How to get frustrating behavior to stop

0:00 [Music] foreign hello and welcome to the your parenting Mojo podcast today I want to focus on a topic that I know will resonate with a lot of parents and that's what to do when your children are doing something frustrating and you've asked them to stop and they won't I'm going to use a question that was posted in the your parenting Mojo Facebook group as an example but it really is just an example you could

0:31 insert whatever frustrating Behavior your child is doing at the moment and that you've asked them not to do and what we'll talk about here will be just as relevant we'll also hear from a couple of parents who have experienced some really challenging behavior from their children and who have figured out how to address it and are coming out the other side and have allowed me to share their thoughts with you on how that went so here's what this parent posted in our

0:56 Facebook community my five-year-old has been doing thing after thing that frustrates the heck out of me for example eating food outside the kitchen and during quiet time coloring on walls taking things apart that can't be put back together scraping bars of soap to bits Gathering giant piles of random items across the house and not helping to put them back hitting her three-year-old sister when she doesn't do what she wants picking up her 10 month old brother without respecting

1:21 his bodily autonomy etc etc the answer is probably connection but I am currently too irritated and tired to figure out how to build that in we haven't been doing any one-on-one time with any of the kids but again where to fit that in we barely manage routine dishes laundry and meal prep I don't know if I need to lower expectations set better limits ask more of my husband or run away and take a nap for several days

1:46 help me think straight and decide on some action items please now firstly I want to point out what I see in the immediate question here this parent clearly has a lot going on and her child is doing things that this parent is finding absolutely exasperating and she does see that a need for connection May well be involved she knows the child isn't just doing these things to be deliberately irritating which is a massive step in itself

2:13 think about what happens when your partner or someone else that you're close to does something that you find irritating I'll give the example of my husband's screen use he's pretty often on his phone for a couple of hours before he gets out of bed in the morning and as he's making his morning coffee there are regular periods where everything in the kitchen goes quiet because he's texting someone and then he's on his phone while he's eating

2:34 breakfast and watching a movie while he works with regular punctuation for texting other people and anytime he's doing something like cooking there are always those regular silent periods and then suddenly the plates are moving around again if Charis asked for something he wouldn't even hear it he could be sitting two feet away from her in between me and her and if she asked for some food he would totally not hear it and the request would come over him to

2:58 me and if someone texted during dinner then he would answer it now there was a long period of time at the beginning of the pandemic when this was driving me absolutely batty to me this was blatantly disrespectful it was disrespectful of me and of our daughter it communicated that we were not important to him that some random photographer who has a question about a lens during our dinner time was more important than us it's really easy to get caught up in

3:27 these stories and to her credit the parent who posted in the group doesn't do that at least not in what she wrote although perhaps those stories are in her mind We Tell those stories to ourselves all the time my child doesn't listen to me which means they don't respect me my husband spends many hours a day on his phone which means he doesn't respect me but what's really going on here I told you the story about my husband

3:48 because it can be easier to understand the perspective of another adult when I finally got on my nerves so much that we had to have it out he explained the texting was his way of maintaining a connection with the outside world which blew my mind I'm an introvert I can quite happily go weeks at a stretch without talking to anyone plus the whole not knowing how to respond in social situations thing has made water cooler conversations

4:12 excruciatingly painful for my entire career so I was not sad to say goodbye to those when I got laid off at the beginning of the pandemic I host coaching calls from members in my community several times a month I'm often doing interviews with parents or with experts for the podcast or I'm interviewing on other podcasts so I talk with other people quite a bit but my husband used to thrive on going into the office he loved hanging out with people

4:37 and going to meetings and getting lunch together and then when the pandemic hit all of that was gone suddenly he didn't leave the house for days at a time and he barely talked to anyone so texting people was how he maintained a connection to the outside world it had nothing whatsoever to do with his respect for me or his willingness to collaborate on parenting the two things were completely unrelated in his mind from my perspective this was about

5:02 respect but for him it was about connection with other people when we can better understand our needs we can then find ways to meet both of our needs in our case we all agreed to a role that we shut off electronics at 6 30 PM usually I have dinner prep underway by then and he and Karis helps at the table and clean up the kitchen a bit and we sit down and eat together around 6 45 and nobody does anything on

