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When my kids were little, we used to love taking short family vacations together. I mean, I wouldn't call traveling with three kids relaxing, but those trips, memories, the laughs, the time together, I wouldn't trade those bonding experiences for anything. Great Wolf Lodge is built around that kind of family time. At Great Wolf Lodge, the adventure is all under one roof. A massive indoor water park with a wave pool, a lazy river, water slides. The whole family can ride together. And it's always a perfect 84 degrees. No weather drama, no sunscreen wars, all splash, no stress. And the overnight rooms are really reasonable compared to a lot of destination spots. There are plenty of food options on site, which matters when you've got tired or picky kids. And they do little extras like nightly dance parties and other activities for the kids. With more than 20 lodges around the country, there's probably a Great Wolf Lodge just a short drive away. So if you're looking for a getaway where the whole family can unplug and laugh and make some memories together, bring your pack to Great Wolf Lodge. Learn more@greatwolf.com and strengthen the pack. Greatwolf.com My husband has a hard time throwing anything out. I mean, anything ratty. Old T shirts, magazines he's never going to read. And it's not just little stuff. There's mismatched patio chairs from a yard sale that somehow became permanent. And don't get me started on the barbecue, which I'm pretty sure belongs to the squirrels. Now, this spring, I'm doing something about it and Wayfair is making it happen. Wayfair has a massive selection of patio furniture. Teak, metal, wicker, wood, and all of it actually matches, which feels like a fresh concept. It looks great, it's priced right and delivery is fast and free. The barbecue is next. They have every model under the sun with all the bells and whistles. Many come fully assembled or they'll assemble it for you, which honestly makes the whole upgrade feel doable. Get prepped for patio season for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W A Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair every style every home. Wayfair Every style, Every home. Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I'm going to be talking about an eternally challenging topic. It's something I think about myself almost on a daily basis. I get asked about it regularly. I recently did a reach out on Instagram asking for questions, and I started to answer A couple of them. If you go on my Instagram, you'll see. But one thing I noticed is that there are a whole group of them that go like this. How to stay calm when kids are melting down. How to hold boundaries when it results in a meltdown. Another one, I'm nervous of my five year old being upset. I freeze and find it hard to stay calm. Any guidance? Here's another one. How to avoid absorbing your kids emotions, feeling responsible for them. And then finally, how to not be as triggered by little ones anger. So all of these are on this theme. How do we allow our kids to have these uncomfortable feelings, Feelings that make us uncomfortable. How do we help our kids through them? How do we respond in a way that doesn't encourage our child to be angry at us? How to not freeze. How to be able to hold boundaries even when our child's exploding about it? And maybe we think it'd be so easy to give in or it just feels like setting a boundary is so hard because we've got to deal with this every time. How do we survive this? How do we respond in a way that helps our child to do the things we want them to do, Build resilience, feel calmer and therefore less likely to explode? What can we do? So I would like to offer some guidelines that have helped me. Hopefully they'll help you too. And the first one is recognizing the immense challenge that this is. I mean, we have to recognize the challenge before we can really face it, right? And if we think, oh, this should come naturally or we're supposed to be able to do this or something else that's not recognizing how hard this is, then it's going to be harder for us to step up to this challenge. So letting our kids feelings be is really it. This is the biggest challenge of parenting in my opinion. Letting feelings be, letting our child feel something that's uncomfortable for them and feeling for us. And why does this matter? Because it affects everything. It affects our ability to confidently and calmly ourselves set boundaries. I mean, the whole thing about setting boundaries is that the other person, our child in this case, isn't pleased about the boundary. That's what makes boundaries challenging. If it was just about people saying, oh yeah, sure, of course, we'll do it your way, or yes, I'd love to do that if that pleases you. That's not the way healthy children roll generally. So to be able to calmly set and hold boundaries, we also want to work on being able to accept this dynamic that happens when we do, which is that Oftentimes our child will explode, have a meltdown, tell us all the reasons why we shouldn't have that boundary, try to talk us out of it. Maybe if they're older, keep whining at us, keep nagging at us, seem really, really frustrated about it, be sad. Even so, our child's uncomfortable emotions are a huge part and really the only challenge in setting boundaries. Holding boundaries affects our ability to care for our children because that's part of the care that children need. They need a leader. They need someone who's not making them be the leader in the house. Because we don't want to set boundaries because we don't like it when they get upset. So it's our ability to care for our children and also ourselves. And that's a huge part of what boundaries are, self care. So we're not bending over backwards. We're not doing things that now make us angry and resentful of our child, make us feel like our child is too much. Because we feel we have to go along with what they want, placate them, be tentative around them, walk on eggshells because we don't want those