Do you ever have that voice in your head that tells you things like: "You shouldn't have laid in bed for so long; you should have got up earlier to get ready for the day"? Or how about: "You shouldn't let your kids watch TV; good mothers don't let their kids watch TV"? Or: "If I was any good at this parenting thing, my kids wouldn't fight with each other"? If you do, have you noticed that sometimes that voice comes out when you talk to your children, in that exasperated, shaming voice: "Why would you do that?" If you have, you're not alone. My guest for this episode is parent Katie, who is a therapist with a Master's in Counseling. She's specifically trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is a method of changing people's behavior - essentially by teaching them to ignore their body's signals of fear and anxiety. Despite knowing everything there is to know about how to change a person's behavior, Katie still struggled as she transitioned from two to three children, and was suddenly dealing with massive sleep deprivation, the oldest child biting the middle child, and a whole lot of yelling (both from the children and from her). She got to the point where she realized: "I can't keep doing this. We can't keep functioning in this way. And I wish I didn't react so strongly but I don't know what else to do." Katie shares some massive transitions she's made over the last year, including: Realizing her body's surprising signal that she's feeling overwhelmed in a situation Her transition from constantly snapping at her children to being patient and THEN snapping to being able to change course even in the middle of a difficult interaction Ways that she gets frustration out before it erupts over her children (which models healthy coping habits for them, too!) A non-cognitive shift (based in her body, not just in her brain)around seeing the systems we live in as an important reason why things are so hard for parents, which means it isn't her fault things are hard How seeing her needs in a new way helped her to heal her inner critic - which is still there, but has much less power over her now than it used to Our inner critics don't appear out of nowhere; they're formed out of the voices of our parents and other people who are important to us. Katie told me after we turned off the recording that her parents - who were good, loving parents - wanted to make Katie's life as easy as possible - which often meant presenting a sanitized view of her hair, her clothing, and her sexuality to the outside world. If you do what's expected, other people won't make your life harder - but those 'criticisms' have now become her own internalized voice, making it harder for her to show up as her real, authentic self. Her oldest son has food allergies but Katie feels guilty asking for accommodations for him that other people might think are 'too much.'  Standing up for her son's needs has taught her how to stand up for her own needs - now she knows she wants to be part of creating a society that sees and meets everyone's needs, rather than forcing the outliers to fit into a traditional mold. This episode is a must-listen for parents who are having a hard time and who think it's their fault. It isn't your fault.   Taming Your Triggers  If you need help with your own big feelings about your child's behavior, Taming Your Triggers will reopen soon. We'll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children's needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It's a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you're less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children. Sign up for the waitlist now. Click the banner to learn more.       Other episodes mentioned in this episode Healing and Helping with Mutual Aid   Jump to highlights (04:35) What parenting was like for parent Katie in her early days. (16:25) The reason why she enrolled for Taming Your Triggers a second time. (21:10) The window of tolerance. (27:39) How the nonviolent communication impacted her inner critic. (45:43) taming Your Triggers and changing behavior. (52:41) Navigating vulnerability and community.  

  In this episode I take a look at the main reasons why we have these hard days - from our child's temperament to our temperament to attachment relationships, trauma, and neurodivergences - all of these intersect especially tightly on the hard days.     Then we look at three ways to get through these days with a little more grace - and maybe even without having to apologize to your child at the end of it.   Taming Your Triggers  We're getting everything ready to welcome a new cohort of parents into the Taming Your Triggers workshop. Enrollment will reopen soon!   In addition to the core content, we'll have the option for you to match with one or two AccountaBuddies to hold you (gently!) accountable to finish the workshop, a roadmap and flow chart so you can see how the pieces all fit together, and some super short audio recordings to help you 'come back to center' throughout the day.   The entire experience is designed to help you not just learn new ideas, but to really take them on and use them in your everyday life.   Sign up for the waitlist now. Click the banner to learn more.   Jump to highlights (02:44) It can be difficult when we have a temperament mismatch (03:25) But having the same temperament can also be difficult (04:36) Children will often take on a role in the family (05:29) Our attachment style impacts how we perceive other people’s behavior (10:40) Making a non-cognitive shift so you see difficult days differently (21:05) We don’t always have to fix everything in the moment (25:59) The challenges to meeting your needs more often (29:43) The part we often forget is that your child has needs as well   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jessica 00:03 Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on yourparentingmojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Overtime, you're going to get sick of hearing me read this intro as well, so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to yourparentingmojo.com and click read the intro. I can't wait to hear yours.   Jen Lumanlan 01:26 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today I want to talk about the hard days that we have as parents.  The days when we’re trying our absolute best to do this parenting thing right, but still it seems like it isn’t enough.  What do we do on those days?  How can we get through them with some grace?  How can we know they aren’t hurting our children, or our relationship with our children?  In this episode I want to think through some of these things with you.  We’re going to take a closer look at what causes some of these hard days, and then I’m going to offer three main ideas to help you navigate those hard days to make them a little easier for you.   Jen Lumanlan 02:01 So I know that our children’s challenges can be really big.  Even when they’re having a good day they can be bouncy and exuberant and joyful and loud, and when we’re having a good day that can be a lot to deal with.  Maybe our own parents looked at the qualities we had and found difficult to deal with and told us that those would be great qualities when we’re adults and they become marketable – things like our ‘answering back,’ which would one day make us a great lawyer – simultaneously legitimizing what they saw as an annoying habit of ours and anticipating a day when they would be recognized as ‘good parents’ for raising a ‘successful’ child.  Even if we aren’t doing that, and we can see how our child’s qualities are good qualities today, that doesn’t mean that they’re always easy to live with.    Jen Lumanlan 02:44 I think this can be especially difficult when we have a temperament mismatch – which can mean we have the opposite temperament as our child, or sometimes it can even mean we have a similar temperament.  So if we don’t like to be active a lot of the time, and we like to do the same things at pretty much the same time every day, and we’re pretty persistent and stick with things that are difficult, and our child wants to be running around from the very moment they wake up to the very moment they fall asleep, and taking our child out to endless activities to keep them occupied means we can’t follow the routines we prefer, and our child flits from one thing to the next and never sticks with anything for more than three minutes at a stretch, it’s not hard to see how contrasting temperaments can make things difficult.   Jen Lumanlan 03:25 But having the same temperament can also make things difficult!  If you’re both highly persistent, you might each get an idea into your heads about how things should be, and not be flexible on accommodating the other’s ideas.  If you both react to things with a high degree of intensity, then even simple issues can throw a real wrench in the works.  If your child has a big reaction because their purple shirt is in the wash, and you have an intense reaction because you can’t believe they’re making a big deal out of the purple shirt being in the wash, then it’s a lot harder to recover than it would be if each of you didn’t react so intensely.    Jen Lumanlan 04:00 If you’re both highly distractible, you might find it difficult to plan, and your child’s distractibility is likely to pull you even more off course. Some people have a generally more positive mood than others; you may see this most clearly if you have more than one child and one of them is usually in a more positive mood than the other.  