5:24 phones except change music volume for the duration of the meal that meets my need for respect and also his need for connection and he collaborates on parenting by taking Karis out for Adventures while I'm working so I can have quiet time for thinking and writing so often this same process happens with our children too our child eats outside of the kitchen or draws on the walls or shaves a bar of soap to bits and we think to ourselves

5:47 my child doesn't listen that means they don't respect me when in the child's mind it means nothing of the kind to me it looks like all of these things the child is doing have something in common they're all enjoyable so eating delicious food when you're ready to eat it rather than at a time when you're supposed to be eating drawing on the walls carving up a bar of soap there are all some variation of fun or satisfying

6:09 activities so is there some way we could allow them can we make some snacks available so the child can help themselves at any time during the day knowing that that is the total pool of snacks for the day and if you eat them all in the first hour there aren't going to be any more can you let them loose in the bathtub with a can of Shaving foam or even watercolor paints and just let them have

6:28 at it I actually don't like using bar soap because I hate the way it sits in water and gets all sloppy on the bottom and all that Gunk gets caught up under my rings and then I have to clean them but I know bar soap is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than liquid soap so is there a way to turn this into a sanctioned activity I have a friend who used to deliberately shave up bars of soap and put the

6:50 slivers plus some water into a liquid soap dispenser and that was their liquid soap at a fraction of the cost could that be this child's special activity in addition to the joyful satisfying nature of these tasks there's also the Forbidden nature of them at five years old the child most likely knows these are forbidden activities but they're doing them anyway and that can be for one of two reasons the first of these is that the child

7:14 doesn't yet have the impulse control to stop themselves from doing it we parents tend to think impulse control comes online way before it really does and we think I've told them not to do this thing tens if not hundreds of times by now I know they know they're not allowed to do it so clearly it's their behavior that needs to change in reality children cannot always stop themselves from doing something they know they aren't allowed to do and

7:40 they're especially unable to do this when they're disregulated and that's true for all of us if we think about it imagine you've had a stressful day either at home with the kids or at work and you're trying to get dinner on the table the kids are fighting and what's called your window of Tolerance is really narrow you're feeling stressed and anxious and like you're being pulled in a hundred directions at once and you're doing everything for everyone else and nothing

8:02 for you and then your partner walks in and starts complaining about how hard their day has been what happens for you in that moment do you respond with compassion do you offer them a hug and empathize with their struggle if you're anything like me you most likely don't do those things it's much more likely you know how you want to show up for your partner when you're having a hard time but everything has gotten on top of

8:24 you throughout the day plus the immediate things happening right now are too much for you to cope with and instead of supporting them you make a sarcastic comment or you tell them to stop complaining and set the table or you just ignore them outwardly well inwardly thinking that clearly they have no idea how much is on your plate now let's translate that to our child's experience all day someone has been telling them what to do if they were a

8:48 preschool or a school it was a day filled with a routine that didn't fit their needs start playing now come to Circle time I know you're hungry it isn't snack time yet I know you want to run around outside but it's snack time now now you can't have crackers today we're having oranges for snack today keep still stop fidgeting stop distracting the other children if they were home with you they likely had a lot of limits on their behavior as

9:08 well get up get dressed make your bed eat your breakfast no you can't have chocolate for breakfast brush your teeth no you can't have screen time now stop spinning around in circles you're gonna fall over and hurt yourself and so on and so on our children find all these kinds of interactions to be really stressful I don't think we fully understand how stressful it is to be told what to do and not to do every moment of the day

9:30 until our children are verbal enough to be able to express it it's only been in the last six months or so that my daughter's been able to do this one evening she dropped a plastic container of food that she was trying to get out of the fridge and it opened and the contents Spilled Out and she immediately burst into tears I was baffled it wasn't big that big of a deal I got it to clean it up and I asked her what's going on

9:49 and she said you said you wouldn't read an extra book chapter and then we were out of my special crackers and I didn't like getting shampoo in my eyes in the shower and now I drop the container and it's all too much and when it all gets to be too much just like we don't always act in alignment with our values and we snap at our partner when we know that isn't going to be helpful to the situation and we may

