Dr. Laura (00:00):

Because really when you think about it, this whole self-regulation thing, you’re choosing every minute that you interact with not just your child but the world and even yourself, you’re choosing, am I coming from a place of fear? If I am, I’m going to try to control, I’m going to threaten, I’m going to throw my own little tantrum. If I can soothe myself enough, then I can come from a place of love and compassion, even if I don’t know what the next step is.

Dr. Sarah (00:34):

What is peaceful parenting really, and how can it help you raise emotionally healthy, resilient kids without losing yourself in the process? I am honored to be joined today by Dr. Laura Markham. Dr. Laura is a clinical psychologist and the author of three bestselling books that have been translated into 27 languages. She is a true pioneer in the field of parenting. In her book, Peaceful Parent Happy Kids has helped countless families shift from power struggles and punishment to connection, empathy, and cooperation. In our conversation, we cover everything from how to set limits with empathy. Yes, it’s possible to why laughter is a really powerful tool for emotional release and how to support your child’s really big feelings like anger and sadness without feeling more dysregulation. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the parenting advice out there, this episode will help you to zoom out, get grounded and focus on what really matters for your child’s emotional wellbeing and your own.

(01:43):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:13):

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Securely Attached podcast. We are in for a very real treat today because we have Dr. Laura Markham here. Thank you so much for coming.

Dr. Laura (02:27):

I’m excited to be with you.

Dr. Sarah (02:29):

I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. I’m so happy to get to sit down with you. So before we jump into all the many questions I have for you, can you share a little bit about your work, sort of the movement of peaceful parenting that you really pioneered and Yeah, I’m just curious the story behind all this.

Dr. Laura (02:55):

Well, the story started when I was in grad school getting a PhD in clinical psychology and was pregnant with my first child. And when he was born, I noticed that I was doing things really differently than anyone around me. And the older he got the more different, it became meaning as a toddler when other parents would punish or threaten or when their child would get upset about something, they would either give in on their limit or distract the child from their dismay. And I realized that parents were parenting as they had been parented and really didn’t have the guidance to think about what they were doing in new ways and the ways I was. And I was thinking in those ways because I was reading all the research. Gentle parenting didn’t exist at the time Mothering Magazine was there. And so that was the only thing I found that was resonant with what I was doing at all.

(04:00):

But what I distilled, I really thought a lot and talked a lot about what I was doing and what I was reading and clarifying. And what I saw is that the research supported very clearly that kids will do their best if they can, and that everything depends on their ability to manage their emotions. I thought, well, that’s really interesting. So we need to coach them to be able to manage those emotions. And then as I was working with parents, I saw that sometimes the coaching worked and sometimes it didn’t. And it depended on two really critical factors. One is the connection between the parent and child did the child, and every parent feels connected to their child, but what would the child say about the level of safety they feel in that relationship? What would the child say about whether when they have big emotions, their parent will be responsive to them, will be able to soothe them, so does the child feel seen?

(05:07):

So that connection, that relationship, I realized, oh, it’s not a set of strategies. Even the coaching for emotional regulation, what we would call emotion coaching today, all of that depends on the relationship between the parent child. And then the question is, can the parent pull that off really hard to do. And parents were not raised this way. And so most of us have to really work at our own self-regulation. And until we can self-regulate our child, we now use the word co-regulate. Our child doesn’t actually lay down the neural wiring to be able to soothe themselves unless we’ve sued them. We can’t soThe them if we are in a state of emotional dysregulation when a child is with an adult who is dysregulated, that child does not feel safe. That child knows that adult is unpredictable. They could do anything. It’s not a safe situation.

(06:04):

That child is not going to be soothed at that moment. They’re certainly not going to co-regulate. So I realized, oh, I have this little backwards. The most important thing first before anything else is us. How we show up with our child is then what creates the relationship, the safety, the scene, the soothing, and then we can coach our child to be their best self instead of threatening them to behave the way we want. We can coach them to be able to manage their big emotions. So that became the three big ideas of peaceful parenting. And the peaceful idea is an aspiration. And it doesn’t mean notice. It’s peaceful parent, happy kids. The kids are not peaceful, kids are not going to be peaceful. They’re all over the place.

Dr. Sarah (06:49):

That is such an important distinction. I love that, that really important point.

Dr. Laura (06:53):

People say, but my house isn’t peaceful. You should see. And I’m like, that’s not the goal. The goal is peace inside your own heart, which when you are controlling, attempting to control your child, when you’re threatening, when you’re punishing, when you’re shutting down big emotions distracting, you’re not feeling peace inside your own heart when you’re connecting. Even if you don’t know what to do next, when you’re connecting, when you’re, you’re loving and compassionate to your child and yourself, then you feel peace in your heart. So peaceful parent, happy kids.

