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 are back with the Securely Attached podcast Beyond The Sessions segment where we are going to answer your listener questions. We have Dr. Rebecca Hershberg, Dr. Emily Upshur. Hello my friends.

Dr. Rebecca (00:56):

Hi. Always good to be here.

Dr. Emily (00:57):

Hi.

Dr. Sarah (00:59):

I have a question for you. Are you ready?

Dr. Emily (01:03):

Let’s do it.

Dr. Sarah (01:04):

Okay. My 8-year-old son isn’t very athletic and doesn’t show much interest in sports, but my husband, who is a serious athlete growing up, is really pushing him to play and practice constantly. It’s causing stress and tension between them and it breaks my heart. I want to support my son for who he is, but I also don’t want to totally dismiss my husband’s intentions. How do I step in here without making things worse and how can I help them find some common ground? Good question.

Dr. Rebecca (01:35):

Yeah, really good question and very common.

Dr. Sarah (01:40):

I was just going to say, I feel like we have so many families in our practice. We’re actually really working on this exact situation.

Dr. Rebecca (01:47):

And it’s sports or it’s music could, it’s like whatever a parent was really into or good at as a kid that they are really wanting their kid to do because it was potentially so meaningful for them, but their kid isn’t, at least right now, and I think it’s important to say right now at this moment in time, isn’t sort of leaning in that direction and how hard that can be as parent or as a parent like this mom who’s not as invested but watching the dynamic between the two of them. So I feel this one.

Dr. Emily (02:21):

Yeah, I think I like that. They also, it is really ubiquitous. It’s one of the most common parenting questions I have, just to pull back a little is how much do you push your kid to stay in an activity? When is it okay to pull them from those types of questions about when is it good to have work ethic and sort of sticktoitiveness and when is it okay to sort of bow out or just not renew the activity the next time? And how to make those choices I think are really tricky.

Dr. Sarah (02:52):

Yeah. Yeah. I think I really see this as two blended, but separate issues that point. Emily, this is it okay to just say, my kid’s not that into it and we should just honor that and let him take a break. We’re feeling too much pressure. It’s not helping versus no, let’s committed to this. Let’s keep going. That’s one issue. The other issue that I’m hearing this mom ask about is basically is my husband projecting his own fantasy of what my child is going to be into onto my child who they’re, and it’s causing who they’re as a person and that is a different issue. And those two things can get really interconnected. So I feel like it’s worth parsing them out and kind of addressing both.

Dr. Rebecca (03:44):

Right? Because there’s also families where they start the child, let’s say in ballet lessons and halfway through the semester the child doesn’t want to do it. And there’s a question of we already paid for it, do we keep doing it, do we not? And it has nothing to do with a parent’s identity and own stuff.

Dr. Sarah (04:06):

And even especially with team sports, there’s this other piece of you made a commitment to teammates if you’re in ballet. I mean, I don’t know. I never really did that much ballet. I guess if you’re in a dance troupe and you leave, you could affect the other people when you are in an organized sport…

Dr. Rebecca (04:24):

Yeah a band, like a band. I mean, I’m thinking my son is a bassist and a band and there were times he didn’t want, I mean, there’s so many episodes here, honestly. I know. I do feel like we should stick to this mom’s questions just for the sake of brevity, but there’s so many spinoffs we can do.

Dr. Sarah (04:42):

That’s true.

Dr. Rebecca (04:44):

Because to answer her specific question, it does, if I take into account the details that she’s putting forth, it does sound like at least from her perspective, dad is really pushing the kid in a way that the kid doesn’t want to go and that’s causing more damage. It just sounds like it’s more straightforward than perhaps or more straightforward in a particular direction than some of the other scenarios that we’re putting out there.

Dr. Emily (05:13):

And I think thinking about how she can talk to him in a productive way, dad, I mean, that’s the question. How can I broach this without it feeling icky basically for dad? How can I preserve his good intention and potentially his values with this sort of, you know.

Dr. Rebecca (05:35):

I mean, the first thing that occurs to me is if we look at motivational interviewing, which is for people who don’t know a form of therapy of how we get people to change their behavior, and you sort of look at what’s meaningful to them. And so I have all kinds of reactions to this question from this mom, but if I think about what’s at the heart of it for this dad, if I put myself the dad’s shoes, he wants his kid to play sports.

