Dr. Sarah (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Hello. We have the lovely, wonderful, brilliant Dr. Rebecca Hershberg with us today. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Rebecca (00:52):

I don’t know if I can stay. I might be too brilliant.

Dr. Sarah (00:56):

Yeah, yeah, you got all the other things calling you.

Dr. Rebecca (01:01):

It’s great to be here. I appreciate, I don’t know how brilliant I’m feeling on a Friday morning in August, but I’m in.

Dr. Sarah (01:06):

Me too. Me neither. So we’ll pull together. The two of us will equal one moderately intelligent human being today.

Dr. Rebecca (01:17):

Let’s do it.

Dr. Sarah (01:18):

Okay, so we have a question from a mom who wrote in, my toddler is very gentle and kind, and he never takes away other kids’ toys in daycare. We have live camera access, but I see how he is less assertive and other kids can easily take away his toys or push him around. Can you advise on strategies for parents how to build assertiveness skills in kids? Thank you so much. I feel for this mama, if she’s watching her little baby get pushed around, that’s got to be really hard to see and you feel helpless and you really want to jump in and rescue. And obviously if you’re watching on a screen, they’re daycare and you don’t have any control over the situation that can feel really helpless making.

Dr. Rebecca (02:05):

Especially I was thinking whatever this mom’s own history with assertiveness is, or it brings up so much for all of us about what that looks like at different ages and stages.

Dr. Sarah (02:19):

Yeah. So my thought is to answer this question, I feel like there’s so many ways we could address this, but one thing I think we should talk a little bit about is sort of what is the foundation of assertiveness skills? How do, this is a toddler, so they’re very young, so we’re going to have developmentally appropriate expectations of that. They’re probably not going to have tremendous assertiveness skills and what are the building blocks for that? And then I feel like we could talk a little bit about out this pull that this mom is having of, it’s hard to watch these things happen and how involved do I get, how not involved do I get? How do I manage these feelings of helplessness and tolerate them? When do I jump in? When do I not jump in? When do I call the daycare? When do I trust they’ll figure it out? I think that’s another big piece to this, right?

Dr. Rebecca (03:11):

Yeah. I’m so glad you mentioned that. And I think in some ways you didn’t name the thing, but the thing needs to be named, which is the live camera access, which many daycares have right now. Many do not. It gets into, also we’re in summer camp season, the pictures that you get of your kids at the end of the day or not, and the real, I think in keeping with this podcast, I can sort of spoiler alert, we’re not going to say that that’s good or bad, but just to be intentional and thoughtful about the pros and cons that can come up around that.

Dr. Sarah (03:49):

Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good agenda for us. Let’s dive in.

Dr. Rebecca (03:53):

Okay.

Dr. Sarah (03:55):

Okay. So…

Dr. Rebecca (03:55):

Yeah, you go.

Dr. Sarah (03:57):

Yeah, right. You go.

Dr. Rebecca (04:00):

We’re missing Emily. Emily, come back and go for it.

Dr. Sarah (04:02):

Where’s Emily? We need you. Teach us about assertiveness skills. She’s listening right now on the beach.

Dr. Rebecca (04:07):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah (04:08):

Suckers, we miss you. Emily, let’s talk about developmental stages first. I think before you can’t see that Rebecca just super, super eye rolled me like deep sigh. It is a Friday in August, guys.

Dr. Rebecca (04:30):

Oh, was that out loud? I’m sorry.

Dr. Sarah (04:32):

No, it wasn’t. It was invisible. Why they can’t see us? So I was just describing narrating.

Dr. Rebecca (04:38):

Yeah, and it’s interesting. I can own that a little bit.

Dr. Sarah (04:42):

Well, why, what does it kick up for you?

Dr. Rebecca (04:43):

Yeah, yeah. No, I attempted to say like, haha, let’s just move on. But I think that reaction was important and I 100% feel for this mom. I want to just put that out there. But I also feel like using the term assertiveness skills in the context of toddlers at daycare is such head nod to the internet and Instagram. I just get a little eye rolly about assertiveness skills are really important. No one’s doubting that we talk about them in the context of school, in the context of friendships, dating, relationships, marriages, workplace. I just have a reaction to this idea that we need to be thinking about things in such formal educational terms, so young. So it wasn’t a reaction to this mom or what you were saying. It was a reaction to just that term, assertiveness skills and all that. It conjures up for me in terms of what we’ve lost about letting our kids be kids and figure stuff out and play around with different roles.

