Q&A#6: Am I damaging my child?

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 of 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 to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today, I want to address a question that unfortunately I hear from parents pretty often, which is: Am I damaging my child? An anonymous listener submitted this question recently on the Ask Jen A Question feature on the Your Parenting Mojo homepage.

So I have trouble summing this up in two minutes, but I have certain sort of bad dynamics with my son who is five, and his father has really good dynamics with him, so I'm causing it, and I'm wondering how much I'm hurting his development. Now the son is in special ed group and considered to have some autistic and ADHD traits. And to be honest, I'm not sure if it's that or rather than just bad, bad dynamics with me. So he has behavioral problems due to that. And the problem is that when I get triggered and I react, I I often just raise voice and sometimes shout back at him, but sometimes, when it gets bad, I said quite hurtful things. I don't know how much he understands, but I do, I do understand that I was hurting him. I do apologize, but it's still bad, and when it happens, the thoughts of me hurting his development, and these being the four years, sort of rush in my head, and I get so triggered by this, the thought of how unfair it is that it's so difficult and that my failure is hurting him, that it kind of grows bigger. So how well can I fix it afterwards? Or do the four years really kind of set his destiny and him having me as a mother make his life worse?

Oh, my goodness, my heart absolutely goes out to this parent, and I have a bazillion questions, and I wish I had their contact information so I could get in touch with them and ask them about what's going on in their life. But unfortunately, I don't have that. So in this episode, I'm going to address the question that this listener raised by bringing up a host of issues that could be at play in this dynamic, and that may be at play in your dynamic with your child as well, in the hopes that we can support this listener and support you as well. Right off the bat, I think the most important thing to understand is that this listener is not alone. This is not a unique experience. Not knowing how to connect with your child can be incredibly difficult. But this is not the only parent who's going through this. Getting angry at your child and saying things that you regret is also not a unique experience. When I surveyed listeners last year to ask about the biggest problems they were having in their parenting, one of the most common responses I received was that listeners were having a hard time connecting with their children when their children misbehaved, and then they felt guilty for failing their children, and then they felt guilty about failing themselves as well and not being able to be the kind of parent they wanted to be. So I hope this starts off by reassuring the listener that you're not the only one having this experience, and I know that seeing that you're not the only one having this experience can be incredibly validating.

We also have to consider what's going on in this parent's life right now. Are they working full time and trying to juggle economically valuable activity with being a great parent, which is what society expects of them. Are they working in a demanding job where they have to be on an even keel all day, and then they get home and they finally have no capacity left to deal with their own child who's having big feelings. I see that a lot among teachers who are trained to manage children's behavior in the classroom, and it takes all of their strength and patience to be able to do that all day. And then they get home and they snap with their own children.

Are they parenting a child with special needs full time and not getting enough of a break? Are they parenting full time and wishing they had an outlet like work to be able to find their own identity as a person that isn't wholly tied up with parenting? Are they getting enough sleep? How's the division of labor in the home? Since the parents said that their partner has a good relationship with their son, I can imagine the partner is more than minimally involved as a parent, which is great, but when things get hard between this parent and the child, what happens? Does the partner blame this parent? If the parent has done a lot of reading and researching on parenting and on managing their anger, does their partner use this as a way to belittle a parent and show that their own methods are clearly superior? Does the partner participate in household task not just the execution of them, but also the scheduling and management of them? What's the division of labor related to the emotional climate of the home? Does this generally fall on this parent, even though they're having a hard time with it? All of these factors can contribute to mental and emotional weight that this parent may be carrying that is unrecognized in the family, that contributes to a narrowed window of tolerance. So when the child misbehaves, the parent has less capacity to respond in a way they want to respond.

The next factor at play is the child's neurodivergence. I'm not exactly sure what the status is of this, since the parent says the child has some ADHD and autistic traits, which implies to me, there might not be a formal diagnosis in place, or that does seem strange, given though the child is in some sort of special educational setting. I know that even neurotypical children's behavior can appear to be baffling to parents. So for example, many children will resist going to bed because they miss the parent, because they want to have a greater connection with their parent. They would rather do it in a way that didn't involve the parent yelling at them, but they will take the parent yelling at them over the parent's speedy exit from the bedroom at bedtime, which ends the possibility of connection. We might think, Well, why don't they just ask to play with us? And maybe they have asked to play with us earlier in the day, maybe we said we were busy or. Didn't have time or we thought their need for connection was met, because our need for connection was met. This can often happen when we spend a lot of time with our children, doing things like tours together that the child doesn't perceive as connecting. So I often hear from parents, but we spend all day together. How can I possibly squeeze any more connection time into our day? But from the child's perspective, the activities are not necessarily connecting, and 10 minutes spent doing something of the child's choice can make an enormous shift in the dynamic at bedtime, as the child's need for connection has been met earlier in the day. It's really important to try and see this from your child's perspective, if possible, because otherwise you can get into what one parent told me they experience as fighting realities. So a child might say, Well, you never spend enough time with me. You're always on your phone. And then the parent feels guilty about that and tries to defend themselves and say, I do spend time with you. And both of those things can be true. We might be spending time with our child, but we might be doing it in ways that don't truly fill their cup and meet their need for connection, and we might also be managing our guilt over that and our big feelings about other things that are happening in our days by spending time on our phones instead of dealing with the feelings that we're having. If you're having trouble understanding your child's needs, I'd really encourage you to go to YourParentingMojo.com/quiz. There's a super short, really easy question set there that you can answer a few questions about your child's behavior, and will give you help to understand what are the most important needs that they're having, and also some strategies you can use to meet their needs on a more regular basis. Once again, that's at YourParentingMojo.com/quiz. I think that one thing that's important to see here is that there's a dynamic building in this parent's relationship with their child, which is heading toward our dynamic between adults, where we kind of coexist instead of discussing our challenges. So when we become adults and we perceive our partners spending a lot of time on their phone, we might not say anything, we might allow resentment to build until we can't take it anymore, and then we explode, and our child hasn't yet learned to bury their feelings and needs, and so they ask us to spend more time with them, even though the request might be a bit imprecise, they can't fully articulate that the way we're spending time with them isn't meeting their need for connection. They know they want to be connected to you, but they don't quite know how to ask for that in a way that we can receive. Over time when our response is to do this arguing over realities where we say, "I do spend time with you," the child learns they can't win. They stop asking us for our time, and then they may repeat this dynamic in their relationship with their partner later in life.

