it was exactly what I didn’t want.

So I could really see: this isn’t like, “Pause and choose X, Y, Z instead.” It’s not that simple. I would say, “How do you pause?” It’s a process of changing bit by bit over time, and making a different kind of habit—energy in your body—learning how to tolerate the difficult things. It’s so much more than willpower.

It gave me a lot of compassion for myself and for other people who struggle, especially moms who couldn’t even say they had any anger—who felt so ashamed of even having it. Because it isn’t a choice. Nobody listening to this podcast or my podcast is thinking, “I think I’ll wake up on Tuesday and scream at Joey.” That’s not happening.

It’s much more than a choice. So I really had to understand it and understand how to be the parent that Maggie needed me to be. She clearly needed somebody steady—steadiness, a lot of steadiness, a lot of rhythm. She was not a go-with-the-flow kid, and I needed to become the parent she needed me to be.

Sarah: I’m lucky—for all the parents you’ve helped out there—that you had that experience. If you had a really easy kid, you might not ever have had to learn all of these lessons that you now share with other people. So it’s a blessing for everyone else that you had to go through the hard time.

Hunter: Yeah. Sometimes I joke that I had just the right amount of trauma: enough that I was able to deal with it in a way that I could break it down, understand it, and deal with it.

But it is really helpful to understand: there’s so much more than, “Here’s how you respond to your kid.” Those skillful ways to respond are wonderful to know, but they go completely out the window as soon as you’re activated—when your stress response is triggered—because your brain is in limbic fight, flight, or freeze mode.

It’s important to understand: this is a biological nervous system response. It’s not your fault. There’s not something wrong with you. This is innate—baked into every single human who is alive. There are tools to deal with it, but we have to stop shaming and blaming ourselves for it in order to take the necessary steps to study ourselves.

Sarah: One of the necessary steps you talk about is that instead of blocking or becoming flooded, we can learn mindful acceptance when we have difficult feelings. Can you talk a bit about what mindful acceptance is for those difficult feelings?

Hunter: Sure. This is really where a formal mindfulness practice shines. It gives us an incredible skill and tolerance, because as we sit—say we take up a sitting meditation practice—we sit there for five minutes or ten minutes. Our mind goes to other things. Our emotions happen. All this stuff happens. And we practice accepting it, observing it. We’re not really doing anything about it except accepting it and observing it. We watch it come, and we watch it go, because nothing stays around forever.

This builds a muscle of non-reactivity. Normally, when we feel a feeling in our body—the tension in our throat, the tightness in our shoulders, the “I’ve gotta get outta here” feeling—we act from it. That’s what our nervous system designed us to do. We’re designed to act on a threat or anxiety. We’re designed to move forward.

So it’s a weird, anti-evolutionary, slightly unnatural thing to sit and feel the thing you’re feeling. But paradoxically, as you sit with the “I’ve gotta get outta here” feeling, it lessens enormously and sometimes completely goes away.

Mindful acceptance is what happens when, for me, I’m practicing my meditation practice on a daily level in little bits—when I’m not quite so activated. There are little bits of: “I’m accepting this thought. I’m accepting these feelings. I’m noticing what’s arising. I’m seeing there’s some anxiety today.” I’m accepting it, and I’m sitting with it.

That means I’m not trying to push it away. I’m opening myself up. I’m saying, “Okay, yes, you are here. Yes, it’s okay that you’re here,” and I’m going to be curious about it.

Instead of saying, “What’s wrong with me for having this feeling?” I’m going to say, “What does this feel like?” This feels like some tension right in the middle of my chest, underneath my collarbones. It feels like a tickly feeling and a little discomfort—maybe slight queasiness. I’m going to observe it with curiosity, as if I’m an alien beamed down into my body. Like, “What is this?” Just curious: “Okay, yes, this is here.”

And as we say yes to this, we stop that instinctive blocking and pushing away.

In the Mindful Parenting Teacher Training program, when we work on this, I invite people to think of a difficult feeling and first try to say no to it—say in their heads, “No, no, no, no, no.” You can watch their faces tighten and their bodies tense up. Then I invite them to say, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” And you can see everyone relax. You can see the unclenching. It’s paradoxical: as we accept, “Okay, this is here—this anger, this sadness, this anxiety, whatever it is,” it lessens enormously just with that acceptance, and often can go away completely.

It loosens the grip to say yes—to open our arms wide and say yes to the difficult feelings, as much as we don’t want to.

Sarah: I love that. And I just want to point out: if you’re listening and you’re like, “I’ve made it to this age and I’ve always intended to have a mindfulness practice, but I don’t”—like me, raising his hand—I think you can still use everything you just said, even if you’re not going to start a daily mindfulness practice. In the moment, accepting the feelings you’re having, and everything you were saying, sounds so helpful to say about your child’s feelings too.

Hunter: Exactly. When we practice accepting our own feelings, then we can accept our child’s feelings. We want to accept their difficult feelings—maybe not the behavior, but the feelings. We may say the words out loud, but our bodies might tell a different story: that we’re not really accepting those feelings. Like, “Yes, it’s okay. I need to be mad at your brother.” And kids have incredible BS meters. They can see right through that.

So for us to really accept them, we have to first accept ourselves. We have to be able to accept our own feelings in order to truly accept our kids’ feelings. Because if we’re secretly judging our own humanity—shaming ourselves for our difficulty—if we’re harsh and mean to ourselves, that’s eventually going to come out. It won’t stay hidden. Those parts of ourselves come out. We live with our kids for at least eighteen years, and it will come out. You can’t fake it. Kids will see the faking it, if we’re trying to—

Sarah: One thing you talk about—I understood it as one of the practices you can put in place to move toward mindful acceptance—is that reflective listening piece with our children. That reflective listening is a tool to help you with more acceptance of feelings. Is that how you look at it, or how do you see those as related?

Hunter: Yeah, they’re totally related. When we practice reflective listening—like, “I see you look really frustrated”—say our kid comes to us and they’re mad at their brother. Instead of saying, “You shouldn’t be hitting your brother,” or being defensive, or trying to make the problem go away, we say, “Oh, wow. You are really upset right now. I can see this was really important to you.” Then they say, “Yeah, because he did this,” and blah, blah, blah. “Oh my gosh. Okay. Wow. This was really upsetting for you. Hold on. I’m going to listen to your brother too.”

As soon as we acknowledge those feelings in our kids, it takes the temperature down. It takes stress hormone levels down in the body—that’s what the research shows.

It’s similar for us. As soon as we’re acknowledging—this is what Dr. Dan Siegel calls “name it to tame it”—when we name something, it’s like magic happens. The left brain and right brain come together. The verbal part of the brain helps take down the temperature in the emotional part of the brain just by recognizing out loud the feelings.

In the same way we’re naming it with our children, we’re naming it with ourselves. That may be out loud with our children, or it may not be out loud within ourselves, but either way it provides release to name it.

Sarah: In my coaching, I’ve heard lots of parents say, “When I do that, it makes my child more upset,” or “It makes them aggressive.” If I say, “I can see you’re really upset right now,” or “really mad at your brother,” do you think that’s because they’re not really acknowledging their child’s feelings and they’re just saying a script? Or is there something about having feelings acknowledged that makes a child go further into the feelings? Or neither, or both? What’s your experience with that?

Hunter: It’s interesting, and it’s really hard to tell when we’re not there in the moment and we’re hearing from one parent’s point of view. I have heard that. And I think being acknowledged is helpful—but it depends on the form the acknowledgement takes.

Maybe it’s, “Oh honey,” with your arms open—communicating acceptance: “I see you and I hear you,” with your body and your mind.

Sometimes we can practice a tool like reflective listening with a script, but without congruence of mind and body—where inside we’re panicked: “The ship is going down and I’ve got to do something. I’m going to do that tool that Sarah and Hunter said to do.” We’re saying the words, but behind it is the panic of, “Oh my God, my kid’s out of control,” and our own nervous system is starting to freak out, like it’s an emergency.

That’s an incongruent message between your mind and your body. It has to be honest and real, otherwise it can’t really work.

That’s why foundation is so important. It can’t just be scripts on the outside. It has to be the foundation of some kind of practices, some kind of intention, that helps you steady and calm your nervous system on a daily basis—so you can access it in a moment like that.

I was with my daughter Maggie not that long ago. She must have been sixteen. She was really mad at me and my husband for something. I think it had to do with swimming scheduling. I forget what it was. She was really mad at us, and she was saying this to us near our living room entryway area.

At first I was listening, and I could feel the agitation in my body. So I got a broom and started to sweep the entryway while she was mad and upset with us. And I was like, “Oh, look at what I’m doing.” I could see myself. So I put it down. I sat down on the ottoman and practiced feeling what I was feeling—feeling the discomfort—without trying to say anything. I didn’t say anything. I was just there, practicing being present in myself with my sensations and my feelings, with what was going on, with this kind of verbal assault that was happening.

Within about thirty seconds of me sitting down and practicing this, she also sat down right next to me on the ottoman and slumped her body against mine. She started to wind down. Nothing special or miraculous was said. It was just the practice of being present—being steady—listening to her, taking in what she was saying, feeling the feelings.

Kids can feel that. We can feel when someone is congruent with what they’re feeling and doing and saying, and when someone isn’t.

So I often encourage parents: reflective listening is an incredible tool and it really can help a lot. But with some kids it doesn’t mean you’re going to say a lot of words. It means you’re going to practice the number one thing about reflective listening: mindfully being present. “I am present in my body. I am seeing and hearing you.” And then offering empathy—whether it’s even just a sound that isn’t a word. It doesn’t have to be a ton of words.

Sarah: I love that. The anecdote you shared with your daughter was a perfect example of co-regulation.

Hunter: Yeah.

Sarah: And being that nervous system anchor—you focused on your own nervous system, and it helped her too.

Hunter: Exactly. I wish I could have figured that out when she was two, but at least I figured it out when she was sixteen.

Sarah: So true. Was there anything you think would be helpful to add about taking care of difficult feelings that I haven’t asked you about? There’s so much great stuff in your book, but just for the sake of keeping the focus on what we’ve been talking about today.

Hunter: It’s important to remember that we have a lot of resistance to doing the practices of taking care of difficult feelings. I offer the RAIN practice and different things for looking at our difficult feelings. We have a lot of resistance to that, and that’s very natural.

But it really does help our kids. Just like in that anecdote I shared with Maggie, for us to model how to do that as a human. For every skill you want your kid to have in life, you have to do it first. You have to model it first. Kids are terrible at doing what we say, but they’re great at doing what we do. They’re great at imitating our behavior and seeing the way we live our lives as a model for how to live life.

So regardless of how old your kid is, it’s an incredible practice for you to do. And it’s a two-for-one: you help yourself, and you help your kid. It makes things less scary. I have less negative anticipation of things because I practice being present most of the time—and because I know that when I get into the present moment of something, I’ll survive it.

I’ve survived a lot of difficult feelings. I’ve felt a lot of difficult feelings, and I’ll be okay. I can tolerate a lot of different difficult things. And it makes me more present for the positive things. It makes me more able to fully feel joy and excitement, and to join in their joy and excitement. So it has a lot of benefits.

Sarah: I love that. You were just talking about resilience—knowing that you can handle difficult feelings. A lot of parents mistake resilience for not getting upset, but I always tell parents: no, it’s not that you don’t get upset, it’s that you get upset and you recover. And the path to that is always going through the upset first.

I love when you talk about reflective listening and the empathy piece. In peaceful parenting we always talk about welcoming feelings, and I think that’s the key to taking care of difficult feelings: welcoming them, and knowing that every time you survive it, you become a little bit more resilient.

Hunter: Absolutely. There are a couple different ways to welcome them. One thing I want to point out—because I think it’s so beautiful—is that I studied mindfulness for many years, and my main teacher was the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, who has since passed.

What he used to say about difficult feelings is that we want to imagine ourselves holding them in our arms like a baby: “Oh, hello, my anger. I’m going to take care of you. It’s okay that you’re here. My anxiety, I’m going to take care of you. I’m here for you.”

That’s such a beautiful image of how to accept and take care of our feelings. We’ve got to take care of these feelings. They’re kind of like toddlers tugging at our legs, and they’re not going to go away until they are seen and heard.

So you’ve got to get some kind of process.

Sarah: I love that. Thank you so much. There’s a question I ask all my podcast guests: if you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what would you tell yourself?

Hunter: I would tell myself to slow down. I don’t have to get it all done. I can give myself time to figure out this experience, and not rush forward.

Sarah: Love that. Where’s the best place for folks to go and find out more about you and what you do?

Hunter: You can find Raising Good Humans anywhere books are sold, and the Mindful Mama Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m at mindfulmamamentor.com, and there are lots of freebies there, and podcasts and articles, et cetera.

Sarah: Great. We’ll link to all those in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us.

Hunter: Thank you, Sarah. It’s been really fun.

Sarah: If this episode brought up that familiar feeling of “I know what to do—why is it still so hard?” I want to pause and say that this struggle is incredibly common, and it doesn’t mean you’re failing. On Wednesday, I’m hosting a live workshop called When You Know Better, but Still Yell, where we focus on understanding what happens in those moments and how to interrupt yelling and repair without shame. If that sounds supportive to you, you can find more information in the show notes or go to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop.

This week’s episode is a conversational invitation rather than a full podcast episode. We’re talking about why yelling happens even when you know better — and why willpower alone isn’t the answer.

If you’ve ever felt ashamed, frustrated, or confused about why old patterns show up under stress, you’re not alone. We also share details about a live workshop, When You Know Better but Still Yell, for parents who want support with regulation and repair in real-life moments. Happening on Weds. Jan 21

Workshop details and registration are HERE

or go to https://reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop

In this episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I bring back one of my favourite holiday episodes, which is an interview with my kids, where we talk about ‘people, not stuff’.

Every year around the holidays, I hear from parents who are worried their kids are too focused on presents, too greedy, or too materialistic — and they’re afraid they’re getting something wrong. I made this episode to offer a long-term perspective.

I interviewed my own kids (then 14, 17, and 20) about what holidays and gifts felt like when they were little — and what actually mattered as they got older.

Us last year at Christmas- on one of the Christmas Day walks we discussed on the podcast:

In the episode, we talk about why “wanting stuff” is normal in childhood, how values really develop over time, and why parents can relax a lot more than they think.

🎉🎂 Also- today is my birthday!

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xx Sarah (and Corey!)

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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, OR we’ve included a fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

We talk about:

* 2:00 — Intro: replay episode + why parents worry about “greedy/materialistic” kids

* 3:00 — Holiday schedule update + invitation to email podcast ideas/guest suggestions

* 3:34 — Why this episode: parents’ concerns about consumerism + interviewing Sarah’s kids

* 4:00 — Important context: privilege, money, and why this worry comes from a privileged place

* 5:00 — Two practical ways to handle privilege: Santa gifts + donating new presents

* 7:00 — Meet Maxine (14): how holiday meaning shifts with age (family time, traditions, coziness)

* 11:38 — “Ungrateful” little kids: why it’s normal + what parents shouldn’t panic about

* 13:23 — What helps long-term: building traditions + experiences as gifts

* 16:34 — Meet Asa (17): growing out of the “wanting stuff” stage + values changing over time

* 21:05 — Middle school + fitting in: when brand-name wanting peaks (and why)

* 22:30 — What parents should do: keep kids grounded + relax

* 23:01 — Meet Lee (20): consumerism awareness, “people not stuff,” and the post-holiday letdown

* 32:00 — Gratitude + privilege: why kids can’t fully grasp it yet, and how it comes with time

* 33:31 — Reassurance: if you’re worried about this, you’re probably already doing fine

* 34:34 — Wrap-up: “the parenting podcast paradox” + holiday wishes

Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:

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* Website

* Join us on Substack

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xx Sarah and Corey

Your peaceful parenting team- click here for a free short consult or a coaching session

Visit our website for free resources, podcast, coaching, membership and more!

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Here’s the polished transcript of the interview-

Today’s episode is a replay of an episode from four years ago.

So many parents get worried, especially at this time of year, that their kids are materialistic and greedy and will never have good values. I thought you could use a little window into the future, and it would be helpful for you to see where we are in my family and what it’s like as kids get older.

So I interviewed my kids about their experiences growing up with presents and holidays and stuff. So if your kid has a case of the greedy, you’ll see, if you listen to my kids, that it won’t last forever. At the time of the interviews, they were 14, 17, and 20. Today they’re 18, 21, and 24. Things really do shift as your kids get older.

My older two kids live on their own—and they have for a few years—and so far, all they’ve said they want for Christmas is socks. Things really do change.

If this holiday support episode is helpful and you aren’t on my email list, make sure you check out the other posts that we have on Substack. As I mentioned, just search up Substack and Sarah Rosensweet and you’ll find us.

My team and I are going to be taking a bit of time off for the holidays. We will be back in the new year with new episodes of this podcast. And if you have any ideas for the podcast, or any guests that you’d like to have on, or you would like to be coached on the podcast, shoot me an email: [email protected].

I’d love to hear from you about any ideas you have for the podcast—what you’d like to have coming up in the new year.

Here we go back to the podcast. Enjoy this replay, whether it’s your first time hearing it or if you’ve heard it before.

Sarah: Today’s episode is a response to some parents’ questions and concerns that I received when I did a call-out asking people what they were concerned about over the holidays. And some parents were really feeling stressed about materialism and consumerism of the holidays, and their kids getting too many presents or wanting too much stuff.

So I interviewed my kids about it—what their perspective was, having gone through the “I want more presents” stage, and now they’re teenagers. They’re 14, 17, and one of them’s not a teenager anymore—he’s 20. So I interviewed them because they’ve been through it, and I’ve been through it with them.

But before we dive into the interviews, I just want to acknowledge that this is a very privileged position—that we have the privilege of being able to be concerned that our kids have too much stuff, or they’re getting too many presents, or that they’re worried too much about getting things and being able to buy things.

For a number of years when our kids were little, my husband was a student and I was a stay-at-home mom, and we really didn’t have any money. We really had to watch every penny. But we still had privilege because we got government assistance—child tax benefit. We live in Canada where we have socialized medicine, so we didn’t need to worry about health insurance.

And we also had the family safety net privilege, which was that we knew if we ever were really in dire straits, our parents would help us out.

And our kids had privilege even though we didn’t have money in those years, because they got a lot of presents from their grandparents. I think we mention that in the interviews that are coming up.

So my husband and I—we didn’t have much money, but we didn’t need to worry about buying them gifts because they had five sets of grandparents. Hello, divorce and remarriage.

So I just really wanted to acknowledge that I am speaking from a place of privilege, my children are speaking from a place of privilege, and those parents who reached out to me concerned about too many presents and materialism and “What are we gonna do when our kids just want so much stuff?”—they’re also speaking from a place of privilege.

And many, many, many parents don’t have that. They don’t have enough money to buy presents for their kids. And those kids might be in school with kids who get tons of presents at Christmas.

So two small things that we can do—and I know these are really just a drop in the bucket—but while I’m here, I’m just going to make two suggestions for all of us listening who are coming from a place of privilege.

One is that we don’t get big presents from Santa. If we do celebrate Christmas and we do the Santa tradition, we don’t give our children big presents from Santa. That’s one thing, because what about kids who are getting hardly anything, if anything at all, from Santa?

Another is that we make donations. Those of us who have privilege—we either make donations to food banks, or we make donations by buying new presents. It’s great to donate things that your kids no longer play with. But what I’m asking here is that we donate new presents to organizations that will then distribute them to kids who are less financially privileged.

I know that’s not a ton, and I always feel kind of nervous and vulnerable when I talk about things like this. I’m still learning and I’m not perfect. However, I just wanted to address the issue of privilege—financial privilege—before we dive in.

So let me introduce you to my kids. If you didn’t hear them in episode one of the podcast, when they were talking about what it was like to be raised by peaceful parenting, you might wanna go back and give that a listen. But let me introduce you to Maxine, who’s 14; Asa, who’s 17; and Lee, who’s 20.

You’re gonna hear each of their perspectives on stuff and presents and materialism and consumerism, and what they think parents should do to raise kids who have great values.

Okay, let’s dive in. Hi, Maxine. Hello. Welcome to the podcast.

Maxine: Hi.

Sarah: Can you introduce yourself?

Maxine: I’m Maxine, and I’m your child.

Sarah: How old are you? I know how old you are, but other people don’t.

Maxine: I’m 14.

Sarah: All right. So do you remember when you were little, what was the best thing about birthdays—Christmas, holidays?

Maxine: Oh… presents, I guess.

Sarah: I think that’s what—well, I—

Maxine: I probably shouldn’t say that, because I know that’s, like, what the whole podcasting is about.

Sarah: No, it’s okay. That’s what I’m trying to normalize. The fact that for little kids, it’s all about presents, right?

Maxine: Yeah.

Sarah: So do you think you’re still in that phase at 14—that it’s mostly about the presents?

Maxine: Well, not really. I like spending time with you guys—especially since Lee moved out.

Sarah: So you’re looking forward to having your brother come home at Christmas. What else is meaningful to you about the Christmas holiday?

Maxine: Well, literally you and Dad don’t have to work that much when it’s—so we get to spend, like, the whole day together. And we always have a nice breakfast, and sometimes we get to help you with that and stuff like that.

Sarah: One of my favorite things the past couple of years that we’ve been doing is the family walk on Christmas.

Maxine: Yeah. It’s fun. And we always take Emmy, and she’s always so happy to be with all of us.

Sarah: Yeah, because she never gets all five of us to take her for a walk at once.

Maxine: Oh—Emmy. Emmy’s our dog, by the way, if you don’t know that.

Sarah: So do you still like the presents?

Maxine: Yeah, I still like presents. But, like, who doesn’t like presents? Even you and Dad like presents.

Sarah: That’s true. But the time with family—you’re starting to appreciate that more as you’re getting older. Do you ever remember getting a present you didn’t like when you were a kid?

Maxine: No, but I remember being disappointed that I didn’t get presents that I wanted.

Sarah: Oh yeah? Tell me about that.

Maxine: When I thought Santa was real, I would make lists and I wouldn’t get all the stuff, and I would be kind of sad.

Sarah: Yeah. And how do you think that affected you as a person?

Maxine: I don’t think it really mattered. I think I was just a little kid who wanted to have all the presents that I wanted.

Sarah: Yeah. Do you think that’s pretty normal?

Maxine: Yeah.

Sarah: Do you think parents should worry about that?

Maxine: No. I think you shouldn’t worry. But I think it’s weird if your kids aren’t excited about presents and don’t want lots and lots of presents, because that’s a normal thing for kids to want.

Sarah: And so what do you think happens as you get older, and now you’re like, “Yeah, I still like presents, but that’s not the most important thing.”

Maxine: I think when you’re little, you just don’t understand what the holidays—and what that is all about. But when you get older, you realize that it’s more about just being able to spend time with people and stuff.

And it’s also nice to give people presents instead of just always getting presents.

Sarah: What have been your favorite presents that you’ve given?

Maxine: I don’t know—like when I give my brothers records or stuff like that, and it just seems to make them happy, then it makes me feel good.

Sarah: Do you remember making presents?

Maxine: Yeah. I made presents—like this year or last year. I made those little tree decorations for my brothers and you and my dad and all the grandparents and stuff.

Sarah: That’s right. Those were nice.

Maxine: Those little candy cane things.

Sarah: Yeah, those were sweet.

Maxine: Also, I like Christmas because it’s all nice and cozy. And just—like on Christmas or just any holidays that we do as a family—but especially Christmas, when we’re all sitting around and listening to music and it’s all cozy in our house and stuff, and then we can look outside and stuff like that.

Sarah: I love that too. I love decorating the tree and then sitting and looking at it afterwards, having hot chocolate.

Maxine: Yeah.

Sarah: You know, that was a tradition that I did growing up too.

Maxine: Cool. Also sometimes on Christmas—or mostly Christmas or New Year’s—when our grandparents call to just say “Happy New Year” or “Merry Christmas,” that’s nice. And you get to talk to them.

Usually I call your mom, and I always show her all my presents and stuff.

Sarah: You know, Nana listens to the podcast. Do you want to say hi to her?

Maxine: Hi Nana.

Sarah: One of the other things that parents were worried about—and why I’m making this podcast—is that sometimes little kids seem really ungrateful. Like they get a whole giant pile of presents and then they’re like, “I wanted the blah blah blah,” or “I didn’t get that,” or “Why did he get more?”

What do you think those parents need to hear when they have little kids? What do they need to hear from an older kid?

Maxine: Like I said before, when I would not get presents that I wanted, but I would still get other presents—I would be sad or unhappy about it, that I didn’t get the other presents that I wanted. But after, I would realize how fun the presents I actually got were.

And honestly, if you have a four-year-old and they’re upset about not getting something, then they’re literally four. So you can’t really think that they’re ungrateful, because they don’t even know what that word means. They probably don’t even know how to say that word.

So you can’t really worry about them being ungrateful, because they don’t even know what that is.

Sarah: Right. And they don’t have anything to compare it to, right?

Maxine: Yeah, because they’re literally four.

Sarah: So if parents are really worried about that—if they think their kids think that toys are the most important thing—what would you say to those parents?

Maxine: Well, kids are just kids. I’m still a kid, but I know that presents aren’t the only thing that’s good about holidays and stuff. But I’m still learning. And if your kid is younger than me, then chances are they’ll know even less about that.

So honestly, kids are just kids, and they just think presents are so cool and exciting that they don’t know there’s more to it than presents.

Sarah: Right. Do you think there’s anything parents could or should do to teach their kids that there are things more important than presents?

Maxine: Well, you could do traditions, like what we do—like where you go on a walk, or you decorate your tree as a family or something. Or if you celebrate Hanukkah, doing little traditions for that and stuff. So when they’re older, they’ll see, “Oh, when we did all those things, those were nice traditions that my parents did.”

Sarah: Can you think of any other traditions that were important to you?

Maxine: Decorating cookies.

Sarah: I was thinking about that too. That’s a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to doing that this year.

Maxine: And I already promised one of my teachers, Ms. Miller, that I was going to give her cookies. So we have to do it.

Sarah: We absolutely will, because she loves sugar.

Maxine: Yeah, she’s sugar.

Sarah: She does. Yeah.

I think you’ve always liked giving presents too. Is there anything else you think parents should know if they’re worried about their kids thinking that stuff is more important than people?

Maxine: Honestly, just what I said before: kids are just kids, and they don’t know anything other than presents. So don’t think it’s a big deal, because eventually they’ll realize more things about holidays, like I did.

But if your kid’s, like, six and they’re so excited about the presents and that’s all they can talk about, then honestly that’s a normal kid behavior.

Sarah: Right. And not worry about it.

Maxine: Well, not, like, normal, but a lot of kids are like that.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think if we can be excited for them too, right?

Maxine: Yeah. If you can show them that it’s so great that they’re excited about it, and it can be like, “I’m excited too,” then they’ll see it’s not something bad. But if you tell them, “No, you shouldn’t be this excited about presents. That’s not allowed…”

Sarah: That’s right.

Hey, do you remember—this is one thing I forgot to ask your brothers about—do you remember times when you’ve gotten an experience instead of a thing you can hold in your hands for a present?

Maxine: People have given me a ticket to go do something with me or something. Just for fun.

Sarah: I think Mimi took you to a show once.

Maxine: Yeah.

Sarah: And Uncle Les used to do sleepovers and movie night.

Maxine: Yeah.

Sarah: Do you think that’s a good idea? Do you think kids like that?

Maxine: Yeah. I liked—huh? But I’m not a normal kid.

Sarah: You’re not a normal kid? Why aren’t you a normal kid?

Maxine: Because I’m not. I don’t know how to explain it.

Sarah: I think you’re a pretty normal kid.

Maxine: No, I’m extraordinary.

Sarah: You’re also hilarious.

Maxine: Thanks, darling.

Sarah: You are welcome. Love you. You look funny with those big headphones on your head.

Maxine: Yeah, I’m sure.

Sarah: I do love you, kid.

Maxine: Oh, I love you.

Sarah: Hello. Okay. Okay, let’s get started. Can you introduce yourself?

Asa: My name’s Asa. I’m your son. I’m 17.

Sarah: Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Asa: Yeah, no problem.

Sarah: So when you were little, you and your older brother Lee used to spend hours looking at the Lego catalog and circling all the things that you wanted.

Asa: Uh-huh.

Sarah: Do you remember that?

Asa: Yeah.

Sarah: And I remember Dad used to really worry about that. He used to worry that you guys—your values were out of place, and you were gonna be super greedy kids and not care about the right things.

Asa: Right.

Sarah: He was right?

Asa: Yeah.

Sarah: Are you super greedy?

Asa: No.

Sarah: Now, I remember one year when you were around 11 and I said, “The grandparents are starting to ask what you want for Christmas,” because they wanted to get you something. And you stopped and you thought, and you said, “Mom, I think I have a pretty good life. I can’t think of anything I want.”

Do you remember that?

Asa: Yeah.

Sarah: So how did you go from the five-year-old who wanted everything in the Lego catalog to—

Asa: I think I kind of just grew out of it, I guess, is the best way to say it. I don’t know. My brain chemistry changed.

Sarah: Do you think that’s typical of 17-year-olds? Do you feel like most kids your age don’t want that much stuff?

Asa: Yeah. The thing is, I don’t really play with toys anymore. So when I was little, you can never have too many toys. You just get more and more and more, and they’re all good.

But now, thinking about it, the only thing I’m missing in my daily life is a backpack big enough to put all my stuff in. So that’s, like, the only thing I want. When I think about it—what would make my life better—the only thing I can think of is a bigger backpack.

Sarah: A bigger backpack. Okay.

Asa: Bigger backpack.

Sarah: I think Santa has gotten wind of that, so you don’t have too long to wait.

I feel like you’re sort of unusual for kids your age in terms of not being into brand-name stuff. Do you think that’s true?

Asa: Yeah. I would say that’s true.

Sarah: Why do you think that is?

Asa: When you get older, you value different things. Your values change. You don’t really care so much about accumulating plastic chachkes, and you’re more focused on just having a good time.

Sarah: I know you don’t want little toys from the dollar store or Lego kits anymore, but why don’t you want brand-name sneakers? You haven’t even gotten sneakers in, like, two years, right?

Asa: I’ve evolved past that.

Sarah: Okay, but what is it? I’m trying to say: I think you’re unusual for someone 17, in grade 12, who’s not like, “Oh, I need these sneakers and that expensive thing and the latest iPhone.”

I want to hear anything you think would be helpful for parents who want to make sure their kids don’t grow up greedy and materialistic.