10:10 even have an expressed value about treating each other with kindness and compassion and our sarcastic comment does not fit with that our children do things they know they aren't supposed to do because they can't do things differently in the moment it doesn't matter how many times your partner has asked you not to be sarcastic or how many times you've told your child not to eat at snack time or Draw on the walls or shave a bar of soap

10:32 they can't stop themselves from doing it in that dysregulated moment the key to addressing this is really to try to set way fewer limits on our child's Behavior and this might initially seem very counter-intuitive after all you're only setting these limits because your child wouldn't do even the most basic necessary tasks and stop doing things that would actually hurt them if you weren't certain limits right you're doing this for their own health and safety not because you want

11:01 to be setting limits on their behavior all the time what alternative do we have When I Was preparing for this episode my mind went back to a consult that I did on a group coaching call with a parent ped you a few months are back she'd asked a question about her daughter who was resisting everything every meal time was a battle everything ped you asked her daughter to do was a battle and forget about Chinese class that her

11:24 daughter was signed up for it was a massive struggle every week during the consult we thought about her daughter's unmet needs and hypothesized that one of these might be for autonomy and a penny really dropped on this perpetua she realized that her daughter wants to have a say over everything and I asked her to take away an idea what limits does she really have to set and which ones could she perhaps think about relaxing a month later Padu joined another group

11:52 coaching call where I was talking about limits and autonomy with another parent and completely unprompted Peju told us what had happened over the last month and she started to relax her limits so here's Pedro explaining that from that video my daughter was what I had talked about with food with you but it turned out when I gave her a little bit more control in her day she was also resisting going to Chinese class Mandarin she has Mandarin after school

12:18 every day and she wouldn't go for I mean it was just I was so frustrating but when I gave her back control like in the morning and I did more in the morning every little thing like okay you know what did you want in your lunchbox I no longer tried to I I realized I had a lot of like I was not giving her many choices at all so I gave it back clothes lunch with I just started giving it and

12:46 then all of a sudden I'll go to Chinese and then she'll start speaking Japanese now she's like me how well she'll do it I'm like oh so you did learn something in there like I had no clue I saw that in the um work out by figuring out the underlying need and it was because of what you said but that was a surprise result that I was I thought it was a battle at food on the table but it

13:08 turned out um you know where I'm still working on ways in which I have to learn to let go and she always reminds me constantly and no longer do I take it so personally when she's like well you're not in control you're not the boss gosh that's like a constant and I know that that's the thing that I have to work on but it's gotten much much better so I think the most important thing to point out here is that Pedro was in this

13:34 really difficult cycle of interactions with her child where it seemed like Peju needed to be more in control after all if her daughter's refusing to do tasks what else is there to do other than exert more control when we say it like that perhaps we can start to see the cracks in this idea who wants to be controlled if we're resisting doing something that our partner or our boss has asked her to do is them exerting more control over us

14:00 the thing that makes us suddenly want to do the thing without any complaining or resistance not usually when Pedro and I talked the first time she immediately recognized that her daughter was looking for more autonomy over things that were important to her and these weren't necessarily very big things something like what goes in My Lunchbox can be a really important decision for a child so when Peju started backing off from the things that really didn't make as

14:26 much difference to her but made a big difference to her daughter her daughter then felt a lot more autonomy over her life and suddenly she stopped resisting as much before Pedro might have looked at resistance over what her daughter ate at dinner time and resistance over going to Chinese class is two completely different issues but when you see them through the lens of the child wanting more autonomy suddenly they're really tightly connected and it's not necessarily the case that

14:53 relaxing rules around food leads to going to Chinese class without a struggle it's possible they might have decided that the child doesn't have to go to Chinese class and then they relax their resistance around food for your child the point issues might be completely different but when we see the underlying needs and start to make shifts on one of the issues we may well see shifts on other issues as well the need for autonomy is one that I see

15:16 showing up a lot for children probably because in our culture we don't think of children as needing it at all we assume that if they're doing what we ask them to do if they are listening to us if things don't seem too hard for us then everything's going well if we can shift our perspective a little bit we can see any resistance we're experiencing from them is a huge gift which indicates something about their unmet needs

