With Christmas just around the corner for those of us who celebrate (my anxiety reminds me daily), I bet you are thinking I am writing a darling tribute to their innocence. I would love to, there is so much about children that is breathtakingly beautiful. I’ve dedicated my life to researching and working with them. I can share a feel-good blog for you one day on the delight of early childhood. I’ll dig up some great quotes like, “I wish I could love anything as much as she loves bubbles,” from the movie Knocked Up. We’ll both feel very warm on the inside because writing about the positive qualities of childhood warms our souls like hot chocolate after playing in the cold snow (see, I can write it.)
However, today I want to talk about their inner emotional world, neurological development, and the frustrations that lead to big emotions. In writing, Honoring Your Peace, I wrote to you about how Dr. Becky’s book, “Good Inside,” led me to some radical shifts in my own parenting methods that I hope will guide you to find alignment in your own parenting. I did not however write to you in depth about the child’s perspective when big emotions come. I’d like the chance to share what I know both as a clinician, a mama, and a member of a brave mom tribe.
Consider Where They Are Coming From
Now that I’ve laid the foundation I will not be writing a blog about the parallels of the magic at Christmas and children and will be writing about big emotions we can begin. For today’s sake let’s start at the scene of the crime (or one of the crimes). You have a toddler, she has woken up from her sleepy slumber, opened her darling eyes, and declared she is not putting on clothing for school. As the bleary morning drags on alongside your coffee IV, she also declares she wanted oatmeal not pancakes, she only wears black mittens, and the granola bar you’ve offered so she has something in her belly on the ride to school is the wrong one. As she declares everything that is wrong she has also hit, charged you, screamed, and cried as if each “that is not a choice right now, let’s make a plan for oatmeal tomorrow,” was a declaration against her very soul. Tear-streaked (her, you… does it matter at this point?) you drive to school thinking, “goddamn that was hard” and she’s soothing herself from the injustice of the morning.
What just happened?
Well, on a very micro level a lot of different things could have happened. There could be a past pattern of you giving in to demands and now you’re setting limits so she’s rebelling against them. She could have an upset tummy. She could not have slept well last night. She could be working through a transition between co-parenting homes. All of the environmental scenarios could be very true and applied behavior analysis can tell us what is leading up to the outbursts of your darling toddler. However, regardless of what is happening environmentally the internal (covert) experience of your toddler is much broader (think macro) and common amongst the toddler tribe. She (he, they) are having big emotions that they cannot regulate and do not have words to explain their emotional world.
It Is Really A Matter of Neuroscience
You see toddlers (2-3 ½) function predominantly from their limbic system which is the part of our brain that says “fight, flight, freeze.” The part of our brain that allows us to reason is the prefrontal cortex and that doesn’t begin to develop until around age 4 and doesn’t finish developing until our early 20s (women finish their development before men, yes I just answered every question you had about your college boyfriend).
Around age 3 children also start to understand the concept of self versus others. Is this me? Do I like this? The combination of the development of self and the primary response of the limbic system creates the perfect storm inside of our toddlers. They want to assert themselves, define themselves, and know themselves. They also do not have the language yet to say what their big emotions are causing them to feel and without being taught do not have the emotional regulation to calm themselves down. This combination, as is true with most toddlers, creates a very loud couple of years for both parents and their children.
I used to be guilty as charged alongside many mamas of just wanting the tears to stop. An actual registered torture technique is to lock a mother away from her baby and play the baby’s cry. No, I do not want to know how they researched this. But anyways, when our children cry our genetics tell us, “no, awful, fix it” and we as mamas want to swoop in and fix it. Yet the swooping, beyond infancy, starts to tell our children that they cannot navigate their big emotions, and neither can we. It tells them their big emotions are wrong and have to be corrected. If there is one thing you take away from this blog, take this: big emotions live in all of us and there is nothing wrong with them. We are a feeling species, who developed language and then behaved.
Helping Toddlers and Up Navigate Emotion
So what do we do with our big feeling language-lost little humans? Starting in toddlerhood we can teach them to stay in their big emotion, ride it until it calms, keep them safe for that ride, and give them words for the experience and tools for the emotion they just felt. That their feelings are messages that something isn’t right for them and that is okay. They don’t have to agree with everything a grownup or parent says, even when a boundary is held. I spend a lot of time reframing Henry and Declan’s language of “worst day ever, I don’t like you mom!” to “Mom, I don’t agree with you.” Then I validate it’s okay to not agree with me and it’s also true that in sub-30 weather coats, hats, and mittens are a rule that has to be followed to go outside. Yes, I know, ninjas do not wear shirts little men.