Asa: They won’t. They won’t. Or maybe they will, but it doesn’t really—some people are like that and some people aren’t.

Everybody when they’re little wants Lego and wants to look in the Lego catalog. Whatever you do then is not gonna shape that. Maybe your kid will grow up and be greedy, but you telling them that they shouldn’t look at the Lego catalog isn’t gonna change that.

It’s not guaranteed everybody’s gonna grow out of it. Whatever you try and do isn’t gonna change that. It’s already kind of preset. Let the kids do whatever they want, and then maybe they’ll be greedy, maybe they won’t. But it won’t really have any effect on it.

Sarah: So you’re saying it’s other things—not what they want when they’re little—that decide how they turn out.

Asa: Yeah.

Sarah: I think it’s pretty normal for little kids to want lots of stuff. It’s hardwired, evolutionarily, for them to want stuff—because if they were just quiet and meek in a corner, everyone would forget about them.

Asa: Yeah.

Sarah: Do you remember when you started to feel grateful for your life?

Asa: I am grateful now, and I probably wasn’t when I was three. So somewhere along the line—maybe somewhere between three and 17—maybe five years ago. I don’t know. It’s sort of a gradual thing.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s hard to pinpoint.

You said that parents telling their kids not to want stuff isn’t going to make a difference. But do you think you internalized what was important in our family, and because Dad and I aren’t really into brand names and buying stuff, that’s how you developed too?

Asa: Yeah. I would say I cared about the stuff most when I was in grade six and seven, and I felt really weird telling you guys that I wanted shirts with company logos on them and stuff. It just felt out of place in our family.

Sarah: Why do you think it was grade six and seven that you wanted the most brand-name stuff?

Asa: Because brain development-wise, that’s when you want to fit in the most.

Sarah: That makes sense. And at a certain point, you just…

One of the things I admire about you is that you don’t care what other people think—in a good way. You have your own idea of what you like and what’s cool. But when you were little, what was the most important or meaningful thing about Christmas or birthdays?

Asa: I guess the anticipation. The anticipation of all of the presents and celebration and whatnot. When you actually get there, it’s like whatever, but it gives you something to look forward to leading up to it. That was probably the most important thing.

Sarah: The excitement of the possibilities of what you might get and do.

Asa: Yeah.

Sarah: What about now? Has anything changed?

Asa: Well, I used to have birthday parties when I was a little kid. I don’t really do that anymore, so birthdays definitely don’t feel as significant.

Christmas is kind of the same mold, but again, I’m not so much into, like, “Which Lego am I gonna get this year?” So I don’t know. I guess now I value the food and the family and everything else. So Christmas, beyond the presents.

Sarah: Nice. Well, thanks, Ace. Was there anything you think parents should know about this topic?

Asa: Make sure your kids are staying somewhat grounded to reality, but just relax too, because they’re little kids.

Sarah: Thanks, Ace. Bye.

Asa: No problem. Bye. Love you.

Sarah: Love you too.

Lee: Hello.

Sarah: Hi, Lee. Welcome to the podcast.

Lee: Thank you for having me.

Sarah: Can you introduce yourself?

Lee: Hi, I’m Lee, your oldest son.

Sarah: How old are you now?

Lee: 20.

Sarah: 20 and—

Lee: A half.

Sarah: 20 and a half. We missed your half-birthday this year.

And for anyone listening who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, I think this applies to birthdays or any other holidays where kids get presents. Looking back on your childhood, do you remember really wanting to get presents and lobbying to get presents when you were little?

Lee: Yeah, definitely. Next question.

Sarah: I asked your brother this—do you remember looking at the Lego catalog, the two of you pouring over it and circling everything you wanted?

Lee: Oh yeah, for sure. I think you and Dad tried to moderate that. I remember you talking to us about consumerism. I think I understood that stuff, but I still just wanted presents. I think that’s how it is for most kids.

Sarah: For sure. It really stressed Dad out. He was worried about all the wanting, like a lot of the parents who wrote with concerns about this.

But you’re a person now at 20 who I would say is pretty non-materialistic. When did you become aware of consumerism and materialism?

Lee: I think I was aware as long as I can remember. Definitely you taught me early, but I don’t think it sank in until I was a young teenager.

When was the first time I was like, “Oh, you don’t need to get me any presents”? I don’t know. By the way, you always still do, but I’m pretty sure I always tell you now that you don’t need to.

Sarah: Yeah. We get you presents because we want to get you presents, not because we feel like we have to.

Lee: But when I was a kid, I wasn’t like, “Oh, you don’t have to get me any presents.” I wanted presents very much.

Sarah: For sure. Do you ever remember—

Lee: I think it was enough times… Do you talk to your parents about the post-holiday letdown? We haven’t talked about that yet, but experiencing that enough made me feel like, “Okay, maybe presents are not the name of the game.”

Sarah: Say more about the post-holiday letdown.

Lee: Somewhere around 3:00 p.m. on Christmas, you’d be like, “Well, that was that. Back to my comfortable life, I guess.” But normal. You’d stop feeling excited and you’d feel like, “Was I really that excited?” Because once the suspense is gone—who said that? The anticipation is always better than the actual thing. Some philosopher said that.

Sarah: That’s so funny because that’s what your brother said. When I asked what he remembered most, he said: the anticipation.

Lee: Yeah, for sure.

Sarah: So what would you say to parents who are worried their kids always want more stuff? And even the post-holiday letdown can look like crying about not having more presents at three o’clock.

Lee: I would say it’s okay. The kids are victims of the mass media, but you’re probably already doing your best to counteract that, and just have faith. If you’re generally raising a conscientious kid, they’ll eventually probably come around.

How many adults do you know who are obsessed with presents?

Lee: Well… some are. Some people are very materialistic. But generally people grow out of it, I think.

Sarah: There are tons of people who get the new iPhone with every update, or who want the newest, fanciest thing and brand-name stuff.

Lee: Okay. I would say then: you guys really hammered it at home with me. And that’s probably why I think what I do now—“People, not stuff,” the old mantra.

Sarah: People, not stuff. That really was a mantra in your childhood, wasn’t it?

Lee: Yes, probably.

Sarah: And for anyone listening, don’t get me wrong—you guys got a lot of presents for Christmas.

Lee: Oh yeah.

Sarah: Not from us necessarily, because we didn’t have much money when you were growing up. Just a lot of grandparents. You guys have five sets of grandparents—ten grandparents—and then aunties and uncles and big family.

I wouldn’t say you were spoiled. Do you think you were spoiled?

Lee: I don’t know. Maybe. I think it’s less about having things and more about having a bad attitude than anything else.

Sarah: Yeah. I think spoiled is when parents can’t say no and they just give everything. You may have had grandparents who couldn’t say no and gave you everything.

Lee: Yeah, that makes sense.

Sarah: Looking back, what was really meaningful for you about Christmas or your birthday?

Lee: I couldn’t tell you what was really meaningful—just the thing itself. You’re very conditioned to be excited for those things when you’re young. Santa and presents.

Sarah: So what about now? What do you like about the holidays?

Lee: I don’t want to say I dislike them. I don’t ever decorate, and I play Christmas songs when I get paid too.

Sarah: You play them for free at our house.

Lee: Yeah. On your request. That’s true.

I don’t know. I’m pretty agnostic about it. I don’t mind it. I mind it in November when people get excited about it, but when it’s actually the season, it’s cool.

Same with my birthday. It’d be cool to do something, but it always ends up being pretty low-key. I don’t think that’s positive or negative—it varies from person to person.

Sarah: Is there anything you’re excited about with Christmas coming?

Lee: I guess it still feels nice—like the intentional family time. And the new Lego and—

Sarah: Sorry, spoiler: you’re not getting any Lego this year.

Lee: Okay. Family time, yeah. Seeing extended family. I don’t know if we’re going to this year. I think Christmas is cool.

Sarah: Do you remember making presents for your siblings when you were growing up?

Lee: I remember making Asa the piggy bank.

Sarah: Do you remember the sock monkeys you made them?

Lee: Oh, vaguely.

Sarah: Those were a lot of work.

Lee: Yeah, I forgot about that. I don’t remember if they liked them.

Sarah: They did. We still have them.

Lee: Yeah.

Sarah: Changing gears a bit—from holidays to consumerism in general—do you remember when you came home from Montessori and said you wanted some company—

Lee: Yeah, I know what you’re about to say. Company shirts?

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee: Okay.

Sarah: Do you remember why you wanted company shirts?

Lee: Because it was cool.

Sarah: We thought you meant shirts that said GAP on them or something. But when Dad took you shopping at a thrift store—

Lee: I just wanted shirts with pictures on them.

Sarah: Do you remember the trip?

Lee: Yeah. I remember getting a Superman button-up. I don’t remember the others.

Sarah: I think you got shirts that said T-Rex.

Lee: I couldn’t read, so I didn’t know what a company versus just a picture was.

Sarah: What do you think that did for you?

Lee: Made me cool. I have more friends. I’m joking.

I don’t know. I remember being happy to have a cool wardrobe. If you want to talk consumerism, I think I still like getting cool clothes. A lot of people do. Although I don’t go shopping that much.

I do tend to buy secondhand clothes, and that’s just a style question. I think that fateful shopping trip—we went to a Goodwill or something, right?

I remember going there as a child. And then I had one or two years in the beginning of high school where I wanted to get all my clothes from H&M, and then I just went back to Value Village after that.

Sarah: Yeah, I remember that. Rebellious years of going to the mall.

So another thing parents worry about is that their kids aren’t appreciative or grateful for everything they have in their life. And I personally think—of course they’re not.

Lee: Yeah. Of course they’re not. They’re little dummies.

Sarah: No. I don’t think they’re little dummies. I think they just don’t have anything to compare it to.

Lee: Yeah, for sure. That’ll come with time.

Sarah: Do you remember starting to feel appreciative and grateful for what you have?

Lee: Do I remember becoming conscious of it? It always was something you guys talked about. It slowly, very gradually became less abstract as I got more world experience.

I don’t totally remember what you said, but the message was: “You are fortunate.”

But I never thought, “I’m not grateful.” When you’re a kid, you just don’t understand much. How could you expect them to understand something as nuanced as gratitude? Or privilege.

Sarah: Yeah, privilege.

Lee: That’s what I’m talking about. It comes with time. You still have to make an effort to show them that, because I definitely know older people who don’t really get that. And if you don’t, you’re one of them.

Sarah: So it would be fair to say that the parents who are concerned about wanting their kids to be appreciative of their privilege, wanting their kids to be grateful, and not too consumerist—

Lee: You’re probably already doing fine. Exactly. Talk to them about it, and within a decade they’ll get it. And within a decade, they’ll become the preachy ones and you’ll get annoyed.

They’ll start lecturing you about capitalism, and you’ll be like, “Gosh darn it, what have I done?”

Maxine: I think that’s happened to us a few times.

Lee: All I was trying to say—I wasn’t trying to say don’t get your kids presents. I think I’ve been pretty clear. I never minded when you guys talked about privilege and stuff when I was a kid. Even if I did mind it, that would be more reason to reinforce those points.

I think the golden rule of parenting podcasts is: if you’re concerned about this stuff, you’re already probably doing pretty well. And if you don’t think about it, then your kid is the one that needs help.

Sarah: Yeah. In any case, those are not the people who are probably listening to this.

Lee: That’s the parenting podcast paradox.

Sarah: Okay, let’s close by saying—

Lee: You better leave that in.

Sarah: I’ll leave it in: “Parenting podcast paradox.” The Peaceful Parenting Podcast paradox—and add another P in there.

Okay. Well, thanks, Lee, for coming on the podcast.

Lee: Thanks for having me.

Sarah: Love you.

Lee: Happy holidays to all your listeners.

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, OR— BRAND NEW: we’ve included a fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I speak with Shireen Rizvi, PhD and Jesse Finkelstein, PsyD, about their book Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships.

We discuss what Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is, how it can help both ourselves and our kids with big feelings, and get into some of the skills it teaches including distress tolerance, check the facts, and mindfulness.

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We talk about:

* 6:00 What is DBT?

* 11:00 The importance of validation

* 13:00 How do parents manage their own big feelings?

* 16:00 How do you support a kid with big feelings, and where is the place for problem solving?

* 23:00 Managing the urge to fix things for our kids!

* 26:00 What is distress tolerance?

* 28:50 “Check the facts” is a foundational skill

* 34:00 Mindfulness is a foundation of DBT

* 36:45 How the skills taught through DBT are universal

Resources mentioned in this episode:

* Yoto Player-Screen Free Audio Book Player

* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

* Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships by Shireen Rizvi and Jesse Finkelstein

* Shireen Rizvi’s website

* Jesse Finkelstein’s websites axiscbt and therahive

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* Newsletter

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xx Sarah and Corey

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Podcast transcript:

Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today we have two guests who co-authored a book called Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships.

And you may be wondering why we’re talking about that on a parenting podcast. This was a really great conversation with Shireen Rizvi and Jesse Finkelstein, the co-authors of the book, about all of the skills of DBT, which is a modality of therapy. We talked about the skills they teach in DBT and how we can apply them to parenting.

They talk about how emotional dysregulation is the cause of so much of the pain and suffering in our lives. And I think as a parent, you will recognize that either your own emotional dysregulation or your child’s is often where a lot of issues and conflict come from.

So what they’ve really provided in this book—and given us a window into in this conversation—is how we can apply some of those skills toward helping ourselves and helping our children with big feelings, a.k.a. emotional dysregulation. It was a really wonderful conversation, and their book is wonderful too. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes and encourage you to check it out.

There are things you can listen to in this podcast today and then walk away and use right away. One note: you’ll notice that a lot of what they talk about really overlaps with the things we teach and practice inside of Peaceful Parenting.

If this episode is helpful for you, please share it with a friend. Screenshot it and send it to someone who could use some more skill-building around big emotions—whether they’re our own big emotions or our child’s. Sharing with a friend or word of mouth is a wonderful way for us to reach more people and more families and help them learn about peaceful parenting.

It is a slow process, but I really believe it is the way we change the world. Let’s meet Shireen and Jesse.

Hi, Jesse. Hi, Shireen. Welcome to the podcast.

Jesse: Thank you so much for having us.

Sarah: Yeah. I’m so excited about your book, which I understand is out now—Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships. First of all, I love the format of your book. It’s super easy to read and easy to use. I already thought about tearing out the pages with the flow charts, which are such great references—really helpful for anyone who has emotions. Basically anyone who has feelings.

Jesse: Oh, yes.

Sarah: Yeah. I thought they were great, and I think this is going to be a helpful conversation for parents. You’ve written from a DBT framework. Can you explain what DBT is and maybe how it’s different from CBT? A lot of people have heard more about cognitive behavior therapy than dialectical behavior therapy.

Shireen: Sure. I would first say that DBT—Dialectical Behavior Therapy—is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. So they’re in the same category. Sometimes we hear therapists say, “I do DBT, but I don’t do CBT,” and from my perspective, that’s not really possible, because the essence of dialectical behavior therapy is CBT. CBT focuses on how our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions all go together, and how changing any one of those affects the others.

That’s really the core of DBT—the foundation of CBT. But what happened was the person who developed DBT, Marsha Linehan—she was actually my grad school advisor at the University of Washington—developed this treatment because she was finding that standard CBT was not working as well as she wanted it to for a particular population. The group she was working with were women, primarily, who had significant problems with emotion regulation and were chronically suicidal or self-injuring.

With that group, she found they needed a lot more validation—validation that things were really rough, that it was hard to change what was going on, that they needed support and comfort. But if she leaned too much on validation, patients got frustrated that there wasn’t enough change happening.

So what she added to standard CBT was first a focus on validation and acceptance, and then what she refers to as the dialectical piece: balancing between change and acceptance. The idea is: You’re doing the best you can—and you need to do better.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Shireen: And even though DBT was developed for that very severe group that needed a lot of treatment, one of the aspects of DBT is skills training—teaching people skills to manage their emotions, regulate distress, engage interpersonally in a more effective way.

Those skills became so popular that people started using them with everyone they were treating, not just people who engaged in chronic suicidal behavior.

Sarah: Very cool. And I think the population you’re referring to is people who might be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I bring that up only because I work with parents, not kids, and parents report to me what their children are like. I’ve had many parents worry, “Do you think my child has borderline personality disorder?” because they’ve heard of it and associate it with extreme sensitivity and big feelings.

A lot of that is just typical of someone who’s 13 or 14, right? Or of a sensitive child—not diagnosable or something you’d necessarily find in the DSM. I’ve heard it so many times. I say, “No, I don’t think your child has borderline personality disorder. I think they’re just really sensitive and haven’t learned how to manage their big feelings yet. And that’s something you can help them with.”

With that similar level of emotional intensity—in a preteen or early teen who’s still developing the brain structures that make self-regulation possible—how can we use DBT skills? What are a couple of ideas you might recommend when you have a 13-year-old who feels like life is ruined because the jeans they wanted to wear are soaking wet in the wash? And I’m not making fun—at 13, belonging is tied to how you look, what jeans you’re wearing, how your hair is. It feels very real.

So how might we use the skills you write about for that kind of situation?

Jesse: Well, Sarah, I actually think you just practiced one of the skills: validation. When someone feels like their day is ruined because of their jeans, often a parent will say, “Get over it. It’s not a big deal.” And now, in addition to fear or anxiety, there’s a layer of shame or resentment. So the emotion amplifies and becomes even harder to get out of.

Validation is a skill we talk about where you recognize the kernel of truth—how this experience makes sense. “The jeans you’re wearing are clearly important to you. This is about connection. I understand why you feel this way.” That simple act of communicating that someone’s thoughts and feelings make sense can be very powerful.

Alongside that—back to what Shireen was saying—there are two tracks. One is the skills you help your teen practice. The other is the skills you practice yourself to be effective. In that moment, your teen might be dysregulated. What is the parent’s emotion? Their urge? What skills can they practice to be effective?

Sarah: I love that you already went to the next question I was going to ask, which is: when that kid is screaming, “You don’t understand, I can’t go to school because of the jeans,” what can parents do for themselves using the skills you describe?

Shireen: I often think of the oxygen-mask analogy: put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. That was certainly true for me when I had fussy infants—how do you manage that stress when you are already heightened?

What do you need to do to regulate yourself so you can be effective in the moment? Sometimes that’s literally taking a time-out—leaving the room for a minute. The kid comes after you about the jeans, and you say, “Hold on, I need a minute.” You sequester yourself in the bathroom. You do paced breathing—a DBT skill that helps regulate your nervous system. You do that for a minute, get centered, and then return to the situation.

If you’re not regulated and your child is dysregulated, you’ll ping-pong off each other and it becomes messier and messier. But if you can regulate yourself and approach calmly, the whole interaction changes.

Sarah: It’s so interesting because people who’ve been listening to my podcast or know my work will think, “Oh yeah, these are the things Sarah talks about all the time.” Our first principle of peaceful parenting is parental self-regulation. It doesn’t mean you never get upset, but you recognize it and have strategies to get back to calm.

And I always say, if you forget everything else I teach about dealing with upset kids, just remember empathy—which is another way of saying validation. I tell parents: you don’t have to agree to empathize. Especially with situations like the jeans.

I love the crossover between the skills parents are practicing in my community and what you’ve written about. And again: those flow charts! I’m going to mark up my book with Post-its for all the exercises.

One of the things you talk about in the book is problem solving. As parents, we can find ourselves in these intense situations. I’ll give an example: a client’s daughter, at 11 p.m., was spiraling about needing a particular pair of boots for her Halloween costume, and they wouldn’t arrive in time. No matter what the mom said, the daughter spiraled.

This is a two-part question: If you’ve validated and they’re still really upset, how do you support a kid who is deep in those intense feelings? And when is the place for teaching problem solving—especially when there is a real logistical problem to solve?

Jesse: I’m going to say the annoying therapist thing: it depends. If we think about how emotions impact our thinking on a scale from 0 to 10, it’s very hard to engage in wise-minded problem solving when someone is at an 8, 9, or 10. At that point, the urge is to act on crisis behaviors—yell, fight, ruminate.

So engaging your child in problem solving when they’re at a 9 isn’t effective.

Often, I suggest parents model and coach distress-tolerance skills. Shireen mentioned paced breathing. Maybe distraction. Anything to lower the emotional volume.

Once we’re in the six-ish range? Now we can problem solve. DBT has a very prescribed step-by-step process.

But it’s really hard if someone is so dysregulated. That’s often where parents and kids end up in conflict: parent wants to solve; kid is at a 9 and can’t even see straight.

Sarah: Right. So walk us through what that might look like using the boots example. Play the parent for a moment.

Jesse: Of course. I’d potentially do a couple of things. I might say, “Okay, let’s do a little ‘tipping the temperature’ together.” I’d bring out two bowls of ice and say, “We’ll bend over, hold our breath for 30 seconds…”

Shireen: And put your face in the bowl of ice water. You left out that part.

Jesse: Crucial part of the step.

Sarah: You just look at the ice water?

Jesse: No, you submerge your face. And something happens—it’s magical. There’s actually a profound physiological effect: lowering blood pressure, calming the sympathetic nervous system.

I highlight for parents: do this with your child, not didactically. Make it collaborative.

And then: validate, validate, validate. Validation is not approval. It’s not saying the reaction is right. It’s simply communicating that their distress makes sense. Validation is incredibly regulating.

Then you check in: “Do you feel like we can access Wise Mind?” If yes: “Great. Let’s bring out a problem-solving worksheet—maybe from Real Skills for Real Life or the DBT manual. Let’s walk through it step by step.”

Sarah: And if you have a kid screaming, “Get that ice water away from me, that has nothing to do with the boots!”—is there anything to add beyond taking a break?

Shireen: I’d say this probably comes up a lot for you, Sarah. As parents—especially high-functioning, maybe perfectionistic types (I put myself in that category)—if my kid is upset, I feel so many urges to fix it right away. Sometimes that’s helpful, but often it’s not. They either don’t want to be fixed, or they’re too dysregulated, or fixing isn’t actually their goal—they just want to tell you how upset they are.

I have to practice acceptance: “My kid is upset right now. That’s it.” I remind myself: kids being upset is part of life. It’s important for them to learn they can be upset and the world doesn’t fall apart.

If they’re willing to do skills alongside you, great. But there will be times where you say, “I accept that you’re upset. I’m sorry you feel this way. It sounds terrible. Let’s reconnect in an hour.” And wait for the storm to pass.

Sarah: Wait for the storm to pass.

Jesse: I’ll say—I haven’t been a therapist that long, and I’ve been having this conversation with my own parents. Yesterday I called my mom about something stressful, and she said, “Jesse, do you want validation or problem solving right now?”

Shireen: Love it.

Jesse: I thought, “You taught her well.” I was like: okay, therapy works. And even having that prompt—“What would you like right now? Problem solving? Validation? Do you want me to just sit with you?”—that’s so useful.

Sarah: Yeah. I have to remind myself of that with my daughter, especially when the solution seems obvious to me but she’s too upset to take it in. Just sitting there is the hardest thing in the world.

And you’ve both anticipated my next question. A big part of your book is distress tolerance—one of the four areas. Can you talk about what distress tolerance is specifically? And as you mentioned, Shireen, it is excruciating when your kid is in pain or upset.

I learned from my friend Ned Johnson—his wonderful book The Self-Driven Child—that there’s something called the “righting instinct.” When your child falls over, you have the instinct to right them—pick them up, dust them off, stand them up. That instinct kicks in whenever they’re distressed. And I think it’s important for them to learn skills so we don’t do that every time.

Give us some thoughts about that.

Shireen: Well, again, I think distress tolerance is so important for parents and for kids. The way we define it in DBT is: distress tolerance is learning how to tolerate stressful, difficult, complicated situations without doing anything to make it worse. That’s the critical part, because distress tolerance is not about solving problems. It’s about getting through without making things worse.

So in the context of an interaction with your kid, “not making it worse” might mean biting your tongue and not lashing out, not arguing, not rolling your eyes, or whatever it is. And then tolerating the stress of the moment.

As parents, we absolutely need this probably a thousand times a day. “How do I tolerate the distress of this moment with my kid?” And then kids, as humans, need to learn distress tolerance too—how to tolerate a difficult situation without doing anything to make it worse.

If we swoop in too quickly to solve the problem for them—as you said, if we move in too quickly to right them—they don’t learn that they can get through it themselves. They don’t learn that they can right themselves.

And I think there’s been a lot written about generations and how parenting has affected different generations. We want our kids to learn how to problem solve, but also how to manage stress and difficulty in effective ways.

Sarah: I think you’re probably referring to the “helicopter parents,” how people are always talking about helicopter parents who are trying to remove any obstacles or remove the distress, basically.

I think the answer isn’t that we just say, “Okay, well, you’re distressed, deal with it,” but that we’re there with them emotionally while they’re learning. We’re next to them, right? With that co-regulation piece, while they’re learning that they can handle those big feelings.

Shireen: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: I thought it might be fun, before we close out, to do a deep dive on maybe one or two of the skills you have in the book. I was thinking about maybe “Check the Facts.” It would be a cool one to do a deep dive on. You have so many awesome skills and I encourage anyone to pick up your book. “Check the Facts” is one of the emotion regulation skills.

Do you mind going over when you would use Check the Facts, what it is, and how to use it?

Jesse: Not at all. Check the Facts is, in many ways, a foundational skill, because it’s so easy for us to get lost in our interpretation of a situation. So the classic example is: you’re walking down the street and you wave to a friend, and they don’t wave back. And I don’t know about you, but it’s easy for me to go to, “Oh, they must be mad at me.”

Sarah: Right, yeah.

Jesse: And all of a sudden, I’m spinning out, thinking about all the things I could have done to hurt their feelings, and yada yada yada. Then I’m feeling lots of upset, and I may have the urge to apologize, etc.

What we’re doing with Check the Facts is returning our attention back to the facts themselves—the things we can take in with our senses. We’re observing and describing, which are two foundational mindfulness skills in DBT. And then from that, we ask ourselves: “Does the emotion I’m feeling—the intensity and duration of that emotion—fit the facts as I’m experiencing them?”

So in many ways, this is one of those cognitive interventions. DBT rests on all these cognitive-behavioral principles; it’s part of that broader umbrella. Here we’re asking: “Do the facts as I see them align with my emotional experience?”

From there, we ask: if yes, then there are certain options or skills we can practice—for instance, we can change the problem. If no, that begs the question: “Should I act opposite to this emotion urge that I have?”

So it’s a very grounding, centering type of skill. Shireen, is there anything I’m missing?

Shireen: No. I would just give a parenting example that happens for me a lot. My kid has a test the next day. He says he knows everything. He doesn’t open the book or want to review the study guide. And I start to think things like, “Oh my gosh, he has no grit. He’s going to fail this test. He’s not going to do well in high school. He’s not going to get into a good college. But most importantly, he doesn’t care. And what does that say about him? And what does it say about me as a parent?”

I hope people listening can relate to these sorts of thoughts and I’m not alone.

Sarah: A hundred percent. I’ve heard people say those exact things.

Shireen: And even though I practice these skills all the time, I’m also human and a mother. So where Check the Facts can be useful there is first just recognizing: “Okay, what thoughts am I having in response to this behavior?” The facts of the situation are: my kid said he doesn’t need to study anymore. And then look at all these thoughts that came into my mind.

First, just recognizing: here was the event, and here’s what my mind did. That, in and of itself, is a useful experience. You can say, “Wow, look at what I’m doing in my mind that’s creating so much of a problem.”

Then I can also think: “What does this make me feel when I have all these thoughts?” I feel fear. I feel sad. I feel shame about not being a good parent. And those all cause me to have more thoughts and urges to do things that aren’t super effective—like trying to bully him into studying, all of these things.

Then the skill can be: “Okay, are these thoughts exaggerated? Are they based in fact? Are they useful?” I can analyze each of these thoughts.

I might think, “Well, he has a history of not studying and doing fine,” is one thing. Another thought: “Me trying to push him to study is not going to be effective or helpful.” Another: “There are natural consequences. If he doesn’t do well because he didn’t study, that’s an important lesson for him to learn.”

So I can start to change my interpretations based on the facts of the actual situation as opposed to my exaggerated interpretations. And then see: what does that do to my emotions? And when I have more realistic, fact-based thoughts, does that lead me to have a better response than I would if I followed through on all my exaggerated thinking?

Does that make sense?

Sarah: Yeah, totally makes sense. Are there any DBT skills that are helpful in helping you recognize when you need to use a skill—if that makes sense? Because sometimes I think parents might spiral, like in the example you’re talking about, but they might not even realize they’re spiraling. Sometimes parents will say, “I don’t even know until it’s too late that I’ve had this big moment of emotional dysregulation.”

Jesse: I think there’s a very strong reason why mindfulness is the foundation of DBT—for exactly the reason you’ve just described. For a lot of us, we end up engaging in behaviors that are ineffective, that are not in line with our values or goals, and it feels like it’s just happening to us.

So having a mindfulness practice—and I want to highlight that doesn’t necessarily mean a formal meditation practice—but developing the skill of noticing, of being increasingly conscious of what you’re feeling, your urges, your thoughts, your behaviors. So that when you notice that you are drifting, that you’re engaging in an ineffective behavior, you can then apply a skill. We can’t change what we’re not aware of.

Sarah: I love that. It’s so hard with all the distractions we have and all of the things that are pulling us this way and that, and the busyness. So just slowing down and starting to notice more what we’re feeling and thinking.

Shireen: There’s a skill that we teach that’s in the category of mindfulness called Wise Mind. I don’t have to get into all the particulars of that, but Wise Mind is when you’re in a place where you feel wise and centered and perhaps a little bit calmer.

So one question people can ask themselves is: “Am I in a place of Wise Mind right now?” And if not, that’s the cue. Usually, when we answer that we’re not, it’s because we’re in a state of Emotion Mind, where our emotions are in control of us.

First, recognizing what state of mind you’re in can be really helpful. You can use that as a cue: “I’m not in Wise Mind. I need to do something more skillful here to get there,” or, “I need to give myself some time before I act.”

Sarah: I love that. So helpful. Before we wrap up, was there anything you wish I’d asked you that you think would be really helpful for parents and kids?

Shireen: I just want to reiterate something you said earlier, which is: yes, this treatment was developed for folks with borderline personality disorder. That is often a diagnosis people run screaming from or are very nervous about. People might hesitate to think that these skills could be useful for them if they don’t identify as having borderline personality disorder.

