177: Three ways to be a good parent, even on bad days

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

In this episode I take a look at the main reasons why we have these hard days - from our child's temperament to our temperament to attachment relationships, trauma, and neurodivergences - all of these intersect especially tightly on the hard days.

Then we look at three ways to get through these days with a little more grace - and maybe even without having to apologize to your child at the end of it.

Taming Your Triggers

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Jump to highlights

(02:44) It can be difficult when we have a temperament mismatch (03:25) But having the same temperament can also be difficult (04:36) Children will often take on a role in the family (05:29) Our attachment style impacts how we perceive other people’s behavior (10:40) Making a non-cognitive shift so you see difficult days differently (21:05) We don’t always have to fix everything in the moment (25:59) The challenges to meeting your needs more often (29:43) The part we often forget is that your child has needs as well [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jessica 00:03 Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on yourparentingmojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Overtime, you're going to get sick of hearing me read this intro as well, so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to yourparentingmojo.com and click read the intro. I can't wait to hear yours. Jen Lumanlan 01:26 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today I want to talk about the hard days that we have as parents. The days when we’re trying our absolute best to do this parenting thing right, but still it seems like it isn’t enough. What do we do on those days? How can we get through them with some grace? How can we know they aren’t hurting our children, or our relationship with our children? In this episode I want to think through some of these things with you. We’re going to take a closer look at what causes some of these hard days, and then I’m going to offer three main ideas to help you navigate those hard days to make them a little easier for you. Jen Lumanlan 02:01 So I know that our children’s challenges can be really big. Even when they’re having a good day they can be bouncy and exuberant and joyful and loud, and when we’re having a good day that can be a lot to deal with. Maybe our own parents looked at the qualities we had and found difficult to deal with and told us that those would be great qualities when we’re adults and they become marketable – things like our ‘answering back,’ which would one day make us a great lawyer – simultaneously legitimizing what they saw as an annoying habit of ours and anticipating a day when they would be recognized as ‘good parents’ for raising a ‘successful’ child. Even if we aren’t doing that, and we can see how our child’s qualities are good qualities today, that doesn’t mean that they’re always easy to live with. Jen Lumanlan 02:44 I think this can be especially difficult when we have a temperament mismatch – which can mean we have the opposite temperament as our child, or sometimes it can even mean we have a similar temperament. So if we don’t like to be active a lot of the time, and we like to do the same things at pretty much the same time every day, and we’re pretty persistent and stick with things that are difficult, and our child wants to be running around from the very moment they wake up to the very moment they fall asleep, and taking our child out to endless activities to keep them occupied means we can’t follow the routines we prefer, and our child flits from one thing to the next and never sticks with anything for more than three minutes at a stretch, it’s not hard to see how contrasting temperaments can make things difficult. Jen Lumanlan 03:25 But having the same temperament can also make things difficult! If you’re both highly persistent, you might each get an idea into your heads about how things should be, and not be flexible on accommodating the other’s ideas. If you both react to things with a high degree of intensity, then even simple issues can throw a real wrench in the works. If your child has a big reaction because their purple shirt is in the wash, and you have an intense reaction because you can’t believe they’re making a big deal out of the purple shirt being in the wash, then it’s a lot harder to recover than it would be if each of you didn’t react so intensely. Jen Lumanlan 04:00 If you’re both highly distractible, you might find it difficult to plan, and your child’s distractibility is likely to pull you even more off course. Some people have a generally more positive mood than others; you may see this most clearly if you have more than one child and one of them is usually in a more positive mood than the other. You might perceive the happy, bubbly child as ‘easier to love,’ while the child who appears more sad and gloomy seems more ‘difficult to love.’ Whether you label this explicitly by saying it in your mind (or even to them) or just subconsciously and implicitly, this can end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Children will often take on a role in the family – the funny one, the smart one, the happy one – or the sad one, the difficult one, the annoying one. We communicate these ideas to our children, whether we intend to or not, and we get into a cyclical process where they’re feeling a little bit sad, or doing something we find a little bit difficult or annoying, and we see them as sad or difficult or annoying, which reinforces their own view and they become more sad or difficult or annoying. And if we also have this slightly sad or gloomy outlook then we’re more likely to put this interpretation on our child’s neutral behavior, and to respond to even their neutral behavior as if it was negative, which continues the cycle. This kind of dynamic sets us up for difficult days even when nothing else is going ‘wrong,’ and makes it harder for us to be with our child in ways that are neutral, never mind ways that are fun and enjoyable and warm and loving. Jen Lumanlan 05:29 Then of course there’s the layer of our attachment style, which is how we learned to receive affection from our own parent or caregiver, which impacts how we perceive other people’s behavior today. So if we developed a strong attachment relationship with our primary parent or caregiver then we may be able to do the same with our children, and be in a relationship that is generally warm and loving. But if we developed an anxious attachment relationship with our parent then even in our relationships today we’re constantly looking to the other person for reassurance that they really do love us, and if our own child has an avoidant attachment relationship with us, where they’ve learned that we won’t consistently be there for them, then they may find that constant checking in to be highly irritating. On the flip side of that, if our child has an anxious attachment relationship with us then they will be the one constantly doing the