(06:05):

I mean, that’s the first thing I would say. Kids at these ages, particularly when they hit four and five, you’ve got the kid who’s the bossy kid and you’ve got the kid who’s this the submissive kid, and then they switch sometimes. It’s like this is the age that they’re playing around with what it feels like to be different ways. She says, my toddler is so kind and gentle. I always encourage parents to add the words right now to anything they say about their kids, whether they’re theoretically good things or bad things. My kid is a terrible sleeper right now. My kid is a piss piggy eater right now. My kid is really good and kind and gentle right now and that’s great. It’s all shifting and moving and we miss out on some of the joy of being curious and exploring with our kids when we focus immediately on what’s missing and how we can teach it.

Dr. Sarah (06:59):

Yeah, I think that is such a valuable point because whether or not we’re going to use these sort of big, big terms, these technical terms like assertiveness skills where we’re going to talk about them as soft life skills, soft identity, building skills, soft, how do I move through the day skills? They’re changing constantly and especially in toddlerhood, they flip from moment to moment, but they’re always building skills. Toddler, this is the cool thing about kids and brains is so much brain, what’s the word I’m looking for? Brain building. I can’t come up with a better word than that, but your brain is literally creating incredible amounts of neural connections and just creating these associations and understanding patterns and learning how to predict things and integrating skills. All of that is happening at the most incredible pace at this age. Their brains grow more in the first few years of life than they will for the next 10 years put together.

(08:11):

It’s crazy. And so they are never not learning. They’re never not learning. It’s really what are they learning and how do we be mindful of patterns that they might be getting into that are laying neural pathways and connections and associations that may serve them or may not serve them so much. Single moments are actually, unless they’re really, really, really impactful, are not usually the things that I’m most concerned about with kids. I’m much more interested in the small repetitive things that happen over and over and over in a kid’s life and day and week and month because that’s what’s going to have the most impact on learning. So if you are looking in video of daycare, you see this interaction with a child and a peer and it bothers you, right? It startles you or it hurts you to look at or it maybe it bothers your child or hurts them. If that’s a pattern, if that’s happening all the time, if that’s something that you’re seeing in lots of different places in their life, different contexts, different settings, that’s really worth paying attention to because patterns are the things that are going to have a really big impact on the brain development.

(09:35):

If there’s a one-off moment and it’s not a massively profound shake you kind of moment probably it’s something that is an outlier and the brain is going to consider it an outlier and move on. So I do think parents sometimes understandably have a lot of nervousness around conflict or moments that don’t feel good or moments that they might in their more sophisticated assessment of things might feel like they would want to see something different. There’s a different skill that’s missing here that I want to see them have or practice. But for a really small child who’s constantly integrating these multitudes of experiences they’re having and using it to really inform their brain development, these little moments are usually not that impactful. Does that make sense? Am I making sense, Rebecca? I want to just check in.

Dr. Rebecca (10:31):

Yeah, no. Absolutely. No, I agree with all of that. I mean, from the question, it sounded like this was something that this mom had observed again and again, but again, I would note again and again might be the three times you happened to check within two days, and that’s not actually within the context of the full day at daycare constituting a pattern. So again, just being aware of what you’re selectively noticing. Also, even when we’re live with our kids, if we are at the playground with our kids, we might notice it’s like the confirmation bias. We’re worried about their assertiveness skills, so we notice all the times that they don’t seem to be being assertive, but actually there’s 20 other times that that’s not the issue. I would say just to sort of shift and start answering the first part of the question as we laid it out, I have a very high threshold for interrupting toddler play, and so it’s hard for me to think about what would be an example if your child has, let’s say a toy taken away from them and they seem perfectly happy with that and they go find another toy. I can’t in this moment think of a way in which I would interrupt that.

