Adrian  00:03

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

Jen Lumanlan  00:53

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. If you don’t give me a lollipop, I won’t be your friend anymore. Maybe said to a sibling. If you don’t come and sit down next to me, I’ll take your toy, perhaps, said to you. If you don’t give me candy before dinner, I’ll hit you. Has your child ever threatened you for doing exactly these things or something like them, or maybe even they’ve threatened something worse? Do they threaten you for taking away things that they want, like sugar or screens, or for refusing to do something that they want you to do. If so, you are not alone. And if you have no idea what to do about this behavior, you’re also not alone. When I asked my listeners in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group about whether their children ever threaten them, a bunch of people raised their hands and said, yep, this happens at our house all the time. It also seemed as though parents felt very conflicted about how to address the topic, especially when they haven’t modeled this kind of language at home. In this episode, I’ll help you to understand where these threats come from and how to handle them in a way that feels good to you and also reduces the number of times your child says these kinds of things to you. I should say at the outset that the strategies I’m going to talk about in this episode are for children under the age of about 10 who might be threatening harm, but you either know they won’t carry it out, or they don’t have the access or ability to actually carry it out. Your preschooler might be able to follow through on a hit, and it might hurt, but it likely won’t cause serious damage. They may even cause more serious damage accidentally. I’ve heard of parents who get a broken nose when they are behind their child and their child arches their back and the child’s head hits the parent’s nose. These kinds of things can be hard to deal with, but they’re a relatively expected part of childhood and are covered in this episode. If your child is making credible threats of serious physical harm against you and you believe they might carry it out, then this is beyond the scope of this episode, and I’d suggest that your first call be to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. I’ll put a link to their website in the show notes for this episode. I also want to point out we’re going to mention violence in this episode, including sexual violence. So if this would be difficult for you today, then I’d invite you to come back to this episode on a day when you feel more resourced. I actually found an old Reddit post that I want to think through as an example of how to understand what’s happening in a situation where a child is threatening us. This post is actually the third result on a search for what should I do when my preschooler threatens me, and I’m going to use it for our analysis, because it has enough detail to understand a fair bit about the dynamic between the parent and child. You might want to listen carefully as I read the post and see if you can figure out what’s happening before I explain what I see. The subject is 3.5 year old giving violent threats. And here’s the rest of the post, I have a very intelligent, strong willed little guy that has an opinion about dang near everything, and assumed he has just as much, if not more, authority than any given adult. Sounds on par for a three-year-old, right? His language skills have always been impressive, and he seems to remember complicated words and phrases used months ago, and will recall them at just the appropriate time. He also likes to be rocked before bed every night. Whether it’s because he cherishes the snuggles or the chance to stay awake for a few minutes longer is yet to be determined. I assume a little of both. But the other night, he was being rude and obstinate, and I warned him that he needed to work on showing me he could be a better listener and be respectful, or he could continue doing what he was doing, and I would leave him to put himself to bed. He didn’t take the path I’d hoped for naturally, and I knew I needed to follow through to show him I was serious. So I said, okay, good night. I love you, and stood up to leave. Instantly, he screamed a guttural no, and began the full on crying fit and yelled, you’re not listening to my words. I will rip you to shreds. And while I was trying to figure out what the actual heck, they didn’t actually say heck, but what the actual heck was coming out of his mouth, he then proceeded to tell the cat to bite my knee off. I have bad knees. And as a cherry on top, he said, I will shatter your eyeballs. First of all, I’m not sure where he’s getting these phrases. They seem kind of specific, and I’m trying to think if we watched any movies recently that would have said such a thing. But like I said, his memory is ridiculous, and he could be pulling something out of his pocket he’s been holding onto for months. It’s not the first time I’ve heard him say violent things, but usually he’s talking to his toys, and the threats are a bit more generic, I guess. Second of all, and this is the heart of the matter, is this typical, or is my kid letting me know he’s got a violent side we need to treat? TLDR, I’m trying real hard to not be raising a future serial killer. Okay, so we’re going to take a close look at what’s happening in the situation, and we’ll start with the parents perspective. I’m going to refer to this parent as Luna, as that is part of their username, and I’m going to assume, for the sake of this discussion, that Luna identifies as female. Since I’ve talked about this, a good deal with female identifying parents, and they seem to have an especially hard time with this behavior. Most of the content in this episode is applicable to parents of any gender. Let’s look at the issues related to mothers first. I think there are two important reasons why female socialized parents have a hard time with threats from children. Firstly, we’re socialized to take care of everybody else’s needs before our own, and if we have a child who’s so dysregulated they’re threatening us with something between not being our friend anymore and hitting us, then clearly there is something wrong, and it’s probably something that we are doing wrong. If we were conditioned to believe that when everybody else around us feels calm and happy and content, then we have done a good job. Anyone expressing discontent seems like a failure, and it must be our failure. This can be especially pronounced if our parents had a lot of disagreements when we were young, and our role in the family was to moderate their fights. In the Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode number 13, from 2021 which was called Triggered all the time to emotional safety, Parent Crystal shared how her parents would get into a huge fight and she would disappear into the kitchen to make tea for everybody to try and placate them. Her parents were supposed to be the ones who helped Crystal to feel safe, but instead, Crystal tried to soothe herself by getting them to stop arguing, because their arguing felt so unsafe to her. When we’ve grown up in this kind of environment, a child’s dysregulation over something like screen time or candy can remind us of how unsafe we felt with our parents in childhood, which triggers us so we may then say things to our child that we don’t mean, and then we go into a guilt and shame spiral because we know we didn’t want to speak to our child in that way. We might even yell at them, but in that moment, we couldn’t stop ourselves, maybe we even threaten our child. And of course, then we feel terrible about it, because it’s just adding fuel to the fire and shows our child that threats are appropriate tools to use. The other way that women seem to experience this kind of behavior as more difficult than dads do is because mothers are judged a lot more by their children’s behavior. What a child eats or doesn’t eat, how they’re dressed, whether they play nicely with other children or use tools like threatening violence, reflects on our ability as a mother. Our culture spends a lot of time and energy telling us that our value as human beings is equivalent to our value as mothers. So when our children use this kind of threatening language, it’s easy to see how our value, both as mothers and as humans beings, seems threatened.