Validating our children’s experiences and opinions teaches them their emotions aren’t scary. That their emotions are signals to their inner world that they need help navigating. Sometimes the world does not agree with our opinion, coats have to be worn, but it’s okay to have feelings about what we disagree with. This path is not an easy one, but it is a brave one for parents and children alike. Turning in to face our emotions instead of shaming their existence teaches children (and us) how to navigate our inner world to create an outer world that makes sense to us.
Next time your little one is having a big feeling first keep their body safe, stay the course of your boundary, and give them the words (and tools) for their experience.
Last week I wrote to you about “The Importance of Not This.” In it, I shared the unearthing of our way of life that the pandemic brought, at least to my friend group and I. After reading this piece you might be asking yourself, “what are they putting down?” “What is it in fact that they are saying they don’t want? I could keep this blog short and sweet and tell you the answer is everything. I would feel fully satisfied with this answer because my integrity says, “yep, that feels right.” However, if you are a mama, papa, or singleton who is still pushing your humanity down like my friends and I on the walks with our strollers I thought, perhaps, you might want a few examples.
Putting Down Toxic Familiar Structures
On a very broad scale what my friends, family, and I are putting down, among the greats like Glennon Doyle, are our gender roles and what society wants for us. Prior to the pandemic, the majority of us were subconsciously following the script both our extended family and society wanted for us. My script looked a little like this, “good girls get good grades, they do not party, they are obedient without question, maintain their purity for their husband, and will find a good man to lead their family as God leads us.” I shit you not, this was the script.
During my childhood, a battle raged between, “this does not make any sense, hard no for me,” and “I want to fit in and belong in my extended family.” As I got older I found out that my girlfriends were all fed their own similar script, give or take the virgin bride. I also found the men, though I admittedly have few close male friends, were given the script of, “be a provider, have no feelings, and man up.” Quite unfortunately, I have memories of my extended family ridiculing my father because he was not assuming his dominant roost in our home. When I filed for divorce one uncle literally wanted to schedule an exorcism for my dad because he was siding with his daughter. A demon must have been talking to him if a woman was being believed; in 2020…
In my own life, my divorce and the pandemic created a drastic unearthing that was necessary for my survival. I do not wish my experience on anyone and yet I am grateful to daily be putting down what and who does not honor my humanity. Unfortunately, I have a few very close friends who were also putting down toxic family roles and some who were also leaving intergenerational trauma. The unfortunate part is that they and their family lived through generations of trauma and the incredible part is my friends (and I) are breaking the cycle of trauma in our own families. We’re putting down abusive behavior that spanned generations and saying loudly, clearly, and firmly, “this is not the way.” A few weeks ago I took a five-mile hike with one of my brave friends. Hot teas in hand we walked against the earth with pride and love for each other.
Shedding Norms, Feeding Our Souls
In many other of my friend’s homes their experiences were not as extreme and yet they were no less true or hard. Several of my friends realized that in their marriage, somewhere along the way, it became a team of the kids and mom versus dad. Dad existed as his own, breadwinning entity, and they were living separate lives. That separation stripped my beautiful friends and their husbands of emotional intimacy among other things. These friends bravely said, “no, not anymore, I’m not running this house or raising these children by myself.” They put down the role of the wife as a selfless caregiver and the man as the heroic provider. Instead, they chose day by day to rebuild connections in their homes instead of filling the roles that were robbing them of intimacy.
Another friend realized after years as a stay-at-home mom her heart wanted to build a business and build one she did. She’s still in her early years of building it and when I walk into her winery my heart beams with pride over what her mind created and body built for herself. I’m sure, as a business owner myself, the first years of running the business brought challenges of their own. But she’s putting down the narrative that she can’t have financial freedom as a woman and she is building it for herself one wine pour at a time.
Individually each of our experiences is different and yet collectively we are all saying the same thing. I will not conform to the roles assigned to me above connection with my own soul. I will stop any gendered role, male or female if it is not serving my highest good. If something looks, smells, or acts like a cage it is most definitely in fact a cage. If connection and humanity are stripped away from us individually or collectively this is a sign that the role we are filling must go. Or perhaps, the systems supporting these oppressive roles must go. That is a story for another time.
Day by day, choice by choice, we are all asking ourselves, “Am I filling a role, or am I filling my soul?” If the answer is a role, we’re putting it down. Perhaps today you’ll join us and start shedding what no longer serves you.