Dr. Sarah (07:28):

Yes. And when did you write that book?

Dr. Laura (07:31):

I wrote that book in, well, I wrote it before it came out. I think it came out in 2012. And the interesting thing is that I’m rewriting it right now because the publisher has asked me to rerelease it next year and I’m adding to it. First of all, it only went up to stopped at the preteen years. I’m including the preteen years now. And screens were not a big part of the book at that point. And at this point, it’s a huge part of the book. It has to be both in terms of emotional regulation, the impact of screens on that at each age, but also in terms of mastery, cognition, executive function, which is so vulnerable to excessive screen use. And I’m also adding in more about parental self-regulation, all of the things we’re talking about that can lead to co-regulation. And also I’m addressing the anxiety epidemic. So anyway, the book is coming out next year.

Dr. Sarah (08:28):

Oh my gosh, this is so exciting because I mean, realistically I know, listen, people who listen to this podcast, the things that we’re going to talk about today aren’t going to be brand new things to them because they already have bought into a lot of these really sort of evidence-based and well more and more increasingly better understood strategies. But I don’t know that everyone understands you were one of the very first people to present this to parents. You’re talking about realizing this stuff when your son was born, but that was at the beginning of this tide that got started to get turned. Just it gives people some context. Your son was born in the nineties, right? And as parents who are maybe millennial parents who we’re raising kids in the 2020s, we get the benefit of the last 30 years of neuroscience, of attachment research has been around since the sixties, but it actually informing mainstream parenting and busting through sort of that iron dome of behaviorism that was so big back then. We all reap the benefits now as parents of all the groundwork that you and a lot of the people working in those decades laid out for us.

Dr. Laura (09:52):

Yes, and we talked about it then. But the wonderful thing along with this turning of the tide is the research that people began to look at it and say, oh yeah, there had been research. Edward TRO is doing his still face experiments. And as you say, I started in grad school with attachment theory as I think you may have. And so it’s not that there wasn’t important research happening then that laid a foundation, but we now have the capacity to do things like use EEGs on toddlers brains and then follow them and see, oh, screen use at the age of two more than an hour a day. We can see the effect on the way the brain functions and even way the brain is built and we can see the difference in the child, how they act at age nine. This is not stuff that we had available to us at that time. So the leap forward in research that has amplified, and I would say that I learn every day, but the general ideas we’re all there, but now we have the research that supports it all.

Dr. Sarah (11:05):

Yeah, yeah. I mean I think we knew back then from the research what we were seeing. They were documenting these phenomenon. They were like Mary Ainsworth Bowlby. They were documenting and proving scientifically that there are real true attachments that are universal across cultures that are happening between the parent child that are formed in very predictable ways. And when there’s interruptions in that process, the outcomes are very predictable and measurable. But now we’re understanding what’s happening in the brains in real time. That’s really explaining what you were seeing, how it happened. That’s so cool.

Dr. Laura (11:51):

And also what we can do now as parents, because I think where the rubber meets the road for any parent is, okay, well this is all great, but Rema, I have a three-year-old who won’t put on her shoes to leave the house. What am I supposed to do? So I think for parents to be able to have the support, as you say, it’s been a whole tide that’s turned, and we do have a different, we’re more curious now about what’s motivating that three-year-old and how we can not just push her around, but in fact nurture her. And we have the evidence that supports it, that actually I think is parents very good sensible information about decisions they have to make in their daily lives.

Dr. Sarah (12:37):

Which is so great because I think because parents are more educated about these things, they get a lot of information, sometimes way too much information, and it is almost like becoming the opposite of, it goes to this other stream of I’m overwhelmed with how much information I have. And also a lot of it is contradicting the other thing. And so I think it’s also equally important, yes, we need as parents to be super educated about this stuff. We don’t need to know everything. We need to know some core basics, and we also need to know what’s noise, what is not important so that we can give ourselves some white space to actually play around with some of these strategies and figure out what works for our kid. Not everything is going to be found on an Instagram post or a Google search or even in the pages of a phenomenal book. You have to individualize it to your kid. And to do that, you got to kind of just get some tools and then play around with it.

Dr. Laura (13:45):

I think in terms of guiding principles, to me it’s all, you start with your own ability to show up with presence and compassion for yourself and your kid, and then you connect. And there are all kinds of ways that we know to connect. You can figure out what works for you and your kid, but then we connect. If you do that, you’re 90% of the way there. And then everything else is just learning. And you can again, have some principles about what works kids need to feel seen. For instance, that’s part of coaching. We know that being responsive and soothing them when they’re upset matters tremendously. So we certainly have a bunch of things that would be a really good place for parents to start. But the principles are pretty simple. It’s all about you show up with self-regulation and you connect.

