208: Three reasons why setting limits is hard (and what to do about each of them)

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 episode soon.

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Okay, let's play a choose your own adventure game for a few minutes. So let's start by imagining that your child really enjoys jumping on the couch. You've both just arrived home from a long day of work and school and your child makes a beeline for the couch. And you say: please don't jump on the couch. Your child looks at you and smiles climbs up on the couch and starts jumping. What happens next? Do you go through Door A where you say calmly: I asked you not to jump on the couch, please get off. And they get off the couch. And then they go and start emptying things out of the kitchen cupboards which they are also not allowed to do? Do you go through Door B where you say I've told you a hundred times not to jump off the couch, get off it now? Do you go through a Door C where you explode and then yell before we're feeling really bad that you exploded and yelled, and then promise both yourself and your child that you won't do it again but deep down, you know it will probably happen again before the end of next week?Do you go through Door D where you sigh and roll your eyes and look the other way. You know that trying to get your child off the sofa is just going to result in a big meltdown. So why even start or do all of those door options feel pretty crummy and leave you wishing there was a Door E hidden somewhere, anywhere?

So in this episode, I want to find that Door E. We're gonna look at the top 3 reasons why setting limits are so difficult and some resources I have to help you make it easier. Most of which are free. So before we get into that, I want to let you know that the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is now available. It isn't for all parents and all children. So do make sure it applies to you before you sign up.

So here are the things to look out for in your child who's aged one to 10: so if you ask them to do something, and they ignore you, or they look you in the eye and do the exact opposite thing; if they're disrespectful when they speak to you with their words, or their tone, or both; and if you've tried the problem solving process that we talked about on the podcast, and your children are inflexible, and demand that the thing that they want is more important than the thing that you want; or if they just refuse to engage, if they act spoiled, or just plain rude, then the Setting Limits workshop will help. And so not all of these things needs to be sure but if any of those things would need to be true.

And so here are some things to look out for in you: so if you've tried reading a lot of books, and maybe you have a whole folder of those Instagram memes that give you the instead of this tried that scripts that seem really great when you save them, but when you actually try them on your child, they say something that isn't in the script, and you're like: Well, what happens now? If you just wish you could get out the door in the morning without a massive meltdown from either you or them. And if you would really like it if you didn't have to approach bedtime with a sense of dread not knowing if tonight's going to be the night when they actually do what you ask, or if it's going to be one of those nights where you're stripping off their clothes as they are kicking and screaming on the floor to try to get them in the bath. And you do all the games of taking turns brushing teeth and brushing the monsters in their teeth and all the rest of it and it ends up with you practically or actually holding them down to get them brushed. And they drag out bedtime by asking for water and saying they need to pee and that they're scared and that you're pretty sure they aren't really scared and they're just trying to get you to come back and you see yourself care time slipping through your fingers, and you haven't cleaned up from dinner yet and the laundry pile is a mile high and you are sick of the whole thing and you don't know what else to try, then the Setting Limits workshop is going to help you. And I would say extra doubly especially if you've listened to the podcast and you find yourself nodding along because you generally agree with a good chunk of the ideas, but it seems like you're missing some sort of key and either you don't understand the ideas fully or you just can't quite figure out how to apply them, then the Setting Limits workshop will definitely help fit those pieces together. And we're going to do that in about eight days.

So the workshop is now available in two different forms. Most of the year, you can take it on our flex path model where we'll send you the first module right away as soon as you mark it complete, we'll send the second one. We have a pair of squirrels working at Your Parenting Mojo headquarters. They are called, rather imaginatively, Squirrel number 1 and Squirrel number 2. I didn't name them. You'll find out who named them once you sign up, and it's the squirrels' job to keep you on track. So if he takes you more than three or four days to complete the module, the squirrels will send you a reminder. And then they wait a few more days and send you another reminder. And then they wait a few more days and ask if you're sure you're in the right place and if you want to continue. It's kind of fun. It's playful. It helps to keep you on track. So you can finish and get the benefit you signed up for, which is learning how to set limits effectively. So you could sign up for FlexPath, from about May to January each year, and just do the workshop by yourself for $7, which is a steal. If you are highly self-motivated, and you want to work at your own pace, then this is the option for you. So here's what parent Jackie said about that.

This workshop has been amazing. I feel like I knew a lot of this information from listening to your podcasts in the past. But the way you laid it out and presented, it was really helpful for me, I loved how you had the modules with the video and the text and the homework. I even loved the squirrels because there definitely was a time where I just didn't have the momentum. It was at the beginning of it. And I just didn't think I'd have time to do this. And the squirrels kept bothering me. So I did it. And I'm so glad I did.

