227: Where emotions come from (and why it matters) Part 2

Denise, hi everyone. I am Denise, a longtime listener of Your Parenting Mojo. I love this podcast because it condenses all the scientific research on child development, compares it with anthropological studies, and puts it into context on how I can apply all of this to my daily parenting. Jen has a wealth of resources here, so if you're new to the podcast, I suggest you scroll through all her episodes. I'm sure you'll find one that will help you with whatever you're going through, or one that just piques your interest 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. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. My conversation with listener Akiko and Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett on the topic of how emotions are made, was so deep and required a good deal of background knowledge on Dr. Barrett's theory of where emotions come from that I split it into two episodes. In our first conversation, I provided an introduction to her theory, which she reviewed and offered minor corrections on so we didn't have to spend our half of our interview just reviewing the basics. So you might want to listen to part 1 of the How Emotions Are Made series first, as it will give you important background information. There was really no easy point to cut the interview and have both halves be approximately the same length. So at the end of our conversation in part one, we were talking about how we as parents can't always understand our child's inner experience. Dr. Barrett cited research showing that autistic kids who were having huge meltdowns weren't just having these meltdowns out of nowhere, like it had seemed to their parents and teachers, but that their heart rates were constantly elevated, meaning they were experiencing stress. It seemed to the adults like the kids really had to learn emotion regulation strategies, but the kids were already spending so much energy regulating their emotions, but the only thing the adults saw was the final straw that broke the camel's back when they couldn't cope anymore. And that point was one of the three key ideas that I left you with at the end of that episode. The other two key ideas were that we have a body budget, which Dr Barrett acknowledges is not a perfect metaphor. Some of her critics have seized on this as a maddeningly imprecise metaphor, which she's essentially describing is the concept of allostasis, which is how our brains budget energy for the basic tasks we need to stay alive. Movement and learning take up a lot of our resources, and eating and sleep provide us with resources. And of course, that doesn't mean we should stop moving. Stop moving and learning, because without those things, we wouldn't last long.

These things make our lives better and to have energy for them, we have to eat foods and get rest that give us the energy to do the movement and learning and other things that our bodies need. We also talked about meaning-making work, and how that connects with Dr Bessel van der Kolk's work in his book, The Body Keeps the Score, as well as Dr Chris Niebauer's work in his book, No Self, No Problem. I've seen Dr Barrett argue that the Body Keeps the Score is a terrible title for a book, because it's actually the brain that keeps the score, but the body is the score card in the episode on the Physical Reasons You Yell At Your Kids, I looked at this a little bit, and I would argue there's more interplay here between our bodies and our brains than much psychological research has given us credit for. And it's interesting to see Dr Barrett argue for the split when she draws so much on fields outside of psychology for support of her theory of emotions. But the larger point about meaning-making work is that when we try to make meaning out of situations we don't understand well, we get into a lot of trouble. We start to think of our kid who often scowls as the angry one, and the kid who smiles more as the happy one, when maybe the smiley kid is just better at hiding their anger. We have to get much more curious about the meaning that other people are creating from their experiences, rather than assuming that we fully understand their experience. So we pick up the conversation today with a continuation on the discussion around uncertainty taking up a lot of energy, and I think we can connect that uncertainty to what I just mentioned about learning. So Dr Barrett gave the examples of learning to crawl, learning to walk, going to a new school and going through puberty as metabolically expensive times due to uncertainty. And I find it helpful to think about the uncertainty being expensive, because we have to learn new ways to cope with it. So Carys and I have been talking a lot about her big feelings as she's approaching puberty, and she's told me that she used to feel like there was a sort of cover over her feelings that made them more manageable, and now that cover is gone, and so her feelings just come out a lot more easily. She's learning how to navigate that new experience, which is metabolically costly for her, so she has less of a body budget available for other things. So we pick up the conversation with Akiko and Dr Barrett about what this means for people who have a hard time creating stability in their families for a variety of reasons.

So what kind of implications are there for people, you know, with neurodivergence, ADHD, autism, or, you know, people in situations of poverty, where they it's really difficult for them to get that, you know, uncertainty reduced. What are the implications for them?