Dr. Sarah (14:34):

Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit of that. You do a wonderful, wonderful job of distilling some of this stuff down into these sort of like, okay, here’s a lane. I’m not going to give you a million rules. I’m just going to give you a lane. And inside that lane, you’re going to figure a lot of this out on your own. But these lanes you have, can you talk a little bit about the three lanes that you sort of invite parents to walk down in your approach?

Dr. Laura (15:02):

I call it the three big ideas, and we’ve already talked about them. They’re that simple. Now, is it simple to self-regulate? It maybe simple. It’s the hardest thing most of us have ever done when we’re triggered, right? It means you have to work on your past that triggers you. It means you have to have some kind of a practice. For some people it’s exercise or yoga or meditation, and every parent listening and saying, I don’t have time for that. So then the question is, what can you do that’s small? Can you listen to a little self-compassion meditation that Kristen Neff gives you every morning? Just something that keeps you anchored, grounded in a place that you’re not. Because really when you think about it, this whole self-regulation thing, you’re choosing every minute that you interact with not just your child but the world and even yourself, you’re choosing, am I coming from a place of fear? If I am, I’m going to try to control, I’m going to threaten, I’m going to throw my own little tantrum. If I can soothe myself enough, then I can come from a place of love and compassion, even if I don’t know what the next step is. So is it simple? It’s huge, but it’s a simple guideline.

(16:24):

Start with you, self-regulate. And there are all kinds of practices that can support you to do that. Figure out what works for you. That’s the first idea. The second one is I said is connection. It’s all about your relationship with your child. And again, we know all kinds of things. I have what I call preventive maintenance practices that include roughhousing, which is just physical play that gets kids laughing, also releases oxytocin in the system. So you’re building the bond with your child every time you’re laughing with them. That’s one of the five preventive maintenance practices. Another is just one-on-one time. Patty Wipfler calls it special time. I’m not even sure she invented that name. I think it had come from someone else, but I learned it from her. And I have seen that when parents adopt special time, one-on-one time with their kids and do it on a daily basis, even if it’s short, if you’ve got five kids and you can’t, and you can only do it every third day with each kid, then that’s what you do.

(17:19):

But it will always, your child will respond if you haven’t done this before, your child will respond as if it’s an essential vitamin they were missing because in fact, it probably is. It’s a psychological vitamin that every kid needs because the one-on-one time again, creates the safety. It strengthens and sweetens your relationship with your child. Now, I could keep going, but those are just two of my preventive maintenance practices that support the relationship. So that’s the second big idea. And then the third idea is a little more complicated. It’s about how we coach our child to be their best self. And it includes how we engage with them emotionally, how we coach them emotionally, but it also includes the environment. So Maria Montessori famously said, don’t try to control the child, control the environment so the child can thrive. So that might mean you make sure that they’re getting fed before they totally lose it.

(18:15):

If you have a highly sensitive kid, they’re going to lose it. If maybe you have a kid who’s very sensory, vulnerable and they’re at a birthday party or they’re in a shopping mall or just a noisy situation or the lights in the dentist office or whatever, you have to be aware for your unique kid what environments are going to work for them. Some kids need more downtime. All kids need some downtime, but some kids need more than others. We know that screens need to be limited for basically all kids, all humans. Really, that’s a part of the environment that can really throw us off. And so when you think about the environment your child is in, and I think especially well in the summertime, as I’m hearing from parents right now, that my kids just on screens all day because otherwise I have to fight with them about the limits.

(19:07):

So I think using your best judgment about what your values tell you and what your intelligence tells you about what your child needs and setting up the environment so the child can thrive huge. And then the part of the coaching that is emotion coaching, I think is something that parents have the most questions about because most parents have a hard time setting limits and they’re not sure they’re allowed to. If I’m going to do peaceful parenting, then my kid runs wild. Well, that’s not peaceful parenting. Peaceful parenting is we’re responsive to the child’s needs, but it doesn’t mean we let the kid run wild through the restaurant, actually. So we could talk some about what limit setting looks like and what actually helps children, but it really goes back to the experiments done in, well, not the experiments, but the research, the observational studies done in the sixties by Diana Baumrind who said it was a different time, and there are a lot of things wrong with those studies, but meaning everything’s a little kind, kinder and gentler today.