I'm feeling a lot happier feeling like I'm enjoying the presence of my children more and even I am taking more joy in their personalities and their thoughts. And I'm able to observe them more as who they are. And that's, that's been that's wonderful. So it, it does feel a bit liberating from that sense and hopeful. Yes, it feels hopeful that that I'm able to, and me and my husband are able to problem solve and address many different situations where we have a line of action that we can follow. It's not like: What do we do? What do we do? It may have felt like that a few weeks ago that were just like, what do we do like is it just kind of, we just got to wait till they get older. But of course, there's just going to be other challenges. So we need to enjoy this, this time at this age. And not just be feeling sorry for ourselves all the time. So yeah, but hopefully this feeling will, will stay and will only further get stronger.

If you're on the free Guided path option, you will get a lot of guidance from me in our private community. But sometimes it's just easier to talk through complex scenarios together. So you also have an option to join me on five of the eight days for group coaching calls. If you want to talk with me directly about your situation, then get live coaching in the workshops Full Experience. It'll be a small group and I promise that if you want to talk with me, you will get to do it. You won't be one of thousands watching me talk for 90 minutes. We will have an actual conversation. Here's what parent Kaja experienced on coaching calls with me:

It intrigued me initially, but I was like, well, it's extra money and it's extra time and I don't know like will it really be that much more benefit to me and I was imagining a group of hundreds of people's cramming on a Zoom call and like would that would like what I find value in that, so I did and truly I think that those coaching calls the small session was some of the it was the most special and it felt the most personal and poignant to me. In exactly the opposite of my kind of fearful expectation, I felt like it was the way that I could bring, I could be heard the most and get the most personal feedback. It was a smaller group. But that experience of like these people are going through the same thing I'm going through, despite the fact that they have different careers and different family setups and different numbers of kids. And you know, like that, again, like really was brought home in those coaching calls of just connecting with those individuals. The coaching calls were probably my favorite part.

So I' really encourage you to sign up for that free Guided path option, which starts Wednesday, April 24th. And you'll also have the option to join the Full Experience, which is just $37 for five live conversations with me recordings available if you can't be there every day. And it also gets you forever access to the workshop content, which otherwise expires for the folks in the free version. So just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/settinglimits. And do it quickly if you want to get my support as you work through this.

Alright, here we go. Let's take a look at the reasons why setting limits is so hard. And we will also talk about how to make setting limits easier. So in third place in this race, setting limits is hard when you don't know what your values are. Maybe you're not even sure what a value is related to parenting if you haven't thought of it until now. Values are different from goals because goals are an end destination. They tell us where we want to go. Obviously, that's difficult with raising children because they have their own ideas about where they want to go. So we can never know 100% that if we do a certain set of actions, we're going to come out with a child who has a certain set of skills and abilities and values of their own. And it's never that simple when there's another person involved. But we do know that if we don't know what our goal is, it's pretty likely we're not going to reach it. So I think of a goal as being like the summit of a peak that I'm hiking and values are the decisions we make about how we want the journey to be along the way. So am I going to talk with my hiking companion? Or are we going to hike in silence? Are we going to stuff a lot to take photos or keep going consistently? Are we bringing energy bars and trail mix or a gourmet lunch? All of these decisions affect what our journey is going to be like and if we'd really prefer a gourmet lunch, but we forgot to go shopping and leave home in a rush and the only thing we can find to eat is energy bars, our journey isn't going to be quite what we would have wanted.

When we start to think about how this applies to parenting, we can imagine we might have a value of respecting property and jumping on the couch doesn't fit with that value. We might also have a value of respecting other people and it might seem to us that our child jumping on the couch doesn't fit with that value either. How is your child going to learn to respect you nevermind other people if they look you in the eye and do the thing you just told them not to do? So let's set the respect for people aside. And we'll come back to that in a minute when we talk about how to set limits.

When we really look at respecting property, I do think it's okay to set some limits around that. So our couch is about 12 years old when Carys was one and jumping on it, it seemed okay. By the time she was three and still jumping on it, it was creaking, springs were collapsing. And it was clear it was not meant to take that kind of use. So we did institute a limit of not jumping on the couch. And the key to setting the limit was it was one I believed in. We didn't have the money for a new couch. I didn't want to sit on a broken couch. And my verbal and nonverbal communication conveyed that. What's really important in doing this is you have to be both willing and able to actually hold the limit. When she's three, I could physically lift her off the couch if necessary. If she's six, I wouldn't be able to do that. So setting a limit might not be the best tool to use in that instance. We might also imagine that other people don't want our child to jump on their couch, perhaps our parents in-laws, and we don't want our child to get into trouble in their homes.