But I think what you’re highlighting, Sarah—and we so appreciate you having us on and talking about these skills—is that we consider these skills universal. Really anybody can benefit.

I’ve done training and teaching in DBT for 25 years, and I teach clinicians in many different places how to do DBT treatment with patients. But inevitably, what happens is that the clinicians themselves say, “Oh, I really need these skills in my everyday life.”

So that’s what we want to highlight, and why we wrote this book: to take these skills from a treatment designed for a really severe population and break it down so anybody can see, “Oh, this would be useful for me in my everyday life, and I want to learn more.”

Sarah: Totally. Yeah. I love it. And I think it’s a continuum, right? From feeling like emotions are overwhelming and challenging, and being really emotionally sensitive. There are lots of people who are on that more emotionally sensitive side of things, and these are really helpful skills for them.

Jesse: Yeah. And to add on that, I wouldn’t want anyone—and I don’t think any of us here are suggesting this—it’s such a stigmatized diagnosis. I have yet to meet someone who’s choosing suffering. Many of us are trying to find relief from a lot of pain, and we may do so through really ineffective means.

So with BPD, in my mind, sometimes it’s an unfortunate name for a diagnosis. Many folks may have the opinion that it means they’re intrinsically broken, or there’s something wrong with their personality. Really, it’s a constellation of behaviors that there are treatments for.

So I want anyone listening not to feel helpless or hopeless in having this diagnosis or experience.

Shireen: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Thank you so much. The question I ask all my guests—I’ll ask Shireen first and then Jesse—is: if you could go back in time, if you had a time machine, if you could go back to your younger parent self, what advice would you give yourself?

Shireen: Oof. I think about this a lot, actually, because I feel like I did suffer a lot when my kids were babies. They were super colicky. I didn’t sleep at all. I was also trying to work. I was very stressed. I wish that at that time I could have taken in what other people were telling me, which is: “This will pass.” Right? “This too shall pass,” which is something we say to ourselves as DBT therapists a lot. Time changes. Change is inevitable. Everything changes.

In those dark parenting moments, you get stuck in thoughts of, “This is never going to change. It’s always going to be this way. I can’t tolerate this.” Instead, shifting to recognize: “Change is going to happen whether I like it or not. Just hang in there.”

Sarah: I love that. My mother-in-law told me when I had my first child: “When things are bad, don’t worry, they’ll get better. And also, when things are good, don’t worry, they’ll get worse.”

Shireen: Yes, it’s true. And we need both the ups and the downs so we can actually understand, “Oh, this is why I like this, and this is why I don’t like this.” It’s part of life.

Sarah: Yeah. Thank you. And Jesse, if you do ever have children, what would you want to remember to tell yourself?

Jesse: I think I would want to remember to tell myself—and I don’t think I’m going to say anything really new here—that perfection is a myth. I think parents often feel like they need to be some kind of superhuman. But we all feel. And when we do feel, and when we feel strongly, the goal isn’t to shame ourselves for having that experience. It’s to simply understand it.

That’s what I would want to communicate to myself, and what I hope to communicate to the parents I work with.

Sarah: Love that. Best place to go to find out more about you all and what you do? We’ll put a link to your book in the show notes, but any other socials or websites you want to point people to?

Shireen: My website is shireenrizvi.com, where you can find a number of resources, including a link to the book and a link to our YouTube channel, which has skills videos—animated skills videos that teach some of these skills in five minutes or less. So that’s another resource for people.

Sarah: Great. What about you, Jesse?

Jesse: I have a website called axiscbt.com. I’m also a co-founder of a psychoeducation skills course called Farrah Hive, and we actually have a parenting course based on DBT skills—that’s thefarrahhive.com. And on Instagram, @talk_is_good.

Sarah: Great. Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time today.

Jesse: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you.

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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, OR— BRAND NEW: we’ve included a fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I speak with Educational Psychologist Liz Angoff.

We discuss when and why a child might need an assessment, what information you get from an assessment, how to help children understand their brains and diagnosis, and celebrating neurodiversity.

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We talk about:

* 7:00 What are some signs that your child should get an assessment?

* 9:00 Getting to the “why” and the “so what”

* 10:00 What do you assess for?

* 14:00 Why it is important to get an assessment?

* 23:00 Should you tell your child about their diagnosis?

* 31:00 Scripts and metaphors for talking to your kids about diagnosis

* 39:00 Red and Green flags with clinicians

* 44:00 Celebrating neurodiversity

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

* Dr. Liz’s website and books

xx Sarah and Corey

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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today my guest is Dr. Liz Angoff, who is an educational psychologist. She does testing, looking at helping kids understand how their brain works and helping their adults understand how their children’s brains work. She has loads of wonderful resources, which we will link to in the show notes.

I love how Dr. Liz takes this approach. It’s about how our brains can work in different ways, and understanding that really can help our child understand themselves, and help us understand our child in a better way.

As you’ll hear in this conversation with Dr. Liz, she really talks about how, if your child is experiencing some challenges or struggles—or you’re experiencing struggles or challenges with them—it can be helpful to get an assessment and possibly a diagnosis to understand exactly what’s going on and how your child’s brain works. Whether it could be anxiety or depression or neurodivergence or learning challenges or any sorts of things that can be uncovered through psychological testing, you can really understand the differences in your child’s brain that could be making life feel more challenging for them and/or for you. And she has a beautifully neurodiversity-affirming lens, where she talks about—you’ll hear her talk about this in the episode—looking at a child’s brain in terms of both the strengths and the challenges.

As always, we would love if you would share this episode with anyone you think might find it useful, and leave us a five-star rating on your favorite podcast player app and leave us a review. It really helps us reach more families and therefore help more families.

Alright, let’s meet Dr. Liz.

Hello, Dr. Liz. Welcome to the podcast.

Liz: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here, Sarah.

Sarah: Me too. So tell us about who you are and what you do before we dive in.

Liz: Right. Well, I go by Dr. Liz, and I am a licensed educational psychologist. I’m in the Bay Area, California, and my focus—my passion—is working with kids to understand how their brains work. I am a testing psychologist, so I do assessment to understand, when things are challenging for kids, why things are challenging and what we’re going to do to really support them.

But one of the things that really caught my interest a number of years ago is that so often we bring kids through the assessment process and we don’t talk to them about what they did or what we learned about them. So I got really passionate about talking to kids directly about how they can understand their brains—what comes easily for them, how they can really use their strengths to help them thrive, and then what’s challenging and what they can do to advocate for themselves and support themselves. So all of my work has been really focused on that question: how do we help kids understand themselves?

Sarah: Which is perfect, because that’s exactly why I wanted to have you on. I’ve had so many parents ask me, “Well, how do I… I’ve got the assessment. How do I tell them? Do I tell them? How do I tell them?” We’re going to get into all of that.

But first I want to start with: what are some signs… I imagine some of the people listening are already going to have had assessments or are in the process of getting an assessment. But there also are some people who maybe—at least in our world—what we look at is: if you feel like you’re struggling way more than everybody else, that could be one sign. And if you’ve already made shifts and you’re trying to practice, in our case, peaceful parenting, and you’re still finding that things are really hard—that could be a sign that you might want to get an assessment.

But what are some signs that you look for that you might want to get your child assessed?

Liz: Yeah, I mean, you named a couple of them that I think are actually really important. All kids have times when they struggle. Growing up is hard. There are a lot of challenges, and they’re really important challenges that kids face. They need to know that it’s okay when things are hard. They need to know they can do hard things and come out the other side.

And there’s so much out there—what I think of as parenting 101—that helps us figure out: how do we help our children navigate these tough times? And then there’s kind of the next level where you might get a little extra support. So you read a book on parenting, or you find a different approach that matches the way your child shows up in the world a little bit better. You might meet with the school and get a little bit of extra help—sometimes called student study teams or SSTs—where you might meet with the teacher and the team.

For most kids, that little extra boost is enough to get them through those hard times. But for some kids, there are still questions. That next level, that extra support—it’s still not working. Things are still hard, and we don’t know why.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Liz: And when you have that question—“Why isn’t this working? It works for so many kids, but it’s not working for my child”—that’s when an assessment can be really helpful to get at the why. The so what.

So the why is: why are things harder for my child, and why are the traditional things that help most children not working? And then the so what is: so what do we do about it? How do we do things differently? And for kids who are wired differently, they need different things. And that’s what we focus on in the assessment process.

Sarah: And so, what kinds of… You know, we’ve gotten extra support, we’ve educated ourselves, and things are still hard for our child—or maybe also hard for us at home with our child. What are the kinds of things that you assess for? I guess that’s the best way to ask. The big ones I think about are ADHD and autism, but what else might be possibilities that are going on?

Liz: I really think of assessment—at the core of it—as understanding how this child’s brain works. The diagnoses that we look at… a diagnosis is just a kind of way to orient us toward the path of support that’s going to be most helpful. But even ADHD, autism, dyslexia—these common things we might look for—show up differently in different kids. There are diagnostic criteria, but they mix and match a little bit. No two ADHD-ers show up the same way. No two autistic kids show up the same way. Even dyslexic kids show up differently.

So at the core of it, we’re trying to figure out: what makes this child’s brain unique? What are the unique strengths and challenges that they have? And we’re going to be able to explain that. A shortcut for explaining that might be dyslexia or autism or ADHD.

We also might be looking at things like anxiety and depression that can really affect kids in a big way—sometimes related to other brain styles, because navigating the world as a different kind of brain is really hard and can lead to a lot of anxiety and depression. Sometimes anxiety can look like ADHD, for example, because it really hijacks your attention and makes it hard to sit still at school when your brain is on high alert all the time.

So we’re really trying to tease apart: what’s the root cause of the challenges a child is facing? So that we know what to do about it.

Some other things we might look at: one of the big questions that comes to me is when there are some really challenging behaviors that kids have, and we want to know what’s underneath that. Sometimes there might be questions about sensory dysregulation or emotional dysregulation—just real difficulty understanding the emotions that are coming up and what to do about them. Some kids get hit like by a tsunami by their emotions. And so learning how to regulate or manage those big feelings might be something we’re looking at. And again, that might be part of a bigger diagnosis, but more importantly it’s something we want to understand so we can support a child, regardless of what we call it.

Sarah: That makes so much sense. And it makes me think about my daughter, who’s 18 now. And just for anyone listening, she’s okay with me talking about her assessment and diagnoses. And I think sometimes when you talk about challenging behavior, we think we know why there’s challenging behavior—but sometimes we can be totally wrong.

I remember when she was in elementary school, her teachers—one after another—would always talk about how she was repeatedly at their desks asking, “What do I do next?” Asking for instruction. And she’s a kid whose connection is super important to her, and I always thought it was because she was looking for more connection from the teacher. That she was always at their side, and that was a “good” reason to go up and talk to the teacher because she loved her teachers.

And then come to find out, when we had her assessed, that she has working memory challenges. She actually literally couldn’t remember what the next thing to do was, because she could only keep one or two things in her head at a time. And that was really helpful information. It completely shifted how her teachers—and how I—saw her classroom behavior.

Liz: Isn’t that amazing? Just getting at the why. Getting underneath and figuring out the why completely shifts our perspective on things. And I think for a lot of kids, that first-line parenting—for many kids, yeah, they’re looking for connection. They’re looking for that. It makes total sense that that would be our first assumption. And for some kids, that’s just not true.

So when we do the assessment, we find out this important information that is so important to understanding what’s going on. And for your daughter to understand: “Oh, there’s this thing called working memory, and that is different in my brain than in other brains.” So I’m not dumb or lazy or all these labels we give ourselves. It’s: “Oh, I have a working memory challenge, so let’s brainstorm some ways I can work with the way my working memory works.” And that might be asking the teacher—that might work for everybody—but there might be something else.

There are any number of strategies we can use to really help her once we know what that is. And when we talk to kids about it, we can brainstorm with them to figure out what the best strategy is going to be—one that works for our child, that works for the teacher, that works for everybody involved.

Sarah: Yeah, for sure. It’s so illuminating. There were so many things about her diagnosis when she got assessed that helped so much to explain behavior that a lot of people found perplexing, and also helped her understand herself and make adjustments she needed to make to be successful.

For example, even now she’s in first-year college, and she knows—this has continued through her whole school career—that because of her focus challenges, she can’t really do any homework after six o’clock at night. Her focus is just not good. She can try, but it’s really hard for her. So she plans her day around: “I know that I’ve only got until six o’clock to really get my good work done.” She’ll even come home, do homework, and then go back into the city to go to the gym or something, whereas other people might do it the other way around.

So I think just knowing—kids knowing—how their brain works is really setting themselves up for success.

Liz: I love that.

Sarah: Yeah. So, which brings me to the next question I was going to ask you, and I think you’ve already answered it or we’ve talked about it together: anything you want to add about why it’s important to get an assessment? I mean, you talked about helping kids understand how their brain works, really getting to the root of the problem, and helping the people around them understand how their brain works. Is there anything else you want to add about why we would want to get an assessment that we haven’t already talked about?

Liz: Yeah. Well, one of the things we talk about a lot is that an assessment can result in a label of sorts. A diagnosis is a kind of label. And something I get asked a lot is: “What do we do when parents feel nervous about having their child have a label?”

There is—as much as I am a proponent and supporter and celebrator of neurodiversity—the truth is that our society still has some pretty challenging stereotypes about what it means to be ADHD or autistic, or to have a different way your brain is wired.

Sarah: Or stigma.

Liz: Yeah—stigma. That’s the word. And so I think it’s a real fear that families have.

There are a couple of things that are important to know about these “labels.” One is that the world is changing. We are understanding these diagnoses in a totally different way—not as something that’s broken or needs to be fixed, but as something that is different. A normal variation of how brains appear in the world. And that is a real change that is happening.

And that label can be—as you were just saying—so helpful, as a way to guide what we do to support our children so they can be successful. Like your example with your daughter: she can learn how to work with her brain so she can be really successful. I think it’s brilliant that she knows that after six o’clock, her brain won’t study anymore. That simple change is the difference between feeling like a failure and feeling like a success.

And I think the more dangerous thing—the scarier piece—is the labels we give children who aren’t properly diagnosed. Those labels are the ones kids give themselves, like “I must be dumb,” or the labels others give kids, like “This is a lazy child,” or “This is a defiant child.” Those labels are so much more negative and harmful to our kids because they tell them there’s something wrong with them.

Are these diagnoses labels? Yes. But I would argue they are such helpful guideposts for us in understanding: this is a difference, not a deficiency.

Sarah: I love that. And I’ve heard people say that you can avoid getting a diagnosis for your child because you don’t want to have them labeled, but they will still get labeled—just with the wrong labels instead of the right labels.

Liz: Exactly. Yeah.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. I know people who… I have a friend who didn’t find out until they were in their late teens, I guess, that they had inattentive ADHD, and they spent years unlearning, “I’m just lazy,” and, “I’m a lazy person, that’s why I have trouble doing things on time,” and really unlearning that bad… that bad idea of themselves that had been put on them when they weren’t aware of their inattentive ADHD.

Liz: Exactly.

Sarah: Yeah. I also have another friend who got diagnosed as autistic late in life, and they wish that they had known that so much earlier because they spent—you know, they’re one of those people that, back when they were a child, the diagnostic criteria missed them. Right? Like they were just quirky, odd, like the little-professor type of autistic kid. But they spent their whole life thinking, “There’s something wrong with me. I just don’t know what it is, but I know I feel different from everybody else,” and searching for, “What is this thing that’s wrong with me?” And finding it in all sorts of things that weren’t actually… you know, obviously there’s not anything wrong with them, they’re just autistic. But thinking how different their life would’ve been if they had known that, and hadn’t spent all those years trying to figure out why they felt so different from everybody else.

Liz: Exactly. And that’s what the research is showing us too—that so many individuals who are diagnosed as adults had these really harmful and unhelpful narratives as kids. And the first emotion that those diagnosed adults feel is this relief: “Oh, that’s why things feel different for me.” But the second emotion I find so much more interesting, because across the board, the second thing that people report is anger. And it’s anger at having lost decades to those false narratives that were so, so unhelpful.

And I think that there are kind of two facets to my passion about talking to kids. One was understanding that kids—they often know that something is different about them way before we even pick up on it, no matter how old they are. They have this sense that, “Oh, I’m walking through the world in a different way.” So the earlier we can have these conversations with them, the better, because we have this opportunity to rewrite that narrative for them.

But the second huge piece for me was working with adults and doing that later-in-life diagnosis, and hearing time after time, story after story about adults who are completely rewriting their self-narrative through the process of our assessment—and what a relief that is. And how frustrating it is that they’ve lost so much time not knowing, and now having to go through the process of identity formation again, because they have this new, critical piece of information that helps them understand things so differently about their childhood, their young adulthood—depending on how old they are.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s so important. And when you just said, “Kids often know that there’s something different about them,” I remembered my daughter. She didn’t—I think partly because I’m, I’m not saying this to toot my own horn, but I’m an extraordinarily patient person, and so some of the things about her ADHD—so she has an ADHD diagnosis—and some of the things about that, I think it took me a long time to sort of think, “Okay, this is unusual, that these behaviors are still happening,” because I was so patient with it, you know? And I think other parents may have been a little less patient at an earlier age and gotten her… and I feel bad about that, because I wish she had gotten her assessment earlier. I think it would’ve been helpful for her.

But I remember one thing that spurred me to finally seek an assessment was she asked me what ADHD was. She was probably nine, ten, maybe. And I told her, and she said, “I have that.” She was like, “I have that.” And I’m like, “Really?” Like, you know… anyway, it was just interesting.

Liz: I think kids know. I’ve had that experience so many times, I can’t even tell you. I’m halfway through a feedback session with a child and I haven’t told them yet, and they come out with, “Do I have ADHD?” Or in the middle of the assessment, they’re wondering about it and asking. And I say, “Well, what do you understand about ADHD, and why are you asking that question?” And I can kind of get more information from them and let them know, “We don’t know yet, but that’s what we’re here for. We’re exploring your brain and we’re trying to understand it.”

But I think that information, I mean, that just speaks to how much our world is changing. This information is out there in the world. We’re talking about it, which I think is so, so important to normalizing the fact that brains come in all different shapes and sizes and ways of being. And so it becomes a point of discussion—like a really open point of discussion—about, “I wonder how my brain is wired.”

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So interesting. I’m pretty sure I know the answer that you’re gonna give: if you do get a diagnosis of something—ADHD or autism—should you tell your child?

Liz: So I do believe that we should be talking to kids about how their brains work. And I want to be really mindful of the parent journey as I talk about this. I think that the most important piece is that, as a parent, you understand how your child’s brain works, and that you go through your own process of integrating that with how you see your child. And that’s a really important journey and a huge piece of the journey, because when we start talking to kids about how their brains work, we need to be really confident as adults.

So I think that while I see this as so important—talking to kids about their diagnosis—I want to make sure that parents are taking time and space to understand it themselves first.

Sarah: I love that. That’s such a sensitive answer, because if, say, you get the diagnosis of your child and to you it feels like, you know, it’s this horrible thing—that would not be a good frame of mind to tell your child about their diagnosis in. Right? So really working through your own fears and your own… getting proper information about what the diagnosis means before you go to your child with that information.

Liz: Exactly. And understanding what it means and what it doesn’t mean. Because there’s a lot of messages out there, especially around autism and ADHD, that are negative: that your child is broken in some way, we need to fix them, we need to make them more “normal,” whatever that means. I mean, all these messages are not helpful, not accurate. So really diving into the neurodiversity-affirming framework around these different neurotypes or brain types is a really important piece to give yourself time to process as a parent.

That said, I do think that being able to have a really supportive conversation with your child about, “What did we learn about the assessment?”—you know, we already talked about that kids know something’s different about them before we know. And so when they go through the assessment process, there’s no hiding from them that we’re doing something different for you. And they’re the ones that go through all these different activities as part of the assessment; they’re working very hard.

And I, as an assessor, I’m very transparent with kids: “We’re here to understand how your brain works,” because I was trained to tell kids, “We’re going to play a lot of brain games, and it’s going to be super fun, you’ll get prizes.” Which it is fun until we do the thing that’s hard for you. And then suddenly, it’s not fun anymore. And kids are like, “Huh, I feel like you’re not telling me the whole truth. This is not fun.” They pick up on it, right?

So I tend to be really transparent with kids: “We’re here to understand how your brain works. Some of the things that we do, your brain is going to find fun and maybe even easy to do. Some of the things are really going to challenge your brain. You might learn something new while you’re here. If something’s challenging, I want you to tell me about it, and we’re going to figure it out together—like, ooh, that’s going to be really interesting.”

So we’re already talking to kids about what’s strong. And I use a construction metaphor that I can go into, but we talk about their brain highways and we talk about their construction projects—what they’re working on. So kids are already learning so much about their brain as part of the assessment. And even without sharing the diagnosis, we can talk to them about what we learned, so that there’s some de-mystifying there. “I went through this whole thing and now everyone’s talking behind my back. They’re having a bunch of meetings. There must be something wrong with me.” Instead, we can say, “I learned so many cool things about your brain. I learned that you are strong in this, and I learned that we’re going to work on this. And so that’s really helpful for me as a parent.”

And then if we do have a diagnosis, what it adds when we share that with kids is: they know that they are not alone. It gives context. It lets them know that while the way their brain works is unique, there are lots of people out there who have very similar brains, who have been really successful with that kind of brain. There’s a path laid out—that we know what to do to work with your unique brain. And so it really helps them feel like, “I’m not alone in this. It’s not weird or broken in any way. This is just a different way to be in the world, and there’s a roadmap for me.”

Sarah: I love that. Yeah. I often, when I’m talking to parents, and you know, often after a couple of parent coaching sessions there’ll be some things that make me say, “Have you ever… has anyone ever asked you if you were considering an ADHD assessment for your child?” I try to… you know, because I’m not a clinician, I can’t diagnose anyone with anything. But there are certainly things that come up that make me think, “I think these people should get an assessment.”

And often they— you know, I try to be really as positive as I can—but often they do have these really negative associations with, for example, ADHD. And then I say, like, “You know, how many entrepreneurs… there are way more entrepreneurs that have ADHD than the general population, and way more Olympic athletes and professional athletes.” And, you know, there are things that are just research- and statistic-backed that you can say that are positive about this differently wired brain.

Liz: Right. I love the research on entrepreneurship and ADHD. I think that it’s so amazing how well-equipped the ADHD brain is to be in a space where we’re disrupting the status quo and trying new things, thinking outside of the box, really using that creativity. And it’s just a world that needs this kind of brain to really move us forward. More neurotypical brains that work well with the way that society is built might not be as motivated to disrupt things in that positive way that moves us forward.

Sarah: I love that. What are some other things that—you know, I feel like we’ve kind of covered most of the questions that I had planned on asking you—but are there any things that I haven’t asked you or that we haven’t touched on? You know, you’ve modeled some really beautiful ways of how to talk to your child about how their brain works. Maybe you want to go into your construction metaphor a little bit more, or maybe there are some other things that we haven’t covered that you want to talk about.

Liz: Sure. Well, I think that one of the things that may be really helpful is thinking about: what is the script for telling kids about their diagnosis? The way that I’ve found most helpful is using this construction metaphor, because it is pretty universal and it has so many places you can go with it, and it just gives you a way to start the conversation.

For parents, it may sound something like: “You went through this whole process and I’m so grateful that you did, because we were able to learn some really cool things about your brain. Is it okay if I share that with you?” So asking that permission to start the conversation, because it is vulnerable for kids. You want to make sure that it’s the right time and place. And most of the time, opening it like that will pique kids’ curiosity, and they’re like, “Yeah, of course, I want to know what you learned.”

And then you might say, “You know, I learned that we can think of your brain like something that’s under construction, like the construction sites we see on the side of the road—that we’re always building our brain. And the way your brain works is that the different parts of your brain communicate through these neurons that make connections, like little tiny roads in your brain. And we learned that some of those roads are like highways for your brain. We learned that you have so many strengths.”

“So, for example, we learned that you maybe have a great vocabulary and really express yourself well. We learned about your creativity, and when you’re really passionate about something, you can focus in so amazingly well on that. We learned that you’re a really loyal friend, or maybe that you have a really strong memory for stories”—you know, whatever it is. “We learned that you have these highways.”

“We also know that some parts of your brain are under construction. Like, you might remember when you were little, you didn’t know how to ride a bike yet, but then your brain had to put all those things together and now you ride your bike all the time. Do you remember kind of building that road? Well, there are some new roads that we’re working on. And so we might be working on… one of the things we learned that’s under construction for your brain is something called working memory. And I think that’s why you’re asking your teacher all the time for the next step—because you’re doing something, you’re advocating for yourself, because your brain does best when it gets one piece of information at a time. And that was so important for me to learn as a parent.”

“And when we put these things together, lots of people have highways and construction zones just like yours. In fact, we have a name for it. We call that ADHD—when you have such a creative, passionate brain that loves to focus on the things that you are really into, but sometimes have difficulty keeping stuff in mind, this working memory piece—that’s what we call ADHD. And it turns out there are lots and lots of people who have ADHD brains just like yours, and we can look at those people.”

So that’s kind of how I go through it with kids. We’re really talking about their highways and construction projects and helping them understand that—and then repackaging it with that name for it. That there’s a name for how your brain works. And that’s where we start. And then from there, we can use that metaphor to keep building the next thing, working on the next construction project as we move forward.

Sarah: Would there be anything specifically different or similar, I guess, about talking about an autism diagnosis for kids with that construction metaphor?

Liz: Yeah, so I use the same metaphor, but the highways and construction zones, for every kid, are going to be a little different. So for an autistic kid—if I think of one kid in particular—we might say that we learned that you have this really passionate brain that loves engineering and building, and the things you did with Dr. Liz where you had to solve puzzles and use logic, that was a highway in your brain. And we know that one of the ways that your brain works really well is when you have space to move and to be able to use your body in different ways.

Then some of the things that might be under construction are… usually I’ll start with something that a child has told me is more challenging for him or her. “So you know how you said that sometimes other kids might say things that feel confusing, or you’re not sure what they mean? That’s something that might be harder for your brain—or something that is a construction project that we’ll work on with you, so that it’s easier to understand other kids.”

“And when we put these things together—when kids have brains that are really passionate and pay attention to details, that love engineering, but have trouble figuring out what other kids are saying or meaning—then we call that autism. And it’s a different way of a brain being in the world. And so, as you learn to work with your autistic brain, you’ll figure out how to really dive deep into your passions and you’ll be able to thrive, find the connections that you want, and we’re here to help.”

Sarah: I love that. And I love how, when you talk about construction zones, it’s full of promise too, right? I read something from someone… that you can work on things—what I mean by full of promise is that there are things that can be worked on that might feel hard or confusing now, but it doesn’t leave a child with a sense of, “I’ll never be able to figure it out, and it’s always going to be this way.”

Liz: Yeah. One of the ways the construction metaphor has really evolved is that for some things, we’re building that road, and for some things, we’re finding a different way to get there. One of the things that I write in my books is that you might build a road there, or you might find a totally different way to get there. In the new book for parents, there’s a picture of a flying car, you know, kind of flying over the construction zone. And I think that it’s really true for our kids that for some skills, there might be some things that we need to learn and really build that pathway in our brain, but for some things, there might just be a different way.

I think for autistic kids, for example, they might connect with others in really different ways. And so it’s like building a totally new way to get there—building a different road, taking the scenic route. There are so many ways we can adapt the metaphor to say, “We’re still going to get you to your goal, where you want to go, but your road might look really different than somebody else’s, and that’s okay. It’s going to be the best road for you.”

Sarah: I love that, because it also—I mean, not only is it promising that you’re going to get to where you want to go, but it also, I think, helps relieve parents of an idea that I see sometimes, where they want their kids to be more like neurotypical kids, right? They think that’s the only way to get to the goal, is for them to have, you know, just using the example of social connections: the social connections of an autistic kid might be really, really strong but look totally different from the social connections of a neurotypical kid.

Liz: Exactly. Yeah.

Sarah: That reminds me of something that I was going to ask you earlier and I forgot, which was: you mentioned that sometimes when you get a diagnosis, you have a clinician who wants to try to tell you how you should change your child, or help them be more “normal” or more “typical,” and that clearly would be from somebody who’s not very neurodiversity-affirming. But what are some things to look out for that might be sort of, I guess, red flags or green flags in terms of the person that you’re looking for to do an assessment—or if you’ve already got the assessment, how they’re interpreting the diagnosis—that might be more or less helpful?

Liz: Yeah. So I love this question, because I think one of the most important questions you can ask a clinician when you are looking for an assessment is: “How do you involve my child in the assessment?” Or, “What will you tell them about what you learned?” Looking for somebody who is really well-versed in, “How do I talk to the child about it?” is going to tell you that they’re really thinking about, “How do we frame this in a way that’s going to be helpful and affirming to a young child?”

Because anybody who’s really thinking about, “How do I communicate this in a way that’s going to make sense to a small person?” has really been thinking about, “How do we think about the whole person, and how do we capitalize on those strengths?” So that is kind of a tell, to say that this person is thinking in this more holistic way—and not just about, “Does this child fit the diagnostic criteria?”

If you’ve had an assessment with somebody that is more coming from that medical lens that we’ve all been trained in—this is so new, and so, you know, a lot of clinicians were trained from this medical lens, which is looking at, “What are the child’s deficits, and do they meet criteria from this diagnostic manual that we have, the DSM, that is a list of things that are harder or quote-unquote wrong?”—from there, I think really getting connected with some more affirming resources is important.

I have a ton on my website that can be really, really helpful. There’s a spreadsheet of ways of talking about autism, ADHD, dyslexia, behavior, anxiety, OCD in really affirming ways. And so just immersing yourself in those resources so you can get that positive language for talking to your child. Or working with the next practitioner—a therapist, a tutor—who has experience working from a neurodiversity-affirming lens, so that you can help to translate those testing results into something that’s going to really be focused on: how do we help your child thrive with the brain that they have?

Sarah: Thank you. That makes so much sense.

This has been so helpful, and I think that so many parents are going to find this really useful—in how to talk to their kids and how to think about it, how to think about it themselves. What it… oh, it has just totally thrown me that I couldn’t remember that thing. All right. So thank you so much for joining us and telling us about all this stuff. You mentioned a couple of books, so we’ll get your books in the show notes for folks, but where else is the best place for people to go and find out more about you and what you do?

