237: 8 reasons your child won’t tell you what’s wrong – and how to help

Adrian  00:03

Hi, I’m Adrian in suburban Chicagoland, and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child. From tooth brushing to sibling fighting to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you’re facing that hadn’t seen possible before. If you’d like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not. That’s less than one minute long that describes what’s happening and email it to support@yourparentingmojo.com and listen out for your episodes soon.

Jen Lumanlan  00:53

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In this episode I want to address some of the most common challenges that parents have when they first start implementing the ideas they hear here on the podcast, specifically related to not being able to understand their children’s feelings, because the kids won’t tell them what’s going on with them. Perhaps their child isn’t old enough to speak yet, or doesn’t speak much or at all for some reason. Their child might not respond when the parent asks how they’re feeling, or they might say ‘stop talking to me with all that therapy speak,’ or “I don’t caaaare!”

Jen Lumanlan  01:25

In this episode we will help you to understand the eight main reasons why your child can’t or won’t tell you how they’re feeling, and give you concrete actionable strategies to address each one of them.  This episode draws heavily on my book Parenting Beyond Power How To Use Connection And Collaboration To Transform Your Family And The World. It also goes beyond the little bit of information in the chapter on common problems parents have with problem solving conversations simply because the space available in the book was limited. Some of the ideas here are also a bit different from in the book because the book looks at challenges parents have with problem solving conversations more broadly.  Here I want to focus more tightly on why your child might not be willing to share their feelings with you – so focusing mostly on the beginning of the conversation, where many parent I talk with are getting stuck. So let’s get into it.

Jen Lumanlan  02:17

We’ll begin at the beginning by looking at the youngest children first many parents discover my work before their children can speak in full sentences, and they wonder how on earth am I supposed to have a problem solving conversation with a young child who can only say a few words, never mind how they’re feeling. When I coach these parents one-on-one it’s actually very easy for them to get a reasonable understanding of their children’s feelings. When we expect a child to use their words to tell us their feelings they’re not going to be able to do it when they’re aged one or two.  But if we put ourselves in their shoes and try to understand how we would feel if we were in their position, most of the time we can actually understand that fairly easily. The tool I use with parents in my private coaching sessions is the same feelings list that’s publicly available to you at your parentingmojo.com/feelings.  It’s freely available to use, you can download a PDF to print and stick on your fridge, there are options to download in multiple languages and if you don’t see your language represented and we’d like to translate the feelings list please do reach out to support@yourparentingmojo.com. We would love to make that happen. We also have picture based version to print and share with your kids. So they can get used to using it. So once you have your feelings list, you might want to close your eyes for a minute or so and imagine yourself as your child. Imagine yourself in a small body being told what to do for a good chunk of the day, at home, and maybe in childcare or at preschool as well. You’re pretty clear about what you want to do and how you want to do it but it’s hard to find the words to explain that to people in a way that they can understand and also makes them want to help you. Now bring to mind the challenge that you’re having with your child and try to frame that in a non judgmental way. So we aren’t working on why my child is refusing to brush their teeth; we’re working on why tooth brushing has been difficult recently. With that in mind, open your eyes and look at the feelings list and see if you can hold yourself in your child’s perspective and imagine what it’s like to be them in that situation, and think about and write down the feelings that come to your mind. The vast majority of parents I work with are pretty capable of putting themselves in their child’s shoes and understanding their child’s feelings when they put their mind to it. This means that the child not being able to verbally communicate their feelings doesn’t have to be a barrier to using problem solving techniques.

