Deep Dive: Myriam Sandler of MOTHERCOULD on Frustration Tolerance and Sibling Dynamics

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0:33 here we've created a private community guided by me dr becky and coaches trained in the good inside parenting method here you can ask questions connect with other parents or attend a live event on a topic that matters to you this is the parenting handbook that doesn't exist this is parenting advice at your fingertips where you need it when you need it the most this is good inside membership hi i'm dr becky and this is good inside

1:07 i'm a clinical psychologist and mom of three on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children [Music] i love translating deep thoughts about parenting into practical actionable strategies that you can use in your home right away one of my core beliefs is that we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us in that moment so even as we struggle and even as we are having a hard time on

1:38 the outside we remain good inside [Music] i'll be doing something a bit different on today's episode i'll be sharing a parenting consultation style conversation i had with miriam sandler you might know her by her instagram handle mother could miriam asked if she could pick my brain about a recurring situation that happens in her home a bit of background before we jump in

2:09 miriam is a play activity expert sharing her ideas on instagram and on her website mothercode.com she's a mother of two daughters nikki aged six and emma age three and she has a third daughter on the way on a personal note miriam has been one of the most supportive people in my own social media journey offering guidance and connecting me with her community i am so excited to have her as my first guest for a deep dive

2:38 let's jump in hi miriam i'm so glad to have you join me and for us to talk through some situations together talk to reggie this is awesome i can't tell you how much i've been looking forward to this i have so many questions i know we won't have time for but we'll do as much as we can we will definitely get a lot in you and i always have a lot to talk about so why don't we jump right in what i'd

3:06 love to hear from you is really what's kind of bringing you in here today and what's on your mind and start whatever makes sense to you we'll jump in there and then eventually zoom out to some bigger themes and zoom back into some really concrete strategies okay so i think the one thing i've been wanting to talk to you about is about frustration and play great and i feel like um both my six-year-old and three-year-old we kind of raise them to

3:32 be pretty independent strong women um we're also latin so you know a little bit about our our background we're a little bit strong-willed which i think are wonderful qualities as you go older but when you're little it's hard to handle yeah being strong is a great quality for later on kind of tricky when we're parenting so can you paint a picture for me of what this looks like in your home so i can visualize it and jump in with you so

4:02 what happens often in our house is that our girls are three years apart and my three-year-old they're both girls my three-year-old wants to do everything the six-year-old wants to do but like everything let's say they're in the playroom and i'm cooking in the kitchen this is exactly what happened i'm in the kitchen the girls are in the playroom and they're building a magnetized tower and my daughter took after me and loves the rainbows so she my six-year-old is going

4:29 red orange yellow green blue purple but the three-year-old is coming in with the purple in the red and she's like please don't do that but she said it like a million times like at this time she's like saying it over and over but the three-year-old is like purple and red are beautiful so she's like putting it together but my six-year-old is like no so she gets to a point where like i said she saw black and she'll just like

4:55 very like in herself she won't hit anybody or do anything but she like will go inside herself and just like cradle into that position she's just like i'm done building this tower i do not want to do it anymore uh it's all ruined emma ruined my tower this is horrible and just and then at that point she's like screaming so i come in from the kitchen and i'm like i pull my three-year-old and i say emma you and i let's build a

5:19 tower a separate tower so we can do one over here and he can continue but nikki's like no the tower is ruined it seems like once something doesn't go the exact way nicki wanted it to she really struggles it's as if she has such a clear idea of what she wants which is amazing and yet sometimes this can get in her way because it can stop her from continuing to play when her sister does something that was outside her vision

5:49 so what's really going on here well i'm thinking it must feel so bad to nikki when things shift on her that she can't access flexibility and find a thought like this isn't exactly the way i wanted it to be but it's good enough and i can keep going i think so many times as parents we kind of know where we want our kids to go and we rush there instead of just starting with whatever's right in

6:14 front of us i and i know i do that with my own kids too so i'll take my own advice and listen to this later um so first thing first i think is narrating exactly what's happening narrating is such a powerful tool because we can do so much we can show a child how we see what's happening for her and for all of us kids and adults when we feel seen we start to calm down and also we can vary our tone and pacing