Jen Lumanlan  08:02

A lot of parents feel concerned about where this kind of language comes from, and you heard that from Luna as well. In some cases, the path is relatively easy to follow. If we’re threatening our child on a regular basis, we can see how they might use this kind of language with us. Even if our threats are delivered in a calm way, like if you don’t brush your teeth now we won’t read stories tonight, we have to acknowledge these really are threats. Our child may be feeling much more dysregulated when they speak to us, which makes their words come out with much more force and passion, but the language is the same as we’ve been using with them. It’s not uncommon for parents to describe a threat their child has made and say, well, I’ve never used language like that with them, when actually we may not have used that specific threat. We have modeled the process many times. We just call it logical consequences, as if there was something logical about the threat. I often find it really puts things that we say to our children into perspective when we hear another adult saying them to us, or when our child said something to us. I remember when Carys was about three, reading in a popular parenting book that children get tired of hearing us repeat our requests over and over again, and so we should use a single word if we restate our request. So if we ask our child to put their shoes away, and we look back five minutes later and they haven’t done it yet, instead of saying I asked you to put your shoes away or why haven’t you put your shoes away yet, we should just say shoes. One day, not long after I started using that tool, Carys and I were sitting on the sofa in the morning, and I was working, I think she may have been doing some kind of screen time, and she asked me to get some blueberries for her breakfast. And I said, Yeah, I’ll do it next time I get up. 10 minutes goes by and I hadn’t gotten up, and I’d also forgotten about the blueberries. She looked over at me and she said, blueberries. I was totally shocked at first and then kind of amused. I certainly did not like being spoken to in that way, and that was how I learned to try to put things we say to our children through a filter of what it would feel like to say or receive the thing I’m about to say from another adult. So when we say something like if you don’t brush your teeth, we won’t read stories. We are training them to use threats, even if that wasn’t our intention. Our child may also have heard their parents threaten each other and understand that a threat is a way of using power over another person. In a moment when they think they don’t have very much power and they want to have something or make you do something, we can see how using a threat can seem like an appropriate choice when the child has heard other people using them for this effect. Children might also pick up this kind of language from media like TV, YouTube, video games, or from the playground. While I think it can be helpful to reduce the number of threats we’re making towards our child and toward our parenting partner when our child’s around, I don’t think it’s super helpful to spend a whole bunch of time worrying about where they might have heard this outside of these relationships. We live in a culture that says violence is not okay, and then practices violence on a routine basis. In his excellent book and talk, which I have quoted from before, indigenous Australian author Tyson Yunkaporta says that “Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug. Violence is part of the pattern. The damage of violence is minimized when it is distributed throughout a system, rather than centralized into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions. If you live a life without violence, you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spheres of your existence.” In every newspaper on every day around the world, acts of violence are described awful violence that humans commit against each other. The countries that many listeners of this podcast live in, try to keep their hands out of direct fighting, but the violence is still there, even if we don’t see it every day. So where does this come from? When parents have been telling kids not to be violent for decades, how do we end up with 20% of surveyed female college students reporting they’ve been raped during college, and over half of women and almost a third of men have experienced sexual violence, including physical contact, during their lifetimes. How can we spend so much time and energy telling people not to be violent and yet still be surrounded by so much violence? I think we can understand quite a bit about this from the Reddit post. So let’s return to the end of the post so we can figure out what was happening and what are the points at which things might have gone differently along the way. I see five of these potential turning points. So we’re going to start at the fifth and work our way backward. And I’m doing it this way because Luna posted about wanting to know what to do about their child’s behavior, which is usually the problem that parents come to me with as well. The fifth turning point was obviously the biggest one, and it happened when the parent said, okay, good night. I love you, and stood up to leave so the child can put himself to bed. The child responds with a loud no and a full on crying fit and the threat of physical harm to the parent. When I see posts like this in online communities, it’s fairly common for the parent to say something like it just goes from zero to 60 immediately. And it sort of seems like that in this example, even though Luna doesn’t use those precise words. Luna says a calm good night, and the child immediately responds with the over the top, loud wailing and threats. And it seems like getting the child to stop making threats is the thing to fix. After all, the thing we said to them right before, okay, good night, I love you was not unreasonable, right? I’m gonna leave us hanging there for just a minute in terms of what we should do after we hear something like that from our child. This was the fifth of our potential turning points. Because the fourth of these turning points was a really big one that could have had a profound impact on how the fifth one turned out. So we learn about the fourth potential turning point in Luna’s statement, but the other night, he was being rude and obstinate, and I warned him that he needed to work on showing me he could be a better listener and be respectful, or he could continue what he was doing, and I would