133. Do You Know The 2 kinds of Love Every Child Needs?

We have two jobs as parents — loving and teaching — and most of us blur them together without realizing it. When you understand which job you're doing in the moment, everything shifts. Parenting becomes clearer, calmer, and so much more connected so that we can love our kids in the two ways our children need the most!

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Transcript

We have two jobs as parents, loving and teaching. And most of us blur them together without even realizing it. When you understand which job you're doing in the moment, everything shifts. Parenting becomes clearer, calmer, and so much more connected.

This is leadership parenting, the two kinds of love every child needs.

Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.

Well, hello, friends, and welcome back to our Leadership Parenting podcast. Today I want to share something that I think can profoundly change the way you see your role as a parent. At least it did for me, helped clear a lot of things up for me. Something simple, something powerful, and something that brings an enormous sense of relief, I think.

It's that we actually have two core jobs as parents, two ways of loving our children. The first is to love them unconditionally, to give them safety, belonging, and connection that never depends on their behavior. The second is to teach and guide them, to help them practice skills so that they can grow and learn how to manage themselves and their world as they become adults.

Both of these are essential. Both are love. And most of our struggle, I think, comes from accidentally mixing them together, trying to teach in moments that require unconditional love, or trying to love unconditionally in moments that really require teaching. And once you see the distinction between these two jobs, I think parenting becomes calmer, clearer, and so much less pressured.

But before we explore these jobs fully, I want to take a minute to just zoom out because understanding why we've been mixing them up will help us release a lot of guilt and pressure that we might unknowingly be carrying.

I want to give you what I call my 90-second evolution of parenting and all of the things we've learned about how to be parents. I think parenting has always been shaped by the world that we live in, right? The current times that we live in.

A long time ago, parenting was about survival. Families were focused mostly on food, shelter, and safety. Children were part of the work structure of the home, and love often showed up as protection, structure for that family, and very hard work. Survival was really the focus. There wasn't space for emotions, emotional coaching. Survival came first.

Then, as life became safer in general, parenting shifted to looking at children's behavior. Experts taught parents to manage behavior through praise or consequences or rewards or withdrawal of rewards and approval. This created generations of kids and then therefore adults who learned how to perform in a certain way in order to belong.

But something else was missing: a full understanding of the developing brain. Now we know more about how kids' brains mature and what's going on in their bodies and their minds. We know behavior is actually communication. We now know that children's brains develop in predictable, immature, messy stages. And we know emotional safety is the foundation for learning. We know connection drives cooperation.

Now, this is an evolution of a hundred years where in those early stages children were seen, not heard. Children were often looked at as belongings, as possessions, all the way to a place in our parenting where it can be a little confusing. We're so worried about putting our focus on children and on how they feel and making sure that they don't feel bad, that they don't have any separation from us, that there's no disruption to our connection.

And it's so interesting to see this pendulum swing. And we've talked about this several times on different episodes because I think it's so impactful to us as parents. I know sometimes the parents that raised us are looking at us like, what are you doing? We never did it that way. Um, sometimes they're in approval of what we're doing, sometimes they're in disapproval of what we're doing.

And I think that's because we really have had phases of parenting education and parenting advice that has shifted and has changed. So I'm gonna call this an evolution in what we know about parenting skills and techniques. And it doesn't mean that the past was wrong. It means that we did the best we could. We were learning and growing.

And what we've learned as we've gone through study and experimenting with different strategies and having thought leaders and researchers bring us new information, it's brought us more clear, more compassionate understanding of what our children actually need from us, which brings us right back to those two jobs I mentioned earlier.

Job number one, it's to love unconditionally. This is the kind of love that I think all of us intuitively know we want to have with our kids. And for our kids, it's that love that says, you belong, you're safe, you don't have to earn approval. Not my approval, not anyone's approval.

This is such a powerful concept, one that a lot of parents themselves didn't experience when they were children from their parents. Not to throw any parent under the bus, because I think all parents really at the heart of what they're doing is they're trying their very, very best. Their intentions are really good. But a lot of times we've been parented in ways that didn't give us that feeling of unconditional love.

