Navigate Power Struggles While Balancing Validation & Boundaries with Children

Show Notes:

Tired of having arguments over every little task that needs to be done? Do you ever find yourself struggling to validate your child's emotions without encouraging unwanted behaviours? 

This is Part 2 of my series on power struggles. In this episode I explore the balance between acknowledging feelings and taking action. I tackle the importance of empowering children to be independent thinkers while teaching them to respect others.

You'll learn  how to support your child's emotional regulation and social emotional well-being while reinforcing your role as their adult guide. 

Listen in to learn and get some tools to help your child navigate their emotions and become a resilient, respectful individual.

Transcript: This Transcript has been edited for readability

Hello and Welcome to Tara's Take a place for parents and caring adults to listen to a fresh take on parenting, education and life with kids rooted in experience, expertise and a deep commitment to life-long learning.

I’m your host Tara Gratto and I’ve spent the last two decades working with children and families in a variety of different roles and responsibilities as well being the parent of two amazing and distinctly unique middle schoolers.

Along the way I've discovered there are things parents never learned that are helpful to understand, topics in education that need more discussion and elements of life with kids that need to be talked about more openly.

My goal is to help parents and caring adults build skills and tools for emotional regulation and social emotional well-being that are fun, effective and will support you and your child’s unique needs. As part of this journey I wrote a comic picture book called The Adventures of Team Brain.

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Review: What Might Be Fuelling Your Power Struggles with Children

This episode is a continuation of an idea I introduced in the last episode, What Might Be Fuelling Your Power Struggles with Children. In that episode I talked about the idea that sometimes we launch into problem solving mode in difficult moments and try to talk our kids into doing what we want with logic and rationalization. We just want them to do the thing and we try really hard to convince them in an effort to avoid pushback or as a way to calm them down. The reality is talking isn’t an effective tool in those moments.

Part 2: What About When Children Just Need to Do the Thing? 

Today I want to talk a bit more about the other piece. The one where not every moment can be a big feelings moment (that doesn’t mean you don’t still validate the feelings, I just mean you can’t always have those feelings taking over). This is a skill that takes time to develop. Building those internal tools to recognize the feeling and move through it is a trajectory that requires some intentional skill building and development. It also requires some reflection and action planning. You can’t stop the cycle if you don’t really know the cycle is happening.

So even though I talk a ton about feelings and emotional regulation I don’t subscribe to the idea that one can have extensive feelings about absolutely everything or at least in a way that they take up so much space you can’t function. To me that isn’t actually making space for feelings that’s actually avoidance or something I like to call unintentional reinforcement.

The goal is to validate the feelings without reinforcing the unwanted behaviours. In my successful parenting program, Building Resilience Through Kindness, I dig deeply into the topic of unintentional reinforcement because it has some layers that often bring about a lot of aha moments for parents. It brought a lot of aha moments for me when I first learned about it.

Reflection from Part 1

In the last episode, What Might Be Fuelling Your Power Struggles with Children, I asked you to reflect on your reaction to power struggles. When your child is pushing back are you taking their behaviour personally or perhaps using a lot of talking to get them to understand your point of view in hopes that talking more will lead to their agreement.

If you’ve done this reflection you likely have taken the next step in realization that talking more does not lead to greater compliance, it only leads to greater conflict or bigger behaviours (for both you and your child).

It’s easy to do, I do it all the time and have to catch myself. I literally had this conversation with my husband last weekend, as my kids shift into a new stage of development I’ve been caught in the ‘convince you rabbit hole’ once again and I just need to focus on validating the feelings, stepping back for a moment or five and then moving forward with the actions. In this stage of parenting (pre-teen/teen) I’m also really transparent with them about the fact that I’m doing this. When they were younger this was not part of how I approached this particular challenge. This is a great example of how your approach to similar challenges needs to look quite different as your children grow and develop.

As I mentioned last episode there is nothing I can actually say that will convince anyone to do something they don’t want to do no matter how old they are or just because they are a child and I’m adult. This model for parenting and adult-child relationships is no longer effective because relationship dynamics are different. When you make an effort to remove threats, bribes and punishment from your parenting, you have to shift your approach. So in an effort to avoid losing your cool, to being supportive, to acknowledging feelings, it’s easy to do things like talk too much, but the thing is, that’s not actually solving the problem and in fact its probably making it a bigger one.

Three Things to Tackle in Reducing Power Struggles  

The problem to tackle is three-fold, the feelings need to be validated, the thing, whatever it is, still needs to happen and children need to learn why listening to adults is important. When I speak to educators, parents and other caring adults, like coaches, one of their biggest complaints right now is a lack of respect, increasing aggressiveness and an unmanageable level of push back on doing everyday things.