You might perceive the happy, bubbly child as ‘easier to love,’ while the child who appears more sad and gloomy seems more ‘difficult to love.’  Whether you label this explicitly by saying it in your mind (or even to them) or just subconsciously and implicitly, this can end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Children will often take on a role in the family – the funny one, the smart one, the happy one – or the sad one, the difficult one, the annoying one.  We communicate these ideas to our children, whether we intend to or not, and we get into a cyclical process where they’re feeling a little bit sad, or doing something we find a little bit difficult or annoying, and we see them as sad or difficult or annoying, which reinforces their own view and they become more sad or difficult or annoying.  And if we also have this slightly sad or gloomy outlook then we’re more likely to put this interpretation on our child’s neutral behavior, and to respond to even their neutral behavior as if it was negative, which continues the cycle.  This kind of dynamic sets us up for difficult days even when nothing else is going ‘wrong,’ and makes it harder for us to be with our child in ways that are neutral, never mind ways that are fun and enjoyable and warm and loving.   Jen Lumanlan 05:29 Then of course there’s the layer of our attachment style, which is how we learned to receive affection from our own parent or caregiver, which impacts how we perceive other people’s behavior today.  So if we developed a strong attachment relationship with our primary parent or caregiver then we may be able to do the same with our children, and be in a relationship that is generally warm and loving.  But if we developed an anxious attachment relationship with our parent then even in our relationships today we’re constantly looking to the other person for reassurance that they really do love us, and if our own child has an avoidant attachment relationship with us, where they’ve learned that we won’t consistently be there for them, then they may find that constant checking in to be highly irritating.  On the flip side of that, if our child has an anxious attachment relationship with us then they will be the one constantly doing the checking, and if we have an avoidant attachment style then we may find that to be highly irritating, and wonder why on earth they need so much attention, and why they can’t do more for themselves.  Two anxiously attached people together are constantly checking in with each other to see if they are OK with each other, and two people with an avoidant style are basically staying at arm’s length from each other, each giving the other one the bare minimum of care and attention in the interest of self-preservation.   Jen Lumanlan 06:41 On top the layer of temperament there’s the layer of the trauma we’ve experienced when we were children and may even still be experiencing today.  Even if our parents were good parents, they probably didn’t model healthy ways to be in conflict.  They may have dismissed our ideas and told us we were fine when we clearly weren’t.  They may have rewarded us for being happy – especially if we’re female-identifying – and withdrawn love and approval if we expressed sadness or disappointment or anger.  Maybe the conflict we witnessed between them was scary so we avoided it, and now we don’t know how to understand our feelings, and think we can’t express certain feelings, and if a situation becomes too volatile we have to get out of it as fast as we possibly can.  Maybe we learned a placating, fawning response and we ran around making cups of tea for everyone, or kept our anxious feelings bottled up deep inside and gained so much praise for being what everyone saw as “just the best-behaved little girl.”  Or if you’re male-identifying then maybe you lashed out at others and the adults told you to stop doing it, but they still sort of expected you to do it because you were a boy, and nobody ever tried to understand all the hurt in you that blew out in hitting other people when it seemed like there was nowhere else for it to go.   Jen Lumanlan 07:54 And then of course, another layer in all of this is the diagnosed or diagnosable things we have going on – so if we have ADHD then maybe it’s really hard for us to plan anything or to stick to plans once we’ve made them. If our child has ADHD as well then that pulls us off track even more.  There are all the challenges like depression, anxiety, alcoholism, over-eating, under-eating, excessive work, excessive social media use, and even ADHD which I’m becoming increasingly convinced are not very different at all.  They’re all different presentations of the same underlying cause, which is chronically unmet needs.  All of these diagnoses are society’s way of saying ‘we have expectations for you, and as long as you aren’t meeting them, we’re going to say that you are the one who is ill.  Your job is to start meeting our expectations, and then we’ll consider you functional again.’  There’s no potential for the system that we live in to change, so we use these coping strategies to get us through – to numb us, to distract us from being present with what’s actually here in this moment.  When we’re depressed or anxious or using substances or eating or not eating or working or scrolling through social media then we’re distracted.  We aren’t present with what’s here in this moment.  We get used to being numbed, and when something like our child’s ‘misbehavior’ drags us back into the present moment, it’s hard to cope with!  It hurts!  And it drags up all the old hurt that we haven’t dealt with yet.  It’s no wonder we’d prefer to get back into our numbed and distracted state as soon as possible.   Jen Lumanlan 09:24 So all of that stuff is there all the time, shaping the ways we’re able to be in relationship with our children on a daily basis, and then something happens and we’re having a bad parenting day.  Maybe our child does something age-appropriate and because we have this temperamental mismatch, and attachment stuff, and diagnoses or diagnosables, it doesn’t take much to push us over the edge.    Jen Lumanlan 09:48 So the big question for this episode is: what do we do when that happens?  What do we do when one thing pushes us over the edge, and we shout at our kids, or we’re rough with them, or we shut them out because their big feelings are too much for us to cope with?  How do we get out of that?  Maybe we’ve become experts at apologizing; the “I’m sorry I did that; I’m having a hard time and I’m trying not to yell at you,” but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough.  Maybe it feels like we should be better; that we’re supposed to be better, and instead we can’t get the needle out of the grooves of the old record of exploding and apologizing, exploding and apologizing.  Maybe these are interspersed with moments of tenderness and affection but the difficult times are happening far more often than you want.  So does it have to be like this?  What would it take for things to not be like this?  How can you recover when you have a difficult interaction at the beginning of the day so it doesn’t derail your entire day?   Jen Lumanlan 10:40 Let’s look at the first of the three ideas to help you navigate difficult days, which is making a non-cognitive shift so you see the difficult days differently.  I had a conversation recently with Margaret and Amy on the What Fresh Hell podcast – I have to say I really appreciate their show.  They have great conversations with guests who are doing great work in respectful parenting, and it’s so obvious that Margaret and Amy do their research before doing these interviews, which of course I always appreciate. They did an episode on pattern breaking a few months ago that I listened to in preparation for the conversation and Margaret said that she doesn’t think it’s possible to break the patterns of our reactions to difficult situations.  She says we can change our responses after we’ve entered into the pattern, and we can remind ourselves to use different tools and change the outcome of the interaction, but the actual pattern of getting triggered in the first place is set.  And I had to respectfully disagree with that because I have seen parents change their patterns.  For some parents, simple awareness about why they feel triggered can create a shift.  Some parents can learn for the first time: “Oh, I thought I was having these big reactions because my child was doing something so inappropriate, but now I see that it isn’t really about my child at all, and I can trace this directly back to something that happened to me when I was young, and now it all makes sense.”  And for those parents, that’s enough to make a shift – suddenly they don’t feel as overwhelmed by their child’s behavior anymore, and the knowledge of what was causing it was enough to make that happen.   Jen Lumanlan 12:12 For most parents that isn’t enough, and I think that’s where this idea of “you can’t break a pattern” comes from.  Maybe a lot of us have seen a lot of memes on Facebook and Instagram about how we can see our challenges differently and we think ‘yes!  That’s true for me!  And that’s how I want to parent!’ and we think: “OK; now I see why this is true, I’m going to do things differently.”  But aside from that different cognitive understanding in our heads, nothing else has really changed – so the next time the difficult situation comes up, we still react in the same way we’ve always reacted. But I don’t think that means that we can’t break patterns; I just think it means we haven’t broken our pattern yet.  And I know it is possible to break these patterns, because I’ve...