Yeah, well, I think it's really important. So I want the first thing I want to say is that there are certain external circumstances that just will be more difficult for a human to live healthfully in, because there the degree of chaos and uncertainty is very high. So just the conditions of poverty, for example, things like, you know, the regulation of temperature, the noise, both light pollution and also sound pollution. You know, there are real biological consequences for having to live in chaos. Don't even get me started about like political chaos and social chaos and what that's doing to everybody's body budgets, but it's relevant to parenting also. I mean, so I think anybody who lives in circumstances like that has a harder there's a bigger ask there. It's a harder ask. There's more demand on the parents' body budgets and parents, you know, I think body, but this idea that your brain is running a budget for your body, you know, it's and it's not budgeting, you know, money, it's budgeting salt and oxygen and water and all the nutrients that keep you healthy. And you can think about things like, you know, metaphorically, you can think about deposits and withdrawals and taxes and savings and so on. So I would say there's more tax. There are more taxes. Everything, metabolically is just a little more expensive. And so I think the first thing as a parent that you that you should do is just show yourself a little compassion, like just parents who are have anything that they're dealing with, chronic illness, even, right? Or a sick parent, or there are so many things that can introduce uncertainty and instability into a parent-child relationship, or into a parent's life, right? So it could be, you know, ADHD or neurodiversity, but it or poverty, but it also could be, you know, you are sick. You have an illness, you have a metabolic illness. Your mother or father has a metabolic illness, or you're helping a neighbor or, you know, so I think that's the first thing to understand. And I think the second thing that you know to understand is that you do everybody has some control that they can take over their lives, that to make things more regular. Not everybody has the same amount of control. Nobody probably has as much control as they would like, but everybody has some right? So simple things you could do, like get your kids off screens at night. That's important. Everybody can do that, even if you're a parent who's working several jobs, you can have your kids listen to a story, you know, on a tape or something, instead of having them watch a screen, watching screens at night is bad. I say this as somebody who struggles myself not to be on the computer at night. It's bad. It's bad because you have cells in your retina that detect light and dark changes to regulate your circadian rhythm, and when that circadian rhythm is not regulated Well, meaning you're staring at a screen at night where there's luminance of a particular at particular wavelengths that tricks your brain into thinking it's daytime, and you end up with circadian rhythm disorder or disjunctions that can drain your body budget in some really substantial ways. So, like that's just one example. I also think that it's possible to work with your kids to help together, to come up with constraints or plans or, you know, rules that you set out for yourself, schedules that work, you know? So if you have ADHD, or you have a lot of responsibilities, you can also just set a schedule for yourself and follow that schedule and have your kids follow that schedule. That's what we we did. And I grew up in poverty, I will say I grew up in very, very limited means, and having a schedule was is a comforting thing, usually for young children, not always for adolescents, right, but, but for young children. So I think there are various strategies that you can use, but you also have to understand that you're working, you know, with less than optimal circumstances. And so you have to be compassionate to yourself. You also it's very helpful to build relationships with other people who you know so for example, I have a friend who decided he wanted to adopt a child, and he was alone. He didn't have a partner, and he his parents were old and lived in another state, and what he did was he built a social network for her, basically. So there was always someone, a neighbor, a friend, a colleague, sometimes, but she understood. She didn't feel passed off from one person to the next. She understood, and she still understands, she's a grown up now that she has this wide network of people who care about her and who she and who are available to her. So that's always possible, too, other people you know, the best thing for a human nervous system is another human. The worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human. So you've got to be, you know, careful about who you ask. But basically, the idea here is that there are options you just once you understand the scientific principle, then you can be creative about this is how you use this is how you use science as a set of tools for living, instead of telling you, well, you should make friends with your neighbors and do this, and do this, and do this like a like a laundry list. You understand what the principle is you're trying to titrate or curate, you know, a certain degree of uncertainty and a certain degree of certainty. You're trying to walk that line. You're doing it because you know uncertainty is expensive. And now look at your life and try to see the places where you can where you can improve the predictability of things. And people are clever, even people laboring under less than optimal circumstances and figure things out.

I really like that idea of curating the uncertainty and predictability in your life that's that's really helpful framing. You just used the word earlier, bereft, which I think many of us don't really use that on a regular basis, or even at all, and you've talked about how it's important to have a bigger emotional vocabulary, and I was wondering if you could explain why that is, and also how that relates to what we were talking about earlier. We want to be humble about labeling other people's or our own emotions, and, you know, kind of stay more open and curious, but at the same time, it also helps to have a larger emotional vocabulary, like, what's the interplay there? I'm curious, because I don't want to use bereft when I don't really understand it.