(06:00):

So then we look at, well, is this working? Is what you’re doing working to help your child foster a love for baseball, soccer, lacrosse? And the answer is no. So if your goal is to have your child really enjoy baseball and really be good at baseball, what’s the best way to get there is potentially a way to talk to dad that doesn’t bring in anything potentially more touchy-feely about the child’s self-esteem or their relationship. But it’s also just like this is a surefire way to turn a child off to an activity. There are so many examples of kids or grownups who talk about how they gave up a particular activity because they were pushed too hard and because it became aversive, because this thing that they wanted to be fun ended up feeling so pressure filled. So my guess would be if this dad keeps pushing the child in this direction, it’s actually going to backfire. If we just look at it purely from a sports as the outcome angle, then of course I would say I’m much more interested in terms of my personal interest, but it also sounds like maybe this mom interest in the relationship between the dad and the kid. And that’s going to ultimately backfire also. But if we wanted to start a conversation with dad with just simply holding his value of this particular sport in mind, that would be one way to go.

Dr. Sarah (07:26):

And I think I really like that. I think helping this dad identify, we’re not saying don’t instill a love of this whatever sport it is in your child, but how do you do it more effectively? And then on top of that, there’s other insights I’d want to help this dad maybe be able to reflect on or identify which is there a particular wish that you have or idea that you have about what it means for your child to be interested in this sport? Is it maybe also at some point being a question of, do I have an idea about my kid that isn’t maybe going to happen? Is there some grief that might need to be processed here of maybe my kid isn’t going to be like a star athlete or maybe he’s not going to like the same things that I like and that also probably means that some of the fantasies that I had about what it would feel like to be a dad to this kid, they might not play out in the way you imagined. And we actually kind of have to grieve a fantasy that we lose as we get to know our kid more and we realize, oh, this might not be the story anymore. And so we have to say goodbye to that dream. And that’s a complex process and could take a long time, or it could be quick for some people, but I think just naming, sometimes we just have to give ourselves permission to be sad that, Ugh, this wasn’t what I was picturing.

Dr. Rebecca (09:02):

I think that’s absolutely a hundred percent true, and I also think it’s really important, I said this before, but I just want to highlight it to note that it’s potentially just for this moment in time, I sing, I’m a performer. I love the performing arts, I love music. My son is very talented in that way, did some of it, loved it, and now baseball has taken over and it’s such a bummer. I love connecting with him about singing, about playing music, about whatever, and I just have to remind myself over and over again, maybe this is grieving forever or maybe this is he’s 11 and doesn’t want to do this right now, and when he’s 14, he’s going to find his way back to it and think it’s awesome. I just think there’s a way of, we have to know that our kids’ developments in terms of what they are interested in and what they’re passionate about and what they’re good at, it just changes so frequently over time as they develop.

Dr. Sarah (10:10):

And I think that’s so important to remember because I think that also gives us permission to not have this intense anxiety, urgency to solve the problem right away, right? It’s like if I think of my child’s disinterest in something I wish they were interested in as not a problem, I need to fix right now what you’re saying, then also that allows me to just be a little more mellow about it. Whereas if I think, oh my gosh, if I don’t correct this right now, the stakes are really high, the window’s going to close, they’re never going to want this. So that can inadvertently increase your sense of pressure, which increases the family’s pressure and the kid’s going to feel it. And we might end up accidentally doing the exact opposite of what we want.

Dr. Rebecca (11:03):

Which is what we’re saying before, right.

Dr. Sarah (11:04):

Push them away from it when they actually might naturally ebb and flow in and out of it on their own and come back to it if we lay off a bit.

Dr. Emily (11:13):

Yeah, this child is eight just very early. I feel like it’s very young. Some kids are more secure in their bodies and have better proprioception knowing your body in space earlier, and some kids have them later, and I just think you just sort of don’t know. I love the idea of right now that Rebecca, you were saying, because I do really think some kids just are later bloomers with some things and some kids are really early. And also within, one of the things that happened within my family is I had two very, very spritely athletic kids very early and not so much, and I was like, who is this child? They don’t fit the mold of my, so I think you also have to take into consideration, maybe it’s a right now thing, maybe it’s this kid thing, but at eight, it’s still kind of early days in knowing what it’ll look like. And I think that gives, that’s right, takes some of the pressure off of it, Sarah, to not think of it. So it’s over now. They’ll never have a good relationship with each other in this sport or in sports in general. It might change a lot.