15:39 I also want to introduce you to parent Fiona I've been working with her for about a year now and when we started working together things were not great between her and her oldest child they had three children at that point and her oldest was constantly answering back refusing to help when he was asked picking fights with the middle sibling and even though Fiona knew this was at least partly due to how much her time and attention was being split across the

16:02 three children with some for her husband and maybe some for herself left over at the end of it that still didn't stop her from feeling completely overwhelmed in the moment she reached out to me recently to ask about some content in the parenting membership about values and the last time we'd spoken a few months ago she was really having a hard time her husband was out of town for an extended period of time the whole family got sick

16:26 and it finally got to a point where she had to ask for help from friends and neighbors because she was finally sick enough to believe she could legitimately ask for help she was just kind of hanging on until her husband got back so when she emailed about values I replied oh things must be going okay if you're asking me about this and she wrote back well yes I've experienced some major shifts in my day-to-day State being able to pause and building

16:48 connection with the kids of course I thought that was amazing and I responded to tell her so and then a few days later I started working on this episode and I asked Fiona if she'd be willing to record something saying what specifically had changed for her and her son which is what I'm about to share with you this is a bit of a longer video it's about 10 minutes long but I think you'll see at the end why I couldn't make it

17:09 any shorter hi Jim thanks for reaching out to see how things have been going here um I think that I mentioned to you that overall I think there's been I've had a huge shift which maybe doesn't it doesn't look that different from the outside but inside um I feel very differently in how I'm showing up

17:40 in certain interactions with my kids um so I think as you know when we first signed up to the membership with you um and then shortly afterwards uh I signed up for the taming your triggers Workshop um my husband and I we just felt at a complete loss with my eldest son's behavior in particular um so at that point my children were seven five and are coming up for a year old

18:12 um and my eldest son was very angry a lot of the time um was saying things to us that would typically be interpreted as quite rude um and uh it would sometimes and they would often be conflict with his brother that would escalate um to

18:45 to him having extremely big feelings um and mine not knowing how to handle those um so I know that a lot of that behavior is probably due to having recently had a baby and all the change and his changing time and attention from me um but even with that we just we just didn't really know what to do and

19:16 I think that we knew already that it was our behavior that needed to change um but we didn't it didn't know how um so I think one example that I told you about would be that um you know I come around a corner and I see the elder brother doing something to hurt the younger brother um and I would immediately be upset by that um it would feel like an emergency I have to do something to separate them or

19:49 help them um so I think one example I told you about was with bikes and the Elder son was trying to push his bike onto the younger one um and so I feel like I have to separate them I have to get the bikes away um and my elder child would be very resistant and would be triggered um what I now know is that he sees my

20:20 behavior as a preference for his brother and he feels he doesn't feel loved um and so I would be trying to stay calm because I want to parent in a certain way and but I wouldn't become inside inside my heart would be raising my body would be tense and and then when my son is triggered he would become be shouting and

20:53 telling me to go away but if I go away then he follows me and I would then basically shut down um and not know what to do feel that there is nothing to do in that situation um and basically just mentally Retreat from the situation and um and it could go on for like 30 minutes at a time so

21:25 and I've always I've always known cognitively that that has its roots in my own childhood um but knowing that has not been enough for me to either to stop either yelling or shutting down um and then a few things happened I think um working through the resources that I've shared through the membership um some of it I feel like I I've known

21:57 already but it just takes time to sit with it and let it all percolate um and also um I think very early on in the coaching calls you had us do some role play and I you asked us to take the perspective of our child during a difficult interaction so for example they're not listening to you um and I just felt completely overwhelmed

22:29 by sadness and loss um when I took the perspective of my child so I think in the example he was refusing to tidy up and so I was just angrily doing it and ignoring him and when I took his perspective I could see how much pain and rejection I would feel from my parents and I realized that when I shut down that is what I am protecting myself from that I don't

23:02 um I don't want to feel what they're feeling that I then feel like I'm failing them as a mother that I'm doing something wrong and those thoughts are too painful for me to handle so I shut them out um and then in my Action Group my group leader actually suggested that I skip ahead and work on self-compassion content and I think these two things are so important for me because