6:42 in a way that kind of mirrors what our child's body just went through so in this powerful non-verbal communication we're showing a child that we really understand what's happening for her let me model what this would sound like because i think this will make more sense then so nikki oh let me see if i got this right you're building a tower in rainbow order the real rainbow order the exact order you know and you love and you can picture you know what you

7:12 want it to look like you're so excited you want to be exactly that way and then emma comes in and she wants to play in uh she wants to build two but now the rainbow order isn't the exact right order and that oh oh that just feels so bad and it feels like forget it i don't even want to do it anymore at all is that right it seems like i'm doing nothing to me that's actually almost like 90 of it i'm

7:37 just narrating what happened i'm starting to build a story going back to that core idea that to learn how to regulate a feeling we have to understand the feeling and we understand things that we can narrate to ourselves and put a story to and kind of quilt together and because i'm narrating it i'm giving permission for it in a way because i'm naming it i'm in it tell me your thoughts of that is that like ever

8:03 something you've ever tried or how do you think because kids respond to that in different ways what do you think he would do with that it's interesting you bring that up because every time i do start with something like that she kind of like takes it in herself to be in the moment and kind of like come down from that black area to like starting to see white again because it's kind of like replaying it but outside of her yes

8:31 so i do think that that helps yeah a lot for sure it's just not something that i go to immediately i'm trying to solve the problem always let me see what i can do right now to end the screaming to end the fighting rather than sitting there taking those minutes to cope with the feeling and look i think that's so amazing to realize in yourself and trust me again with my kids when i'm not giving other

8:57 people my own thoughts and i'm just you know with my kids i do the same thing also because we see our kids distress and it brings up our distress and then we think we're solving their problem we're just solving our own problem through shutting down their meltdown we're like we're just i just want to go back to the kitchen and finish okay this is like really inconvenient so please stop this so here's what you can do instead right but

9:18 what ends up happening if that's the general pattern is it's kind of this intergenerational transmission of i don't want to feel distressed then you feel distressed i feel distressed i shut down mine we shut down yours and we're all in the same place right so we all do this to me a big difference in our building our kids resilience is how our kid feels our presence in their difficult feelings versus whether they feel alone and if you think about solving our kids

9:47 problems there's almost an irony to it when we're solving a problem quickly we're also taking them out of that emotion to like a more pleasant one and so what actually gets encoded in their body sometimes is oh so the next time i feel frustration with something not going my way i'm kind of just as alone as i was before because if there's not someone to take me out of the feeling i haven't learned that anyone is in this feeling

10:10 with me okay so to me that's always like an extra motivator to be like okay yes becky like this is really stressful and whatever i'm cooking on the stove is like probably burning right now and i'm going to end up having cereal for dinner and which is kind of delicious delicious but like 100 my favorite dinner but so many good things are happening right now and i think reminding ourselves of that is really key because it reminds us like

10:35 this is a good moment this isn't a bad moment this is a bang for my buck moment not a distractor moment or not a detractor moment so if you were gonna see it that way if you're like oh everything good with nikki is gonna happen here like everything good is the longer i can tolerate her distress the longer she's going to be able to tolerate her own distress right and i think that there is a direct

11:02 relationship there so let's say you say this to her right you kind of narrate because you've given yourself permission i don't have to take away the distress right resilience isn't getting out of frustration resilience is tolerating frustration right it's like being in frustration not getting out of it the frustration kind of ends when it ends right so you've narrated this but let's let's say she's like yes that's exactly what happens and i'm not doing it mom

11:32 i'm not doing it no more tower no emma ruins everything or something like that yes sounds okay accurate right so then what well we just did this amazing narration and we stayed with the feeling and it seems like our kid is still as stuck as ever narration is one of the best strategies we have to connect with where our child is in that moment and now that we've shown our kid she's not alone now that we really get where she's at

