Parenting Blog

"2 year-olds argue with their parents 20 to 25 times an hour." -- Child Development

Between 12 and 15 months, we learn a wonderful word:  "No!"
It's an ecstatic discovery.
We learn we are separate, autonomous beings with a will of our own who can impact what happens in the world.
We delight in saying, "No!" at every opportunity.
Our "No" is actually a big "YES!."
It's an awesome, pure expression of our life force.

After the first cute "No" or two, our parents are usually less than delighted.  In fact, this developmental stage launches what's often called the "terrible twos."

Rarely are our ecstatic expressions of primal life force affirmed.  Do you remember your father or mother saying:
"Oh, thank you for expressing your No so passionately!"
"I so appreciate your affirming your autonomy so directly!"

More common messages are along the lines of:
"Do what I tell you!"
"Don't you dare talk back!"
There may the threat—or the reality—of punishment or physical force.  There is almost always the withdrawal of love, as parents walk away when little ones tantrum.

Being powerless and utterly dependent, we soon learn to hide our No's.  We begin to resort to whining, passive resistance, manipulation, or very often, actual denial of our needs.

So when our little one falls in love with the word NO! alarm bells start ringing for us.  We think we MUST teach him who's in charge, right away.

But this isn't about who is in charge.  Your child knows you're in charge.  This is about your child's right to his feelings, even while you honor your responsibility to keep him safe and healthy.

Can you say "No" in a way that honors your own truth, while still staying in positive contact with your child? Your "No" doesn't need to be a bludgeon— simply a strong statement of your position in a duet dance of negotiation.  Here's how:

1. Don't take it personally.  This isn't about you or your rules.

2. Remember that this is a positive developmental stage that is giving your child the ability to stand up for his own truth later in life.

3. Sidestep the NO! by giving your child a choice.  He says NO! to a bath?  Ask him if he wants to fly up the stairs or dance up.

4. Sidestep the NO! by making your request into a game.  "Climb on my back, Cowboy, we're headed for the bathtub in the hills!"

5. Sidestep the NO! by honoring his autonomy without giving up your request.  "NO Bath right now?  Ok, Sweetie.  But when you're ready, you can look at the plastic containers in the kitchen and be in charge of which ones you want to play with in the tub."  You won't be able to restrain him from the bath.

6. Use reverse psychology.  "Whatever you do, DON"T get in the bathtub.  NO, NO, NO, don't turn on the water!! NO, NO, NO, don't take off your clothes!!"

7. Remember that you can always find a way to meet both your needs.  If you keep your sense of humor, and honor both your own NO and your child's, you can always find a way to get past the word NO --  to the YES! energy right behind it. 

(Special thanks to Robert Gass, who inspired today's message.)  

 "In contrast to their enthusiastic, loving nature, all children (like all adults) experience times when they aren’t themselves. They lose their sunny attitude, their ability to make each day a good one... They can’t listen or respond thoughtfully to the situation around them. Their behavior goes off track, and they begin to do things that don’t work, things that isolate them from other people...Every effort to guide them sends them further off track...When our children are unreasonable, they are asking for our help. They need us to set limits for them. They also need to know that we care about them. It’s our caring that puts them back on track again." -- Patty Wipfler

When your child is acting like a little demon, it's your cue to step in. He's signaling that he needs you to hold him -- figuratively and literally.  He needs your help to work through some "messy" pent-up emotions.  He needs to reconnect with you, and with his own sense of well-being.  And he'll keep acting out until you help him.

If you punish him for misbehaving, you're not helping him learn to manage the emotions that are fueling his misbehavior.  Even "mild" punishments like timeouts isolate him and disconnect him from us just when he needs us most.  But that doesn't mean you don't set limits as necessary. In fact, a limit -- set empathically so he feels safe -- may be just what he needs to trigger a release of his upset feelings. Crying in the safety of your loving presence restores your child to a state of well-being and connection. Once he feels good again, he'll "act good" -- because our kids naturally want to connect happily with the adults they love. 

How do you set limits that help your child?

1. Be kind but firm: "We don't hit....It's time for bed.....Toys are not for throwing....It's time to leave the playground."  Usually, you'll need to intervene physically to enforce the limit because kids in an upset state can't control themselves. Your child needs to know it's a firm limit.  If she senses you waffling, she'll keep fighting to change the limit rather than grieving and moving on.