23:33 without the self-compassion I can't stop myself from shutting down and trying not trying or none of this is conscious but protecting myself from my kids feelings or my own feelings um and so I tried to do some mindful self-compassion every day um and I'm consciously working to be there for myself first when these difficult moments start and at the same time then I also worked

24:04 into the day something for me and Finley to do together to reconnect um maybe read a book or talk and he gradually has started to open up with me about how difficult his days are at school um and they have games of social exclusion and things like that and the things that our kids have to deal with on a daily basis are so stressful um so now when he comes out of school and he says something rude or harsh or

24:36 he tries to provoke his brother I I can see him and I can hear him and I can understand him that he is a child that is struggling not you know I don't snap at him and say we don't talk to each other like that or something similar I can say something like wow honey uh you seem really unhappy right now and and that's enough for him to then open up and unload about his day and why

25:06 it was so stressful and hard and I can see his whole body relax after he's shared that knee and it feels so good to know that he has somebody that he can share that with and also when he gets into that really emotional state where he is triggered why maybe I'm setting a limit or maybe he has felt like I did something that suggests that I prefer his brother over him um which is such a painful trigger for

25:34 him I'm able to stay calm you know I'm not just trying to be calm I'm actually able to stay calm and be in a state of curiosity or for why um why that's happened and what I can do to help him um and try and connect with him in that moment so it might be just asking if he wants to push against my hands or if he wants an up hug which are things that I know help him

26:05 um and I can realize now how scary it is when my response is to either shut down and mentally disappear or explode and yell um but instead of being debilitated by the shame of that and um being unable to tolerate my own emotions I can now feel compassion for myself in that moment and know that it's hard for me too and I'm doing the best I can in that moment to be there for him

26:37 yeah and that's and that you know these episodes used to last 30 minutes and now they don't happen as frequently and they only last maybe 10 minutes now um but they're also easier to to handle um because I am present and there with him even if I don't know what to do and even if I

27:09 have to stop him from destroying things um it's I feel like we are maintaining that connection even through difficult moments um so that's where we are right now and there's still so much that I want to work on um and you asked me to only talk for five minutes and I've now talked for 10. um I'm gonna send this to you but if you want me to try and shorten it or

27:42 do something different then just let me know so of course you can see here why I couldn't possibly have asked Fiona to shorten what she sent me because there's so much witness here it seems like her son's rude Behavior was the thing that needed to be changed even though she had some understanding it was at least partly a result of big feelings he was having about younger siblings and there was something that she could do differently but how could she know what

28:07 to do when he would tell her to go away she would go away and he would follow her if she's doing what he asks and he's still upset about it what is she supposed to do what you can see happening in Fiona's video is what I call a non-cognitive shift because she already knew a number of the tools that I teach she already knew this had links to her relationship with her parents and her brother I remember the coaching call that she

28:32 mentioned so clearly when we walked her through the process of sharing what was going on for her in a really difficult interaction between her and her son and then she took her son's perspective and she broke down as she saw the effect that her own reaction was having on him and of course she was doing the best that she could do she wasn't shutting him out because she wanted to she was shutting him out because the thought of

28:54 not being there for her children's feelings just like nobody was there for her feelings when she was young was too horrible to bear so seeing that interaction from his perspective was really the beginning of her non-cognitive shift and then she's showing up in her Action Group each week which is inside the parenting membership where you meet with up to five other members and an experienced peer coach and I have to say that most parents who sign up for the

29:19 membership really discount the value of action groups because they figure you know how much could it really help to be in a group of six people who all know as much as I do what could I possibly learn from them that's useful quite a few parents who are in action groups have described them as a Lifeline they get deeply invested in each other's lives even though many of them have never met in person here's parents Stephanie describing how

29:42 close she is to the members of her Action Group as well as how it's so much easier to get connection through a standing weekly meeting than through one-off visits with friends in real life I would say that they really feel like friends and I feel closer to a lot of them than I do to my friends in person mostly because I don't see many of my friends in person and so having that Weekly connection where I may see like