explosions. So it all works together. This is about our comfort in our role in day to day life as a parent. We're not going to be a happy, contented parent if we're not comfortable with our child having lots of unhappy, unpleasant moments during the. Because our children's moods are going to be ebbing and flowing constantly. That's how children are. They process the feelings very quickly and openly, usually in their early years especially. And we're going to exhaust ourselves before noon if we allow ourselves to get swept along with their experience, feeling responsible for every feeling they have, making it color our day. Now, we're not going to be able to completely avoid obviously the moods that we feel from our children's feelings. But this is why this is something to work on. This is why it's such an important challenge to face in our job. Also, what matters to us, matters to our child always. So our level of comfort is going to decide theirs. And if we're uncomfortable because we're going up and down with their feelings, that's going to create more discomfort for them. Unfortunately, when we can't be comfortable with those feelings, when we can't be accepting of them, and what can happen is instead of our child building their resilience, which is what happens when we can at least work towards having a healthy response and feeling about their emotions, what can happen if we don't work on that Is that they can come to feel afraid of not feeling okay because they sense we are uncomfortable with it, so it makes them anxious. We've unwittingly maybe taught them that they need to avoid these states, that these states of being aren't normal and safe. Therefore, these feelings become unfamiliar to them. So then fear is added into whatever feelings they're having. Sadness is not only sad, it's kind of scary. Disappointment is not only disappointing, it's scary. Anger is not only angry, it's scary that they feel themselves going there. We want to give our child another message, if we can. So understanding what a challenge it is and how counterintuitive this is for most of us is the first step. And all these steps are, like, constant. We have to constantly remind ourselves, unfortunately, that we're putting this at the top of our goals as parents or near the top, that we want to have this all feelings allowed, attitude towards our child's emotions. But easier said than done, right? The second part of this, so we're recognizing, then we want to work on getting to that place where we can accept and allow the feelings to be. And that's going to be individual to all of us. It's like a personal thing. What do I need to be able to move toward some semblance of acceptance when my child is going there, getting angry, having a meltdown, getting upset. How can I accept and allow it? A big part of this is understanding our triggers, how to not be as triggered by my little one's anger. This parent asked, so where am I going when I feel triggered? I believe so strongly, and I've said here before, that feeling triggered is a gift because it's telling us that there's something about us, something in us that we want to heal. So when parents say, I'm triggered, what do I do? That's a wonderful signal that you're getting that's going to help you when you explore it and ideally work on what you need to work on to heal it. Realizing where it came from, if possible, and then letting yourself feel those feelings at some point with a therapist, a counselor of some kind so that you can let it go or at least understand it as your stuff, and that your child's anger is this whole other thing that's healthy and safe for them to pass through. I mean, all these parents know that, that have written to me. They know that this is something they want to work on. And like I said, that's the first and most important part of this, that recognition. So accepting and allowing the feelings, how do we do that? Understanding our triggers, self reflection. It's this wonderful practice that we can make part of our life. I'm absorbing my kids emotions. Why am I doing that? So reflect on that more with all of this love for yourself, compassion. Take a look at that. What's going on for me here? Where am I going when my child feels that? Why am I feeling what a lot of us feel responsible that I need to change this, that there's something very wrong going on here when my child is upset that I need to go into action rather than acceptance which is very inactive. Right. It's a letting go. One of the ways that helps me is self talk. With mantras like this too shall pass. Feelings are healing if we let them be. That's the one that I made up for myself. It's okay not to feel okay. We can't ever do this too many times. I still need to do it and I have been working on this for a long, long time. I still need to do the self talk and sometimes the visualization of myself as my child's therapist and my child is having a breakthrough. I mean maybe they have this breakthrough like five times a day, but it's a positive thing. This is going to help them. This is what I want them to do to clear their feelings and feel better. Especially if I can be this safe, accepting presence. Another image that helps me is this idea of being an anchor. Letting the waves of my child's emotions pass me by. I'm still there. I don't need to do anything to try to stop them. Just be that calm presence. This is CO regulation. CO regulation is not we do something to make our child feel better. It's actually being able to witness and support or child feeling whatever they're feeling, especially when it's uncomfortable. That's co regulation. And we could start practicing this with our infant where instead of trying to fix them, rock them all around and get them to stop crying somehow we actually see this as huh, I wonder what's going on with you. We want to respond to this as communication and try to discern what it might be. Reminding ourselves that it's really okay and safe for our baby to be crying while we're there supporting them, wanting to help them feel better, but knowing