Well, I think that there's a difference between having a large vocabulary and using it right. So I would say words are invitations to learn concepts, to learn meanings. And the more words you know, the more concepts you have, more concepts you have, the more flexibility you have, the more flexibility you have. That's a really good thing. What you're doing is you're teaching yourself that any given set of circumstances, your mood, what's going on around you in the world, any set of circumstances can be understood. You can make sense of it emotionally in in more than one way. And so the more flexibility you have, the more options you have. I think that's the main advantage of of being what we would call emotionally granular. Emotionally granular doesn't mean that you're always experiencing emotion. Sometimes you might be experiencing, you know, sometimes you experience something as having a bad you're having a bad body budgeting moment, and you just, you know, like I can remember telling my daughter, you know, you're just worked up. Today was a challenging day. Go to sleep. Tomorrow will be a better day. Everything will look different when you get some rest, and it does, as opposed to there are other ways that we could have made sense of that situation, right? So I remember when my daughter was five years old, she was having a play date, and she used the word loathe. I loathe. That is what she said. And the kid's mom called me and said, "What is wrong with your daughter? That no five year old should be loathing anything." And I said, "What is wrong with you that you don't understand, that she doesn't know what loathe means, other than I don't like that very much. That's what she doesn't know." To her, she heard the word she doesn't know what the word means in its normative meaning in English, the English language. She just knows it means, right? So like people who are not granular, they will use words like sad and angry and afraid to mean the same thing, which is, I feel bad right now, we see people using very, very indiscriminately the word trauma. I'm traumatized by this, they're using the word to mean I feel really, really, really bad about this. This affects me in a really, really, really serious way. Trauma is a very specific thing. It has a very specific set of features. Most people right now, when they're using that word, aren't using it to mean that they're having intrusive thoughts and that they are ruminating, and you know that they're having intrusive thoughts to the point where they feel like they can't function, and they feel, you know, some people do experience trauma when they say they are experiencing trauma, but other people use the word to mean, I feel very, very, very bad, like this is impacting me in a very, very it's hard. This is really super, super, super hard, and so I think it's important. I'm not like saying there's a correct way to use a word, but I do think again that context matters here so bereft, you could guess what that means. I mean, you can make a decent guess about what it means. It means I was very, very sad, and I felt I had, you know, lost something, and it impacted me significantly. And it's more intense then, and maybe more impactful than, you know, I feel sad. I felt sad about this. So being able to use words like use to refer to different concepts, it's not just about labeling. It's really about making meaning of your right, that irritation, frustration, anger, enragement, loathing, those are all. They have their own set of intensities associated with them, and it's helpful to be able to make those distinctions, because by virtue of making those distinctions, your brain is planning different actions planning. It's not like you feel something and then your brain plans an action. Your brain, when your brain is using a concept, making a concept and using it, it's planning an action. And what you feel is a consequence of that planning. Feeling derives from action planning, not the other way around. Your feelings don't cause you to do things. Your feelings are a clue that your brain is automatically planning certain actions, and you can use the features of the feeling to double check yourself. Like, do I really want to yell at that person? Do I really? I really, you know, would like to tell my boss, or I would really, I'm really frustrated with my kid. But do you really want to act on, you know, do you really want to let let that action loose or, or do you want to reconsider?

Yeah, I'm tying this back to a framework we use a lot in our Akiko, and I use a lot, and I use it in my work with parents, and in terms of nonviolent communication and the idea of understanding your needs. And it seems as though what you're getting at is, when you understand this kind of feeling, planning Nexus, what you're really understanding is, what is my need? And I can say, okay, you know, my my kid is is screaming at me right now, or whatever is happening. I have a need for respect. Maybe I have a need for for ease, for harmony, for, you know, all different kinds of things. And when I understand that need more effectively, then I can choose the action that I want to say to my child or not say anything to my child. Are we on the right track with that?