A lot of the parents I work with tend to kind of catastrophize. And when their child does something like looking the parent in the eye and doing the thing the parent just told the child not to do, the parent immediately casts ahead 20 years and thinks that they're going to raise an adult who can't or won't fit in with society. And when we do this, we might set limits that we don't really believe in but that we think are necessary, because otherwise our children just won't learn this critical lesson that we think they really have to learn so that they don't become a person nobody wants to be around. And the key to doing this is to see when we're doing with catastrophizing. When we can see it happening, we can interrupt it and you might want to look back to episode 193: You don't have to believe everything you think for help with this. Four listeners sent me videos saying how this tool has helped them and I walk you through a practice you can use yourself as well. Ultimately, when we use that tool, we find: Oh, this isn't as much of a big deal as I thought it was. We might realize that the thing is pretty unlikely to happen. As an advanced practice, we might realize the thing we thought we cared about so much actually isn't so important after all. It might be easier to say: Okay, I can see that my child probably won't be a truly awful person. If I don't stop them from jumping on the couch now, then I can see that my mother's opinions of my parenting are really more about her than they are about me. And so maybe I can let go of caring so much about what she thinks. Maybe I can meet my need for competence as a parent by looking at things that are actually meaningful to me, like my relationship with my child, rather than my mother's opinion of my relationship with my child. And then we find opportunities to back away from setting limits, rather than setting them because it seems like we have to set them.

And that's where we can come back to the idea of respect. The really important part about seeing respect as a need or a value is that there are always multiple ways to meet them. We might get attached to one particular way of meeting that need, which is that our child must stop jumping on the couch, or they must not speak to us in a certain tone of voice. But the child not jumping on the couch or not using a certain tone of voice is not our need. I really can't overemphasize how important that point is. When we see that we have a need for respect, we can find many ways to meet that need. And we also have to consider our child's needs. So if our need is for respect for property, and our child's need is for joy and playing movement, we might decide to set the limit that our child mustn't jump on the couch, but we could just as easily ask if they'd be willing to jump on the bed, assuming the bed is more stable. Or if we have a trampoline, they could jump there, or maybe they would be willing to run outside instead of jumping. Or maybe they actually have a need for connection with us. And they're trying to meet that need by doing something they know irritates us. Because up to that point, we were ignoring them. As soon as they do something that's forbidden, they know your attention is going to be on them. So they use jumping on the couch as a strategy to get connection with you. They don't want to get yelled at, but they'll take it over having you disengaged.

When we think about the tone of voice that someone uses, we generally want this to be pretty perfect when it's coming from other people. But we wish that others would give us a lot more grace. So maybe we have a crappy day at work. And our commute is horrible. And we walk in the front door and the house is a disaster. And our partner walks in right behind us and says: Did you remember to get milk on your way home? And you forgot. And you reply: No. Did you remember to get milk on your way home? And we might easily imagine how our partner has a need for respect. And we could imagine them thinking clearly my partner doesn't respect me, because if they did respect me, they wouldn't speak to me like that. And you might be thinking, clearly my partner doesn't respect me, because if they did, they would have remembered the damage at themselves instead of reminding me about it when I'm already home, and then asking about it in that tone of voice.

But neither person was really doing anything related to respect here. One partner was making a simple inquiry about milk. Maybe their tone implied to us something about respect. But maybe they had had a hard day at work as well. And we're a little unguarded and we took it the wrong way. We wish that they would speak to us with what we consider to be respect. But then the next thing we said didn't come out in a way that we would want to be spoken to either. Yet we wish our partner would just know that we've had a hard day, or would attribute our snarky remark to our hard day rather than thinking or saying that we aren't treating them with respect. We want them to grant us a level of grace. But when they say something that we find hard to hear we see it as their fault. Does respect really mean that your partner should always monitor their tone of voice and speak in an appropriate way, even when they've had a hard day? Or could they show respect for us by getting dinner started while we play with the children or by thanking us for making sure we don't run out of milk the vast majority of the time, or by pointing out that everyone forgets things sometimes, and that we are an awesome parent and a colleague? So if that would feel good to us to receive is it possible that we could extend that kind of respect to our partner as well.

And the same thing happens with our children, we want them to always speak to us in a tone that we perceive as respectful, but very often we speak to them in a tone that they probably consider to be far from respectful when we tell them to stop doing this so why haven't they done that already, because we told them 15 times and we do this every day for crying out loud. We have so many more ways to meet our need for respect. We have friends, and maybe a partner and a therapist and hopefully a work environment with colleagues and a boss who are respectful, although that isn't always a given. And our need for respect can be met by so many other people, which means we aren't reliant on our child doing something or not doing something or using the exact right tone of voice for our need for respect to be met. Maybe we can start to see a difficult tone of voice or our child's refusal as something other than disrespect. I'm thinking of a parent who has allowed me to use her story with a pseudonym so I'm calling her Jamie. She was able to empathize with her daughter and a difficult moment when her daughter was heading for a meltdown. And it seemed like her daughter's behavior was the thing they needed to change so they could stop at the grocery store without a big hassle.

I do think our relationship has become better and stronger, calmer. I listened to her with a lot more attention and purpose. And so I really liked that and you know navigating difficult times conversation even as are difficult times, maybe slightly easier for me now, not not as easy as I would like it to be. But even last night, me and my husband picked her up from daycare, and we wanted to stop by the store to buy something for dinner, and she was the assistant that she is tired and she wants to go home and she was crying and leading us walk in the opposite direction having a tantrum, almost. We didn't get to a tantrum, but almost. And so I stopped. And I said: I see you're very tired, and you really want to go home, you must have had a really, really hard day today. And she stopped and said: Yes, I had a very hard day. And this boy, hit me today during break at school on my head and really hurts me. And so I was really happy that we were able to switch from this tantrum that could have gone really bad with all three of us being very upset to her actually opening up and telling us about what's really underneath the whole thing and bothering her. And then somehow things just changed and improved, not 100%. But she was feeling better, happier, talkative, excited. So then we went to the store and things were better. So moments like this, make me feel that, that everything I've done so far is starting to pay off. And it's been really worth it.