that that doesn't mean just making them stop. It means actually wanting to know what the crying is and whether it's just something they want to share. Like, oh, they had such a busy day and all the stimulation. The relatives were there, everybody was in their face or something. Else like that we can actually help with, like I'm hungry. And then maybe our child isn't even crying unless you know, they're having a growth spurt and all of a sudden they're wanting to be fed more often than we're accustomed to. But sometimes they do just cry, they have a tummy ache, they have, they're overstimulated, something startled them. These are things we want to know about, not shut down. Right. And if we start practicing this when children are very small, the thing is it becomes easier for us to understand the feelings, whether it's a meltdown, crying, anger, as healthy to share. The third step that I recommend is practice, practice, practice, practice. So if we can start this early, which not all of us do, not all of us get to that, some of us, we start realizing we need help much later and that's fine. But the earlier that we could start practicing, the more practice we can get, the easier it's going to be, the more comfortable and normal it's going to feel to us to be sometimes in conflict with our child, like when it comes to boundaries and they're reacting to it. Other times to have that empathy and witnessing without absorbing like this one parent said, how do you avoid absorbing your kids emotions? You work on why you're absorbing them, the triggering that's happening maybe. And then practice seeing them as this positive, separate thing that isn't something to fear or to shut down, but communication. That's really healthy for them to share always. It's always healthy for them to share it with our loving support and our loving support. Like I said, it's really just acceptance and allowing. So practicing this, it's a constant thing. It's probably always going to feel like a practice that we're able to do sometimes and not other times, but gets more familiar and easier for us. Just like our child. Our child is practicing what it feels like to be so angry, to be so frustrated. And that feeling rises in them and it has, like Magda Gerber said, a beginning, a middle and an end. So this is going to end and our child needs the practice of going there and we need the practice of letting them. And again, that doesn't really look like doing anything. Yes, if we need to get our child from point A to point B, like they're melting down about leaving the park or the activity, coming in the house, then we try to get on this early with confident momentum and then just accept and acknowledge the feelings as much as possible. You don't really have to say much, just like, no, you don't want to do this. Here we go. We got to do it. And you're just carrying them in, helping them to get to the car if you need to, helping them get their shoes on. I know, it's so frustrating. You didn't want to wear these shoes, or you just couldn't decide, I'm going to help you. So it's not like we're just passive and we're waiting and we're making a whole event about this, that life stops while our child is feeling it. No, allowing the feelings means life goes on while we're understanding how our child feels. This parent said the most beautiful thing I ever heard. I don't know if I've said this on the podcast before, but I was at one of my son's soccer games, and I think he was about, you know, 10 years old or 11 then or something. And there was a family from the team that had this little tiny guy that was maybe 2 years old who had to come to the game. And, you know, that's not the most fun thing. Maybe he'd missed a nap or something, or he was, you know, we were away from home at a tournament, and the little boy was crying, and I didn't hear the whole story of what was going on, but I heard this dad say, I feel you. And I thought, that's like the most beautiful, simple thing. I feel you. And the little boy didn't stop crying right away then, but you could see that the dad was in this beautiful acceptance mode. And the little boy, you know, he wasn't escalating after that. He was just sharing. So it doesn't magically make it go away when we acknowledge, but it's part of letting our child know that we are doing the more important thing, which is we're accepting and allowing. You know, again, we don't need to say something. We could just accept and allow and be in that mode, and our child will feel that coming from us. So I just want to talk a little about what gets in our way or the things that we can feel we're supposed to do that take us in a different direction that isn't giving us the practice we need, the lifelong practice we need, honestly to be able to face with our child all the disappointments they're going to face in life and not personalize it, not absorb it, not be enmeshed in it, but really have that healthy attitude that can help our child so much. One of the things that's always been popular is distraction, and a lot of people I admire that give parenting advice, talk about how you do that with babies. And lately there's even this trend, this thing of saying, where's Jessica? Where's Jessica? I don't know. I only just heard about this. And it reminds me of other trends that I've heard about in the past. But this one kind of works magic for some parents that their child will be having a tantrum or a meltdown and they, they say, oh, where's Jessica? Where's Jessica? And the child stops. So this feels like a cure, right? It feels like, wow, we've just helped our child feel better. But the truth is that we've done what's actually really easy to do with kids, which is trick them and distract them. But those feelings that they had in there, it's not resolved for them. So it's going to flare back up the next time. There's no way that we can flip a switch on emotions. It wouldn't make sense, right? That would mean that kids feelings really are meaningless, that they're just doing it to us for no reason. And there's a lot of