I think so. I think it's also important, though, to I mean, we all have needs as parents, because we're human right, but sometimes it's not reasonable to expect your kid to meet that need. Sometimes you have to go, you know, somewhere else. And it's tricky. It's really tricky, you know, like my daughter now is 25 and we were having conversation the other day, and I thought we were talking to each other like grown ups. So I said something to her that I would normally say to a friend, and I forgot for a minute that in that moment, she was still looking at me like I was her mom. And in the end, like, you know, it came up later that, you know, she was very upset by what I had said, and it made her worry and my okay. So there was a part of me in that moment was like, Oh my God. Like, you know, is this ever gonna stop my are you ever gonna see me as a person? Like, come on, you're 25 but that I didn't say that, I didn't express that, right? What I did was, I'm sorry, like I thought we were, I thought we were having a conversation as as friends, and that you wanted to know how I felt about something. And I told you the way that I would tell daddy, or the way that I would tell another friend, and I forgot that I I need to ask you first, like, I need to say: Can I say something to you, like we're friends. This is something that she taught me, actually, you know, when she was an adolescent, she said, can I tell you something, not as my mom, but like, pretend you're my friend. And I was like, sure I could, you could tell me. And then you have to honor that. Like, when, instead of going, what are you doing? You know, you you have to act like the friend. And then later, maybe after the moment, you come back and say, you know, is it okay if I just make an observation? So

Can I ask you something as your mom rather than as your friend? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

But I think this is also like, this is also something we use in our house, right? So one time we do these as if moments, right? Like one time when she was a middle schooler, she was being very badly bullied by these girls, and I was on a flight. I think I got caught in O'Hare Airport, so I was in Chicago, and I couldn't get home, and the flight was canceled, and it was a mess. She called me, and she's crying, and of course, I can't get home, and so I said to her, can I speak to your 18 year old self? Crying stops. There's silence. And I'm thinking the right thing to say. I hope that was right. And she says, did she gets and then she says, but a very grand voice, hi mom. She you know when, when she's upset, she'll call me Mama, and she'll, you know, but you know, come mom in her imagined 18 year old self voice. And I was like, hey, you know, I'm at the airport. I'm stuck here, and I'm remembering last time that I was stuck here. Do you remember what? Can you even remember what happened? I think maybe some girls were mean to you. And she was like, Yeah, I'm having a hard time remembering that. And I'm like, yeah. Do you even remember what those girls names were? She's like, No, I really don't like whatever happened to those girls? She's like, I don't really know. I'm like, Yeah, thanks, Mom. So this kind of, you know, channeling your future self, you know, imagining what something will feel like, not just in the moment, the flexibility isn't just how you feel right now. It's also understanding that however you feel right now, you might not feel that way later, if that later might be in 10 minutes from now, or it could be tomorrow, or it could be in a year from now. But feelings are changing constantly, and you can play a role in how they change, you know, and we're not talking here. I mean changing how you feel, it, everybody has more control than they think they do, but nobody has as much control as they would like. It's never as easy as they would like. It always takes. It's always harder and takes longer than everybody would like, but it's doable. It's doable. It's doable for you. It's doable for your kids. You just have to, you just have to have the tools and know how to use them.

Yeah, so that was, like a great example of how you helped your daughter, you know, maybe sort of recategorize, you know, how she was thinking and feeling in that moment. And I feel like that kind of advice is not common these days. Um, you know, even in sort of the so-called respectful parenting or gentle parenting arena, there's so much focus on, like, validating kids emotions and helping helping them to learn, you know, regulation skills like take a deep breath and, you know, count to 10, or, you know, whatever it might be. And I feel like your theory of constructed emotion kind of expands, you know, gives us a larger range of strategies in helping you know us as parents, help our kids to learn emotional regulation. I'm wondering what you would give us some advice about how to how to help them?