Jen Lumanlan  04:34

The second reason why children might resist sharing their feelings is because we are focused on trying to change the child’s behavior, or we’ve done this in the past, even if this isn’t our explicit intention this time around. So if you think about a time when somebody has come to you and has tried to change your behavior- whether it was a parent when you were young, a spouse more recently, or even a boss, you might remember some of the feelings that popped up when that happened – especially if you thought the way you were doing the activity was actually objectively the better way. Most of us resist having our behavior changed. I resisted having a child for several years for not much more of a reason than my mother-in-law wanted me to have a child!  When we approach a challenge we’re having with our child from the perspective of wanting their behavior to change we can expect before the conversation even begins that they’re going to resist, and the best way a child has to resist is to refuse to participate in the process. We can have a pretty good idea that we are going into the conversation with a goal to change the child’s behavior when our statement of the problem contains the word “you.”  So “can we talk about why you won’t get dressed in the morning,”  “Can we talk about why you keep yelling at me,” and “Can we talk about how to get you to stop hitting your sibling” are all great examples of a parent focusing on changing a child’s behavior. Seeing a behavior that we want to change might be a reason why we want to have a problem solving conversation with our child, but if we express it to our child in that way they’re going to resist.   It is possible to form a neutral observation using the word ‘you’ but when you’re just learning how to start making these observations, I’d recommend avoiding that construction for now. I think one of the reasons we get sucked into thinking that their behavior has to change is because we’ve been doing things a certain way for a long time – sometimes we consciously chose to do them that way, but sometimes we just fell into them for no real reason and kept doing them that way.  Then we expect our children to do things the way we’ve always done them when they may have their own ideas about what would work better for them.  Then we get into a power struggle.  I explored this in an early episode which was an interview with Alfie Kohn, where I’d read an article on how to use rewards to get a child to comply with doing household chores like putting clothes in the hamper.  We can reward our children for putting their clothes in the hamper and they may do it while we’re rewarding them, although they may stop once the rewards stop.  But why weren’t they doing it in the first place?  When we reward them, we miss the opportunity to ask that question.  If they weren’t putting their clothes in the hamper because they had a need for ease, then how could we make this easier for them?  Could we put a hamper, or even just a laundry basket, in their room so they don’t have to go out to the bathroom?  We also miss the opportunity to ask why we want them to use the hamper in the first place – what need are we trying to meet? Most likely it’s needs related to ease, collaboration and teamwork (so I’m not the only person doing all the work in the house) and competence in parenting – so I can feel more confident that I’m raising a child who has skills to succeed in the future.  There are a hundred other ways I could get those needs met, and I would put money on being able to identify some ways my child could help out around the house that also met her needs. And then I wouldn’t have to bribe her to put her clothes in the hamper, and both of our needs would be met.

Jen Lumanlan  07:53

The third reason why children might not want to participate in a conversation is linked to the second, and it’s that we judge their behavior. This can often come out in the format: “You always…” or “You never…”.  As I said in parenting beyond power it’s pretty easy to see the effects of judging when we think about how it feels when other people do it to us. It might be something like: “You never unload the dishwasher” or “You’re always so emotional.”  Another word for a judgment is a criticism, and we learned in episode 209 on how to get on the same page as your parenting partner how criticism is the first of what doctors John and Julie Gottman call the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Criticism is almost invariably followed by one or more of the other three horsemen of the apocalypse which is when things get even worse.  The second horseman is defensiveness, which can come out in one of three forms: righteous indignation, counterattack, and whining. So when somebody else criticizes us for being too emotional righteous indignation would have us say: I’m not too emotional!” Counter attack would have us say: “at least I don’t have the emotional life of a rock!” And the adult version of whining might sound something like: “OK fine, I’ll make sure my emotions match your expectations in future.”  Because our children are people too, they tend to use these same tools. If we tell them their bedroom is messy, our judgment they say: “I like it that way!” or “Clean it yourself, then, if you care about it so much!” or “Why do I have to clean my room when my brother doesn’t clean his?” The third of the four horsemen is contempt, which the Gottmans define as treating others with disrespect mocking them with sarcasm and condescension, using hostile humor, name calling, mimicking, and body language such as eye rolling and sneering. We tend not to see this so much with younger children because we use our power over them to get them to stop if we do see it. But eventually our children learn that we actually don’t have the power to control their bodies, which is why we see so much of this behavior come out in the teenage years. The fourth of the four horsemen is stonewalling, which is the stereotypical male response to a female criticism: simply shutting down. Stonewalling was my preferred defense mechanism for many years, developed during my teens when my father would lecture me for hours on end about my many failures. I wasn’t permitted to answer back so I simply nodded and agreed as he talked himself through his lecture, but mentally I was somewhere else.  When our children mentally or emotionally check out by being physically with us in the room, but refusing to participate in the conversation, or if they physically walk away from us, we might check whether our framing or explanation of the problem could be perceived as critical. If it can we want to try to restate that from a neutral perspective, where we own the problem together. We talked with parent Diana in episode 207 on how not to be a permissive parent how a judgments damage our relationship with our child. Judgments can be incredibly useful in our heads, as they give us information about our needs that are not being met. But when those judgments come out of our mouths unedited, they often hurt the person who is on the receiving end. Instead, we can make a translation in our heads to reframe the problem as one that we own together. When there’s one specific behavior that seems challenging, it’s OK to be specific. So you might reframe: “can we talk about why you won’t get dressed in the morning?” to “I’ve noticed that we’ve had a hard time getting out the door in the morning at 8:30 recently. It seems as though getting dressed has been difficult. Can we talk about that?”  Where the child has experienced big changes recently, like a new school, a new teacher, birth of a sibling, etcetera it can help to use more general language. So instead of “can we talk about why you keep yelling at me?” you could try “it seems like we’ve been having a hard time lately. Would you like to talk about that?”  The child may not perceive their hitting or yelling as a problem, so if we frame the problem in that way, there isn’t much incentive for them to participate. But if we acknowledge that they’ve been having a hard time, and they know they’ve been having a hard time, then they’re going to be much more likely to want to work with us in the conversation. 

