Rethink Your Rules
Dr Jenny Hobbs is a practicing physician with ADHD, a wife, and a mom to differently wired kids. She combines candid, insightful conversations with practical tools to help you enjoy better relationships at home, at work, and with yourself.
Rethink Your Rules
Your Job is to Help Your Kid FEEL The Feeling. Not to FIX It.
Do you ever wonder if putting your child's feelings first means letting go of boundaries? In this week’s episode of "Rethink Your Rules," I challenge the conventional wisdom that prioritizing emotions leads to chaos.
I’ll clear up some of the most common misconceptions about “Feelings First,” including the fact that acknowledging your child's feelings does not mean you have to fix them or take responsibility for them. Rather, this style of parenting is about creating a supportive & safe environment, which does NOT require you to agree with their point of view or fulfill illogical demands. You can allow emotions while also maintaining your boundaries and expectations.
This episode provides practical insights into responding to your child's feelings in a calm, confident way. It’s perfect for parents of neurodivergent kids…and really for anyone trying to improve their emotional intelligence.
_________
Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help:
https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult
_________
Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
Welcome to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. A fresh perspective on relationships, success and happiness for high achieving moms.
Speaker 2:Hey, there it's Jenny. Welcome back to another episode of Rethink your Rules. Today I am actually going to be responding to some of the concerns and critiques that I get when I talk about the idea of connecting with your kids around emotion and putting their feelings first. I'm really excited because these are some of the questions that people raise over and over and I think as we talk about those you'll probably recognize some of your own skepticism there and it also will help us to get a better understanding of what it actually looks like to put feelings first. It does piggyback a bit on the last episode, so at some point you may want to go back and listen to that, but hopefully this will kind of also stand on its own. But before we hop into that, I did just want to give you a quick heads up that I'm going to be changing the expected frequency of these new podcast episodes to every other week instead of every week. That's just because, as you've noticed, sometimes I'm a little late getting it together on the weekly frequency and I think that's happening more and more often just because of my new work schedule and everything. So I'm going to focus on putting out great content for you consistently every other week, versus kind of scrambling around and trying to come up with more each week. This may change as life changes, but I'm working really hard, as I was telling you to do, on, you know, setting appropriate expectations and boundaries for myself and being realistic, and I think this is going to allow me to do a better job of serving you and also kind of keeping the rest of my life afloat and serving my clients as well. So just wanted to make sure you knew that and knew what to expect.
Speaker 2:Okay, so with this topic today, if you'll remember, in the last episode I shared a mantra I really like people to keep in mind, which is feelings first, feelings first. So whenever you're in a difficult situation and the examples I was giving last week were about, you know, my kids, like my daughter, being mad that I was going to miss her birthday for my job and you know blaming me and telling me I don't care about her and I should quit my job and all those things and just kind of using that as an example where I could argue and debate the logic or tell her that that's not really a nice way to talk to me and all that stuff, which is all kind of true right. But in that moment the most useful thing I can do as a parent is actually put feelings first and respond to her feelings right With complete compassion and empathy and kind of in the back of my mind, also allow myself to have my feelings first right and acknowledge that. But particularly when you're dealing with neurodiverse parenting, you know your kids are going to have these huge emotions and if you think about, you know we talk a lot in parenting about kids getting flooded and things like that and when they're in that flooded, big emotional state, they're just their logical brain is offline and so trying to talk to them about the logic at that point is just not going to work and it's going to escalate, which is one of many reasons I really advocate for people to go with feelings first and just take all that aside for a second. Set aside all the logical responses you have and maybe all of your guilt or frustration or anger or whatever. Set that all aside and just hone in on responding to their feelings first Okay, even if you don't know what their feelings are, just sort of listening to them and engaging with them and acknowledging it.
Speaker 2:That's what I mean when I say feelings first, and what I find when I share this concept with people is they often come back with well, okay, but this is isn't this the problem with today's kids, you know? And as they become young adults and come into the workplace, they think their feelings are always valid. They think other people are responsible for changing, to fix their feelings, right? They're kind of like very overly sensitive and I think some people think that if we're just acknowledging their emotions, these strong, potentially inappropriate responses that come from them, right, like my daughter's inappropriately blaming me and yelling at me and all this stuff which isn't really fair or kind, right, I think people think that if we just respond with empathy to that big display of emotion that may be kind of rude or mean or inappropriate or overly dramatic, right, or you know, they're going to now go around and be blaming everyone for their feelings and expecting everyone to sort of cater to them, and I think we hear this a lot from kind of like older school parenting styles, very like restrictive religious styles, maybe like what you know, grandparents, and maybe your parents or the kids' grandparents maybe kind of coming back with you know, and I do want to say I understand where that comes from, but I think it is from a misunderstanding of the implementation.
