What If Your Child Doesn’t Need Fixing?

 This week, I’m sharing a powerful collaboration with parent coach and counselor Dawn Friedman from the podcast Tell Me It Will Be OK. She dives into the idea of “judicious giving up” — not giving up on your child, but letting go of rigid expectations, timelines, and the belief that parenting should look a certain way.

In this episode, she explores why the problem may not actually be the problem, how our own “manuals” about parenting create stress, and why growth often happens when we stop rushing to fix discomfort and instead learn to understand it.

She also talks about:

• parenting anxious children
• perfectionism and control
• emotional regulation
• sitting in the struggle instead of avoiding it
• honoring each child’s unique sensitivities and needs
• why kids don’t need fixing
• how parents can approach challenges with more reflection, compassion, and flexibility

If you’ve ever felt like you’re failing because your child is struggling, this episode will give you a completely different way to look at parenting, anxiety, and growth.

You can learn more about Dawn Friedman and her work at Open Book Parenting. 

 Struggling with anxiety in your family? If anxiety is causing tension, fights, or disconnect in your home, you don’t have to face it alone. I help parents bring more peace, confidence, and connection to their families. Let’s talk—schedule a free consultation today or email me: ccoufal@cynthiacoufalcoaching.com

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Transcript

This week, I am so excited to have you listen to Dawn Friedman's podcast.

It's called Tell Me It Will Be Okay. I love the name of that because I think so many parents think that. Like, tell me everything's gonna be okay. And Dawn's topic that she's gonna be talking about is judiciously giving up, and it sounded- it sounds like such an interesting concept. Like, what is that? What does that mean?

It sounds like you are not caring about what's happening. But I looked up the word judiciously, and it means acting with good judgment, wisdom, or prudence. It describes doing something in a careful, sensible manner, often after weighing all options to achieve the best outcome. Oh my gosh, that's beautiful.[00:01:00] 

And what she really means is many times when parents feel like... Well, really, when anyone feels like they have a problem, like when kids would talk to me about their problems, they're like, "Well, I hate school," or I don't- "My teacher is mean," or, "My parents are mean," or, "These friends won't talk to me," or whatever, and they say that that is the problem.

Many times when we dig down into all of the nuance and all the different things that are actually happening in that situation, we can find out that the original thing they said, you know, "My teacher is mean, my parents are mean, these kids won't talk to me," whatever, there's really something else that's going on.

And so in this episode, and it's such a good one, I'm- can't wait for you to listen to it. But Dawn talks about many times parents come to her with, a certain problem, and the example she- one of the [00:02:00] examples she gives in, in her podcast is, "My child needs me to sleep with them," or, "My child needs me to stay in their room until they go to sleep or whatever," and that's the problem.

And that can be the problem, like you don't want that to happen, but when you look at all the different things that are going on, there's so many other... in the end, you may find that's not actually the problem, or that's not actually the thing you end up working with, or the problem that you end up trying to solve.

And so- I think when we're just thinking about this in our lives and, and as young people, um, I think this is a good thing for me to teach my teens and young adults as I'm working with them. And I have been teaching them that, that many times the things that they're coming to me with as the problem are not the things...

And sometimes that's because we have a manual about the world, about people, and we all [00:03:00] have a manual, and we have to be aware that we have this manual. And I have an episode way back towards the beginning about the manual, and I think I'm sure I've talked about it in other episodes because it comes up in so many different situations.

But it's, we think that someone's, someone should act a certain way. Sometimes it's genders should act a certain way or just people should do certain things. You know, moms should be doing certain things, teenagers should be doing certain things, teachers should be doing certain things. And when people don't do the things that we have in our manual as a written rule that they, you know, all teachers should be like this, all parents should be like this, then we feel like something is wrong or off or we wanna change those other people or other situations because we don't like how it's going or we don't think it should be that way.

And it doesn't mean that we shouldn't have standards or ideas about in our lives, you know, [00:04:00] like my partner should have certain qualities or, or do certain things, or I want my children to have certain values or ideas or you know. Those are all fine, but sometimes people are not going to follow our manual, and we need to figure out when do we give up the idea of what someone should be or such...

what a cert- situation should be, and maybe what it is, and how are we gonna work with the reality that's in front of us? How are we going to deal with, well, our kid is this way, and we need to figure out how do we, how do we deal with that? Because this is how our child is, instead of constantly trying to fix or change them.