(11:53):

That doesn’t feel, like to me that it’s showing that your kid is developing flexibility and adaptiveness and maybe has learned that that kid gets really upset. I mean, whatever. I just think if everything seems copacetic to me, your child can learn assertiveness in different ways at different times, and that wouldn’t be something I would interrupt if my child, I’m observing my child and someone takes their toy and they don’t fight to get it back, but they seem upset and they seem like they didn’t like that. And again, this is something that I have seen happen more than once. This isn’t just a one-off situation where I would probably sort of stand back and wait and watch how they handle it, but if this is a pattern, I might step in and we talk about this intervention a lot on this podcast echo what I would imagine my child is feeling in that moment.

(12:51):

I think when we talk about building blocks, that’s the first building block is helping our kids feel confident in what their internal experience is and helping them realize we saw that and it was real. So something like you didn’t like that you were playing with that Troy and Micah came over and he grabbed it from you and you weren’t done. And just that alone is to my mind, a place to stop for those, just helping our kids be aware that they didn’t like it. Again, if this is a pattern that keeps happening, then you can get into when you see Micah do it, speaking for your child, Hey Micah, I don’t like that. And sort of modeling for your kid, but again, as I’m speaking, I’m realizing just how high the threshold would need to be for me to feel like that was ultimately going to be more helpful to my child than allowing my child to navigate it themselves again, short of their being in real apparent distress.

Dr. Sarah (13:59):

I’ll just expand on that because I think that’s exactly what I would do in the moment. I love everything you said and I would say the same thing. I also think that parents often feel very limited to parenting in the moment, and I really encourage parents to expand the window of when you are going to deliver your intervention of building assertiveness skills, helping a kid understand what happened and how they felt about it and what they could do differently to get their ball back or whatever it is, expand that to the outside of the moment of parenting. There’s so much more space to build these skills. And so one thing that I would consider doing as well is if you’re noticing these patterns and you want to help your child kind of have a better understanding to Rebecca’s point of what is going on, how do we help them put words to their experience, help them understand that it makes sense and what is happening and also what they can do to solve those problems, especially with little kids like toddlers, books are a really great way to do this. Calm, connected moments. You’re snuggling, you’re reading a story, they’re engaged, and then helping them sort of connect dots that they see in the books to maybe perhaps a similar scenario in their life.

(15:30):

A book. There’s a whole series that I love called It’s Terrific Toddlers series. Do you know this book series? Rebecca? Yeah, I’m familiar with it. Yeah. They have a book called All Mine, and I love that book for this because it’s like, it does talk about how some of these kids are a scene with maybe four, they have six recurring characters in all of their book series, but I think it’s like four kids in a school setting. I think pretty sure it’s only at school, but it might be other places. But there’s all these little tiny scenes where someone is taking something from another kid and the kid is actually saying, no, I’m not done. No, I’m using that or I don’t want to share that. It’s counterintuitive. I know a lot of parents are really, really heavily invested in having their kids build skills for sharing, but assertiveness skills is actually a prerequisite for building sharing skills because we need to be able to feel like our territory is protected in order to then share our territory with others.

(16:44):

And so actually I think this isn’t exactly what this mom is asking, but I think it also applies to other questions that we get a lot, which is how do I help my kids share more? If you build assertiveness skills, your kids will have better success with sharing, I promise you, and I’d focus on that before you focus on making them share. But being able to say, no, I’m using this. You can play with that or you can play with it when I’m done, or asking a teacher or grownup for help in sharing counterintuitive, but this is kind of what a assertiveness is built upon. It’s owning your territory feeling you have that your desire to own your territory is valid and fair, and then giving you skills to put up a boundary, say, no, it’s my turn now, please wait, or I want to do this too.

(17:34):

Can I do this? Can I do that when you’re finished? So these are really important pieces to assertiveness. Again, whether you want to formalize them as assertiveness skills or you’re just thinking of them as life skills and in the very, very, very early building blocks for young kids, we’re not going to expect them to be able to do this. This is something that they have to learn with practice, with modeling and with time outside of these hot moments to really sort of think about, reflect on practice, all that stuff. So I think we should put a link to the all mine book here because I actually love that book for this.

Dr. Rebecca (18:15):

Yeah, no, I agree with everything you just said. And it’s interesting. I paused. It’s only two of us, so it’s different than when Emily’s here, but I paused because it was like, okay, I’ve said this piece. I’m going to let Sarah say the next piece, which is going be about the not in the moment stuff. I literally said that to myself.