A.J. Bond, a writer and filmmaker, discusses the origins of shame, healing from toxic shame, and not passing it on to our own children. They explore the role of therapy in confronting shame, the importance of attunement and connection in preventing shame in children, and the four broad categories of reactions in the compass of shame. They also discuss the accessibility of therapy, the significance of peer groups and group sharing for healing, and strategies to support healthy growth and avoid shame.

This episode kicks off a series of new episodes that I'm very excited about, which is based on listeners' questions. My goal is to produce shorter episodes that cut across the research base to help you answer the questions that are on your mind about your child's behavior and development.   Our first question comes from Dee in New Zealand, who wants to know: should she should do what her preschooler is asking and buy a pair of inflatable boxing gloves so he can hit her when he's feeling angry. Or would hitting a pillow be a better option?   If you'd like to submit your own question, you can record a video of yourself asking it in two minutes or less, upload it to a platform like Drive or Dropbox, and send a link to it at support@yourparentingmojo.com. Alternatively you can go to the homepage and click the button to record your question for an audio-only option.   Other episodes referenced in this episode: Episode 159, Supporting girls' relationships with Dr. Marnina Gonick     Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open soon. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children. Sign up for the waitlist now. Click the banner to learn more     Jump to highlights (02:18) Parent Dee’s question about her child (04:02) The six things going on in the question (06:19) The Catharsis Theory (07:18) Pointing out the difference in terminology about anger and aggression (09:38) Most of the research has studied cognitive behavioral therapy as a treatment for anger and aggression (11:22) The difference between adults and children in navigating situations (13:10) Anger in girls and boys (14:42) Addressing the difficult behavior instead of the reason for the behavior (16:00) The importance of self-regulation in managing feelings of anger (17:06) Most of us didn’t have great role models for how to cope with anger (22:23) Things to do to help a child regulate their feelings   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Lumanlan 00:10 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. And today I'm launching the first in a series of new episodes called Q&A. And my goal here is to take short questions from listeners and turn them into concise episodes that you can listen to for quick answers. When you have a specific question and you just want to know the answer to that question. I realize that it takes me a couple of weeks to research an average episode, and it takes you all a fairly long time to listen to it as well. And I know that while some folks really want to go in deep on learning about a specific topic, very often you just want to know what is the answer to this specific issue that I'm facing. So these episodes are really an attempt to give you that what you need in a very short, concise way. So this episode will be a little bit longer, partly because of this introduction and partly because this is actually a more in-depth question that we're going to get to today, which is on hitting and anger catharsis, so. So that's coming up in a second. Before we get to that, I just want to let you know if you have a question that you would like me to answer on one of these episodes, you can preferably record yourself on a video and send it and put it in a Google Drive folder or something like that and send it to support@yourparentingmojo.com. If you would like to record an audio only question, you can do that on yourparentingmojo.com. There's a button there that you can press and that will take you to a page where you can record the audio for your question in just a couple of minutes. So look for that if you would like to do that there. So these episodes are definitely going to be shorter, they're going to be more informal, they're not going to be as tightly scripted. I may make mistakes. So I'm trying to be OK with that and to really just get you what you need in a short period of time. OK, so the first question is actually from a parent who is in my parenting membership and she asked this question on a group coaching call recently, but I was not comfortable answering it on that call because I hadn't looked at the research at it yet. I had been on the deck for a while and I had been in the back of my mind, but I hadn't actually looked at the research. So I said could you please record that as a question and send it to me and I'll make that in the first Q&A episode. So here she is asking her question.   Dee 02:18 My question is, my three-year-old wants to hit people when dysregulated. Usually, this means angry, frustrated, excited. The hitting when excited, frustrated, seems really impulsive and is often directed at other children or sometimes us father, or me. That hitting when angry is mostly directed at me or my partner, and there's a desire to hurt us, I think; that's what our sees. We have problem solved this a few times now, and almost always asks for giant inflatable boxing gloves. I've also tried some other options like paper ripping, screaming into a pillow, but these are generally not accepted in the moment. Though I am optimistic, this will improve with age. I have been hesitant to get the boxing gloves because I don't understand the link between anger and physical aggression, and so I'm not sure if I should encourage the hitting when dysregulated even if it seems harmless and playful. My question, probably more specifically, is what's the source of the desire to hit? And my concern is that I inadvertently reinforced the link between dysregulation and aggression, and specifically anger and hitting. Okay, thank you.     Jen Lumanlan 03:50 OK, so this seems like a fairly simple question, right? Should I or should I not allow my child to hit me in a way that doesn't hurt me? Or should I let them hit a pillow as an alternative? And actually this is a really complex issue, so I've identified 6 things that are going on in this question. So firstly, we don't fully understand the link between anger and aggression, so we don't know what causes anger necessarily. We don't always know what leads from anger to aggression. We don't know why anger doesn't always lead to aggression. There's a lot of complexity that we don't fully understand. Secondly, different anger management techniques work for different people. Some people find hitting a pillow to be very useful to them. Others it doesn't help them at all. So we can't necessarily apply one solution and have that work for everybody. Thirdly, most of the research on anger and the process of navigating anger and managing that anger is done in adults, and then it's applied as if it were immediately relevant to children, when adults have a massively more developed brain and way more different kinds of tools available to them to manage their anger. So I don't think it's really necessarily right to look at research that's done on adults as if it automatically applies to children with no modification. Fourthly, anger in the expression of anger is discouraged among girls particularly so it goes underground, and boys are taught that anger is the only acceptable emotion, that is, that is OK to express. Fifthly, it's this assumes that anger is the thing to be addressed rather than the reason why the child is feeling angry. And I see this in parents’ questions that come up in the membership, in communities that I'm in where parents want to know what do I do about the anger my child is experiencing? And what do I do about the thing that the way that they're expressing that anger rather than looking at the underlying cause, what is the reason the child's angry? And then finally, most of us didn't have a reason to uh, sorry, most of us didn't have role models for how to cope with anger because the people who raised us, our parents, our caregivers saw our anger as a threat to their control over us. They wanted us to be under their thumb whether they had that was at their official goal or not. And that our anger was a threat to that control. So we, most of us didn't have a good role models for how we should actually navigate aggression in the course of normal relationships with other people.   