I worked with a family years ago whose child was hitting the parents, often not in response to any particular provocation, but seemingly randomly. When the parent was just standing on the other side of the room, the child kind of running across the room and hit the parent. Child was around 6 at the time and had been potty trained for years, and would also save their poop each night in their underwear, having held it in all day. And it turned out that the child was having extreme distress at the reward and punishment systems that were being used in their school. And I know that changing schools can seem like a dramatic strategy to try and it may not be available to all families. For this family, it made a world of difference when the family changed to a school that used different practices, the hitting and the nighttime pooping stopped. And these are neurotypical children whom we might expect it would be relatively easier to understand their behavior.

When we add neurodivergence into the mix, it can get even more confusing. One thing it took me a long time to understand about ADHD is the hyperactivity and name Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and I couldn't understand why we would give already hyperactive children stimulants. And then when I looked into it, I found that children with ADHD have brains that are constantly looking for more stimulation, and medication can provide some of that stimulation, which allows the child's brain to relax. Now, I'm certainly not advocating for medicine as a cure for all ADHD, because in many cases, I think it creates a slippery slope that can lead to the need for other medications to manage symptoms from the ADHD medication. But when we see this need for more stimulation in a child with ADHD, we can look for ways to provide it, which then helps their brain to relax. It doesn't seem as though this child has any siblings, but often we'll see children with ADHD hitting their siblings as a way to provoke stimulation from their sibling. They're either looking for their sibling to play with them, or potentially even for a push or a hit back, which provides its own physical stimulation. This parent doesn't say what kind of behavior is leading to their own triggered meltdown, but if stimulation-seeking behaviors are a part of it, then addressing the child's need for stimulation is likely to provide a sense of calm for the child's brain, which then means they won't behave as often in the way that the parent perceived to be difficult, and then the parent won't be triggered as often.

The same kinds of things can happen related to autism. Since we don't know what kinds of behaviors the child is doing, let's just pick a random example, right? Maybe the child gets hyper focused on talking about a particular topic, and when the child's interrupted, accidentally or unavoidably, the child has a meltdown. To adults, and particularly to neurotypical adults, this behavior can seem mystifying and also one that should be changed. After all, nobody in the real world is going to accommodate our child's need to talk for as long as they like without being interrupted. But when we see this from the autistic child's perspective, which is something that autistic adults can help us to do, we can see the child is speaking for a long time, maybe partly because it's extremely difficult for them to regather their thoughts once they're interrupted. They may also perceive an interruption as an indication that we don't care about their thoughts, when this isn't actually true. So when we understand this behavior from the child's experience, we can put systems in place to help us both. I'm not saying we should never interrupt the child again, because there are times when it truly will be unavoidable, but if you've ever been interrupted in the middle of saying something that was important to you, then maybe you can get an inkling of what this might feel like, which might increase your willingness to try not to interrupt the child whenever it's possible and in the circumstances where it's unavoidable, for example, there's some kind of emergency happening, or something slips out before you're able to stop it. We can take steps like remembering what the child was saying before they stopped, which may allow them more easily to pick up their thought process again after the interruption. We can also try to reassure them that the interruption doesn't mean that we weren't interested in what they were saying, and that we will pay attention again once we've dealt with the interruption. At that point, it's possible the child will be better able to cope with the fewer interruptions that are now happening, so the child won't have an eruption, which means the parent is then less likely to melt down as well. I