(20:16):

But basically what she said is authoritative. We’re helping the child to meet our expectations by giving them support. That’s very different than being punitive and threatening to get them to meet our expectations. And it’s very different than compromising our expectations. So I said that I base this all on the research that I started with and that I’ve continued to read as the years have gone by and there’s so much more research than amplifies it. But all of that research has been born out by subsequent research, and we know that kids do actually need limits. In the old days, they talked about it as building ego structure. Now, you talk about as building brain structure, right? Dan Siegel has the wonderful prefrontal cortex clutch. He says, if you’re shifting gears between what you want, I want, if it’s an adult, I want this piece of cake, but there’s something I want more.

(21:12):

I want my health, so I’m going to switch gears and go for that thing. I want more and with the kid, I want to hit my sister, but there’s something I want more. I want my mom to not be disappointed in me, and I want my sister to be close to me and for us to have fun together, and I’m going to just switch gears between what I want, what I’m so frustrated. Instead, I’m going to go ask mom for help with my sister’s aggravating behavior. So that’s switching the gears, and by the time they’re 14, I want to go off behind the school and smoke some weed with my friends, but I don’t want to get kicked off the soccer team. So all of this is about developing self-discipline so we know kids’ ability to do this, to switch gears that way, that prefrontal cortex, clutch, prefrontal cortex develops every time a child has a limit set for them, that is an empathic limit. If it’s an empathic limit, they go along with it. If it’s not an empathic limit, it’s just I told you it’s time for bed. Come on. They’re not making a choice to go with you. There’s no brain change there. They’re angry at you. They’re not laying down anything in their prefrontal cortex that’s going to allow them to make a choice that’s going to serve them next time.

Dr. Sarah (22:25):

Right.

Dr. Laura (22:26):

But if you can do an empathic limit and they’re like, all right, I don’t want to stop playing, but dad’s telling me he’s going to read me that, the book we wanted to read, and he says, I can play with this tomorrow. And I get he does it for dad. They do it initially for the relationship, but that doesn’t make them people pleasers. What it does is it’s initially motivating and then it allows them to make the choice for themselves.

Dr. Sarah (22:53):

As you’re describing this, I’m realizing, okay, yes, you have these three paths, these three ideas, and yes, they’re presented as three distinct things, but they all actually interact with one another, right? Because if you want a child to learn, you really want to have that cognitive development, these neural connections made in the brain that helped me to learn strategies to regulate an emotion, inhibit an impulse problem, solve whatever for the brain to be able to make those connections actually learn. Right? Learning is just connecting the dots, connecting neurons together.

(23:35):

They have to feel connected to us or the subject. They have to have some sense of what’s in it for me and why am I listening to you? And in order for them to do that, they need to be regulated and feel safe, and we have to be regulated and safe feeling first. So it’s like it’s kind of all builds upon the first stage. If you can go in with your child in a hot moment, not in fight or flight, you yourself are regulated, you’re going to increase the chance that your child’s brain is going to move out of fight or flight into safety and connection, rest, digest. And that increases the chance for their ability to take in information, have some sense of, I’m interested in this, so I’m going to listen, not listen to your agenda, but listen to what you are going to tell me. My ears are open. Listen, not cooperate just yet. But then if they listen because you’ve engaged them in a way that allows them to feel open enough to hear what you have to say, then you are allowing them to make certain connections. Again, how you present that information is important. They have to have some, it has to speak to their experience, not your agenda. But then we can get someone with our kids that teaches these much bigger skills. It’s building blocks.

Dr. Laura (25:08):

I think every time they choose to use this example, the self-discipline example, they choose to give up something they want for something they want more, not what I want more as the mother, but they want more. That’s what lays down the neural pathways, or you could think of it. That’s what develops the skill and they can build on it.

Dr. Sarah (25:31):

Yeah. And I think parents have been kind of served a bit of a disservice historically because we were talking a little bit about behaviorism before. Maybe we could do a quick little overview on that because behaviorism really, I think oversimplifies, but simplifies the learning process to be like, it’s just about cause and effect. It’s just about if I ring this bell and give you a treat, your brain is going to connect those two things and then you might salivate next time I ring the bell, whether I give you a treat or not, it’s about just sequencing behavior and manipulating the outcome of that behavior. But that’s not really how humans learn. Humans learn through connection and safety. We don’t just learn through repetition and reward punishment connections. It’s not the full picture. And so then parents have been taught for decades and decades and decades, and I think it’s still a relic in our world right now, even though it’s been kind of disproven that if you want a kid to do this, you need to pair this thing with the experience in a way that gets them to make connection super fast.