Yeah, so I would say all regulation strategies are just you recategorizing that is making a different meaning or doing something different with your body, or shifting your attention or right so you. It all has to do with meaning-making, basically. And I think there's no one strategy, or one set of strategies that works for everybody all the time, so you have to think of them more like a tasting menu, like just or a toolbox, right? And you've got to figure out which ones. So there are a couple of things I think that make a lot of sense to me. First of all, I when my kid is distressed, I want to fix it. I want to fix it. I want to fix it right now, because I feel distressed. But sometimes that's not the right thing to do. If my daughter were here, she'd be laughing and her eyes would be rolling back in her head, right? Because I this was something I really struggled with. But what we decided was that it was important to ask, do you want empathy right now? Or do you want me to help you fix this? Even a five year old can answer that question if you ask it in the right way. So you're asking them what they want. And a lot of times I think, like, if I think about my own relationship with my own kid, a lot of what she wanted was validation. She wanted empathy. I understand how you feel, but I really wanted to fix it, fix things. So the optimal thing to do is to ask, because you can't know for sure, and then to give them what they want, and then ask if you have permission to give them the other thing like give her empathy, and then say, I feel very strongly, I feel very compelled that I want to help. Would you be willing to hear me hear a strategy for helping? I think when you again, treat your children like they're people, they're little people.

So sometimes I think it's good to make it really clear when you're trying to help them regulate themselves and when you're regulating yourself in response, right? So sometimes I'll still, even now say: Can I nag you about something? I It's not that I think you need to be nagged, but I feel compelled to nag you about this, and I will feel better if you just let me nag you about this for one can I just be a mom for one second, will you just let me do that? She's never, ever, ever said no, but I've labeled it really clearly as my need, my need, and it's real. It's a real need. And so she has a way of now understanding what it means. Sometimes distraction is the right thing, not making a different meaning. Sometimes distraction is the right thing. It's all about flexibility and picking the strategy that is best fits the situation and the outcome that you're looking for. I think that's the the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more flexibility you've got. And making a distinction between, you know, what does your kid feel like they need? And you know what you may believe that what they need is one thing, but what they want is something else, but that's a different kind of a problem. So just give them what they ask. And then, I mean within reason, you know, like, oh, well, it would make me really feel better if I had 12 cookies, you know, like, okay, no, you can't have 12, but maybe you could have one. Yeah. So I think try to give them what they need, and then if you need something different, it's okay for you to say that, but you have to own it, you know, you have to own it. And I think it will help a child understand the me, not me, distinction, when you make that distinction as a parent, you know? Yeah, I remember when my daughter was 16, she came into my office and she said she was very, you know, she applied to college, very, very upset. What was she upset about? She was upset that she wasn't going to get into the college that I wanted her to go to. She said, I, I'm just and she was crying. She was like, I, I'm so worried I'm going to disappoint you. And I said, You know what, there is 100% chance that you will disappoint me. At some point in your life, you will disappoint me, and at some point in my life, in our lives together, I'll disappoint you too. It's probably already happened. So then what happens next? Right? Or and then we talked about it, and I said, and when I said, Yeah, but if you disappoint me, whose problem is that? So I'm a person. I have wishes and desires as her mom, but I also have to separate those and model that separation for her so she can do the same thing, not just with me, but with everybody else, right? So I think the thing to remember is that I every interaction that you have with your child is also a teaching moment. They're gonna learn something. They're you know, every interaction we have with each other, we're wiring each other's brains like all the time. Brains wire themselves to their world. Brains wire themselves to their world. That doesn't stop in childhood. It goes on throughout your whole life, slower and with more effort, but it goes on throughout your whole life, and what you put into the world with your actions and your words is the world that you end up having to deal with. You know, I think in in contemplative philosophy, it's called karma, you know, so that's the thing to remember. And will you always remember it? No, will you screw up, for sure, and then you have to own that and label it, because you're a person, and that's what your kid will learn, is that people make mistakes and then it gets repaired, and then everybody goes on from there.

Yeah, yeah, we're starting to use distraction more. Actually, my daughter's 10 now, and she uses the word I'm feeling dull, which she says it means that just nothing matters in the whole world. And she'll say, you know, Can can you tell me some jokes? And we'll look up silly jokes on the internet, and it will distract her from from that feeling of dullness, and then she feels better afterwards. And I just wanted to offer gently a reframe. What I'm hearing from you is such a need for competence in parenting, and that parenting is so important to you, Lisa, and I wonder if it would be possible to see your empathy towards your daughter that she's looking for as competence in parenting?