I also want to point out the two levels of triggering that the parent mentions in their voicemail. So there's the initial perceived misbehavior that brings about the first incidence of triggering, and then afterwards, when the parent compares their behavior with their child to the standard of behavior they want to achieve with their child, there's a second triggering that's happening as the parent sees the huge gap between the two. And I think it's really important this parent knows they're not alone in experiencing this. Either, many parents have some sort of compass that they may feel in themselves is leading them towards the way they want to parent, or perhaps they've read a lot of books, they listened to a lot of podcasts on parenting and child development, and they've arrived at the experience of having a compass in a more analytical way. Either way of getting to this point is totally fine. The challenge happens when we have this compass pointing to where we want to go, but all we have to help us get there is a seemingly random set of tips that aren't really connected to one another. So we might have read or heard that connection is the thing that's most important to children, and maybe someone like a therapist has given us certain tools, like telling us to take a minute before responding, but in the moment when our child refuses to do what we've asked them to do, or hits their sibling for the 10th time today, and we start to feel overwhelmed and stressed out, then all of those tips and scripts just fly out the window, and we just cannot be the calm person that all of the books are saying we should be in those moments. We might shout at our child, or even if we're able to keep our voices calm, it's possible we will find ourselves saying things like, "Why would you do that?" which is a rhetorical question that we don't actually expect our child to answer and to which they're likely to respond with a feeling of shame. And we can know that we want our children to feel our love and know that we love them no matter what. And we can also know that in these kinds of situations that may well not be their experience. We might even worry that our children are afraid of us. We can know that we want to make a change and spend a lot of time on energy working on it, but it might seem as though the change we're looking for is not happening fast enough.

So these are some of the things I see coming up in the voicemail itself, and now I want to help us put that into context and understand what kinds of situations might trigger us, because if we understand these, we may be able to better see them coming, and potentially change our situation so that we avoid the triggering environment. And then the second idea I want to think through is to push back a little bit on what parents have told me about this being something within them that needs to change, and consider that maybe the problem isn't within us, but is within our wider society. So let's start by looking at the categories of triggers. And there are 9 of these that I'm going to draw from neuropsychologist R Douglas Fields's book, Why We Snap. And these can be remembered using a mnemonic, which is LIFEMORTS, with MORT meaning death in French, so the mnemonic means life and deaths. So there are nine of these anger triggers. And I have reached out to Dr. Fields to understand whether these have been scientifically validated in some way. They do seem to be written from his positionality as a middle class white academic. But I also see ways to fit types of triggers that he doesn't necessarily consider directly into these categories. The reason it can help to understand these categories is because if you know the kinds of things that are likely to trigger you, you can avoid your triggers and or take steps to manage them more effectively. So I'll say all 9 categories, and then we can look at each one in a little more depth. So the 9 categories are life or limb, insult, family, environment, mate, order in society, resources, tribe and stopped.

And so let's look at those one by one. The first is life or limb, which is the idea that almost anyone and most animals will defend themselves in what is perceived as a life or death attack. We may have experienced violence when we were children, or more recently than that, and when our children do things like hit us or hit each other, it can remind us of what we experienced. It's possible that we learn to react to our parents' anger with our own anger, but it's also possible that we experience one of the other triggered responses, which are flight, so removing ourselves from the situation as fast as possible; freeze, which is potentially getting stuck between fight and flight; and fawning, which is doing anything we can to make the aggression from the other person stop. So while I agree that almost anyone will defend themselves in what is considered as a life or death attack, this anger does not always take the form of lashing out. We might hit back, we might shout or rage at our child, which we could perceive as an expression of anger. But for some people, particularly women, although not only women, the most adaptive response when confronted with our parents anger will be to leave the situation as quickly as possible, or to try to placate the adult, to get them not to be angry anymore so they weren't won't hurt us. When our child does something like hit us, our brain may misperceive the hit as if it had come from a bigger, stronger parent when we were children, and react as if a life or limb threat were occurring, which then prompts the oversized reaction from us.

The next category is insults, which Dr. Fields says will easily provoke a rage response. And these underlie family feuds. They're a means of establishing dominance. Dr fields tells us to bear in mind that it's the perception of an insult that triggers the rage, even if the action was not intended as an insult. And I think this is important in our families when we consider things like the idea of respect, many of us learned in our families of origin that respect is the same thing as obedience, which means a child who respects a parent will do what the parent says. But if we look at another definition of respect, we can see that it can also mean to recognize the worth of a person or thing, which does not necessarily have to be tied to obedience. We parents can get into trouble when we want to recognize our children's worth and also have them recognize our worth, and then we ask them to do something, and they refuse, or we ask them not to do something, they do it anyway, and deep in our brains, we remember that old meaning of respect that we were raised with that equates respect with their obedience. We perceive that because our child is not obeying us, that they disrespect us. And of course, another way of saying a person has disrespected us is that they have insulted us. We can make really big shifts in our ability to navigate our children's behavior when we perceive that their behavior is their best attempt to meet their own need. It doesn't say anything about their level of respect for us, meaning their recognition of our worth as a person. It just means that they see they have a need and they have chosen a particular strategy to help them meet that need. They will almost certainly be willing to try another strategy that meets both of our needs, if we can propose it, and as they get more practiced at doing this, they become better able to generate these strategies themselves. If you want to dig deeper on this, I'd suggest going back to episode 207 on How to not be a permissive parent, where parent Diana thought that her daughter was speaking to her in a way that was bossy and inflexible and rude. And Diana came to see that perhaps her daughter was actually doing the best that she could. When Diana shifted her perception that this behavior was an insult to her, she no longer felt triggered by it.