Dr. Sarah (12:29):

And that takes some of the urgency off of it and the pressure, which I think can ultimately give this kid a little bit of space because at the end of the day, what I hear this mom kind of being most concerned about is that the stress and tension that’s being generated between the two of her son and her husband, that’s the thing that’s starting to become palpable. And that’s the problem. The problem isn’t the sports. The problem is that these two, this child and father are feeling at odds with one another. They have both competing needs in this moment, and that friction of those competing needs is creating stress in that relationship. And in this case, the dad is going to have a better capacity than the child to reduce the pressure, the competing need in this moment because this is an asymmetric relationship. The dad’s going to have to be the one to pull the pressure to take his foot off the gas. The kid’s not going to be able to, he’s going to dig in with his resistance to the baseball or to the sport, whatever.

Dr. Rebecca (13:47):

Yeah. I mean, I also think it’s not black and white. It’s not just totally back off. It’s like I had a client where there was a similar dynamic and it was around baseball, and it was like, what if you just played some version of baseball but no rules? You know what I mean? What if you just went out there with the baseball bat? There may be a way in which you can still play, but can you play and have fun? And maybe it means there’s no rules. You’re not playing with the usual rules or you’re not so nitpicky about the technique in terms of the way he’s holding them MIT or it doesn’t have to be like, and so we walk away from a sport right now completely or not. It could be can we change just our relationship to what it means to play together, love, take the pressure off in perhaps a little bit less black or white way?

Dr. Sarah (14:47):

Yeah, that makes me think too about the idea of outcomes, like attention on outcomes versus attention on process. If we want to help a child explore their relationship to an activity and we’re really focused, like the questions mom, Roach, he’s pushing him to play and practice a lot. That to me sounds very outcome oriented. We got to get better at hitting the bad and we have to practice this or we have to go to practice. Or it could just be the organized sport aspect, not the sport itself. To your point where Becca, like how do we bring the play back into this dynamic, the playfulness, the fun versus it? We as adults are so conditioned. We’ve really become very desensitized and kind of trained to think about things as like skill building, outcome oriented, and we we’re building something so we can get better and better and better at it so that we could achieve something.

(15:54):

And that’s actually not how, certainly not eight year olds, but most kids, they don’t approach interests like that initially. That’s a very adult mindset to be putting onto the kid in this situation. So if we can notice that and come pull it back a bit and be like, maybe baseball or we keep going to baseball, but maybe whatever sport it is, maybe we are going to toss the ball around in the backyard or have some fun or go see something to go do something together. But instead of it being like, we got to go to practice and we got to have these games, and it’s much more, maybe it’s the organized sport aspect that the kid is not enjoying, maybe they have to break it up and break it apart and figure out what is it that the kid is kind of resistant to. It might not be sports, it might be these team practices and all of the activities.

Dr. Emily (16:54):

I mean, I think what I’m hearing you say, which I think is I staying very curious with your child and maybe this dad can do that. It sounds like they’re talking about one sport or she’s talking about one sport. And I always think if they’re curious, they might find out that he likes they’re talking about baseball, but he might find out that he likes golf. I think if you’re curious and you remain open that that is a surprising thing too. It might be there more confident in one genre than another. And I think just remaining, I think what we’re hearing is a little rigidity like practice and structure and if we’re a little curious and flexible, that might also help this wife talk to her husband around those topics.

Dr. Sarah (17:46):

I feel like this is all really good because I think this could be applied to so many different situations. I feel like this is, whether it’s sports or musical instrument or a language or whatever, dance, I feel like every parent has this thing. They just secretly just really wish that their kid would do because they love it and they had this fantasy of this is how I pictured parenthood to just get to teach my kid this and share this with them. So I get it. I get why this dad would maybe feel really strongly about instilling this in their child. So hopefully this will be a helpful reframe to be able to help him have some strategies to get where he’s trying to go with a little less resistance and a little less stress. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you guys for coming on and answering these questions with me.

Dr. Emily (18:39):

Good to be here.

Dr. Sarah (18:41):

See you soon.

(18:41):

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.