12:03 now that we've built up that connection capital we can now maybe add some agency or move things forward by adding a type of choice it might sound like this look sweetie i guess you kind of have a choice right now you can choose to say no more building at all feels too bad or my guess is you can find a way to make this tower still feel great even if it's different from what you had imagined

12:33 this is tricky i see that and also you're a kid who can handle tricky things and figure things out okay let me pause and step out of that role play to talk a little bit about these words this you're a kid who sentence starter here's the main idea our kids respond to the version of themselves we reflect back so often when our kids are struggling we reflect back a version that they're trying to shift out of not stay in or

13:01 grow meaning we say you never clean your room or you're so irresponsible or in this case maybe nikki you can be so difficult we want our kids to know that we see their problem-solving abilities we see their flexibility if our kids are going to grow these qualities we have to make this possible by what we reflect back so let's bring that all together giving a choice after narration and being mindful of which part of our child

13:28 we're reinforcing might sound like this seems like you have a choice sweetie you can decide that this didn't go the way you wanted it to and that things feel too bad to continue or you can remind yourself that you're a kid who can figure out tricky things like building when things don't go the way you initially wanted them to and then after that i could see you miriam walking away and saying like i'm gonna go back to the kitchen and i'm

13:50 curious about what's gonna happen next the reason i would do that for my kids they would need a little space after that like they wouldn't want to feel like now i'm just gonna build a tower because my mom said or my mom now is it feels like they're watching me so in a way i'm like coming in i'm narrating i'm kind of getting into that moment with them and then when i feel that opening i might give that choice and i really

14:12 mean it it's not reverse psychology like you can choose to be done okay or you can choose to do this other thing i trust you to figure it out and then i would walk away because i think actually giving our kids space actually encourages them to try new things and it really says to someone i trust you right and i know again you're like i want to raise girls who feel good about themselves and who feel like they're their own person and

14:35 they have independence so i'm coming in to regulate but then i'm also and i'm giving you a message that i trust you and then i'm giving you space tell me what you think about that this whole time that you've been explaining this i feel like i think about it as myself as an adult and my parents did none of this but the way that i cope with frustration is kind of talking myself down in my own mind i'm i have conversations

15:04 with myself basically and in my mind i'm like okay this is the scenario this is what happened these are the possible outcomes and this is um my best possible outcome in this moment right now this is what i do for myself yeah and this is nothing that my parents did but at some point this kind of like started happening to me and it's my form of coming down from that i'm so glad you're connecting that that things that tend to help us the

15:34 things that we tend to need in our tough times they're the same elements our kids need it's such a good point okay so we've thought through what to do in this hard moment let's think about what we can do to build skills outside of the moment because i think for me sometimes with my kids when stuff like this happens over and over which of course it does our kids struggle with the same themes and they just keep

15:55 popping up in different ways one of the things i try to think about is okay so there's the moment it happens but what i really need to do is kind of store data in those moments to use later right because i don't know about you if i'm not acting my best toward my partner or toward my husband that's not gonna be the best time for him to talk about my anger no it's always it's always a bad idea my

16:18 husband actually calls me the cold shoulder because i in that moment i'm just like i'll be back later because in that moment it will not be good right not good so you store it and you figure it out later but then we have to hold ourselves to the later so what is this core struggle for nikki it's something about i want things to go a certain way and i can get blinders on and then it's hard

16:45 to be flexible again equality you don't want her to lose in some ways how awesome that she's so aware of what she wants right so again how can we just harness that so let's talk about how to kind of prepare for those moments because i think we really build skills outside the heat of the moment so what i would say to take it a step further i would love you to do more things with her where you

17:08 get that same almost like huffy puffy shut down so maybe it's in a project or if they know you tend to kind of be experimenting there maybe it's something a little different that would be a little you know new for them maybe it's you know drawing a certain figure or something like that and you're working on drawing a person you know it could be something so simple like that and i would do this right next to nikki

17:30 right so to me the most powerful moments with our kids is when they kind of quote just happen to witness us doing something right of course sometimes it's maybe a little pre-planted on our end and i would be drawing right let's it could be anything could be a person it could even be i'm trying to draw a great five-pointed star right and you do it and you're like that is not the way i wanted it to go