As we move to empowering children to be advocates and independent thinkers sometimes they are learning that their opinion matters more than others and that they only need to do things that are fun. More on that last one in a future episode.

In standing up for oneself or engaging in a disagreement children need to be taught this does not mean devaluing another person and that many adults have a lot of lived experience to shape their perspectives. This is not to say adults exist as know-it-alls, but it certainly does not mean children are either. Mutual respect is important, lived experience is also important and I think some of the efforts being made to support children right now are being done in a way that devalues adults. Which is making for situations where children aren’t listening to adults. There are layers of nuance to this, an entirely different episode’s worth, but for now, let’s focus on the three layers.

Layer One: Validating the Feelings 

First, validating the feelings. This is knowing the difference between saying things like: suck it up and only babies cry (emotional suppression) and understanding that you don’t have to like your feelings to still do the thing. And that some feelings can’t take up space in that moment in time. Here’s the potential mic drop moment. It doesn’t matter if you agree with your children’s feelings or if they make sense to you or if they feel silly or downright annoying. If you are aiming to reduce your power struggles while validating feelings with some actionable tools, all feelings matter BUT that doesn’t mean feelings should not be an obstacle. They are a warning, a guide, a cue… they are not a wall and you also can’t convince someone to feel the way you want them to, that’s isn’t your choice. That’s a hard pill to swallow as a parent.

If you’ve been in my world for a while you know I used to call this podcast Raising Resilient Children with Tara. This would be a good example of fostering resiliency. The importance of validating feelings without letting them hold you back from doing the thing, whatever that thing is. Going to school, brushing your teeth, turning off the video game, get back up after falling down and keeping at it instead of going home…

So on a practical level how do you do that? How do you validate the feelings without having them take up so much space or have every little thing become a big thing?

Well first, stop over-talking and focus on building tools for emotional regulation where things like feelings validation can look like a lot of different things ranging from simply identifying the feeling happening to needing some tools to de-escalate that Dino brain. If you want to take this concept to the next level, I invite you to check out my 1:1 support or look at the RRC Resource Centre because this is part of what I teach in those spaces. You could also grab The Adventures of Team Brain because that will get you started in the process.

Layer Two: Building Independence Over Time 

The second piece is about connection, relationships & fostering independence as a trajectory. I recognize that sometimes we just need to make decisions and our children just need to do the thing. How are you actively fostering and developing a relationship based on support and connection with an understanding of what parents and adults know and do versus children. The extension of this is taking the time to build an understanding with your child about doing uncomfortable, boring and necessary things and why sometimes adults make seemingly unfair rules, decisions and so on.

This is the part that is most likely missing in your current dynamic. And, the important thing to note is that there’s more to this conversation than ‘because I’m an adult.’ If you want this to be something that you’re children get on board with it’s something that takes time to teach and will require you taking a step back to figure out situations where your child does have control and where they do not and maybe some reflecting on why. It will also take some time reflecting on how you are currently communicating your role as their caring adult outside of tricky and difficult moments.

Here’s the thing, nobody likes rules and responsibilities that are made up in the moment.

Adults make up a lot of rules in the moment because that’s when they realize their children are pushing too far or doing something they shouldn’t or need to be doing something. This is also where threats, bribery and punishments come into play.

Ultimately this is why I’m having this conversation. Those elements are ineffective at getting the outcome you need while also fostering a respectful and connected relationship with your child. This is the difference between power struggles and adult-child relationships. Ideally we want children to listen to us because they want to and understand the value of our experience and expertise not just because they have to or are afraid not to.

As a long time educator there is something significant I’m noticing about most parenting advice I’m seeing out there, the missing ingredient in many of the recipes. Most of the models require an understanding that the things you are changing are all related to skills or the skill building process. They will take time.

In this case, building a solid foundation for independence is a trajectory, a really long one. In the culture where I currently live the magic deadline is 18 years or so but, in terms of brain development we are talking 20-25 years. So as we build our child’s independence and work towards supporting the development of their executive functioning skills (things like impulse control, decision making, organization, time management, emotional regulation), the truth of the matter is sometimes we need to make top heavy decisions they don’t have to like, but need to do. How we communicate this is an essential component of reducing our power struggle dynamics.

On a practical level, to do this you need to actively strike a balance between the spaces where your child has a strong sense of control and autonomy over decision making and choices and then spaces where you are clearly communicating they don’t. Actually in both situations you need to be clearly communicating the difference (not in tricky moments. I know I say this a lot but it’s essential). This means they don’t get choices over everything and it also means there are going to be decisions you make they don’t like. Don’t fall down the rabbit hole of using logic to dig yourself out of those situations, validate the feelings while holding the boundary, limit or decision.