How easy would it have been for Jamie to have told her daughter to watch her tone and start walking away and come back here because we need to go to the store to get this ingredient for dinner. And instead, she took a moment to connect with her daughter. And she uncovers the real reason why that behavior was happening. And then we see that a limit wouldn't have helped, and neither would telling the child to change her tone have helped. The child had a need to be heard and understood. And once that happened, she felt better, and was able to come to her Jamie and meet Jamie's need for communication and collaboration, and then get the errand and the store done. And as we respect our children more by doing things like letting them make their own choices about what they eat, and how they eat it and what they wear without us sticking our origin and telling them that our way is better, we might find that they respect our choices and decisions more as well, not because we're forcing them to, but because we're now in a mutually respectful relationship.

The flip side of setting limits that aren't really a big deal to us but doing it a fear of what will happen if we don't set them is when we set limits that we don't think we should set or don't want to set and we set them because we've fallen into a habit of saying "no." Some parents I work with say they just don't even realize they're saying "no." They do it so reflexively. Their child asked for something, and the parent says "no." And if you put yourself in the child's shoes for a minute, you can start to understand what this might feel like from their perspective. Imagine that you're small, and you can't reach a lot of things and you're told that a lot of things are too dangerous for you to do, and you're exuberant and you want to do things that are fun, and you have a hard time doing them by yourself, and you ask for help, and your parent tells you "no." And you ask again, and there's still "no." And you asked to do something else and it's still "no." So you start jumping on the couch, partly because it's fun, and partly because it gets your parents' attention. And you wish your parent would have done the first thing you asked and now they're yelling at you to stop jumping on the couch, as they've told you a hundred times before and why can't you just do what you're told sometimes like your sister does. Your parent probably doesn't mean for you to feel shame when they say that they're just feeling exasperated and exhausted and they have needs for quiet and ease. But the effect on you the child is that you learn you shouldn't be exuberant. You shouldn't share everything that's going on for you because your parents don't want to hear it. They don't have time. It's too much for them to cope with. Sometimes they tell you they want to hear how you're feeling, but it's hard to believe them when they're constantly telling you to stop doing things. So pretty often when they ask how you're feeling you just shrug or say: you don't know. So yes, some limits may be helpful in helping us to live in alignment with our values. But when we're doing it constantly, all day every day, a child can start to feel hurt.

Last year I did the levels 1 and 2 training of the Gottman method for working with couples doctors John and Julie Gottman say that when couples have an average of five positive loving interactions to each negative one. Things are generally going well in the relationship. When the ratio drops below that the relationship just doesn't feel fulfilling and joyful. We start interpreting positive and even neutral signals is negative and reacting accordingly. Maybe we make snarky comments or make a point of not helping them when normally we would help them or we pick a fight. Now imagine this from your child's perspective. Many of the parents I meet reverse that ratio, they're giving five negative limit-setting interactions for every one positive loving one. And suddenly it makes more sense that our child would be rude and defiant and do the things we asked them not to do. And we find ourselves setting more limits because we don't know how else to change their behavior.

And all of that leads us very neatly into number 2 of the top 3 reasons why it's hard to set limits. And it's one of the easier ones to get our heads around. And that's because when we set a limit, we're trying to control or change someone else's behavior. We're saying you must do X, or you must not do Y. So let's try a little thought experiment to make this one more real. So think of a time when someone told you you had to do something, or are strongly implied that they wanted you to do something. It might have been your parent telling you what classes to take, or what major to take in college, maybe it was a boss handing your project to you. Maybe it was your partner telling you they wanted you to do something. Maybe the person told you that you didn't have a choice. Maybe they said you did. But you knew what they wanted you to do. You knew they would punish you by withholding love, or approval or money or an interview or rating or a promotion. Did you want to do the thing they wanted you to do? Even if you did want to do it before, maybe you now wanted it just a little bit less.

I remember that my husband's family wanted me to have a baby for a long time before I was ready. I can't even remember anything specific that his mom said. But I knew it very well. In one time at a holiday party, his godmother told me that children were a God's gift to women. And I don't always think on my feet that time I managed it. And I told her I thought birth control was God's gift to women. And she did not seem very impressed. I will say I'm much less snarky now than I used to be. But I was kind of sick of other people are having opinions about when was the right time for me to have a baby. And even whether I should have one at all. I was actually becoming more open to the idea, but I wanted it to be my decision. If you heard the Ask Alvin Anything Part 1 episode, you'll know two things: firstly, he cannot be concise; and secondly, he didn't pressure me into having children. So that helped, but the pressure from his family did not help.