The third category is family and Dr Fields says animals will protect their offspring and family members against attack or other threat. We see this in a mother bear protecting our cub, or when people are killed, when they come between an adult moose and their baby, and this is perhaps one of the most basic of all instincts and animals as well as people. I see this most often among parents who have more than one child, where one child regularly verbally insults or physically hurts the other child. It's most often the older child who is "attacking" the younger child, although that dynamic may be reversed if the younger child is particularly socially skilled to us adults, it might seem like one child responds in a very irritated way towards the other when sometimes it's warranted, when the sibling's been pestering the child, but at other times, the sibling might ask a simple question and receive a disproportionate response. Parents can experience this as heartbreaking, and on the surface, this is about finding what's fair without taking sides. We want our children to get along, and we tell them we love them, and we tell them we love them equally. But it's not okay for them to do this to each other. But each child probably feels like we're taking the other child's side even though we're trying not to do this. There's almost always a deeper level of meaning in these sibling struggles for us as parents, and this is usually linked to our experience and our families of origin. It can actually cut both ways. We may have had a terrible relationship with our siblings, perhaps even experienced verbal or physical abuse, often at the hands of an older sibling, and we may feel afraid that our own children will repeat the dynamic that was so difficult for us to grow up in, or we may have an amazing relationship with our own siblings and desperately want our children to replicate this relationship for themselves so they can experience the love and support that we experience, and their squabbling indicates our failure to create this relationship between the two of them. So we're trying to process this information about our own family of origin and how that's showing up in our siblings dynamic today, and as we try to figure out at the same time what's fair in their current squabble. It's no wonder we don't have enough capacity to be able to respond in a calm way. One idea that can really help you is to sit down with each child, not at a time when they're actually squabbling, at another time and ask them what kinds of things that we do and say really fill their cup and help them feel connected to us. And this is where we see that treating children equally doesn't actually meet either child's needs. One child may want us to build Lego with them every day for 10 minutes while another child wants to make sure we see their performance at dance class once a week. Once we see and meet each child's unique needs, they start to care a lot less about what the other child is getting, which leads to fewer fights that are instigated because our children are trying to connect with us, which means we feel triggered less often.

The fourth category is environment and Dr. Fields says that most animals will protect their own environment, their territory and home, because home and territory provide the basic necessity for survival. Dr. Fields says that border disputes between neighbors are a common trigger for violent attacks that may be instigated by trivial matters like an encroaching tree or a shortcut across their property. And I think that where this can come into play in our families is less related to the protection of our home and more related to the protection of our bodies. Many parents who spend a lot of their days in caregiving roles also spend a lot of their days touching and being touched. Some people thrive on touching and being touched, and other people prefer a greater degree of personal space between them and the people around them. It can feel disregulating when we like to have personal space, and our children want to climb on us and hug us and be within three inches of us, 24 hours a day. So in this case, a border dispute becomes a dispute over the border around our bodies, which we can think of as a body bubble. We will each have different size body bubbles, and when someone pierces our body bubble, we can have a big reaction. This can be very difficult to navigate with young children, but as our children understand the idea of "no," we can know that they understand what it means to want to be touched and not want to be touched. Very often, when a toddler says "no" to us, it's because they don't want to be touched. They don't want us to put their shoes on or to rub them with a scratchy cloth in the bathtub. When we honor and respect and their knowledge and find ways to work together, like bringing shoes with us or guiding their hand while they wash themselves in the bathtub, we respect their sovereignty over their body bubble, and we can explicitly refer to their body bubble as we're discussing these issues. And then when we feel touched out, we can refer to our body bubble and physically make motions with our hands indicating the size of our body bubble, asking our child not to be in our body bubble when we're having a hard time. If we ask our children to leave our body bubble, but we don't respect their body bubble, then chances are our request is not going to have much of an impact. But if we've been having conversations with them about their body bubble and showing that we respect their body bubble, hopefully also find a way for them to feel connected to us without being in direct contact with us, then they're more likely to respect our body bubble when we ask for it.

The M in LIFEMORTZ is represented by mate, which Dr. Fields says is violence to obtain and protect a mate, which is a rule of the jungle. This is the trigger for violence in domestic disputes, infidelity, attacks by jealous lovers since this one is less related to our relationship with our children, I'm not going to consider it further here.

The next category is order in society, which exists among other social animals, but is highly developed in human beings, because our species is so utterly dependent on social order for its survival. And I actually want to put this one off for a few minutes, because it has a lot in common with the last category, which is stopped. Okay, so we're going to put the O off and put it in with the S at the end, consider the R first, which is the category of resources. While money issues can definitely be a triggering issue for relationship between partners, I don't see anger related to money showing up as directly related to anger between parents and children in the families I work with, but there are other kinds of resources that are extremely valuable within our families. Our children may consider the resource of our love and time and attention to be the most valuable currency in the family, and when they perceive another child as getting more of that currency than they are, this can provoke anger in them. We may also consider our time and energy to be both valuable and limited resources, and when it seems like our children are using more of those resources than we are, it can also provoke a lot of anger in parents. I also see anger related to resources being directed outwards in places like the school system, where parents are unable to access resources for their children that would support their children's learning. So for example, if the school denies a child access to certain accommodations, or even refuses to assess the child to determine whether the child should receive accommodations, parents may experience extreme anger at their inability to access what they perceive as needed resources.