Jen Lumanlan  11:51

The fourth reason children might resist participating in this kind of conversation is that we have already decided what the “correct” solution is in advance and we’re using the problem solving conversation as a way of trying to get them on board, and make then think it was their idea.  Because almost everybody resists having someone try to change their behavior, this almost always fails and the child refuses to tell us how they’re feeling or participate in the process. The reason it fails, is that the solution we have decided on as the correct solution doesn’t meet the child’s needs. So maybe the child is resisting diaper changes, so we give them a toy to hold to keep them entertained during diaper changes. The child still resists their diaper changes. This is because we haven’t correctly understood that the child is feeling uncomfortably cold during a diaper change because they’re half naked in a cold room, so giving them a toy to play with which would meet their need if their feeling bored and wanted some entertainment doesn’t meet their need for warmth and comfort.  When we decide the solution in advance we have essentially said that the child’s needs aren’t important, and the correct solution is the one that meets our needs. When we instead take the time to understand our needs, we can usually find multiple strategies that meet both of our needs. We’re focusing on feelings in this episode because it’s the part of the process where parents usually realize there is a problem, because their child won’t participate. But understanding needs is our ultimate goal. We can imagine feelings as signposts towards our needs.  When a child is resisting, they are really saying: “the strategy that you’re proposing, or that I think you’re gonna propose doesn’t meet my needs. I don’t know how to explain that to you in a way that you’ll receive, so I’m going to refuse to participate.”

Jen Lumanlan  13:30

The fifth reason is linked to the fourth reason, and this is that in previous conversations we haven’t taken the time to understand the child’s needs. Sometimes we can get caught up in a moment where the child does share their feelings and we empathize with them.  We’re feeling great about how the conversation is going, so we jump ahead to looking for strategies to try. But if we haven’t taken the time to understand the child’s needs, then the strategies we propose are most likely only going to meet our needs and not theirs. The child sees this happening, but doesn’t know why it’s happening.  All they see is that their parent has asked them about their feelings, and then suddenly they’re being asked to agree to a strategy that doesn’t work for them then the next time when we ask them about their feelings they shut down because they feel afraid that if they share their feelings then they’re gonna end up with a strategy that works for them; in other words a strategy that meets their needs. Use the needs list at your parenting mojo.com/needs again available to download in multiple languages where to pick your version for your kids to make sure that you’re accurately identifying both your and your child’s needs in the situation.  If you’ve tried having problem solving conversations with your child in the past and now they’re elementary age or above and they’re saying things like “stop talking all that therapy speak” or “I don’t caaaaare,” then it’s most likely because in the past you’ve asked them about their feelings and have jumped straight to those strategies that meet your needs without considering their.  We can imagine them thinking: “What the way things are happening right now sucks, and I hate it, but the only thing I hate more is having this stupid conversation about my feelings and then my parent says we’re going to do ANOTHER thing that doesn’t work for me.  Why even bother?  I’d rather save the time and energy and not have to share anything about how I’m really feeling that my parent might then end up try to use against me.”  Believe me, even if the child says they don’t care, they care.  Every person wants to be deeply seen and known and understood, even your child who says they barely want to be associated with you.  They’re rejecting you because it feels safer for them to reject you than for you to show that them that you don’t ‘get’ them. The most effective way to understand each person’s needs is to use their feelings as a signpost. So as you’re working to understand each person’s feelings when you’re doing that, write them down. Then when you look at the needs list look for any needs that immediately feel right for you. So if you’re struggling with toothbrushing you might immediately know that you have a need for ease as well as for collaboration. You might immediately know your child has a need for autonomy. You’ve also identified that you’re feeling tired, which points to an additional need besides ease and collaboration. In this case probably a need for rest and maybe for self-care as well.  You want to make sure that each of the feelings you have stated for you and your child are associated with a need doesn’t have to be one to one, they could be package of feelings that are related are associated with a need. If there are any feelings that don’t seem to belong to a need, look at the needs list again and see if you can identify a need that that feeling points toward.  Then you’ll start looking for strategies that meet both of your needs, and that process is covered extensively in Parenting Beyond Power.