leave him to put himself to bed. So there’s a lot in that sentence, so we’re going to break it apart so we can look at the pieces more clearly. There are two sets of judgments in this statement, the rude and obstinate, and then later be a better listener and be respectful. So what might have been happening for this parent to think that their child was rude and obstinate? Well, we can imagine that the child probably used a tone that the parent didn’t like, and maybe even words they didn’t want to hear. He probably said no to something the parent wanted him to do, and maybe it seemed like he was stalling and doing chores before bed, like bath time, brushing teeth, getting into pajamas. The parent uses the words rude and obstinate to describe this behavior, but what if we substituted the words exhausted and overwhelmed? Does anything change about our perception of a situation when we do that? Can we perhaps remember a time when we might have felt exhausted and overwhelmed, and perhaps we spoke to our colleague or partner in a tone that could be considered rude? Might there have been a time when we even said no and they asked us to do something that they might have perceived as obstinate, but from inside our own bodies, we aren’t being rude and obstinate, we’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. When we imagine ourselves in another person’s shoes, we can start to get a sense for what might be going on for them, which can help us to explain their behavior. I don’t know if this child was feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, but I’d say there’s a decent chance he was experiencing some feelings that we would want to receive compassion for if we were experiencing them. Let’s put this through our How would it sound if an adult said this filter. Let’s imagine you’ve had a hard day at work, and you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, and you know you’re going to immediately have to shift into making dinner as fast as you possibly can. And then bedtime routine. You arrive home, the first thing your partner says to you is, hey, can you take the trash out? What do you say? Do you say, Sure, darling, I’d be happy to take the trash out without any sense of frustration, anger or resentment. Do you take the trash out and slam the can around a little bit as you’re doing it, and kind of give a huff as you walk past your partner and close the door with just a little extra oomph? Do you say, I just got home, why can’t you take the trash out? Is it possible that our behavior could be described as rude and obstinate? Are we actually being rude and obstinate? No, we’re expressing our frustration, our anger, our resentment that our partner hasn’t recognized our needs for rest, for mental space and for collaboration when they made their request. So is it possible that our child’s rude and obstinate behavior isn’t actually rude and obstinate, but is an expression of their feelings about the things we’ve asked or more likely, told them to do throughout the day. And if that’s the case, does threatening them to change their behavior or will withdraw our love acceptance and comfort seem like the right way to address this? When I asked in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group for parents who had experience with their children using threats against them, Parent Lauren said, Oh my gosh, you must have been in my household. I get very triggered when my six-year-old, ADHDer says these kinds of black melee, transactional threats. Eye for an eye type thinking as some of the most offensive ideology there is. I don’t handle it. I gave a five-minute TED talk this morning, and I replied, can you say more about your TED talk? What happened? Lauren said, I ranted about the importance of instead of trying to blackmail his little brother into sitting next to him at the table, if you don’t sit at the table, I’ll take your toy. He should apologize for taking the toy in the first place and tell his little brother that he’d really like him to sit next to him. Epic parenting fail. No one was taking anything in, and I was triggered by all the crying and lack of eating anything for breakfast. Huh? That’s really tough. And I get why this happens because of the things we’ve said about our children’s behavior being a measure of our success as parents and as people. When they do something like threatening and especially when they threaten violence, we snap. I’m sure, looking back on it, Lauren wishes they’d been able to take a pause before responding and see that they were about to say things that weren’t helpful and take a deep breath and re-regulate and remind themselves this was not a crisis or a reflection of our worth, but in the moment, it’s so hard to do. When parents first learn about the problem-solving approach that I use, one of the first things they often want to do is problem solve on how to get their child to stop hitting or stop being rude and obstinate. Let’s continue our example of taking out the trash. So your partner asked you to take out the trash, and you gave your rude and obstinate answer, and then your partner says, hey, can we problem solve on how to stop you from being rude and obstinate to me when you get home from work? How do you feel about having that conversation with them? My guess is that you would not welcome it, and you might even threaten some physical violence of your own. What do you want your partner to say to you in that kind of circumstance? If you gave you a rude and obstinate response, what you probably want your partner to do is say, Oh, my goodness, it sounds like you must have had a really hard day. What’s going on? Do you want to tell me about it? Let me just turn the oven on so we can have frozen pizza for dinner, and then you won’t have to cook. What would it be like to hear that from your partner? And even better, what if your partner knew you were having a hard time at work lately, and that morning, when you said good morning, they heard your tense tone, and they said, I’m going to take out the trash this morning so we don’t have to do it later. I know today is going to be a long day for you. Shall I get takeout on my way home? Or should we just throw a pizza in the oven for dinner? We want that kind of support and understanding for ourselves, but it’s so hard to give it to other adults, and it seems impossible to give it to children. It becomes a lot more possible when we see that our children are people with feelings and needs just like we are, and that they have a hard time when their needs aren’t met, just like we do.