(26:45):

If you want to teach a kid not to hit when they hit, you need to put them in a timeout so that they learn. Don’t do that. But in reality, because human learning is so much more complex, if we can zoom out and say, okay, well what is the motive? What happened that made my kid the hit is not the actual thing, right? Hit’s not the start of the thing. We have to go back and be like, what was my child’s experience that led them to become so dysregulated that they couldn’t control the impulse to be aggressive? That’s where we teach. That’s the whole point of teaching is the way before moments.

Dr. Laura (27:26):

Absolutely right. And in fact, there’s recent work that’s been done on murder murders in this country, and it turns out that about 70% of murders are like the kid hitting. It just happens when the person is that dysregulated, that same murder would not have happened the next day or if in a different situation. Right now, 30% of them are probably premeditated or whatever, and that person may be thinking about they’re going to get tenure years or life, whatever they’re thinking, but most people are not. When they do something aggressive to someone else, it’s completely because they’re in fight or flight. That person looks like the enemy. And that’s true for the murder, but it’s unfortunately also true for my 4-year-old who’s in preschool.

(28:12):

When you talk about teaching lessons, it makes me think about the assumptions in our culture about don’t pick up that baby who’s crying, you’ll spoil them, or he’s just looking for attention. He’s just acting out because he needs attention. And as if, first of all, attention, which is really connection. It’s a basic human need. Of course, they need attention, connection, and rewarding. That means you’re responding to them. So this whole behavioral idea of if a child expresses dysregulation, they’re hungry, they’re tired, they’re angry about something, whatever it is, and we respond by connecting with the child and soothing them and helping them to feel better, somehow we’re teaching them that they shouldn’t express those feelings. What we think we’re teaching them, they shouldn’t even have those feelings. And we know now that that’s one of the worst things we can do to babies and young children is not respond to them. We know that secure attachment comes from children feeling the parent will be responsive, in fact. So I think the whole behavioral thing is there in our culture, and it’s important to notice as things come into our own minds or someone says something to us, oh, it’s connected to that whole idea, that idea.

Dr. Sarah (29:42):

And that’s the fear, right? Because the fear is if I don’t pair this behavior with a punishment, then I’m not going to be doing my child the service of helping them live in this world and be a functional human and a functional adult. And it’s like that fear is so understandable, but that’s not what we understand now about learning. And so being able to, like you say, self-regulate, recognize I’m in fight or flight, I’m panicking because everyone at the grocery store is watching me as my child is just completely losing it, and I’m feeling fight or flight because I am overstimulated by this intense noise and struggle that my child is. And so I both want to appease the onlookers to make that threat go away. And I want to turn this feeling off my child because it’s dysregulating for me to see them in this much distress.

(30:39):

So we have to really fight against some of our own threat responses in these moments where I feel like your self-regulation idea is so critical, but then we also have to just know some basics about how the brain makes connections, learns new things. If we want our child to not melt down the next time we’re in the grocery store, it’s not about what we do this time in terms of punishing them or reprimanding them. It’s what we do in between this grocery store moment and the next grocery store moment, the in-between time, that’s where the learning’s going to happen. We have to get rid of this idea that we have to parent urgently in this moment. So much of the real parenting is going to happen in the calmer moments in between these triggering times.

Dr. Laura (31:29):

Yeah, it makes me think of Gordon Neufeld says that how a child responds to us is going to be completely based on who we are to them. In your relationship, have you been someone who your child trusts feels safe with, feels as responsive to them, then your child’s going to cooperate with you much more likely even when they’re dysregulated.

Dr. Sarah (31:53):

And even not all the time. And that’s still okay. I think that’s another thing. I hear so many parents think, well, I’m doing the right things right. I’m trying to stay calm. I’m trying to co-regulate late with my child, but they still don’t do what I want them to do and they’re still losing it with me. What am I doing wrong?

Dr. Laura (32:12):

So that holds what you just said has an underlying assumption that says the child, if I show up and I’m regulated and I’m loving and compassionate to my child, my child will act like a mini adult. No, your child is going to act like a child. That’s their job description. That means they don’t have that much prefrontal cortex yet. That means that they have big emotions. That emotion are the biggest thing they’ve ever felt. That means that at that moment when their big brother took their toy, it’s a threat to their very survival in their life. And so the fact that you respond to that altercation between your two kids or one takes the toy, even if you’re able to stay completely calm, self-regulated, soothing, and create safety, it really helps. It keeps the kids from, so they’re probably, even if they’re trying to hit each other, it’s better than it would’ve been if you had not done this.