I’ve written to you before and I am confident I will write to you again about society’s impact on our lives. My own lived experience, professional research, and the work of others have brought me to one conclusion; society has an agenda that has very little if anything to do with us as individuals. As a woman, I’ve expressed the oppression I have felt as a woman to be small, polite, obedient, submissive, quiet, and filled with servitude (Brave Not Perfect). It was almost two years ago I wrote “Too Strong for Who” and the words in that blog are still true today.
As the years have gone by, I’ve been able to stand back and look beyond my own gender, race, and socio-economic status. I know my privilege and restrictions as a white, middle-class, woman. I will say loudly and clearly that I do not understand the experience of others because I have not lived their lives. However, in stepping backward I am able to see if society has its preference we all have a submissive, suffocating role to fill. In the creation of capitalism and the nuclear family the roles society has for us were created far before our inception.
Bucking the Standards
Why am I writing this to you? You might be thinking I have a baseball bat (or ax like at my trash the dress party) against modern life. I don’t, but I have some real problems with how we are living. I also don’t have a single loved one who has not encountered serious problems in their life because of societal standards. We are living in a society where profit and image are held above our humanity yet our humanity is pleading to be heard.
Prior to the pandemic, alongside almost everyone else, my friends and I were buzzing around “fine.” We were following all the latest trends for raising children, running those children everywhere they needed to be, keeping our weight down, complaining about when we couldn’t keep our weight down, doing 99.9% of all domestic work in our homes, some of us were working, some of us weren’t and didn’t have access to financial freedom, and the list goes on and on. Yet during this time after dozens of playdates, morning coffees, and afternoon margaritas not one of us said, “You know what, this shit is crazy, who the hell made the rules of this game, and how do we quit?” Instead, we took the badge of motherhood and being a wife with honor and buzzed right alongside the beehive.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, I have spent many nights with friends cozying up with a glass of wine listening to story after story of “not this.” As we sit and honor each other during these talks I sit with the dichotomy of deep regret and gratitude that it took an international pandemic to unearth our way of life.
Grow and Learn Together
I have always been a child who learns the hard way. I poured bacon grease over my hand once just to prove to my mother that I can stabilize the jar while pouring out the hot oil. You cannot in fact do this safely. The lessons that came from the pandemic to my friends and I felt very similar. Like a lesson we could have learned from each other painlessly. The difference was that we did not have a wise mother telling us what was safe, good, and right for us. Instead, we had a world telling us exactly the box we needed to fit into in order to find our happiness. No wonder we got burned.
The pandemic itself became unearthing for better or for worse. Keeping up our lives as they were before was not sustainable. In hindsight they would have probably crashed at some point we would have all just had to have reached our own trauma limit instead of collective trauma. In a way, the pandemic brought a gift, the gift of, “not this.” The “not this” looks different for each of my friends that I cozy up next to, but the words bring the same truth; I am not fully myself and I want above all else to be gloriously human.
In their stories, my friends share loneliness, burnout, desire, crumbling perfectionism, toxic relationships, mental health breaks, and the list goes on and on. Yet this time instead of pushing our strollers while we pushed our feelings down we’ve been able to say to each other, “I don’t want this anymore.” I am honored each and every time a friend shares their truth with me. While our experiences vary, our struggles are almost always the same. I’m suffocating in this life, I need to breathe and just like the Little Mermaid, I want more. Unlike the Little Mermaid, the more is not a prince charming.
In these conversations, my friends don’t know what is next. I sure as shit did not know what was next two years ago this time. I’m still not quite sure. That part is OK. The profound impact of “not this” is the first step towards integrity towards ourselves. There is too much to shed, too much to unpack, and to learn about ourselves, to truly know what it is we want. How could we, with all the noise of the world?
As I’ve watched my beautifully vulnerable friends come to the realization that they want more out of their lives I’ve seen each of them bravely stand up for themselves. The standing is always the same. “Not this.” Each friend is flush with joy they have come to these words and full of rage about what has brought them here. Perfect, they are absolutely perfect. Through their powerful words and willingness to be open to the unknown, they are walking themselves back to their humanity.
I’m grateful to be walking beside them loudly declaring, “not this,” well before I softly fold into myself and say, “ah, yes, this.”
Sometime in September, I was introduced to the best-selling author Dr. Becky who recently authored the book “Good Inside.” I am trying to remember if it was on a podcast from one of my soul teachers or if it was from a friend as I complained for the millionth time about a tantrum. I honestly don’t know. It wasn’t the tantrum itself (OK sometimes it’s the tantrum itself), but it was the fact I didn’t feel I was in alignment with my own peace at the time. Last week I wrote to you about honoring your peace yet I was struggling with my own peace when my sons became dysregulated as all children do.