Jen Lumanlan  19:27

There’s another set of judgments where Luna says they want a child to be a better listener and be respectful. Be a better listener is actually a code that’s commonly used in parenting at the moment, and we can translate it to mean do what you’re told. When we say a child isn’t listening, we don’t really mean they aren’t listening. We mean they aren’t doing what we’ve told them to do. This child might look their parent in the eye, listen very carefully and decide to do the opposite of what the parent has said. The child would have been a better listener, but because that’s not what listening means in this context, this behavior would not have met the parent’s approval. We don’t know exactly what the parent means by be respectful, but we could imagine it’s linked to doing what you’re told using words and speaking in a tone of voice that doesn’t challenge the parent’s authority. And as we come to the end of this long sentence we’ve been working through, we find the real kicker. I’m going to read you the whole sentence with emphasis on the relevant part. But the other night, he was being rude and obstinate, and I warned him, he needed to work on showing me he could be a better listener and be respectful, or he could continue doing what he was doing, and I would leave him to put himself to bed. Now, I don’t know about you, but to me, that sort of sounds like a threat. The parent is saying that when the child’s behavior matches the parent’s judgment and expectation of good behavior, he can have what he wants, which is to snuggle with his parent before going to sleep. If his behavior does not match the parent’s judgment and expectation of good behavior, then the parent will withhold affection and comfort from the child until the child changes their behavior to match the judgment and expectation. And this is the moment where we realize that we have most likely used the exact tool that we don’t want our child to use on us, on them, many times, and now they’re using it against us. The ‘if you don’t’ part of the child’s threat is implied rather than stated, but the implication is clearly there. The child is saying, if you don’t snuggle with me before I go to sleep, I will rip you to shreds and shatter your eyeballs, just like the parent said, If you don’t show me you can be a better listener and be respectful, you can put yourself to bed. The parent has probably never threatened such physical violence as a child is threatening, but in the child’s mind, these threats may feel very equivalent. To a young child, their parent or caregiver is everything. This is the person who feeds them, who soothes them after they scrape their knee, who provides comfort and snuggles so the child can feel safe and secure. When we are having a hard time, we have lots of potential resources available to us. We may have a partner, friends, perhaps our own parents and a therapist. When our child is having a hard time, they probably have one main resource to help them, and that’s us. To a young child who relies on his parent for snuggles to feel comfortable enough to go to sleep every night, the threat of having snuggles withdrawn may very well feel equivalent to the threat that he made to his parent to rip them to shreds and shatter their eyeballs. To us, they seem several orders of magnitude of difference. But when we put ourselves in the body of a young child who relies on his parent for something as critical as a sense of safety, we can see how the parent withdrawing their presence during the part of the day when the child might feel most vulnerable could be extremely difficult for them. In my book, Parenting Beyond Power, there is a flow chart that describes the tools we have available to us to address the challenges we have with our children. When our first line tool is the problem-solving approach, we identify strategies that meet both of our needs. There are times when we can’t find a way to meet both of our needs. Very often that happens because we parents have gotten our heads wrapped around a certain way of doing things and can’t imagine doing it a different way. When that happens and we are the person who’s most affected, we can set boundaries to protect ourselves. If we can’t set a boundary, we can set a limit. If our child is the person who’s most affected by the challenge we’re facing, a natural consequence is our best tool, which is a consequence that we don’t make any decision about, like getting cold if you go outside when it’s freezing without a jacket. The very last tool in that flow chart is a so called logical consequence, which is really just another name for a threat or a punishment. And that’s what Luna is using here. There’s a problem between them and their child, and the first tool that Luna uses is to set this logical consequence/ threat/ punishment. When that happens, we find ourselves in a very difficult place in the relationship. Relationship experts, Doctors John and Julie Gottman talk about needing a minimum of five positive interactions to each one negative interaction for a couple to feel good in their relationship. And this is a relationship between equals, not where one person is highly dependent on the other for emotional support, and it’s also a minimum, rather than an optimal amount. When a logical consequence aka threat aka a punishment, is our first line parenting tool, it’s likely we aren’t in that magic five to one positive to negative comments range, and it’s possible the ratio is reversed, with five negative comments to each one positive one. The child actually told us what they wanted in this case. He said, you aren’t listening to my words, and we can understand more about the situation in Luna’s opening description, I have a very intelligent, strong willed little guy that has an opinion about dang near everything, and assumed he has just as much, if not more, authority than any given adult. This child has a strong need for autonomy, which means making decisions that the child feels are important to him and also to be heard and understood, for his request to be realistically considered, even if we didn’t actually say yes to it in the moment. The child has probably made many such requests to have his need for autonomy met throughout the day, many of which were denied which resulted in the behavior that Luna perceived to be rude and obstinate. The threat was their last ditch attempt to have Luna consider what they were asking for when so many other previous requests had apparently failed. I hear you asking, Jen, are you really saying it’s okay for our child to threaten us with physical violence? And my response is, no, no, I’m not. It’s no more okay for your child to threaten you with physical violence that they aren’t going to carry out than it is for you to threaten to withdraw their main source of comfort and connection, which you actually are going to do, and which was what prompted the threat of physical violence in the first place. So let’s look at some of these ways to navigate situations, most of which happened long before the threat is made to avoid the threat happening in the first place. When I ask parents in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group, if their children ever threaten, Parent Susan said, my four-year-old often does this, and I often struggle with how to respond, I tell her things like, it hurts me when you say you’re going to hit me. We don’t hurt each other. If you do that, I’ll have to take you to a room to protect myself. Then I drop it and go back to trying to trying to address whatever it is she wants or doesn’t want. I don’t want to give her the big reaction she’s maybe fishing for. I think this is a big step forward from seeing the child’s behavior as rude and obstinate, although personally, I wouldn’t say it hurts me when you say you’re going to hit me. We don’t hit each other and so on. We don’t hit each other is an indirect way of saying, I don’t want you to hit me, which is what we actually mean. The we don’t hit each other makes it sound like something the child has agreed to, when actually this is probably some kind of family rule that has been imposed on the child. Of course, I’m not saying we should actually let our child hit us, but chances are the child has hit us at some point so we don’t hit each other isn’t technically true. It also probably isn’t something the child has agreed not to do. I would say something like, I don’t want you to hit me. You must feel really strongly about whatever it was you just said no to. Do you want to tell me about it? Then once we’d address that topic so the child’s need to be heard and understood has been met. I would follow up with something like, next time you think about telling me you want to hit me, could you try saying something like, I really want you to listen to me, mama, what do you think? This is how I would handle the threat if it had actually happened, if we had missed all of the other potential opportunities to turn towards a different pathway before we got to that point, same goes for Luna. If we’d missed the opportunity to address the rude and obstinate behavior and the threat came out, that would have been an ideal moment for softness, rather than following through to let him know that I’m serious. So when this child screamed no and threatened to rip his parents to shreds and shatter their eyeballs, what he was actually saying was I feel lonely and scared and worried that I won’t be able to sleep without you here next to me in the way that we always do it, and I know we had some difficult interactions early in the evening, but please don’t take your comfort and love and approval from me so we can hear the threat to hurt us and make the translation to what the child really means, and then maybe even apologize to our child. And that might look like we had such a hard time tonight, haven’t we? I’m sorry I said I wasn’t gonna lie with you like we usually do. Did you feel scared when I said that? Is that why you said those things to me? Would you like a hug and then we can snuggle with our child like we usually do.