Dr. Sarah (18:32):

Our brains tag team without speaking.

Dr. Rebecca (18:33):

And then you jumped in with exactly that. I was going to talk about books and then also play with stuffed animals, play with dolls, play with figures, play with whatever, but just practicing in the context of imaginative play, this stuffed animal grabs the plastic egg and the other one, whatever. But just again, these are all opportunities not in that sort of moment to reflect on some of these things and practice some of these skills.

Dr. Sarah (19:04):

And you made a point earlier at the very beginning, I think it’s worth circling back to, which is encouraging this mom who’s wrote in this question to take a little look at her own relationship to assertiveness, because sometimes I’ll see parents who they’re wanting their kid to build these assertiveness skills, but then when the child is being assertive back at the parent, that’s really intolerable to them in a different context. When a kid is saying, no, I don’t want to do this, or I need you do this for me right now, and we get really sort of ruffled by that. So we have to kind of understand where else we might be reinforcing the opposite of assertiveness in other spaces. But also I see a lot of parents who respect their child’s assertiveness within their relationship with their kid, but they’re not necessarily modeling assertiveness in their life and around where their child might be having an opportunity to, are they displacing opportunities for their child to observe them being assertive about other things like, this is mine, I have a need, I want this, this is what I prefer.

(20:11):

No, I’m not comfortable with that. No, I prefer not to do that. Also with it, their child, if a kid’s climbing all over you and you don’t really like it to be like, no, I’m not going to let you climb on me, that doesn’t feel good to me. So sometimes, so on one end of the spectrum, sometimes I see parents have a really difficult time tolerating their children’s assertiveness back at them. On the other end of the extreme, I see a lot of parents struggle to beat assertive with their child about their own boundaries and their own needs. So that’s just something to take a peek at and see, do I fall on one end of that spectrum? Is there some way I can come more into the middle of allowing for their and their assertiveness with me and also allowing for my autonomy and assertiveness with them?

Dr. Rebecca (20:53):

I think that’s such a great point, and I think it highlights something else I was saying in passing, which is the idea that kind of the other side of the assertiveness coin is flexibility and adaptiveness, and those are also skills that we’re trying to teach toddlers who can be so rigid and get stuck easily. And so again, it may be that we have to tune into how our kids are feeling. Does it look when another kid takes their toy, they really did have a boundary broken and they didn’t have the skills to assert that boundary or does it look like they were kind of done anyway and they’re going with the flow and finding something else? And I’ve seen both of those things happen, but they’re different and it’s okay to try to foster flexibility while you are, again, without overthinking it. Just back to the original point, these are all life skills that kids are learning, as you said every second.

(21:53):

Are they learning assertiveness right in that second? No, but they’re learning emotion regulation because they were frustrated, but actually they kept it together and found something else to play with. So maybe they didn’t have the opportunity to practice this skill, but they practiced another important one. And so again, to be, I want to just again hit with a hammer to be really aware that unless this is a repetitive pattern where they really don’t seem to be able to meet a need with a skill, okay, not to think about a lot of this in a super conscious way and let it play out. Because toddlers are amazing at learning these skills in their day-to-day interactions, which I think gets to the second big realm of this question that we wanted to hit on at least a little bit, which is this idea of having live access viewing available.

(22:47):

And I work with parents a lot on this, not only in the daycare context, but as I said summer camp and also monitors, baby monitors, video monitors for the little ones, and how wonderful it is that we have this technology that allows us to be with our kids when we can’t be with our kids. So you are a working parent who drops your kid off at daycare. What a beautiful thing to be able to watch them play for 10 minutes of your day and feel like you’re connecting with your kid in that way and getting a sense of their world, but how quickly and easily it can slip into a hypervigilance around, I want to check in on them, I want to make sure everything’s okay, I want to make sure they’re safe. I want to kind of micromanage. And again, just being aware for yourself of where that line is and how you’re going to keep monitoring that line because I do believe it can backfire and it can lead to, I mean I guess this is a good place for me to let you jump in, Sarah.