17:54 no or maybe you're doing something and your husband it's like oh i want to do this with you and he had something like uh what because maybe that kind of mimics what happens between your girls what now the whole picture is ruined and you kind of plan this out and he says miriam it's not ruined it's just different from what you thought it would be right and you i would if i were you i'd say no and

18:19 whatever nicki would do right and then just pause and i could see whispering to nikki i love using a whisper voice to kind of alternate it creates something like intimate like oh what do you think i should do what should i do do you think the whole thing's ruined is there any way oh and then i would put words to this uh i really wanted to go one way your dad wanted to help with the drawing

18:43 but then it's different from what i had in my mind in my mind this was going to be like all hearts and stars and he added like these flowers and he added like this football and i i didn't want that and like that's not oh i don't do you know what i mean and even if she just says something that i would consider off script like you're right mom throw it away and you're like oh well that was you know even if she says

19:03 that i'd be like oh sometimes it does feel like when something doesn't go exactly the way i had imagined that it is something we should just stop and put in the trash oh i know sometimes it does feel like that i'm just gonna take a moment and then i'd introduce like a little mantra this didn't go the way i wanted i can cope with it and still make it great something like that okay wait i want to say that one more time sorry

19:29 this is just actually helping me a little bit so i'm just gonna say it one more time this didn't go the way i wanted i can get through this i can still make it great okay and then i could see whispering to nikki i'm still not that happy i'm still not that happy about the football to me what's really key there is i think it's really important to model realistic regulation too often we see our kid

19:53 they're struggling learning how to tie their shoes and they're like yeah i'm gonna help them out see we just take a deep breath and then we try it again like no right it's not it's not really what it looks like right and also when you're dealing with something less than ideal the best you get is coping with it and accepting it you don't have to like the fact that your husband made a different drawing than you wanted and

20:18 nikki doesn't have to like the fact that emma doesn't know the colors in order of the rainbow we're trying to work with her just tolerating it enough to stay engaged and stay creative and stay involved she can still end saying that kind of stinks i didn't want to look like that but that would be a step beyond what she can do now so i think sometimes we go to and you were saying the solution we go to like put

20:45 your sisters doing it that way and that's beautiful or but you can just make another one on the side and we offer all these alternatives that are also kind of feel-good alternatives but that's actually not realistic what's realistic is let's get through this moment and try to make it just a tiny bit better and i think if you model that around her yes it it gets absorbed yes sometimes emma my three-year-old will ruin some projects that i'm doing

21:13 and nikki's eyes sparkle she's like she's doing it to you too uh-huh like um what are you gonna do about it like what's gonna happen yeah and i could see it like actively happening and it happens every time every time emma does something and nikki's like on the corner like she's looking for either an explosion or a problem solve or we're gonna sit down or she's looking for something and it's possibly different every time if it's like a really

21:40 important project i'm just like explosive or i'm just like if it's not not that important or even if it's important enough but i'm in a good mindset it's like oh it's okay we'll do it again it doesn't matter we have more glue we'll try the slime again and she's looking for that and it's interesting that you say model it because she is looking looking for it actively like what what is mom gonna do when little sister ruins

22:05 her stuff again miriam you're noticing how you and nikki are actually so similar you have so much in common and how actually you understand from your own experience how difficult it can be to work on something and then be so surprised by someone else jumping in and changing it on that note surprise there's a way you can really help nikki here being caught off guard having something happen that you didn't expect this is really hard for all of us

22:33 so one of the things you can start doing with nikki when it's just the two of you is give her body a bit of a preview or practice for what might happen when emma joins here's what this might look like so you're playing alone with nikki say maybe you're building a magnetile tower then pause and say oh i wonder what would happen if emma came in and wanted to add animals to this tower and you didn't want animals oh that