Liz: Yeah, so I have a ton of free resources for parents on explainingbrains.com. There are articles—just very, very short, parent-friendly articles—with both the strengths, the “highways,” and common construction projects for ADHD brains, for autistic brains, for dyslexic brains, for kids who have difficulty regulating behavior, anxiety, intellectual disability—just ways of explaining so many different types of brains, as well as what we do about things like screen time or talking about medication. So hopefully that resource is helpful for parents.

And then I have a brand-new book out for parents called Our Brains, and it is an interactive, collaborative workbook that helps you explain a diagnosis to your child. So it’s something that you can get after an assessment, and it will walk you through explaining to your child how their brain works, what you learned from the assessment. Or, if you have a diagnosis that’s been on the table for a long time and you just haven’t had that conversation with them yet, it is designed to really help kids not just know, “Okay, this is my diagnosis,” but really understand how their brain works and how they can advocate for what their brain needs to thrive.

Sarah: Fantastic. That is going to be so helpful for so many parents. Okay, now here’s the mystery question that I told you about before we started recording, and this is a question I ask all my guests. So, if you had a time machine and you could go back in time and give a message to your younger parent self, what advice would you give yourself?

Liz: Oh. I would just constantly remind myself that there are so many ways to be in this world, and it’s all okay. I think—even I was amazed—that even as somebody who has decades of experience in this field and has made a life out of celebrating neurodiversity, there was a way that doctors communicated with me from this deficit lens that would just put my mommy brain on high alert all the time when something was just a little bit different. And I really needed just constant reminders that my child is going to show up how they’re going to show up, and that that is not only okay, but it is beautiful and amazing and so important to how they are and the unique contribution they’re going to have to this world.

And it’s something that I’ve grown into—my child’s seven and a half now—and it’s something that we get to celebrate all the time: incredible uniqueness, and celebrate. But I think I remember very distinctly as a new mom, just with all the doctors using their jargony, deficit-based language, it was just really hard to keep that solid head on my shoulders. But I think it’s a really important message to keep with us: that there’s just so many ways to be, and it’s all amazing.

Sarah: I love that. Thank you so much for joining us, and really appreciate it.

Liz: Thank you for having me. This has been a blast.

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, OR— BRAND NEW: we’ve included a fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, Corey and I discuss why “Special Time”- the gold standard for cultivating connection with our kids- might not work the best for complex kids.

We cover who complex kids are, what parenting them looks like, how to co-create interests and activities together, and being playful to connect deeply while getting through the daily routine.

**If you’d like an ad-free version of the podcast, consider becoming a supporter on Substack! > > If you already ARE a supporter, the ad-free version is waiting for you in the Substack app or you can enter the private feed URL in the podcast player of your choice.

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We talk about:

* 6:43 What is Special Time?

* 7:51 What is a complex Kid?

* 10:08 What does it look like to parent a complex Kid?

* 19:30 What does daily life look like with complex Kids?

* 22:03 What to do for connection when special time doesn’t work?

* 23:05 Cultivating shared hobbies

* 27:00 Finding books you both love

* 30:00 Instead of only putting kids in organized sports, exercise together!

* 33:30 Sideways listening with our kids

* 37:00 Playful parenting as we move through the daily routine

Resources mentioned in this episode:

* Yoto Player-Screen Free Audio Book Player

* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

* What you Can Do When Parenting Hard: Coaching with Joanna

* When Peaceful Parenting Doesn’t Look Like It’s “Supposed To” Look

* How To Take the Coach Approach to Parenting Complex Kids with Elaine Taylor- Klaus

* What Influencers are Getting Wrong About Peaceful Parenting

* Staying Close to Your Tweens and Teens

* How To Stop Fighting About Video Games with Scott Novis

* Playful Heart Parenting with Mia Wisinski

xx Sarah and Corey

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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s episode is about why you shouldn’t do special time, which is, I admit, a little bit of a provocative hook here. But it’s something that Corey brought to my attention that we have been talking about a lot. And then after last week’s podcast, we both agreed—after the podcast with Joanna and her complex kid—we both agreed we have to talk about this, because this is something that probably a lot of parents are feeling a lot of conflict, guilt, and shame around: not doing special time or not wanting to do special time or not being able to do special time.

Sarah: Hey Corey. Welcome back to the podcast. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Corey: Hi, I am Corey Everett, and I am a trained peaceful parenting coach, and I work for Sarah. I live in Ontario, but I work with clients all over the world doing one-on-one coaching. And I myself am complex and have a complex child. And I have two kids. I never can remember this, but I have a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old.

Sarah: I am glad you’re not the only one who can’t remember their kids’ ages. I have to stop and think. Okay. Well, I’m so excited to talk about this. And this is actually something that you and I have talked about over the years, because you have found it really difficult to do special time with your complex kid. Maybe just tell us a little bit about what happened when you tried to do special time and why you eventually sort of gave it up. And, you know, this is something that Joanna in the podcast last week—the coaching podcast—she was talking about how she didn’t want to do special time with her kid because she was so exhausted. So I think this is sort of like a two-part: why sometimes special time doesn’t work for the kids and why it doesn’t work for the parents. So let’s start by talking about what happened when you would try to do special time with Big C, who’s your 10-year-old.

Corey: Okay, so when I would try and do special time with Big C, I actually found—first of all—I didn’t really feel very present in it. I felt like I was trying to do it, but I felt like I didn’t have a lot of energy for it. I think he could feel that. So I just didn’t feel very engaged in it and I just felt exhausted, and it just felt like another thing on my to-do list. And so therefore he didn’t necessarily enjoy it as much either.

We did do a podcast—it’d be really great, I can put it in the show notes—where we talked about some things for peaceful parenting that aren’t working, and I did a really good description in that one of why special time didn’t work for him.

Sarah: Okay.

Corey: And so we can have them listen to that if they want more details on that part. Instead, I think I want to really focus on why it didn’t work for me and why I’m finding with my clients it’s not working for them either.

Sarah: You know what, sorry to interrupt you. I realize we should really just say what special time is, in case—like it’s such a gold standard of peaceful parenting—but there could be some parents listening to this, parents or caregivers who are newer to special time and might not know what it is.

Special time—and there are, I think, some other brands of parenting that might have other names for it—but basically the gold standard is 15 minutes a day of one-on-one time with you and your child, where you put aside the to-do list, put away your phone, and some people suggest that you set a timer and say, “I’m all yours for the next 15 minutes. What do you want to play?” It’s really immersing yourself in the child’s world. That’s one of the main ideas of special time: that we’re immersed in our child’s world of pretend play or some kind of play. It can be roughhousing or it can be playing Lego or dolls—something that is really child-centered and child-led.

So that is special time. And let’s take it from there. You had mentioned already that energetically it was really hard for you.

Corey: I think the best way that I can explain this is if I paint the picture for you of what it looks like to be a parent of a complex kid. And—

Sarah: Wait let’s give a definition of complex—we’ve got to make sure we’re covering the basics here. What’s a complex kid?

Corey: Okay, so a complex kid. This term, I first heard it from Elaine Taylor-Klaus—and we can also put in the show notes when you had her on the podcast. She is amazing. And basically, we’re really often talking about neurodivergent kids here. But it can be more than that. It’s just kids who need more.

Sarah: It’s that 20% of kids that we talk about—the 80% of kids who, you know, you say “Go put your shoes on and wait for me by the door,” and they go and do it and they don’t have the extra big feelings. So in my idea of it, it can be neurodivergent and also spirited, sensitive, strong-willed. The kids who are not your average, typical kids. And I always say that when I tell people what I do—parenting coach—some people look at me like, “Why would anyone need a parenting coach?” and other people are like, “Oh, I could have used you when my kids were growing up.”

So really there are kids who are—I’m sure they’re wonderful—but they’re not as more or complex as some other kids.

Corey: Kids that you almost don’t have to be as intentional about your parenting with.

Sarah: Yeah. You don’t have to read parenting books or listen to parenting podcasts. I would hazard a guess that most people who listen to this podcast have complex kids.

Corey: Yes. They’re our people. We always say the people who are our people are the ones who don’t have to talk about challenges around putting on shoes.

Sarah: I love that.

Corey: That seems to be the number one thing we’re always talking about.

Sarah: We always use that as an example, whether it’s sensory or strong-willed or attentional. It is kind of like one of those canary-in-the-coal-mine things. Will your child go and put their shoes on when you ask them to? If the answer is no, you probably have a complex kid.

Corey: Yes, I love that it is the canary in the coal mine. So that’s what our complex kids are. And for the parents of these kids, I think of these parents as being absolute rock stars. They are just trying so hard to peacefully parent their kids. And, like we said, they’re reading all the books, they’re listening to this podcast, they’ve probably signed up for all sorts of online seminars and courses and just do all of the things.

Often these parents were not peacefully parented themselves. Most people weren’t. So they’re learning a whole new parenting style. And a lot of people today are getting all their information off Instagram and TikTok reels that aren’t very nuanced, so they’re also not getting really full information. They’re trying so hard off of all these little sound snippets.

Sarah: Or the peaceful parenting or gentle parenting advice that they’re being given, and what’s supposed to happen just doesn’t look like that for their kid. And that reminds me—the other podcast that we did about when peaceful parenting doesn’t “work,” we could link to that one too.

Corey: Yes. Parents of complex kids are also trying to problem solve so many challenges because the world is often not designed for their kids, and it’s often not designed for them.

Sarah: Say more about that—about “not designed for their kids.” What’s an example of how that might show up?

Corey: So an example is conventional schooling. They’re expected to go into this noisy environment and just be able to eat the food they’ve been sent and listen all day and stay in their seats and learn the same way that everyone else is learning. I didn’t really realize how complex my kid was until I tried to send him to daycare.

Sarah: I was just thinking about the spirit days at Big C’s school, and how you’ve shared with me that those spirit days—like pajama day or “everyone wear the school colors day”—for some typical kids can be exciting and fun and a diversion. And for complex kids that can cause a whole level of stress and anticipation and the change of routine. Other parents of non-complex kids might be like, “Whatever, it’s not a big deal.” For our complex kids, it throws them for a loop.

Corey: Yes. My first moment of starting to realize there was something I needed to pay more attention to was they were having a movie day at Big C’s daycare, and they said he kept covering his ears and hiding. And that was my first idea that every other kid was so excited that it was movie day. They’d been looking forward to it. And for my child it was just so loud, and then suddenly the lights were turned off, and the whole situation was throwing him off.

So that’s what I mean. We’re designing the world for kids who are excited about movie day or special event days. But for complex kids, this is a complete change in their routine and all sorts of different sensory things that are happening that can make it really hard for them.

Sarah: Or that they can’t handle as much as other kids. I have a client who was just talking about how she’s realized for her son, who’s nine, that they literally can’t do anything after school. They can’t stop at the store and run in and grab a few things. They really just have to come straight home and not do anything extra or different. And he does so much better when he can just come home and unwind and needs that.

Corey: Yes, exactly. So the world wasn’t designed for them. And then consequently, the world was often not designed for those parents either. So many of the people we work with—including ourselves—only start to realize how complex we are once we start identifying it in our children. So it’s just not really an accommodated world.

Sarah: So talk about how that has led to burnout for you. And by the way, when you started talking about rock stars—in the membership the other day, in office hours, one of our members, I’ll call him D, who works incredibly hard and has two very complex kids, was just sharing how dark and hard life had been feeling for him lately. And I said, honestly, I just want to give you a medal. And I grabbed this off my desk and held it up—this silver milagro from Mexico that’s a bleeding heart. It was the closest thing I had to a medal.

But I really feel like so many parents who have hard or more complex kids, all they feel is that they’re doing a bad job. They don’t realize that they’re up against something other people are not up against. They don’t realize that because that’s all they know—unless you have one kid that’s not complex and one that is—you just don’t know that you’re working so hard and things are still hard. It feels like you must be doing something wrong or failing. What they don’t realize is that you can do everything “right” in peaceful parenting, and things are still really hard if you’ve got a complex kid.

Corey: Yes. And the last thing I want to say to help paint this picture is that these parents—part of what they’re dealing with, and I actually think this is huge—all parents today have a huge amount of family admin: managing appointments and things from the school and all those kinds of things. But that’s this other crushing weight we’re carrying as parents with complex kids: the admin.

Sarah: Right.

Corey: The amount of communication we have to do with daycare providers and teachers almost every day at points—

Sarah: And also the searching. I’ve watched you go through this, and I watched my sister go through this, and countless clients. The searching to try to figure out what exactly is going on with my kid so that I can best support them. And even with the privilege you have and my sister has in terms of being able to access specialists and testing and all of that—even with that privilege—it’s still almost a full-time job. And then getting the OT or the supports too.

Corey: Yes. I started for this podcast listing some of the people I’ve had to coordinate with over the years, and I was like: different types of medical doctors, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, psychologists, social workers, dieticians… so many. And just so much coordinating and searching. And the other thing that’s hard is you also then have homework from each of these people. So not only do you have to make appointments and get your children to appointments, you then have to fill out all this paperwork to get reimbursed or get payment sorted. Then there’s all the paperwork they want you to sign for ongoing parts of that. Then they have homework for the kids that they’re supposed to be doing all the time to help them with whatever’s going on. It’s endless.

Sarah: Yeah. And then there’s the day-to-day. Tell us—paint a little picture of the day-to-day living. Not only do we have the world that isn’t built for them or for you, and then all of the extra stuff that goes along with having a complex kid, but then the day-to-day life. Speak to that a little bit.

Corey: Yeah. I think that’s the thing you just see is so painful to talk about for all the people in our membership and our clients, and I’ve experienced it firsthand. You had children to add love to your family. And then you love them so much and you’re struggling because there’s chronic dysregulation, and they’re having such a hard time getting through your daily routines, and they need more supervision than the average child does. Just getting through the day can be really challenging when you have a complex kid. And then if you yourself are complex, your nervous system is getting completely overwhelmed by trying to be the calm for everyone’s storms.

Sarah: It’s a lot, Corey. I understand why you get emotional about it. It’s a lot. And you’re still in the thick of it with two young kids. I think everyone who’s listening to this can relate.

Okay. So how and when did you decide that you were going to quit special time, and what does that look like? And—I just want to center us here—the reason why we do special time is for connection, right? Complex kids need connection just as much or more than typical kids. And so just because we’re saying you might want to quit special time, it does not mean we’re saying you want to quit connection. So what does that look like? What have you found? Because I know you’re super connected with your kids. I’ve seen you together. I know the things they say to you and about you, and that you have an awesome connection. So what do you do for connection when special time does not work?

Corey: A big thing that I’ve been telling clients and that I’ve done in my life is—first of all, I had to acknowledge to myself, it felt like shame. Because here I am—it’s one of the first things we tell everyone we work with: “Are you getting one-on-one time doing special time with your child?” And then I’m sitting there being like, but I don’t really do this. I get a ton of one-on-one time with my children. And I think that’s at the heart of it. But what I realized is because we’re carrying all those weights we talked about, your whole life feels like it’s all about this kid. And then to be like, “You know what? Let’s make it more about you and give you another 15 minutes,” just feels—I almost felt like I don’t have this in me.

So I realized: let’s pick things that we can do together that are interesting for both them and me. Instead of getting locked in their play and being led by them, I’m finding things that we’re co-creating together.

Sarah: And can I just note too that you’ve told me—and I know you said you talked about this in another podcast—but I just want to say it again: a lot of times complex kids’ play doesn’t look like typical kids’ play. So you might be like, “What do you want to play?” and they’re like, “I don’t know.” They don’t have the same kind of “Okay, let’s play store and you be this and I’ll be this.” Or they play with their toys in a different manner. So it can also be just awkward to insist that you play with them when that’s not their style anyway. I just wanted to throw that out there.

Corey: Yeah. And, or if I did, they’re always telling me I’m doing everything wrong.

Sarah: Right. Because I do think that play—I do think that for most kids, even though we’re saying don’t do special time—I do think that for most kids it is important to put yourself in their world. And I don’t want people to think, like, “Okay, this means I never have to try to do special time.” We’re just saying if it’s not working for you for these various reasons—whether it’s because of your own constraints like it was for Joanna, or because it doesn’t work for your kid—it doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong and that there’s no way to connect and that you should just give up.

But I do think that—just a side note—I’d say the majority of kids, play in their world is the key to a lot of connection. But for some complex kids, that just isn’t their mode. For some of them.

Corey: Yeah. Because I think we were coming out of special time feeling angry.

Sarah: Right?

Corey: Because we were coming out of it like, “I’m trying to get lost in my child’s world,” and he’s just like, “You’re not doing anything right, Mommy.” It was frustrating for him because he had these ideas and he couldn’t really get me to do it right. And I think for some kids that can be really empowering, where they like that feeling of being in control and telling them. But for him it was frustrating because he’s like, “I had this vision, and you are just not executing.” I’m like, “I don’t know, I’m trying to execute your vision.” So I think that’s why for us, I could just tell it wasn’t just me—neither of us were finding it was working.

Sarah: But—

Corey: We were desperately wanting to be together.

Sarah: Okay. So you said “finding,” right? I interrupted you when you were talking about finding things that were co-interests—things that work for both of you, co-creating.

Corey: Yes. When they were younger, one of the big things I did was buy myself really special pencil crayons and nice watercolor paints because both of them loved doing art. So I could sit and do art with them and use my fancy coloring books and feel very “we are together doing something” that was making me feel really good, but they also felt really happy, and they loved showing me what they were making.

Sarah: And did you let them use your stuff? Because I think that would be really hard for me, because you can’t really be like, “These are my special things, and you use these Crayola ones.” How did you navigate that?

Corey: Okay, so that was really hard. This never would work for my husband, so I’m going to acknowledge for some people this wouldn’t work. I let them grab my crayons, and they dropped them a lot. I acknowledged that they were not going to last. But I still wanted good ones available to me. So I had to be flexible. They definitely grabbed them, and the watercolors were wrecked really quickly. But they respected not touching my special brushes for some reason. So I kept my own special brushes for the painting.

Sarah: You know, that reminds me—one of our members has a just-newly-3-year-old who’s super complex, and she was talking about how she was doing a jigsaw puzzle, like a proper adult thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. And she was really worried that—since it was on the table in a room where the parents could be—her kid was just going to come in and wreck it. Instead, her child is really good at jigsaw puzzles and is doing them with her. So I think sometimes—she’s totally shocked and thrilled that this has become something—and this is clearly a case of coming into the adult world of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. You just reminded me—she put a post in our Facebook group about how… I don’t know, did you see that post?

Corey: Yeah, I did.

Sarah: About how wonderful it’s been to have her just-turned-3-year-old do these adult jigsaw puzzles with her. So that’s a perfect example of what you’re talking about, I think.

Corey: I think it’s—so I love what you’re saying here, because we’re always told “go into their world,” but there’s something really powerful about letting them into yours. I didn’t actually realize that’s what I was doing—I’ve been bringing them into my world with me, and then they feel really special being allowed in there with me. And so it creates this really beautiful thing, but I’m flexible about letting them in there, knowing it’s going to look different.

Sarah: Right. What are some other things that you’ve done besides art that might be inspiring?

Corey: I realized a long time ago I had to let go of the idea that I needed to read really interesting books to my kids so that every night we could look forward to reading beautiful stories that drew me in. We actually realized bedtime has started getting hard again, and we realized it’s because we’re in between books. So that is something—and a shout-out to my mom; she’s really good at researching books—she’s come up with some really cool books that have really diverse characters and really interesting stories. That’s been another really important thing: don’t just read. I’ve picked really good books that draw me in.

And so last night we actually just started a favorite series of mine. I kid you not, I’m reading to my 10-year-old a feminist fantasy book that I read when I was a tween. It’s called Dealing with Dragons, and he actually is loving it.

Sarah: Nice. So you’re saying—maybe you misspoke—you said you had to give up on reading books that you… beautiful books that you liked. But did you mean that you were finding beautiful books that you liked?

Corey: Yeah, sorry, that’s—earlier on I felt like I was just reading, you know, books that I thought they would like.

Sarah: Oh, okay.

Corey: But instead I was like, “The heck with that,” and I found books that I loved, and I started reading those to my kids. And then they loved them. And then that really got us so excited about bedtime.

Sarah: Great, great.

Corey: We got through it, and we would read that together, and it became—I actually think reading books that I love to my kids has become one of the most important special times that we have each day.

Sarah: So another co-creating—something that’s interesting to both of you. And it’s not necessarily going into their world and reading the Captain Underpants or something that they might like that you find mind-numbingly boring. And maybe Captain Underpants isn’t boring—I’ve never read it—but I’m just using that as an example.

Corey: That’s a perfect example. So it’s like, here, I’m providing those books for them to read to themselves for their reading time. Absolutely—read all the Captain Underpants, the Dog Man you would like. But my goodness, when I’m reading to you, I’m picking something. And look, we’ve abandoned lots of books that we started reading that they couldn’t get into. We keep—we just keep trying.

Sarah: Okay. What else—what else is next?

Corey: Exercise.

Sarah: Okay.

Corey: I’ve realized exercise for me is the number one way for me to deal with stress. Of all things, I need to exercise to help manage stress. And it’s very hard to fit in exercise when you have complex kids. So from the time they were little, we’ve been very flexible about how we’ve done it. But my husband and I have—once again, instead of picking things they’re naturally into (this is starting to sound really funny)—we just brought them into our exercise with us, and they love it. From the time they were little, we had a balance bike for my littlest guy. He was on that balance bike, and we were riding bikes together.

So my littlest one ended up being able to ride a regular bike before he was three.

Sarah: Same with Maxine. Those balance bikes are amazing. She just—yeah. It’s crazy.

Corey: Yeah. And sometimes—

Sarah: Sometimes you’re like, “What have I done?” The 3-year-old is riding off.

Corey: It’s true. It was unbelievable, though. So we just rode our bikes together. From the time ours were very little, we had them as little guys on—you can get an attachment to your bike—and my husband put them on his road bike with him and would take them for rides on his road bike.

Sarah: There’s also the trailer bike too, which we had, which is good.

Corey: So we did that. We had our youngest on skis when he was two. COVID kind of interrupted some of that, but now we ski every weekend with our kids, and we decided to do that instead of putting them into organized sports so that we would all be doing it together.

Sarah: Oh, I love that. Instead of dropping them off and they’re playing soccer, you’re all doing stuff together.

Corey: Yes.

Sarah: I mean, and you could—and, you know, for other families—you could just go and kick the ball. Or I always say, chase your kids around the playground if you feel like you don’t have time to exercise but you need to. It can be that simple, right? Kicking the ball around, chasing them around the playground—get some exercise and have some connection time too.

Corey: Yeah. One of the ways we got our one son kind of good at running is taking the kite to the park, and we just ran around with the kite. But we started even going to—and I advised another family to do this—going to a track together, because it’s a contained area where everyone could run at different speeds. And the really little ones were playing on the inside of the track with soccer balls and things like that, and then everyone else could be running around the track.

Sarah: Love it.

Corey: So getting really creative about literally bringing them into our world of things that we love, and then connecting deeply. And it’s one of those things where it’s an investment you make over time. It starts small, and you have to be really flexible. And there are these little hands grabbing all your fancy pencil crayons, and you’re having to deal with it. And then one day you’re sitting beside them, and they’re using them themselves—drawing works of art.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah.

Corey: And it’s happening now where my older son and I have been going for runs together around the neighborhood, and we have the best talks ever because I’m sideways listening. We should talk about sideways listening, actually.

Sarah: Okay.

Corey: So I learned about this from you. You have a great article—I recommend it to everyone—it’s called “Staying Close to Your Tweens and Teens,” and that’s where you talk about how it’s actually easier for people, I think, to have important conversations when you’re side to side, because it’s not that intensity of looking at each other’s faces. This is extra true for neurodivergent people who sometimes have a hard time with eye contact and talking in that way. So we go for these runs together all around our neighborhood, and I hear everything from my son during that time because we’re side by side. So it’s become special time, where it started when I taught him to come into my world with the track running and all the different things, and now that we’re running, he’s bringing me into his world.

Sarah: Love it. Do you find that a lot of complex kids have special interests—do you find that there’s a way that you can connect with them over their special interest? Does that feel connecting to you if it’s not something—like, I’m literally just curious about that.

Corey: I think that can be tricky, but I do think it’s very important. I’ve learned that I was having a hard time with how much my kids loved video games because I’ve never liked video games. And, you know, as someone with ADHD, it’s so hard to focus on things that I don’t find interesting. And I realized that I’ve spent all this time cultivating bringing them into my world, and we’ve gotten to such a beautiful, connected space that I do need to go into theirs. And now that they’re older, I’m finding it is easier to go into their world, because we’re not trying to make some sort of play thing happen that wasn’t natural.

Sarah: Right.

Corey: So I have been making a point now of—I’ve sat down and been like, “Show me how to play. I’m a beginner. Teach me how to do this.” And I’ve been playing video games with them. I’m so bad.

Sarah: You know, in our podcast with Scott Novus about how to stop fighting with your kids about video games, he says how good it is for kids to see you be bad at something.

Corey: They’re seeing it.

Sarah: I love that.

Corey: I’m so bad. I cannot even a little bit. So they find it very funny. I’ve been playing with them and letting them talk to me about it, and I’ve found that’s been really important too. Because I keep on saying, “Do you see why they love this so much?” And I’m kind of like, yes—and I see what skills you’re learning now that I’ve tried it. It takes so much skill and practice to be good at these complex video games on the Switch and on the PlayStation. So I am learning a lot, and I feel like we are shifting now, where I found a way to connect with them by bringing them along with what I was into, and now that they’re older, we are switching where I’m able to go back into their world.

Sarah: Right. Love it. So we also—you know, I think delighting is something that probably you still do, and we always talk about that as the low-hanging fruit. If you can’t do special time or it doesn’t work for you, delighting in your child throughout the day—letting the love that you feel in your heart show on your face, right? And then finally, you talked about using routine—the things that you do throughout the day—as connection. Can you talk about that a little bit before we go?

Corey: Yes. So this is where long-time listeners of our podcast know that although special time is a big fail for us, I’m really good at being silly with my kids. Really good at being silly. And I’m very inspired listening to Mia from Playful Heart—Playful Heart Parenting. I think I told you, listening to her talk, it was like the first time I heard someone talking about exactly how I do playful parenting. And it’s just injecting play and silliness and drama throughout your everyday things you’re doing together. And so we do that all the time to get through the schedule. Especially now, my 10-year-old is starting to act a little too cool for some of this, but it’s still really happening with my 7-year-old, where we’re always singing weird songs about what we’re doing, and I’ll take on weird accents and be my characters. I’m not going to demonstrate them here—it’s far too embarrassing—but I still have my long-running characters I can’t get over.

Sarah: You’ve got, like, the dental hygienist—what’s her name?

Corey: Karen. Karen the dental hygienist.

Sarah: What’s the bus driver’s name?

Corey: I have Brett the bus driver. We have “Deep Breath,” who’s like a yogi who comes in when everyone needs to take deep breaths. There’s—oh, her name’s So? I’m not sure why. So is the dresser who’s really serious and doesn’t know how to smile. So if my kids ever need help—this has also been a big way that I delight in them, I think—if they ever need help getting dressed (which complex kids need help getting dressed for a long—)

Sarah: And even body doubling when they don’t need help getting dressed, right?

Corey: Yes. So I would always pretend to be a dresser who was sent in to get them dressed in their clothes, and they didn’t know how to smile. So they’re always trying to teach me how to smile when I’m keeping a serious face. And actually, recently I was doing this and I was having such a hard time not laughing that my lips started visibly quivering trying not to smile and laugh.

Sarah: I love that.

Corey: I think it was the hardest I’ve ever seen my 7-year-old laugh. He was on the floor laughing because I was like—

Sarah: And for anyone who this sounds hard for—just, you know, it takes practice, and anyone, I think, can learn to be playful. And I love Mia’s account—we’ll link to that in the show notes. I love Mia’s account for ideas just to get you started, because I know you—you’re a drama kid. I’m not. But I still found ways to get playful even though it’s not my natural instinct. And so you can—this way of getting playful and connecting through the day and through your daily routine—you can do that. It’ll take maybe a little practice; you might feel funny at first. But I think it’s possible for everyone to do that.

So thank you so much. We have to wrap up, but I also want to point out that anyone who wants to connect with you, reach out to us. Corey’s available for coaching. She’s a wonderful coach. And I have people who specifically ask for Corey because they can relate to Corey’s experience as a parent of complex kids. And so, on our website, reimaginepeacefulparenting.com, there is a booking link for a free short consult or for a coaching session. We’ll also put that in the show notes. So if you want some more support, please reach out to us. Either of us are here and want to help you.

And, Corey, thank you for your honesty and vulnerability—vulnerability about being a parent of a complex kid and sharing how you can do that connection, even if it feels like special time is just too hard and something that doesn’t work for you or for your kid. And thanks to Joanna for also inspiring us to get this out there to you all.

Corey, before I let you go, I’m going to ask the question I ask all my guests, which is: what would you tell your—you had a time machine and you could go back in time—what would you tell your younger parent self?

Corey: Okay.

Sarah: About parenting? What do you wish you knew?

Corey: I think what I wish I knew—I think this is easier than I thought it would be, because I just told my best friend who just had a baby this—and it’s: trust your intuition. I think I spent so much time looking for answers outside of myself, and I could feel they weren’t right for my kid or for me, that I was so confused because other people were telling me, “This is what you should be doing.” And the more I’ve learned to trust my gut instinct and just connect deeply—and this special time example is perfect—I knew it wasn’t working for us, and I intuitively knew other ways to do it. And I wish I could have just trusted that earlier.

Sarah: And stopped doing it sooner and just gone with the other connection ideas. Yeah. Thank you so much, Corey. This has been so great. And, again, we’ll put the link to anyone who wants to book a free short consult or coaching session, and also to our membership, which you’ve heard us mention a few times, which is just a wonderful space on the internet for people who want some community and support with their complex kid.

Thanks, Corey.

Corey: Thank you.

>> Please support us!!! Please consider becoming a supporter to help support our free content, including The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, our free parenting support Facebook group, and our weekly parenting emails, “Weekend Reflections” and “Weekend Support” - plus our Flourish With Your Complex Child Summit (coming back in the spring for the 3rd year!) All of this free support for you takes a lot of time and energy from me and my team. If it has been helpful or meaningful for you, your support would help us to continue to provide support for free, for you and for others.

In addition to knowing you are supporting our mission to support parents and children, you get the podcast ad free and access to a monthly ‘ask me anything’ session.

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, OR— BRAND NEW: we’ve included a fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I do a coaching call with Joanna who has a 2-year-old and a 7-year-old.