Because fixing and changing other people never works, whether they're... it's our children or our partners or our parents or our [00:05:00] neighbors. My husband wants to talk to the neighbors about their dogs barking, and I'm like, "Well, you can talk to them about that, and it's fine that you have an expectation that people's dogs don't bark.

But if they don't think that or if that's not a priority for them, you just have to know that when you go have this conversation, it's possible that the other person is not going to care about what your concern is, or they're not gonna- Change their behavior because we can't change or fix other people.

So you just have to think about that, and that goes along with our kids too. And I think that's harder for us to understand or deal with because it feels like we should be able to change and fix our kids and make them into the things that we... You know, we're raising them a certain way so we assume that they're going to be a certain way.

But we know that that doesn't happen. We see it happen to other people, and it's probably happened to us in some situations. Now, [00:06:00] I hope that your child doesn't turn out 100% different than what you were trying to raise them into being, and I don't think that usually happens. But, um, we have to allow for them to be different and what- decide what are we going to fight for and what are we gonna give up in these, uh, parenting situations that we have.

Some of the other things that she kinda talks about is that we want to just fix things instead of go through some of the suffering sometimes that we have to go through to, to have a better, a bigger, greater learning than what we, we would if we just fixed it. Um, and sometimes just fixing something, we don't really get down to what really is the cause or what really is going on here.

And so sometimes we have to go through some suffering, some time of trying to figure it [00:07:00] out so that we can get to the answer. I remember, I don't know even what that episode's called either, but I did an episode about the U diagram, and it has to do with, like, there are dips. Uh, if you think about the letter U and how it goes down and back up again, that there are times in life where, you know, things are going to get difficult and tough.

Um, I've recently been talking to some people who have adult children that have full agency in their own lives and are making decisions that are just really harmful and hurtful and sad and, and the parents so desperately want to fix the problem. And I get it. I would wanna do the same thing, and it's very sad to watch your child sometimes destroy their life.

And I hope that that's, you know, that tho- those are minimal times when people are experiencing that kind of stuff. But [00:08:00] sometimes that child has to experience that U, that going down to the very bottom, getting super uncomfortable before they want to come back up the other side to learning and to healing and to recovery or whatever it happens to be.

And even in our maybe, hopefully, smaller problems that we have with our families- That we're willing to kind of go through those struggles and feel that and experience it to really get to the bottom of what's really going on. And the way one family or one child deals with situations is not the way any other family or child is gonna deal with it.

Sometimes we can make some generalities, and that's great when we can because we can say, "Oh, well, I did it with this kid, and I'm gonna try it with this one, and it's just gonna work again," and sometimes it does. But every person has their own personality, their own [00:09:00] sensitivities, their own gifts, their own everything, own strengths and values, and sometimes those are opposite in our own kids and, the siblings.

Sometimes the parents' values and ideas are completely opposite than their child's. I know on this podcast I've talked about how I very much love and respect my mother, but we have some really opposite views on things. And in our judiciously giving up, we don't talk about those things. I can really enjoy her and talk to her about almost everything in the world.

There's just a few things that we don't, and we've just decided that we wanna get along, we wanna love each other, we want to respect and be kind to each other, and we just have to not go in some directions because neither of us want to change how we feel, which is fine. Nobody should want to change how they feel.

That's up to [00:10:00] them. And so, and just thinking about as you listen to this episode of Dawn's, think about what are some things that you're holding onto that you have rigid ideas about or rigid timelines about, or you wanna be perfect about it or whatever and how are you going to give up some of those things so that you can get to the bigger problem, or you can get some greater learning for yourself, or maybe your child needs some more learning in certain areas.

So, enjoy this episode, and please let me know what you're thinking about this podcast collaboration during the month of May so that you can meet new parent coaches and get new ideas about things. But also, I want you to see how it aligns with things that you've been hearing on my podcast and talking with me about.

