SYPM 011: Untigering with Iris Chen

In this episode we talk with Iris Chen about her new book, Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent. Iris admits to being a parent who engaged in "yelling, spanking, and threatening with unreasonable consequences" - but far from becoming a well-behaved, obedient child, her son fought back.  The harder she punished, the more he resisted. Their home became a battleground of endless power struggles, uncontrollable tantrums, and constant frustration. But Iris didn't know what else to do: she had learned this over-controlling style from her own parents: watching TV without permission, talking back to her father, and having a boyfriend before college were simply out of the question when she was growing up. In her parents' eyes, they had done all the right things: Iris got good grades, graduated from an elite university, and married another successful Chinese-American. But through interacting with her son, Iris realized that all of these achievements had come at a great cost: a cost that her son was trying to show her through his resistance.  Eventually Iris saw that her son's behavior wasn't the problem; he was simply reacting to her attempts to control him, and that it was her own approach that needed to change. Now Iris is well along her own Untigering path: basing her relationship with her children on finding win-win solutions to problems, being flexible, and respecting each other's boundaries. As I do too, Iris sees this path as a journey toward creating a society where everyone belongs. If you see yourself in Iris' descriptions of her early days as a parent, and especially if you find yourself routinely overreacting to your child's age-appropriate behavior, I invite you to join my Taming Your Triggers workshop, which will help you to understand the true source of your triggered feelings (hint: it isn't your child's behavior!), feel triggered less often, and respond more effectively to your child on the fewer occasions when it does still happen.           Jump to highlights:

• (01:34) Children’s dilemma between being seen/heard and being accepted
• (02:50) The trauma we pass on to our children
• (04:04) How to tame your triggers
• (04:59) Confidence in parenting that gives parents a sense of calm
• (06:39) Iris as a Deconstructing Tiger Parent
• (08:13) “I thought my responsibility as a parent was to push harder when my child resisted”
• (09:26) “I saw in my children a freedom to express their resentment in ways that I was never free to”
• (11:05) The walls that are created between parent and child because children’s authentic selves are not accepted
• (11:24) Our parents have their own traumas as well
• (13:18) The Idea of Untigering
• (14:19) Permissive parenting
• (16:06) Viewing children as full human beings
• (18:43) Adultism and Childism
• (20:05) Is respect something a child needs to earn from their parents?
• (21:26) Redefining our ideas for success as parents
• (27:29) Navigating the needs that drive behavior
• (31:30) Chinese somatization
• (33:57) The internalization of injustice and suffering
• (36:50) Holding space for one another and the greater community
• (41:19) The cascading effect of changing the way we relate to our children

  Books and Resources:

• Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

  Links:

• Taming Your Triggers Workshop
• Upbringing Podcast
• Untigering Website

  Join the YPM Facebook Community

• Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. In today's Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we hear from Iris Chen who I first found on Instagram and then started reading her blog on her website Untigering.com. Iris describes herself as an American-born Chinese who somehow ended up with kids who are Chinese-born Americans. She writes about navigating life and parenting at the intersection of her Chinese and American identities and as a deconstructing Tiger Mother who's trying to become a gentle parent. She's just published a book called appropriately enough Untigering: Peaceful Parenting For the Deconstructing Tiger Parent.   Jen  01:34 Before we meet Iris, I also wanted to mention you're going to hear a lot in this episode related to trauma.  Trauma that we parents may have experienced ourselves and also trauma that's been passed down through the generations in our families. And this trauma shows up in the ways we interact with our children. Trauma can be the classic things you might think of like experiencing war or sexual abuse, but it can also show up in much milder circumstances like being ridiculed by a parent. This can be incredibly difficult for a child to bear because it represents a rupture of the attachment relationship that's so important to our well-being. When our parent causes us to feel shame and humiliation because of something we did or said, we find it hard to accept that they could be wrong, because as far as we know, they see and know everything. And they tell us so often they love us so they must be right. And we ended up walling off the part of ourselves that was trying to meet the need we had when we did the thing that our parents disapproved of. It's too hard for us to hold the two truths together, that we can need these things like respect and autonomy and the ability to make real choices, and that we also need to be accepted and loved by our parent. And very often our need for acceptance wins out and we put the other need on hold. We deny that it exists, but it does still exist, and it lives on somewhere deep inside us, waiting for a chance for us to be truly seen and known as whole people.   Jen  02:50 When we've experienced trauma, we may realize that while we thought we had it all under control for much of our lives, and it wasn't really impacting us so much anymore. When we have children, we can find that just through being normal children doing things that normal children do, many of which may be the very same things that we did as children that upset our own parents so much our children trigger reminders of the trauma we've suffered. When this happens, we tend to go into one of three instinctive modes: Fight or Flight where we're ready to take action back before many of us lived in houses. This would have prepared us to either fight a bear or run away from it. Or maybe we freeze which in our parenting often comes out as emotionally shutting down, maybe physically walking away from a situation that feels like more than we can deal with. Or if we've survived abuse, we may use a fawning mode or we try to placate the other person to minimize the rupture between us.   Jen  03:39 While we can't say there's a direct relationship between the trauma we've experienced and the likelihood we'll pass this down to our children, we do know that trauma is transferred intergenerationally through a combination of the expression of our genes and our parenting style. And we can also be reasonably sure that if we don't take steps to do things differently, this kind of trauma is going to keep on impacting us and our relationships with our children. This kind of stuff doesn't fix itself or just go away.   Jen  04:04 If you're realizing that maybe you need help understanding the trauma you've experienced both on a cognitive level in your brain and also on a physical level in your body, and that you need help finding new ways to cope in moments when your children's behavior makes you explode, apparently, without warning, I do hope you'll join my highly popular Taming Your Triggers workshop, which is now open for registration. So many parents have taken this workshop and found that even just the insight into the origins of their triggered feelings has brought a great sense of relief. One participant told me that the email about understanding our relationship with our mothers as a source of our triggered feelings "dropped a bomb on me that I never saw coming. Of course, I realized I had issues with my mom but not the extent to which it affected my actions on an hourly basis." So we get insight into the origins of these feelings and begin to heal from that trauma, but we also go on to develop tools you can use to create space between your child's behavior and your reaction.   Jen  04:59 Where it probably seems like there is no space right now, then once you have that space, you'll learn ways to respond to your child that are aligned with your values as a parent, rather than reacting based on your trauma history will also help you repair your relationship with your child, so they don't take on your triggered reaction as their own trauma and develop your self-compassion skills. So you don't beat yourself up every time you don't do things perfectly, which you won't because none of us do. In the workshop, you'll receive content released weekly over the course of 10 weeks, and you'll get support from me and the other parents on this journey in a private community that isn't on Facebook. Parents who have really engaged with this work find it seriously life changing, knowing that you can respond to your child from a place that allows you to feel your feelings, while not being yanked around them. And going from zero to apoplectic or shut down in a second, gives parents a great deal of confidence that they've really got this parenting thing, which brings an incredible sense of calm. If you'd like to learn more about the Taming Your Triggers Workshop, please go to YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers. Doors close on February 28, 2021. So we can get started as a group on March 1 and sliding scale pricing is available. Once again. That's YourParentingMojo.com/TamingYourTriggers.   