Discover A Surprisingly Simple Way to Set Limits Your Child Will Listen To with Patty Wipfler

0:00 hi it's patti whitser here and i'm so glad that you're back here or have just found hand in hand we have some listening tools that really can change your life and really strengthen and warm your relationship with each of your children no matter how difficult that relationship may have become so and the the listening tool i'm going to talk about today that we outline in the book listen five simple tools to meet your

0:31 everyday parenting challenges is setting limits and i think in my mind all the tools go together and it they don't none of them work all that well if you only use one the tools are sort of a concert of ways to connect with your child and ways to make it safe for your child to offload the feelings of upset and and all kinds of different feelings that get in their way of really being

1:02 their best and most creative and most cooperative and most thoughtful selves and setting limits is a very important tool sometimes when people hear about special time they think oh this is such a permissive parenting approach you just tell a child well i'll do whatever you want to do what do you want to do and where are the limits how do children not grow up to be uncivilized if there are no limits and actually that's a misunderstanding

1:31 of who we are and what we put forward setting limits early and often is very important it's a very important part of our approach and the setting limits tool is like almost nothing that most of us saw as children it's not the way our parents set limits and setting limits using our thinking about it makes it so that when you set limits you

2:02 can do it with confidence that it is the very best thing for your child that you are being a good parent that no matter what they tell you about how awful you are how mean or how thoughtless or how unloving they they feel like you are you can have confidence that it is a good thing to do and that you and your child will come out the other end of this limit setting episode closer than before and in better contact

2:32 than before and that oftentimes when children show us that they are off track and they can't think well it is the most thoughtful and kind thing to do to set a limit with your child and that after your child unloads the feelings that we're driving him or her off track they will be able to relax their day will go better and they will be one step farther in thinking better in an area where they

3:02 have difficulty so it is a tool for great progress between parent and child and it's a tool that lets you put your head on your pillow at night and go oh hard day but i did my job i loved my kid and and we will have a better day tomorrow and that's really how we want to be able to put our heads on our pillow at night as parents it's what we want the most so the kind of setting limits that we

3:31 are talking about is not anything that you have seen very much of it's not telling a child what to do and expecting them to do it it's not lecturing a child about you know the harm they caused or all the reasons why they shouldn't have done what they just did and shouldn't do it again it's not reasoning with a child trying to get them to agree with you to do something differently it's not threatening it's not punishing

4:01 it's not promising consequences it's not ignoring a child and hoping they figure it out it's none of those things what it is is just bringing the limit you bring yourself and you make it impossible for your child to pursue the thing they're doing which is not working well you know and sometimes you do that very quickly without thinking twice because what they're doing is you know beating on their younger sibling and you've got to get there to

4:31 keep everybody safe but rather than scold or punish or yell you know say a child has been you know hard on their younger one younger sibling and aggressive you move in and you just you bring the limit you move the child away from the sibling they're attacking but you don't do a whole bunch of other stuff in particular you don't talk you know you might say can't let you do that that would be can't let you do that

5:03 that's five words that's about the limit of words that a child can process when they are thinking so poorly that they are being hard on someone else in it in an obvious way and so you just say something oh i'm here uh-uh no no no or come here come on over here or uh-uh no it's just

5:33 it's just it's you coming in and stopping the irrational behavior and then you are quiet because what your child needs is for to go in and feel the feelings that were driving that behavior they cannot get to those feelings and shed them they can't get through those feelings to the other side and improve their thinking unless you give them the room to do it so you give them you know 100 body language i'm here i'm

6:04 with you i see i'm not going to let that happen but you don't say very much you let them find what's going on inside you let them tell you how awful you are you let them scream and stomp and throw themselves around you let all of that happen because that's exactly where they needed to go and that's the healing process that they were trying to trigger by doing something so outlandish as to draw your attention so our setting limits as you bring the

6:37 limit and then you bring one of the other listening tools you bring yourself and stay listening you bring yourself and perhaps play listening because there are playful ways of setting limits that get laughter going which then helps your child more deeply connect with you and offload some of the lighter fears that were bothering them sometimes what they need is a tantrum and you just stop them from banging away at something that they might break because it won't work the way they want

7:08 it to and then then they can slow down and have that tantrum which allows them to actually come back to learning nice and fresh and ready to ready with an open mind to see what happens when they try it this way and try it that way so it's a revolutionary way of thinking of setting limits as you try it you can begin to toss consequences you can begin to toss punishments you can begin to stop i mean

7:39 it's like yelling will not happen as often from you well it may happen from your child because every limit brings a protest because every limit stops action that is governed by unruly feelings and when you stop that action the unruly really feelings have a chance to be expressed and you have a chance to receive it all and heal the lack of connection there really get on your child's side with this healing process and appreciate

8:09 how fully they go into their feelings and appreciate how long those feelings last and appreciate the deep intensity of it all because that is what it takes to get rid of a feeling you have to really scrub you have to really feel every little bit of it and all the you know and you have to say then the unhappy things that go along with that feeling so you're there to use the other listening tools and to keep holding the limit so your child

8:39 can keep feeling these awful feelings until they go away okay that in a nutshell is it and you know if you take a look at this book listen um which tasha shore and i wrote together um you will find so many stories of setting limits this way and that way in the next way so there's a story about you know setting limit on hitting there's a setting a limit in the middle of a sibling dispute

9:10 there's a story of setting the limit when a child lies about you know who hurt the baby when it was them and their you know they're pretending it wasn't setting a limit around aggression setting limits around music practice and homework and slowly but surely as you carry your child through great big emotional upsets after you've set a limit you will see that over and over again

9:41 when you bring yourself and not all of the heated stuff that your parents brought to setting limits they feel closer to you afterwards um the issue that you know the thing they they wanted and desperately needed that you're saying no to um it's the issue just disappears it's like they don't need it anymore they don't care um tomorrow will be fine or next week we'll be fine um and and that will give you confidence that i don't know how else

10:11 you get as a parent just the confidence that even in the hard times even when your child is just nuts and you set a limit your relationship will be stronger afterwards and that kind of confidence is what allows us to relax as parents in a way it's what allows us to begin to believe that all the little things that we do every day are going to amount to a child who can think who can be thoughtful of

10:39 others who can cooperate and who knows how to use his or her intelligence very very well in the world by the time they're you know entering adulthood so and that's really i don't know that kind of confidence is priceless and you won't get it the very first time you set a limit i don't think um it took me probably i don't know more like a year or a year and a half before i had a lot of confidence in

11:06 in the goodness and the rightness and the love that setting the limit brings to a child i mean i think one thing you have to know is your child never wants to hurt somebody they never want to be thoughtless and so when you set a limit on thoughtless behavior hurtful behavior nutty behavior you are keeping them safe from feeling bad about themselves you are letting them work on the feelings that are driving them and when they're finished they have you

11:37 you know backing them and they can feel that you back them and they haven't hurt anybody you stopped it you prevented you know that hard thing from happening where they had to feel terrible because they were hard on someone else so you can become a really good limit setter it takes work on ourselves but we have a listening tool for that and um i don't know that the benefits are huge

12:08 so i hope you enjoy exploring this tool i hope you enjoy the book that tasha and i wrote for you we just wanted other parents to have the benefit of our experience and the experience of about 130 other parents who gave us stories for the book it's full of riches for you so enjoy bye

12:38 you