We actually have the T in LIFEMORTZ as well, to get to before we put the O and the S together, and that T stands for tribe. And the description is that humans, requiring a tight social structure for survival, will fiercely defend their own tribe and us versus them, imperative rules. In families, this can unfortunately show up in struggles for resources, where parents believe that their family doesn't have access to as many resources as other families, especially when those families are in a resource constrained environment like school. So families might advocate for classes or extracurriculars that they perceive will help give their children an advantage without considering the impact of fewer resources being available for other children who would benefit from different services. Both families involved in this kind of scenario may become very angry when they perceive that they are being denied access to resources, or that resources they have once enjoyed access to are being taken away.

Okay, so let's finally return to order in society in its combination with the category of stopped. So violence is used to enforce the rules of society, to ensure fairness, to correct transgressions. Dr. Fields gives examples of imprisonment, fines, firing someone from a job and revoking a professional license, as modern practices of forcing people to comply with the rules of orderly society through violent action. He describes these, these actions as violent action, so if the person still does not comply, we forcefully remove their liberty and things of value with an intention to harm and punish the individual who transgresses. Rage attacks frequently break out in response to a perceived social injustice. Dr. Fields says that this trigger often incites mob violence. I want to consider this trigger alongside the last in the LIFEMORTS mnemonic, which is stopped. So Dr. Fields says that animals will struggle violently to escape restraint, even to the extent of gnawing off their paw if caught in a trap. And while we can certainly think of isolated cases of people physically hurting themselves through to escape a physical trap, the more interesting aspect of this to me is being restrained, cornered, imprisoned or impeded from the liberty of pursuing one's desires, which will trip this trigger of rage, the stopped trigger is what motivates individuals or groups to seek liberty through violent actions such as revolution and war. So now you start to see the connection between the violent action through the stop trigger and the mob violence through the order in society trigger.

And I want to link these two things together using Dr. Jennifer Mullen's framing from her excellent book Decolonizing Therapy. So if you close your eyes for a minute and imagine a mob, and you picture what they're doing, the shapes their bodies are making, what they're wearing and if you now take a closer look at what color their skin is, you may picture the kind of image of a darker body that's often shown alongside descriptions of mob and raging and riots. And it reminds me of the news coverage after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, where a sample image of a Black person carrying groceries is accompanied by the caption, a young man walks through chest deep floodwater after looting a grocery store, and a comparable image of a White couple is captioned, two residents wade through chest deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store. When we see a "mob," we see unjustified violence. And Dr. Mullen says that "There are perfectly healthy explanations for why a group of people, not a mob, would demand justice and freedom. The release of rage is in itself an ancestral bellow for safety, justice and a demand to be heard."

And the reason I'm most interested in these two rage triggers is because I think they show up more often than we realize in our families. I'm preparing a module of content for the Parenting Membership on the topic of anger and rage, so I've been doing a lot of reading on this topic lately. We'll explore the idea of mom rage, specifically in an upcoming podcast episode, through an interview with journalist Minna Dubin in a couple of weeks. Her book is among the best I've seen of the many books discussing mom rage, because it doesn't just acknowledge that mom rage exists, but also proposes strategies we can use at both the personal and policy levels to address it. I'm following Minna Dubin's lead here and not referring to parent rage, because mom rage is not divorced from gender. There are power dynamics at play in the oppression of mothers, which leads to anger and that are not recognized if we assume moms and dads experience this rage in the same way. Mom rage sits within a broader category of rage about our position as women and alongside rage that some of us may feel about the oppression of people of color, particularly if we identify as a person of color, as well as rage about our economic circumstances as we realize that no matter how hard we work, it will never be enough. As much as I would love to explore all of those issues in depth, what I will say for right now is that Black women may experience the most rage of all, as they bear the brunt of racism, gender-based discrimination, as well as economic discrimination. So perhaps the angry Black woman stereotype, well, obviously a harmful stereotype is actually justified. I would be pretty angry too. As I was exploring the rage that women experienced, I found one of the most useful books was Soraya Chemaly's book, Rage Becomes Her. It's very readable, but you can tell it's my kind of book, because it has 64 pages of notes and references, and it's pretty hard not to be angry when you read about the higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders in women, which isn't only because women seek help more than men do, but because they're experiencing more stress and anger. Women are more likely to experience shame than men, which we saw in the voicemail that started this episode. As we see that second level of triggering brings out a feeling of shame in the parent who left it. Shame infuses parenting because we're all supposed to be perfect parents all the time, at same time as we manage our body weight and body hair and our smell and everything else about ourselves to ensure that we are desirable to men. Soraya Chemaly describes giving a talk to students at an unnamed college in New England about feminism and gender and violence, and she had a conversation with the students about their ideas about gender inequality, and the conversation turned to sexting, and a 19 year old man at the back of the classroom asked, "What's the difference between sharing a picture of my toaster and sharing a picture of my naked girlfriend? Either way, the picture is mine." Another student asked, "I mean, if she gives it to him, what does she expect?" Chemaly says that, "The young man's choice of a toaster was fascinating. He equated the woman in the photograph with an actual tool, perceiving both in terms of their instrumentality. They were inert possessions to be used and lacking in self-determination. A toaster, coincidentally contains warm slits and produces consumable pleasure. If the woman, unlike a toaster, had any boundaries that should be respected, they were easily done away with in the subtle shift from subject to object. Stymied and laughing to myself, I couldn't figure out how to answer his question in the scant few minutes left. Women and toasters are different. Did I really have to explain this, out loud?" When our young men today can't perceive that a young woman has agency and a right to privacy and to consent over the use of her image, this isn't just an academic discussion. This represents years of subtly and not subtly, learned lessons about the value of women's bodies. Chemaly notes that the women in the classroom didn't appear to feel offended by the toaster boy's assertion. If anyone was indignant, it was toaster boy who thought that his property rights were being disrespected. Toaster boy's assertion of property rights sees a woman's body as existing solely for his pleasure. The woman may experience a momentary sense of power as she shares the picture of herself and receives approval for it, but she probably does not consent to toaster boys sharing her image with everyone else in their class.