We cover how to make mindset shifts so you can better show up for your kids, as well as get into specifics around night weaning, bedtime battles, handling meltdowns, playful parenting and increasing our connection to our kids.

**If you’d like an ad-free version of the podcast, consider becoming a supporter on Substack! > > If you already ARE a supporter, the ad-free version is waiting for you in the Substack app or you can enter the private feed URL in the podcast player of your choice.

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We talk about:

* 6:40 how to manage meltdowns

* 9:00 Night weaning and bedtime challenges

* 20:00 Emptying a full emotional backpack

* 26:00 Kids who always want more attention

* 28:00 Understanding blame and anger

* 38:00 Games to play when a child is looking for more power

* 44:00 How our mindset makes such a big difference when parenting

* 47:30 Two keys to peaceful parenting!

* 55:00 Playful approaches to bedtime

Resources mentioned in this episode:

* Yoto Player-Screen Free Audio Book Player

* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

* How to Help Our Little Ones Sleep with Kim Hawley

* Episode 100: When Your Child Has a Preferred Parent (or Not) with Sarah and Corey

* Episode 103: Playful Parenting with Lawrence Cohen

* Playful Heart Parenting with Mia Wisinski: Episode 186

xx Sarah and Corey

Your peaceful parenting team- click here for a free short consult or a coaching session

Visit our website for free resources, podcast, coaching, membership and more!

>> Please support us!!! Please consider becoming a supporter to help support our free content, including The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, our free parenting support Facebook group, and our weekly parenting emails, “Weekend Reflections” and “Weekend Support” - plus our Flourish With Your Complex Child Summit (coming back in the spring for the 3rd year!) All of this free support for you takes a lot of time and energy from me and my team. If it has been helpful or meaningful for you, your support would help us to continue to provide support for free, for you and for others.

In addition to knowing you are supporting our mission to support parents and children, you get the podcast ad free and access to a monthly ‘ask me anything’ session.

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Transcript:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s episode is a coaching episode. My guest is Joanna, mom of a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old. Joanna’s 7-year-old is an intense child, and she wanted to know how to handle her big feelings and find more connection with her.

She also had some specific challenges around bedtime, namely that her partner works shift work and is not home at bedtime. She still breastfeeds her 2-year-old to sleep, so is unavailable to her seven-year-old for a bit, and then has trouble getting her seven-year-old to bed without a fight. Joanna also shared how low she was on resources, and we had a great discussion about how that impacts her parenting and what she might do about it.

Also, meltdowns—we talked about those too and how to respond. I know Joanne is not alone. One note: after we did the follow-up call, I realized I forgot to ask her about a few things. So she kindly recorded a couple of P.S.’s that I’ll include. If you’re curious, like I am, you’ll be glad she gave us the latest updates.

If you would like to come on the podcast and be coached by me, I am looking for a few parents who are interested. You can email me at [email protected].

As always, please give us a five-star rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, and if you know another parent or caregiver that this would be helpful for, please screenshot it and send it to them. The best way to reach more families with peaceful parenting is through word of mouth, so we really appreciate any shares that you might be able to give us.

Okay. Let’s meet Joanna. Okay.

Sarah: Hi Joanna. Welcome to the podcast.

Joanna: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Sarah: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Joanna: Sure. I live up in Ottawa, Canada, with my husband and my two kids. I’m a music therapist, so right now I’m working with babies. I teach Yoga with Baby and, um, a class called Sing and Sign at a local wellness center.

Sarah: Nice. How old are—

Joanna: Yes, I have a 7-year-old girl who we’ll call Jay.

Sarah: Okay.

Joanna: And then a 2-year-old boy called JR.

Sarah: JJ. Okay, perfect. Okay, so how can I support you today?

Joanna: Yeah, so my daughter has always been, like, a bit of a tricky one. Um. She was born premature, so at 29 weeks. And no kind of lasting effects. But as she’s gotten older, we’ve noticed, like, she’s really struggled a lot with emotional regulation. Um, and she kind of gets stuck on certain behaviors. So I feel like we’ve done a lot to change our parenting, in part thanks to you and your podcast and all the material. Um, I did finally read, um, Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids this past summer.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: And I feel like it also had a huge effect, just having, like, that bigger scope of understanding of, like, the peaceful parenting philosophy.

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Joanna: So I would say, like, even from where we were a few months ago, we’ve experienced tons of positive shifts with her.

Sarah: Sweet.

Joanna: Yeah, so we’re already kind of well on our way, but there are certain behaviors that she has that still I find really perplexing. So I wondered if maybe we could go over a couple of them.

Sarah: Sure. Yeah, no problem. For anyone—if, for anyone who doesn’t know, Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids is the book written by my mentor, who I trained with, Dr. Laura Markham. Um, and just for my own curiosity, what do you think? Because, you know, I always worry that people are—that they don’t have the fully formed idea of peaceful parenting. And that—and I’m not saying you, because you’ve listened to the podcast so you probably have a deeper understanding—but some people are just getting their little snippets on Instagram reels, you know, and so it is hard to understand, like, the, the sort of the core reasons why we do the approach if you don’t have that deeper understanding. And also, I’m working on a book right now, so hopefully soon you’ll be able to say you read my book. But what did you—what do you feel like got fleshed out for you when you read that book?

Joanna: I think she really breaks a lot of things down step by step, such as, like, what to do when your child is going through a meltdown.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: And that has always been an area—like, when my daughter gets to that point where she’s, like, become really explosive and aggressive and she’s just, like, in it and she’s kind of unreachable at that moment—like, what to do step by step at that time. I think, like, that’s been the most helpful because I’ve been able to really settle into my own parenting and just, like, really trust myself and anchor in at that point, which is exactly really what she needs and what was missing.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Joanna: So—

Sarah: So I think, um—like I always say, focus on regulating yourself first. Like, when someone’s having a meltdown, empathize.

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: Um, you know, it—yeah, it’s—it can be hard because you often feel like you need to do something. And even though you’re saying step by step, it’s less about doing anything than just centering yourself, staying calm yourself, trying to get in touch with the compassion and empathy even if you’re not—some pe—some parents say, “Oh, well, when I try to say anything, then my kid just screams more.” So sometimes it’s just empathize—like, getting connected in your own heart to the empathy and compassion, even if you’re not saying anything—and that, that does something.

Joanna: Absolutely it does. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Joanna: Yeah, so that’s all been really helpful. Now, in—in terms of emotional regulation, I do definitely think that that’s the biggest piece.

Sarah: Okay.

Joanna: Uh, it’s been the biggest piece for me and sort of, like, one of the big things that I wanted to talk to you about today is we are still really not getting sleep because my 2-year-old is not a good sleeper and has never been a good sleeper. And we’ve gone through periods where I’m like, okay, now he’s only waking up, like, twice a night, and that feels manageable. Um, but he’s kind of been back to waking up, like, three to six times a night again, which is so hard. And then my husband’s very supportive; however, he works afternoons, so he’s gone from about 3:00 PM to 1:00 AM, so he needs to be able to sleep until about eight, which means I’m up with my son between six and seven. My daughter gets up for school around 7:30, so that’s, like, a tricky time of day because she’s really quite grumpy in the morning. He’s not—the toddler’s really, like, kind of a totally different temperament. But, like, I’m tired after struggling with, like, night wakings all night. And then I’m with the kids from the time that she gets home from school, um, and then doing both bedtimes myself.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: Um, so there’s a lot of time where, like, I am solo parenting, and I’m definitely, like, the preferred parent. Um, and both my kids really want me and need me at bedtime. So he is still nursing—like, I’m nursing to sleep and then nursing during the night. And I know that that’s probably contributing a lot to all the night wakings. So, I guess my question is, like, I am at the point where I am ready to night-wean. I probably should have done it already, but—

Sarah: Don’t say “should have.” Like, it’s—if you’re not ready to make that change, like, in your heart, it’s really torturous to try to—try to, like, not—so say you decide you want to night-wean, but you weren’t really ready to do it. It would be so painful for you to deny your son nursing in the night if you were—if you didn’t feel in your heart, like, “No, this is the right thing to do. I’m totally ready. I think he’s ready.” So, so I think waiting until you’re really, like, actually, yes, “I’m done with this,” is a smart thing. Yeah. So don’t beat yourself up for not having done it already. But you’re right, it probably does contribute to him waking up in the night.

Joanna: Yeah. And, um, I do feel like I—I’m ready. I just—I’m not quite sure how to make that shift. So what generally happens is, like, we have some, like, virtual babysitting going on with my mom, where, like, when I nurse my son to sleep, which generally takes, like, between maybe 30 and 45 minutes, she’ll, like, sit with her and do a workbook. So we’ll have, like, a video chat, and then after—

Sarah: Yeah, it’s great.

Joanna: So then after, um, I’m with her to get her ready for bed, and that oftentimes looks like a lot of, like, dragging heels on, like, “Oh, I want another snack,” and “I wanna, like, brush my teeth,” and “Whatever—don’t wanna brush my teeth.” So, um, then that ends up taking usually about an hour, but we both sort of have, like, this expiration at about 9:00 PM, where, like, she just gets so dysregulated because she’s so tired.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: So if I don’t have her in bed at that point and, like, already kind of with the lights out, there’s often just, like, a meltdown and some—like, she’ll start calling me names and start, like, you know, throwing stuff down at me and whatnot. And then I’m just really tired by that point too. Yeah. So we can kind of joke around about it now—like, nine o’clock is the time where we’re, like, where we both expire. So I’m trying to figure out, like, how can I night-wean? Because I know that that is supposed to start with, like, him being able to fall asleep by himself at the beginning of the night, so—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: Slowly phasing that out and laying with him. I know it’s gonna probably take a lot longer in the beginning, so I’m just a little worried that, like, maybe if it takes, like, an hour, an hour and a half, then all of a sudden she’s kind of, like, left hanging and it’s getting later and her bedtime’s being pushed back.

Sarah: Are there any—are there any nights that your partner is home at bedtime?

Joanna: There’s two—

Sarah: nights that—

Joanna: he—

Sarah: is,

Joanna: yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I guess I would start with those nights.

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. Start with those nights. And—and when was your son’s birthday? Like, like how—two—is he—

Joanna: He just turned two, like, two weeks ago.

Sarah: Okay. So, I mean, I think I would start with trying to just practice, you know, nursing him and maybe nursing him somewhere else and then bringing him back, you know, and then putting him in—are you co-sleeping?

Joanna: Sleep—yeah. Well, I put him—like, I generally nurse him to sleep. He has a floor bed in his room, and then I go to bed in my own room, and then at his first wake, then I go back in, and I just stay there for the room—the rest of the night from that point.

Sarah: Right, right. So I, I guess I would try just, like, nursing him and trying to, like, pat his back and sing to him and, you know, tell him that—that he can have—I, I mean, what we did was, “You can have milk in the morning,” you know, “You could have it when it’s light.” I remember my oldest son—when he—it took him a couple of days—and if you wanna hear the whole story of my failed night-weaning with my second son, it was in a podcast that we did about infant and toddler sleep, uh, with Kim.

Joanna: Yeah, Kim?

Sarah: Yes. So you could listen to that if you haven’t heard that already. But my second—my first son was super easy to night-wean, and a couple of—it was, like, a couple of nights of a little bit of crying, and he would just say, “Make it light, Mama. Make it light,” because he wanted—I said, “You can nurse when it’s light.” But, you know, I, I, I don’t wanna get into that whole big thing on this podcast because—mm-hmm—just because I’ve already talked about it. But if you wanna listen to that, and if you have any questions when we do our follow-up, you can, uh, you can ask me. But, you know, I would just try, you know, talking to him about, then, you know, “You can have Milky in the morning,” or whatever you call it, and, you know, those two—see how it goes for those two nights where your partner’s around. And if it doesn’t—I would say, if it still seems really hard, maybe just waiting to do it until—I don’t know if you have any other support you could enlist. You mentioned your mother—maybe she could come and visit, you know, because I do think it would be hard to try and do this and do the solo bedtimes for a while. So I don’t know if there’s a time when your mom could come visit or if there’s some other support that you could have. But yeah—

Joanna: I think the tricky part with that is that, like, she—even with my husband—like, she doesn’t want him to put her to bed.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: And depending on the kind of night that she’s having, sometimes she’ll end up, like, screaming, and their bedrooms are right beside each other. So we’ve had it before where, like, she’ll start having a meltdown and, like, wake him up, and then he’s not able to fall asleep either. And then we—

Sarah: There’s also—your husband could be with your son.

Joanna: It’s the same—same situation though. Like, he doesn’t—him—

Sarah: It sounds—it sounds like possibly—I mean, there—kids do have preferred parents even when, um, they do have good connection with the—with the other parent. And you could maybe still work—have some—that be something that you’re working on, having your partner, you know, maybe even practicing having—before you start doing the night-weaning—practicing having your partner doing some of the bedtime stuff. When you are—when, you know, when—before you’re starting to make a change so that your son doesn’t associate, you know, “I’m not getting what I want,” and my dad, you know, putting me to sleep.

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: So I would maybe try to get your partner a little bit more involved in bedtime before making a change. And—and even if there’s some crying—we also have a podcast about preferred parents that you could listen to. So I—you know, I think maybe you do have a little bit of pre-work to do before you start doing the night-weaning, and, in terms of when—how can you get support at bedtime?

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: Okay.

Joanna: I mean, the other option is if you just kick it down the road more and—or, you know, there isn’t—there’s actually a third option now that I think about it—it’s that you still nurse him to sleep but then don’t nurse him when you wake him up—when he wakes up in the night. Get him to go back to sleep without that.

Sarah: I hadn’t thought about that, because I think that everything that I’ve heard has been, like, they have to fall asleep on their own because then they’re always gonna be—

Joanna: looking—

Sarah: for—

Joanna: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: But I mean, you could still try it.

Joanna: Hmm. Okay.

Sarah: Or you could try shortening the—you know, give him a little bit of milk and then see if he’ll go to sleep, um, after he has a little bit, but without nursing to sleep.

Joanna: Okay. Yeah. Okay, I’ll give that some thought and try some different things there.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: Okay. Thank you. But yeah, I feel like just starting to get sleep again is pretty important. So, even in terms of, like, being able to center myself to handle all of the things that goes on with my daughter during the day, that feels like a really important piece right now.

Sarah: For sure. And if she’s—if she’s some nights not going—it sounds like quite frequently maybe she’s not asleep before nine.

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: And what time does she wake up?

Joanna: 7:30.

Sarah: 7:30. So do you think she’s getting enough sleep?

Joanna: Probably not. She’s really lethargic in the morning.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: But I can’t really seem to figure out how to be able to get her to sleep. Like, I did talk to her about it, and she was like, “Well, maybe when I turn eight, like, I can start putting myself to bed.” And I was like, “Okay, well what—what would that look like?” And she kind of went through, like, “Okay, I’ll, you know, I’ll brush my teeth on the phone with Grandma, and then I’ll just, like, read in bed.” And—but this is, like, in a moment where she’s feeling very regulated.

Sarah: Right, right, right. And when’s her birthday?

Joanna: Uh, in about two months.

Sarah: Okay. Yeah. Um, have you had a conversation with her about how neither of you likes the fighting at night? And, you know—and does she have any, like—not in the moment, but does she have any ideas of, you know, how you can solve the problem of her not, you know, not wanting to go to bed and then getting too tired and then getting really cranky?

Joanna: Yeah, we have—we have talked about it, and we can talk about it with, like, a little bit more levity now, but I don’t think that she’s actually—we’ve gone to, like, the problem-solving—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: of that.

Sarah: I mean, that might be a helpful conversation to have with her and just say, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what often happens at night, you know, and I totally get it, that you don’t wanna go to bed. Like, you know, when I was a kid, I never wanted to go to bed, and I would’ve stayed up all night if I could. And I’m sure you’re the same because it’s just—you know, when you’re young, going to bed is, like, you know, not any fun at all.” And you can make—you could even make a joke, like, “When you’re old like me, like, you can’t wait to go to bed.” But of course when you’re young, you don’t wanna go to sleep, and I totally get that. So, like, lots of empathy and acknowledging, like, her perspective. And—and then you could say, “And at the same time, you know, you do—you know, why do you think it’s important to sleep?” So I guess you could have that conversation with her too about, like, you know, what happens when we’re sleeping that—your, you know, you could talk about how your cells, like, fix themselves. Also we grow when we’re sleeping—like, we get the—like, the growth hormone gets secreted, and that’s the—if we don’t get enough sleep, we’re not gonna grow and we’re not gonna feel happy the next day. So you can, like, talk to her about the importance of sleep. And then you could say, like, “So, you know, I know you don’t wanna go to sleep, and I know how important it is, and now you do too. And, you know—and I hate fighting with you at bedtime. You know, do you have any ideas for how we can solve this problem? Because I really want us both to go to bed feeling happy and connected.”

Joanna: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great suggestion. Thank you. I think the biggest barrier to her getting to bed on time is she is finally feeling, like, a bit more calm and relaxed at night. Like, she comes home after school with a lot—she’s holding a lot from school. They have, like, a point system for good behavior at school.

Sarah: Oh.

Joanna: And you should see how she racks up the points. She has great behavior at school. The teacher’s, like—would never believe what goes on at home.

Sarah: Of course, yeah.

Joanna: So then she comes home, and it’s, like, a lot of unloading. So I feel like by that time of night she’s, like, ready to pursue her hobbies. Like, she’s like, “Oh, I just wanna do this one more little”—you know, she’s drawing something, and it’s always like, “I just need to finish this,” because once she gets started on something, she can’t seem to break her focus on—We’re very much suspecting ADHD. That’s gonna be probably in the next year we pursue a diagnosis, but—

Sarah: Typically—do have a lot of trouble falling asleep—that’s with ADHD. What about—you know, so two outta three of my kids had a lot of trouble falling asleep, and they’re both my ADHD kids, and what really helped them was something to listen to at night. You know—

Joanna: Yeah, she does listen to podcasts falling asleep—

Sarah: Does listen to stuff.

Joanna: Yeah, she’s always listened—listened to, like, a story falling asleep. I think part of it too is we don’t get a lot of one-on-one time throughout the day.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: Because my son’s around in the morning.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: And it’s usually just the three of us until my husband wakes up, which is shortly before she goes to school. And then it’s again the three of us from after school till bedtime most days, except for the two days a week that he’s off.

Sarah: Well, I mean, that’s something to explore too, like, in—are there, you know—I don’t know if you live in a neighborhood that has some, like, tweens that could come over and play with your son for an hour—you know, just someone really fun that he would like to play with—and then you and your daughter could have some time together. Because what I was gonna say when you said that she comes home with what we call the “full backpack” in Peaceful Parenting—which is, she’s been carrying around, for anyone who’s listening who doesn’t know what that is, it’s a concept that my mentor, Dr. Laura, came up with—where you’re holding on to all of the stresses, big feelings, tensions from the day, and then when you come home, it’s too much to, you know, to keep holding onto it. And so that’s what you were just referring to, is just that she’s got a lot to unpack after the day at school. And so I’m wondering—so when you mentioned that, I was gonna say, like, what could you do to try to proactively get some of that emptied out? Couple of ideas: do you do any roughhousing with her?

Joanna: We actually just started doing that, and I couldn’t believe how much she was into it. Yeah, I was super surprised. But I also think that it’s taken just a lot of, like, repair with our relationship to get to the point that I’ve even been able to try some of this stuff. Like, because at first, like, when I first started hearing about some of these, like, peaceful—I, I don’t know if you’d call them techniques—but, like, being playful and, um, roughhousing and things like that—she was so not open to anything at all because she was just so serious and so edgy and like, “Get away from me,” like, so irritable. So now I think that we’ve just—I’ve poured a lot of time in on weekends just to, like, spend time together that’s enjoyable, and I’m noticing a huge shift. So now we are able to do some of these things, and it—it is turning out more positively.

Sarah: Good. I mean, as you’re speaking, I’m thinking that it sounds like there was maybe, um, quite a—a breach when your son was born, like, the last two years. Or, or do you feel like your relationship has always been a little strained even before that?

Joanna: I feel like maybe it’s always been a little fraught. I don’t know if his birth had, like, a huge impact on that. Um, it has always been pretty strained.

Sarah: Okay, okay.

Joanna: Just because she’s the more challenging kid?

Sarah: I think so. And, you know, when she was two there was the pandemic. I think, like, I was carrying a lot of trauma after the whole NICU experience with her. And then we had the pandemic, and then we moved, and then I got pregnant, and then I had my son. So it’s like there’s sort of been these, like, things along the way where—yeah, I don’t know.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, that’s good that you brought that up because I think that, you know, maybe that’s gonna be the pre-work—that even before bedtime starts to feel better is really working on—you know, if you can get some support in, because it is really hard to have one-on-one time with a 2-year-old who probably doesn’t wanna leave you alone. But even if—you know, continue with your sort of bulking up on the weekends with that time with her and do some, like, roughhousing and special time with her. Do you guys do special time?

Joanna: Yeah. And that’s something I wanted to talk about because special time has been sort of a big fail when I call it special time and when we set a timer for special time, because it really tends to dysregulate her, I think, because she’s like, “Oh my God, I only have you for 15 minutes.” Mm-hmm. She gets really stressed out, and then she’s like—oftentimes she likes to do these, like, elaborate pretend plays—things which need, like, a lot, a lot of setup time. Yeah. So she’ll be like, “Pause the timer so I can set this up,” and then it just becomes, like, more tension between us. Like, it’s not enjoyable.

Sarah: It’s one of those things where, like, you really have to adjust it to how it works for your particular family. Um, so, you know, maybe you just have, like, a couple hours with her on the weekend and you’re—and it would be good for your—your partner and your son too. Maybe he could take him to the park or go and—you know, for them to work on their connection, which might make him a little bit more willing to go to bed with his dad, you know, on the nights that your partner is home. So, you know, I would really work on that connection with her and do those pretend play things with her. And even—you know, and this is maybe obvious, which is why I didn’t say it before—but, you know, partly she’s dragging her heels because that’s the only time she has you to herself—at bedtime, right?

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: And so she doesn’t want that to end because that’s the only time that it—her brother’s asleep—she has you all to herself. So if you can increase the time where she has you all to herself, she might be more willing to, um, to go to bed. Yeah. The other thing I was gonna say is, do you have anything that you do together at bedtime that would be, like—it sounds like she’s dragging her heels to actually get in bed. Is there anything that you can do to entice her to get in bed, like a chapter book that you’re reading her, that you read a chapter every night or something like that?

Joanna: Yeah, and that has worked in the past, but it can—it can also kind of cause tension because I find, like, then I am a lot more apt to kind of hold it as, like, a bargaining chip instead of, like, “Oh, let’s get to that.” Right. But lately we’ve been playing cards, and she’s really motivated to, like, play a game of cards when we’re in bed. So that seems to be working right now, but it’s always kind of like—it changes all the time.

Sarah: Right, right. Well, just keeping—thinking of something that you can use to make getting in bed seem more attractive? Um, maybe—I mean, my kids used to love hearing stories about me when I was little or about them when they were little. So it could even just be, like, a talk time. I know Corey, who works with me, does—she started doing a 10-minute talk time with one of her sons, who’s a little bit older than—than your daughter, but where they just have, you know, this time where they just get in bed and he tells her stuff and they—they talk. So that could be something too—just really pure, straight-up connection.

Joanna: Yeah. Okay, I like that. Maybe I can just ask you a couple more things about some of the things I—She’s kind of a person that really wants constant connection too. Like, it does feel like I could spend, like, all day with her, and then she—once it’s over, she would still be like, “Well, why are we not still—” like, it—we’ve always kind of—my husband and I will joke that she’s got, like, a leaky cup because it’s, like, “Just fill up their cup,” but it doesn’t seem to matter. He used to play with her for, like, two to three hours when she was younger, and then at the end she would just, like, not be satisfied. Like, it didn’t seem like anything was going to, like, fill her cup.

Sarah: And that—you know what, there are kids like that. I remember I had this client once whose son actually said to her, “Mama, all the—all the hours in the world are not enough time with you.” And there are some kids that are really just like that. And, you know, I’m not sure how you respond when she says, like, you know, “But we hardly even got to play,” after you play for three hours. I mean, that playful—like, “Oh my gosh, like, what if we could just play all day?” You know, either, like, playful response of, like, “We could play for 27 hours,” you know, “and—and—and we would still have so much fun together.” Or just pure empathy, you know, like, “Oh no, it just feels like it’s never enough time, is it?”

Joanna: And it almost seems like sometimes when I am empathetic, it almost, like, fuels her anger. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that before from anybody else, but—eh, I don’t know. Like, we had a situation with—like, she was looking for a specific bear last weekend—a teddy bear that she’s missing—because she wanted to bring it to a teddy bear picnic. And so we were sort of, like, you know, we had to get out the door to go to this party. She couldn’t find this bear, and I was, like, you know, offering a lot of empathy, and just, like—the more that I was like, “I know, like, you’re so frustrated; you’re so disappointed that you can’t find your bear,” it was like the more that she was like, “Yeah, and you took it, you hid it, you put it somewhere.” Like, it just—the more empathy I gave, it seemed like the more that she was using it as almost, like, fuel to be upset. Does that make sense? Right.

Sarah: Yeah. No, that’s pretty common. And the thing is, you have to remember that blame is trying to offload difficult feelings. It’s like, “I don’t wanna feel this way, so I’m gonna blame you.” And then—you know, it’s anger—have you ever seen the image of the anger iceberg?

Joanna: Yes.

Sarah: Yeah. So the anger iceberg is, like, the anger is the only thing you see coming out of the water. But underneath the iceberg are all of the more tender feelings, right? And anger is actually a secondary emotion. So you don’t start out by feeling angry. You feel—like, like for her, she maybe was feeling frustrated and disappointed that she couldn’t find her bear. And those are the first feelings. But those more tender feelings are harder to feel, and so anger is often protective. And the tender feelings also set off that—you know, that overwhelm of our emotions registers as a threat to the nervous system, which sets off that fight, flight, or freeze. So there’s all those things going on, right? Like, the blame of, like, trying to offload the feelings; the anger of feeling like it’s easier to go on the offensive than to feel those tender feelings; and then the nervous system getting set off by that overwhelm that registers as a threat, right? It sets off the fight, flight, or freeze. And they’re—they’re kind of all different ways of saying the same thing. And yes, empathy often will help a child—that they get more in touch with those feelings. And I’m not saying that you don’t wanna empathize, um, but just recognize that, you know, the feelings are happening, and when you empathize, they—you know, you’re welcoming the feelings, which sometimes can have that fight, flight, or freeze effect.

Joanna: And would you recommend that I continue to really lean into empathy more and just stay with all of that emotion until it passes?

Sarah: So—totally depends. The other thing I was gonna say is it’s possible—like the situation you just gave me—it’s possible—like, how—were you actually feeling empathetic, or were you trying to just get out the door?

Joanna: I think I was, but at a certain point I was like, “I think, you know, we have two options from here. Like, we can continue to be upset about the bear and it—it will make us late for the party, or at a certain point we can move on and make a new plan,” and, like, “get our—make our way over there.” So, um, is that effective? Yeah, I—I mean, she eventually was able to change gears. But, I mean, it doesn’t feel like real life to just be able to, like, sit in your negative emotions all the time. And I think, like, maybe I struggle with doing that for, like, a long enough period of time to actually let her—let them out.

Sarah: Well, I don’t know—yeah. So, I mean, there’s a difference between welcoming feelings and wallowing in emo—in emotion, I think.

Joanna: Yeah. And she definitely is a wallower, and she almost has really, like, attached so much sadness and frustration and anger to this bear. Like, now she’ll just, like, think about the bear and be like, “Oh, I still can’t find that bear.” Like, she was just, like, you know, exploding about it again this past weekend. So it almost feels like she’s just latching onto it to, like, feel bad there.

Sarah: I mean, some kids—she’s probably not choosing to latch onto it to feel bad, but she probably just has. So, so what I was gonna say is sometimes when kids seem to be wallowing, it’s just that there’s so much there that they haven’t been able to get out on a regular basis. So I think it is just like a full backpack, and there’s just a lot there. And it’s not—it’s probably not just about the bear. It’s probably just like she’s—it’s, you know, processing other older things too. And you don’t have to know what’s in the backpack or try and figure it out. But you might find that if you had more opportunities for her to process feelings, then she might not get so stuck when they do start to come out.

That’s one thing that I would think of. Like—and more laughter should help with that. Like, more laughter and roughhousing to help her sort of process stuff. And also sometimes—so the bear thing reminds me of—some kids will just feel bad, you know, like feel bad sometimes from, like, a full backpack, or maybe they don’t even know what it is, they can’t connect. Or maybe they’re just tired and low-resourced and their brain is kind of like, “Why do I feel bad? Why do I feel bad?” And she’s like, “Oh, the bear.” You know, she remembers, like, the bear. Like, I’ve had clients tell me, my kid will say, like, “I miss Grandpa,” who they never met, who died before they were born—like, just kind of casting around for, like, “Why could I be feeling this way right now? Oh, I know—it’s ’cause I can’t find that bear.”

Or maybe the bear is so important to her that it really is—that she thinks about it and it just makes her feel bad. But I think what you wanna remember when it seems like she’s wallowing is that, you know, getting—like, having empathy. And I actually also did a podcast about this too, with another coaching call, where I talked about, you know, cultivating a certain amount of nonchalance after you feel like you’ve been pretty empathetic and welcomed the feelings. Because I think if we’re too empathetic sometimes—and I do wanna be very careful with this because I don’t want anyone to take this as, like, “Don’t be empathetic”—but, you know, there is a time where you just say, like, “You know what? I hear how upset you are about this, and I get it. And I would be really bummed if I couldn’t find the bear I wanted also. And we have to decide, like, are we gonna stay here and just keep feeling sad about the bear, or should we figure out another plan?” Like what you said, right.

Joanna: Yeah, I have heard you say that before, and that’s been so helpful for her. Mm-hmm. It seems like if I’m not so reactive to her emotions, she realizes that they’re not an emergency either.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean—and that’s a good point too, because I didn’t even ask you, like, how’s your regulation when this is happening? Like, are you getting, like, annoyed, frustrated, upset for her, kind of drawn in? Are you able to, like, kind of center yourself and stay calm?