Jen Lumanlan 06:19 And So what we're getting at here, I've mentioned this word a couple times now—Catharsis Theory. And so this is a theory that has been developed over the years. And Dr. Riccarda Karsten in the University of Innsbruck, Austria, defines it as “The concept of catharsis traces back to the ancient Greek idea and was later suggested by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer as a treatment for hysteria, which is a very loaded word often applied to females. Note the link to hysterectomy. Um, it's sort of this, this female madness, as it were. So by experiencing and expressing repressed emotions, symptoms of psychological diseases were believed to be alleviated. A more recent definition of catharsis has been given by Geen and Quanty in 1977, who define aggression catharsis as a “hypothesized process which follows aggression and that is postulated, meaning we think it leads to a reduction in aggressiveness.” So there is aggression and there's this cathartic process in this model and then there's a reduction in aggression.   Jen Lumanlan 07:18 And so I just want to point out a bit of a difference in terminology in the way that I think about anger and aggression. So Karsten is using aggression to mean a feeling, and I see it a bit differently. I see anger as the feeling, and aggression is the thing that happens if catharsis fails, right? Like if we don't get it out in some way, then aggression towards another person follows. And that seems to fit better with how a lot of other emotion researchers think about this. Dr. Feldman says that “Anger, an emotion evoked when one’s goals are blocked or one experience is insult to the self or significant other is an intense adaptive approach in motion that requires the mastery of efficient regulatory strategies for proper functioning.” And so it's just sort of assumed that reducing anger is going to result in a reduction of aggression, so. The sort of that that correlation that's expected between those two things. So the link between anger and aggression could probably fill an entire full length episode, and maybe it will one day. A study of five-year-old children found that children who were more angry were also more aggressive, but there was not a simple anger causes aggression 1 to 1 correlation among children. The relationships between the anger and aggression were more complex than that. So I want to to look at each of the issues that I raised early in the episode and dig into them a little bit more deeply and work towards an understanding of what do we want to do about this parent’s question about should I let my child hit me, should I let my child hit a pillow.   Jen Lumanlan 08:49 So on the idea that we don't fully understand the links between anger and aggression that what that means is I can't give you a for sure answer that's true for everybody because for one thing we don't understand this very well for anybody. And secondly the vast majority of this research is done in a lab and it may not have any real-world application whatsoever. You know, these are people that the researchers are doing experiments like making somebody angry and then giving them a test on something else and seeing how well they perform on the test. And that has no relation whatsoever to how I feel in my real life when my best friend does something that I don't like. So it's possible the results that researchers are finding in the lab have no real world relevance. Going back to the second idea that that different anger management techniques work for different people, most of the research has studied cognitive behavioral therapy as a treatment for anger and aggression, actually. And that is based on the idea that if we if we change the behavior, right, if we, the clinician can get the patient to change their behavior, then the problem is gone. There is no more anger. There is no more there, there's just nothing to worry about here. And the research indicates that this may be moderately effective at changing behavior, right? We may be able to train people, adults particularly, maybe also children, to change the way they express their anger, but the cause of the behavior is still there, we're not actually necessarily making the anger go away. We may be making the aggression go away. We're not making the anger go away. We're just training the person that it's not OK to express it. So for me that's sort of a non-starter, especially when we're working with children who may not have consented to engaging in some kind of therapy to change the way that they are expressing their feelings. And, and so we're sort of moving into the idea that that it's not OK to express anger. So I'll come back to that in a second. Our third point was that most of the research is done on adults and used as if it was immediately relevant to children when adults have way more developed brains, wider set of tools. So I mean this, this is sort of intuitive, right. Adults have a much better capacity to wait. We can defer a potential reward for a much longer period of time. Unless of course we're struggling with something like ADHD, which can make the ability to wait much more difficult. But even with ADHD, an adult is probably going to have a bit more of a capacity to wait than a child does. Adults can imagine a wider array of strategies that might help them to navigate the situation, and also a wider array of tools that they can use, like making a list to help you remember the strategies, whereas children are trying to they can’t write yet, they can't read yet necessarily. They they're using a smaller array of strategies and they don't have a way of remembering them in, especially in the difficult moments when they're feeling dysregulated. So adults may have a goal to express less aggression. Very often children don't have that goal, right? And this is it. This is something that adults may see how it affects the people around them. Children may not be making that correlation yet. They may not be seeing the effect that their behavior has on somebody else necessarily so. So an adult may have a goal of reducing their aggressive behavior, whereas a child may not have set that goal, which is going to impact their ability to put these strategies to use. So we can't just say that most of, as most of the popular articles on this topic do, you know, if you Google, should I let my child hit a pillow or, you know, anger in children, something like that. Most of the popular articles that pop up are going to say they're gonna cite one study of college students who are given deliberately bad evaluations no matter what their work was like. The evaluation says your work is terrible, and then they're told to hit a punching bag while they think about the person who gave them the evaluation, and that those people report feeling more anger. Then a person who sat quietly for two minutes instead, and so most people say, well, because those students in that situation felt more angry when they hit the punching bag, then we should tell children that it's not OK to punch things. But as we have seen, that doesn't necessarily translate. Just because that finding happened in the college students doesn't mean it's applicable to a real-world situation with children. OK, the 4th point, anger is usually discouraged among girls, so it goes underground. And boys are taught that anger is the only acceptable emotion to express. So in our culture it's not OK for girls to express anger, never mind aggression, right? So we tend to praise and reward the good and the nice and the cooperative behavior in girls, and we don't give in to expressions of anger when those when those are expressed and we withdraw love and affection. And we train our girls it is not OK to express those feelings. So that doesn't mean that girls stop feeling anger. It just means that they learn to cover it up and then they get into doing things like excluding each other and talking behind each other's backs as a way of managing those angry feelings that are still there. They didn't go anywhere, they're just managing them differently. And so if you would like to learn more about that, my interview with Doctor Marina Gonick will go into much more depth on that. I'll put a link in the show notes for this episode. We don't reward emotional expression among boys. The only way that they can get big feelings across to us is through anger. And if we think, oh, well, I'm not raising a boy, this isn't an issue for me, then girls police this as well, right? Girls tell boys not to cry. Mothers, parents, you know, female relatives tell boys not to cry. Ostracize boys if they express sensitive feelings.   Jen Lumanlan 14:31 So moving into the 5th, the 5th idea

In this episode, the host shares their personal experiences and insights regarding their recent autism self-diagnosis. They discuss the results of their autism screeners and conversations with friends about difficult aspects of friendships. The host also shares listener feedback, both positive and negative, regarding their podcast episodes, and highlights the journey of a listener with an ADHD diagnosis. The goal of the episode is to help listeners gain self-understanding, meet their needs, and foster more authentic relationships. Various chapters explore personal sharing, stepfamily dynamics, social struggles, and the value of clarity and communication in relationships.