The kind of narratives that make avoiding rape women's responsibility are everywhere. I recently read a fantasy novel aimed at tweenagers to my daughter, and the first book in the series was set at their grandparents house, where the older girl and younger boy siblings fought and they defeated evil monsters. They were the usual ideas about gender norms sprinkled throughout the book, things like women always being described as pretty and slender or fat and their prettiness not being mentioned. But these ideas were not overwhelming, so I was blindsided when we started the second book in the series, which was set at the children's school where gender norms are policed as a routine part of the school environment. We could barely make it through a single page without having to discuss an idea, and we had a particularly long discussion when the girl character, Kendra, was trying to get one of her friends to accept a ride home with her rather than walk home with a boy that Kendra knew was a goblin. We stopped to talk about why it was the girl's responsibility to keep herself safe, acknowledging, you know, all bets are somewhat off when you're trying to keep your friend safe from a goblin. But the goblin was posing as a boy, and the broader narrative was the author was teaching girls it is their responsibility to keep themselves safe from boys. My husband piped up to say, "Girls actually do need to keep themselves safe from boys." And I asked, "Where are the messages teaching boys not to attack girls?" There are hundreds more examples like this, and rage becomes her with women not being believed about their credentials as a doctor, with Chemaly not being believed when she said she was a speaker at a conference, rather than a host, whose job it was to take the male speakers from one event to the next, and with the tone of everything we say being policed, and if we still come across as too loud or too shrill or too angry, we're put in our place.

Approval from others is important among members of social species, like humans and so women tend to seek approval from higher ranking males. This means that the same men who put us down are the men whose approval we seek. The evidence suggests the energy it takes to manage our feelings and our bodies, firstly, to keep ourselves safe, and secondly, to gain and maintain the approval of men requires an enormous amount of our energy and time that is energy and time that we do not have to spend meeting our own needs, so we have less capacity when our children ask us repeatedly for help getting their means met. It's hundreds of wasted hours and so much wasted brain capacity that could have been used on things that are meaningful, and instead, we're used on trying to keep ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally safe.

I also think it's important to come back to the idea that we mentioned earlier, that we don't have to have personally experienced violence for violence to touch us. Dr. Jennifer Mullen ties together a lot of threads from different sources to understand the ways that intergenerational violence has affected us. Dr. Mullen describes 37 founding practitioners in psychology and their theoretical or assessment contributions. All of these founding practitioners are White, most are men. None have acknowledged the efforts of intergenerational violence on us and our families. This can happen when our own parents experienced violence directly and pass on the effects of their trauma to us. Dr. Mullen quotes the Aboriginal Healing Foundation as stating that, "The effects of trauma are not resolved in one generation. When trauma is ignored and there is no support for dealing with it, the trauma will be passed from one generation to the next. So what we see learn to see as normal, we pass on to our own children." To be more specific, when our parents experienced violence, especially in their own families, and they grew up with a model of what it means to be a parent, which they then passed on to us as they raised us. Resmaa Menakem book, My Grandmother's Hands, is also relevant here. He says that "When European settlers first came to this country centuries ago, they brought a millennium of intergenerational and historical trauma with them stored in the cells of their bodies. Today, this trauma continues to live on in the bodies of most Americans." Menakim's larger point is that White people didn't arrive in what is now known as the United States and suddenly start killing indigenous people out of nowhere. They had been the victims of trauma through experiences like seeing people being home drawn and quartered or being beheaded in public spectacle as punishment for a crime. White colonists brought this experience of trauma with them and then began enacting it on indigenous residents. This means that although Black and indigenous people of color have experienced, on average, a far greater depth of violence, violence also runs like a thread through White families, even if our own parents never hit us.