Jen Lumanlan  28:08

I’m also thinking back to when Luna said he didn’t take the path I’d hoped for naturally, and I knew I needed to follow through to show him I was serious, because that’s the third potential turning point. We had to change the course of this interaction, because making these kinds of threats gets us into trouble. If we’re going to make them, we should be willing to follow through. But if there’s a decent chance that following through is going to create a meltdown at bedtime, which is perhaps the moment in the day when I least want to have to deal with a meltdown, is that really the right time for a threat? Even if you do want to teach your child to be a better listener and be respectful, is now the right time for that lesson? What could we do in that moment instead? I’m putting myself in Luna’s shoes and imagining Luna thinking I am feeling kind of irritated about my child’s behavior this evening and resentful that he’s spoken to me in a tone of voice that I consider rude, and now he wants me to snuggle with him so he can get to sleep like nothing’s happened. And then instead of the ultimatum to be a better listener and be respectful or put yourself to bed, I could say you’ve had a really hard time tonight huh? What was going on for you? And then pause and listen to what happened from our child’s perspective, which we may well find involves all kinds of difficulties that we didn’t even think were that big of a deal, but which very much were a big deal to them. And at that point we may find that we soften a little bit, because still share I felt irritated when you said you brush my teeth instead of doing it yourself, and also when you said you wouldn’t help clean up your toys. I don’t really want to snuggle when I feel irritated. And then we can see how our child responds. And it’s possible that as we both soften up, we might be able to come towards our child and find that we actually can snuggle with them. And if we can’t, we’re going to go ahead and set that boundary. And at that point, we might say, I’m not willing to snuggle with you, but I am willing to lie with you for a while, if you like, or whatever is the thing we think we can do that most come towards our child without feeling frustration, anger or resentment. And we do that, the path where we both soften and both of our needs are met is much better if we can manage it, because there is still a chance of a bedtime meltdown if we set the boundary. But what’s different here is that we’ve carefully considered the boundary. We haven’t just made a random threat that we’re not going to do something the child relies on as a way to punish them for their disrespectful tone. We’ve carefully considered, is there a way I can meet my needs here? Can I calm myself? Can I use my empathy with my child’s difficult day to create curiosity about what needs they have had today that haven’t been met? If so, maybe then I can find a way to snuggle with them and I won’t feel frustration, anger or resentment. If I can’t find a way to do that, I’m going to set a boundary, and my child may protest, and at that point, I will be okay if they have a meltdown because I just cannot snuggle with them tonight. I am willing to lie with them and consider other potential ideas they might have. Let’s take a look at some other ways that parents told me that they are currently handling this threatening behavior. Parent Kitty told us that they try to find a solution that works for both them and their child. So if he wants candy and Kitty wants him to eat dinner, Kitty says something like, if you don’t hit me and can wait 15 minutes, I’ll serve candy with dinner. Unfortunately, there’s no candy for hitters if you choose that route. And I want to point out some distinctions between this and the way that I’m describing using the problem-solving method in this episode and in other episodes as well. The first thing is that when we understand needs, we find multiple potential strategies to meet needs instead of only working with one strategy. If I say, if you don’t hit me and can wait 15 minutes, I’ll serve candy with dinner, I’m proposing one single strategy that will work for me, and it might not work for my child, because we don’t know their need. We can hypothesize that they want to eat candy because they have a need for some combination of food, joy, indulgence, but they might also have a need for autonomy, especially if we’ve already said no to a lot of things that day. In that case, it’s entirely possible that waiting 15 minutes does not meet the child’s need and he gets frustrated because we haven’t taken the time to really hear what’s going on for him, and then he hits us, which we framed as, unfortunately, there’s no candy for hitters if you choose to go that route. By this point, the hit probably wasn’t really a choice. It was a reaction to the needs that weren’t met over the course of the entire day. If your child is coming to you saying, give me candy or I’ll hit you on a regular basis, I’d want to have a conversation with the child about candy consumption over the entire day. So how much candy does he think is a reasonable amount? How much do I think is a reasonable amount? Screens and sugar and snack foods are the two main areas where I see it’s most difficult to use problem-solving because companies spend billions of dollars making those things more palatable to us, so we crave more of them. So you may not be able to get to an agreement that you’re both fully on board with, but you can get a lot closer. So maybe your child wants 10 pieces of candy every day. You’ve been doing three pieces a day. The outside limit you’re comfortable with is five pieces a day. In this case, I’d suggest offering five pieces a day, which is coming towards your child a good deal, and because it’s the maximum amount you’re comfortable with, you’re going to feel really confident holding that limit when they ask for more. And if possible, your child can eat the candy whenever they like during the day, which also meets their need for autonomy. If they want to eat it all before breakfast, go ahead. If they want to portion it out through the day, that’s okay. You can give that a try for a week or two, and then check in and see how’s this working for us. Do I feel frustrated, angry or resentful that I’m the one keeping track of how much candy you’ve eaten today, and so how much more you have left? If so, can we portion out the candy at the beginning of the day and you can eat it from this bowl as you go? Do you want to make sure we buy certain candy when we go grocery shopping so you know it will be available? You can adjust your agreement so it better meets your needs, and then you don’t end up in these one-off negotiations over and over again. Parent Rebecca says that her nearly five-year-old threatens her as well, and she doesn’t have a consistent strategy, but does find herself falling into if-then language more than she wants. So if you do X, then I’ll give you Y, which I’m sure you can hear, is not so terribly different from if you don’t do X, I’ll do Y, which is essentially the exact thing we don’t want our children to do. Some parents will try to shift that to when we do X, then we can do Y, which can be different in that it may not require to change the child, to change their behavior. We could definitely change if you don’t brush your teeth, then I won’t read you bedtime stories to when we’ve brushed teeth, then we can do bedtime stories. And if we’re requiring the child to brush their own teeth in both scenarios, then nothing’s really changed. We use the we language to try to make it sound less like we’re forcing them to do something, but nothing else has really changed. If when we’ve brushed teeth, means I’m willing to brush your teeth for you, then we’re coming towards them a bit when we’re using the we language, assuming they’re resisting tooth brushing because they’re tired and they have a need for ease, which would be a step in the right direction if that were the case. But if we’re just using we as a way of camouflaging our demand as something we’re doing together, then you might get away with it with a two year old, but pretty soon, they’re going to realize what you’re doing, and they will go back to resisting. When we do X, then we can do Y, can be a very useful language with a child who resists demands or requests simply because it’s a demand or request. So if you’re seeing the child refuse to do things that they like to do in multiple settings simply because somebody else suggested they do it, it’s possible this could be what’s known as pathological demand avoidance, the acronym PDA has been reclaimed by some parents of PDA kids as pervasive drive for autonomy. I don’t ever jump to assuming PDA, because first I would want to see this behavior in multiple situations, and even when we really are doing everything we can to relax limits and demands. A lot of parents will say to me, my child doesn’t really have any limits on what they do. But then you hear things like, if you don’t stop being rude and obstinate, then you can put yourself to bed. And we find limits where it had previously seemed like there weren’t any. This way of phrasing things, by making statements rather than asking questions or making demands, is known as declarative language, and I’m planning a whole episode on that topic. It can be a really useful tool, especially for kids with PDA, but it’s also very possible to use declarative language in a coercive way, just like camouflaging the if you brush your teeth, then we can read stories inside a when we’ve brushed teeth, statement.