Speaker 2:Okay, so when you listen to parenting, experts and coaches talk about this idea of empathy and connection first and validating feelings feelings first, like I talk about and that is not the same as saying those feelings you're empathizing with need to be fixed right. So when I say feelings first, there's kind of like also some sub points to that right. And sub point number one is but feelings don't always have to be fixed right. And another one is but feelings are not necessarily your fault, right, and I've talked about this before. If you kind of scroll back to some of my prior episodes, just in general in life, you know, just because you understand and respond to how someone is feeling in the moment, right does not necessarily mean that you are taking responsibility or accepting the blame for that or that you need to solve for it.
Speaker 2:Okay, and this is really important because what I think happens is some parents hear this strategy of focusing on feelings first and making sure that the child knows how to acknowledge them and name them and that they have been heard and validated right, which is all really important, but I think a lot of parents, when they implement that, they kind of forget that second piece, which is just because I am showing that I understand and I'm allowing space for this emotion and I'm responding to it. And all of that doesn't mean that I have to buy into their story about it, like their story that it's my fault, their story that I should have prevented it. Right, that's all coming from your kid's emotionally immature brain, right? But remember, like I talked about last time, you're the grownup in the room. You don't have to buy into their emotionally immature story where they're saying, like my feelings need to be blamed on someone, right, like that's them being a kid, which is developmentally appropriate, right. So your job is to hear what they're saying but not necessarily to agree with it, right, so you don't have to agree that they think it's your fault or that you should fix it. You don't have to agree with their illogical story about it, which often your kid's story about why they hurt is going to be totally illogical because they're kids, right, and you don't have to accept the responsibility to fix it or make it go away faster.
Speaker 2:It's just the feelings are not a problem to be solved, even extremely painful feelings, and I think so often, as parents, when we embrace this feelings first strategy, which is amazing. We forget that other part of like managing our own, our own heart. Okay, so, because I'm responding and hearing my child's pain, I can separate that out from me having to solve their pain and me having to put myself in the position of sort of trying to make them agree with me or make them feel better so that I can feel better, like we talked about before. Because when you're in that energy of I need to solve for my child's pain, what happens is your kind of people-pleasing tendencies come into play, right, and so you aren't now the sturdy, stable adult who can help them navigate this painful experience from a calm, centered place. Instead, you are now basically resting your ability to feel good on your child's emotional state. Right, and let me tell you, if you've got neurodiverse kids and this is me speaking from experience here if you have neurodiverse kids, they tend to be very, extremely emotional, very emotionally immature at times, very volatile, right, and very impulsive. And so if you are resting your own emotional stability and calm on their emotional state, that's a very rocky foundation and really this is true for anyone. If you are ever allowing your emotional well-being to depend on someone else feeling good, you are always setting that on a very unstable foundation.
Speaker 2:I'm talking a lot about neurodiverse parenting here, but if you have teenagers, I think you know what I'm talking about, right? Like if you got a 13, 14 year old teen and you can't interact with them without trying to solve for their pain, you're going to have a really rough time of it because their pain could be due to some random emotional you know spike that they had or any number of things, right, and you just cannot possibly live your life on that roller coaster right Now. That doesn't mean that you don't care about that roller coaster. You don't respond to the roller coaster, right? You don't empathize with it. You have to actually empathize with it and allow it and experience it. Allow them to express it fully in order for you to create connection and safety with them, right, and for their you know emotional brain to kind of get it out of its system so that their logical brain can come back online. That is all really important, but while you're doing that, you have to remember my little footnotes here.
Speaker 2:Okay, so feelings first. But feelings are not a problem to be fixed necessarily, and feelings are not my fault necessarily, right? And it's interesting because, in the moment, I think, if we are thinking that the feelings are a problem and we need to solve them, that creates this urgency that I talked about before, right, and it creates this codependency, right, which is no good. And, yes, it does give your kids, over the long term, this idea that, like, their feelings are a problem, right, because you're essentially teaching them that by trying to solve them all the time, right, and so what you want to do is coach yourself in that moment to you know, deep breath. I can handle my kid being upset, I can handle my kid being wrong about me. I don't necessarily have to fix this right.
