182: How to get frustrating behavior to stop

Hi, I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives. But we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use everyday in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on The 13 Reasons Your Child Isn't Listening To You - And What To Do About Each One, just head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. And pretty soon, you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro. So come and record one yourself at YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today I want to focus on a topic that I know will resonate with a lot of parents - and that's what to do when your children are doing something frustrating, and you've asked them to stop, and they won't. I'm going to use a question that was posted in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group as an example, but it really is just an example - you could insert whatever frustrating behavior your child is doing at the moment, and that you've asked them not to do, and what we'll talk about here will be just as relevant. We'll also hear from a couple of parents who have experienced some really challenging behavior from their children and who have figured out how to address it and are coming out the other side and have allowed me to share their thoughts with you on how that went.

So here's what this parent posted in our Facebook community: "My five year old has been doing thing after thing that frustrates the heck out of me, for example, eating food outside the kitchen, and during quiet time, coloring on walls, taking things apart that can't be put back together, scraping bars of soap to bits, gathering giant piles of random items across the house and not helping to put them back, hitting her three year old sister when she doesn't do what she wants, picking up her 10 month old brother without respecting his bodily autonomy, etc, etc. The answer is probably connection, but I am currently too irritated and tired to figure out how to build that in. We haven't been doing any one on one time with any of the kids, but again, where to fit that in? We barely manage routine dishes, laundry and meal prep. I don't know if I need to lower expectations, set better limits, ask more of my husband, or run away and take a nap for several days. Help me think straight and decide on some action items please!"

Now firstly, I want to point out what I see in the immediate question here. This parent clearly has a LOT going on, and her child is doing things that this parent is finding absolutely exasperating, and she does see the need for connection may well be involved. She knows the child isn't just doing these things to be deliberately irritating, which is a massive step in itself.

Think about what happens when your partner or someone else that you're close to does something that you find irritating. I'll give the example of my husband's screen use. He's pretty often on his phone for a couple of hours before he gets out of bed in the morning, and as he's making his morning coffee there are regular periods where everything in the kitchen goes quiet because he's texting someone. And then he's on his phone while he's eating breakfast, and watching a movie while he works (with regular punctuation for texting other people), and anytime he's doing something like cooking there are always those regular silent periods and then suddenly, the plates are moving around again. If Carys asked for something, he wouldn't even hear it. He could be sitting two feet away from her, in between me and her, and if she asked for some food he would totally not hear it and the request would come over him to me. And if someone texted during dinner, then he would answer it.

Now there was a long period of time at the beginning of the pandemic when this was driving me absolutely batty. To me, this was blatantly disrespectful. It was disrespectful of me and of our daughter. It communicated that we were not important to him - that some random photographer who has a question about a lens during our dinner time was more important than us.

It's really easy to get caught up in these stories. And to her credit, the parent who posted in the group doesn't do that, at least not in what she wrote, although perhaps those stories are in her mind. We tell those stories to ourselves all the time. "My child doesn't listen to me, which means they don't respect me." "My husband spends many hours a day on his phone, which means he doesn't respect me."

But what's really going on here? I told you the story about my husband because it can be easier to understand the perspective of another adult. When it finally got on my nerves so much that we had to have it out, he explained the texting was his way of maintaining a connection with the outside world, which blew my mind. I'm an introvert. I can quite happily go weeks at a stretch without talking to anyone. Plus the whole not knowing how to respond in social situations thing has made watercooler conversations excruciatingly painful for my entire career, so I was NOT sad to say goodbye to those when I got laid off at the beginning of the pandemic. I host coaching calls from members in my community several times a month, I'm often doing interviews with parents or with experts for the podcast, or I'm interviewing on other podcasts. So I talk with other people quite a bit. But my husband used to thrive on going into the office. He loved hanging out with people, and going to meetings, and getting lunch together. And then when the pandemic hit, all of that was gone. Suddenly, he didn't leave the house for days at a time, and he barely talked to anyone.