Jen Lumanlan  16:43

The sixth reason while your child might not tell you how they feel is that they don’t know how they feel. If talking about feelings is relatively new to your family, then it’s not surprising that you might all find it quite difficult at first. It’s very common for young children to have a limited emotional vocabulary, and describe every feeling as happy, sad or frustrated. Many adults don’t grow much more sophisticated in their feelings than this either, especially men who are not rewarded in our culture for having a rich emotional vocabulary.  As we learned in episodes 226 and 227 on where emotions come from and why it matters with doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett, the point of understanding our emotions better isn’t just to have a bigger vocabulary. If we understand our emotions then we are better equipped to meet our needs more effectively. If all we know is that we feel like crap but we don’t have any more information than this then it’s hard to know what to do to address the situation. If we know that we feel hungry and crave comfort, then pulling ice cream out of the freezer might be the most appropriate strategy. If we feel lonely because we need connection, then the ice cream isn’t going to help very much. If all of those feelings get lumped together under the general heading of crap, then it can be difficult to know which of these potential strategies we should choose.  I know a lot of parents like to download and print feelings wheels to broaden their emotional vocabulary because they’re often rainbow colored and very pretty, but my caution with these is that many of the so-called feelings on the feelings wheels aren’t actually feelings. Things like ridiculed, violated, provoked not actually feelings.   These are judgments of an action that somebody elses has taken or something they’ve said to us and our feelings in response to those actions or words might include anger, fury, or hurt. You may remember from point #3 in this episode that when we judge another person’s behavior they usually don’t want to participate in problem solving with us. So if we go to that person and say I feel ridiculed, I feel violated or I feel provoked, then they recognize that as a judgment and immediately go into defensive mode. Before you run to your feelings wheel to cross those words out, those are not the only words on the wheel that aren’t feelings; they’re just three words from the sixth of the wheel devoted to the feeling of anger.  There are lots of other fake feelings words on the wheels as well which is why I advised not using them. Instead of fake feeling words, which are really judgments, when we use actual feeling words, we’re able to keep the lines of communication open more effectively. For this reason I would highly encourage you to download and print the feelings list from your parentingmojo.com/feelings, because the feelings on that list are all feelings rather than judgments. You might try to use a wider variety of feelings words in your conversation with your child, as a way of broadening their vocabulary. Another tool I’ve used successfully is to pause at moments of tension in story books I’m reading to my daughter, and ask her what she thinks the main character is feeling. In the early days she would say either happy, sad or frustrated, to which I would respond something like “Yeah it’s possible that the character does feel frustrated and I’m also wondering if they feel overwhelmed because their parent is asking them to do so many things at the same time.” So try having a conversation like that and see how it goes.

Jen Lumanlan  19:56

The 7th reason why they might not be willing to tell you what’s wrong is that you’re asking them in the heat of the moment, and especially when you’re riled up as well.  Most of us need to feel safe before we can share our feelings with someone else, so if you’re yelling ‘tell me how you feel’ at them, it’s probably not going to happen.  If you’re still dysregulated over a disagreement the two of you had, it probably won’t happen.  Make sure you’re calm before you ask them what’s going on with them.  You can try making empathy guesses, which means making educated guesses as to what you think they might be feeling similar to how we described thinking about how they might be feeling earlier.  So you could say: “We had a hard time tonight, huh?” that’s your non judgmental observation.  “I’m wondering if you felt surprised and hurt when I yelled at you?”  If they have a blank face then your empathy guess probably wasn’t right – if this happens, make another guess and try again.  If they say ‘no’ because you got it wrong, they may well then just tell you how they’re feeling because they don’t want you to misunderstand.  No problem – it doesn’t matter that your guess was wrong; it only matters that now you understand what’s going on for them.  If you do get it right they will probably nod or say yes, or they might just crumple into tears.  It can feel really good to have someone else ‘get’ us, especially if that hasn’t happened a lot in our lives.  Once your child knows you understand their feelings, they might then be willing to talk about their needs as well.