(33:13):

If you had come in screaming, you should know better give that back to your brother or whatever. It’s going to make everything worse, not just at that moment, but afterwards. The takeaway for both kids is going to be like, well, she likes him more. She let him have the toy. I always have to give everything to him, and that’s just going to make worse altercation next time. So how we intervene if we don’t try to show up in the way that we aspire to, it’s going to make everything worse. That is true. But even when we show up where we can give ourselves 10 gold stars for how we showed up, our kids are still going to be kids. They’re going to be kids, and they’re going to be learning from every experience, but they will. They are calm. Our soothing communicates itself to them, and we’re teaching them skills.

(34:04):

It sounds like you have something really important to tell your brother. Use your words, not your fists. I’m going to hold your hands to help you. And you tell him it looks like you’re very upset that he grabbed your toy. So the child is learning from you in that moment in a way that he would never have learned if you had showed up in a different way. But it doesn’t mean that he’s always going to be able to pull that off. He may be struggling against you now. He may be throwing himself down on the ground and screaming. He may be kicking his brother if he can. He does have to calm down first before he can actually learn what it is you’re telling him. But if you show up this way repeatedly and you get curious about what’s going to help your child to be better regulated, he’ll move in that direction.

Dr. Sarah (34:50):

Yeah.

Dr. Laura (34:51):

And the reason I say about getting curious is that I mentioned a kid who might have sensory issues get overstimulated in certain situations. Maybe you have a kid who has some impulse control challenges, and that kid is always going to have more problems with their siblings. They’re not going to be able to hold it together in those sibling altercations as well as some other kids could because their brain is not quite caught up. But we do know that every single child, I was just looking at studies between the ages of six and 10, every child grows in executive function during that time. Even the ones who have special needs or ADHD diagnoses or whatever, they all become more able to self-regulate during that time. And we as the parents have a lot of impact on that. We do, even when we wish they would be different when we show up as we would all love to aspire to. But if we can increase our ratio of good moments, we do have an impact on our children basically growing their prefrontal cortex faster, actually, those executive function skills.

Dr. Sarah (35:59):

Yeah, I think it’s also so helpful to be reminded by you in this description. It’s the long game. Yeah. Emotional intelligence, emotion regulation skills, prefrontal cortex development. This is a long process. Behavioral inhibition in the moment may or may not happen. But what are we doing in terms of the long game learning? And that I think is an important distinction to make for parents who get confused by this. I think they’re like, I’m doing the things, but in the moment it’s not feeling like it’s working. And then I think it’s helpful to sort of encourage those parents to say, zoom out. Is it working in the long run? Are you seeing patterns that indicate we’re moving in the right direction over time?

Dr. Laura (37:01):

I do think it’s important to acknowledge that sometimes there has to be some cleanup of the past because I do see parents who will say, look, I found your work and I’ve been parenting the way you recommend. I worked so hard to self-regulate and I’m really proud of myself. I hardly raise my voice anymore. And I do your preventive maintenance practices. I connect with my kid and yet I find that my child still has come home from preschool and hit me and have a meltdown and I don’t know what. And of course the aggression is scary for every parent. If this child’s aggressive and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, I don’t know what to do. And my answer at that point is great that you’re amazing that you’ve done everything you’re doing. You’re working so hard on this, and let’s think about it from your child’s point of view.

(37:57):

Let’s get curious about what’s shaping this reaction in your child because your child was conventionally parented until a few months ago. Your four or 5-year-old was being put in, timeout, was being yelled at, maybe got an occasional little slap. And they do not completely, they have a lot of stored up stuff that they couldn’t process before. And the metaphor I use is the emotional backpack that there was anything we can’t process gets put in the emotional backpack. But you could also say it’s just the subconscious. It’s the things I can’t, can’t bear that my mom or dad would actually give me a smack. I can’t bear that my mom or dad screamed in my face and put me in my room and shut the door, whatever the thing is that I can’t bear and I shut it out of consciousness. But that means it doesn’t get healed.

(38:53):

Only the things that we’re able to bring into our conscious awareness have a chance to heal. So sometimes kids will come with baggage that the parent actually has to allow to come out. That doesn’t mean you let your kid come home from preschool and hit you. It does mean that you realize, oh, my kid has something going on here that they need to tell me about. And what we do is we look under the anger for the tears and fears that are driving that anger. Now, maybe it has nothing to do with the past with you. Maybe it’s about what’s going on in preschool. That’s why we get curious. We don’t just assume we know what’s going on. But there are many instances where once you start this kind of parenting where you see your kid needs to cry, they just need to cry, which is what we all need.