We all want to make decisions that affect our own lives that feel meaningful to us. And that's not something that just starts being a thing when we become an adult or a teenager or a school-aged child or when we can talk. Even children who can't talk yet want to have a say over things like what they eat and how they use the bathroom. The older they get, the more choices they want to make. But that need for autonomy is always there. When we can see that need and support our children and meeting that need, everything gets easier. Think back to Parent Peju in episode 182 on How to get frustrating behavior to stop, her child was refusing to eat dinner every night and refusing to go to Chinese class and Peju couldn't understand where this defiance was coming from. And I coached her for a bit and we realized all the limits that Peju was setting on our daughter's behavior every day. And that most of those limits were completely unrelated to her values. So Peju relaxed, the vast majority of those limits, let her daughter make a lot more choices about things like what she ate for breakfast when she ate it, why she packed for lunch at school. When she did that her daughter was suddenly willing to eat the dinner, her parents cooked and go to Chinese class.

There isn't always a one to one correlation like that. But pretty often, we do see that kind of thing happen. Peju told us that the message her daughter was trying to communicate to her was: You're not in control. You're not the boss of me. And once Peju communicated that she wasn't trying to control her daughter, and she wasn't trying to be the boss, her daughter suddenly felt much more collaborative. So if you're seeing a lot of combative behavior in your child, that may be communicating: You're not the boss of me. And it seems like you need more limits on their behavior to get them to act the way you want. I'd encourage you to try backing off from the limits and moving toward that 5:1 golden ratio.

And finally, the number 1 reason why we find it so hard to set limits is because we don't know our needs. If we don't know our needs, that means we have no idea why we're setting a limit. It's coming out of nowhere or out of the fear that something awful will happen if we don't or because we're so tired that our default answer is "no." When we know our needs and we know our children's needs, suddenly we find solutions to problems that meet both of our needs. We mentioned that earlier when we were talking about respect and now I want to flesh that out a bit more fully.

So I remember a time when my daughter was about 6 she was jumping on the deck of a house that we were staying in and I was working outside with her because she had asked me to keep her company. And she kept jumping toward the steps down to the garden and there was a pretty good chance she was going to tumble down them eventually. And the easiest thing for me to do in that situation is set a limit right? Stop jumping like that because you're gonna hurt yourself. Because we're used to trying to understand our needs. I didn't say that instead I said: I'm feeling worried you're gonna fall down the steps and hurt yourself. How can we make sure that doesn't happen? And I had the idea she could jump across the stack the deck instead of a long it so that she wouldn't be jumping toward the stairs but she was using the widths of the planks to mark how far she was jumping, And she would lose that if she jumped the other way. She suggested that she lay out some pebbles to show where she jumped to last time, but she was then planning to jump right on the same spot. And so I was worried she'd twist her ankle by jumping on the pebbles. So she suggested we move the pebbles off to the side. So she would jump in a clear area, but still have the markers. And that worked for both of us, in that her needs for joy and play and competence, and it met my need for her safety.

The most important part of this interaction was that I knew my own needs, I knew my need was for her safety, and not for quiet for me to work. If I had a need for quiet and didn't realize it, while we were talking about which way she jumped, and where she put the pedals, I would have felt resistance, some sense that this was not working for me, and I probably would have become increasingly irritated. My window of tolerance would have become narrower in Taming Your Triggers language. And then the next time she asked me for something, I probably would have snapped at her. If I'd seen a need for quiet, then I would have been looking at very different strategies. She could have played her jumping game in the grass further from me, or I could have gone inside. Because I was very clear in my own mind that I wasn't trying to get quiet for myself, I was open to suggestions for her playing close to me, as long as they would keep her safe from rolling down the steps. Having this knowledge meant that I didn't have to set a limit in a situation in which it would have been very easy to set one. Instead, we found a way to meet both of our needs, which is the kind of interaction that makes a positive contribution on that 5:1 ratio.

Knowing my needs helps me all the time in my relationship with her. When we're at home, my need is for quiet so I can concentrate on work, and she's laying out a game of Hopscotch in the hallway and masking tape with a friend, I can ask them if they're willing to play more quietly, or I can offer to go and sit in another room. When she's feeling lonely in the evenings, we found that if I can work in her room while she goes to sleep, then her needs for comfort and emotional safety are met. And so is my need for competence in my work. Normally, I'm happy to do this. But then one time, I noticed resistance in myself and I realized I was hungry and I wanted a snack. And I said that to her. And so more recently she has begun saying to me I'm feeling lonely. Are you feeling hungry? Or is there any other reason why you might not want to sit in my room, because she knows that if my needs are met, I'm pretty likely to say "yes" to meeting her needs as well.