Jen Lumanlan  36:21

As we consider all of these different kinds of scenarios in which our children make threats, I want to return to Luna’s second potential turning point, which is really multiple potential turning points earlier in the day. If you think back to the recent episode we did on 10 parenting hacks from master dog trainers, you might remember that dog owners tend to think their dog’s bites come out of nowhere. Dr. Patricia McConnell, the dog trainer who wrote the book,The Other End of the Leash, said she would be in a consult with an owner and their dog, and the dog would be giving very clear, I’m going to bite you if you don’t stop petting me like that signals as the owner is explaining that the dog’s bites seem to come out of nowhere. Dr. McConnell teaches the owners to recognize the dog’s communication that means I’m not enjoying that, so the owner can do different things and they never get to the I’m going to bite you if you don’t stop doing that point. So the behavior does not come out of nowhere once we learn to recognize the signals. Luna’s child was probably giving a whole lot of signals throughout the day that were saying, this doesn’t work for me. I’m having a hard time. My needs aren’t being met. Most often that looks like just a little bit of resistance. Our child turns away from us, or rolls their eyes, or slow walks as they do something we’ve asked them to do, or keeps doing something we’ve asked them not to do for just a little bit longer before they stop. That is the moment when we set the stage for the threat to rip us to shreds and shatter our eyeballs. Focusing on that moment is dramatically different than focusing on the moment when the child threatened us. That’s the equivalent of our partner’s morning offer to take out the trash and get dinner organized when they heard our tense tone in the morning. This approach works with us adults because it meets our needs. Our partner is helping us to meet our needs for ease, mental space, and collaboration by showing they’re on the same team as us. When our children turn away from us, roll their eyes, slow walk, they’re saying what you’re asking me to do doesn’t meet my needs. Here’s an example from our house from just a few minutes ago as I was writing this episode, actually, my husband said to Carys, you’ve got to take a bath because you haven’t had one for several days, and we’ve been working on spotting judgments and criticisms and instructions in our home. And he knows the phrase you’ve got to is the start of an instruction, and that means there’s no space for the person receiving the instruction to disagree. And you can bet that I don’t love receiving instructions in that way either. And he heard that, and he hurriedly rephrased to it would be a good idea to take a bath, which is just another way of imposing his judgment of whether it’s a good idea or not to take a bath, which isn’t much better. And Carys was kind of turned away from him and just not acknowledging him as he was saying these things. And I rephrased for him to you could take a bath today if you want to. And she nodded yes. It wasn’t the bath she was objecting to. She was objecting to being told what to do. My husband was trying to meet his need for competence in parenting by getting her to take a bath, because good parents have children who bathe on a regular basis. And Carys was trying to meet her need for autonomy with the soft refusal. When I stepped in and gave her the choice to take a bath, she immediately agreed to it, because she had the space to decide for herself. Another important idea from the dog training episode is that while we know that we don’t reset to a neutral baseline after each difficult interaction with another person, it’s hard for us to remember that with our child, we see this perhaps most clearly when we’re having a rough day with our child, because they’re asking us to get them a snack and then watch them do tricks as they launch themselves off the couch and get toys out for them and get them a snack, and they refuse to help put the toys away again, and they want another snack. And we might feel irritated after each of these requests, and we don’t go back to neutral after each one. The irritation level might drop a bit, but then the next request ratchet up the irritation a bit more, and we don’t regulate a bit, and the next request takes us a little bit higher and so on. And somehow we keep it together throughout the day, and then finally, we explode at them when they stall at bedtime for as long as possible. Even though we might think that our children reset to neutral after each difficult interaction, they are people, too, and so they go through a similar process to us. We tell them they have to wait for their snack. We’re busy right now, so we don’t have time to watch their tricks. We get the toys and then we refuse the second snack. We try to get them to help clean up. We threaten to take the toys away if they don’t. We tell them they can’t have the snack they want. They can only have apples or carrots. It all compounds for them just like it does for us. So our incident of the bath could have been that first incident of the day that compounded into a big threat at bedtime, but because I could see her need for autonomy and help her to meet that need, the incident was done, she agreed to take a bath, and then she went on to make a gift certificate for our neighbors to tell them we will help the husband with meals and dog walking so he can take care of their baby more easily while the wife is out of town. And we’re I would say we were back to potentially neutral or even slightly positive baseline, and I don’t have to worry that this was going to contribute to a meltdown later in the day. And that brings us to the first potential turning point that we had with Luna’s child, which is to recognize the background stress going on in his life and take steps to address it long before it gets to the point of anyone making threats. To help you think this one through, I’m gonna ask maybe you can remember working in a job that you found stressful. For me, it was fine dining waitressing, which I did in my late teens. I’d worked in a seafood restaurant where the customers ordered for the table and the food came out of the kitchen in these huge stainless-steel bowls, and I just had to dump the food on the newspaper in the middle of the table. That was my kind of waitressing. And then later I worked at a fancy Italian restaurant where suddenly I had to remember who had ordered what, and understand a lot about an entire wine list that I’d never drunk any of before because I wasn’t even old enough to drink and try and make it sound like I knew what I was talking about, which I hate doing when I really don’t know what I’m talking about, and I had to anticipate the customer’s needs when I’d barely eaten in restaurants myself by that age, so I didn’t know what good service was like. Never mind good fine dining service. It was super stressful, and I didn’t last long before I left. With enough training, I could have learned systems for remembering who ordered what, and the owner could have had one of their best wait staff service a meal to point out what good service looks like, but they didn’t want to spend the time and money to that kind of training. They wanted me to just slot in and do the job, and no, honestly, I needed the money so badly, I told the owner I could do it. If we translate that experience into things our children experience, it’s possible that our home environment is a place that has as much background stress in it as the Italian restaurant had for me. We’re constantly telling our children to remember things, to do things they’ve done once on a good day, but now they have to do it even when they’re struggling. We give them checklists of things they have to do before we leave the house in the morning, and those can really help when the reason they’re struggling to do the tasks is because they can’t remember what the tasks are and what order to do them in. But when the reason they aren’t doing the tasks is because they’re looking for connection with us, and dragging the tasks out gets them more time with us, or they want to make more choices about things that are important to them, and they don’t think some of these tasks are important, or they can’t stand the way their clothes feel on their body, or their sibling has been poking them at them already this morning and yesterday morning and the morning before, and they’re feeling so overwhelmed, a checklist is not going to help. So if you’re seeing a lot of threats from your child, or even just a lot of dysregulated behavior, I would start by looking at the background stress that’s happening long before the threats come up. Parent Lisa told me that when her son tells his brother he has to play in a particular way, or he’ll never talk to him again, or he’ll hit him when she has the capacity, Lisa will say something like, it sounds like you want your brother to play like X, but he wants to play like Y. Can I help you work it out together? Lisa goes on to say this response is hit or miss in terms of its effectiveness because the flare up is usually the challenging seven-year-old wanting to control others actions. I personally think that’s an awesome response when these kinds of threats happen occasionally. When they’re happening on a regular basis, it’s not really about whatever situation is happening right now. Let’s use our adult lens again for a minute. So bring to mind a time when you really tried to get control over a situation. Could be something to do with your kids, kids behavior, your spouse, your work. And now think about why you wanted to be in control. What would have happened if you didn’t control that situation?