So texting people was how he maintained the connection to the outside world. It had nothing whatsoever to do with his respect for me, or his willingness to collaborate on parenting. The two things were completely unrelated in his mind. From my perspective, this was about respect but for him, it was about connecting with other people. When we can better understand our needs, we can then find ways to meet both of our needs. In our case, we all agreed to a rule that we shut off electronics at 6:30pm. Usually I have dinner prep underway by then, and he and Carys help set the table and clean up the kitchen a bit, and we sit down and eat together around 6:45, and nobody does anything on phones except change music volume for the duration of the meal. That meets my need for respect, and also his need for connection. And he collaborates on parenting by taking Carys out for adventures while I'm working, so I can have quiet time for thinking and writing.

So often, the same process happens with our children too. Our child eats outside of the kitchen, or draws on the walls or shaves a bar of soap to bits and we think to ourselves: "My child doesn't listen. That means they don't respect me," when in the child's mind, that means nothing of the kind. To me, it looks like all of these things the child is doing have something in common. They're all enjoyable - so eating delicious food when you're ready to eat it rather than at a time when you're supposed to be eating; drawing on the walls; carving up a bar of soap - they're all some variation of fun or satisfying activities. So is there some way we could allow them? Can we make some snacks available so the child can help themselves at any time during the day, knowing that that is the total pool of snacks for the day and if you eat them all in the first hour, there aren't going to be any more? Can you let them loose in the bathtub with a can of shaving foam or even watercolor paints and just let them have at it? I actually don't like using bar soap because I hate the way it sits in water and gets sloppy on the bottom and all that gunk gets caught up under my rings, and then I have to clean them. But I know bar soap is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than liquid soap. So is there a way to turn this into a sanctioned activity? I have a friend who used to deliberately shave up bars of soap and put the slivers plus some water into a liquid soap dispenser, and that was their liquid soap at a fraction of the cost. Could that be this child's special activity?

In addition to the joyful satisfying nature of these tasks, there's also the forbidden nature of them. At 5 years old, the child most likely knows these are forbidden activities, but they're doing them anyway. And that can be for one of two reasons. The first of these is that the child doesn't yet have the impulse control to stop themselves from doing it. We parents tend to think impulse control comes online WAY before it really does. And we think: "I've told them not to do this thing tens if not hundreds of times by now, and I KNOW they know they're not allowed to do it, so clearly, it's their behavior that needs to change." In reality, children cannot always stop themselves from doing something they know they aren't allowed to do, and they're especially unable to do this when they're dysregulated. And that's true for all of us, if we think about it. Imagine you've had a stressful day, either at home with the kids or at work, and you're trying to get dinner on the table the kids are fighting and what's called your Window of Tolerance is really narrow. You're feeling stressed and anxious and like you're being pulled in 100 directions at once, and you're doing everything for everyone else and nothing for you. And then your partner walks in and starts complaining about how hard their day has been. What happens for you in that moment? Do you respond with compassion? Do you offer them a hug and empathize with their struggle? If you're anything like me, you most likely don't do those things. It's much more likely you know how you WANT to show up for your partner when you're having a hard time for everything has gotten on top of you throughout the day, plus the immediate things happening right now, are too much for you to cope with, and instead of supporting them you make a sarcastic comment, or you tell them to stop complaining and set the table, or you just ignore them outwardly while inwardly thinking that clearly they have no idea how much is on YOUR plate.

Now let's translate that to our child's experience - all day, someone has been telling them what to do. If they were at preschool or school it was a day filled with routine that didn't fit their needs - stop playing now, come to circle time; I know you're hungry. It isn't snack time yet; I know you want to run around outside but it's snack time now; no you can't have crackers today; we're having oranges for snack today; keep still; stop fidgeting; stop distracting other children. If they were home with you, they likely had a lot of limits on their behavior as well - get up, get dressed, make your bed, eat your breakfast, no you can't have chocolate for breakfast, brush your teeth, no you can't have screentime now, stop spinning around in circles; you're going to fall over and hurt yourself... and so on and so on. Our children find all these kinds of interactions to be really stressful! I don't think we fully understand how stressful it is to be told what to do and not to do every moment of the day until our children are verbal enough to be able to express it. It's only been in the last six months or so that my daughter has been able to do this. And one evening, she dropped a plastic container of food that she was trying to get out of the fridge and it opened and the contents spilled out, and she immediately burst into tears. I was baffled - it wasn't that big of a deal, I got up to clean it up. And I asked her: "What's going on?" and she said: "You said you wouldn't read an extra book chapter and then we were out of my special crackers and I didn't like getting shampoo in my eyes in the shower and now I dropped the container, and it's all TOO MUCH!" And when it all gets to me too much, just like we don't always act in alignment with our values, and we snap with our partner when we KNOW that isn't going to be helpful to the situation, and we may even have an expressed value about treating each other with kindness and compassion and our sarcastic comment does NOT fit with that, our children do things they know they aren't supposed to do, because they can't do things differently in the moment. It doesn't matter how many times your partner has asked you not to be sarcastic, or how many times you've told your child not to eat a snack time, or draw on the walls or shave a bar of soap - they can't stop themselves from doing it in that dysregulated moment.