Many times in therapy, this is the thing that we're looking at, helping people resolve, getting that sense that you don't have to earn love. You don't have to be a good kid to be loved. You don't have to get approval to be okay.

The truth is, really, you can have parents that taught you this and go out into the world, and it still feels hard to really grasp those concepts. And so it's a therapeutic concept, but it's also just a common base knowledge educational concept that I'm constantly trying to teach. That each of us is whole, we're valuable, and we're wise. And we don't need other people's approval to settle into that deep knowledge of who we are.

Unconditional love is supposed to support that. And as parents, this is our primary goal with our children. We are the one safe place for our kids from now until forever, that they know that their parents love them unconditionally.

Job number two, that's to teach and guide our children. This is where we set boundaries. We help our kids practice skills their brains haven't mastered yet. This is where we help our kids learn right from wrong, help them understand the skills of empathy, help them gain the values that we want to instill in them.

Things like hard work, honesty, reaching out to help other people. This is where we teach kids how to take care of their bodies, learn to shower and do those personal skills, and also to set goals and achieve goals, to take care of the property that they have, right? To clean their room, to take care of their toys, where they learn some behavior is appropriate and some behavior is not appropriate and not allowed with other people because it's hurtful or it's not thoughtful to others.

And layering through all of this is the understanding of what kids can do at certain stages. Because when we try to teach complex skills to children who don't yet have that ability developmentally, it falls flat. Even worse, it can be destructive or difficult for the kids to feel confident. So it set them back in their confidence.

Job one is a big job. Job two is also a huge job. These two jobs are both loving our kids, but they show up very differently. So job one, connection and belonging. It's the love that never wavers, never depends on behavior, never gets withdrawn when things get hard.

Job two is about growth and development. It teaches, it corrects, it guides, it models, it holds for accountability with our kids. All the things our kids need to learn to become capable, emotionally healthy adults.

Okay, most of the stress that we have as parents, I think, comes when we mix these two jobs up. When we make our love feel conditional on behavior, we hurt job number one, that unconditional love. When we're afraid to set boundaries because we don't want our kids to be upset with us, we're failing at job number two.

But when we can hold both jobs clearly, unconditional love in one hand, teaching and guiding in the other, something incredible happens. We feel much more free and capable to do both of our jobs. And this matters because the way our children's brains are set up, they need job one first to help them feel safe and secure before we teach them the things that need to happen in job number two.

Now, when our children come to us, their babies, our expectations from them are so low. So it makes it almost easier, right, to just love them unconditionally. We accept the idea that they don't have to perform, they don't have to do anything, they don't even have to assist us in caring for them.

We love them. We don't judge them according to their mood that day or whether they cried or whether they had a messy diaper. That's not only the training ground for our children to develop close attachment with us, but you guys, that's the training ground for us to get that feeling of what it's like to love a little person unconditionally.

At the roots of all of this is what we call attachment. Unconditional love, that connection, that acceptance, that being there, supporting and giving of it freely, it develops attachment.

And we know that attachment is the security that children's brains need to grow and learn and develop so that they can do the higher level skills that we eventually want them to move into adulthood with.

It's so helpful to really look at your child's brain and recognize that it's not a miniature adult brain. It's literally a construction site. The cells are all there, but the connections, the roads between those cells, they're still being built.

At 18 months, toddlers are wired to explore and say no. At four years old, kids are not wired to share consistently. And yet we're really trying to teach them that, aren't we? At seven, their thinking is still very black and white. And at 10, their impulse control drains very, very quickly.

Then adolescence arrives and the entire system gets rewired. As Dr. Dan Siegel explains in his book Brainstorm, which is an awesome book and helping us understand what's going on in the teenage brain, the brain undergoes massive pruning and reconstruction, which is very messy by design. And kids kind of go back to those toddler years where they're relearning things with a new network, neural network.

It's so kind of confusing for us as parents when it happens. But when you stand back and you see that this is part of the development, it makes so much sense.

So behavior, when it's occurring at any stage, is not really disobedience. It's actually development. And once we understand that, it really helps things change in our mind, in our eyes, so we can more fully fulfill that job number one.

It doesn't feel so much like a challenge against us. It helps us see that we can unconditionally hold our children in love as we're teaching them the things they need to learn stage by stage.