Speaker 2:And if you're thinking, gosh, I'm the parent I need to be educating them and teaching them and guiding them, and there's so much stuff they're not doing right and they need to learn and like, what's my role? I'm going to talk about that more next week, so don't I'm not saying those aren't important, but in the moment, with the emotions, what I want you to be thinking is okay, maybe what I'm teaching them here is that this emotion will not kill them. Maybe what I'm teaching them here is how to sit with and express an emotion. Maybe what I'm teaching them here by example is that it's okay if other people are upset, that you don't have to like join in, that you can be emotionally calm and sturdy and supportive without sort of jumping into the emotional fray with the other person like, cause, they're seeing how you're responding to them, right, and you're showing them a certain amount of sturdiness and confidence that you can. You are not scared of the emotions and you don't even have to say that out loud, but you're just embracing that you're not scared of their emotions. And that way they're learning by you know, by example, that they don't have to be scared of their emotions, right, and if you can kind of convince yourself, okay, in this moment my only job is to model and teach them that emotions will not kill us and emotions are real and valid and important and it's okay to have them, there's nothing wrong with them and they also won't kill us. And, of course, as an aside, to keep everyone safe. So if they're reacting in an unsafe way to their emotion, right, you got to just kind of go Zen, keep everybody safe, but don't get in a rush to solve it, okay, don't get in a rush to buy into their belief system about it? Um, because I think about it.
Speaker 2:Like, when someone is in this sort of like people pleasing energy, like, if you're the parent and you're in people pleasing energy right, like now they're either feeling pressure from you to to pretend they don't feel that way anymore because they can tell it's making you uncomfortable, right, so now they're shutting down their emotional freedom and safety to please you, right. Or if you're trying to convince them out of it, right, you're trying to let you're in this convincing energy of like, trying to debate with them, and they're either going to agree just to say fine and stop talking to you, right, or to people please you. Or if they're like my kids, they're going to double down and be more and more stubborn and more and more irrational because they don't want to agree with you in that moment, right, and so all of that is not where you want to go, right, and all of that. You can set that all aside and simply be with them in the moment, okay, and let that be okay. But you get to coach yourself that this is not your fault, this is not a problem for you to solve, you are not to blame and you don't have to fix it necessarily right away and we'll get to some more later, but I really want you to keep that in mind and if you can go back and listen to my last episode, if you didn't already and think about those examples of my daughter being mad at me.
Speaker 2:And when your kid stubs their toe, okay, and the example there is your kid stubs their toe, you hear it, your heart goes out to them. It's true, real, valid pain, part of life. You respond to it, right, but and this has happened in my house what if your kid starts to say, well, you shouldn't have that couch, you shouldn't put that couch there. You should have thought ahead to tell me not to do that. This has literally happened in my house. My child told me that we should have a different house because they bumped themselves on something. Okay, that we shouldn't even live here. Right, and I mean, if I had pushed it, I'm pretty sure they would have said like it'd be better to be homeless than to live in this house, because they stubbed their toe and it hurts.
Speaker 2:Okay, notice, this is like this, completely illogical. You know, track that their brain is going down because they're an emotionally immature kid who's looking for someone to blame for their stubbed toe pain, right, right, my job in that moment is to put their feelings first, but my job in that moment is not necessarily to agree with their logic or try to solve for it by trying to somehow appease this feeling, you know, oh, I'm sorry, I will do that. I should have watched, you know. Or to like become a hovering parent who always watches to make sure they don't stub their toe, or to sell my house right. I don't have to buy into any of that in order to support them and we, we can talk about all that later, but they're likely not even going to bring up all that crap later once the emotion has passed right.
Speaker 2:And so I want you to think of that analogy here. When you're parenting with feelings first is just because you're being responsive does not mean that you have to agree or solve or fix it just like that stubbed toe. Okay, I hope that that I kept that a little shorter than last week or last episode. I hope it's helpful and be sure to tune in next time, because I'm going to talk some more about the other side of this and how you can actually enforce some boundaries and expectations and what that looks like. All right, have a great week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. Would you like to learn more about how to apply this to your own life through personalized coaching with Jenny? Visit us on the web at JennyHobbsMDcom to schedule a free consultation. If you found value in what you heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a five-star rating so we can reach even more women like you.