So with all of this in mind, we return to the parent who left me that voicemail, saying their poor relationship with their son is their own fault, and wondering if this is damaging their son. Given the evidence we've reviewed, I feel very confident in saying this is not the parent's fault. It is not the parent's fault they were born into a culture of violence, and may have experienced violence in their own family, and that they are almost certainly living their daily life without getting their needs met. It is not their parent's fault that they've had these experiences, and we now know enough about children's development that we can say that this may well be having some impact on this child. Research indicates that having one parent with whom the child has a close relationship can be an important buffer. But obviously the situation is not ideal. It's a tragedy that this parent lives in a cultural and historical time where their needs are not being met, and now we finally understand the impact of this on children in a way that we haven't in the past. And this means that even though it's not this parent's fault this situation is happening, it is this parent's responsibility to try to make some changes, and these changes should not just happen at the individual level. We have to advocate for policy changes, to recognize the value of carework, to provide help for people who provide carework and to provide culturally relevant mental health support. We are and have been very close to achieving some of these goals in the past, but we haven't fully realized them yet, and this means that we are in the unfortunate position of seeking individual level fixes to what is in large part a societal level problem. This shouldn't be where we are, and yet this is where we are. The alternative is to pass on our traumas to our children, which I think it's safe to say that none of us want to do.

So I want to offer some general thoughts to help this parent and hopefully other listeners as well, who find yourself in this position and this falls into three main buckets. The first is that it can help to understand the origins of your trauma if you don't already know this. A therapist can help with this, and sometimes just the insight that comes with this knowledge can create some kind of shift, even without the person learning any new tools, although this is fairly rare. Beginning to heal from that trauma is important too. Understanding the parents unmet needs and starting to take steps towards meeting those needs is crucial. And the most crucial piece of that crucial step is understanding the difference between needs and strategies we use to meet our needs. So taking a bath is not a need. Taking a bath is a strategy to meet a need for self-care. When you say, I need to make dinner, that is not a need. Making dinner is a strategy we are choosing to meet our need for food, which could be met by going to a restaurant, picking up food, throwing a frozen pizza in the oven, or having cereal for dinner. Throughout our days, we probably find ourselves saying to our children, I need you to: I need you to put on your shoes, I need you to brush your teeth. I need you to stay in bed. And in all of these instances, we are not expressing a need. We are expressing a strategy we have chosen to meet our need, and we use the word need to make our strategy sound more important than our child's strategy. When we understand the need underlying the strategy we've chosen and that our child is resisting in this moment, then we find ways to meet both our real need and our child's need as well. If we haven't had our needs met for a long time, it can be hard to see where to see where to even start doing this. I'd recommend using the needs list at YourParentingMojo.com/needs so you can be sure you're identifying a need rather than a strategy. As you look at that list, notice what changes you observe in your body. When you see yourself thinking, Yes, that's what I need, and either getting excited or experiencing a sort of settling, you can be reasonably sure you've identified a need of yours that isn't being met right now and is important to you.

Next, try to brainstorm at least 10 ways you can get that need met. In my book Parenting Beyond Power, I give an example of a parent who has a need for connection, and you might do things like ask for a hug or a kiss or a back rub. You could call a friend or a relative, go for a walk with a friend or relative. You could do something special for another person, or express appreciation for something another person's done for you. You could make a point of looking a person in the eye when you're talking with them, or remember a previous connecting conversation with them if they aren't available right now. You could learn how a person who is important to you likes to receive love and do something that helps them to meet that need. You could share something interesting with them that's happened to you. You could be honest about how you're feeling. You could make a point of listening intently to them and not interrupting them. You could do something new together, play a game, be silly together, do something to show them that you're on their side. You could tell them you love them. You could meet someone new and do any of these steps with them. And this is by no means all of the strategies you could use to meet a need for connection, and there are tens, if not hundreds more. So make a list of the 10 to 20 strategies that call to you the most for whatever need is most important to you, and stick them somewhere. You'll see them often. You might make a point to do one of them each day. You could start a journal so you can see how doing those activities helps you to shift your mood and your outlook on life. Of course, you probably have more than one unmet need, so you can do a similar process for your other needs.

The next step I would try would be to choose a conflict that you're having with your child that occurs regularly, and this could be something like putting on their shoes, brushing their teeth, getting them to stay in bed, or any of the other typical parenting struggles Next, try to get underneath the strategies to the needs. So you've been saying, put your shoes on or brush your teeth or stay in bed, remembering those are not your needs. Look at the list of needs. See if you can identify the needs that lie underneath the strategy you've chosen, which may be things like ease and collaboration and rest. Now think about the strategy your child has chosen, which may be resistance. They're saying no, I won't put my shoes on or brush my teeth or stay in bed. What needs are underneath their strategies? Very often with young children, the most important needs are for autonomy and connectedness. So if they want to decide what happens to their own body and/or they want to feel connected to you, they will resist your requests that don't help them meet their needs. Now make a list of the strategies you think could help both of you to meet your needs, and if that's too hard to do all in one go, you could first consider strategies to meet your needs, even if your child may not accept all of them, and then try to put yourself in your child's shoes and imagine all of the strategies that would meet their needs, even if you, as the parent, might not find all of them acceptable. When you put those two lists together, what do you see? Are there areas of overlap? If you were to modify one of the strategies, would that make it more acceptable to the other person?