Joanna: It varies. I would say I currently am the most resourced that I’ve ever been—good with, like, the emotional regulation piece. And then that—I see, like, sometimes she is able to come out of it more quickly, or it just depends on, you know, what her tolerance is at that—at that time. So—

Sarah: Joanna, it might be that, you know, you’re coming out of—almost like you’re coming out of a fog of, you know—you said all the things: like the NICU experience, and then the—and then COVID, and then your new baby, and—and that it might be that you’re really, finally for the first time, kind of getting to tend—you know, look at yourself, your own regulation, and be more present and connected with your daughter. And all these things are gonna start having a little bit of, um, of a snowball effect. And it may be that you’ve just had this, like, seven-year period of difficulty, you know?

Joanna: Oh, that’s horrifying.

Sarah: Well, but the good news is it sounds like things are shifting.

Joanna: Yeah. It really does feel like that. Yeah. You’re—I feel like even if I talked to you a few months ago, I would’ve been like, “Oh, help me.”

Sarah: Well—and that you’re recognizing what you brought—what you bring to the table, and that, you know, things have been fraught with your daughter, and that you’re sort of starting to come out. And—and honestly, also doing that—doing that bedtime—after-school bedtime by yourself five days a week, that’s gonna be tough too. Uh, so you’ve got situ—just that current situation doesn’t sound like it’ll change, but you’re changing what you’re bringing to it.

Joanna: Yeah. Yeah. Um, if I can maybe just ask you, like, one more little thing?

Sarah: Sure.

Joanna: Maybe this is—it all comes back to, like, wanting a lot of connection, but this is also what kind of drains my battery. She constantly wants to, like, talk to me or ask me questions from, like, the time that she wakes up to the time that she goes to bed. And it will be—like, currently it’s, like, “Would you rather.” It’s like, “Would you rather eat all the food in the world or never eat again?” Uh-huh. In the past it’s been, like, “Guess what’s in my mouth?” But then she always really tries to make it—make me wrong in the circumstance, if that makes sense. Like, I don’t know if that’s just her, like, looking for power or, like, the upper hand, or like—I don’t know. I’m not sure what it is.

Sarah: Well, I mean, if you feel—if you have a sense that she’s looking for power, I would bring that into the roughhousing—where you are the one who’s weak and bumbling and idiotic, and, you know, you’re so slow, and she beats you every time at a race. So I would really try to bring some of that—some of that stuff into your roughhousing where she gets to be—Do you know the kind of stuff I’m talking about? Like, “I bet you can’t—um, you know, I bet you can’t beat me at arm wrestling,” and then, like, you know, you flop your arm over in a silly way, and like, “How are you so strong? Like, I’m gonna beat you next time.” And it’s obviously playful, because probably you are stronger than she is at this point, but, you know—feats of strength or speed, or, you know, figuring things out, and you act like you really don’t know anything. And—but in, of course, in a joking way, so she knows that you’re not—you know, you’re pretending to be all these things, but she still gets to gloat and, like, “Ha, you know, I’m the strongest, I’m the best.” So really giving her that in roughhousing.

And then also, like, real power. Like, I don’t know if she gets to make—what kinds of decisions she gets to make, or, you know, how much—how flexible you are on limits. Because sometimes, as parents, we do set unnecessary limits, which can make our kids, you know—make them look for power in other ways. So really looking at what limits you’re setting and if they’re necessary limits, and—and how you’re setting them. Uh, and also I think it sounds like it’s connection-seeking—like, she just wants you. You know, she wants to know that you’re there and paying attention to her. And so everything else that you’re doing—that we’re talking about—that you’re gonna try to do more—more time with her and get more one-on-one time with her, hopefully that will help too.

And I think it is okay to say, like, after you’ve done, like, 25 “would you rathers,” I just say—like, I used to say to my kids, “You know what? My brain is just feeling really stimulated from so many words. Like, can we have some quiet for a few minutes?” And not—and being very careful to not phrase it like, “You’re talking too much,” or “I don’t wanna listen to—” and I’m exaggerating for effect—but just framing it as, like, your brain and a regulation thing—like, “My brain,” and it is words. Yeah. And so, like, “Do you—should we put some music on?” You know, “Can we—like, think of—can you connect in a way that—let’s listen to a story.” Okay. Something like that where you still, like, keep up connection with her, but—and it might not work. She—she might not be able to stop talking, but you can try it at least.

Joanna: No, that’s a—that’s a really good suggestion. Almost like replacing it with some other kind of stimulation if she’s looking for that in that moment.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I think—I think it’s just—I think it’s fair. Like, it’s totally—I, at the end of the day, with people, like, talking at me all day, I sometimes am like—you know, when my kids were younger, I’d be like, “Okay, you know, I—I just need a little—my brain needs a little bit of a break. It’s feeling overstimulated.” So I think just using that language with her.

Joanna: Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you. Well—

Sarah: Yeah, I think you’re—you know, I think that I’ve—that we’ve connected at a point where you’re, like, at—you’re, like, at the—sort of the top of a mountain, you know? And you’ve been, like, having all this struggle and uphill battles. And I think you’ve put—before even we talk—you’ve put a lot of pieces [together] of what—you know, why some of the challenges were. And they do seem to be connection—you know, connection-based, just in terms of, um, you know, her wanting more and you not being as resourced. And so hopefully working on connection is gonna help with that too.

Joanna: Yeah. I’m gonna keep that at top of mind.

Sarah: And your self-regulation too. You said you’re—you know, you’ve been having—you’re more resourced now than you ever have been, so you’re able to work on really staying, like, calm and compassionate in those times when she’s dysregulated. Going back to what I said in the beginning, which is that, you know, the steps for the meltdowns really start with our own regulation.

Joanna: And I find it’s a snowball effect too, because once you start seeing positive changes, it allows you to, like, rest in knowing that things will not always be so hard.

Sarah: Yeah. So it—

Joanna: It gives you motivation to keep going, I think.

Sarah: Totally. And, you know, with complex kids—which it sounds like your daughter is one of those more complex kids—um, brain maturity makes such a huge difference. Um, like, every month and every year as she’s starting to get older. And, you know, you mentioned ADHD—that you—that you suspect that she might be ADHD. ADHD kids are often around three years behind, um, in terms of what you might expect for them in terms of, like, their brain development. And not—and not across the board. But in terms of, like, their regulation, in terms of what they can do for themselves, um, like in—you know, and obviously every kid is different. But it really helps to think about, um, your ADHD kids as sort of, uh, developmentally younger than they are. My—my girlfriend who has—her son and my daughter are the same age, so they’re both just starting college or university this year. And, um, she was—I—she lives in California, and I was talking to her, and her son has ADHD, and she was talking about how much support he’s still needing in first-year college and how she was feeling a little bit like, “Oh, I feel like I shouldn’t be supporting him this much when he’s 18.” And—and she said, “Actually, I just re—you know, I always remind myself of what you told me a long time ago: to think of him as three years younger than he is in some ways,” and that that’s made her feel a little bit better about the scaffolding that she’s having to give him.

Joanna: Yeah, I’ve never heard that before. That’s good. She’s also gonna be starting to work with an OT in a couple of weeks, so we’ll see if that has any effect as well.

Sarah: Cool.

Joanna: Cool.

Sarah: Alright, well, I look forward to catching up with you in around maybe three weeks or a month and seeing how things went, and, um, good luck, and I hope this was helpful and gave you some things to work on.

Joanna: Okay. Thank you so much.

Sarah: Hi Joanna. Welcome back to the podcast.

Joanna: Hi Sarah.

Sarah: So—how has—it’s been about—I think it’s been about four weeks since we talked the first time. How have things been?

Joanna: Yeah, things I think have been going a little better. Like, every day is a little bit different. We definitely have, like, a lot of ups and downs still, but I think overall we’re just on a better trajectory now. Um, it’s actually—I was wondering if things—if, like, the behavior has actually been better, or if it’s more just, like, my frame of mind.

Sarah: That is the classic question because—it’s so funny, I’m—I’m laughing because so much of the time when I’m coaching parents, after a couple of sessions they’ll say, “This isn’t even about my kids. This is all about me.” Right.

Joanna: Yeah, it really, really is and just continues to be about, like, my own—not just frame of mind, but, like, my own self-regulation. That’s always the biggest thing.

Sarah: Yeah.

Joanna: Um, I think the biggest challenge is, like—ever since, like, about six months ago, I just have had really bad PMS. So I find, like, the week before—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: I just feel so irritated by everything.

Sarah: Yeah.

Joanna: So I feel like that’s a really—just so much more of a challenging time because then things that normally don’t bother me are bothering me a lot more.

Sarah: Right.

Joanna: And then it’s harder to keep that connection strong.

Sarah: Totally. Yeah. And you also—as we mentioned last time—you have come off of a whole bunch of different events of, you know—we talked your daughter’s premature birth, and then COVID, and then the new baby. And the new baby—you know, you’re not sleeping that much, and, um, all of those things would make it also have your resources be low. Like, not only the PMS, but, like, anything that puts a tax on us—on our resources—is gonna make us more irritable.

Joanna: Totally. And—but I’m really trying to lean into having a lot more compassion for myself, because I know that when I do that, I can have a lot more compassion for her and, mm-hmm, whatever’s going on that she’s bringing to the table too. So that’s—that’s, I think, probably the biggest thing. But I think that our relationship is just starting to have a lot more resilience—like, when things do start to go sideways, either she or I—we’re able to kind of get back on track a lot more quickly than before, and it doesn’t become as, like, entrenched.

Sarah: That’s awesome. And we—we talked last time about trying to get some more time with her so that the only time that she has with you isn’t just at bedtime when you’re trying to get her to go to bed. Have you been able to do that, and has it—do you think that’s been helping?

Joanna: Yeah. It depends. Like, we had a really busy weekend this past weekend, so not as much. And then I find that sometimes, like, a barrier to that is, like, by the time the weekend finally comes, I’m so depleted and really just, like, needing time for myself. As much as I’m like, “Okay, I need to spend one-on-one time with her,” I’m like, “I don’t want to—I just, like, be by myself for a little while.” So it’s—

Sarah: I hear that.

Joanna: It’s always that—like, yeah, it’s always that balancing act. And then, like, feeling guilty of, like, “Okay, no, I know I should want to hang out with her,” and I kind of just don’t really.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. No, you’re—you’re totally not alone. And it’s funny that you just—you mentioned self-compassion and then you said, “I feel guilty ’cause I—I don’t wanna hang out with her,” but we all—the theme so far in this five minutes is that, um, you know, what you’re bringing to the—what you’re bringing to the relationship has been improving. Like you said, your mindset has shifted, and that’s helping things with her. So even if you’re not getting time independently with her—and hopefully you can work towards that after you fill your own cup—but you’re still helping things with her by getting time to yourself.

Joanna: True. Yeah, because then I’m coming back just a much better, happier—yes—parent and person.

Sarah: Totally.

Joanna: Oh, thank you. That’s helpful.

Sarah: Yeah, and the—and I think you’ve—you know, you’ve touched—just in these few minutes—you’ve touched on two big things that I always say: if you can’t really take these two things to heart, it’ll be really hard to be a successful peaceful parent. And one is what you said—the mindset shift, you know, of how you see her behavior with, you know, that children are doing the best they can. You know, they’re not giving us a hard time; they’re having a hard time. And the other one is self-compassion. So making strides in both of those areas will really help you be that parent that you wanna be.

Joanna: Yeah. And even though we’re maybe not getting huge chunks of time individually, I am really trying to make the most of, like, those little moments—

Sarah: Good.

Joanna: —of connection. Yeah. So even, like—what we’ve started doing is, because my husband’s on night shift, he is waking up with her in the morning because she has a really hard time in the morning. So now he’s sort of with her, getting her ready in the morning. And then I am—like, we used to all walk to the bus together because my son likes to go too. But now my husband’s hanging back with my son, so now I’m just walking her to the bus. And even though it’s five minutes, it’s like we’re holding hands. She’s able to tell me—

Sarah: Yeah.

Joanna: —you know, talking about whatever.

Sarah: That’s still—that—that totally counts. That’s—and that also, um, that also takes care of something we talked about last time too, which is your husband and your son having more time together, um, so that the nights that—when your husband is home—maybe he can put your son to bed and start trying to shift that dynamic. So yeah. That’s amazing that you’re doing—that. Yeah, I think that’s a great shift—walking to her—to the bus by herself.

Joanna: And I think it—it actually makes a huge difference. You know, before it was like she would just kind of get on the bus and not really look back, and now she’s, like, giving me a hug and a kiss and waving—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: —waving in the window. So, like, I can see that it’s having a positive effect right away.

Sarah: You could even leave five minutes earlier than you have to and have—turn that five minutes into ten minutes.

Joanna: I would love to do that. It’s always just—like, it’s really hard to get to the bus on time as it is. We will work toward that though.

Sarah: I hear that. Well, if you did try to leave five minutes earlier then it might be more relaxed, even if you didn’t even have any extra time, but you were just, like—leave, you know, change your whole morning back five minutes and try to get out five minutes early.

Joanna: Yeah. Yeah. True. So I think that we had talked a lot about roughhousing last time too—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: —and I do find that that’s—that’s really—it works well for her, but I run into this really specific problem where when, uh, like, we start roughhousing, and then she’s enjoying it, but then my son wants to get in the mix—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: —and then right away she’s like, “No, like, get outta here.” So then she’ll start kind of, like, pushing him or, like, throwing kicks or something. So—and then he gets upset because he’s like, “Mom! Mom!” So then I end up sort of, like, pinned underneath both of them—

Sarah: Right.

Joanna: —they’re mad at each other, hitting each other—

Sarah: Oh no.

Joanna: —they both want me.

Sarah: Well, maybe—maybe don’t do it then if that’s how it ends up. But I do have a couple of shifts that might help before you give up on it when you’re alone with them. One is, do you ever try to do those “two against you”? Like, start it out right from the get-go—“You two against Mommy. See if you can—see if you can—” Um, it’s funny you just said you end up pinned down because that’s what I often say. Like, “See if you can stop Mommy from getting up,” or “See if you can catch me,” or, you know, trying to align the two of them against you. That might help.

Joanna: Yeah, I love that idea. Never thought about that. Yeah, I think she would love that.

Sarah: Yeah. So, “Okay, you two are a team, and you have to try to stop me from jumping on the bed,” or “You know, you—you have to stop me from getting to the bed,” or, you know, something like that.

Joanna: Okay, I’m gonna try that. I think that they’ll love it.

Sarah: Yeah. Another idea is, um, what I call “mental roughhousing,” where you’re not doing, like, physical stuff, but you’re being silly and, like, um—I think I mentioned her last time to you, but A Playful Heart Parenting—Mia—W—Walinski. She has a lot of great ideas on her Instagram—we’ll link to that in the show notes—of, like, different, um, like, word things that you can do. When I say mental roughhousing, it’s like getting everyone laughing without being physical.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Uh, which—you know, the goal of roughhousing is to get everyone laughing, and sometimes being physical might not work. But you can—like, I’ll give you an idea. This isn’t from Mia, but this is something that I used to do with my kids. Like, you know, one of you—you’re like—you say to JR, “Oh—where did your sister go?” And she’s sitting right there. “She was just here a minute ago. Where did Jay go? I don’t see her. What happened to her? She disappeared.” And meanwhile she’s like, “I’m right here! I’m right here!” You know—something like that that’s more of, like, a—more of a mental roughhousing.

My kids and I used to play this game that actually my brother-in-law invented called Slam, where, like, you both say a word at the same time. Um, so, like—I’m just looking around my—like, you know, “curtain” and, you know, “lemonade.” Uh, and then it’s like—you both say it—both—you both say your word at the same time. And that actually wasn’t a very funny one—kids come up with much funnier ones than I do—but it’s like, “Is that, like, a lemonade that is made out of curtains, or is it a—what—” It’s such a dumb example now that I think of it, but—but—or is it, like, a curtain that hides the lemonade? And so you just try and—like, you think of silly things that the two words together—the two words “slam” together—mean.

Joanna: Okay, great. That’s—that’s on my next book—that’s on my next thing to read. You—man—you keep mentioning—what is it? Playful—Playful Heart Parenting? She has an—I—

Sarah: There was a book—there was a book too. And—

Joanna: Oh—

Sarah: Playful Parenting—the Larry Cohen book.

Joanna: The Larry Cohen book, yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: That’s a great book. Yeah, and he was on my podcast too, so you could listen to that. We’ll also link to—Mia was on my podcast, and Larry was—so we’ll link to both of those in the show notes as well.

Joanna: Okay, great. I may have listened to one of those, but—yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Sarah: And Playful Parenting is really great for also talking—and, like, Mia is just straight up, like, how to be more playful in life and to, you know, make more joy in your family kind of thing. And Larry talks about how to be more playful to also support your child through transitions and through big emotions and different things—like, it’s a—it’s a little bit more, um, like, all-around parenting—Playful Parenting.

Joanna: Okay.

Sarah: But it is different.

Joanna: Yeah. I used to have a really hard time getting the kids upstairs to start the bedtime routine. And now it’s like—I’ll be like, “Okay, I’m gonna hide first,” and, like, I go upstairs and hide and we start—

Sarah: Oh, I love that.

Joanna: —we play hide-and-seek, and—

Sarah: Oh yeah, it was a stroke of genius one day, and it’s been working so well just to get everyone, like, off the main floor and—

Joanna: —upstairs.

Sarah: I’m gonna totally steal that idea. That’s such a good idea. Yeah, because you could also send them up—“Okay, go hide upstairs and I’ll come and find you.” And then you could do a round of you hiding. And I love that. That’s a great idea. Yeah.

Joanna: And I especially love hide-and-seek for sometimes when I need, like, 30 seconds by myself in a dark closet—

Sarah: —to, like, take a breath.

Joanna: That’s great.

Sarah: I love it. I love it. Yeah, it’s—that’s so great.

As I mentioned before, I forgot to ask Joanna for an update about a few things. So here’s the update about breastfeeding her son in the night.

Sarah: Okay.

Joanna: Hi, Sarah. So, in terms of the night-weaning, um, I haven’t gone ahead and done anything about that yet just because he does have his last molars coming in and has been sick. So I want to wait until he’s well and pain-free to kind of give us our best chance at getting that off on the right foot. But I have really realized that because he’s my last baby, that this is really the last little home stretch of being woken up by a baby at night—specifically to nurse. So that’s helped me kind of reduce my feelings of resentment toward it.

Sarah: I love that Joanna zoomed out and looked at the big picture and the fact that this is her last baby, and used that to sort of just change her mindset a little bit and make it a little bit easier to continue on with something when she knew it wasn’t the right time to stop. And now here is her update about bedtime with her daughter. And for this, I love that she got preventive—you’ll see what I mean—and also playful. Those are two really great things to look at when you’re having any struggles with your kids: like, how can I prevent this from happening? And also, how can I be playful when it is happening and shift the mood?

Joanna: And in terms of bedtime with my daughter, we’ve made a couple of schedule changes to set us off on a better foot once I get back together with her after putting my son to bed. So I think we used to have a lot of conflict because it was like she was still asking for another snack and then hadn’t brushed her teeth, and then it was just kind of getting to be too late and I was getting short on patience. So now we have, like, a set snack time where everybody has a snack, and I let them know, like, “This is the last time that we’re eating today,” and then we’re going upstairs—using hide-and-seek, like I mentioned—and then just really continuing to be playful in all doing our bedtime tasks together.

So, for example, I’m saying, like, “Okay, I’m gonna go into my room and put my pajamas on. Can you guys go get your PJs on—and then don’t show me, but I have to guess what pajamas you have on?” So she really loves that because, like I mentioned, she loves to get me to guess things. But also she’s then helping her brother get ready for bed, and he’s far more cooperative with her than with me in terms of getting his pajamas on. So it all works really well.

Yeah, and then just kind of continuing to be silly and playful is really helping with brushing teeth—it’s like, “Who can make the silliest faces in the mirror?” and stuff. So, really kind of moving through all those tasks together so that by the time I’m out of the room and ready to put her to bed, everything’s done, and we can just get into playing cards and then snuggling and chatting and—and leaving from there after maybe a five- or ten-minute snuggle. So there’s been way fewer meltdowns at the end of the night because we are able to just not get in this place where we’re getting into power struggles in the first place. It’s just really all about, like, the love and connection at the end of the day.

Sarah: The final thing I wanted to check in with you about is—you were asking about the meltdowns. You know, when Jay gets really upset and, you know, how to—um—how to manage those. Have you had any chances to practice what we talked about with that?

Joanna: Yeah, she actually had a really, really big, long, extended meltdown yesterday, and, um, I just continue to not really feel like I’m ever supporting her in the way that she needs supporting. Like, I don’t—I always end up feeling like I’m not—I’m not helping. I don’t know. It’s just a really, really hard situation.

Sarah: I was just talking to a client yesterday who—who actually wanted to know about supporting her child through meltdowns, and I said, “Well, what would you want someone to do for you?” You know—just kind of be there. Be quiet. You know, offer a—you know, rub the—rub your back—rub her back. I mean, I don’t know exactly what your child wants, but I think that’s a good place to start if you feel like you’re not being successful—like, “Well, what would I want if this was happening to me?”

Joanna: And I think that really—that’s enough, right? It’s enough—

Sarah: Oh, totally.

Joanna: —to be there. And it always—maybe I’m just feeling like it’s not enough because we don’t really even get, like, a good resolution, or, like, even—eventually it just kind of subsides, right?

Sarah: If you were having a meltdown, that’s what would happen. Nobody can come in there and fix it for you.

Joanna: Um, exactly.

Sarah: Nobody can come in and say the magic words that’s gonna make you not feel upset anymore. So it’s really just about that—being there for somebody. And we’re—it’s not that the resolution is “I fixed their problems.”

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: The resolution is “I was there with them for the journey.”

Joanna: Yeah. And it goes back to what you were saying, where it’s like, “Oh, this work really is just about me.”

Sarah: Yeah, totally.

Joanna: And learning how to show up.

Sarah: And not feeling anxious when your child is upset and you’re like, “I don’t know what to do,” and just think, “Okay, I just have to be here. I just have to be here for them.”

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: And help them, you know, feel not alone in their meltdown.

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: Gosh. It’s also hard.

Joanna: Yeah, it’s hard.

Sarah: And it’s also, like—sometimes I think it’s more simple than we think it is. Like, it’s simple—simple doesn’t mean easy, but it’s—so—it’s not easy, but also can be simple. Like, just, you know—be there. Be there for her.

Joanna: Yeah.

Sarah: Keep forward and try not to—

Joanna: —get—

Sarah: —try not to have the wave take you over as well.

Joanna: Yeah. That’s always the challenge.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Joanna: But no, I’m—I am motivated to stay the course because I’ve already seen how—the positive effects of peaceful parenting, so—

Sarah: Yay. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Joanna: You’re welcome.

Sarah: Keep in touch, and, um, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your experience with other parents. It’s—I always hear from listeners how helpful these coaching episodes are.

Joanna: I’m glad.

Sarah: Yeah. So thank you so much for having me—for sharing.

Joanna: Perfect. Thanks, Joanna.

Sarah: Okay, bye.

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, OR— BRAND NEW: we’ve included a fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I am giving you another sneak peek inside my Peaceful Parenting Membership!

Listen in as I interview Tosha Schore as part of our membership’s monthly theme of “Aggression”. We discuss why kids get aggressive, how to handle it no matter how many kids you have, and dealing with the aggressive behaviour from many angles.

**If you’d like an ad-free version of the podcast, consider becoming a supporter on Substack! > > If you already ARE a supporter, the ad-free version is waiting for you in the Substack app or you can enter the private feed URL in the podcast player of your choice.

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We talk about:

* 6:35 Is a child’s aggression OUR fault as the parent?

* 13:00 Why are some kids aggressive?

* 15:00 How do you handle aggression when you have multiple kids?

* 22:00 A new sibling being born is often a trigger for aggression in the older child

* 29:00 When you feel like you are “walking on eggshells” around your child

* 35:00 How naming feelings can be a trigger for kids

* 37:00 When aggression is name calling between siblings

* 42:00 Friends- roughhousing play or aggression?

* 49:00 Coming from aggression at all angles

* 50:35 Using limits when there are safety issues

Resources mentioned in this episode:

* Yoto Player-Screen Free Audio Book Player

* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

* Tosha’s Website

xx Sarah and Corey

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Transcript:

Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Tosha Shore, a peaceful parenting expert on aggression. I invited her into the Peaceful Parenting Membership a few months ago to talk to us about aggression and to answer our members’ aggression-specific questions.

So many fantastic questions were asked. I know they’ll help you if you’re at all having any issues with aggression. And remember, aggression isn’t just hitting. It’s any expression of the fight, flight, or freeze response—including yelling, spitting, throwing things, and swearing.

Tosha is such a valuable resource on this issue. I really, really admire how she speaks about aggression and the compassion that she brings to both kids and parents who are experiencing aggression.

One note: one of the members was okay with her question being used in the podcast, but she didn’t want her voice used. So in the podcast today, I paraphrased her question and follow-up comments to preserve the flow of the conversation.

As I mentioned, this is a sneak peek inside the Peaceful Parenting Membership. If you would like to join us, we would love to have you. It is such a wonderful space filled with human touch and support. There are so many benefits, and it’s my favorite part of my work as a parenting coach.

We’ll put the link to join us in the show notes, or you can visit reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/membership. If you know anyone who could use this podcast, please share it with them. And as always, we would appreciate your five-star ratings and reviews on your favorite podcast app.

Let’s meet Tosha.

Hello, Tosha, welcome to the membership. I’m so excited that you’re going to be here talking to us about aggression today. So maybe you could start out by just giving a brief introduction of who you are and what you do.

Tosha: Absolutely. So my name is Tosha Shore and I am the founder of Parenting Boys Peacefully, where we are on a mission to create a more peaceful world, one sweet boy at a time.

I’m also the co-author of Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges. And I work with a lot of families with young kids who are struggling with hard behaviors like aggression, and my goal is to give you all hope and inspiration—to keep on keeping on with peaceful parenting practices because they do absolutely work. Even, or maybe even especially, for really hard behaviors.

Sarah: I love that you added that—especially for hard behaviors—because I think there’s this fallacy out there that, yeah, peaceful parenting’s nice if you have easy kids, but, you know, my kid needs more “discipline” or whatever. So I love that you called that out, ’cause I think it’s absolutely true also.

So maybe—just—we have some questions from our members that people sent in, and I’m not sure, some people on the call might have questions as well. But maybe we could just get started by you sort of centering us in what causes aggression.

I was just on a call with some clients whose child was having some issues at school, which, if we have time, I might ask you about. The mom was saying, “Oh, you know, he’s being aggressive at school because I sometimes shout or lose my temper.” And I said to her, you know, of course that plays a part in it, but there are lots of kids whose parents never shout or lose their temper who still are aggressive.

So why is that? What causes aggression?

Tosha: I mean, I think there are a few things that can cause aggression. I often will say that aggression is fear in disguise, because I’ve found that a lot of kids who are getting in trouble at school—they’re yelling, they may be hurting siblings or hurting their parents—they are scared inside.

Sometimes it’s an obvious fear to us. Like maybe they’re playing with a peer and the peer does something that feels threatening—goes like that in their face or something—and instead of just, you know, play-fighting back, they clock the kid or whatever.

And sometimes the fears are a little bit more hidden and maybe could fall even into the category of lagging skills. I don’t even like to say “lagging skills,” but, like, skills that maybe they haven’t developed yet. School’s a perfect example. I think a lot of kids often will be acting out in school—even aggressively—because they’re being asked to do something that they don’t yet have the skills to do.

And that’s pretty frustrating, right? It’s frustrating to be asked, and then demanded, to perform in a certain way or accomplish something specific when you don’t either feel the confidence to do it, or you don’t yet have the skills. Which sort of spills into another reason that kids can get aggressive, and that’s shame.

We can feel really ashamed if everybody else in the class, for example, or a lot of kids, are able to just answer the questions straight out when the teacher asks—and maybe we get stage fright, or maybe we didn’t quite understand the example, or whatever it is.

So I definitely want to pull that parent away from blaming themselves. I think we always tend—we have a negative bias, right? Our brain has a negative bias. All of us. And I think we tend to go towards taking it on ourselves: It’s our fault. If we had just done X, Y, or Z, or if we hadn’t done X, Y, or Z, my child wouldn’t be acting out this way.

But I always say to parents, well, that’s a choice. There’s like a 50/50, right? We could choose to say, you know what, it could be that I did something, but I don’t think so. That’s the other 50%. But we always go with the “it’s my fault” 50.

So part of my job, I think, is to encourage parents to lean into the “It’s not my fault.” Not in the sense of nothing I do has an impression on my child, but in the sense of: it’s important that we as parents all acknowledge—and I truly believe this—that we are doing our best all the time.

There is no parent I’ve ever met who purposefully doesn’t behave in a way they feel good about, or purposefully holds back their love, or purposefully yells, or anything like that. If we could do differently, we absolutely would as parents.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. So more like, “I didn’t cause this. There’s maybe something I could do, but I didn’t cause this.” Right.

Tosha: I mean, like, look, let’s just be honest. Maybe she did cause it, okay? I mean, I’ve done things—maybe I’ve caused things—but so what, right? There’s nothing I can do at this point.

I can either sort of wallow in, “Oh gosh, did I cause this?” Or I could say, probably I didn’t, because there are so many other factors. Or I could say, you know, maybe I did, but one, I’m confident that I did the best that I could in that moment.

And two—and this is an important part—is that I am doing whatever work I need. I’m getting the support I need, right? I’m showing up to Sarah’s membership or this call or whatever, to take steps to do better in the future.

So if we’re just making a mistake and not doing anything to try to behave better next time, that’s not worth much either. Like, I remember once when my kids were little—I don’t even remember what I was doing, I don’t remember what the situation was—but I do remember very clearly that I apologized. I said, “I’m sorry, I won’t do that again.”

And my kid goes, “You always say that and then you do it again.”

And that was true. But if that were true because I was just saying “I’m sorry” and going about my next thing and not paying attention to the why or getting to the crux of what was causing me to behave that way, then that would be disingenuous.

But in fact, I was doing my own emotional work to be able to show up more often in ways that I felt good about. So I could genuinely feel good about that apology, and I could not take it personally. I could say, “You know what, you’re absolutely right. I do keep making this mistake. And I want you to know that I am working hard to try to change that behavior.” And that was true.

Sarah: Yeah. Makes sense. So you mentioned before that you want parents to see aggression as fear in disguise. And you mentioned that the fear can be something obvious, like someone’s gotten in your face and you’re scared. Or it can be fear of not being able to meet the expectations of your teacher or your parent. Or shame that can come from maybe even having made a mistake.