Jen Lumanlan  44:26

Chances are whatever you said for the reason why you wanted to be in control, you could add the words ‘I felt afraid that’ and it would still make sense. So if your child was speaking in a tone that you perceived as rude when you were at your in laws house and you tried to control how they spoke, maybe you felt afraid that your in-laws would judge your parenting based on your child’s tone, and they would think you’re a terrible parent. And maybe that would mean you are a terrible parent. If you try to be in control of a lot of areas of your life, maybe there are bigger issues that cut across many parts of your life, like money, that you feel afraid about. That’s why the word control doesn’t appear on my list of needs, which you can download for free at yourparentingmojo.com/needs. They are written list for adults, list with pictures for children, and we’re adding them in different languages as well. I don’t think control is a need because control hides something else. It almost always hides a fear of some kind. You try to control your child’s behavior because you feel afraid that other people will think you’re a bad parent. So your need for competence and being perceived as competent is not met. So why is your child trying to control someone else’s behavior? What are they afraid will happen? What are they afraid is true? Do they feel afraid that you don’t love them or that you love a sibling more than them? Is there a new baby on the way? Have you moved house? Has the child changed school? Are you fighting a lot with your spouse? Is there undiagnosed or inadequately addressed neurodivergence at play? Ultimately, control is a strategy we’re using to try to navigate our fear. And we know what that fear is, and can take steps to address that, we won’t be playing Whack a Mole with this difficult behavior. You may find you don’t want to control your child’s behavior as much when you realize it’s okay if your in laws don’t think you’re a great parent because they aren’t your kid’s parent. You find that trying to control other people or life in general, doesn’t help very much. What helps more is meeting your need. So perhaps you and your partner have a talk about your parenting goals and values, and you see what’s really important to you, that the things you’re doing are aligned with your values, which meets your need for competence. And you realize that having your in-laws approve your parenting is only one potential way to meet your need for competence. We might understand that our in-laws ideas about our parenting are most likely rooted in their traumatic childhood experiences and our ability to support them in dealing with that is likely limited. But we can help our children to address their fears, which will have a significant impact on this controlling behavior. All of this represents background stress that’s impacting our child’s ability to show up in our relationship with tenderness and compassion for us because it’s really hard to have compassion for someone else when you’re in survival mode yourself. Now I hear you saying, But Jen, we have to get out the door in the morning, and I don’t have time to figure this crap out every freaking day. And that’s the thing, when we figure this crap out, we don’t have to have this fight every day. We figure it out one time. We find out that our child is stalling because they want to connect with us, and we spend three minutes helping them get dressed, instead of 10 minutes yelling at them to get dressed. And things feel easier. If they’re eating breakfast as slowly as possible because they don’t get hungry early in the morning. Maybe you could put their breakfast in a container to eat on the way to school, or pack an extra big snack for their mid-morning break. My husband and I trained for a half marathon, where we lived on the East Coast, and he could quite happily go for a 13-mile run before eating anything at all in the morning. In fact, he preferred it that way so he didn’t have the food rattling around in his stomach. I wouldn’t make it through the end of one mile without a breakfast first. Cereal commercials have fed us the idea that children who do well in school and in life eat breakfast, and that good parents and especially good moms make sure their kids eat breakfast. But some people just aren’t hungry at 6:30 am when they have to get up for an 8 am start time at school. We can find what clothes work for our child, and they could just wear those same clothes over and over again. Maybe we can keep siblings apart in the mornings until they’re both ready to be with each other. One could eat breakfast on the floor in the living room, the other eats at the table. One brushes teeth in the bathroom, the other in the kitchen. If one or both of them needs mental space in the mornings, this could well make your mornings a lot easier. Your needs for ease and mental space are met. Their needs for physical space are met, and the morning flows more smoothly. Each of these strategies works to meet different needs. Wearing