23:03 would be so tricky i wonder and i would start with i wonder what that would feel like oh and just plant that seed because then and she might say oh that'd be so annoying i'd be like ah that is really hard when you want to do one thing and someone else wants to join you oh that is really tricky i wonder the different things we could do if that were to happen let's think think of three different things and i think a

23:27 viable option sometimes is saying hey emma right now i have a really specific idea about what i want to do with these blocks and i don't want any help because i really want it to go that way i think it's really important for her to feel the freedom and actually i think if she knows she has the freedom to say that it becomes a little easier to tolerate the times that things don't go her way because she kind of knows she

23:49 has full ownership at other times right yes and i would play that out with her and then i i i'm going to model it again because i i i feel like there's something to the oh and then what if oh oh right you're kind of again being a scientist there like oh i have another idea oh and what if oh and right our tone matters so much is we're kind of really getting into how it feels and

24:13 what if you want to do the rainbow thing again and you're like here's the rainbow order and then you look back ugh and then two colors are like not in order you don't even have to say that's hard because in your tone you're showing her that you get how hard that is so in that prep stage you can first take on and act out the frustration yourself and then we can do a couple things we can model realistic regulation

24:39 ourselves which we just discussed or you can do something else that's really powerful you can act out the frustration and then pause without modeling the regulation and see what happens in that pause see if your child offers you an idea offers you a strategy or maybe prompt her a bit something like any ideas of what i can do to calm my body so you're taking on this frustration which is really hers in the first place and you're really joining her in this

25:11 way right so my kid feels less alone again my kid feels less alone in the feeling if i'm doing the same thing and then when we're doing that our kid has access to their problem solving because we're owning the part of them that's struggling so they can on the part that's problem solving as opposed to what often happens where our kid is struggling and we kind of own the problem solving we're totally reversing that right we're letting them do the

25:36 work exactly i love how you said that we're letting a child do the work that is so powerful and while we've been talking i keep thinking about another big theme that is clearly at play here and that's siblinghood and how it's hard to be a younger sibling we didn't even really talk that much about emma it's so hard to want to do things that you can't really do because you're younger and yet you really want to do independently

26:03 because you want to be so much like this capable older sibling yes and it's really hard to be an older sibling who probably sometimes feels annoyed that a younger sibling is messing up their stuff right so to me it's just so helpful every once in a while even when someone's not expecting it like you're having lunch one day with nikki and just saying isn't it being a big sister like it's like so many things right like

26:27 sometimes it's great and so fun and sometimes it's like oh it's like really hard right and just level with her on that yes you just kind of like validate the feelings that she's probably already feeling a lot of things that i'm guilty of is like you should be grateful that you have a sister you need to take care of your sister like you're you don't even know how lucky you are to have a sister like saying those

26:53 types of things out loud is hurtful and i think in the long run because you're like you just just be grateful like when when you're feeling sad about something and somebody is like just be grateful you have your health right you have some like choice words you want to say back right that we won't say on air exactly exactly it is really hard and i think a couple things it's one of the things i love so much about you you're so amazing

27:18 miriam kind of looking at something and reflecting on it with an openness and curiosity toward yourself not a judgment of like oh i do that i don't think that's great right yeah that's such an amazing attitude it's so it's probably one of the reasons you can be so creative and create so many things is that you're so open to kind of trying and not judging so right so amazing just always see that in you in so many ways

27:38 and showing up here and it's interesting at this point to kind of come to what actually we started with and i want to link back to that we can only regulate the feelings we allow ourselves to have so let's use that i feel angry toward my sibling sometimes we feel so angry at a sibling that in that moment what feels loudest is i wish i didn't even have a sister right and i think we hear these

28:00 things right as if that's the whole truth it's just yeah in the moment right unless i hate you when they go i hate it exactly i hate you right so what happens to say i hate you i'm always what that's just the tip of the iceberg what led to that moment i felt frustrated i felt something i wanted got ruined by you right probably so if the first steps of regulating is allowing ourselves to have a feeling the