people that believe that. And maybe those are the same people that believe in distracting. But that doesn't jive with everything we know about children and how sensitive they are and how impressionable they are and how they take messages from everything we do when we're trying to stop their emotions, they're taking a message from that. They may not seem to be on the outside, we may never see this, but they're learning all the time. And they take a message from that, that I need to stop when I'm feeling like that, that my parent wants me to stop. And also with this Jessica thing, the learning my parent makes things up to. And I know people are going to get mad that I'm saying this, but on some level to manipulate me because they don't like the way I'm acting. And instead of facing that head on with me, they might play a trick and tell me things that aren't true. And when we talk about things like trust building in our relationship and how that is the glue really between us, this trust, this mutual respect that is not taking us in that direction right now. I'm not saying that a parent that does that is ruining their child or even ruining their relationship, but it's giving our child a message that could hinder the kind of trust that we want to build with them. And even more, it's giving ourselves a message that this is our job to decide when our child's Feelings should be done when they're too silly, when they're overreacting, when it needs to be time for them to stop. We're giving ourselves this job of judging that and deciding that for this other person. And it's a responsibility that we're putting on ourselves that actually not only doesn't help our child, but doesn't help us. It puts us in that position every time. And there's going to be a lot of times where they're so disappointed, they're so angry, and maybe we've been practicing that we're the fixers of that, that we're the changers of that. And it's going to get harder and harder and more and more frustrating. And even when kids are little, it can be very frustrating when our child is going through a lot of things and we feel like this is our job, that we have to make them stop, get them to shut that down. You know, I saw that a very, very popular parenting advisor said that this Jessica thing and other types of distractions that parents might do that. Actually, the reason it works is because it's letting our children know that we're calm. But that's absolutely untrue in my opinion, because if we were calm when our child was upset, we wouldn't need to do those things. We could be calm while our child was upset and really give them that message. It's okay not to feel okay because we're believing that ourselves. That's what's making us able to be calm. But when we're trying things to try to stop our child's feelings, that's not coming from a calm place in us. It's coming from a. I don't like this. I'm not comfortable with this. I don't want you to do this anymore. So I'm going to stop you, and I'm going to do it in this way that, you know, would work with an adult, too. If we said, there's a giant sea lion behind you and somebody was really angry or crying, they would stop, right? They wouldn't feel great about us, but they would stop. So with a child, this is even easier to do, right? To pull the wool over their eyes. So, anyway, I'm strongly against that as a productive approach. And honestly, anytime we hear the words parenting and trend next to each other, I would run a mile. This job is so challenging and so important to most of us. It's too important to do it by a trend. I'm a lot older than a lot of you listening here. I'm sure. And I've seen a lot of parenting trends, and none of them have lasted because none of them really work in the end. And we don't deserve that. And our kids don't deserve that, in my opinion. A Mochi moment from Mark, who writes, I just want to thank you for making GLP1s affordable. What would have been over $1,000 a month is just $99 a month with mochi. Money shouldn't be a barrier to healthy weight. Three months in and I have smaller jeans and a bigger wallet. You're the best. Thanks, Mark. I'm Mayra Amit, founder of Mochi Health. To find your mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com Mark is a Mochi member, compensated for his story. When my kids were little, we used to love taking short family vacations together. I mean, I wouldn't call traveling with three kids relaxing, but those trips, memories, the laughs, the time together, I wouldn't trade those bonding experiences for anything. Great Wolf Lodge is built around that kind of family time. At Great Wolf Lodge, the adventure is all under one roof. A massive indoor water park with a wave pool, a lazy river, water slides. The whole family can ride together. And it's always a perfect 84 degrees. No weather drama, no sunscreen wars, all splash, no stress. And the overnight rooms are really reasonable compared to a lot of destination spots. There are plenty of food options on site, which matters when you've got tired or picky kids, and they do little extras like nightly dance parties and other activities for the kids. With more than 20 lodges around the country, there's probably a Great Wolf Lodge just a short drive away. So if you're looking for a getaway where the whole family can unplug and laugh and make some memories together, bring your pack to Great Wolf Lodge. Learn more@greatwolf.com and strengthen the pack. Greatwolf.com. So another way of responding that is popular, I wouldn't call it a trend, but there's a lot of advice around it is coaching our child through, like emotional coaching. So when our child is having a meltdown, we want to say, okay, breathe. Whereas with distraction. I don't think there's any place for that personally, in the kind of dynamic we want between our kids. But coaching, yes, there can be a place for that. Unfortunately, the way that it's taught and just our own vulnerability as parents who will naturally find allowing the feelings and really letting the feelings be to be challenging, it's easy to want to