The key to addressing this is really to try to set way fewer limits on our child's behavior. And this might initially seem very counter-intuitive - after all, you're only setting these limits because your child wouldn't do even the most basic necessary tasks, and stop doing things that would actually hurt them, if you weren't setting limits, right? You're doing this for their own health and safety, not because you want to be setting limits on their behavior all the time. What alternatives do we have?

When I was preparing for this episode, my mind went back to a consult that I did on a group coaching call with a parent Peju a few months back. She had asked a question about her daughter who was resisting EVERYTHING. Every mealtime was a battle, everything Peju asked her daughter to do was a battle, and forget about Chinese class that her daughter was signed up for. It was a MASSIVE struggle EVERY week. During the consult, we thought about her daughter's unmet needs, and hypothesized that one of these might be for autonomy. And a penny really dropped on this for Peju, where she realized that her daughter wants to have a say over EVERYTHING. And I asked her to take away an idea: what limits does she really HAVE to set, and which ones could she perhaps think about relaxing?

A month later, Peju joined another group coaching call where I was talking about limits and autonomy with another parent. And completely unprompted, Peju told us what had happened over the last month, and she started to relax her limits. So here's Peju explaining that from that video:

My daughter was, but I have talked about with food with you. But it turned out when I gave her a little bit more control in her day, she was also resisting going to Chinese class Mandarin. She has Mandarin after school every day, and she wouldn't go for I mean, it was just, I was so frustrating when I gave her back control, like in the morning, and I did more in the morning. Every little thing like, okay, you know, what did you want in your lunchbox, I no longer tried to, I realized I had a lot of like, I was not giving her any choices at all, like, gave it back. Close lunch. I just started giving it and then all of a sudden, I was Chinese. And then she starts freaking out now. She's like (speaking in Chinese) I'm like, oh, so you did learn something? And they're like, I have no clue. Yeah, I would say that was really I saw that it worked out by figuring out the underlying need. And it was because of what you said. But that was a surprise result that I was at, I thought it was a battle at food on the table. But it turned out, I'm still working on ways in which I have to learn to let go and she always reminds me constantly, and no longer I take it so personally when she's like, well, you're not in control. You're not the boss. Constant. And I know that that's the thing that I have to work on. But it's gotten much, much better.

So I think the most important thing to point out here is that Peju was in this really difficult cycle of interactions with her child, where it seemed like Peju needed to be more in control. After all, if her daughter's refusing to do tasks, what else is there to do other than exert more control? When we say it like that, perhaps we can start to see the cracks in this idea... who wants to be controlled? If we're resisting doing something that our partner or our boss has asked us to do, is them exerting more control over us the thing that makes us suddenly want to do the thing without any complaining or resistance? Not usually.

When Peju when I talked the first time she immediately recognized that her daughter was looking for more autonomy over things that were important to her. And these weren't necessarily very big things - something like what goes in my lunchbox can be a really important decision for a child. So when Peju started backing off from the things that really didn't make as much difference to her, but made a BIG difference to her daughter, her daughter then felt a lot more autonomy over her life, and suddenly, she stopped resisting as much! Before Peju might have looked at resistance over what her daughter ate at dinnertime and resistance over going to Chinese class as two completely different issues. But when you see them through the lens of the child wanting more autonomy, suddenly, they're really tightly connected. And it's not necessarily the case that relaxing rules around food leads to going to Chinese class without a struggle. It's possible, they might have decided that the child doesn't have to go to Chinese class, and then they relax their resistance around food. For your child, the point issues might be completely different... but when we see the underlying needs and start to make shifts on one of the issues, we may well see shifts on other issues as well.