It's just kind of like I'm, I want you to know that there are all these other people out [00:11:00] there, and I'm gonna have Dawn's contact information so that you can contact her, listen to her podcast whatever it is that you need for your family, because everyone is different. I'll talk to you soon. 

  Welcome to the Tell Me It Will Be OK podcast. My name is Dawn Friedman, and I've been working with kids and families for more than three decades. I've been a preschool teacher, a parent to educator, a family case manager, a clinical counselor, and now I help parents of anxious kids at Open Book Parenting. That's openbookparenting.com, and through this podcast, Tell Me It Will Be OK. And I can't promise you that it's going to be okay, but I can promise you that the meaning is in trying to figure it out and trying to understand and trying to be the parent we are meant to be and that our children need. And that's ultimately what this podcast is all about. Today, I wanted to talk about a concept I call judicious giving up, and it's something I ask parents to do pretty often, my clinical clients, too. Judicious giving up sounds like giving up, but actually, judicious giving up is a way to let go so we can figure out what really matters and figure out what we want to do about it. Let me explain this a little bit further. When I was a brand-new counselor, not even graduated from my graduate program, I was already seeing clients. The way it works in our training is while we're still in school, we have a practicum or an internship, and then postgraduate, 3,000 more supervised hours where we were meeting with a therapist with additional training in order to watch over us, make sure that what we were doing was kosher, was effective, et cetera, help us discover the kind of clinician that we were going to be in our careers. So that is a whole lot of time that I spent doing therapy before I was a full-fledged therapist. At the very beginning in my internship when I was first doing therapy, I was super excited about being a therapist and fixing everything for everybody. Now, as I mentioned, I was a case manager previously, and case management is very solutions focused. Your client needs bus tickets, and you hand them some bus tickets. Your client needs to fill out an application, you give them the assignment to fill out the application. You oversee them filling out the application. Maybe you even go and find the applications that they need to fill out. It is a very kind of productive thing. You are moving someone through a case plan to get from here to there. In my particular case, I was working with women escaping domestic violence, and so we were looking at housing, how to get housing, how to get on WIC, how to get welfare, how to get on Section 8 housing lists. It was very, very structured, and that felt great because you did the thing. You had a goal, you did the thing. That is how I came to therapy at first. So a client would come to me and say, "I have a problem," and I would say, "Let us fix that problem. Let us come up with a plan to fix the problem." And that is not how therapy works. For one thing, sometimes the problem is not actually the problem. So the client comes to you and says, "I'm coming to therapy because I hate my job." And as a case manager, you would say, "Let's come up with a plan about how to get out of that job and get into this other job." But as a therapist, you first have to figure out, is that really the problem? Is the problem that they hate their job and so need a new job? Or is the problem that they think they hate their job, but really it's that they're stuck in a difficult marriage? Or they think they hate their job, but really they hate their boss. But the answer isn't get a new job, the answer is to figure out why they've stayed there so long, or how they ended up there in the first place, or what does it mean to hate your job? Can they learn to hate their job but love their life anyway? It ends up being much more complicated. So a client says, "This is my problem," and maybe it is their problem, or maybe it is their problem and something else, or something else entirely, and the first whole big part of therapy is figuring that out. Now, I should have known that, because the very first time I came to therapy when I think I was 18 or 19 years old, I reported that the problem I was having had to do with a lousy ex-boyfriend, 'cause what teenager hasn't had a lousy ex that is gumming up the works? But as I dug into things with my therapist, it turned out I had, no surprise, some family of origin issues that I needed to explore, come to grips with, and figure out how that was actually what was keeping me stuck in the lousy relationship that I thought was my actual problem. This is true when it comes to parenting things, too. Parents come to me and say, "I have a problem with my child. My child is having a problem." And maybe that's true, and maybe it isn't. We have to figure it out. And very often the problem is not quite the problem. The problem isn't one that we need to solve, it's one that we need to tolerate and understand and put in its proper place. Maybe a parent comes to me and says, "My child will not sleep alone." And that is a very typical problem for anxious kids. Anxious kids who have some separation anxiety will be struggling to sleep. Generally anxious kids whose brains wake up to their anxiety at night, we all know that feeling of waking up at 4:00 in the morning and worrying about something. Those kids, they wake up, they're anxious, or