(23:57):

I don’t know. It can lead to just, I think anxiety in parents. It can lead to an over, I don’t want to say overprotectiveness because I think that’s a judgy word, and I don’t mean it that way, but a way in which we don’t allow our kids necessarily to develop autonomy to feel like they are independent and they’re important things to watch as our kids get older, whether it’s that daycare stage or the, I’m tracking them on their phone in the teenage stage, we have great technology that keeps our kids safe, and it’s less likely that a daycare that has live access camera is going to do something horrible that we read used to happen in the eighties at daycares. And that’s great, and there’s a way in which it can go too far on an individual or collective level where our kids are less likely to thrive and be free and learn independence.

Dr. Sarah (24:56):

And I think you make a very good point in that this not only affects maternal and paternal mental health because constantly checking and scanning is kind of just hard wiring your amygdala to be just connected to fear. A lot of the time it is reinforcing a bit of a fear response, even if it doesn’t start out as a fear response, but it can be this morph into, like you said, it’s like a slow boil, but it can actually start to become a compulsive checking and that can actually not just maintain but actually amplify anxiety in the long run because it starts to kind of feed our worry bug a little bit too much, or maybe there is something I need to check on. Maybe something is if I’m not checking and something does happen, I’m not on top of it, so then my check more and it just becomes this sort of dependent cycle.

(25:57):

I found this even personally, not so much with monitoring daycare video, but with a parent app when I was breastfeeding, when I first had my son and I was using an app to track every feeding, every diaper change, every sleep wake cycle. And I was becoming so almost addicted to it to manage my anxiety that I was becoming more anxious. And when I didn’t have the app, I was not trusting that it would be fine. And so it became almost compulsive dependence on this external thing that was taking me away from my attunement and my trust and my just relaxation around this stuff not being so rigid. It was making me more rigid and I needed to go back to being more flexible. And I actually had a conscious thought when I was pregnant with my second and I got the app out, I was like, Ooh, I should dust this off and get ready for number two.

(26:56):

And I don’t even know how or why, but I had this moment of like, I don’t actually think I want to do it this time and I want to see what happens because I don’t actually, it just had this awareness that I didn’t like how addicted and dependent on it I was with my first and that I was like, maybe I should not, I should just see. And it was hard. It was hard to let go of that. It felt like a very helpful crutch. And so that’s a very different situation, but I think it’s very similar in that checking these apps, checking these videos, checking, checking, checking can actually, when we don’t start off anxious, it can create some anxiety. So that’s something to think about. And then to the point, it’s not also great for our kids development to always be monitored and always be watched because even if they don’t really think about it that they’re being monitored and watched, it’s more like the amount of times we are there before they’re even realizing there’s a problem because we’re monitoring and watching means they’re not actually, there’s probably much less of an experience for them where they’re having to find themselves in a tricky situation and have to figure out how to get out of it, or at least signal for some support on their own, so they’re not practicing strengthening those muscles and those neural pathways.

(28:20):

And so it’s not that they might not even be aware that us monitoring them might be leading to more anxiety in the long run for them, but because we are jumping in so much faster and rescuing them so much more often because we have this constant bird’s eye view of everything going on for them, they’re not really exercising as much grit building and resilience building work, and that if that atrophies or doesn’t develop because of lack of use, it’s not going to serve them when they’re older, which is hard.

Dr. Rebecca (29:01):

And it’s also important, I think, for kids to start realizing that we have lives outside of them. So if I say to my kid like, oh, I saw today when Micah took that toy from you, and they’re like, wait, what? But you told me you’re at work and you’re like, well, but sometimes I watch you. It’s like, well, but when I mean it just can be confusing. And again, by all means navigate a way to do it. I don’t think either of us are saying, and therefore never check the live cap. As I said, it can feel really connected and really lovely. Just again, I think what we’re saying as we often say is just be aware and be intentional and thoughtful. Yeah, that’s all I got.

Dr. Sarah (29:45):

I think that’s enough. I think that’s good. Thank you for writing this question in because I think you speak for a lot of people, so we’re always grateful when people write in. Thank you so much. Talk soon.

Dr. Rebecca (29:58):

Thank you. Talk soon.

Dr. Sarah (30:01):Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.