the same clothes every day works when your child’s need is for comfort. If your child needs mental space in the morning, then what they wear may not matter in the slightest, and keeping kids apart may help more. It all starts with understanding your child’s needs. One final idea that I want to leave you with is for the more adventurous ones among you. So Parent Lisa said that one way they respond to threats from their child is you want X? Did you know it’s okay to ask me for it? You don’t need to shout XYZ, meaning a threat, I would have said yes. So here’s my challenge to you. If your child is asking you for a lot of things, you would say yes to you could tell them you don’t have to ask me to do things, just let me know, and I’ll let you know if I have any concerns about it. I might not try this with a child with whom you aren’t generally on the same page already and don’t have a good routines in place, although I could see an argument for the idea that if you aren’t on the same page because of your child’s consistently unmet need for autonomy, then this strategy could loosen up a lot for you. I did it with Carys when she was about five. I just told her one day she didn’t have to ask me to do things anymore. So now, if she wants to go for a walk in the neighborhood in the late afternoon, instead of saying, can I go for a walk, she’ll just say, I’m going for a walk, and I’ll reply, okay, dinner’s at 6:45. I’m not demanding that she be back for dinner, just letting her know what time dinner will be ready. We have walkie talkies, and she will take one and let us know where she is and when she’s coming home, so I’m not worried about her. If she was the kind of kid who would stay out until 10 pm just to see what would happen, I might think twice about this, and I would certainly have a lot more communication about when she planned to be back. But it’s worked very well for us without that extra support. She does still ask for things like my help and if something’s okay with me when it affects me a lot, but even then, it’s more of a would it be okay with you if I do X rather than a ‘Can I do X’, which seems pretty different to us. It creates space for me to share any reasons why X might cause problems for me without me actually holding the power over her and giving her permission. So as we wrap up, let’s summarize the main ideas that we’ve covered in this episode. We looked at the Reddit post about the three-and-a-half-year-old child who threatened violence toward his parent, which originated in his unmet needs for autonomy and to be heard and understood, and where the child simply used the same kind of threatening structure that his own parent had used substituting something he thought that would hurt his parent as much as not snuggling at bedtime would hurt him. We looked at the many potential points when we could have turned this story around, one after the threat had been made, and four more before it. Our primary tool here is understanding our child’s needs, which is your entry level curious action item for this episode. So if you’ve listened to this point because your child is making threats, but you aren’t clear on what need your child is trying to meet. I’d invite you to take the Tell Me What My Child’s Need Is quiz. It’s 10 super simple questions designed for parents of toddlers, preschoolers and younger elementary schoolers. And at the end, I’ll tell you the need your child is most likely trying to meet over and over again throughout the day, and a whole variety of strategies that you could use to help them meet that need. That’s available at yourparentingmojo.com/quiz. If you’re looking for something a little more the middle learning level, practice is to translate your child’s threats and also statements more broadly into their needs. So we translated Luna’s son’s threat into a need for comfort and safety at bedtime. We can also translate his rude and obstinate behavior from earlier in the evening into a need for autonomy. Whenever you’re seeing behavior that you don’t like from your child, try and practice this translation so you can understand it from their perspective. It may help you to have needs lists printed and stuck on the fridge to refer to easily, which you can get at yourparentingmojo.com/needs. And finally, if you’re really ready to try something radical, you might consider telling your child they don’t have to ask you for permission to do things anymore, and instead, they can let you know that they’re going to do something and ask whether and how it affects you. It still creates space for your needs to be met, but it doesn’t require your approval, which can be a huge gift for a child who has a high need for autonomy. Thanks so much for joining me here to learn more about the ways that we can be with our children that meet our needs and meets theirs as well. You can find the transcript, show notes and references for this episode by searching threats on the podcast page at yourparentingmojo.com.

Adrian  53:01

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