Many parents I talked with have a hard time at bedtime because their children are trying to delay bedtime as long as possible. And the parents are trying to get connection time for the two of them or rest or a competence in their work. The children are often stalling because they want more connection time with the parents. You wouldn't think that getting yelled at for not brushing your teeth counts as connection. But in a child's eyes, at least they have you're looking at them and interacting with them. Hitting siblings can very often be a similar bid for connection when you're distracted or in another room, they know they'll get your attention when they hit. It can seem like bedtime is the thing to fix here. But just think back to Peju. If the problem was with Chinese class that the child was struggling or it didn't get on with the teacher or was too tired after school from our classes, then trying to figure out how to meet those needs might have been effective. But because Peju's daughter's need was for autonomy, none of those things would have helped. It was looking outside of the interactions about Chinese class and even about dinner that met her daughter's need for autonomy.

So then we want to start looking at helping parents to get more opportunities for connection earlier in the day. Maybe the parent can find ways to rest with the child perhaps by reading a book or listening to a podcast or meditating while rubbing the child's head or stroking their back. But if you don't know that your need is for connection or rest or competence in your work, you'll never find the strategy that meets your needs. There will just be the sense of resistance in you and maybe frustration, maybe anger that indicates that you have needs and they aren't being met. Just because you don't know what your needs are doesn't mean you don't have needs. It just means it's going to be really hard to get those needs met. And of course, it gets doubly hard when you don't understand your child's needs, because their behavior just looks like resistance and defiance. I know that when things seem really hard, and you just want things to be easier than any movement toward compliance can seem like a good thing. So maybe you announce it's time to start bedtime routine and they stomp off down the hallway. And they're pouting as they get in the bath and it can seem like progress because the thing they're doing right they're doing what you ask them to do. In Parenting Beyond Power, my book, I suggest that parents who are thinking about these kinds of things, asks two questions: firstly, what is it that I want my child to do? That question is usually relatively easy to answer. It's things like stop stalling during bedtime routine and brush their teeth without a struggle and eat the dinner I cook instead of saying they aren't hungry and then demanding crackers an hour later. You know, usual stuff.

And the second question is, what do you want their reason to be for doing it? I know that many parents think: Well, life is full of rewards and punishments, and I'm not really punishing them if they don't do what I tell them. I just get angry which is kind of a natural consequence rather than a punishment. And if I don't teach my kids how to survive in this world, how are they ever going to learn in my life is going to be easier when they do these things without fighting me every flippin day so the fastest path to make that happen is the best path. But when we think of this, in the light of our second question, what do I want to be their reason for doing it, then the water gets a little bit more murky. So do I want their reason for doing it to be that they're afraid of me? Most parents who are listening to this podcast are fairly clear, they don't want that to be the reason. But rather less clear is the reason your children may be thinking if they know that there really is no option not to do the thing. And that is that they've given up. They're fighting you less as they're stomping down the hallway to the bathroom. You can imagine them saying: I don't like doing this. I'm doing what you're telling me, it doesn't meet my need. But I know you're going to win. I know you're bigger and stronger than me. And you might say: Well, let's talk about this. But really, that just means you're going to talk and I'm going to pretend to listen but tune you out because I know I won't have a chance to be heard. So for now, I'm going to do what you tell me. But I'll make sure you know, I don't like it by banging things around and by stomping my feet and looking miserable. And we can see that signal is an indicator that our child's needs aren't being met. And we can take that opportunity to adjust our approach and connect with them, and find out what need they have that isn't being met. And hopefully look for a way to meet that need that also meets your own need.

But if we don't do that, and we continue down the path of ignoring or pretending we don't see their resistance and rewarding them for doing the thing we're telling them to do. Eventually, things go even further. Because eventually they stop fighting us. Eventually, they do the thing we're telling them to do and they no longer bang things around or stomp or look miserable. Eventually, they take on our ideas about what it means to do things properly, even if that's different from what they think. Eventually, they forget themselves. They forget who they are. And yes, our life may get easier at that point because they just do what we tell them.

But I would ask you to think back to a time when this happened to you and your childhood? Was there a time when you resisted your parents? Did you try to get your point across to them? And maybe they didn't listen? What happened then? I remember when I was 12 my stepmom to be moved into our house and she had been my mom's best friend. But we didn't get along at all. My dad told me years later, it was partly because I did so much better in school than her own daughter, which made her daughter's problems seem worse by comparison. I don't remember a lot of the details anymore, but I do know that I drove her absolutely nuts. And I guess I went through a phase of sniffing all the time. I don't know why I might have had allergies. And she thought I was sniffing just irritate her. When she thought that I wasn't bathing well enough, so she forced me to take a bath with her supervising me washing myself sometime in my mid teens, which I found utterly humiliating.