28:29 narrative of i should be feeling a pleasant happy feeling instead of the feeling i'm feeling is one of the biggest things that gets in our way of learning to regulate the feeling because we can't regulate a feeling we tell ourselves we're not supposed to have so if i feel frustrated and the narrative is get to grateful get to grateful where's the grateful where's the grateful should only feel grateful now not only do i not know how to

28:51 regulate the frustration but i'm adding shame and blame to that frustration because it's an awful feeling to feel a feeling in your body that you think you shouldn't be feeling you're like oh my body is like working against me what's wrong with me that's the what's wrong with me narrative right so i think a really powerful reframe for parents is especially with siblings is i don't want my kids to have only positive feelings toward their sibling i want them to get

29:16 pretty good at understanding and regulating the tougher feelings they have because then actually those feelings won't act themselves out as much in behavior right our feelings are forces i always like to imagine it that way and what that means is if we don't know how to regulate a feeling and don't feel like it's okay to have that feeling inside of us if a feeling is a force then it literally has to explode out of us as a behavior our behaviors the i'm not

29:47 doing this and you can't build with me even the i hate you is to me a sign oh there was some feeling that felt too big and too unmanageable inside that it had to explode outside right so i love saying proactively to my kids it's okay to have so many feelings about your sibling and sometimes we have many feelings at once you can feel like you love your sister and you're so happy to have a sister

30:15 and you can also feel very annoyed that your sister is playing with the same blocks in our family we understand that you can be mad at the same person you love and that's something i'm gonna keep reminding you of so when the rainbow tower doesn't go the way you want i think two things are true in that moment you love your sister and you're very mad at her that she totally changed the direction of what this tower

30:42 was going to be i get that that is going to help her stay engaged and regulate the feeling right the feelings are never the problem it's the regulating of the feelings and so many of us were brought up get rid of the feeling get rid of the feeling get to the happy feeling and so that is our knee-jerk response versus weight we all have every feeling yeah right you have every feeling i'm sure toward the people you

31:08 love in your life too yeah right i don't know if every day you're like i'm just so grateful i have a husband i'm just so grateful like no there's some days you're like oh my husband's really annoying me it doesn't mean you're not grateful it just means that's not the loudest thing that's right then right and actually the more we regulate those tough feelings the more space there is for those other feelings to surface when i tell my six-year-old no matter how mad

31:31 i am with you i'll always love you she like starts crying yes and it's just like so powerful to see okay she's mad but she still loves me yes yes you know the other day i was playing with my three and a half year old and we were playing family and i was the dad and he was the mom this is always the roles we have when we play family and he looks at me and he just goes

31:55 do you know that even when you're at work i love you even when i'm not with you i love you and it was just so poignant because i was like this is what kids are trying to figure out this is on their mind all the time all the time right and so even between siblings right we want to teach them between siblings you can love your sister and not want to play with her you can feel very angry at her and all of us

32:21 still know yeah that you have a close relationship with her and i i can't help myself but going to the next step which is knowing that you're pregnant yes and there's another girl coming yes and to me i think it's so empowering to say to our kids it's okay to have a lot of feelings about having a new baby coming and i love to make things concrete for kids because feelings it's like so confusing like what is that and so i still remember

32:50 what i said to my kids when i was pregnant with each other one is and i would kind of touch my arm just to make it kind of like it's okay like this part of your body might feel like so excited so excited can't wait can't wait and this part of your body might feel like nervous like oh change it's four of us what is yeah what is that gonna be like in this part of your body just some other part might

33:10 feel like mad like oh i think we're fine as we are like is this not like i'm kind of mad and we can have all those different feelings and i still remember when my oldest when i had my second he came to me and he actually goes this part of my body's glad you had a baby but this part of my body misses when it was just us and i was just like that to me was part of his regulating

33:33 strategy yeah right he took what you said and applied it which is really incredible and i think that's what our kids they they're sponges so the more you give permission just for a range of feelings the more we're teaching nikki to regulate them we're teaching her how to regulate frustration by your modeling it and prepping and narrating and the part of this that might not just be about frustration but it's also just about all the feelings about siblinghood and how