Most of the resources related to parenting and neurodiversity are geared toward helping neurodivergent children, not neurodivergent parents, so this episode aims to help close that gap.Whether you (or your partner, if you have one) have a diagnosis or you see yourself (or them) struggling but can't quite figure out why, this episode may help. Autism and ADHD are diagnosed at wildly differing rates in girls and boys (in large part because boys' symptoms often turn outward while girls' symptoms turn inward), which means that girls are very often undiagnosed and unsupported well into adulthood.Dr. A. may help you to identify neurodivergence in yourself or your partner, and then connect you to resources to support you on your journey.Find more about Dr. A's practice at SpectrumServicesNYC.comI also very much appreciated Dr. A's memoir The Rose Hotel (affiliate link) about her experiences in Iran during the revolution, and later in the U.K. and the U.S. Jump to highlights(00:03) Introduction to this episode.(03:07) What kind of patterns do you see in couples where one partner is known to be neurodivergent?(07:28) It’s often the female-identifying partner who is the one who identifies the issue.(11:46) What are some of the red flags for neurodivergent partners?(16:05) Men tend to flood four times as fast as their female partners when they are in an argument.(21:43) How do I support my partner in being a successful parent and also find more balance in terms of what they bring to the family?(25:38) What do we do with this knowledge that we have?(30:31) Dealing with conflict between the couple.(32:46) What do you think of the idea of trauma as a factor in ADHD?(36:12) Diagnosis of ADHD is multi-directional –.(41:56) Mental health is still stigmatized and getting a diagnosis could backfire on you.(42:31) What is a diagnosis and how does it help?(47:44) The different types of ADHD.(53:03) Social calendaring and extracurricular activities.(54:46) Time blocking is a better approach for ADHD.(01:01:45) Strengths of people with ADHD.ReferencesBlair, R.J.R. (2005). Responding to the emotions of others: Dissociating forms of empathy through the study of typical and psychiatric populations. Consciousness and Cognition 14(4), 698-718.Bostock-Ling, J.S. (2017, December). Life satisfaction of neurotypical women in intimate relationships with a partner who has Asperger’s Syndrome: An exploratory study. Unpublished Master’s thesis: The University of Sydney.Chronis-Tuscano, A., & Stein, M.A. (2012). Pharmapsychotherapy for parents with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Impact on maternal ADHD and parenting. CNS Drugs 26(9), 725-732.Chronis-Tuscano, A., O’Brien, K.A., Johnston, C., Jones, H.A., Clarke, T.L., Raggi, V.L., Rooney, M.E., Diaz, Y., Pian, J., & Seymour, K.E. (2011). The relation between maternal ADHD symptoms & improvement in child behavior following brief behavioral parent training is mediated by change in negative parenting. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 39, 1047-1057.Conway, F., Oster, M., & Szymanski, K. (2011). ADHD and complex trauma: A descriptive study of hospitalized children in an urban psychiatric hospital. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy 10, 60-72.Dziobek, I., Rogers, K., Fleck, S., Bahnemann, M., Heekeren, H.R., Wolf, O.T., & Convit, A. (2007). Dissociation of cognitive and emotional empathy in adults with Asperger Syndrome using the mUltifaceted Empathy Test (MET). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 38, 464-473.Ford, J.D., Thomas, J., Racusin, R., Daviss, W.B., Ellis, C.G., Rogers, K., Reiser, J., Schiffman, J., & Sengupta, A. (1999). Trauma exposure among children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Attention Deicit-Hyperactivity Disorder. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 67(5), 786-789.Hull, L., Petrides, K.V., & Mandy, W. (2020). The female autism phenotype and camouflaging: A narrative review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 7, 306-317.Lilley, R., Lawson, W., Hall, G., Mahony, J., Clapham, H., Heyworth, M., Arnold, S., Trollor, J., Yudell, M., & Pellicano, E. (2022). “Peas in a pod”: Oral history reflections on autistic identity in family and community by late-diagnosed adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 1-16.Mazursky-Horowitz, H., Thomas, S.R., Woods, K.E., Chrabaszcz, J.D., Deater-Deckard, K., & Chronis-Tuscano, A. (2018). Maternal executive functioning and scaffolding families of children with and without parent-reported ADHD. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 46(3), 463-475.Mazursky-Horowitz, H., Felton, J.W., MacPherson, L., Ehrlich, K.B., Cassidy, J., Lejuez, C.W., & Chronis-Tuscano, A. (2014). Maternal emotion regulation mediates the association between adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder symptoms and parenting. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 43(1), 121-131.McGough, J.J., Smalley, S.L., McCracken, J.T., Yang, M., Del’Homme, M., Lynn, D.E., & Loo, S. (2005). Psychiatric comorbidity in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Findings from multiplex families. American Journal of Psychiatry 162, 1621-1627.Moser, D.A., Aue, T., Suardi, F., Manini, A., Rossignol, A.S., Cordero, M.I., Merminod, G., Ansermet, F., Serpa, S.R., Fabez, N., & Schechter, D.S. (2015). The relation of general socio-emotional processing to parenting specific behavior: A study of mothers with and without posttraumatic stress disorder. Frontiers in Psychology 6:1575.National Library of Medicine (n.d.). 14. Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK332896/Park, J.L., Hudec, K.L., Johnston, C. (2017). Parental ADHD symptoms and parenting behaviors: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review 56, 25-39.Pearlstein, T., & Steiner, M. (2012). Premenstral Dysphoric Disrorder: Burden of illness and treatment update. The Journal of Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry X(1), 90-101.Psychogiou, L., Daley, D., Thompson, M.J., & Sonuga-Barke, E.J.S. (2008). Do maternal attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms exacerbate or ameliorate the negative effect of child attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms on parenting? Development and Psychopathology 20, 121-137.Reinhold, J.A. (2015). Adult ADHD: A review of the clinical presentation, challenges, and treatment options. Psychiatric Times 32(10), 41.World Health Organization (2022, March 30). Autism. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/autism-spectrum-disorders#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20worldwide,figures%20that%20are%20substantially%20higher

Have you ever seen recommendations for the books called Your One Year Old, Your Two Year Old, and so on, by Louise Bates Ames?  Every few weeks I see parents posting in online communities asking about some aspect of their child’s behavior that is confusing or annoying to them, and somebody responds: “You should read the Louise Bates Ames books!”This usually comes with the caveat that the reader will have to disregard all the 'outdated gender stuff,' but that the information on child development is still highly relevant.In this episode I dig deep into the research on which these books are based. While the books were mostly published in the 1980s, they're based on research done in the 1930s to 1950s.I argue that far from just 'stripping out the outdated gender stuff,' we need to look much deeper at the cultural context that the information in these books fits within - because it turns out that not only were the researchers not measuring 'normal,' 'average' child development, but that they were training children to respond to situations in a certain way, based on ideas about a person's role in society that may not fit with our views at all. And if this is the case, why should we use these books as a guide to our children's development?Other episodesRIEScience of RIEToilet learningParenting Beyond Pink and BlueNVC Jump to highlights(02:41) An open invitation to check out the new book that will be released in August 2023.