grab at that, right? Like, okay, I just have to. You Know, tell my kids to breathe and get them out of this. So I'm not doing it in a distraction way, but I'm doing it with the like, okay, you're upset, Just, you know, do this thing, name the feeling, you know, all of this stuff to calm them down. But the problem with that is that it often comes from a place of discomfort and that urge to get our child over the hump of the feelings. So I would look at that and know that these ideas might work in terms of like, do you need to hit, do you need to push on something? If we're really in that place of acceptance when we coach our kids that way. And this is again, mostly for older children, I would rarely try to do anything like this with somebody under 4 years old because usually then they're really going into a state that they kind of need to go through all the way. But with an older child and sometimes with a younger one, yeah, you can help them a little bit if you've already practiced that place of acceptance. Otherwise, it does tend to give kids that message again, that this isn't safe, I need to come out of this. My parents trying to help me, they're nervous about it. I've got to feel better for them. And so none of this is talking about the more authoritarian responses, you know, the old school responses of the scolding and the punishing and the rejecting. I'm talking about these much more gentle responses, but ones that can still give the wrong message and put us in the position where we're the ones deciding if our child should get to feel this and for how long. We wouldn't want someone else deciding that about us, would we? I know people say, yes, children are different, and yes, they are, they're in a more vulnerable stage of life. But this is also when they're most impressionable, when it comes to their relationship with their emotions, which is based on our relationship to their emotions, unfortunately. You know, it's unfortunate in a way how much power we have there, because none of us are going to like our kids feeling hard things. It's just not a parent thing. It just doesn't go with being a parent. That's why it's a challenge. So how does this actually look? Well, it often starts with us setting a boundary that we imagine may take our child to this uncomfortable place our child may react. And so we're already not anticipating fearfully, but ready that, okay, I'm going to have my confident response and they're going to have their safe, healthy response, during which they're going to vent a lot of things that they may need to vent right now. As I said in another recent podcast, it's not about the watermelon, but there is a reason that my child is reacting the way that they are. And so then I'm just ready to work on myself and my acceptance. If my child is thrashing and trying to lash out at me, then I'm going to put my hands up, maybe hold a hand away from me, but not overdoing it, doing the minimal that shows I'm accepting that you feel like this, but I'm not going to let you hurt. And we don't really even need to say the words a lot of the time. If our child especially is in the middle of that tantrum or meltdown, we don't want to talk too much at all because they can't process it anyway. But in our minds we're like, you know, I'm going to keep you safe to keep me safe. But yeah, you're so mad. You're so this. You're whatever it is, you're allowed to be like that. This too shall pass. Parents often want to pick up the child and take them in another room and everything. I would really avoid that if possible. That I would only do if there were other children. My child was like a whirling dervish, flailing around and just hurting everyone. And I couldn't control it unless I took them to the other room or I knew they were so exhausted that they needed to go in their bedroom with me and I would take them. Or if they were in a public place, I would, you know, get them away so that they wouldn't disturb people and also, you know, have to fall apart in front of everyone. I don't want to expose them that way if I don't have to. So I might move them away then. But just to move them away, to move them away, that tends to make like a bigger event out of something that may be happening several times a day with some children during some periods. So the less energy I put into that, the better, the more I can be in acceptance mode, just reminding ourselves this is going to end soon and my child will feel better. And then after we don't have to go over it with our child, what happened there, whatever. Especially if they're very young, they don't even know what happened. They have no idea. And it's really hard to do that from a non judgmental place. It's hard not to say, like, why did you do that? Let's make sure this doesn't happen again. It's better to let it go. And then when you see that relaxation happen, that's when come you want to hug. I don't recommend trying to hug them, but being open for it, being receptive to it. And that's the kind of repair that our child needs at the end. Not that they've done something wrong, they've done something they have no idea why they did, but it reassures them that we're so there for them and that we've done all the things that I'm talking about, which is accepting and allowing and trying to understand, wanting to understand what's going on with them. So that's it. And I really hope some of this helps. I also talk about this in my no Bad Kids course at no Bad Kids course. So you can hear a lot more of my coaching and specifics around handling meltdowns and tantrums in that master course. And it's very reasonably priced and has gotten a lot of very positive feedback that it's been helpful to people. So that makes me grateful and proud that I was able to put it together. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We can do this. Close your eyes. Listen to Monday. Com Feel the sensation of an AI work platform so flexible and intuitive it feels like it was built just for you. Now open your eyes, Go to Monday. Com, Start for free, and finally breathe.