Of course, there are moments when I yell, when I mess up, and wish that I could have done something differently. All parents do. However, it wasn’t that I felt out of control around my children or that I was harming them in any way that made me feel out of my peace. I simply felt that there was a better way to navigate their big feelings without constantly leaning on discipline. I couldn’t find my peace in the thought, “I should be in control of my children” or “my children need to be good.” Each and every timer I set for a time-out didn’t feel like growth for them or parenting. It felt miserable. Enter Dr. Becky and her brilliant work.
Everyone Is Good Inside
In her work, Dr. Becky has one core belief she shares with her readers, “everyone is good inside.” This concept on paper felt validating of my own belief and it also triggered a lot of fears. You see holding the belief that everyone is good inside left me in relationships, extended family, and social groups well past their expiration date. Up until my early thirties (I’m 35 now…a newbie) I gave pretty much everyone a free pass while holding this belief. In creating the boundaries that have led to regaining my peace I created a new boundary to stay away from people behaving in harmful ways. Reopening this boundary felt like a hard no for me. Nope. Not doing it. But, when I look at my darling son’s faces, I know in my soul that Dr. Becky is right. We are all good inside.
Lucky for me, Dr. Becky doesn’t stop at the belief that we’re all good inside. She builds on it and teaches us how to create boundaries for our children. This felt like a relief because while it doesn’t address the boundaries I’ve built in my own life, it validated the need to uphold safety at all times. As I dove into her work and began practicing it at home a wave of peace came over me.
Dr. Becky teaches that when young children are throwing fits, having tantrums, or saying unkind words, it boils down to the fact that they are dysregulated. Not that they are disobedient, disrespectful, or bad little kids; they are good humans having a hard time. She then goes on to talk about the importance of being a sturdy leader for your children as they are dysregulated which means keeping their bodies safe. Contain the fire! Tell your children that they are allowed to feel their feelings, to disagree with you, to rage… but it is your responsibility to keep them safe.
Narrating Your Child’s Big Emotions
When the waves of dysregulation slow and my sons are able to calm down I have always talked about emotions to give language to their experience. Dr. Becky also validates this practice and writes about the importance of narrating to children their experiences after their big emotions have settled. This tiny step is the foundation of teaching children to keep their peace and that their big emotions do not define them. Instead, their big emotions are simply part of being human and they need help learning how to express them. I believe that this tiny step builds shame resilience, which in our home is a core family value as we follow the teachings of Dr. Brene Brown.
It has been about two months since I picked up “Good Inside,” and began shifting my own practices as a parent moment by dysregulated moment. I replaced time out with a “do it differently spot,” where we sit and breathe through the waves of big emotions. I began narrating what happened before the boys fell into a fit. Narrating, “you really wanted a waffle, and mommy gave you a cinnamon roll, that was tricky.” I also narrate when I am having a hard time so they do not assume any responsibility for my own stress and develop codependency. “The Pumpkin Show was loud, you wanted toys from the games we couldn’t win, and got stuck in the funhouse. Mommy was having a hard time too.” After the waves of emotions settle for all of us we settle down and I repeat, “wow, that was hard, how can we do it differently next time?”
I am not going to lie to you. You might think as you read this as you enter my house you will inhale lavender, soft music will be playing in the background, and we will all be calmly navigating our emotions while honoring our peace. Some days it is quiet here, but we are after all human, and big emotions are well known in the walls of our farm. This past Sunday by 9 am my children had broken each other’s block house, changed into two different costumes, had a do-it-different moment for hitting, requested face paint, played Candy Land, the dog got out in the back pasture, and tears flowed readily. I was short on patience and could feel myself getting snappy. At that moment I asked myself, “what are you choosing above your peace?” It was the age-old narrative that parents should be able to control their children. No thank you, not interested. I want to raise good humans who can make choices that are right for themselves and their world.
At 9:05 I called a family time out, asked Henry to pick 10 good books, and we piled into my bed to read. “Wow, that was a lot, we’ll feel better if we can sit down and do it differently.” Book after book, kiss after kiss, we settled back into our peace. I am sure later in the day someone cried. Tree climbing and being stuck is a common theme around here. But, we held our peace after having a hard time.
Dr. Becky was the reminder I needed that when children are having big emotions it’s not a problem. The problem is missing skills and the need for boundaries. It’s Applied Behavior Analysis paired with emotional regulation. The combination at least in our home is the foundation for raising good humans in a way that brings me back to my peace, moment after parenting moment.