I think so. I mean, I try not to think about parenting as different from other relationships in the sense that you're trying to calibrate yourself to the needs, to the requirements of the person and the needs of the situation, and what that means when you're you know little person is a baby, or when they're two, or when they're five, or when they're 15, or when they're 25 it's different, but I don't think the rules of engagement are different than they are with any other person. It's just the way that those you know the actions that are performed, or the content is different, but the rules of engagement are the same, which is that you have to be able to distinguish your own needs from the needs of other people, and you have to be aware, try to be aware of your the impact that you have on other people, or to be strategically, to be strategically deciding you're not going to be aware, you know, like sometimes when I want other people not to affect me very much. I use a concept that my husband came up with, which is that's just electrical activity in somebody's head that can take the sting out of a lot, actually, right? But, but I am the architect of my own experience, and partly I'm architecting by my actions and my words. And you do that with your kid, and you teach your kid how to do that. They watch you do it. They learn how to do it. So maybe it's just being a competent person as opposed to being a competent parent, you know, yeah, it's just harder. It's just, it's just harder in parenting, because you're, it's like, you rip your heart out, and then you set it down on the ground, and then you just, you know, and then it goes off and toddles away, and then you've gotta, right? I think the hardest relationship to make that me, not me distinction, and it's very, very, very challenging, I think, even for the best parent in the world,

Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. We so appreciate your time. Dr Barrett and and to really understand what are the implications of your work for us as we are doing that work of ripping our hearts out and watching you walk away so so thank you for being here with us today.

For sure, my pleasure.

Thank you, Akiko, for the introduction. So glad that that you were able to make that connection for me. Really appreciate your being here as well.

Thank you Jen. Thank you Dr Barrett.

So I want to finish this episode by drawing some conclusions from across the two episodes. The first thing I'd like to mention is I was hoping Dr Barrett would engage a bit more directly with my question of researchers who disagree with her in the first conversation. Unfortunately, I found out right as we were getting started that she hadn't been able to access the questions that Akiko and I had meticulously prepared. Dr Dacher Keltner and Dr Jonathan Haidt. Yes, the same Dr Jonathan Haidt as who wrote the new book The Anxious Child, responded to Dr Barrett's criticisms of closed ended prompts and generated some more nuanced findings, including that many people in the US and India recognize posed faces showing anger, disgust and happiness, and very few recognize compassion, shame and contempt. Even if there is no universal arrangement of facial figures that are associated with these emotions, it does seem as though there are some arrangements that occur frequently enough that we can make a decent guess about what the person is feeling, especially if we come from the same culture as that person. I also think it's likely we can learn to infer a specific person's expression of anger, even though it's wise to check that what we are seeing is anger rather than assuming we're correct. Another dissenter is Dr Jaak Panksepp, who argues that emotions are biologically basic and inherited and can't be broken down into more basic psychological components. He sees emotions as living in networks in the brain that are inherited and shared with other mammals. Dr Barrett told us offline that there are a handful of people who both understand her theory fully and disagree with her, and I would guess that Dr Panksepp is one of those people. She said she enjoys and values their conversations, because that's how science gets pushed forward. She and Dr Panksepp have different theories or explanations for feelings, and maybe in time, as we come to understand more about the brain, we can be a bit more sure about which theory is correct, or maybe another theory will emerge to replace both of them. I wish we could have explored that a little more directly, but we'd already spent quite a bit of time on it, and there was so much more we wanted to cover that we didn't really have the time.

So the first overarching implication of Dr Barrett's work is that body budgeting is really important. Sleep, nutrition and movement explain a lot about how we feel in our bodies and what energy we have to cope with life. And when those things are off, then everything else can seem out of whack. So when we're parenting in an environment where we don't have enough support, so our own level of uncertainty is high, and we have one or two or three or more kids who aren't sleeping through the night, and we don't have time and maybe money to prepare food that we would otherwise prepare, and we aren't moving in a way that feels good to us. It's no wonder our own body budgets feel depleted, and then we combine that with our children's growth and depleted body budgets as they enter new stages in their development, and that creates more uncertainty for us, and we can see how we can get into a real downward spiral. I have to say, it was a bit hard for me to hear that screens at night are bad and that parents with ADHD should just make a schedule and follow the schedule and have your kids follow the schedule. I'd agree that screens at night probably aren't helping us to get to sleep, but I hope the judgment in that statement that screens are bad didn't cause you to experience so much guilt and shame that you turn tuned out the rest of the episode, because I definitely had a hard time with it, and we don't use screens before bed. I also think there's a lot more to parenting with ADHD than making a schedule and sticking to it, because otherwise parents with ADHD would just do that. I'm looking for someone to do a whole episode specifically on parenting with ADHD. So let me know if you have any suggestions on who might be good for that. I do think that widening our support networks is an important way to navigate the challenges of parenting, and this can be a positive experience, both for us and for our children, as Dr Barrett described. Everyone benefits when we have a wider group of people to support us and to be supportive for the other people in the network as well. Our capacities vary so much that having a wider network means there will be someone with more capacity when you have less, and you'll be able to support them when they need it as well. Rather than focusing so much on schedules, I find it more helpful to address it from the broader perspective of looking for ways to reduce uncertainty, because following a schedule is one way to reduce uncertainty.