(39:42):

Maybe their sibling was born and they never got a chance to cry. Maybe the parents had a really hard time and we’re fighting for a while and they’ve gotten their relationship together and they’re good now, but the kid has some fears about that. So whatever that is, sometimes kids just need to cry and highly sensitive kids need to cry more. And so I always ask parents, how much does your child cry? And often, not very much. And the way to help children cry is simply to get them laughing. I know that sounds crazy, but the more kids laugh, the more well, the metaphor is they siphon off the top layer of fear in the backpack. So now what’s under there has a chance. The more intense stuff has a chance to bubble up. But you could also just say the laughter creates safety. They feel safer with you, and therefore they’re able to show you the tears and fears that are under there. And so helping our kids feel safe enough to cry, not manipulating them into it, but if your kid comes home from school and everything you do is wrong and they know I wanted the blue cup and you always this whatever, there just nothing you do can be right.

(40:58):

At that moment. Maybe what you need to do is set a limit, not arbitrary limit, but a limit. You would’ve said, anyway, no, I’m not going to make you another sandwich. I hear you that I cut this one wrong. This is the sandwich we have. And they will maybe have a total meltdown. And you stay. That doesn’t mean you failed at anything. That means bingo, your child is feel, trust you to be able to show you these big feelings that maybe are there from this morning. Maybe they’re there from last week, maybe they’re from last year. I have seen situations where I’m sure it’s from a past medical intervention that kids have when they’re told they’re going to the doctor or they have something comes up about something related to medical stuff where they cry, and I’m sure it’s about old medical stuff or old separations, trauma. We’re talking about trauma. And so if the parent can show up and say, I’m right here with a hug when you’re ready. I’m right here. Don’t look at me. I’m moving back just to here. I’m right here with a hug. When you’re ready, that kid’s going to be climbing into your lap to finish their sobbing at some point. And you’re going to see your child is, we started this from the question of, well, what if my child still has behavior that’s bad? Well, this is behavior. That’s not what we want it to be. But what we’ll see after a meltdown like this is that then there will be better behavior in between. You’ll get another meltdown, but it won’t be as dramatic. It won’t be as bad. And so the arc of that is going to take your child where your will go.

Dr. Sarah (42:40):

No, that makes so much sense. I think parents, again, these are these old things that we’ve internalized as parents that our job is to keep our child. And the reality is no, the regulation comes. The behavior regulation follows the emotion regulation, but the motion regulation comes from being able to actually express and release big emotions.

Dr. Laura (43:06):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (43:07):

And so really parents’ ability to say, my goal isn’t actually for my child not to have these big emotional outbursts. My job is one to keep people safe. Because I got to do that. And have really clear limits and boundaries and be predictable in how I hold them. And my child can just trust that I’m going to put a container around stuff and they can lose their mind inside of that container. But I’m not going to let them damage anybody, anything or our relationship. That’s okay. That’s all okay. But I think parents are scared of the big release. They think that the goal is to prevent that from happening. And actually what I’m hearing you say, and I totally agree, is that actually the big release can be sometimes the most cathartic and healing thing, especially if we can receive it without freaking out about it.

Dr. Laura (43:54):

I think that tears are always going to be healing. Anger is not in the backpack. Anger is a defense, but the tears are what’s in the backpack that needs to come out. Anger is the body moving, the neurology moving into threat. Threat mode and anger is going to protect us. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how we’re still here as human beings. And it’s okay for our kids to get angry. If we can create enough safety, they can show us what’s under the anger and that’s where the healing happens.

Dr. Sarah (44:31):

And that helps them move through the cycle. The flow of that emotional experience also helps with this emotional intelligence development. I have this feeling sometimes it’s like arousal, right? It’s positive or it’s negative. How many times have we seen a kid get so excited that they lose their mind? Everything falls apart. It’s not always negative, but it’s just activation. They hit a certain threshold and then something else pops out, right? They’ve hit some threshold. I’m really excited. I’m playing with this awesome toy and oh my God, no, my sister took it and she smashed it. And that Lego that I built is now in pieces. So that moment of uhoh goes right into rage. But we don’t want them to get stuck in rage. We want them to then move into sadness and grief. I wanted that. That was important to me. I’m sad about that. And then they can process that and they will naturally move into some new emotional experience that’s like, Nope, I’m excited about something new now. But if we don’t help them move through that cycle, they can get stuck. We do get stuck in anger or stuck in sadness. We got to help them flow through it.

Dr. Laura (45:47):

I think parents have a hard time helping kids with anger because they think they’re supposed to empathize. So the kids in rage and the parent’s like, you are really mad about this. I hate my sister. She wrecked my Lego thing. You hate your sister. The parent, first of all, can’t do that. They can’t echo that. But also the empathy in that moment isn’t empathizing with what’s really going on.