You didn’t say this, but I’m thinking of something common that often happens—like a kid makes a mistake or does something they didn’t mean to do, and then they lash out. Right?

So how do we get from those feelings of fear and shame to aggression? Because that doesn’t happen for every kid, right? Some kids will just cry or say something, but then some kids really lash out and hit, throw things, shout, scream. So how does that happen? How do we get from A to B?

Tosha: Well, I think all kids are different, just like all adults are different. And when we encounter fear—any of us—we go into fight, flight, or freeze. And kids who are aggressive go into fight.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Tosha: So some kids do and some kids don’t. And you know, I don’t have any scientific research to back this up, but I would say part of this is DNA, part of this is the nature of the kid.

Sarah: Right.

Tosha: And I think that’s also going back to the self-blame. I’ve got three kids, they’re all very different, right? Same house, same parents, same everything. They’re different. They came into this world different, and they’re still different.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Tosha: And I can help guide them, but I can’t change the core of who they are. So I think that aggression is those kids who go from “I’m scared, I’m having to protect myself” to that attack mode.

Sarah: Right. Makes sense. And just—I mean, I know this—but is it in the child’s control?

Tosha: No, it’s not in the child’s control. It is absolutely a reaction. And I think that’s why I feel like having that concept of aggression being fear in disguise can be so helpful from a mindset perspective for parents. Because it’s so much easier to have empathy for a child who we see as being scared, right? Than one who we see as being a jerk, picking on his brother, or disrespectful, rude—all of those terms we use when we’re struggling.

Sarah: Right. Well, there may be a few other points that I want you to make, but they might come out in the context of some questions from our members.

So I know at least two people on the call right now had sent me a question in case they couldn’t make it. But I’m going to ask Sonya—are you willing, Sonya, to unmute yourself and ask your question?

Sarah: Hi.

Sonia: Sure. Hi.

Sarah: Hi, Sonya.

(Sarah narrating): Sonia wonders how to handle aggression when you have multiple kids. She has three kids—a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a baby—and it’s often her 7-year-old who reacts in fight mode. She’s trying to figure out how to keep her cool and also how to handle it and take care of the other kids and manage him.

Tosha: Yeah. So one thing that I noticed is how Sonia kind of glossed over the keeping her own cool. And I want to bring that to everybody’s attention, because we all do that. But actually, when we’re dealing with aggression, we have to come at it from a lot of different angles.

There’s no one magic pill I can give her, but it has to actually start—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Tosha: So it doesn’t mean we have to reach Nirvana or become the Buddha or never yell before we can make any progress. But we can’t put that aside and just go, “Okay, what do I do to get my kid to stop doing this?”

Because our energy has a huge effect on our kids’ aggression. And usually—well, let me just say—it makes sense to ask yourself questions like: how am I feeling about this? Because most people are feeling scared—either scared of their child (“they’re going to hurt me” or “they’re going to hurt a sibling, hurt the baby”), or scared for their child (“he’s going to end up in juvenile hall, he’s going to end up the next school shooter”).

We project forward. So if we’re having fear for our child or fear of our child, that child is soaking up that feeling. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met anybody who could actually change their behaviors—who was inspired, motivated, or able to change their behaviors—when everyone around them was scared of them or scared for them.

Maybe occasionally there’s somebody who’s like, “I’m going to prove the point because the world is against me,” right? And this is like a Hollywood film. But most of us don’t work that way.

So I want to come at it from all the angles. There’s the “take care of yourself” piece. But at the same time, we have to keep our kids safe.

One thing that I think really helps is to pay attention to the pattern of when the aggression is happening, so she’s not surprised. Because if we’re surprised, then we act in surprising ways to ourselves. We don’t show up as our best.

So pay attention. Does this happen at a certain time of day? When there’s a certain constellation of kids playing together? When one particular child is present? When you’re doing something specific? If there’s another parent—when they’re present or absent? Pay attention to these things so that you can show up ready.

Because if you can change your story in your head from, “I have no idea when this happens, it happens all the time, it happens out of the blue”—which is really disempowering—to “I’ve noticed that every afternoon when I pick my 7-year-old up from school and bring him home, then I go in the kitchen to make a snack… and then he lays on top of the baby,” or whatever—then it is much more manageable.

Then you can say, “Okay, well, I remember this call that I was on and they talked about maybe there being some fear in there. Well, I don’t know what the fear is, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to be ready. I’m not going to let it happen.”

So rather than make that snack, I’m going to make it before he comes home, or I’m going to just pull out some frozen pizza. But I’m going to stay present with that child during that time and expect that the upset will happen.

Because then, when that child goes to lay on the baby—or whatever the aggression is—you can actually physically get in the way. You can prevent it from happening. And then what happens is, because that child—the 7-year-old—has something to push against, something preventing them from acting on their fear response, from fighting—what happens then is like a magic reaction.

He’s able to erupt like a volcano and release the tension, those fears, the upsets. Maybe it’s 12 things that happened to him at school today. Maybe there was shame around not knowing the answer when he was called on. Whatever it was.

But there’s suddenly space with an attentive adult who remembers that the child is scared. So they have empathy. They’re not worried, they’re not caught by surprise. So we’re not going to jump at them. And that child has the opportunity then to heal.

That release of the feeling is what heals the child. It’s like pulling up weeds in your garden by the roots, as opposed to just pulling and having them break off, and then the next day you’ve got the whole thing back again.

So this tool—which in our book we talk about as Stay Listening, where we’re staying and allowing space for the child to feel—is what, over time, will change that fight response. That’s actually the gold nugget that, over time, will both change the intensity of the outbursts and also change the frequency.

Is any of that landing for you?

Sarah (narrating): Sonia responded that it was very helpful. She’s told me before that her baby’s almost one, and this started happening a lot right after she had the baby. She also says that she’s done my Transform Your Family Life course, and she’s still working on it. She’s done more of the welcoming feelings, and she has put together that it’s usually in the afternoons—so Tosha is right about that—and it’s happening after school.

She’s also connected that there are things happening at school that aren’t in line with how she and her husband want their child treated, and she thinks that’s related.

Tosha: Yeah. So in light of this new information, I would also say—and I’m sure Sarah’s talked to you about this as well—but pouring in as much connection to that child as possible.

And it can feel, especially when you have multiple kids, that it’s unfair, right? One kid is getting more… Are you familiar with the concept of special times, Sarah? Is that something that you teach?

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: Okay. You know, if you’re doing special time—oftentimes we talk about, or I talk about at least—I’m not a “fair” kind of a person. I’m a “life’s not fair” kind of a person. My kids will tell you that.

But when it comes to special time, I always encourage parents to think about a week and to try to give your kids about the same amount of special time over a week. But—and here’s the caveat—when we have a kid who is struggling, they are demanding more of us. They are demanding more attention. And our time didn’t increase.

Tosha: So that means we are going to need to devote more time. It’s going to be uneven. But that child—and especially, like, this is probably the number one reason that I hear for aggression to start, and we didn’t talk about this at the beginning—is when a younger sibling is born. I mean, it is so often the trigger, I can’t tell you.

And if I could go back to all of those parents and say, “Don’t worry about being fair. Just pour as much extra love and connection and yumminess into that child who’s struggling as you can. It will pay off later. You can make it up to the other kids later.” In fact, you’re giving them a gift by helping their older brother, because then his behavior isn’t going to have that negative effect on them.

So I think that we get stuck in the fairness sometimes. I’m not saying you do this, Sonya—this is just from my experience. And then we hold back from giving that child what they need. So special time isn’t the only thing. I would say: make a list of things that you do with that 7-year-old that creates laughter between you, that you both feel really good—where you have that yumminess, like, oh, you’re loving on him and he’s loving on you. Maybe that’s shooting hoops in the front yard, or maybe it’s drawing a picture together, or jumping on the trampoline, or reading a book. I mean, it could be anything at all.

You can do those things, and you can do them with the other three kids around. Also, keep doing all of that stuff. And you’re going to have to, I think, carve out some time for one-on-one special time—named, timed—where he gets to lead and he gets to be the boss.

Sarah: That’s awesome. And we always talk about equity versus equality with the sibling relationships, and I think that’s—

Tosha: Oh yeah. I love that.

Sarah: Okay, awesome. Thank you so much. Priya, do you want me to ask your question, or do you want to ask the question since you’re on the call? Maybe she’s stepped away or can’t unmute herself. Uh, she wants me to ask. Okay. So I’m going to find Priya’s question and ask it.

Uh, Priya says: “My five-year-old gets angry at anything and everything. He has zero tolerance for any kind of dislike or disagreement. We acknowledge his feelings with empathy, doing our best to stay calm and give him time to process his emotions. The only limit we consistently set is holding him from hurting people or property while he yells, screams, says hurtful things, and tries with full rage to attack us.

“We’re consciously making time for roughhousing, special time, connection, laughter, and tears—though he rarely cries—and we talk about asking for help before things escalate. I’ve been trying to track patterns by logging some incidents, but sometimes it feels completely unpredictable. We often have no idea why he’s screaming. If I push a chair slightly, he gets angry. If someone else presses the elevator button, he gets upset. If he has a plan in his mind and we don’t pick up on it, he becomes extremely frustrated. He gets irritated and grumpy very easily. It’s gotten to the point where we feel like we have to expect an outburst at any moment. It looks like it’s becoming a habit for him, and I feel like I’m starting to walk on eggshells—always watchful for what might happen when I say or do something.”

Tosha: Yeah, so this is a really—believe it or not—common situation. Did she say he was five? Is that five?

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I cannot tell you the number of parents who come to me and this is what they say: “I’m walking on eggshells.” Right? If we get to the point where we’re walking on eggshells, generally what that says to me is that we are not either setting enough limits or we’re not setting limits effectively.

And one thing that I would suggest to Priya is to take a minute to think about whether or not there are places where she’s feeling resentment. That’s always a good sign for me—like, if I’m feeling resentment about something, then that’s probably a place I need to hold a limit. If I’m not, then there’s more wiggle room.

So when this is happening all the time about everything, I would say: get really clear on what limits are important to you and what limits are not. Right? So if you’re in public, in the elevator, and you don’t want to deal with a big meltdown about the elevator button, can you plan for that? If you know that that’s an issue, when you go in, you can say to people, “Hey, my son would really like to press the buttons—what floor would you like?”

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Right.

Tosha: “Here’s our elevator operator—exactly. What floor, please?” Or, if somebody presses the button—or if she’s pressing the button—to just go in knowing, “I’m not going to press the button. I’m going to let my child do this.” And if somebody else has already pressed it, you can say, “You know what? Hey, let’s take the next elevator and then we’ll press it. You can press it.”

So there are places where we can be flexible. But we don’t want to do that all the time, because essentially what this child is showing me is that he has a real intense lack of flexibility. And ultimately, the goal that I would have for him would be—slowly, slowly and lovingly—to help him increase that flexibility. So that, yeah, maybe he’s not going to say, “Oh, shoot, I’m feeling really disappointed because I didn’t get to press the elevator button and I really like to do that.” But maybe instead of having a huge tantrum, he just gets a sourpuss face and crosses his arms. Okay, I’ll take that. That’s better. We’re moving in the right direction.

So it sounds like you’re doing a lot of things right, but I would hone in on limit-setting. Really: are you taking the time to think about what kind of limits you want to set? Are you letting go of limits when you know that you don’t have the wherewithal to stay calm in the face of the upset?

So, oftentimes—I’m hearing Priya say she does a lot of Stay Listening—I would be curious to know: what does that Stay Listening look like? Because I was working with a dad this week, a client of mine, and we were talking about a situation that was going on with his kid, who was coming home really frustrated with homework. And what ended up coming out of his mouth was, “I thought I was Stay Listening, but I think I actually wasn’t Stay Listening.”

Right—because Stay Listening isn’t about trying to calm the child, or trying to get them to stop what they’re doing. It can’t be with the goal of, “Let me get this kid to quiet down,” kind of a thing. Stay Listening is really holding space lovingly for whatever needs to come out, which means—yeah—all the words, all—like, we don’t take them personally.

Sarah: Can I just interject something? For my community, what they would recognize Stay Listening as is “welcoming feelings.” Mm-hmm. Just because that’ll be a familiar phrase to them. So I just wanna—

Tosha: Yeah, absolutely. Right. But “welcoming feelings”—I feel like we need to also talk about: what does that look like? Mm-hmm. What does that look like when we welcome feelings? Because, you know, you could be upset and I could just be like—

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: —like waiting for you to be done. Right? I could be like, “Okay, I’m not gonna shut you down, but, you know, hey, whatever you do, what you need to do, I’m gonna go answer my email.” That’s—you know—I can “welcome” the feelings like that. But again, coming back to our energy: what energy are we bringing to that? Are we really staying present with the energy of “We are gonna get through this,” with the energy of “You are safe,” with the energy of “I’m here with you.”

Mm-hmm. Right? Like, can that child sense that they’re not alone—that you’re on their team? And that’s maybe a good litmus test. If you were to ask yourself: do you feel like your child would feel like you’re on their team, or that you’re butting heads? Mm-hmm. And if the answer is “butting heads,” then the question is: what can you shift so that your child will feel like, “Hey, we’re in this together”?

Sarah: Sounds good. Priya, I don’t know if you have anything to add. It sounds like maybe she can’t unmute herself, but—oh, she says he screams really loud, so we usually stay quiet and don’t say anything because it’s really loud. We wait for the moment to pass before we can say anything, at the same time being present. So she’s saying they’re trying to be present, sometimes trying to say, “I see you’re really upset.”

Tosha: Yeah. And so when she says—I’m sorry, it’s a little bit via you here—but before, when you say, “Priya, before I say something,” what is it that you’re saying? Because another thing about Stay Listening—or welcoming feelings, from my perspective—is that saying something actually doesn’t really have a place. So if we need to say something, it should—I think—uh, or let me just rephrase that: I find it most effective when it’s something that essentially allows that child to feel safe, to realize that they’re not alone.

Right—to realize that we’re on their team, and to realize that it’s not gonna last forever. So that they’re loved—these types of things. So I wouldn’t—if you’re naming feelings, and I don’t know that she is or isn’t, but if you’re naming feelings—which is something that a lot of professionals, for example, will recommend—I would play around with stopping that and seeing if that makes a difference, because sometimes that’s a huge trigger for kids. And maybe even, “I see you’re upset,” or whatever it is that she said—that also might be a trigger.

Yeah. Don’t be afraid to really not say anything at all, and just think about each of these things as an experiment. Take a day and don’t say anything at all and see if it makes a difference. Other things to try—’cause it sounds like he’s quite sensitive—is distance, right? How close are you to that child? Some kids don’t want you all up in their face. Some kids want to be on your lap and hugged. Some kids want to be a room’s distance away. So play with distance; play with tone.

Sarah: Love that. Thank you so much, Tosha. Does anybody else who’s on the call have a question? And if not, I have questions that were sent in, but I want to give priority to people who are here. Uh, and—and Priya says, “Thank you, Tosha.”

Tosha: Yeah, my pleasure. I’m trying to work without the direct back and forth.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: No—so I hope that was helpful.

Sarah: Yeah, that was great, Lindsay.

Tosha: And I want to acknowledge that it is really hard. It is hard.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It’s one of the most—

Tosha: It won’t last forever either. Like, it’s absolutely—move through. I can assure you of that.

Sarah: Lindsay, do you have a question?

Member B: Yes. I have a question about my son, actually. He’s 10 years old, and I have a 10-year-old boy and then a 7-year-old girl. And a lot of times—there’s kind of two different questions—but between the siblings, a lot of times my daughter will be, like, have verbal aggression towards him, and then he—he is my—he is a little more sensitive, and he will hold it in, and he won’t spit out things back at her, but then he eventually will just hit her. And, like, he comes with the physical aggression. So kind of, as the parent, proactively trying to step in there—like, how do I handle both of those when one is verbal—maybe aggression—and one is physical? I know it can escalate there. Where do I step in?

Tosha: Yeah. First of all, I just want to appreciate that you can see that there’s a dynamic there. Because oftentimes we get into this place as parents where we’re like, “This person is the aggressor and this person is the victim.” Because oftentimes there is a pattern like that, but it’s—it’s beautiful that you can see this dance that they’re doing.

Member B: Yeah.

Tosha: And so if you see it kind of as a dance, you can interplay around and experiment with interrupting it in different ways. Okay. I would say that, in terms of the verbal aggression, what I have found works best—and again, I was talking to a client yesterday and he was saying to me that this is what works. Mm-hmm. I’m like, “Okay, so let’s do more of that. You came out of your mouth; you said it works when you do it—let’s do more.” And that is being playful in the face of the verbal aggression.

And so it can look like a lot of different things. You could say ahead of time to your daughter something like, “Hey, I’ve noticed that, you know, sometimes these nasty words come out of your mouth towards your brother, and I know you don’t mean them. So I’m gonna—I’m gonna pay attention and just try to help you with that, ’cause I know you don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

Member B: Yeah.

Tosha: And just, you know, outside the moment, just kind of toss that out there. And then in the heat of the moment—I mean, you can just get as goofy as you can think. You could get a paper bag and just pull it over her head, right? Or you could get those indoor snowballs and just start pelting her with snowballs. You could do what we call the “vigorous snuggle,” which we write about in the book, which is something like, “Do you know what happens to little girls who call their brothers, you know, ‘stupid buttheads’” or whatever it is—

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Tosha: —and then you—rather than push away, which is what we tend to want to do—you do something goofy, right? “They get their elbows licked!” And then you’re, like, chasing after her elbow and trying to lick it. What you’re going for is laughter. You’re trying to elicit laughter, because she’s stuck in a hard spot where she can’t feel compassion for him and she can’t feel your love or anybody’s. And so laughter will loosen that up.

So I would say: interrupt the verbal aggression with play.

Member B: Okay.

Tosha: Some of those things will maybe annoy her; some of them will lead to laughter. And then sometimes you’ll do an experiment and it’ll annoy her—mm-hmm—and she’ll explode. And what I want to say about that is—that’s okay. Because, like we talked about with the school incident, it’s an opportunity for her to do that healing and release the tensions and the hurts and the upsets and the gripes and all the stuff that she’s holding in there. So when that happens, if you can welcome those feelings and not try to shut them down or judge her—or what many of us, sort of in the peaceful parenting world, will do is just talk, talk, talk, talk to her about it—if you can let all of that go—

Member B: Yeah.

Tosha: —you’ll see the behaviors lessen. Okay? You know, that would be—I mean, we talked a little bit about the physical stuff before, so I thought for this question I would focus more on the verbal.

Member B: Yeah.

Tosha: But in the sibling dynamic, just kind of rotate who you go to, so they don’t feel like there’s one “bad guy” and one “woe-is-me” sibling.

Member B: Yeah. Right.

Tosha: Because ultimately, our goal as parents is to nurture that sibling relationship. Right. I don’t—I don’t know—like, I just had a birthday. I’m like, “This is my best birthday ever.” And people are like, “Really? How is it your best birthday ever?” I’m like, because, like, a lot of people couldn’t come to my party but all three of my boys were home, and we sang karaoke, and the three of them sang me a song and sang all this. It was like—there is nothing I think we want more than to see our kids loving each other, enjoying each other—mm-hmm—having a strong relationship down the road.

And let me tell you, these kids were at each other. I mean, now they’re 18, 20, and 22. But I have been in your shoes where my mom would call me and be like, “I’m afraid they’re gonna kill each other. I’m worried.” I’d be like, “It’s okay. I got this, Mom. You know, things will change.” Yeah. But we do want to experiment—interrupt the behaviors.

Member B: Yeah, I appreciate the trying different interventions and then also being prepared for her to, like, not enjoy some of them as well. ’Cause I think that happens a lot more than, like, the positive, you know, playful things. Right. So I appreciate that space to, like, let that happen too—and that’s okay.

Tosha: Yeah. It’s—even more than okay. Like, that’s kind of what needs to happen—mm-hmm—in order for her to shift—yeah—in order for her to be able to show up differently. She’s stuck. Just think of her as being stuck.

Member B: Yeah. And maybe it’s not gonna fix that moment, but later on it’ll be less and less, right?

Tosha: Yeah. And it happens much more quickly than we think, oftentimes.

Member B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. The other quick question—do I have time, Sarah, to ask the second—

Sarah: Sure.

Member B: Okay. The second one is more—it’s my 10-year-old. So recently, like, he was at a playdate. He’s getting to play with a lot more of his friends. They’re all playing football and sports and things, and he’s just a bigger kid—my husband’s 6’5”, so he’s just naturally bigger than a lot of the kids. And he is super playful, but he gets, like, playful aggression. And, like, one of the moms was saying, like, “Oh my—” I’ve seen the dynamic of how all the boys are playing, and I noticed Calvin sometimes gets a little too aggressive. And her son Luke is pretty small. And Luke is like, “Yeah, I get trampled sometimes.” And so the mom was like, “I just try and tell Calvin, like, how big he is and, you know, his awareness.” But I know it happens with his sister, and I think it probably happens at school sometimes too—that he doesn’t realize his size, and that maybe it comes out to be as, like—I don’t know if he has internal aggression or if it’s just playful and he’s not aware of how big he is.

Tosha: Yeah, I mean, I’d say two things about this. One is: I always have to ask the question in these situations—Is it the kids who are having the problem, or is it the parents who are having a problem?

Member B: Yeah.

Tosha: And I don’t know the answer in this situation, but oftentimes our kids play a lot rougher than we feel comfortable with—but they’re all actually having a good time. Yeah. I mean, the way that you said that kid reported didn’t sound like it was a problem. I could be wrong and it could be a problem, but I think it’s worth asking: whether or not it’s a problem—Is that mom worried, or is the kid not having fun?

Member B: Yeah.

Tosha: So just to keep that in mind. Because there’s often a par between what we are feeling comfortable with and the way our kids are going at each other. Right. And I think in that situation, we do want to stay close if we’re not sure. And just ask—like, if you notice that energy going up—just say, “Hey, are you all having fun?” If everyone says yes—okay. If one person says no, then we know we need to intervene. Okay. So that’s one piece.

And then I think it’s about body awareness for him. Mm-hmm. And maybe one thing that you could do at home would be some practice—sort of—physical wrestling matches or something of the sort, where you could just pretend like you’re in a ring—

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Tosha: —with a timer, and do, like, 15-second, 30-second sessions—or whatever you call it. I’m not a boxing person or whatever, but I don’t—

Sarah: Rounds.

Tosha: Rounds. Maybe it’s rounds, right? Yeah. So where somebody’s actually the ref and saying, “Okay, go at it,” and then when the whistle blows—when the ref blows the whistle—everyone has to run back to their corners. And so we’re increasing the awareness of stop-start, stop-start.

And then also I think it’s oftentimes a good idea to have kind of a—what do you call it—an emergency word, secret word, whatever it’s called—

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Tosha: —the word—

Sarah: Safe word.

Tosha: What’s the word? Safe word. Safe word.

Sarah: Safe word.

Tosha: Yeah. Safe word. And so you all could figure that out at the beginning of this game. And, in fact, that’s something that he could transfer over to his play with his friends. Like, “Yeah, once he learns—he’s like, ‘I know I’m big; I’m just having a good time. I know I don’t want to hurt you, but if things are getting too rough, say banana and I’ll know I gotta pull back.’”

Yeah. But “banana” is going to work a lot better than, “Hey, stop doing that,” or a parent coming in and saying, “Hey, be careful, you need to be careful, you’re a lot bigger than him, you need to pull back.” That’s not going to work as well. But you have to practice those things at home. So—come at it from two different angles.

Member B: Yeah. I like how that is—he and his sister have a thing where if they’re being too much, they yell “T.” Yeah. Okay. And so if they’re like “T, T,” then they know like, oh, that’s a timeout—like, I need to pause for a second.

Sarah: Perfect.

Member B: So yeah, maybe just—yeah—telling him, like, set it up with your friends so they can say it.

Tosha: Yeah. If he already has that skill with his sister, that’s amazing. Mm-hmm. And then, yeah—could we just transfer it over to a friend?

Member B: Yeah, and I agree—it could be a little more parent than kid, because the kid’s inviting Calvin over all the time and wants him to come back. So I’m like, I think they’re having fun. You know, and it just may be the parent’s perception of—or protection of—her child.

Tosha: Right. And I think it’s—I think it’s fair to just ask.

Member B: Mm-hmm.

Tosha: You know, ask the child. I mean, you can ask the child if the child’s at your house. Yeah. You can just say, like, “Hey, you know, if you guys need me, I’m in the other room,” or whatever. Like, you don’t have to— I just—I don’t like to assume that there’s a problem.

Member B: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because he’s—he—it’s very sweet. I just think he—he just plays rough sometimes and—

Tosha: Yeah. Well, some kids like to play rough. And the other thing is, if we interrupt too much, we’re interrupting the development of important emotional intelligence. Because one of the ways that kids learn—or build—emotional intelligence is through playing with one another. Right? If they play too rough, they’re going to lose their playmate. Right. If they don’t play rough enough, they’re also going to lose their playmate. Right. This kid might like to play rough. I mean, this little kid might like to play rough—mm-hmm—because he doesn’t have that opportunity with other kids. And, like, it’s an opportunity to sort of be bigger and use strength and feel—I mean, I don’t know.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: But there’s something about the dance that they do when they play. I remember reading research about this in the animal kingdom. It was like a—it was a—I forget what his name was. This was like a million years ago at a conference when I was—back when I was a linguist—who was talking about this. And it was super, super interesting. I thought, “Wow, okay.” And so I think we need to let our kids also do that dance and just be present—so if there is a problem, we can step in—let them know that we’re there. But don’t assume there’s a problem when nobody’s complaining.

Member B: Right. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Lindsay. That’s helpful.

Sarah: So I’m conscious that we only have about, uh, eight minutes left with you. And I don’t think anyone else on the call has a question, so I will go to a question that was sent in. And actually two questions that were sent in, and I’m not sure how different they are, so I’m going to tell you both of them.

Okay. And if you can answer them both together, or if you think they’re separate—if that works. Okay. So one of them is a person, a member who has a child—a girl—who is just about to turn eight. And when she gets upset, she hits and throws things at her mom. And they haven’t been able to—and she’s been following peaceful parenting—but still hasn’t been able to curb this. She doesn’t have any issues anywhere else, except for—

Tosha: Okay.

Sarah: —her mom. The second person has a 12-year-old daughter that is hitting, kicking, pinching, saying mean words, etc., to her younger siblings when they’re not doing what she wants them to do. She’s the oldest of five; has younger siblings who are 10, 8, 4, and 2. And she didn’t mention this, but I know she also—when she gets upset—she will do that to her mom too.

Tosha: Yeah. Yeah. So for me, these are really both limit-setting issues, right? Like I’ve said earlier, we have to come at aggression from all the different angles, right? So we talked—we started out at the beginning with the first question about, like, hey, let’s—we gotta focus in on our own healing and our own triggers, and make sure that we’re not sort of trying to skate over that and pretend that we’re gonna be able to be better without addressing anything.

We also have to focus on connection. Like—somebody said they’re tracking. Yeah, we need to pay attention—like, when does this stuff happen? We need to pour in connection, like we talked about. Make a list of all the things that are yummy when you do them together—just do more, do more, do more. Use play in the ways that we’ve talked about.

But limits aren’t necessarily the place to start—but if there are safety issues, then we have to go right there. So if the problem—well, there are lots of problems—but one thing that I’ve seen is that if we let a child, quote-unquote, succeed—or if a child succeeds in hurting us—let’s just say throwing—like, let’s say we get a stapler thrown at us and we end up with a black eye, or a cut on our face, or whatever it is—that child feels more fear than they felt before. Because there’s a huge amount of fear associated with having that much power when you’re so small, and feeling like the adults in your life can’t keep everybody safe.

Right? Because our number one job, in my opinion, is to keep everybody safe and alive. Let’s just start there. Mm-hmm. So this is just basic. So that means that in a situation like this, you’re gonna want to pay attention. You’re gonna really want to track when this happens. It’s good—it only happens with you, I think. That’s telling in the sense that she feels safe enough with you to be able to show you that she’s kind of holding things together out in the world, but actually feeling yucky inside, and these feelings need to come out somehow.

And the next step is you figuring out: well, how do I want to show her that, yes, I can keep her safe? And that is likely gonna look like you physically anticipating—for her throwing something—or you see that she reaches for the stapler, and you’re gonna rush in and you’re gonna put your hand on her hand on that stapler: “I don’t want that stapler to get thrown.”

And I’m not gonna lie—it’s gonna look messy, and it’s gonna be a struggle, and all of the things. That’s fine—as long as you’re calm. If you feel triggered by the throwing, and you don’t feel like you can stay calm, and you can feel like—to talk about, you know, the sweet child underneath the yucky feeling. So let’s—got the throwing or the hitting or the cussing out or the whatever up here, and there’s just always this sweet child underneath.

If you lose sight of that child, then in a situation like this, I would rather you walked out of the room and the—you know—the stapler hit the door. You know, it breaks the window or it dents the door or whatever it is. I don’t want that to happen, but I would rather that happen than it hit you and then you hit her, or you held her harder than you want, or you screamed horrible things at her that you wished afterwards you could take back.

Right. And I say these things not because I think you’re doing this, but just because in my 20 years of working in this world and raising three kids—I know what those feelings feel like, and they’re real, and they happen to all of us. So if you feel out of control, remove yourself.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Tosha: Even at the cost of the window. But—which is why we have to start with our own—getting ourselves in what I call “good enough emotional shape.” Because ultimately, you need to be able to move in, put your hand on that hand with the stapler, and just say something like, “I can’t—I can’t let you throw that, sweet girl. I can’t let you throw that.” And that’s it.

And then she’s gonna have a huge upset. She’s gonna fight, and she’s gonna try and—“Let go of me,” and “I can’t breathe,” and whatever. And unless she breathes through her hand—like, she’s breathing okay, right? But that upset, again, is the gold nugget. Like—then you welcome the feelings and you allow them to pour out. Because something happened. Something is going on. And it might not be that one thing happened during that day at school, or wherever, but it might be that there was a little nick and a little nick and a little nick. And every time—whatever—she didn’t get what she wanted, or a sibling got something and she didn’t, or you answered a sibling before you answered her, or whatever it is—they’re just all little things.

They happen. They’re not your fault or anybody’s fault. It’s just that if, every time they happen, she doesn’t release the yucky feelings that arise in her as a result, then what’s happening is they’re building up. And so I like to think of it as the sand—or the sedimentary rock—on the beach. You can see those striations in it, right? So it’s like—sand is really soft; you can kind of brush it off, but when it sits and it hardens, then you have to take, like, a chisel to it.