The need for autonomy is one that I see showing up a lot for children, probably because in our culture, we don't think of children as needing it at all. We assume that if they're doing what we asked them to do; if they're "listening" to us, if things don't seem too hard for us, then everything's going well. If we can shift our perspective a little bit, we can see any resistance we're experiencing from them as a huge gift, which indicates something about their unmet needs.

I also want to introduce you to parent Fiona. I've been working with her for about a year now, and when we started working together, things were not great between her and her oldest child. They had three children at that point, and her oldest was constantly answering back, refusing to help when he was asked, picking fights with the middle sibling. And even though Fiona knew this was at least partly due to how much her time and attention was being split across the three children, with some for her husband, and MAYBE some for herself leftover at the end of it, that still didn't stop her from feeling completely overwhelmed in the moment. She reached out to me recently to ask about some content in the Parenting Membership about values, and the last time we'd spoken a few months ago, she was really having a hard time. Her husband was out of town for an extended period of time, the whole family got sick. And it finally got to a point where she HAD to ask for help from friends and neighbors because she was finally sick enough to believe she could legitimately ask for help. She was just kind of hanging on until her husband got back. So when she emailed about values, I replied, "Oh, things must be going okay, if you're asking me about this! And she wrote back: "Well, yes, I've experienced some major shifts in my day to day state, being able to pause and building connection with the kids." Of course, I thought that was amazing and I responded to tell her so. And then a few days later, I started working on this episode. And I asked Fiona if she'd be willing to record something saying what specifically had changed for her and her son, which is what I'm about to share with you. This is a bit of a longer video, it's about 10 minutes long, but I think you'll see at the end, why I couldn't make it any shorter.

Hi, Jen, thanks for reaching out to see how things have been going here. I think that I mentioned to you that overall, I think there's been I've had a huge shift, which maybe doesn't look that different from the outside. But inside, I feel very differently in how I'm showing up in certain interactions with my kids. So I think as you know, when we first signed up to the membership with you and then shortly afterwards, I signed up for the Taming Your Triggers workshop, my husband and I, we just felt at a complete loss with my eldest son's behavior in particular. So at that point, my children were seven, five, and coming up three year old. My eldest son was very angry a lot of the time, was saying things to us that would typically be interpreted as quite rude. And it would sometimes, and they would often be conflict with this brother that would escalate to, to him having extremely big feelings. And my not knowing how to handle those. So I know that a lot of that behavior is probably due to having recently had a baby and all the change and his change in time and attention from me. But even with that, we just didn't really know what to do. And I think that we knew already that it was our behavior that needed to change, but I didn't know how. So I think one example that I told you about would be that I come around the corner and I see the elder brother doing something to hurt the younger brother. And I would immediately be upset by that. It would feel like an emergency, I have to do something to separate them or help them. So I think one example I told you about was with bikes and the eldest son was trying to push his bike onto the younger one. And so I feel like I have to separate them. I have to get the bikes away and my eldest child would be very resistant and would be triggered. What I now know is that he sees my behavior as a preference for his brother, and he feels he doesn't feel loved. And so I would be trying to stay calm, because I want to parent in a certain way, but I wouldn't be calm inside inside my heart would be racing, my body would be tense. And then when my son is triggered, he would become be shouting and telling me to go away. But if I go away, then he follows me. And I would then basically shut down and not know what to do feel that there is nothing to do in that situation. And basically just mentally retreat from the situation. And it could go on for like 30 minutes at a time. So I've always known cognitively that that has its roots in my own childhood. But knowing that it's not been enough for me to either to stop either yelling, or shutting down and then a few things happened, I think, working through the resources that I've shared through the membership. Some of it, I feel like I've known already, but it just takes time to sit with it. Let it all percolate. And also, I think very early on in the coaching call, you had us do some roleplay. And you asked us to take the perspective of our child during a difficult interaction. So for example, they're not listening to you. And I just felt completely overwhelmed by sadness and loss when I took the perspective of my child. So I think in the example, he was refusing to tidy up, and so I was just angrily doing it and ignoring him. And when I took his perspective, I could see how much pain and rejection I would feel from my parent. And I realized that when I shut down, that is what I am protecting myself from, that I don't want to feel what they're feeling that I then feel like I'm failing them as a mother that I'm doing something wrong. And those thoughts are too painful for me to handle. So I shut them out. And then in my action group, my group leader actually suggested that I skip ahead and work on self-compassion content. And I think these two things are so important for me, because without the self compassion, I can't stop myself from shutting down. And trying called none of this is conscious, but protecting myself from my kids feelings, or my own feelings. And so I tried to do some mindful self-compassion every day, and consciously working to be there for myself first, when these difficult moments start. And at the same time, then I also worked into the day, something for me and fiddly to do together to reconnect, maybe read a book or talk and he gradually has started to open up with me about how difficult his days are at school. And they have games of social exclusion and things like that. And the things that our kids have to deal with on a daily basis are so stressful, for so now, when he comes out of school, and he says something rude, or harsh, or he tries to provoke his brother, I can see him and I can hear him and I can understand him that he is a child that is struggling. Not, you know, I don't snap at him and say, we didn't talk to each other like that or something similar. I can say something like, wow, honey, you seem really unhappy right now. And that's enough for him to then open up and unload about his day and why it was so stressful and hard. And I can see his whole body relax after he's shared that knee. And it feels so good to know that he has somebody that he can share that with. And also when he gets into that really emotional state where he is triggered why maybe I'm setting a limit, or maybe he has felt like I did something that suggests that I prefer his brother over him, which is such a painful trigger for him. I'm able to stay calm, not just trying to be calm, I'm actually able to stay calm, and be in a state of curiosity over why, why that's happened and what I can do to help him and try and connect with him in that moment. So it might be just asking if he wants to push against my hands or if he wants an up hug which are things that I know help him and I can realize now how scary it is when my responses to it. they're shut down and mentally disappear, or explode and yell. But instead of being debilitated by the shame of that, and being unable to tolerate my own emotions, I can now feel compassion for myself in that moment, and know that it's hard for me too, and I'm doing the best I can in that moment to be there for him. And that, you know, these episodes used to last 30 minutes. And now, they don't happen as frequently. And they only last maybe 10 minutes now. But they're also easier to handle, because I am present and they're with him, even if I don't know what to do. And even if I have to stop him from destroying things, I feel like we are maintaining that connection, even through difficult moments. So that's where we are right now. And there's still so much that I want to work on. And you asked me to only talk for five minutes, and I'm gonna have to opt for time. I'm going to send this to you. But if you want me to try and shorten it, or do something different than just let me know.