We stop taking behavior personally. We start seeing skill gaps instead of defiance. Do you know what I mean by that? If you have a child who isn't following through on something that you're telling them, instead of seeing it as defiance, when you understand this developmental kind of skill mastery, you can look at it as a gap in their ability to learn that skill.

And we realize then that our child isn't giving us a hard time, they're having a hard time. This is why we need both jobs. One job says, you're safe with me, even when your brain can't handle this yet, and even when it's frustrating to me, I might add, on a as an aside. And job two says, let me teach you over and over until your brain is ready to handle it.

Let me tell you what happened to me last week. I'd spent the last few weeks really pondering this whole concept because you guys, I get this coming for parent coaching all the time with moms where they're trying very hard to understand the behavior that they're seeing in their children.

Oftentimes it's defiance. Oftentimes it's a misconnection. They don't feel connected to their kid. They, their children are not doing the things that they're teaching them to do. And it's so frustrating. It's just, it's more than frustrating. I would say it's probably scary.

These moms that I'm working with have so much love and concern and desire and vision for their children to be succeeding and to master the skills developmentally that they want these kids to kind of march forward with. And when they're not, it feels scary.

Have you ever had that experience? I've had that experience where you're looking at your child and you're thinking, what if they're not up to speed here? What if I'm doing this wrong? What if my child's never gonna learn this skill? And what if I, it's my fault? What if something's so seriously wrong with my child that this is not ever gonna happen?

We get a lot of scary scenarios in our mind. It's because it's such a big important job. Nobody cares about it like we care about it. Nobody has the influence that we have except for us in our children's lives.

And I'm watching parents ping-pong back and forth between just showering their children with love and just trying to infuse that attachment and that connection and trying to follow all those guidelines of validation and allowing kids to feel their feelings and not being too harsh with them and doing all of the gentle parenting, and then really struggling because they're not seeing their kids learning the skills that they need.

And then sometimes they'll waffle back or, you know, like swing back and be really highly focused on getting those skills learned and get maybe a little bit harsh or a little bit demanding and feel a disruption to their connection with their child and just feel like they're failing at both jobs without even realizing that they're actually doing two separate things.

So when I'm able to put this into categories, it just started to make so much more sense to me of how I could talk about it with parents.

And as I explain this to parents, I you can kind of see a light bulb go off. And I hope that this is maybe helpful for you too, that it sometimes feels like you have to sacrifice one for the other, right? Like I can't do both of these at the same time.

And I think when you separate them, you start to see how you can and how important it is that you do.

So I've been spending the last few weeks really pondering this whole concept and how to teach it, how to teach it so it makes sense. These two jobs of parenting. And I thought I had it figured out, you know, like I understood it intellectually.

Then I had an opportunity to have a whole bunch of my grandkids with me for the weekend. And I'm Mimi now, that's what they call me. And being Mimi is this beautiful, humbling experience because I get a second chance to kind of practice what I've learned and with more wisdom and perspective than I had the first time around.

And of course, as a grandparent, I have breaks that you moms don't have. And I remember that feeling. And so it's this really lovely opportunity to be in these little children's lives and be a gentle influence and not have the full responsibility.

But when you have them for a whole weekend, then all of the responsibility is on me, right? Like I have to do a little bit more of the parenting. I have to make sure the kids are safe. I have to follow through on the things that their parents want them to know and learn and do, and make sure that um I'm also loving them deeply so they feel that connection.

So there I was on a Saturday morning feeling pretty good about myself because we'd gone through almost a whole day together. And I had my little two-year-old with me for the morning. I think my husband took the other kids to get donuts or something fun.

Anyway, I made my two-year-old this very perfect green smoothie that he wanted, right? Spinach, banana, almond butter, the whole thing. I was feeling very competent, very calm, very, I've got this. We were having a great morning.

And then as I was sitting next to him and we were talking and laughing, and he was drinking his drink that I happened to give him without a lid on it. Um, my fault, my fault. He wanted it just as it was. I was sitting right with him.

And out of nowhere, he took the cup, looked at me, and threw it across my kitchen. Like, not just down, threw it down. He threw it across the table, across the bar, across my kitchen.