they go to bed and those anxieties start running around in their brain, and they want us to be with them. The problem is, ostensibly, that the child won't sleep alone. But actually, the problem is bigger than that. It's that our child is anxious, and we have to figure out how we are going to attend to and care for a child with anxiety. That's part of the problem. The other problem is what is happening for us when our child is anxious and does not want to sleep alone. And as we explore that, it will help us understand how we got stuck in that parenting pitfall of laying down with our child every night. It's interesting, not every parent with an anxious child who does not wanna sleep alone ends up laying down with their child every night. Some parents are able to tackle that pattern of anxiety more effectively than others. Some people don't get stuck in it at all. Some people get stuck in it for a really long time. Now, the way I look at things, I don't start with the assumption that the parent should or should not be operating in any particular way, and that allows me to just listen further about what's going on with the family. Because frankly, some parents will come to me and say, "The problem is my child won't sleep alone," and then as we work through this problem, we realize that's not actually a problem for the family. So, the child isn't sleeping alone, but the parent then comes to the conclusion, "That's not where I wanna do the anxiety work. I'd rather do it over in this area. So even though I felt like, as I came in here, I should make my child sleep by themselves, in talking to you, I realize I'm okay with lying down with them every night, but I would like them to be able to get out the door to school a little more easily. I'd rather work on the separation there than the separation here." And you know what? That's fine. There are lots of places that we can explore and work on anxiety. It doesn't have to be in any particular place to start. That is a very personal decision for every family. So the judicious giving up in this would be, let's give up on trying to make your child sleep alone, and instead focus more on the separation in the morning. That would be judicious giving up. I'm giving up in this one area so I can work on this other area. We only have capacity, and when I say we, I mean ourselves and our children, to do what we can where we can. We can't do all the things all at once. Another way we might judiciously give up on making our child sleep alone, that is our goal, that is definitely what we want as a family, is to have a child who is able to go to bed alone and stay in bed alone and sleep through the night, but that's not going to happen right now. It's just too much, and it's too hard for us or for our child, and so I'm going to judiciously give up on that and take it in smaller bites. This might be because our child's feelings about it are too big and too much, and we need to take it in smaller bites, but it might also be that for us, it's just too much. Maybe in the evenings, we're much too tired. I just can't even deal with it. I'm so exhausted at the end of the night, it's just easier this way. So I want it to work, but not yet, not now. And figuring out if it's our issue or our child's issue is part of what we're working on. So if we judiciously give up on that specific goal, say, we're not even gonna tackle that yet, we're just gonna explore it. We're not gonna problem solve for it yet. First, we're just going to try to understand why it's a problem. Is it our child's big behaviors? Do they seem like this is just asking way too much of them right now? Or is it our response to it? Does it trigger some of our own feelings of being alone as a child, alone in our bed during a thunderstorm, or hearing our parents go to sleep and feeling isolated in the dark? Do we have to work through some of that before we can ask our child to meet this challenge as well? That would also be judicious giving up, because we realize the work is bigger and more complicated than we thought. Like my client who comes to me and says, "The problem is I hate my job," maybe that's not the problem. Maybe it's that you thought you could only work this kind of job, and you have to craft a new identity for yourself to be the kind of person who works a different sort of job. Maybe you always thought you were an accountant, and actually, you think you wanna scoop ice cream, but what does it mean to leave being an accountant and become someone who scoops ice cream? What would that be like out in the world? By the same token, we need to understand, how does this change my identity as a parent? If I'm not lying down with my child at night, do I think of myself as less caring or meaner or someone without empathy? We have to look at that. We have to explore it. And again, that means giving up on this is the plan. This is one of my, frankly, many problems- With the sort of behaviorist way we tend to look at parenting. I think this is fueled in part by very one-size-fits-all, quick snack delivery of TikTok and Reels, this belief that every problem can be broken down into tiny, solvable, step-by-step, one, two, three pieces, and my experience in working with thousands of families is that's just not true. I may have 10 families come to me and say, "The problem is my eight-year-old won't sleep alone," and there might be 10 different reasons that are driving this challenge, and every parent needs a unique look at what's happening for them. What is happening for that child developmentally? Where