2. Empathize: "I know that makes you sad and mad.....You wish you could have the candy now....You don't want to stop playing."  Feeling understood defuses the angry energy and puts your child in touch with the more threatening feelings that always hide behind anger -- sadness, hurt, fear, disappointment, powerlessness. If you set the limit harshly, your child stays in anger and can't get to those underlying feelings he needs to discharge.

3. If your child begins to rage or cry, stay close. You've given your child a tremendous gift:  access to the feelings that were making him act out. You may think he's over-reacting, but who knows what hurts he has stored up that he needs to get off his chest? It's your loving, attentive presence that allows him to feel all these scary feelings and let them go. Hold him if you can, but if he struggles, just stay close. Be his witness. Reassure him that it's ok: "I love you...I see how sad and mad you are...so much hurting...it's ok to feel mad and sad...everybody feels upset sometimes....it's good to get all your angries and sads out...I'm right here....I won't leave you alone with these scary feelings....Cry as much as you need to....When you're ready, I will hold you."

4. Reconnect. After kids have a meltdown, they're ready to reconnect with you. Don't insist they talk about their emotions.  They probably don't know why there were so upset, and feeling analyzed will make them feel less safe about trusting you with their inner lives.  Just scoop them up, hug them, reassure them that everyone needs to cry sometimes and that you love them no matter what.

Should you always set limits?  No. First be sure that what you're asking is age-appropriate.  You can't ask a two year old to sit quietly in a restaurant in the name of setting limits.  Second, be sure you're not creating the situation with your own impatience. Kids are acutely sensitive to disconnections from us and always respond by acting out; in those cases a big hug will restore everyone's sanity. Third, offer help.  Sometimes your child can pull himself together if you just offer assistance with whatever's frustrating him.

But if he seems hellbent on trouble, he's asking for your help. Give him the heaven of your loving attention, and you'll get your little angel back.

"I'm struggling with my own inability to be present and show empathy to my young children when they are having meltdowns. I want to be able to do this. I know this is the right thing to do. But when the meltdowns start, something in me shifts and all my good intentions fly out the window and I just want to get away from them. I'm not sure how to change this behaviour because it seems so deep-rooted in me."

Who hasn't had a hard time with this?  I know that when my child starts to lose it, something in me wants to scream "No!"

• No, I don't have time for this right now!
• No, you're embarrassing me, people are looking!
• No, why can't she be reasonable?
• No, we've been through this, not again! 
• No, she is so self-centered, I need to teach her a lesson!
• No, what am I doing wrong that she's tantrumming again?
• No, I know this is my fault, I should have... I shouldn't have...!
• No, why is she doing this to me?!
• No, why can't you just suck it up the way I do?

Bingo.  If I had acted like that as a child, I would have had it knocked out of me -- probably physically, but at least with the threat of abandonment.  Like most kids in my generation, I learned to stuff my feelings.  I learned they were dangerous. 

I was lucky enough to have some excellent therapy and a meditation practice before I had kids.  That helped me to notice my own thoughts and feelings, and train myself to tolerate my child's. But most of us enter parenting without that head start. 

So when our child has a meltdown, the little one inside of us gets triggered.  Danger signs flash. As always when danger looms, we feel a sense of panic.  We just want to get away (that's flight) or we feel a sudden rage -- we want to MAKE him shut up (that's fight) or we go numb (that's freeze).

Holding him with empathy, allowing him to let all those feelings out? Witnessing his anger without taking it personally?  That's a stretch for most parents, maybe an impossible one. All of our good intentions fly out the window.

And yet every child has numerous experiences of fear, anger, frustration and sadness that need to be expressed and accepted. That's a foundation of emotional intelligence, which allows kids to learn to manage their emotions.

So what can we do to address our own deep-rooted feelings, so we can be there for our kids?

1.  Acknowledge your own feelings.  Our panic in the face of our child's raw emotions is an issue from our own childhoods.  The only way to uproot it is to see how it served us when we were little.  Say to your rising panic:  "Thanks for keeping me safe when I was little.  I'm grown now.  All these feelings are ok. I can handle this."

2. Remind yourself that it isn't an emergency. This isn't a threat; it's your beloved child, who needs your love right now.  Whatever happens, you can handle it. If your mind persists in setting off alarms, tell it you'll deal with those concerns later, not now.

3. Remind yourself that this is a good thing.  We know your child will feel these feelings, no matter what.  The only question is whether you make it ok for him to express them, or whether you teach him they're dangerous.  (Just in case you're wondering, it's the emotions we repress that pop out without warning and get us into trouble.) Even if you can't say a whole-hearted YES! when your child starts to melt down, try to move from your automatic NO! to a warm-hearted OK, just the way you do at other times when your child needs you.