(04:59) Why these child psych books from the 1980s are all over parenting Facebook groups today(06:01) The Gesell philosophy of human behavior(08:48) Who is Louise Bates(10:32) Who is Arnold Gesell(11:28) How the children were selected to participate in the experiment(14:28) How our view of childhood had undergone a massive shift in the previous 100 years(16:09) What’s it like to have a child involved in the study(19:35) Some of the significant milestones provided by researchers(20:50) Dr. Gesell is looking to study the natural development of children’s physical capabilities(22:07) What normal seems to mean in the study(23:11) Gesell fails to observe what the baby’s hands are actually doing(24:18) The purpose of the ‘performance box’(27:44) I add my own judgment of the research(28:32) Gesell wrote that what he called ‘systematic cinematography’(29:22) Another way that the situation was anything but natural was that the study took place within a dome(30:59) Dr. Gesell observed the effect of the running commentary on him in the experimenter role(31:54) Dr. Gesell makes contradictory statements about whether the behavior he observed in the lab was the same as the behavior the child displayed at home(32:58) A baby’s behavior changes based on the environment it is in(35:04) What the researchers say about children’s capabilities outside of the lab(35:56) Even the view of maturation itself is inextricably linked to Euro-centric ideas about time, on both micro and macro scales.(40:51) What are parents supposed to do with all this information(45:19) One of the Dr. Bates Ames’ key ideas is that development doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion(47:52) The similarity between reading the development book and reading a horoscope(52:33) The idea that things aren’t linear in our children’s development is super helpful(52:54) I found the most useful description of why this non-linear behavior happens in a book of essays by Dr. Myrtle McGraw(54:14) Going back to the outdated ideas about gender(57:11) The flow of authority(01:00:55) When we use our power to get children to do what we want them to do we’re still promoting the values of a patriarchal culture(01:02:58) The most common word uttered is ‘mine’(01:05:04) Each of the decisions parents make is made in a cultural context(01:07:36) An episode suggestion to listen to [accordion][accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]Emma 00:03Hi, I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives, but we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe. And pretty soon, you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro. So come and record one yourself at yourparentingmojo.com/recordtheintro.Jen Lumanlan 00:51Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Have you ever seen recommendations for the books called Your One Year Old, Your Two Year Old, and so on, by Dr. Louise Bates Ames? Every few weeks I see parents posting in online communities asking about some aspect of their child’s behavior that is confusing or annoying to them, and somebody responds: “You should read the Louise Bates Ames books!” They are really short; just about 150 pages each, and were written in the 1970s and ‘80s, and seem to describe a ‘normal’ child’s behavior at each age. The idea of the books, as Dr. Bates Ames and her co-authors state, is that the parent will be able to see their child’s behavior described in the book and be able to relax because the child really is ‘normal.’Jen Lumanlan 01:36I first heard about these books when Carys was about two, and I have to say I found them somewhat helpful and reassuring at the time, even though I would read them and think: “no, Carys doesn’t do that…or that…but she does do that – OK; I guess everything is fine.”Jen Lumanlan 01:50Whenever someone suggests reading these books, they always come with a caveat that you have to disregard the outdated information on topics like gender roles, and that didn’t quite sit right with me but for a while I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then more recently parent educator Robin Einzig posted in her group with a link to a Slate article that recommends these books, and suddenly I realized what I was struggling with. I do want to say that this is not a take-down of Robin Einzig; I GREATLY respect her work, because she’s one of the few people out there who works with parents who truly sees and treats children with respect. I almost wrote this episode without mentioning her but it would have been really hard to explain how my own understanding shifted without talking about her post, and even if I’d anonymized it I know we have enough folks who follow both of our work that it would most likely have gotten back to her. Overall it seemed more honest to just acknowledge the whole story, so that’s what I’m doing.Jen Lumanlan 02:41In a minute I’ll tell you about the whole process but before I do that, I just want to say that the reason these ideas are now much clearer for me than they were even a year ago is because I’ve spent the last year writing a book at the intersection of parenting and social justice. Many of the books on this topic that have been written recently take the perspective that to create a society where everyone belongs, we should talk with our children about the kinds of systems that make that not the case today like White supremacy and racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I agree that yes, we absolutely MUST do those things…and that also if those are the only things we’re doing, we’re missing something really important. Our ideas aren’t just transmitted to our children through the conversations we have with them but also through the ways we interact with them about things like mealtime and bedtime and what we do when we’re feeling frustrated. If we’re using our power over our children to manage those situations then we’re still perpetuating the very same ideas that we’re telling our children are bad. The book will be released in August 2023, and I’m starting to think about ways to get the word out about it. I’ve created a new page on my website at yourparentingmojo.com/book, so you can go there to find out more information. There’s only a bit about the book there now, but there is also a form where you can let me know that you’d like to be notified when the book is released, and if you’d like to know if I come and do a reading in a town near you, and maybe even offer to help bring me to your town to do a reading or a workshop related to the ideas in the book. So, you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/book, and we’ll also update that page when we have more information available about where I’ll be and when after the book is released.Jen Lumanlan 04:20So, the event that caused me to think about these books again was when Robin posted in her group: “I just came across this wonderful article about the persistent value of the [occasionally outdated, "old" in the world of publishing] series by Louise Bates Ames and the Gesell Institute of Child Development entitled "Your One Year Old", "Your Two Year Old" and so on.I recommend these books left and right, almost every day, both online and in personal consultations. Get them. Read them. Read excerpts of them online. Disregard the outdated stuff--you can do this, you can overlook stuff that doesn't apply anymore and focus on the information about child development, which is top-notch. There is really nothing else like them out there, and there is so much in them that is of great value.”Jen Lumanlan 04:59She then posted a link to an article in Slate from 2021 called “Why these child psych books from the 1980s are all over parenting Facebook groups today,” which mentions some of the stuff we’re going to go into in more detail in this episode – the idea that a 4 ½ year-old can be trusted to play outdoors without much supervision, which implies that the family lives in a safe neighborhood, and probably has a fenced yard as well that the parent can look into. We’ll look at the weird gender stuff more closely as well, where girls are shy, boys are