So of course, you can see here why I couldn't possibly ask Fiona to shorten what she sent me because there's so much richness here. It seems like her son's rude behavior was the thing that needed to be changed, even though she had some understanding, it was at least partly a result of big feelings he was having about younger siblings. And there was something that she could do differently, but how could she know what to do? When he would tell her to go away, she would go away, and he would follow her. If she's doing what he asks, and he's still upset about it. What is she supposed to do?

What you can see happening in Fiona's video is what I call a non-cognitive shift, because she already knew a number of the tools that I teach. She already knew this had links to her relationship with her parents and her brother. I remember the coaching call that she mentioned so clearly when we walked her through the process of sharing what was going on for her in a really difficult interaction between her and her son. And then she took her son's perspective. And she broke down and she saw the effect that her own reaction was having on him. And of course, she was doing the best that she could do, she wasn't shutting him out because she wanted to; she was shutting him out, because the thought of not being there for her children's feelings, just like nobody was there for her feelings when she was young, was too horrible to bear. So seeing that interaction, from his perspective, was really the beginning of her non-cognitive shift.

And then she's showing up in her ACTion group each week, which is inside the Parenting Membership, where you meet with up to five other members and an experienced peer coach. And I have to say that most parents who sign up for the membership really discount the value of ACTion groups because they figure you know: "how much could it really helped to be in a group of six people who all know as much as I do? What could I possibly learn from them that's useful?"

Quite a few parents who are IN ACTion groups have described them as a "lifeline." They get deeply invested in each other's lives even though many of them have never met in person. Here's parents Stephanie describing how close she is to the members of her ACTion group as well as how it's so much easier to get connection through a standing weekly meeting than through one off visits with friends in real life:

I would say that they really feel like friends and I feel closer to a lot of them than I do to my friends in person mostly because I don't see many of my friends in person and so having that weekly connection where I may see like other friends of mine once every couple months now at this point and getting to have that weekly connection knowing it's always there, knowing I can also reach out to these people outside of that weekly connection if I need to and I have done that before and kind of expanded on these relationships outside of our weekly meeting, has just been huge for me it's really has filled like I can't describe it enough it fills my cup and I don't I wish I could describe it better. But that is really what it has done for me where and it's easy. It's not okay I need to text this person, figure out a time to meet them. When are their kids available, other kids are sick, okay we can't meet. Well now it's going to be next week. We never heard back from them we'll do I reach out to them. They're not reaching out to me. It's kind of internal you know, external thing going on have to reach just one person reckon get get on this call. I can talk to multiple people. I can express what's going on with me. I can get multiple opinions if I want them. And if I don't want them, nobody just offers their advice and says you should try this or you should do this. They just listen and hold space. And if I say that I want advice on this or recommendations then I freely get great advice. Nobody really has ever had bad advice. So it's just been very fulfilling for me.

Of course, it was Fiona's ACTion group leader who suggested that she skipped over some module content and go right into the self-compassion module, which normally we cover at the end of the first year in the Parenting Membership. And through a daily practice, Fiona developed her non-cognitive shift. She used to try to tell herself to stay calm in these difficult moments with her son. But now instead of convincing herself to be calm, she just IS calm. And I know that those of you who struggled to stay calm in difficult moments can appreciate the monumental nature of that shift. It's not that everything's magically fixed now, but things ARE easier. She mentioned that she's able to be curious about why her son is behaving the way he is when he's having a hard time, and it's pretty much impossible to be triggered and feel curious at the same time.

That curiosity is really where the magic happens when we're feeling triggered by something. We're usually telling ourselves a story about what's happening doesn't feel like a story. To us, it feels like The Truth but it's really The Truth from our perspective, and another word for that is a story just like the story I was making up about my husband screen time. So maybe our story in this instance, might go something like: My older child is picking on my younger child again, he's going to really hurt the younger one one day. It's my job to protect the younger one. They're going to have a terrible relationship with each other when they're older. And I don't have much of a relationship with my sibling. I want them to be able to support each other and I'm a failure as a parent because I can't make that happen." And you can hear that catastrophizing, right? It's like a train, and once we get on it, it's really difficult to get off again.

But when we're curious, we're opening up the possibility that our story is not the only one, that our child has their own story to about what's going on, and their own unmet needs. And we might be able to help them meet their needs. So Fiona's eldest son, picking fights with the middle sibling, or answering back or refusing to help looks a lot like rudeness and defiance that should be squashed. But when we can get curious about that, we can ask: what's underneath that? Why is he behaving like this? He's a deeply feeling child engaged in complex social dynamics at school? Is it possible he's had a bad day? Is it possible he feels disconnected from me right now? And if either of these are the case, how could squashing his rudeness and defiance possibly be the answer?

If I'm short with my husband, he might respond: "Don't you dare talk to me like that." But if he responds: "It sounds like you're having a hard day, how can I help?" Then I'm just gonna melt. It's so hard to respond to other people in that second way, mostly, because when we were growing up, people only ever responded to us in the first way. Between those two responses lies the self-compassion that Fiona has discovered, which enables her to see and acknowledge her own struggle as well, and to shift out of "Don't you dare talk to me like that" mode? and into "It sounds like you're having a hard day, how can I help?" mode. Of course, there are still things Fiona wants to work on. But whereas before, I used to hear a sense of despair in her voice, that things could ever be different, and that she could have the wherewithal to make things different. Now, I hear in her words, and her voice, a real sense of hope.

So now we've heard from Peju and Fiona and Stephanie, we can come back to the parent who posted in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook community at the beginning of the episode, and we can start to see her child's behavior in a different light. We mentioned the first of the two reasons that a child might do a forbidden activity, which is they don't have the impulse control to stop themselves from doing it. And here's the second reason: they're doing it deliberately, because it's the best way they know to get our attention.

It's very possible that some of the needs that Fiona's child was expressing are present here as well, as the child is doing things she KNOWS she's not allowed to do. When we've told children to do something over and over again, and we're immediately on them telling them not to do it, each time they do it, we can almost always hypothesize they have a need for connection with us. What the child is getting when we're telling them off is a kind of connection, in that they have our attention. It's a pretty crappy kind of connection. And they'd much rather have your attention in a moment when you aren't telling them off. But they'll take your attention in that negative interaction over no interaction at all. So we can see all of the soap shaving and the drawing on the walls and the hitting of the younger sister and picking up the baby as her saying, "I'm still important too." I was once the only kid here and I liked that. And I miss those days, even though I'm the oldest and technically I CAN wait for everybody else to get their needs met. I still want to know that I'm important!