Jen Lumanlan  21:20

The 8th and final reason why your child might not be willing to tell you what’s wrong with them is some sort of combination and culmination of all of the other reasons. What I mean by that is that things have been difficult in your relationship for so long, that your child is unwilling to share anything that might provide a real window into their experience. It’s possible that you remember doing this with your own parents as well. Even though our parents were doing the best they could with the skills that they had, along with all of their own unresolved trauma, many of our parents could not really see us for who we really were. They thought we should be different, and show up in the world differently, and they tried to shape us to do that. They didn’t do it to hurt us, they did it because they wanted us to succeed and thought that we wouldn’t succeed if we showed up as we really were. We learned that we were not lovable as our whole true selves and so we hid the parts of us that our parents didn’t deem to be lovable in a box and we pretended that they didn’t exist. Most likely, these are now the parts of ourselves that feel hurt in response to our partners and our child’s behavior and that trigger us when they are touched. Over the last few years I’ve learned that I am excruciatingly sensitive to criticism from people who are close to me. I don’t love conflict at the best of times and I avoid it if possible, but with anyone I’m not very close to, it’s easy for me to distinguish between criticism and feedback and navigate those appropriately. But when my partner criticizes, it really hurts-because I learned in childhood that I am not lovable as I am. Because my dad criticized so many aspects of me, whenever my husband says something that is critical of what I’m doing, I find it really hard to deal with. I react as if I’m a teenager again looking for love and support and acceptance from the only figure in her life who was positioned to offer this, and those needs were not met at that time. Through everything I’ve learned in the teaming your triggers workshop I no longer have an immediate overreaction. I might hear my husband criticize my daughter, which in a way is an implicit criticism of me, given how much research I’ve done on parenting and how much of our ideas about the ways we raise her are based on my work. I can hear that criticism and remain calm, and help them to have a conversation where each person’s needs are met. I don’t do it perfectly, and there are times when there are multiple criticisms over the course of a day and by the end my tolerance is very narrow. But for the most part I’m able to see that my husband and my father are two different people, and that my husband isn’t responsible for the ways that my dad didn’t see me when I was younger. He’s still working on reducing criticism, because it is still one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and reducing that helps all of us. But because of the tools I’ve learned and that I share in the Taming Your Triggers workshop I’m able to create a pause and connect with my values and a sense of calm before I enter these situations, and enter them with a non-judgmental observation rather than assuming that my daughter is in the right and my husband is in the wrong, and create separation between them if things are heated.  And then once they’ve calmed down I can help each of them to hear the other one’s feelings and needs so they can find a strategy that works for both of them.  My husband is learning these skills as well so they’re less dependent on me.  Carys is very well able to problem solve but she’s a kid, so she has a harder time doing it when the adult in the conversation isn’t doing it.  She can’t steer the conversation herself, and neither should she have to.  We’re developing these skills as a family, and the more effectively we use them the more we all get our needs met.  If you’re feeling triggered a lot by your kids’ behavior, and if they’re not willing to share how they’re feeling with you because they’re afraid of your reaction, or because they think you’ll just try to get them to change, then I’d really love to work with you in the Taming Your Triggers workshop.

Jen Lumanlan  25:01

So those are eight of the most common reasons that I see children resist sharing what’s really going on for them when their parents ask. So I hope that it gives you some scope to start thinking about which of these might be showing up in your relationship with your child and some ways to address it. And if you know a parent who might be struggling with this as well and you’d be willing to share this episode with them to help them as well, then I would really appreciate it too. Thanks so much and I’ll see you again soon.

Adrian  25:29

If you’d like Jen to address the challenge you’re having in parenting, just email your one-minute video or audio clip to support at yourparentingmojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.