I've talked a lot about how getting 10 minutes of daily special time with us can be an important way for kids to feel seen and known and understood for who they really are. That special time doesn't always have to happen at the exact same time every day. When we started doing this during the early days of the pandemic, my daughter would also meet her need for autonomy by deciding when we had special time. It would be different every day and I would say, you know, now doesn't work for me. I can do it at 2pm if the time she proposed didn't work, but in our situation, I really could do the work that I was doing when she asked either now or at 2pm so if I could get over the idea that work has to come before play, I could actually play with her now and meet her needs for play, being seen, understood and autonomy, and not compromise my need for competence in my work. I know this isn't possible for all parents in all situations, but I do think it's possible more often than we acknowledge when we get stuck in doing things a certain way.

Another of the ideas I wish we'd had more time to explore is how long we should support children in feeling their feelings. Dr Barrett spoke about this with Dan Harris on the 10% Happier podcast. She was talking about how we're often told to feel our feelings and let our children feel their feelings, contrasted with the idea based in her work, that while our feelings are real, they don't always mean what we think they mean. So for example, a stomachache might mean I ate too much, not that I'm dreading a difficult interview. And as I was listening to that episode, my husband and daughter were talking in the background, and my daughter just appeared off into a corner of the room with her head down and her shoulders were hunched and so I paused the interview that I was listening to with Dan Harris so that I could check in with with Carys. And I asked if she was feeling frustrated about something, and she said she was, and that it was her dad had asked her to do something in a way that made her think that she didn't have a choice about it. And so her feeling of frustration was useful for as long as it took for her to get support from me in offering alternatives to the thing that her dad had suggested/told her to do, and my hypothesis was that beyond that, there isn't a ton of value in continuing to feel the feelings after they've helped her to get the social support she was seeking. When our kids are younger, we can sometimes sense when they're in the middle of a meltdown, that somehow things have shifted, and that even they wish they could start crying, but somehow they can't beyond that point. They might even distract themselves. Maybe someone in the house will say something, or a bird will fly past the window, or the dog will bark, and all of a sudden they're out of it. And as they get older, you can ask them about this more directly. So a few days ago, Carys arrived home from her not school program. She was in a full on meltdown because her foot was hurting. She got a small cut on it a few days ago, and it was looking kind of infected, and so I got her in the bath, cleaned her off, got her cooled down, because it was a hot day and she'd been running around in black clothes all day. She was super sweaty. She got dried, she got dressed. We put some antibiotic on her foot, but she was still crying, and she was scheduled to go to her close friend's house, and she doesn't see this friend as often as she would like, and they were supposed to have a play date, and of course, there's an option to not go, and that was that option was always available to her, but I know how much she loves this friend, and was really looking forward to the play date. And so I said: Do you want to stop crying? And she said: Yes. And so we did the exercise where you look for five things. You can see, four things, you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. And I did it with her, and by the end of it, she was ready to head out for her play date. And I mentioned in the conversation with Akiko and Dr Barrett that we'll sometimes watch silly videos together when she's feeling what she calls dull, or if it's dinner time, I'll look up kid friendly jokes and we'll tell them at the dinner table. And I know we're using distraction in those moments, and honestly, I think it's okay. I think parents feel anxious about using distraction, especially parents who have been using respectful parenting methods since birth, when we deliberately did not distract our children from their hurts by dangling shiny objects in front of them. We've seen all the advice to allow our children to feel their feelings, and we remember how we were punished for having our big feelings. And we want to make sure that our kids know they can express their feelings with us. And I think all of that is great, and also it doesn't mean we want to tip too far the other way and allow them to encourage them to wallow in their feelings. So Dr Barrett says that feelings exist to help us figure out how to act. And you know, we use distraction a lot ourselves that's why we disappear into our phones or working really hard or buying stuff. We're trying to distract ourselves from our feelings.