are they in their development? What kind of child are they? Are they more or less sensitive? Are they more or less intense? That's going to color the way their parents parent them. By the same token, who are you as a parent? What are your values that are driving your feeling that this child should be sleeping alone? Why does it matter to you? And I don't mean in a why does it even matter to you? I mean in a why does it matter to you so I can also understand from that values place so that I can deliver support that respects those values, honors those values, and includes those values, because you deserve solutions that fit your family spiritually, emotionally, and in the context of what's happening for you. Right now as I record this, we have just had the time change. We have just sprung forward an hour, and for lots and lots of families, springing forward an hour creates some chaos in their home. They have kids that are very rhythmic, which means kids who really stick to a schedule, or kids who are very tuned in to change and any little detail can throw them off their groove, or maybe the parent is like this. And so that might not be a time to tackle that issue. On the other hand, maybe it is Because your family does not look like anybody else's family. It depends on who else is in the family. Are there other siblings who need specific kind of bedtime support? Are there other siblings who will miss out on much needed sleep if you decide to tackle it with this sibling, and now is not the time to do it? Maybe you wanna wait until the summer because your schedule will be different, or maybe it's better to do it now before summer comes and your schedule changes a lot. Maybe your family is too stressed by other events. Maybe you're very tense right now. Maybe you're concerned about what's happening out in the world, and that's making you feel extra shaky or extra sensitive, or maybe because of what's happening in the world, you want more cuddling with your child right now. The thing about parenting problems is they will reoccur over and over again as we work through them and as we work to solve them. By which I mean, if you have a child who struggles with separation, likely that struggle will reoccur at different times in your parenting journey with them. You might have a three-year-old who sobs when you leave them at preschool, an eight-year-old who wants you to lay down with them, and a 14-year-old who texts you throughout the school day checking in, into a college student who calls and says, "I'm homesick and I wanna come home." Each time, you have the opportunity to revisit that particular crisis for your child and for yourself. I say this not to discourage you, but to say that another kind of judicious giving up is to give up on the idea that this is a one-shot deal, that you have to get it right, and then if it comes up again, it's proof you haven't gotten it right. Instead, every time it comes up, you get to learn about yourself more, your child gets to learn about themselves more, and y- you both get to acquire new skills, not just in the context of your relationship, but in the context of who you are and will be throughout your lives. Judicious giving up means understanding that your child's functioning is not necessarily reflective of your parenting, that good kids with great parents still have struggles, that you can't parent so well that you won't sometimes feel like you're failing, that you'll feel like you're letting your kid down. I must be the worst parent ever, because look at what's happening with my kid. Judicious giving up is understanding that parenting itself is a challenge. It just is. Parenting is a relationship we have with our child. It is also the act of caring for and making decisions about Our child and our family and ourselves. And sometimes we're gonna get it right, and sometimes we're gonna get it wrong. It's all about how we learn from it, how we bring self-reflection to it, how we understand that parenting, like history, may not repeat itself, but it does indeed rhyme. So you get to give up on parenting so well that it will never be a struggle, and instead, you can see the struggle as a message from your child, from yourself, that there's something new to learn here. There's something new to explore. It's not as easy as just getting a new job. You have to figure out, why is this bothering me? What is this about me? Is it crossing the line of my values? Is it triggering some loss in me? Is it challenging my identity of who I thought I was? Is it challenging my idea of what parenting was supposed to be, or who my child was supposed to be? The idealized child I had in my mind, do I have to give up an idea about that? And that's an opportunity for growth. As a parenting so-called expert, my thoughts are that parenting is meant to help us grow. The growing is right in front of you in the context of this relationship you have with your child. That's where the growing is. When you are struggling and you feel like, "This is taking time from me," it is. But that is where the time is meant to go. You don't have to leave the parenting relationship in order to grow. That is the opportunity offered to us in this experience with our child. So even if our child is the problem, they're not clearing the dishes, they're having tantrums and meltdowns every night, they are struggling to get off to school, that does belong to them, but it also belongs to us, not because they're the problem, but because how we feel about it, what it brings up in us, what we try to