And she used to snoop in my room to look for things I'd done wrong. And I did steal money from my dad's money jar sometimes because I knew they wouldn't give me money if I asked for it. But I would have things in my room like a library book that had been withdrawn from the library, which she would then accuse me of stealing. And at some point, she punished me by telling me to pack up all of my things except for my bed and my schoolbooks and put them in the garage and they stayed there for months. And I stopped speaking at the dinner table. It's not like I did took a vow of silence or anything I just didn't have anything to say. And so she created a rule where everyone had to speak and share something about their day, which I did a couple of times. But pretty soon I just said I didn't have anything to share. And I started eating less not because I especially wanted to be thin but for two reasons: firstly, because it seemed like I couldn't control anything that was happening in my life, but I could control what I ate; and secondly, although I don't think I realized this at the time, I think I thought that if I got thin enough, they would just stop noticing me and they would leave me alone.

And my stepmom understood each of these things as me making life more difficult for her. And by extension for her and my dad. She thought that I wouldn't speak at the table deliberately to irritate her. She saw me not eating as a deliberate strategy to get attention and to drive a wedge between her and my dad. And when they eventually separated when I was about 18, she told me that separation was my fault. So each step of the way, she saw my behavior as something that had to be changed and squashed to make her life easier. I don't think she had an injury or anything. She was a stressed out lady who was trying to figure out her third marriage and I seem like I was the thing that standing was standing in her way.

But the effects that she had on me was absolutely profound. I started resisting a little bit, but resistance wasn't really my style. My mom was pretty dominating as well. So it's not like I had a model for how to communicate with a parent who wanted to hear my needs. And I responded by squashing myself physically and metaphorically. And I was lucky that my undiagnosed autism gave me skills that were highly valued in school and so I did well. I graduated second in my class. The person who was first was sleeping with our English teacher. But inside I was dying. I forgot what my needs were because I was just keeping my head down and trying not to be noticed.

I stopped resisting and it looked like I was doing well, but actually, I was right for a relationship with a narcissistic drug addict as soon as I left home because attention from him felt like love. I had no idea how to set boundaries. I'm not sure I even could have said what boundaries were. And we were totally a meshed. I'm not trying to tell you that if you force your child to take a bath when they were a toddler, that they'll end up marrying a crack addict at 19. But what we're talking about is establishing a pattern. When we establish a pattern, that we will perceive their resistance as their problem, as their behavior that needs to change, we're essentially telling them, their needs don't matter. And their consent doesn't matter. As long as they do what we tell them. We don't care why they're doing it--even if they're doing it because they've essentially given up on themselves and advocating for themselves and even understanding themselves.

So you might be conceptually on board with this but still wonder, well, how are the teeth actually going to get brushed where my child says no? When I talk with parents for the first time, it's pretty common for them to tell me the long list of things they've already tried to address the problem they're having with their child. Because they didn't know the child's needs, none of those strategies worked. That's the problem with posting about your struggle that you're having with your child in most online communities. Because the other parents in those groups don't know you or your child, they don't know your needs or your child's needs. So the strategies they suggest that worked for them are the ones that met their needs and their child's needs, which they mostly arrived at by random trial and error. And because they and their child are different people from you and your child, the strategies that work for them will probably not work for you, unless by some magical coincidence, you happen to have the same needs as them, and their child happens to have the same needs as your child. It does happen but it's relatively rare. So sticking your hopes on this way of getting two strategies that will work for both of you is kind of a moonshot.

That's why I get the long list of moonshots that haven't worked. And by the time I talk with them, the parent is usually pretty much convinced that nothing is going to work. There is no way out of the situation so the parent just keeps repeating the same struggle every day. It's exhausting. It's demoralizing. And it's a big reason why parenting seems so hard. That's what happened to parent Cori, who was the one I quoted at the beginning of the episode saying she couldn't believe the Setting Limits workshop was free. At the beginning of the eight days, Cori was basically holding her son down to get his teeth brushed every day. He was a little less than two years old at the time. He hated it. And she hated doing it to him. She had tried asking him when he would be ready, and he was saying "never," and let him brush his own teeth and her teeth and his toys, teeth but she said without fail, he acts as if I'm torturing him when I go to brush his teeth. She realized he probably had a need for autonomy, but she didn't really know how to address that. So she set it aside for a bit and she tried to give him a lot more autonomy throughout the rest of their day together. She let him choose whether they ate breakfast inside or outside gave him a chocolate covered fig snack he asked for. They kept talking about toothbrushing. She did no force brush. But she told him she wanted to try to find different possibilities. Separately, she had been having a hard time because whenever she gave him an open container of liquid, he would dump it out. Of course, she tried putting everything in cups with lids but you don't always have one handy. So next time he was about to dump the water, she was ready. She had a plan. She told him he could dump it in the bathtub or outside.