4. Take the pressure off.  You don't have to fix your child or the situation.  All you have to do is stay present.  Your child doesn't even need the red cup, or whatever he's crying for, he needs your loving acceptance of him, complete with all his tangled up feelings. His disappointment, rage, grief? They're all ok, and they will all pass without you doing a thing.

5. Take a deep breath and choose love.  Every choice we make, at core, is a move towards either love or fear.  Let your caring for your child give you the courage to choose love.  Not just love for your child, but love for the child you once were, and the parent you are now.  Just keep breathing, and saying to yourself "I choose love."  (Too corny?  Research shows this works.  But you can easily find another effective mantra:  "She's acting like a kid because she IS a kid....This too shall pass....I came out ok and she will too."  Whatever works for you.)

6. Keep it simple. Your child needs you to witness her outpouring of emotion and let her know that she is still a good person, despite all these yucky feelings.  So she needs your reassurance and permission.  Explanations, negotiations, remorse, recriminations, analysis of why she's so upset, or attempts to "comfort" her ("There, there, you don't have to cry, that's enough") will all shut down this natural emotive process.  You don't have to say much.  Your calm, loving tone is what matters.  Maybe:

You are so upset. 
Go ahead and cry.
That's ok.  Everybody needs to cry sometimes.
I hear how mad and sad you are.
I will stay right here while you get all those mad and sad feelings out.
You're telling me to go away, so I will move back a little bit, but I won't leave you alone with these scary feelings.
When you're ready, I am right here to hug you.

7. Find a good listener so that you can talk about your feelings.  Nothing triggers primal emotions like parenting.  You also need to vent, which means you need someone to listen.  Someone who will resist giving you advice.  Someone who won't be shocked when you admit that you wanted to slam your kid against the wall or leave him there in the grocery store, because they know everyone has felt this way, and you wouldn't actually do it. Someone who won't get triggered and go into a panic about whether it's ok for you, or your child, to feel such things.  Someone who will let you cry, who will be there for you just as you're there for your child.

This is hard work for parents, but a great gift to our children.  The good news is that once we say YES to children's full range of feelings, they learn to manage them in healthy ways.  In fact, you'll see positive results immediately after every "tantrum" that you meet with love, because your child will feel so much better for the rest of the day. That's unconditional love in action.

“I'm afraid that if I continue to parent DS as I did when he was a baby (meeting his needs) he won't learn to control his emotions." -- Joanna, mom of one year old on Continuum Concept Forum

It's true that when little ones get to about 14 months, parenting gets more complicated.  Babies have needs that parents aspire to meet whenever possible.  Kids have wants, which are their strategies to meet their needs.  We still try to meet kids' needs, of course -- but we can't, and shouldn't, meet all their wants. That's where parents have to get creative, or maybe where the real parenting begins!

But this fear so many of us have about whether our child will learn to control his emotions is, I think, where we start to go wrong as parents.  Most of us assume that when kids stop being so easily controlled, we have to stop giving them unconditional love.  We start putting conditions on our love in order to control them. We think we're changing their behavior but in actuality we're withdrawing the support they need to thrive.

And this is all based on a mistaken idea of how kids learn to control emotions. Denying emotion or making ourselves wrong for having emotions doesn't help us control them.

Here's how a child actually learns to control his emotions:

1. We accept ALL of his feelings, and help our child feel safe enough to express them, even while we limit his actions (for instance, he can be as mad as he wants, but he can't hit the other child.)

2. We resist all forms of discipline, which are essentially punishment (such as time outs, or consequences.)  Instead, we meet our child's needs, including her need for a deep nurturing connection with us, which eliminates most "misbehavior."  Then, we help our child stay on track with positive, respectful guidance and scaffolding (which just means that we help them to learn the skills until they can do it themselves.)

3. We model healthy emotional self-management by resisting our own little "tantrums" such as yelling and instead choosing to speak respectfully to our child and everyone else.  (This is the one most of us are still working on!)

When kids feel good, they "act good."  Kids who are parented this way turn out to be respectful, considerate, delightful kids, right through the teen years.  They learn to "control" their emotions because they have a healthy emotional life, not because they have been humiliated, made wrong, or forced to be untrue to themselves in some way.

If you're still working on "controlling" your own "tantrums," you'll be glad to hear that your kids will almost certainly be better at managing their emotions than you are.  Why?  You're doing the hard work now to help them learn how!