Jen  06:16 Okay, so without further ado, let's talk with Iris Chen about her own journey from overcontrolling Tiger Parent to being a parent who can respond to her children's needs from a place of calmness and connection. Welcome, Iris.   Iris Chen  06:27 Thank you so much for having me again.   Jen  06:29 And so I wonder maybe we can start by hearing a little bit about what you were like as a parent in your children's early years. Where did that approach come from?   Iris Chen  06:39 Sure. So yeah, I call myself a Deconstructing Tiger Parent, because I definitely started out as a pretty typical, you know, controlling Tiger Parent: was very strict, had a lot of rules, expected obedience. And yeah, I write about the story at the beginning of my book, were one of my children, as a toddler, I was like obsessed with getting enough sleep, you know, as young parents were so sleep deprived. And so regardless of whether or not he was tired, I was going to make him have a nap. And so I would, you know, place him in bed, I would flip him towards the wall. If he began turning his body at all, I would flip him back, if he like, got out of bed or did anything, you know, I threatened, I spanked, I yelled, I did all those things. And so that was just like one little snapshot of sort of the type of parenting that I practiced early on, where it was very controlling, very coercive, and created a really toxic and contentious relationship with my child. So it's something that I look back on with a lot of sadness and yeah, but I'm just glad that I'm not there anymore and I'm really excited about helping other parents move away from that type of parenting.   Jen  07:56 Yeah, and we're going to dig very deeply into the moving away part. I'd love to spend just a little bit more time in the "in" part, if you wouldn't mind. I'm wondering...   Iris Chen  08:05 Sure.   Jen  08:06 ...how did your children respond to you when you were trying to exert too much control over them?   Iris Chen 08:13 Yeah, they did not, especially my older child did not respond well at all. Like, he resisted my attempts. And I just thought that my responsibility was then to push harder. And to Yeah, like it was a battle of the wills and I was going to win, you know, that's what I believed was my responsibility. And so I came down harder. I had harsher punishments, all of that. And it just kept on escalating and escalating to a point where I was at a loss, like, I did not know what else I should do, you know, so I really began to question but yeah, they did not respond very well. My second child was much more complain but my oldest child was like, very sensitive and overwhelmed easily and I read that, I interpreted that as rebellion and disobedience. And so yeah, I came down harder on him.   Jen  09:12 Yeah, I was also curious as I was reading as well about whether you saw yourself in either of your children's responses, like did you look back and think, "Oh, yeah, I was like that as a child, or I totally wasn't like that. And why is my child like that?"   Iris Chen 09:26 I think I like on the surface for me, I was a very compliant child where I learned to be, I learned to follow the rules. I learned to obey and do whatever was expected of me. But inside I was like, always simmering with resentment. And so what I saw in my children was sort of like them, feeling free to express their resentment in ways that I was never free to, like I never talked back to my dad. I never, you know, expressed, you know, like, slammed the door. Well, I can't say never slammed the door, but just a lot of ways that they were expressing their resistance to my control in ways that I was never free to. So when they began to do that, I'm pretty sure it took me aback because I was never allowed to do that. But as I began to dig deeper, I realized that those were also the feelings that I felt as a child, like nobody likes to be, you know, shamed, or you know, threatened or punished in those ways. So, yeah, I think as I dug deeper, I saw that they were really expressing things that I also experienced as a child.   Jen  10:35 Mm hmm. Yeah. And when we look back on this, I think it becomes more obvious that we can see that we created these walls between what the authentic are us and the way we want to authentically show up in the world, and what we know to be socially acceptable. And we think to ourselves, well, this is how I really feel but my parent, whoever it is, cannot live with that cannot accept that. And so I'm going to present this compliant view of myself to the world, but the other part of us didn't go away. Right?   Iris Chen 11:05 Right, exactly. So I think there are ways that like, in some ways, maybe my parents felt that they had raised a good daughter, you know, but there was a wall that was created because of that, because I couldn't show them parts of myself, I couldn't really be who I really was in front of them, because that was not accepted.   Jen  11:24 Yeah. Yeah. And you raised in the book as well about how some of this has roots in your parents' traumas and the traumas that they've experienced. And I think that for so many of us, I mean, it's pretty uncommon, I think, for parents who have not experienced trauma of some kind. And our parents experienced their own traumas as well. And how did you see that play out in your family? How did that dynamic show up?   Iris Chen 11:46 Well, I think as a child, we don't really unpack that, because we don't know what our parents’ traumas are. Right? So all we're reacting to is how they're treating us. And so yeah, but as I got older, as I became a parent...