The big addition I've made to anticipatory guidance

For parents but also to help kids

I read this article from the cut and a few people told me it resonated with them. I had a lot to say about this topic. So here we go.

I really appreciate the gentle parenting influencer content- it provides helpful reframes, tools and scripts. So many parents I know view these folks as their gurus guiding their parenting, one of their most important responsibilities, in the best direction.

However, I hear from parents all the time that some of these techniques don’t help. The bedtime routine gets endless extended, the limits are fewer and harder to enforce, and the parents are way overextended.

It’s not that the techniques are bad or the parents aren’t “doing it right”. The problem is about the dose. At its core gentle parenting leans into the attachment with the parent and the parent helps the child to emotional coregulate. It’s a beautiful thing, but it doesn’t come for free.

The Rhino who swallowed a storm is a children’s book is about supporting children after natural disasters and trauma, speaks about a Rhino holding in all their emotions as if he’s holding in a storm. It reminded me of a parent gentle parenting, swallowing up all their children’s angry, sad or dysregulated energy to provide them with peace. There’s clearly a cost or at the very least a limit to what parents can accept before they lose their temper.

 

When a parent doesn’t have a break or a parent has many children and other work (paid or unpaid) they have to attend to, it’s overwhelming and nearly impossible.  You simply can’t do everything all the time. When parents swallow too much they yell or lose their temper, and they deviate from the gentle parenting scripts because they can no longer maintain their regulation. Most parents can only tolerate so much of our children’s distress until we snap, raise our voices and say something not so gentle. Or we try to cope with it by laughing at our children’s distress or sarcasm which invalidate their experience.

The other problem is that if we coregulate with our children helping them through every single one of their difficult moments they don’t build the skills to regulate themselves and they don’t build the emotional resilience, self esteem and skills that comes from being more independent.

So what is a parent to do? Part of gentle parenting not often talked about is picking when to get involved. Imagine an emotional thermometer, like the ones posted in some preschools. 0-3 the child is happy and in a groove, 4-6 there may be some tension, and above 7-10 the child is really upset. We want to encourage is for children to try to work through things on their own, 4, 5, 6, even 7.

This sounds easy right, but it’s not. In expressing confidence about our children’s ability to tolerate being upset, we feel uncomfortable. Perfect example, my daughter woke up early Saturday wanting her screen. We don’t do screens before breakfast. She sulked, she pouted, she stomped, and she called me mean. And I acknowledged it and just kind of ignored it, offered some distraction because it was like a 6 or a 7. 

Not giving in and not negotiating was the right move because I got to finish my workout and I didn’t compromise my limit. The problem is it was actually more work than giving in. It’s very difficult to just accept your child being upset and uncomfortable to hear them whine, fuss, or experience uncertainty or boredom.

It’s so uncomfortable that Ferber, Weissbluth, and tons of other sleep experts have written thousands of pages about how it’s OK to give a child a moment to self sooth through their distress. Crying it out (not for everyone! This newsletter is not about infant sleep!) is so hard on parents, but parents who get through it often feel “done”. Unfortunately the same skill, holding space to allow your child to struggle through something will help them learn how to handle tantrums, homework, and friendship struggles independently too.

So what do we do? One thing we can do as parents is acknowledge where we stand with distress tolerance. Some parents can make easy dinner conversation through a child refusing to eat what’s been offered, and other parents have a really hard time. When you acknowledge that tolerating your child’s distress is hard in certain situations you can then better plan for those situations and scaffold yourself and your children towards success.

We can also increase our skills at tolerating distress. Dialectic behavior therapy has become very popular to treat many mental health conditions like anxiety and borderline personality disorder. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and the skills it teaches are useful for everyone, so useful that over the past ten years more and more people are thinking we should teach all high school children these skills. One core cluster of skills within DBT is distress tolerance and by practicing these skills we can presumably better cope with our distress around us.

In years of working with parents I’ve become more and more interested in how parents can build their distress tolerance. Intense exercise, mindfulness, deep breathing, progressive relaxation and other skills can make a meaningful difference in how much a parent can hold space for their children to figure something out on their own. Tolerating our children’s distress and swallowing their storms more efficiently enables us to set limits without losing our temper.

All to say with toddlers, I have started talking to parents about distress tolerance when we talk about tantrums. Because building parents resilience facilitates and enables parenting, gentle or not.

Chime in the comments to let me know your thoughts on this topic.