It went everywhere. The walls hit the cabinets and the floor. Green smoothie went everywhere, dripping down.

And I felt that surge, that frustrating, angry, overwhelmed surge inside. Heat rising up in my chest, my jaw tightened, and the thoughts came rushing in like a train, right? No, sir, you know better than that. What were you thinking? I just made that for you.

And that was going through my head. And instead, what I said was, you can't do that.

And he looked at me with these beautiful big brown eyes that he has, and I could see he didn't understand why my voice had that edge to it.

And right there in that split second, standing in my kitchen with green smoothie dripping down my white cabinets, it clicked. He just did do that. He literally just did the thing I said he can't do. And he doesn't know better yet.

His little brain, that beautiful under construction two-year-old brain, has not filed away all the things that his parents have told him or that I've told him. He wasn't thinking about consequences or social rules or Mimi's white cabinets. He was thinking nothing at all, not the way I think.

And I realized this is it. This is the same moment all of you guys have. All those weeks of pondering the two jobs that parents have, and here I am standing in the actual test of it. How can I love him unconditionally and still teach him?

So I took a big breath and I thought, I can feel frustrated by immature brains. I can feel overwhelmed and tired and like I just want five minutes where nothing gets thrown or spilled or broken.

And by the way, remember, I only had him for the weekend. So you guys are in the trenches all the time. I was too, and you kind of forget. And this is the best thing ever for me as I work with moms to have these refreshing experiences.

But I felt all of that. And I can still love him wholeheartedly. I can still show him that love, even in this messy, sticky, frustrating moment. Both things can be true at once.

So I got down on his level. I regulated my body first because he's not going to learn regulation from a dysregulated me.

And I said, that was a big throw. The smoothie went everywhere. Let's clean it up together.

And we did. He helped me wipe the floor. Well, he mostly pushed the paper towel around and made it wetter, but he was there with me and I kept my voice gentle and I said, When we throw cups, it makes a really big mess. It's a lot to clean up.

Now, will he remember this tomorrow? Probably not. I wonder if when I get really frustrated with kids, if they even understand what it is we're frustrated with, right? Do they put those two things together?

I know this sounds a little disrespectful, but I've learned so much about child rearing from training my puppy. What I learned when the dog trainer came to help us train Bella, our dog, that our kids grew up with, what I learned from her was that the puppy does not put together the things that they did wrong and our anger.

The things they did wrong in the moment is gone. Our anger feels personal to the puppy. And so any kind of harshness, um yelling, punishment isn't effective when you're training a dog.

You know how you train a dog to go potty outside, to come when you call them, to stay where you want them to stay? It's to catch them doing the good thing and praising them.

And by the way, what started off all the training was understanding very clearly how long could a puppy hold their bladder. It was important to understand the developmental stages of a dog so that when they're chewing on things, you understand that that's not disobedience. That's actually them teething, right?

I also learned that my dog paid much more attention to my expression and the tone of my voice than any words that I said. They get the feel of you. Children are no different.

To understand what developmentally they're able to do. We want to interpret their behavior appropriately. We don't want to assume defiance when they're probably going through a developmental stage.

And our regulation sets the stage for their regulation. And we know from human development and the study of the brain that children don't learn when they're dysregulated. When they're afraid, they might obey. But deep learning only occurs when they feel safe.

So as I was cleaning up that mess, I thought, will this little guy remember this tomorrow? I don't think he will. Will I have to teach him this again? Will his parents have to teach him? Oh, yes. 200 more times, maybe thousands of times over the next few years.

And that's exactly what we're supposed to do as parents and as leaders to our children.

Because at age four, he might stop throwing his cup at Mimi's house, but he'll still have a complete meltdown if I say no to a toy at Target. At age seven, he might be able to manage his disappointment at the store, but he might fall apart when his best friend doesn't invite him to a birthday party.

At age 14, he might throw down his bat on the baseball field when he strikes out. Not because his parents haven't taught him, but because his brain still hasn't matured enough to manage those enormous emotions in that high pressure moment.

And here's what I kept thinking about as I wiped Green Smoothie off my cabinets. If I had yelled at him that morning, if I had let my frustration and my outrage take over and raised my voice or shamed him or made him feel small, I would have hurt job one.