And of course another aspect of this is how our culture is affecting this family and this parent who is clearly stretched way too thin. Because we weren't meant to raise children like this. We were meant to have way more adults than children around so anytime the mother needed a break, she could not cook dinner that night pass the child on to somebody else. Our capitalist system has led us to live in these boxes completely apart from other people trying to manage more than any one or two adults can possibly manage, because when we all live separately, we all need everything - our own kitchen equipment, washer, dryer lawn mower and all the rest of it. When the cultural marker of you being a real adult is you moving into your own place and buying your own stuff, it becomes clear that companies have a lot invested in keeping us apart. We're not going to reimagine our national housing stock overnight from single family homes to living arrangements to make it easy to share the load but we can make a start.

Inside our own homes, we can let stuff go. We can wear clothes more often before we wash them. We can eat off paper plates for a while to get through a difficult stretch. We can cook twice as much as we need whenever we do cook, so we only have to cook half as often.

And then we can start asking for help from other people. I remember being on a call with Fiona, where she was practically at death's door with a really bad cold. And finally feeling justified in asking the neighbors for help. What's wrong with our culture that we can't ask for help until there is simply no other option? What if we could ask for help before things got to that point? What if we could have the neighbors take one or more of our children for a few hours on one day, and then we take one more if there's another day? Pretty often our children play together with less fighting when there's somebody else's children around too, so having more children in the house might paradoxically mean less work for you. Could we get someone's groceries one week and they'll get ours the next? Could we cook a meal for them and then they'll cook meals for us another night? Looking outside the four walls of our house is where we start to find the space to get help, so we can rest, so everything else doesn't seem as hard.

As we went our way towards the conclusion here, the one big idea I want to leave you with is that if we're focused on trying to change our child's behavior, we're missing something really important. I know it can seem hard to understand what your child is needing through what seems like highly specific difficult behavior, so I would love to help you work through that. I hope you'll join me for a free 90 minute masterclass on Setting Loving and Effective Limits on Saturday, May 6 at 10am Pacific. I'm sure you can see that the name of the masterclass is a bit tongue in cheek, just like the eight day workshop of the same name that's been running recently. So if you didn't have time for the full workshop, or you missed the signup window, come and join me in the masterclass instead and get a good chunk of the information in a super short window of time.

I really do believe that we need to be able to set limits effectively. We have to do it on exactly the right issues and with real conviction. And we should be doing that in about 3% of the interactions when we're having some sort of conflict either major or minor with our child. So in the masterclass will absolutely teach you how to do that. As I see it, we should be using boundaries about 7% of the time when we're in conflict. And we'll show you the critical difference between boundaries and limits. That makes all the difference in when and how to use them. And the other 90% of the time, that's when we're looking for our needs and our child's needs and how we can meet both of them. So we'll cover that too. And if doing all that seems completely overwhelming, and you don't know how to start uncovering the knees underneath your child's difficult, puzzling, overwhelming behavior... nevermind figuring out what your own needs are and how to go about meeting both of them... well come on over to the masterclass and all of that murkiness will get much clearer.

Because when you know how to do that you won't be lurching from one issue to another; from one crisis to another, always trying to figure out where on earth there can be space for yourself and your own needs and all of the messiness of parenting. You'll have a repeatable framework that you can apply in any situation to ANY challenge, and feel confident that you're doing the right thing. You will be doing the right thing, because you'll be doing what meets both of your needs, the vast majority of the time, and that feels great. Join me for just 90 minutes on Saturday, May 6, I'll share the framework answer your questions. I'll coach one lucky participant live in the session and there'll be an awesome giveaway as well. Sign up now at YourParentingMojo.com/settinglimitsmasterclass. I'll see you there.

Hi, I'm Emma. And I'm listening from the UK. We know you have a lot of choices about where you get information about parenting, and we're honored that you've chosen us as we move toward a world in which everyone's lives and contributions are valued. If you'd like to help keep the show ad free, please do consider making a donation on the episode page that Jen just mentioned. Thanks again for listening to This episode of The Your Parenting Mojo podcast.