And I'm gonna quote the next stretch of what she said: "She said he was thrilled. His eyes lit up. We went outside and he poured his tiny cup of water several times intensely and excitedly. How was this so easy? I had spent so much time and energy trying to prevent or manage this behavior. Later in the evening, he got a hold of my cup with a little water in it. I started I saw him start to pour and as my arm reached out instinctively he stopped himself and asked me, "Outside?" I could have cried he actually stopped himself. I brought a pitcher of water out and let him fill up his cup and pour it out again and again. He asked me to join him and I did so it offered not only play but also connection. When it was getting toward the end of the picture, I told him we would go and brush teeth after this. He asked for more water when the picture was out. I told him we were all done with the water for now. He ran inside and I put the picture away. I went to find him assuming he was hiding to prolong bedtime. And he was already in the bathroom with the lights out in the same area he chose to brush his teeth in earlier, waiting. I turned the lights on and he said, "Teeth". And then at this point she inserted a little tears of joy emoji. She said he still doesn't want me to brush him. But this feels like incredible progress for one day. I've been using the tools from this workshop for about a week so maybe it's the culmination, but it feels like a lot came together today.

And then just two more days later, Cori's son let her brushed his teeth. She kept offering him real choices around the whole process and asked him if he had any ideas how to make it more comfortable and enjoyable. She wasn't even really sure he understood all of it, but she was pretty sure he sensed that she was willing to try and meet him someplace new in this and that she would make reasonable accommodations that took him into consideration. That night, they ended up rushing in the kitchen sink, and she was patient as he played, and he got distracted by the new space. And she would gently remind him, they were there to brush teeth, he opened his mouth, and he let her brush for the first time, in probably a year. He would resist for a bit, she would take a break, so she wasn't forcing it. And he let her in several times before she hit a sensitive area, she brushed about 80% of his teeth with no struggle. She said, "I'm just in awe of this." And then concluded by saying, "I have the sense that in the future, I will get back all the extra time I'm investing in this process now along with a much deeper relationship between us based on trust and not force."

So if your interactions with your children are more similar to Cori's at the beginning of this story, and if you're nowhere near that 5:1 ratio in the positive direction, and maybe you're even getting pretty close to 5:1 in the negative direction, and you're fed up of it for yourself, and you know, this is not what what you want your children's childhoods to be like, then I've got three great resources for you and they're all free.

Firstly, we have a new list of feelings and needs available at YourParentingMojo.com/feelings and YourParentingMojo.com/needs. There are lists of words available for the grownups and for the kids, there are pictures of faces they can point to to identify some of the most common feelings and needs that children have, especially when things aren't going well, because that's when it can be really helpful to have these tools to address challenges between you. So you can print those out, stick them on the fridge, reference them when you're having a hard time to try to identify how you're each feeling, and what are your needs. And if you're working with these lists, you are probably not setting a limit, which is going to almost automatically improve the situation, even if you don't quite get to the point where you fully understand your child's needs. So again, those lifts so you're at YourParentingMojo.com/feelings and YourParentingMojo.com/needs.

Second resource is going to help you narrow things down even further. So in my book, Parenting Beyond Power, I lay out a template for the Needs Cupcake, which is the idea that much of the time we're trying to meet the same needs over and over again. At the top of the cupcake is the cherry, those are the three to five needs that your child is trying to meet all day every day. Underneath that is the frosting which is the next three to five needs that are most important to them. Underneath that is everything else on a needs list. When you know the child's cherry needs, then whenever you're having a hard time with them, you don't have to go through a complete list of needs, you just go to their cherry needs first. If it isn't that you look at the frosting needs. If it isn't that you look at the rest of the needs list. So how do you find out what are your child's cherry needs? Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/quiz, you'll find 10 quick and easy questions. Once I have those answers, I can tell you your child's biggest cherry need. Once you know that, you're likely to have found the root of some of the biggest challenges between the two of you. I'll also send you a free guide with some strategies you can use to meet your child's cherry need, as well as some other needs that are likely to be pretty important to them as well. Once again, you can find that at YourParentingMojo.com/quiz.

And finally, if you want to work with me directly to figure this out, we can do that too. So you can do the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop in the Flex path format pretty much anytime you like between about May and January, and you can do those modules as fast as you like. I recommend one module per day because each module has homework to help you actually practice what you're learning. And if you just skip quickly through the content, you won't get the benefit of the practice. Or you could come and do the workshop with me, live, between Wednesday, April 24th, and Friday, May 3rd, with the weekend off in the middle. I will be live in our private group every day. You'll get the benefit of learning alongside all the other parents on this journey.

At the end of one of the Setting Limits workshops, one participant wrote in the chat, "I didn't think it was possible to find a community like this in an online format. You'll come out of a coaching calls, rooting for the other parents' success just like they will be rooting for yours. You'll have have a clear strategy to address the challenges you're facing with your child's behavior. And as we go through the workshop, you'll get to try things out. Let us know what worked and what didn't, and we'll help you refine your approach. Yes, you will learn how to set limits effectively but that's actually the easy part. What's much harder is setting fewer limits and using problem solving conversations and boundaries and limits in the right way at the right time. We will cover all of that and so much more. So come join me in the workshop. Sign up now is totally FREE to follow the Guided path of one module per day, starting Wednesday, April 24th. And all of the details on that are at YourParentingMojo.com/settinglimits. I will see you there.

If you'd like Jen to address the challenge you're having in your parenting, just email your one minute video or audio clip to support@YourParentingMojo.com a