So one thing we do not allow in our home is using electronics when we're very dysregulated, because I think that if we do that, we're learning to avoid our feelings. Devices are so attractive to our brains that it's easy to stop feeling our feelings entirely because we're so distracted by the device. So when our child is dysregulated, the first step is to figure out why they're dysregulated and address that root source. So I helped my daughter with her foot. I helped her navigate the situation with her dad, because those root causes were really important and addressable. We're starting to track what happens on the days when she feels dull to see if there's any pattern to it. But the biggest pattern we see so far is the combination of tiredness and boredom in the late afternoon. So it helps to have friends available to play in the late afternoons, like I mentioned in part one of this conversation. We don't necessarily have to dig for some psychologically complex explanation for these feelings of dullness. If the feeling has helped her to get support in meeting her needs for connection and autonomy and fun, then it's done its job. Beyond that, we don't have to wallow in it, and it's okay to distract ourselves or see if our child wants help distracting themselves, if they can't seem to get themselves out of it.

The final important implication of our conversation was that we can find tools that help us to be regulated in difficult moments. Dr Barrett mentioned thinking, do I really want to yell at that person? And that's called reappraising the situation. I think it's most powerful when we do it for ourselves, and I definitely find it helps me. So if another driver cuts me off, I used to feel angry about it, but now I just tell myself, I don't know what's going on in their life. Maybe they had a crappy day. Maybe they're rushing to pick up their kid from daycare because they can't afford the fee for being late. Maybe they're new in town, and you can know that to some extent by looking for out of state license plates and license plate holders that show you the names of dealerships that aren't in your area, and now I don't even go through the getting angry phase, my mind immediately goes to the reasons why the person might have cut me off. I will say, though, that this reappraisal is not always well received by others. So if someone else cuts my husband off when he's driving, he wants the first thing that I say to be empathy for him, something like, wow, that was really dangerous. He perceives me saying maybe the other driver's having a bad day, or if you weren't in the fast lane, he might not have gone around you and cut you off, as me not being on his side.

So be warned that reappraising for others is not always well received, but it can be really useful for yourself in all kinds of situations. You don't even have to be correct about what you're imagining might be happening, just the idea there is any other explanation for the thing you're having a hard time with helps you create some distance from the situation. So maybe your child refuses to do what you ask or answers you back, and you think you're being disrespectful. And then you think, Hmm, what if there's another explanation for the behavior I'm seeing? And then you realize maybe there is another explanation. Maybe your child is feeling tired or overwhelmed or anxious about something, and the thing you're asking them to do is beyond their capacity to cope with at that moment. Just think about the times when we've been in that situation and we say something snappy doesn't mean we don't respect the other person, just that we're having a hard time.

We don't have to jump to a conclusion about what our child is feeling. Oh, you must be feeling anxious. Let me fix that situation for you. We're just using it as a tool to consider that our first assumption may not be the correct one, and using that to create some space for ourselves to make a decision about how to act that's aligned with our values. We can use distraction as long as we're cognizant about what we're doing, and preferably if we are highly dysregulated, we stay away from screens for a bit so we can let ourselves feel our feelings first and really consider what our needs are and how we can get those needs met. And if we have a real need for connection with someone else, we do that rather than defaulting for screens. But if we have taken steps to understand and meet our needs and we need a little bit of help resetting after that. I think it can be okay to use screens to do that, and again, the key is to be conscious and to address the underlying needs first. We learn all kinds of tools like this in the Taming Your Triggers workshop that can help you create the pause so you aren't distracting yourself, and you aren't modeling distraction using screens to your kids, but we're modeling using our feelings as a key to understanding our needs first.

So I hope you found this deep dive into the origin of our feelings to be helpful. You can find all of the references I've consulted during these two episodes at YourParentingMojo.com/emotionspart2. That's emotions part and then the number 2.

I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy the show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can donate to help Jen produce more content like this. Just go to the episode page that Jem mentioned. Thanks for listening.