Sarah: Yeah. For our people, we call that “getting a full emotional backpack,” when you’re talking about the nicks that build up over time. So that’ll resonate for people.

Tosha: Exactly. Exactly.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Tosha.

Tosha: Yeah.

Sarah: I hope—that was—

Tosha: Helpful. But you have to physically get in there.

Sarah: Yeah, physically get in there. And if it happens too fast to catch the first one, you just kind of do your best and try for the second one.

Tosha: Yes.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: Yes. And then you expect the upset, and you stay with it if you can.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: Remembering that that’s just a scared little girl in there.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tosha: Right. You don’t know what this is about. Just trust that her body knows that it needs to do this healing, and she’s picked you because she knows you can handle it—that you won’t lose sight of her goodness, that your love is strong. And that’s an honor. I know it feels hard, but it’s actually a real honor when we’re the one who gets chosen for that emotional work.

Sarah: I love that, and I want to highlight that a lot of what you talked about today was our own inner work on keeping ourselves calm and keeping our mindset of keeping track of that sweet child—as you say, the sweet child inside that’s just afraid and needs us in those moments. ’Cause it can feel—I think a lot of parents can feel—like, quote, victimized, and that’s probably going to get them deeper into the aggression than get them out of it.

Tosha: Exactly. Exactly. And so we want to feel—I hope that after this call you feel empowered. I mean, I hope there’s just one thing that you can take away and experiment with doing differently. Just think of these things as experiments. You don’t have to get it perfect—right? Whatever the word is that you have in your head. Right. Just try something.

Sarah: Just—

Tosha: Pick one idea that you heard and try it. Try it for a day. See how it goes. And remember that if it leads to big upset on the part of your child, that doesn’t mean you did it wrong. It probably means you’re actually doing something right.

Sarah: That’s so key. I love that. Thank you so much, Tosha. We really appreciate you and your work, and everyone, be sure to let us know how it goes for you when you try some of these things. Let us know in the Facebook group. And thank you, Tosha—thanks for getting up early and meeting with us today.

Tosha: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me back, Sarah.

Sarah: Thanks, everyone.

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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, OR— BRAND NEW: we’ve included a fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I am giving you another sneak peek inside my Peaceful Parenting Membership!

Listen in as I interview Rachel Simmons as part of our membership’s monthly theme of “Friendship Troubles”. Rachel is an expert on relational aggression, AKA mean girls. We discuss how to intervene in this behaviour when kids are young, how to prevent our child from doing this, and how we can support our children when they’re experiencing it.

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We talk about:

* 6:27 What is relational aggression?

* 8:50 Both boys and girls engage in this type of aggression

* 10:45 How do we intervene with young kids

* 14:00 How do we teach our kids to communicate more effectively

* 22:30 How to help our children who are dealing with relational aggression

* 33:50 Can you reach out to the aggressive child’s parents?

* 38:00 How to reach out to the school

* 47:30 How to help our kids make new friends after relational aggression

Resources mentioned in this episode:

* Yoto Player-Screen Free Audio Book Player

* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

* Rachel’s website

xx Sarah and Corey

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Rachel interview transcript

Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s episode is another sneak peek inside my membership, where I interviewed Rachel Simmons — an expert on relational aggression, AKA “mean girls.” She wrote a book called Odd Girl Out, which is all about the topic of relational aggression and how we can support our children when they’re experiencing it — and what to do if our child is actually doing that to other people.

If you don’t know what relational aggression is, don’t worry — listen up, because she goes into the definition of it. This was a great conversation. My members had questions, I had questions, and in the end, we all agreed it was a very helpful discussion. I think you’ll find it helpful as well — no matter how old your child is or whether or not they’ve experienced any relational aggression.

This is something we should all be aware of, and as parents, we actually have a lot of control over preventing our child from becoming someone who uses relational aggression.

As I said, this is a sneak peek inside my membership, where we have a theme every month. This month’s theme was “Friendship Troubles,” and it actually came as a request from one of our members. So we brought in Rachel to talk to us about relational aggression, which this member’s child had been struggling with.

Every month in the membership, we have a theme — I do some teaching about it, and we also bring in a guest expert for teaching and Q&A.

If you’d like to join us inside the membership, you can go to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/membership to learn more and join us.

Another thing we do inside the membership is office hours. You may have heard a recent podcast that gave a sneak peek into what those are like. We do office hours twice a week where you’re welcome to drop in, ask a question, get support, or share a win — from me, Corey, and other members. It’s just a wonderful place.

Our membership is my favorite corner of the internet, and we’ve been doing it for six years. It really is a special place. I’d love for you to join us! Please let me know if you have any questions, or just head over to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/membership to learn more.

And now — let’s hear from Rachel.

Hey Rachel, welcome to the podcast.

Rachel: Thank you.

Sarah: Can you just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Rachel: Sure. Well, I’m based in Western Massachusetts, and I’m a researcher and author. Over the last eight years, I’ve also become an executive coach. I’ve always been fascinated by — and inspired by — the psychology of girls and women.

Over what’s now become a long career, I’ve worked with women and girls across the lifespan — beginning, I’d say, in elementary school, and more recently working with adult women.

I’ve always been animated by questions about how women and girls experience certain phenomena and spaces differently, and how paying attention to those experiences can contribute to their overall wellness and potential.

Sarah: Nice. And I just finished reading your book Odd Girl Out, and I could see how much research went into it. I think you mentioned you interviewed people for a few years to write that book.

Rachel: It was a long time, yeah. I was just actually reflecting on that. I came across a shoebox filled with cassette tapes — little cassette tapes of the interviews I did when I wrote that book, which came out 20 years ago.

I worked all over the United States and tried to speak to as many girls as I could.

Sarah: It’s a great book — highly recommended. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Thank you for writing it.

So today we invited you here because we want to talk about relational aggression. Can you give us a definition of what relational aggression is?

Rachel: Yes. Relational aggression is a psychological form of aggression — a way that people express themselves when they’re trying to get a need met or are upset about something. It usually starts as early as two or three years old, when kids become verbal, and it’s the use of relationship as a weapon.

It can start off as something like the silent treatment — “I’m going to turn away from you because I’m upset with you” — cutting someone off as a way of communicating unhappiness. That silence becomes the message.

I remember once interviewing a seventh-grade girl who told me she gave people the silent treatment — that she’d stop talking to them as a way to get what she wanted. That was really unusual, because most girls won’t come up and be like, “Yeah, here are all the ways I’m mean.”

In fact, it’s often the secrecy that makes this stuff hard to talk about. So I was like, wow, here’s a unicorn telling me she’s doing it. And I asked, “Why do you do it?” And she said, “Because with my silence, I let my friends know what’s going to happen if they don’t do what I want.”

A very powerful description of relational aggression.

So that’s the silent treatment, but it can also take more verbal forms. Like, “If you don’t give me that toy, I won’t be your friend anymore.” Or, “If you don’t play with me at recess today, then our friendship is over.”

The threat is always that I’ll take away a relationship. And it’s so powerful because — what do we want more than connection? That’s a profound human need. So it’s a very, very powerful form of aggression.

Sarah: Your book is called Odd Girl Out, and you focused on women and girls. Do you think this also happens with boys? Has it started happening more with boys? What’s your take — is it still mainly a girl thing? I mean, when I think of relational aggression, I think of “mean girls,” right?

Rachel: Yes, I think a lot of people do — and certainly did when I first started researching this book many years ago. I did too.

It’s important to remember that yes, boys definitely do this, and they do it as much as girls starting in middle school — at least according to the research I read. I haven’t read the very recent studies, so that could have changed, but back when I was doing this work, no one was writing about boys doing it.

There was almost no research, and frankly, because of my own experience — seeing boys being more direct and girls being indirect — I assumed it was just a girl thing. But it most definitely is not.

I think I and others, in many ways, did a disservice to boys by not studying them. I wish I had. It’s something that’s much more widely understood now by people out in the field doing this work.

Sarah: Yeah, interesting — because my oldest son, who’s now 24, definitely experienced a lot of relational aggression in elementary school. And my daughter did too.

And just as a side note — it’s so painful to watch your kids go through that. I want to ask you more about parents’ roles, but it’s so painful as a parent to watch your child have their friends be mean to them.

You mentioned it can start as young as two or three, and I remember reading in your book — that sort of “you can’t come to my birthday party” thing. Even little kids will say that to their parents sometimes, right? Using that relational aggression.

You said that if we don’t actively get involved, it can turn into older-kid relational aggression that never goes away. What do you suggest parents do or say when they hear this kind of thing — whether it’s to other kids on the playground, to a sibling, or even to the parents themselves?

Rachel: Yeah, with little kids — we’re talking about little, little ones — I often answer that question with a question back to the parent: What do you do when your kid hits or bites somebody?

Usually what most of us do is stop the behavior, make sure the other kid’s okay, and then turn to our own child and say, “You can’t do that. We don’t do that in our family. That’s not what we say, that’s not what we do. You have to use your words.”

And we say, “We don’t ever threaten people when we’re angry.” It’s okay to be mad — that’s really key — but it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Certain ways of speaking are off-limits, just like certain words are off-limits.

It’s also key, though, to practice self-awareness as a parent. Because if you’re the kind of person who goes quiet when you’re upset, or withdraws as a way of expressing yourself, that’s probably where your kid’s picking it up. They’re not unaware of that.

It’s kind of like when parents tell teens, “Hey, get off your phone,” and the teen says, “You’re on your phone all the time.” Modeling is key.

Sarah: That makes a lot of sense — treating relational aggression like any other form of aggression, giving alternatives, correcting the behavior.

Rachel: Exactly — and helping them cultivate empathy. Ask, “How do you think that other person felt when you said that? How do you think it feels when someone says they won’t be your friend anymore?”

You don’t want to lose friends just because you made a mistake.

Unfortunately, so many people believe this is just “kids being kids.” When you hear that phrase, it’s almost a way of disqualifying or invalidating the behavior as aggression. We have to be really careful not to trivialize it or write it off. That’s the gateway to not taking it seriously and not holding kids accountable.

Sarah: One of the things you talk about in your book — which I thought was really great food for thought — is how this often happens with girls because girls are socialized not to express their anger and to be “nice” and “good.” So it goes underground and comes out in these covert, or even not-so-covert, forms of relational aggression.

What can we do as parents to change this? Any concrete ways to help girls express themselves or communicate more effectively so that this doesn’t happen?

Rachel: That’s a really good question. I think one approach I value — both as a parent and in my work — is taking a more integrated approach to parenting, not just saying something in the moment.

If we want kids — and we don’t even have to say “girls,” just kids — to be more emotionally expressive and authentic so they don’t resort to indirect or harmful behaviors, then they need to be raised with certain principles.

Those principles have to be voiced, reinforced, and practiced throughout daily life — not just in response to an acute moment of aggression.

Some of those principles are: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. All feelings are welcome, but not all behaviors are. You have the right to be treated with respect and dignity by your friends, and you owe that to them as well.

And not even just your friends — everyone. You don’t have to be friends with everyone, but you do have to treat everyone with respect.

That’s key for girls, in particular, because they’re often expected to be friends with everyone, which makes them feel resentful. So another principle is: You don’t have to be friends with everyone. You can be acquaintances and still treat people respectfully.

You’re striking a balance between supporting expression — it’s good to say how you feel — and being thoughtful about how you do it.

It’s also a practice. Sometimes we’ll make mistakes or feel awkward expressing ourselves, but that’s far better than going behind someone’s back or ignoring them forever.

Sarah: Right. I’m reminded of a line we often use in peaceful parenting when one sibling is being “mean” to another verbally. We’ll say, “You can tell your sibling how you feel without attacking them,” or, “You can tell your sibling how you feel without using unkind words.”

That’s really what you’re saying — it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

So as I was reading your book, I realized that many of the things we teach in peaceful parenting already help kids express themselves in healthy ways — and also not put up with being treated poorly.

If you learn at home that you don’t have power or agency because your parents don’t treat you with respect, then you’re more susceptible to peers treating you poorly.

Rachel: Yeah, I think so. Parents teach us what to expect from other people. They also teach us how to respond in difficult moments.

If they normalize difficult moments and your day-to-day life includes not feeling valued or safe, you’ll import that into your relationships with others.

It can be more subtle too — if you don’t feel unconditionally valued, or if you have to fight for your parents’ attention, or you don’t feel consistent attachment, you might become vulnerable to pursuing peers who recreate that familiar but painful dynamic.

If your “happy place” becomes constantly trying to get the popular girl to win you over, that might mirror how you once tried to win your parents’ attention.

Sarah: If your child is the victim of relational aggression — what should you do? Both in terms of how to support your child and whether there’s anything you should do with other parents or the school?

Rachel: Great questions. First, how to support your child when they go through something like this — and you’re absolutely right, it can be really triggering for us as parents.

Empathy really matters. And I know some people are like, “Yeah, duh, empathy.” But in my work — and in my life as a parent — I’ve found that we’re wired to help and fix, not to empathize. That’s how humans have survived — by fixing and protecting, not empathizing.

So our instinct when we see our child in distress is to jump in and try to fix it.

Sarah: It’s called the “righting instinct,” I think.

Rachel: The righting instinct — oh! Like to put them upright again?

Sarah: Yeah.

Rachel: Oh, that’s helpful — I didn’t know that! Yes, the righting instinct.

So we have to override that and remember that what a child really needs is to know that what they’re going through is normal — even if it’s incredibly hard — and that their feelings are normal. They need to know they’re not alone.

Say things like, “You must feel really hurt,” or “That sounds so hard.”

Now, some kids will say, “No, I’m fine.” Not every kid will respond with, “Thanks for empathizing, Mom.” But you can still name the feeling — “If I were you, I’d feel the same way,” or, “That’s really hard.”

The feelings are scary, and kids want to know it’s okay to feel how they feel — that they’re not alone, and that it’s normal.

After that, try to override the fixing instinct as much as you can. Because unless your child is in acute distress, these are opportunities for them to develop problem-solving skills.

They will experience social aggression — that’s inevitable. If they don’t, they’re probably not connected to other people. So it’s not a question of if, it’s when.

These moments are opportunities for you to be with them and support them — but not to do it for them.

Ask, “Okay, this is going on — tell me one way you could respond. What’s something you could do?”

What we’re doing by asking that is not jumping in with, “Here’s what I’d do,” which doesn’t teach them anything. We’re giving them a chance to think.

A lot of kids will say, “I don’t know,” or get annoyed — that’s fine. You can say, “Okay, what’s one thing you could do?”

If they say, “Nothing,” you can say, “Nothing is a choice. That’s a strategy. What do you think will happen if you do nothing?”

We live in a culture that’s consistently deprived kids of opportunities to become resilient — deprived them of discomfort, and that’s cost them problem-solving ability.

I’m not saying kids should handle social aggression alone, but these moments are a chance to hold them and be with them — without doing it for them.

So those are kind of the first two steps.

Sarah: Well, I mean, I think empathize and empath—one thing that I read in your book is that sometimes parents dismiss that it’s really happening, or because of their own fears of their child. Wanting their child to fit in, they might try to encourage them to stay in the relationship or to try to fix the relationship. Maybe you could speak to that a little bit.

Rachel: Sure. Well, I think these kinds of moments can be incredibly disorienting for parents and triggering. And I use the word disorienting because we start to lose—we stop losing—the ability to differentiate between our feelings and experiences and our kids’.

So, for example, if we have a lot of emotion and a lack of resolution around what happened to us, when our kids go through it, all those feelings come right back up. And then we may start to assume that our kids are actually suffering more than they are.

Like, I’ll give you an example of a kid I met and her parent. The kid had been not treated well in middle school and she said, “I just want to sit at a different table.” And her mom was like, “But this is terrible! This is a terrible thing. We have to do something about it.” And her kid was like, “I just want to sit at a different table.”

So remaining aware of any delta between how your child is reacting and how you are is very key. And if you sense that difference, then you really need to conform to where your kid is and not insert or enforce your own emotions on them.

I also think it runs the other direction. To your point, Sarah, if you yourself fear—if you remember being really afraid of what happened when you felt alone—and you start to imagine that if your child were to make a move that would put them in more isolation, that would be bad for them because it was bad for you. Again, that’s a flag.

Anytime you find that you’re sort of flooding your parenting with the memories or the experiences that you had long before you were a parent—if you have the ability to differentiate—that’s really where you learn how to do it differently. But becoming aware of that is most important.

Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. And then I love how you’re talking about inviting problem-solving—you know, “What do you want to do?” Because often we come in with this, “Well, this is what you do. You march back in there on Monday and you say this.”

But as you said, that doesn’t allow them to develop any skills.

And, you know, where’s the spot—where’s the space—for encouraging? Because I know that my daughter, I went through this with her, with some mean girls in our community and at her school. And I just wanted to say, “Just make friends with different kids! Why do you keep trying to be friends with these same kids that are not being nice to you?”

Like, where’s the space for that? And what do you do?

And that actually is a question that one of our members sent in: what should we do, if anything, if our child still wants to be friends with the kids that haven’t been kind to them or who have been relationally aggressive?

Rachel: Yeah, it’s such a great question, and it’s one that many, many parents hold. Because it is certainly a phenomenon where, you know, you keep going back to the person who has hurt you.

And girls can be very inconsistent or all over the place—like, one day we’re really good friends, the next day you don’t want to sit with me at lunch, three days later you invite me to your house for a sleepover, right? You kick me out, you take me back in.

There comes a point in a kid’s life where they’re old enough to make their own decisions. They’re going to school, they’re going to hang out with whoever they want. And I’m most interested in supporting the parents who actually can’t control who their kid hangs out with.

Because if it were as easy as just saying, “Well, you can’t go over to their house anymore,” that would be fine. But it’s not—because the kid’s going to make their own social choices when they’re out and about.

So I think the answer is that relationships are a classroom. Relationships are a place where we learn all kinds of life skills—including how to say what we want, how to compromise, how to forgive, and how to end a relationship.

I think that while it is incredibly frustrating and stressful for a parent to watch their child return to an aggressor, trying to remain as much of a guide as you can to your child, rather than bringing down the hammer, is key.

So, in other words, one strategy I’ve suggested—which is not maybe for everyone—but it’s kind of like: think about a friend you’ve had in your life as an adult who keeps going back to somebody who isn’t good to them. Maybe you remember—they were in a relationship with a crappy person—and you’re like, “What are you doing with that person? Why are you dating them?”

And you probably weren’t yelling at them or saying, “You better stop dating them or I’m not going to be your friend anymore.” You had to stick with them as they figured it out, and you knew they were learning and you hoped they would learn.

There’s a bit of that with your kid. Your kid is not your friend—your kid is much more triggering than your friend—but they’re actually in a very similar learning experience to your friend who’s dating somebody that everyone knows isn’t right for them.

And so as a parent, you want to stay connected and say, “Okay, so what’s your takeaway from what just happened? What are you learning about this person—how they’re treating you?” And you’re going to say it a hundred times before maybe some neuron fires next week or next year, and they’re like, “Oh, I get it.”

Sarah: Yeah.

Rachel: Like, they need to keep hearing from you. They need to keep hearing that this isn’t a good person—that this person’s not good to you, that this person doesn’t have the values our friends have.

Sarah: That happened with my daughter—with a best friend from birth, too. I think it was around age eight when things started shifting, and the girl started being pretty mean to my daughter.

And it took her four years until she finally made the decision on her own. One thing happened, and it finally cracked it open for her, and she just said, “I don’t think [name] and I are best friends anymore.”

She cried for about three hours, and she went through maybe a month or two of grieving that friendship. But that was kind of like—it had been the straw that broke the camel’s back, where she finally saw everything in the true light. You know what I mean?

But it was so hard for those four years to watch her keep going back and trying and giving her the benefit of the doubt. Anyhow, it was rough.

Rachel: It was rough. And what do you think she learned from that?

Sarah: Well, I think she learned to look other places for friends. And I think she learned how she wanted to be treated.

So we’ve talked about how to support your child who’s going through this. Is there anything you recommend doing with the other child’s parents or with the school to support your child?

Rachel: Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on their age, right?

Sarah: Let’s say tweens.

Rachel: Okay. I think it depends. So first, with the other parents—it’s important to remember that if you call another kid’s parents without clearing it with your own kid first, you just never know what those other parents are going to disclose to their own child.

If you don’t know these parents well, you have no idea whether they’d go to their kid and say, “Guess who called me today?” So, as much as possible, have some communication with your own child about reaching out to another parent, especially if you don’t know that parent or have a prior relationship.

I understand the intention is to help, but when you call another parent, you can’t control what that parent does with your words—or how that affects your own child. So you have to be very careful.

Now, does that mean you always have to have your child’s permission to reach out? No, it doesn’t. There are times where you’ll just do that because that’s your job. I just want people to be aware of that.

Also, when you call another parent, it’s critical to start the conversation with: “I know I only have one perspective here. I know I can only see what I can see. Can you tell me if there are things I’m not seeing? I’d love to know what’s going on from your perspective.”

In other words, you’re not going in heavy-handed or accusatory—you’re going in with humility. It’s okay to say you’re upset and to talk about what you know, but it’s critical to maintain the humility of realizing you don’t know everything.

And that children—just like everyone else—can have their own distortions or lenses through which they experience their peers.

Finally, when you talk to another parent, be very precise in your language when you describe what happened. Stick to the behaviors that allegedly occurred.

Like, you can say, “My understanding is that your kid called my kid with some kids over while they were having a sleepover, and it left my daughter feeling pretty embarrassed and hurt. Can you tell me more about what you know?”

So you’re not saying, “Your kid did this and really messed up my kid.” You’re saying, “Here’s my understanding of what happened, and here was the impact.” Those are two things you can control knowing—without accusing.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes sense. I made all the mistakes with my friend’s daughter’s mother, so yeah, I think your advice is good.

And I wish I had had it then. It’s so hard not to rush in as a parent, especially when kids are younger. It’s so hard not to rush in and try to—like you said—right things, to try to fix it and make things better.

There’s just a comment from Mare—when we were talking about kids going back to people who are unkind—she said that her grandson, who I know is nine, told her that he’s “an easy mark.” And when she asked why he felt that way, he said his friend punched him in the stomach and he just accepted that and continues to be friends with him.

Do you have any words for her around that—how she might support her grandson?

Rachel: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I like that he’s comfortable talking to his grandmother in that way—how wonderful for her that he’s so vulnerable and authentic. So I would, as the grandma, be very cautious and handle delicately the vulnerability your grandson’s giving you.

And I would be very inquisitive. I’d put on my coach’s hat and say, “Tell me more about that. Tell me more about what happens and why. Tell me more about your decision to accept it. What do you think would happen if you didn’t accept it?”

I’ve learned a lot in the later part of my career about the importance of just holding space for people to talk something through. You don’t have to give advice. You don’t have to have an idea. You can just ask questions and let them talk it through.

Talking aloud to someone who cares and listens closely is not that different from journaling. Both can help you arrive at new insights that you couldn’t otherwise on your own—but don’t require someone telling you what to do.

So I think that kind of stance, if you can take it with your grandson, would be very effective—and you’d probably learn a ton.

Sarah: Thanks. That’s great. So the final part of that three-part question that we keep getting back to is—what about with the school?

One thing that I thought was interesting in your book is you talked about how a lot of the kids that are doing the relational aggression have a lot of social status, and that it often flies under the radar—that the teachers don’t see what’s going on.

I think that would make it especially tricky to try to get support from the school if they’re not seeing what your child is reporting back to you.

Rachel: Yes, it does make it tricky. And you know, psychological aggression is just that—it’s psychological. So unless you’re listening, you’d miss it.

It’s also the case that—like Eddie Haskell in Leave It to Beaver—when the adult shows up, a lot of the most aggressive kids turn into very likable, charming, dynamic kids. They know how to work the adults in the room.

This is why even the most devoted, skilled teachers who really want to catch this stuff still say to me, “Why don’t I see it? I’m trying so hard.”

That does make it hard. And I say that because it makes it particularly hard for a school to respond if they’re like, “We don’t see it.”

So, when you talk to the school, it’s important to keep that in mind—that this stuff might not be visible.

It’s also important to practice that same humility, because often the school does see things you don’t. They may have awareness of the different sides of the story.

Schools are filled with human beings who are tired, and if they get a two-page single-spaced email from a parent at 11:30 at night with a call the next morning saying, “Why haven’t you responded?”—they’re not super psyched to work with you.

Treating people like they’re customer-service reps who are there to serve you—especially if you pay tuition—I understand why that happens, but you’re going to catch a lot more flies with honey.

Sarah: Than with vinegar.

Rachel: Yeah, I couldn’t remember what the insect was—but I think you catch more flies with honey.

It’s hard. It’s heavy. It’s a tall ask, because you’re hurting as a parent—you’re frustrated, you’re angry, you’re worried about your kid. But it’s a really complex situation.

A couple other ways to approach this: figure out if your school has an anti-bullying or behavior policy that acknowledges these more indirect forms of aggression.

Also, I’d caution parents against using the word bullying unless it actually meets that definition. That’s a big turn-off for school administrators and teachers when parents elevate something to bullying that isn’t.

Bullying is more of a protracted campaign of one person against another, typically with a big power dynamic. Most of what kids experience are acts of aggression, but not ongoing campaigns.

So being careful about the words you use is important too.

And then, see what training teachers have—what professional development they’ve been given around what to look out for, how to manage their classrooms.

There was a long period in my life where all I did was professional development sessions for schools. We talked about, “Have you talked to your students about body language? About the power of rolling your eyes when someone speaks up, or laughing, or staring?”

Those are silent behaviors, but they send strong messages. Many teachers don’t have those conversations with students—and that’s the kind of thing that makes a difference in communicating expectations.

Sarah: Someone on the call just asked a question related to that. She’s curious what you have to say about shame being used by girls as a form of aggression—especially middle schoolers.

Rachel: That’s interesting—when you say shame, meaning like trying to shame the target for something they’ve done?

Sarah: Yeah, she says yes. Like rolling your eyes at somebody when they do something—that would make someone feel a sense of shame. She also said her daughter was shamed for talking to boys.

Rachel: Yeah. So I think there’s quite a bit of shame that both boys and girls experience.

So—sorry, I’m reading the comments too—your daughter was shamed for talking to boys who came to their lunch table, and was asked to sit at a different lunch table?

Yeah, I wonder if that’s about shaming for breaking an unwritten code—“We don’t talk to boys.” Which can also be rooted in cultural expectations around girls—like, “You’re such a slut if you talk to boys,” or “We don’t.”

And so there’s a way in which girls can police each other and shame each other by channeling messages from the culture that they’ve learned.

What I have to say about that is that girls do become agents of the culture—and of patriarchal culture—that says, “You’re not supposed to talk to boys because that means you must be sexual with them,” or, “We just don’t like those people, so we’re going to punish you.”

Boys will do it to each other too—when they’re vulnerable or show feelings.

So, to support a girl who’s going through that: if we think about the definition of shame, it’s to feel like you are a bad person—that your core identity is defective.

The difference between shame and guilt is that shame is about you, and guilt is about the thing you did.

We’re all vulnerable to shame, but I think tween girls are particularly so because they’re both able to understand what adults are saying and still in a very self-focused moment in development. That’s a pretty toxic brew.

It means you can easily take on shame without fully understanding what’s being said to you.

So I think just really taking a moment to say, “You are a good human being. You are valued. You are loved. You’re not alone.”

You may not think a moment like this requires those words, but if your child is feeling ashamed because of those behaviors, it’s important to remind them they’re just like everyone else—in the best way—and that even if they’ve been othered or singled out, they’re still part of a loved whole, whether that’s family or friends.

Sarah: Yeah, when you were saying that, I was reminded of something I did with my daughter that I talk about a lot—making sure our children, even if they’re having social troubles or not feeling like they have friends or the friends they want—making sure they feel unconditionally loved and appreciated and delighted in and celebrated at home can be very protective, I think.

And I’ve heard adults talk about that—who were bullied—and say, “The only reason I came through it with my self-esteem intact was that my parents made me believe this wasn’t happening because there was something wrong with me.” They made me feel loved and celebrated and appreciated at home.

So I think that’s something for all of us to keep sight of too—if our kids are having friendship troubles—to do the work at home to help them.

Rachel: Yes. A thousand percent. That has nothing to do with their friends.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rachel: Yes.

Sarah: Okay, two more questions before we let you go. A question from a member who couldn’t be on the call: any advice for making future friends once they’ve gone through a mean relationship?

So this person’s child is on the other side of a difficult elementary school relationship, starting middle school at a new school, and is finding it hard—maybe she’s a little hesitant about making new friends after what she’s gone through. Any advice about that?

Rachel: I think you validate it. You validate the hesitation.

And you also say, “Hey—do you notice how many people date and break up and then start dating new people? Or get divorced and marry new people? Friendships are the same thing.”

We’re not meant to have one best friend forever—that’s a myth. People lose friends and also cut loose people that aren’t right for them.

Maybe your daughter’s been through that—but remind her we’re constantly regenerating new connections.

It’s okay to feel a little gun-shy or apprehensive. Ask, “What would make you feel more comfortable making new friends so you don’t feel like you’re exposing yourself too much?”

Again, always staying curious, inquisitive—not assuming you know what’s right because you’re the parent—but asking, “What would need to be true for you to feel comfortable making this new friendship?”

Maybe she’s not comfortable socializing one-on-one outside of school for a long time and wants to keep it to school. That’s okay.

So being flexible and kind of flexing to where your child is, while also holding the line about the importance of continuing to connect—that’s important.

Sarah: Love that. My final question to you is one I ask all my podcast guests—and you can answer this in any context, not just what we were talking about today—but if you had a time machine and could go back to your younger parent self, what advice would you give yourself?

Rachel: Oh my God, so much. Don’t let your kid have YouTube as early as you did. That would be the first one.

I guess I’d say that feeling out of control is normal—and you’ve got to learn to breathe through that more. Yelling isn’t going to give you anything but a false sense of control, and it’s just going to upset your kid.

That’s the truth of it. I think I would’ve yelled less if I’d been more comfortable with the discomfort—feeling like things were out of control and I couldn’t manage or have the solution for something.

Sarah: Love that. Thank you so much for joining us. Where’s the best place for folks to find out more about you and what you do?

Rachel: Find me at rachelsimmons.com.

Sarah: All right. Thank you so much, Rachel.

Rachel: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Great questions.