I would have taught him in that moment that my love has conditions, that when he messes up, he's not safe with me, that his worth depends on his behavior.

And I would have lost a chance to do job two really well, which was to actually teach him, to model for him how a regulated adult handles frustration, to show him that we can clean up our messes together.

Both jobs matter every single time. And standing there, paper towel in hand, two-year-old helping me, that's in quotations at my feet, I felt this wave of gratitude because I got to practice what I've been preaching.

And it was hard, really, and I didn't do it perfectly. But I got it in that moment.

Now I want to be really honest with you about something. It's a lot easier when you only have the kids for a weekend, when you know there's an end in sight, when you're not doing this day in and day out, when you get to send them home and collapse on your couch.

And that's the reality for most of you listening. You don't get to do that. You're in it every single day. The breakfast battles, the homework struggles, the bedtime negotiations, the sibling fights, over and over and over.

So we're not pretending that this is easy or that you're gonna do it all the time or do it perfectly. I didn't do it perfectly.

On that Saturday morning, there was an edge in my voice at first. I was overwhelmed. I was shocked. My first response was defensiveness.

There are gonna be days when you lose it completely, when you yell, when you might even shame your kids, when you do the exact thing you told yourself you wouldn't do. It's gonna be an up and down thing with lots of learning and lots of repair. Repair is the best thing ever.

But here's what I want you to hear. The concept we're talking about, these two jobs, this is your anchor. When you can see your path clearly, it's so much easier to stay on it.

And when you fall off, because you will fall off, you will know how to get back on.

You know when there's something that you let yourself down in or your parenting down in, what which job you kind of didn't do, and you know how to repair it.

You can go back to your child and say, I got frustrated and I yelled and that wasn't okay. I'm so sorry. You're learning, I'm still learning, I love you, and we're gonna try again.

That's repair. That's job number one coming back after job number two went sideways.

And that's what I want for you too. Not perfection, but clarity, not getting it right every time, but knowing which job you're doing in each moment and doing your best to honor both.

Because our kids and our grandchildren, they need both of that kind of love from us.

Now that you understand the two jobs and why they matter, I want to talk about the internal shift that's required inside of us.

We need to take our kids off that imaginary timetable. You know the one, the one that says they should have certain skills by certain ages? That timetable is built from comparison and what I think is fear.

So let me invite you to think about this differently. I like to look at the timeline of raising our kids from a much wider lens.

We have them for 18 to 20-ish years, right? In those years, we have a list of skills and capabilities we want them to learn.

If you haven't thought of it that way, I invite you to take a minute, write down the things you want your kids to know when they leave your home, when they're fully an adult.

My list looked something like this. I wanted them to know how to manage their emotions, to not fly off the handle in anger when something didn't go their way.

I wanted them to be kind, thoughtful, to think about others' needs, to be empathic, generous, honest, brave to stand up for what they believed in and to even know what they believed in.

I wanted them to be able to see the big picture rather than only the problem that was in front of them at the moment.

I wanted them to be grateful and self-motivated, to make their bed, brush their teeth, hold the job, do hard things. Oh my gosh, I could go on a lot longer, but isn't that a huge, long list?

I don't make that list or ask you to make this list to get you overwhelmed. Rather, I want you to get a glimpse of your job, what's expected of you. It's so huge.

And if you think that feels big for you, think about how big it is for our kids.

Here's what gives me hope and optimism. We have such a long runway to learn these things. 18 to 20 plus years in our home, in our care, to help them learn these things.

Now, some of your kids are gonna learn them fast. You might have an eight-year-old who's pretty much doing more than half of those things. She might be able to manage her emotions and see the big picture and share her last cookie with a sibling who didn't get one because she's already feeling empathy, probably way before she should be able to developmentally.

Did you have a kid like that? Do you have a kid like that?

Some of our kids are gonna learn these skills early, easily. So exciting. Makes us feel so good as parents, doesn't it?

But what about your kids who haven't been able to get there yet? They're not on the fast track. They're 11 or 12 and still not able to manage their emotions well, or maybe they're still very self-focused. They have a hard time sharing. They can't quite seem to be happy for others who win when they didn't win.