30:08 other friends of mine once every couple months now at this point um and getting to have that Weekly connection knowing it's always there knowing I can also reach out to these people outside of that Weekly connection if I need to and I have done that before and kind of expanded on these relationships outside of our weekly meeting um has it's just been huge for me it's really has filled like I I Can't

30:39 Describe enough fills my cup and I don't I wish I could describe it better but that is really what it has done for me where and it's it's easy it's not okay I need to text this person figure out a time to meet them when are their kids available oh their kids are sick okay we can't meet well now it's gonna be next week we'll never heard back from them well do I reach out to them they're not

31:01 reaching out to me this kind of internal you know external thing going on of trying to to reach just one person where I can get get on this call I can talk to multiple people I can express what's going on with me I can get multiple opinions if I want them and if I don't want them nobody just offers their advice and says you should try this or you should do this they just listen and hold space and if I say that I want

31:27 advice on this or recommendations then I freely get great advice like nobody really has ever had bad advice so it's just been very fulfilling for me of course it was Fiona's action group leader who suggested that she skip over some module content and go right into the self-compassion module which normally we cover at the end of the first year in the parenting membership and through a daily practice Fiona developed her non-cognitive shift she used to try to tell herself to stay

31:57 calm in these difficult moments with her son but now instead of convincing herself to be calm she just is calm and I know that those of you who struggle to stay calm in difficult moments can appreciate the Monumental nature of that shift it's not that everything's magically fixed now but things are easier she mentioned that she's able to be curious about why her son is behaving the way he is when he's having a hard time and it's

32:22 pretty much impossible to be triggered and feel curious at the same time that curiosity is really where the magic happens when we're feeling triggered by something we're usually telling ourselves a story about what's happening doesn't feel like a story to us it feels like the truth but it's really the truth from our perspective and another word for that is a story just like the story I was making up about my husband's screen time so maybe our story in this instance

32:47 might go something like my older child is picking on my younger child again he's going to really hurt the younger one one day it's my job to protect the younger one they're gonna have a terrible relationship with each other when they're older and I don't have much of a relationship with my sibling I want them to be able to support each other and I'm a failure as a parent because I can't make that happen and you can hear that catastrophizing

33:08 right it's like a train and once we get on it it's really difficult to get off again but when we're curious we're opening up the possibility that our story is not the only one that our child has their own story too about what's going on and their own unmet needs and we might be able to help them meet their needs so Fiona's oldest son picking fights with the middle sibling or answering back or refusing to help looks a lot

33:32 like rudeness and Defiance that should be squashed that when we can get curious about that we can ask what's underneath that why is he behaving like this he's a deeply feeling child engaged in complex social dynamics at school is it possible he's had a bad day is it possible he feels disconnected from me right now and if either of these are the case how could squashing his rudeness and Defiance possibly be the answer if I'm short with my husband he might

34:02 respond don't you dare talk to me like that but if he responds it sounds like you're having a hard day how can I help then I'm just gonna melt it's so hard to respond to other people in that second way mostly because when we were growing up people only ever responded to us in the first way between those two responses lies the self-compassion that Fiona has discovered which enables her to see and acknowledge her own struggle as well and

34:28 to shift out of don't you dare talk to me like that mode and into it sounds like you're having a hard day how can I help him out of course there are still things Fiona wants to work on but whereas before I used to hear a sense of Despair in her voice that things could ever be different and that she could have the wherewithal to make things different now I hear in her words in her voice a real

34:49 sense of hope so now we've heard from Peju and Fiona and Stephanie we can come back to the parent who posted in the your parenting Mojo Facebook community at the beginning of the episode and we can start to see her child's behavior in a different light we mentioned the first of the two reasons that a child might do a forbidden activity which is they don't have the impulse control to stop themselves from doing it and here's the

35:11 second reason they're doing it deliberately because it's the best way they know to get our attention it's very possible that some of the needs that Fiona's child was expressing are present here as well as the child is doing things she knows she's not allowed to do when we've told children to do something over and over again and we're immediately on them telling them not to do it each time they do it we can almost always hypothesize they have a need for