The third of the three big three buckets that can really help us is finding community. It's one of the biggest challenges parents can face, because at the very moment when we need community the most, we find that we don't really have it. Even if our parents live close by and are willing to help with childcare, they may parent in a way that's so different from our values and goals that we hesitate to ask them. We might see that we do things very different. From many other parents around us, which creates a disconnect. It can seem like the only other people we can ask for support are other parents with young kids who are so busy they wouldn't possibly be able to help. I've worked with parents who think they can't ask anyone else for help, and they were unless they are actually, legitimately dying. I think we need to radically reevaluate what it means to give and receive support. One thing I've noticed from the parents I work with is that when we make an initial ask for help, it isn't an imposition on the other person, but rather a gift that allows them to ask us for help in the future. And when we conceive of our community as much broader than just other parents with young children, we open up possibilities of getting our needs met in creative ways. Many retired people have time on their hands and feel lonely. Many parents of young children wish for time alone, and it probably seems like we were stretched and possibly thin. There are obvious synergies here to ask for and offer help. There's more to it than this, of course, but the three big ideas of understanding where your trauma comes from and beginning to heal that hurt, understanding your needs as well as get them met more often and understanding your child's needs so their behavior becomes easier to cope with, and then finally, creating a supportive community are the critical components of not passing on our trauma to the next generations. Because we aren't just talking about this one child, we're also talking about all the children down the line who may be affected by it today, if we don't do something differently, just like we've been affected by nobody making those decisions in our past, it's a lot of responsibility butut what we're also looking at is the possibility of true thriving, true thriving for ourselves, not just so we can be better parents, but because we're whole people, and we have a right to thrive. True thriving for our children who come to see that their whole selves are acceptable to us and lovable by us, just as we wish we had been accepted and loved by our own parents and caregivers. And true thriving for all the generations to come, which happens because we here today, have the insight and courage to interrupt the cycle. It is difficult to do this work alone, and I don't believe we should do it alone.

We'll hear from a parent in a few weeks who has found that sharing honestly and openly with friends she trusts about how she's exploded at her children helps her to heal the shame that she feels. So she doesn't just tell a friend I exploded at my kids, but instead says exactly what she did, exactly what she said, that she's feeling so much shame about. Shame thrives in secrecy and hiding, and so sharing our experience with people we trust helps us to feel less shame. I created the Taming Your Triggers workshop to address all three of the main topics we need to show up differently for our children. We learn the real causes of our triggered feelings. We begin to heal from the hurts we've experienced. We learn how to identify our needs and our children's needs, and you get support in doing this in your unique situation. So even if the needs seem completely incomprehensible right now, we help you figure it out, and then we work together to find strategies that can meet both your child and your needs, and when that happens more often, you explode less often.

And finally, we create community. I've worked with parents who have experienced huge shifts on day one of the Taming Your Triggers workshop, when they see hundreds of other parents introducing themselves and explaining that they're doing the best they can, and they still explode at their kids, and all of a sudden, they perceive their own parent who would cause so much hurt in them in an entirely different way. And that shift can produce insight and forgiveness. We share the things we're ashamed of knowing that we're almost certain never to run into the other workshop participants in the grocery store. We get practice asking for help and then receiving help and offering help to others that we can take out into our real lives as well. It's a deep, powerful, intense experience that leaves participants truly changed. It's not just a set of tips and tricks that leave you better able to hold the lid down on your simmering frustration, but that truly nurtures and heals all the parts of you that are hurting. Enrollment for this season's workshop will be open very soon, on Sunday, September 29. The 10 week workshop gets underway on Monday, October 14. You can join the waitlist now at YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers, and we'll send you a coupon code for when enrollment opens.

We'll also invite you to a masterclass that's happening on Friday, September 27 at noon Pacific, and we're going to do this differently from masterclasses we've done in the past. We're going to send you the recording of a previous year's presentation, and then we'll spend all of our time together live, doing Q and A and coaching. And the coaching tends to be incredibly impactful for parents, both the parent who is being coached and the parents who are watching, who see that others struggle in very similar ways that they do and that we truly can find strategies that meet both our needs and our children's needs. I'd love to see you at the masterclass on September 27 and in the full workshop as well. You can sign up for the masterclass and get the coupon code by joining the workshop waitlist for the full Taming Your Triggers workshop, all of that you get at YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers and enrollment will open again for the full workshop on Sunday, September 29 so masterclass on the 27th you get the recording before that to watch at your leisure. And then if you come to this recording after the 27th you'll be able to enroll in the full workshop, which opens on the 29th. So I'm so looking forward to meeting you in one or all of those places.

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 Jen mentioned. Thanks for listening.