It feels so disappointing sometimes. It could be embarrassing. It's scary to us as parents. I get that a lot as we're working through coaching issues or problems or things that worry us with our kids.

We can even get stuck pushing our kids forward faster than they have the ability to go. And that's when parenting feels hard, I think, and kids feel bad and when our connection starts to struggle.

But here's the thought I want you to remember. What if we gave every child the full 20 years to get these skills?

When I thought of it this way, I literally could just breathe again.

One child might be half through the skills we want them to have at age eight, and another is just gonna take the whole 18 to 20 years to get those same skills.

And what if that's okay? Because do we really have another choice other than to go at the pace our child is able to go?

That's why I love being able to settle into job one and just accept our child where they are. Let that be okay. Love without condition, without comparison. Let them be right where they are.

Take a breath and then use job two to set out a deliberate path to teach those skills one by one.

Given a little longer time frame, some of the pressure lifts. We get to do both love, accept, and teach.

Your child will get there. But it might take the full 18 years. It might even take longer. Your job is to stay steady beside them, not push them ahead.

We need thicker skin, I think. So other people's opinions don't push us into reactions that harm our connection with our kids.

You have the fully developed brain. I have the fully developed brain. Even our friends whom we might feel pressure from, they have fully developed brains. We need to use those brains to lead.

We were built for resilience, and relationships can mend when we're struggling with our kids, even.

I think we stop asking our kids to make us feel like good parents. That is not anywhere in their job description.

It's only in ours to love our kids unconditionally and lead them with steadiness, clarity, and compassion.

When you hold job one and job two clearly, unconditional love in one hand, and what I'll call teaching love in the other, something incredible happens. You feel free.

You realize you can love your child fully and hold boundaries. You can correct behavior without withdrawing warmth. You can stay connected even in conflict.

Their growth becomes something you guide, not something you pressure, because your love stops being something they earn. And their behavior stops being something you need to feel okay.

Keep this in mind. Job one, love, connection, safety. Job two, guidance, teaching the boundaries.

Let them work together like two wings of the same bird. Love lifting, the teaching that is steering. Love anchors, the teaching guides.

And when you honor both you and your child feel secure, and something else happens almost quietly but profoundly, I think you start to enjoy parenting again.

Because now you're free to do the hard parts, the repetition. Oh my gosh, so much repetition, right? The boundaries, the teaching, without losing that loving connection.

You're no longer parenting from fear or pressure or timelines. You're parenting from clarity and compassion.

And when you feel safe and steady, your child feels safe and steady. That's how you build a resilient relationship, one that grows through the messes, the emotions, the teaching moments, and all the years ahead, your runway to get all that done.

As we close, as you move through your week, I want you to remember this. You and your child are both growing. There is no rush. There really isn't.

Parenting is not a performance. Not for you and not for them. It's a relationship. It's messy. There's no perfect timeline.

I know your heart is longing for peace, for freedom from all that pressure, for connection with your child that doesn't depend on them hitting certain marks and things going well.

And here's what I want you to know: you can love them that way and also teach them with purpose. You can do both. Be soft and strong, patient and firm.

So take a deep breath with me. You're not behind. You're evolving. You're doing this sacred, hard, beautiful work of raising a human being and becoming more whole, a little more confident, and joyful in the process.

That is real leadership and that is real love.

Play around with this idea. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. You can always reach me through email, Leigh at LeighGermann.com. I believe in you guys. I hope you have a great week loving and teaching your families. I'll talk to you next time. Take care.

If you feel like these ideas really speak to you, but you're not sure how to actually apply them in your own life, I want you to know you don't have to do it alone.

I'm currently opening a few one-to-one coaching spots for moms who are ready to go deeper and get personalized support as they build their own resilience. This is where we take everything we talk about here and we tailor it to your life, your story, your goals.

If that sounds like something you're craving, just head to legermann.com and click on one-to-one coaching. We'll set up a free call to talk about where you are, where you want to be, and whether coaching is the right next step for you.

You can always find me on Instagram at LeighGurman or on my website at legermann.com.

The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It's also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances.

Thanks again and take care.