checking, and if we have an avoidant attachment style then we may find that to be highly irritating, and wonder why on earth they need so much attention, and why they can’t do more for themselves. Two anxiously attached people together are constantly checking in with each other to see if they are OK with each other, and two people with an avoidant style are basically staying at arm’s length from each other, each giving the other one the bare minimum of care and attention in the interest of self-preservation. Jen Lumanlan 06:41 On top the layer of temperament there’s the layer of the trauma we’ve experienced when we were children and may even still be experiencing today. Even if our parents were good parents, they probably didn’t model healthy ways to be in conflict. They may have dismissed our ideas and told us we were fine when we clearly weren’t. They may have rewarded us for being happy – especially if we’re female-identifying – and withdrawn love and approval if we expressed sadness or disappointment or anger. Maybe the conflict we witnessed between them was scary so we avoided it, and now we don’t know how to understand our feelings, and think we can’t express certain feelings, and if a situation becomes too volatile we have to get out of it as fast as we possibly can. Maybe we learned a placating, fawning response and we ran around making cups of tea for everyone, or kept our anxious feelings bottled up deep inside and gained so much praise for being what everyone saw as “just the best-behaved little girl.” Or if you’re male-identifying then maybe you lashed out at others and the adults told you to stop doing it, but they still sort of expected you to do it because you were a boy, and nobody ever tried to understand all the hurt in you that blew out in hitting other people when it seemed like there was nowhere else for it to go. Jen Lumanlan 07:54 And then of course, another layer in all of this is the diagnosed or diagnosable things we have going on – so if we have ADHD then maybe it’s really hard for us to plan anything or to stick to plans once we’ve made them. If our child has ADHD as well then that pulls us off track even more. There are all the challenges like depression, anxiety, alcoholism, over-eating, under-eating, excessive work, excessive social media use, and even ADHD which I’m becoming increasingly convinced are not very different at all. They’re all different presentations of the same underlying cause, which is chronically unmet needs. All of these diagnoses are society’s way of saying ‘we have expectations for you, and as long as you aren’t meeting them, we’re going to say that you are the one who is ill. Your job is to start meeting our expectations, and then we’ll consider you functional again.’ There’s no potential for the system that we live in to change, so we use these coping strategies to get us through – to numb us, to distract us from being present with what’s actually here in this moment. When we’re depressed or anxious or using substances or eating or not eating or working or scrolling through social media then we’re distracted. We aren’t present with what’s here in this moment. We get used to being numbed, and when something like our child’s ‘misbehavior’ drags us back into the present moment, it’s hard to cope with! It hurts! And it drags up all the old hurt that we haven’t dealt with yet. It’s no wonder we’d prefer to get back into our numbed and distracted state as soon as possible. Jen Lumanlan 09:24 So all of that stuff is there all the time, shaping the ways we’re able to be in relationship with our children on a daily basis, and then something happens and we’re having a bad parenting day. Maybe our child does something age-appropriate and because we have this temperamental mismatch, and attachment stuff, and diagnoses or diagnosables, it doesn’t take much to push us over the edge. Jen Lumanlan 09:48 So the big question for this episode is: what do we do when that happens? What do we do when one thing pushes us over the edge, and we shout at our kids, or we’re rough with them, or we shut them out because their big feelings are too much for us to cope with? How do we get out of that? Maybe we’ve become experts at apologizing; the “I’m sorry I did that; I’m having a hard time and I’m trying not to yell at you,” but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Maybe it feels like we should be better; that we’re supposed to be better, and instead we can’t get the needle out of the grooves of the old record of exploding and apologizing, exploding and apologizing. Maybe these are interspersed with moments of tenderness and affection but the difficult times are happening far more often than you want. So does it have to be like this? What would it take for things to not be like this? How can you recover when you have a difficult interaction at the beginning of the day so it doesn’t derail your entire day? Jen Lumanlan 10:40 Let’s look at the first of the three ideas to help you navigate difficult days, which is making a non-cognitive shift so you see the difficult days differently. I had a conversation recently with Margaret and Amy on the What Fresh Hell podcast – I have to say I really appreciate their show. They have great conversations with guests who are doing great work in respectful parenting, and it’s so obvious that Margaret and Amy do their research before doing these interviews, which of course I always appreciate. They did an episode on pattern breaking a few months ago that I listened to in preparation for the conversation and Margaret said that she doesn’t think it’s possible to break the patterns of our reactions to difficult situations. She says we can change our responses after we’ve entered into the pattern, and we can remind ourselves to use different tools and change the outcome of the interaction, but the actual pattern of getting triggered in the first place is set. And I had to respectfully disagree with that because I have seen parents change their patterns. For some parents, simple awareness about why they feel triggered can create a shift. Some parents can learn for the first time: “Oh, I thought I was having these big reactions because my child was doing something so inappropriate, but now I see that it isn’t really about my child at all, and I can trace this directly back to something that happened to me when I was young, and now it all makes sense.” And for those parents, that’s enough to make a shift – suddenly they don’t feel as overwhelmed by their child’s behavior anymore, and the knowledge of what was causing it was enough to make that happen. Jen Lumanlan 12:12 For most parents that isn’t enough, and I think that’s where this idea of “you can’t break a pattern” comes from. Maybe a lot of us have seen a lot of memes on Facebook and Instagram about how we can see our challenges differently and we think ‘yes! That’s true for me! And that’s how I want to parent!’ and we think: “OK; now I see why this is true, I’m going to do things differently.” But aside from that different cognitive understanding in our heads, nothing else has really changed – so...