exuberant, and the stay-at-home mother is always the book’s reader. The article concludes that “one things these books offer that does transcend time is a feeling of parental solidarity – and that, alone, is valuable.” And to the extent that parents see themselves and their families reflected in these books I imagine it is. But what I realized as I read Robin’s post is that you really CAN’T disregard the outdated stuff and focus on the information on child development. Dr. Bates Ames opens her 1979 book The Gesell Institute’s Child from One to Six with this paragraph: “The Gesell philosophy of human behavior maintains, and has always maintained, that behavior is a function of structure. This means that to a large extent we behave as we do because of the way we are built, and because of the stage of development we have reached.” This is the guiding principle of the Your X-Year-Old books. She goes on to say that “Age norms are not set up as standards; they are designed only for orientation and interpretive purposes. It is a gross misinterpretation of our normative work for anyone to assume that we are staying that all children do or should develop in exactly the same way or at the same rate.”Jen Lumanlan 06:38I quote that section to make it clear what I’m NOT debating. I’m not trying to argue that Dr. Bates Ames and her colleagues ARE saying that all children develop all at the same rate. But what I AM arguing is firstly, that children’s development is shaped much more by their environment than Dr. Bates Ames acknowledges. I’m not going to get into the nature-nurture debate here because I don’t think it’s helpful; I agree with them that we exist within the boundaries of what we’re physically and mentally capable of, but we are still impacted by our environment in ways they don’t seem to recognize that we’ll talk more about in a few minutes.Jen Lumanlan 07:12And secondly, I believe that what we know, or think we know is also highly shaped by our environment. That means that the way Dr. Bates Ames and also Dr. Gesell, who she worked with a lot, ask their research questions and set up their studies is NOT value-neutral, as they seem to think it is; it is very much shaped by our culture, which means their ideas about what they think children can do is also shaped by our culture.Jen Lumanlan 07:38So, to understand this better, I did what I do, and I got 20 books out of the University of California Library written by Dr. Bates Ames and her colleagues, because if there’s one thing that library does well it’s books published in the 1930s. I wanted to look more into the research that is behind the books in the Your X Year Old Child series so I could see what are the ideas about children’s development and about society that underpins them.Jen Lumanlan 08:01So in this episode we’re going to start by learning a bit about the two main players in this field. Dr. Louise Bates Ames, and Dr. Arnold Gesell. We’ll look at the ways they studied babies and young children, and how the children they chose to study and the methods they used to study them affected their views on how children develop. We’ll do this somewhat chronologically, starting with Dr. Gesell’s work in the 1920s, their work together in the 1930s-1940s, and then Dr. Bates Ames work with others at the Gesell Institute through the 1970s. By the end of the episode, we’ll have an understanding of whether the ideas in the Your X-Year-Old books fit with the kinds of relationships we want to have with children, and thus whether we should continue to rely on them.Jen Lumanlan 08:42Alright, let’s start by finding out about the two main actors in the drama that’s going to unfold in this episode. Louise Bates was born in 1908 in Portland, Maine. Her father was a lawyer and judge, and her mother a schoolteacher. She attended public school in Portland, and then Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Apparently, she disliked the elitist atmosphere of the all-female school and transferred to the University of Maine to receive her B.A. in psychology. She decided to pursue a career in psychology because it would allow more flexibility for family life, and the same year she graduated she married fellow student Smith Ames, although they would divorce in 1937. She received her M.A. from the University of Maine in 1933. She earned her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale University in 1936, and her dissertation was on the sequence of creeping and crawling behavior in human infants. While working on her Ph.D., Bates joined the Yale Clinic of Child Development and worked there from 1933 until it was closed in 1948, acting as the clinic’s secretary and personal research assistant to the director, Dr. Arnold Gesell. They published a lot of books and papers together, and it was these books – as well as books that Gesell wrote alone – that I reviewed to understand the basis for the Your X-Year Old books. In a book published in 1972, Dr. Ames says that in 1950, she and others founded the Gesell Institute of Child Development Inc. That “Inc” implies that the institute is actually a company, although it is now known as Gesell at Yale. The Your X-Year-Old books leave off the “inc,” and the current website gives information on Dr. Gesell’s original research, but nothing about the early days of the institute.Jen Lumanlan 10:23We also need to know more about Arnold Gesell, since Dr. Bates Ames was intimately involved in his work and carried forward his legacy after he died. Gesell was born in Wisconsin in 1880 and received his doctorate at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1906. In 1911 he went to New Haven, Connecticut to head the Yale Psycho-Clinic, which was later called the Clinic of Child Development. He knew he would need medical training to understand child development so he obtained an M.D. from Yale in 1915. He initially studied abnormalities in childhood and then realized that he couldn’t really do that until he better understood “normal” infant growth and development. His first book appeared in 1912, but he really hit his stride between 1930 and 1960, when a multitude of books described the method he’d developed of using the new technology of video to observe young children’s behavior, many of which he co-authored with Dr. Bates Ames. Unfortunately for me, at least, these books are extraordinarily repetitive, describing the set-up of the experiments and their results over and over again.Jen Lumanlan 11:28The first thing I want to look at in the research is how the children were selected to participate. Gesell wanted to understand “normal” children’s development, and he said that to do that “the norm may be derived from a random sample or from a homogenous group.” He apparently rejected the random sampling method because he wanted to work with a small sample size, and he said that: “by carefully selecting a homogenous group rather than a random sample of the population, the normative character of the data was greatly strengthened and the central trends of development were accentuated. A relative homogeneity of environment, racial inheritance, and physical status was secured by including only those infants whose parents were of the middle socio-economic status with respect to occupation, schooling, avocational interests, and home equipment; whose parents were born in this country; whose grandparents were of northern European extraction, and whose gestation term, birth history, and physical status were within specified limits.”Jen Lumanlan 12:34To Gesell’s credit, he didn’t use the lazy sampling method that many other psychologists of his era did where they just studied the children in the nursery attached to their institution, which was mostly filled with the children of highly privileged graduate students, and then extrapolated that data to the entire population. The fathers in Gesell’s study had job titles like butcher, electrician, factory operator, mechanic, printer, and ticket seller. “Unemployed” was not an available category. There’s a large table describing the nationality of the mother’s and father’s parents; there are four...