do, what we fail to do, what we have to understand, that belongs to us. Judicious giving up means we can also judiciously give up on the idea that we can fix our kid. Kids aren't broken, so they don't need fixing. You're not broken, so you don't need fixing. Judicious giving up on fixing means we can just sit in the brokenness to understand more, to understand ourselves, to understand our child. The first place I ask people to start when we judiciously give up on solving a problem and instead commit to being in the problem is, what is going on for you about it? How is this a struggle for you? Why is this a struggle for you? In what way is your child violating your idea of how things ought to be? Or in what way are you violating your idea of what things ought to be? Let's think about what ought to be. What did we expect? What do we have to lose when we give up on that expectation? Judicious giving up, what does it mean when we give up? How can we explore that, understand our feelings about it, grieve the loss of the thing we're giving up, even if it's just an evening alone without a kid hanging on you? Let's talk about it. And then once we've really explored those values, understand why it matters to you, we ask, is this still the goal? And if you say, "Yep, my child needs to sleep alone because I value time to myself, and I need that in the evening. I need that to recharge." Once you understand that, it's a whole lot easier to commit to, "I need this to happen. It's important." And then we explore what are the values that have prevented you from taking action so far. And maybe it's a value of compassion. Maybe you feel like a compassionate parent would continue to lay down as long as the child needs it. And so you have to think about, can I still be compassionate and get time to myself? Is it necessarily cruel to let a eight-year-old sleep by themselves even though they really want you there? We would explore that, and I would argue that helping an eight-year-old learn to sleep by themselves is a perfectly reasonable, developmentally appropriate task. Who is your child right at this minute? Can an eight-year-old reasonably be expected to sleep by themselves? And the answer is yes. We know that. We have scads of information about child development, so we can think about that. Is there a difference between asking a two or three-year-old to do it and an eight and nine-year-old to do it? Of course. Are the skills that we're asking an eight and nine-year-old to build reasonable skills to ask of them? Of course. So then we say, okay, we know our child is capable developmentally. This is a reasonable expectation. But then we try to figure out, I, you know, my kid is more than just every eight-year-old. They're also themselves. So then we explore who is this child? Why is it especially difficult for this child? So that we understand what are the skills this particular child needs. What are we asking of them? The skills this eight-year-old needs might be different than the skills that eight-year-old needs. Maybe this eight-year-old needs to learn some positive self-talk, and that eight-year-old needs to learn how to deal with dysregulation. Maybe another eight-year-old is just kind of in the habit and just needs more practice. So we create a plan based on that particular eight-year-old that meets your values, because everything needs to be in there. And then we come up with our plan based on what we know, the evidence of what is help for kids to get to sleep by themselves, and again, lots of research about that. It's pretty clear, the plans are pretty clear, but how we execute that plan depends on your values and who that child is. We must give up on that big goal and sit in the problem, and that's also judicious giving up, and we do that for every parenting challenge. As you learn th- how to do this process, how to reflect, how to self-reflect, how to explore what it means to you, and who your child is in that moment, and who they always are and have been and will continue to be, it gets easier and easier to make parenting decisions. It doesn't mean executing those decisions gets easier. That can always be a challenge, but the challenge is where we grow. But it does mean you start having the answers in yourself. You don't have to look outwards and have the world tell you what ought to be. Instead, you can rely on this informed, educated, reflective, and compassionate mindset of who you are, who your child is, who you are both meant to be. That is what judicious giving up means. It means slowing down. It means understanding the problem may not be the problem. It means giving up on solving the problem and instead being in the experience of having the problem. Let me tell you that when you change your mindset that way and you no longer see these problems as problems, and instead you see them as part of the whole experience, the holistic experience of parenting, then everything gets a little easier, because you no longer say, "Oh my gosh, I'm failing." You say, "Oh, here is yet another opportunity for growth," and that's a different way of looking at things. I hope this reframe gave you some room for yourself and for your child, and changed the way you approach this as a problem, whatever this is. And if you would like help in exploring problems, I hope that you will reach out. If you found this podcast helpful, it would be great if you would rate and subscribe or share it with a friend who might also learn and feel some support by listening. Thank you so much, and I will see you next time