34:00 and her sometimes older kids feel like they have to take a back seat and understand that someone's younger and understand that they don't understand the color of the rainbow yet and that's frustrating too so that could also be contributing to the like kind of i'm not doing anything when we told the girls that we were expecting they were jumping up and down they were so excited and then i remember that same night nikki comes to me and

34:24 she's like ma another baby monster in my mind i'm like this is how she thinks of her baby sister and now she's like there's gonna be another one and the way she said it to me is i was like we're having another baby but don't worry she's six years younger than you so what i would really encourage just to kind of bring this together again in this theme of we want to help our kids sit with

34:54 and allow themselves to have a range of feelings the widest range of feelings rather than give them the message that they should have a narrow range because the narrower of a range we tell our kids they quote should have anything outside the range becomes immediately impossible to regulate because they're learning from us what's allowed and not allowed so at some point if it feels right i would probably encourage you to have a conversation with nikki that says and i love the

35:24 language of parts because it allows us to kind of sit with conflict instead of resolve everything into one i don't think the truth is that she's excited or the truth is that she thinks this is a monster i think both of them are there right just like i'm sure for you part of you so excited and party is like oh my goodness what are we doing right and yes one's not more true than the other they're

35:43 just both true so i would say you know what it makes me think about or nikki i was thinking about you know i'm having this baby and it is okay to have so many different feelings it's okay to be so excited about a new baby and you're gonna be so much older and to feel like oh that's gonna be so great for me and it's okay if another part of you feels a little nervous and when you said baby monster that lets me

36:08 know that a part of you knows that siblings can be kind of hard and that's okay and then i think a step further i'm so glad you feel comfortable talking to me about all the different things you feel and i think sometimes when we just tell our kids don't worry we don't think about it like that we're also kind of saying i don't want to hear i don't really want to hear that i want to hear more of this so i think that

36:33 would be a really powerful conversation and leads into the conversation about her having to share play space and negotiate things with emma and also just going to set you up really well for when this new baby comes that the more comfortable both of your kids are with the range of feelings that are coming the more they can say to those feelings when they arrive oh it makes sense i kind of knew i would have this feeling

36:53 which is getting you on the path toward regulating instead of acting that feeling out so let me know how it all goes i will look forward to hearing more thank you so much for this this is awesome i love talking with miriam i think we can all relate to tricky sibling dynamics and to how hard it is to be flexible when things don't go the way you wanted them to let's tie it all together with three

37:22 takeaways first the power of narration when your child is frustrated pause breathe and tell the story of what just happened no need to solve or come up with some insight just talk slowly and name what happened by doing this you add coherence and connection to a moment that felt really bad for your child and these elements help a child regulate feel safe again

37:54 and re-engage two model realistic regulation i always think about how us adults we forget how capable we are as compared to our kids who are learning everything so if your child gets frustrated in art make sure you too draw a picture that doesn't go the way you wanted it to and then don't make it perfect right after but instead model what realistic regulation looks like which often means taking a breath maybe saying something

38:24 nice to yourself and then tolerating something that feels hard it might sound like this oh that flower's too big i don't like how it looks okay okay okay deep breaths deep breaths i can keep drawing even if the flower isn't perfect third we don't need to change feelings we want to help our kids have all of their feelings which means they'll learn to manage all of their feelings which means they are less and less likely over

38:56 time to have those feelings show up in behavior this is true everywhere and definitely in sibling relationships the more we normalize having a range of feelings towards siblings the less likely we are to see those tough feelings the jealousy the anger the competitiveness come out in difficult behavior or nasty words [Music] thanks for listening to good inside let's stay connected at goodinside.com

39:27 you can sign up for workshops and subscribe to good insider my weekly email with scripts and strategies delivered right to your inbox and for more ideas and tips check out my instagram dr becky at goodinside goodinside is produced by beth rowe and brad gage an executive produced by eric kabelski and me dr becky please rate and review our show let us know what you think and what resonated i actually do read each and every review

40:00 so please know that your feedback is meaningful to me let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves even as i struggle and even as i have a hard time on the outside i remain good inside

40:39 you