Are you a shitty parent? Or do you ever think you might be? Parenting today is so hard, and there are so many models of 'perfect parenting' available on social media that we can compare ourselves against that provide 'evidence' that we're not doing it right. Things can get even more difficult when we believe in respectful parenting, because we have a model for what we know we want parenting to be like - and every time we fall short of that ideal, the voice is there: "You don't know what you're doing." "You'll never be able to do it right." "You're a shitty parent." My guest today, Carla Naumburg, is the author of the bestselling book How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids, which was conveniently released just before a global pandemic started when we suddenly all started losing our shit with our kids. Now she's back with a new book: You Are Not A Sh*tty Parent which helps us to understand: Where these stories about ourselves come from How we can stop believing these stories Ways to treat both ourselves and our children with more compassion Carla was kind enough to send an advance copy of the book to a member of my community who said that she would read a sentence in it and think: “But you don’t know me; I actually AM a shitty parent!”...and then in the next sentence it was almost like Carla had read her mind and was prepared to address the member's precise concern. So if you ever feel anxious about your ability to parent in a way that's aligned with your values and think it's all about your failures, Carla has ideas to help. Please note that some swearing is inevitable when you're talking about Carla's books but apart from that the conversation was remarkably restrained on the language front!   Carla Naumburg's Books You Are Not A Sh*tty Parent Affiliate link to How to Stop Losing Your Shit With Your Kids (Affiliate links)   References Yarnell, L.M., Stafford, R.E., Neff, K.D., Reilly, E.D., Knox, M.C., & Mullarkey, M. (2015). Meta-analysis of gender differences in self-compassion. Self and Identity 14(5), 499-520.   Jump to Highlights 01:53 Introducing today’s guest0 02:52 Exploring various types of struggles in life and parenting and the importance of distinguishing between them 08:54 Discussing self-compassion, distinguishing it from what it isn't 14:18 Exploring the difficulties of practicing self-compassion in a world of constant comparison and negative self-talk 20:07 Recognizing thoughts, acknowledging the separation between ourselves and our thoughts 29:57 Fostering compassion by first being kind to yourself, speaking compassionately to your kids, and adjusting your self-talk about them 40:06 Embracing the ever-changing seasons of life helps us release unrealistic expectations, find gratitude in the present, and accept the natural flow of experiences 44:53 Balancing compassion with power is essential for a just society 50:05 Self-compassion as a lifelong journey, not a destination 56:50 Wrapping up the discussion

Did you read Little House on the Prairie when you were a child? I didn't, but I know it's a common American rite of passage.   My guest in this new episode, Dr. Dolly Chugh, got entirely immersed in the story with her two young daughters - so much so that they took a vacation to the places depicted in the story, and her daughters danced around in prairie dresses.   Dr. Chugh didn't realized until afterward that there was something missing from both Little House on the Prairie and from her family's exploration of the Midwest: settlers didn't arrive to find unoccupied land ready for farming; the government actively removed Native Americans from the land so it could be occupied by 'settlers.'   Dr. Chugh studies issues related to race as a professor, and yet she completely missed this aspect of our country's history.   In her new book, A More Just Future, Dr. Chugh asks why so-called Good People act in ways that are counter to their beliefs because we don't have all the information we need, or we prioritize some information over others.   In our conversation we discussed this research, and what we can all do to take actions that are aligned with our values - even when we're new to working on social justice issues.   Dr. Dolly Chugh Book: A more just future: Reckoning with our past and driving social change. (Affiliate link)   Jump to highlights: (09:13) 3 ways that we tend to perceive ourselves. (12:02) People who are trying to avoid a loss are more likely to make less ethical choices than people trying to make a game. (14:35) Kahneman and Tversky's work that says how you frame something can have meaningful consequences, even if the thing you're framing is exactly the same. (15:06) So that’s all the research of Framing says, and the gain versus loss piece of it says that you can have identical situations. But what the research, Molly Curran and I have shown us that if you frame it as a loss, people are more likely to cheat. (28:51) James Loewen has done some, some deep analyses of textbooks where he's, you know, God bless him spent two years he took like the 20 most popular history textbooks used in American high schools.   References Blunt, A., & Pychyl, T.A. (2005). Project systems of procrastinators: A personal project-analytic and action control perspective. Personality and Individual Differences 38(8), 1771-1780. Fee, R.L., & Tangney, J.P. (2000). Procrastination: A means of avoiding shame or guilt? Journal of social behavior and personality 15(5), 167-184. Gilbert, D.T., Wilson, T.D., Pinel, E.C., Blumberg, S.J., & Wheatley, T.P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Personality and Social Psychology 75(3), 617-638. Kim, K., del Carmen Triana, M., Chung, K., & Oh, N. (2015). When do employees cyberloaf? An interactionist perspective examining personality, justice, and empowerment. Human Resource Management 55(6), 1041-1058. Sirois, F.M., Melia-Gordon, M.L., & Pychyl, T.A. (2003). “I’ll look after my health, later”: An investigation of procrastination and health. Personality and Individual Differences 35(5), 1167-1184. Sirois, F.M., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7(2), 115-127. Wohl, M.J.A., Pychyl, T.A., & Bennett, S.H. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: how self-forgiveness for procrastination can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences 48, 803-808.  

Dr. Fuschia Sirois, expert on procrastination, discusses the different types and prevalence of procrastination. They explore the link between emotional states and procrastination, as well as tools for managing procrastination as a parent. The role of forgiveness and self-compassion in addressing procrastination is also explored, along with the concept of visualizing your future self. The podcast ends with a discussion on helping children overcome procrastination and model healthy emotion regulation.