Dr. Sarah (46:12):

Yes.

Dr. Laura (46:13):

That’s just the grief layer. Exactly. It’s the grief. So if the parent can instead remember, oh, under the anger and say to the kid, oh, your Lego thing. Oh honey, it broke. Oh, I’m so sorry. Oh no, that’s so awful. You’re just acknowledging the child’s experience at that point. And the child’s like, yes, it’s awful. But they notice there’s some tears starting in their voice. They’re now shifting. They may still be enraged at that sister for breaking that thing, but they’re starting to acknowledge how that feels inside them. And if we can keep acknowledging they can go there too.

Dr. Sarah (46:53):

That’s the beauty. That’s the moving them through. We get stuck in the anger. We’re all afraid of anger. It’s just we have a society that does not know what to do with it. And we are not modeled. It’s, it’s a whole big thing. That’s why you and I have jobs is because our world, our society does not know what to do with anger. But yes, the parents do. They think I’m supposed to validate the anger. Anger’s a byproduct, go to the grief, go to what they were trying to do that got thwarted, got broken, got interrupted, help them move from anger to sadness, and then they’ll move out of it all. Once they can release that, integrate that. You see me, right? You talk all the time about being seen. You see me, I’m not holding this by myself. Now both of us can hold it. We’re spreading. We’re distributing the weight of this grief between two people instead of making the tiny little body hold it all. And then they can let it go eventually. And sometimes it takes some kids longer and some kids quicker. It depends on the kid you got. But I love that. I think that’s so useful.

Dr. Laura (48:02):

I think that parents are always doing their best. And if we see a situation that gets repeated, that’s life tapping us on the shoulder to say, oh, check this out. Maybe I need to do some work to allow anger to be there and not be afraid of it and not be running the other direction. It scares me when my kid’s aggressive, but maybe I can acknowledge the feelings. And I’m not saying, don’t acknowledge that the child’s angry. That’s completely fine to acknowledge Don’t stop there. Don’t get stuck there. Keep going. And so if you notice that’s an issue for your kid. If you have a kid who is aggressive, a kid who’s hitting, I have seen that hundreds of times get cured by the child being allowed to cry. I swear hundreds of times I’ve seen a child who was not allowed to cry or was not, I would say to the parents, how often does he cry? Oh, every day. And then I would ask a little more and the parent says, well, he starts to cry. And we tell him that whatever. They shut it down in some way and like, okay, well he’s not actually crying. No wonder he’s sitting.

Dr. Sarah (49:18):

You cry all the way. That’s the, not just do they cry, but can they get the cry fully out? Can it be fully released? Yes. That’s a huge, I think that is an actually very important distinction. Yeah, if your kid’s crying, but you are in an attempt to soothe, actually suppressing the cry, like turning the water off before it’s completely finished, flowing out, then they’re still holding it. I always say better out than in. You got to let it all the way out.

Dr. Laura (49:55):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (49:57):

Thank you so much. That’s been just so lovely talking with you. If parents want to learn more about your work, you have wonderful courses, you have wonderful books. Where can we connect them to?

Dr. Laura (50:12):

My website is peacefulparenthappykids.com. It’s a thousand page website. There’s a section for every age child, and you can just put whatever you want in the search box. You’ll find it. It’s a free public service. I have a weekly newsletter that is also free that goes out to 150,000 people. And you could be one of those people if you’re interested in getting a little inspiration every week. It has four articles in it, just the beginnings of each of those articles. And they’re always, there’s something for toddlers or something for older kids. There’s something about self-regulation, whatever. And as you said, I have books, which of course you could find on Amazon or on my website or your local bookstore. And I teach a course, and the course is sort of like a parenting bootcamp in the sense that it takes all of what we’ve talked about today and over 12 weeks, three month period. It helps parents develop these ideas into habits of self-regulation, habits of connection, habits of coaching with their child so they can make these ideas actually work for them with their unique child in day-to-day life. And parents tell me that. I’ve had many parents say to me in their evaluations, I can’t believe this. This was so helpful. More than years of therapy.

Dr. Sarah (51:37):

Yeah. I mean, sometimes it just needs to be broken down and delivered. Right? And I think, yeah, these are wonderful resources. So definitely everyone go check out all of these. We’ll link them in the show notes and the show description, and please come back whenever you want to share your wisdom with us and when book, when the updated edition comes out too.

Dr. Laura (52:02):

Let’s do that. That sounds great.

Dr. Sarah (52:05):

Amazing. Alright. Thank you so much.

Dr. Laura (52:08):

My pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Sarah (52:15):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general. Your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how the show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening and don’t be a stranger.