If you want a deep dive into the concept of choice overwhelm and age appropriate choices I’ve discussed these ideas in a in a few episodes, but to get you started you could check out Is Saying 'Be Careful' Really Not Specific Enough? That episode looks at a how we manage risk and age-appropriate independence and where we are removing children’s skill building opportunities and then other one is called Giving Children More Choices Might Be Making Your Power Struggles Worse. That one really digs into choice overwhelm, increased anxiety and freeze brain.

Now something I’ve noticed as a bit of a snap shot on this topic as a whole: we tend to give younger children too many choices and older children too few. We need to flip our approach.

I also recognize the messaging and research out there is a bit misleading because it’s often shared in a way where there is an assumption that parents understand the nuance or a belief that children are intuitive and understanding well beyond their abilities. This is not to say children aren’t smart and intuitive, they totally are, but I think we put a lot of pressure on them to be wise beyond their years. I also don’t see how we can just put all children in one bucket. There’s such a range of differences as children grow and develop.

There is so much complexity in decision making, in being able to weigh one’s options, to resist impulse to make the better decision for our body and mind. Decision making is a skill that needs to be developed over time and we need to build skills incrementally.

Ultimately as part of the process you need to reflect on the types of choices you give, when you give them and how you are working on intentionally fostering independence and autonomy in a way that reinforces where they have control and where you do and why those two spaces are different. If you currently give children choices to avoid power struggles or talk them through situations in hopes of getting them on board with this narrative, I suspect the missing pieces are building some essential life skills for emotional regulation and fostering some conversations about why caring adults do things that children have to do, but don’t always like.

I think on any given day I might do an even amount of tasks that I don’t want to do with ones I want to do and, I love what I do, but the reality of living and working is that not all of life is fun, exciting or entertaining. I think we’ve lost track of the idea that completing tasks and mundane actions can be  rewarding and valuable. It’s just not fireworks and shiny objects.

Okay, so let’s loop back to how we can strive to strike a balance. If we want children to accept your decisions without engaging in logical and rationalization rabbit holes and without them losing their minds, you have to do some work in calm and connection (that means not in the tricky moment) to build this understanding.

This looks like two different things. With younger children in particular we reflect on where they are in control. When is it a kid choice and what do those spaces look like. It might also look like ensuring there are spaces like that. Again the goal here is not to be using tricky moments as the teaching space for the kid choice/adult choice because that’s not going to work. It’s having those conversations and little comments outside of tricky moments on an ongoing basis.

Layer Three: Building Respectful Adult-Child Relationships

The other piece is one you build over time and it’s the idea that different people have different roles or responsibilities. I have a mini-lesson called Parent Job - Kid Job - Friend Job inside the RRC Resource Centre and it’s a framework for guiding conversations with children about why sometimes we make the decisions we make and how we understand they don’t always like those decisions. It gives you a solid answer to their ‘why’s’ without getting caught in the cycle of conflict, over-convincing & ultimately power struggles.

I know some of you are thinking… Why do I need to have this type of conversation? Isn’t it obvious?

Well here’s the thing, it’s not obvious until you make it that way. Children are awesome and intuitive, but they are also learning and growing and you are implementing strategies with them that have never existed before, so the best way to remove any confusion is to create a clear baseline that removes  any possibilities of misunderstanding, misinterpretation or assumption (yours or theirs).

Reflecting back to something I said earlier. If your aim it to use less threats, bribery, lose your cool less (in other words yell less) and to never cause physical harm you have to change your mindset around why children should listen to adults and what they understand about your role and relationship with them.

The reality it, most people grew up in homes where they feared adults, at least a little because they held the keys to power or punishment. Now, when you remove that element, there’s a really important part here. You have to build adult-child relationships differently. I think part of the message being lost in this approach is that this does not make children and adults equals in terms of the experience or expertise. It makes them both equally human and valuable.

As I say to my children, you can have your feelings, it does not mean you can be unkind to me. You can show me that I am wrong, it does not mean you should do this disrespectfully. You don’t have to like all your teachers, but you do need to listen to them and when you disagree with them, use kindness. Being right about something doesn’t mean it’s okay to be mean. This is a two way street.

Reflection & Actionable Takeaway

So your goal this time is to reflect on where your child has control, what does that look like and how are you positively talking about it (in other words,  reinforcing it).

In a tricky moment, the idea of do as I say works a lot better when children know of some spaces that they don’t have that dynamic. We need to make sure those spaces exist.

The other piece is, how are you actively building tools for emotional regulation and social emotional well-being to support the feelings (yours and theirs) without having them take over.

Finally, how are you putting in place some language to explain what the role of caring adults is, what the role of children is and how sometimes your job in protecting their physical and mental well-being is asking them to do things they may not like, but need to listen to. Again these conversations will vary by age and stage, but there are ways of having age appropriate chats along the way as you intentionally  build skills and tools for independence and autonomy while supporting feelings and still getting out the door on time.