35:33 connection with us what the child is getting when we're telling them off is a kind of connection in that they have our attention it's a pretty crappy kind of connection and they'd much rather have your attention in a moment when you aren't telling them off but they'll take your attention in that negative interaction over no interaction at all so we can see all of the soap shaving and the drawing on the walls and the hitting of the younger sister and

35:56 picking up the baby is her saying I'm still important too I was once the only kid here and I liked that and I miss those days even though I'm the oldest and technically I can wait for everybody else to get their needs met I still want to know that I'm important and of course another aspect of this is how our culture is affecting this family and this parent who is clearly stretched Way Too Thin because we weren't meant to

36:21 raise children like this we were meant to have way more adults than children around so anytime the mother needed a break she could not cook dinner that night pass the child on to somebody else our capitalist system has led us to live in these boxes completely apart from other people trying to manage more than any one or two adults can possibly manage because when we all live separately we all need everything our own kitchen equipment washer dryer lawn

36:45 mower and all the rest of it when the cultural marker of you being a real adult is you moving into your own place and buying your own stuff it becomes clear that companies have a lot invested in keeping us apart we're not going to reimagine our national housing stock overnight from single-family homes to living arrangements that make it easy to share the load but we can make a start inside our own homes we can let stuff go

37:10 we can wear clothes more often before we wash them we can eat off paper plates for a while to get through a difficult stretch we can cook twice as much as we need whenever we do cook so we only have to cook half as often and then we can start asking for help from other people I remember being on a call with Fiona where she was practically at death's door with a really bad cold and finally

37:33 feeling justified in asking the neighbors for help what's wrong with our culture that we can't ask for help until there is simply no other option what if we could ask for help before things got to that point what if we could have the neighbors take one or more of our children for a few hours on one day and then we take one or more of theirs another day pretty often our children play together with less fighting when somebody else's

37:56 children around too so having more children in the house might paradoxically mean less work for you could we get someone's groceries one week and they'll get ours the next could we cook a meal for them and then they'll cook meals for us another night looking outside the four walls of our house is where we start to find the space to get help so we can rest so everything else doesn't seem as hard as we went our way towards a conclusion

38:21 here the one big idea I want to leave you with is that we're if we're focused on trying to change our child's Behavior we're missing something really important I know it can seem hard to understand what your child is needing through what seems like highly specific difficult Behavior so I would love to help you work through that I hope you'll join me for a free 90-minute masterclass on setting loving and effective limits on Saturday May 6 at 10 A.M Pacific I'm

38:48 sure you can see that the name of the masterclass is a bit tongue-in-cheek just like the eight day workshop of the same name that's been running recently so if you didn't have time for the full Workshop or you missed the sign up window come and join me in the master class instead and get a good chunk of the information in a super short window of time I really do believe that we need to be able to set limits effectively we have

39:10 to do it on exactly the right issues and with real conviction and we should be doing that in about three percent of the interactions when we're having some sort of conflict either major or minor with our child so in the master class we'll absolutely teach you how to do that as I see it we should be using boundaries about seven percent of the time when we're in conflict and we'll show you the critical difference between boundaries and limits

39:34 that makes all the difference in when and how to use them and the other 90 of the time that's when we're looking for our needs and our child's needs and how we can meet both of them so we'll cover that too and if doing all that seems completely overwhelming and you don't know how to start uncovering the needs underneath your child's difficult puzzling overwhelming Behavior never mind figuring out what your own needs are and how to go about meeting both of them

39:59 well come on over to the masterclass and all of that murkiness will get much clearer because when you know how to do that you won't be lurching from one issue to another from one crisis to another always trying to figure out where on Earth there can be space for yourself and your own needs in all of the messiness of parenting you'll have a repeatable framework that you can apply in any situation to any Challenge and feel confident that you're doing the

40:24 right thing you will be doing the right thing because you'll be doing what meets both of your needs the vast majority of the time and that feels great join me for just 90 minutes on Saturday May 6th I'll share the framework answer your questions I'll coach one lucky participant live in the session and there'll be an awesome giveaway as well sign up now at yourparentingmojo.com forward slash setting limits masterclass I'll see you there foreign