“Our children pick fights with us when they don’t know how to manage their difficult feelings.” – Sarah Rosensweet
A child who is experiencing difficult feelings (or an adult!) will be whiny, demanding, rigid, bossy, easily upset and looking to fight. All those difficult feelings are swirling around inside and looking for a way out and to be healed.
If your child is misbehaving, they are literally acting out all the difficult feelings they have stored inside. They are trying to offload all the uncomfortable feelings. (Maybe you can relate: Have you ever had a bad day and come home and picked a fight with your partner?)
If we, as adults, come home after a hard day at work, we have lots of options for processing our day. (If we can avoid picking that fight!) We can talk to a friend or partner about our day, write in our journals, or just reflect on the day and its challenges. Our rational minds are well developed enough to do this. Younger children can’t process feelings intellectually yet and they often need our help to get the feelings out.
While it might feel like they are deliberately trying to upset us (and yes they really might be being provocative!) they are doing the best they can. If we know this, we can recognize that they are having a hard time, not giving us a hard time and we can respond with compassion.
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Sarah Rosensweet is a certified peaceful parenting coach, speaker, and educator. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three big kids (ages 15, 18, and 21). Peaceful parenting is a non-punitive, connection-based approach that uses firm limits with lots of empathy. Sarah works one-on-one virtually with parents all over the world to help them go from frustrated and overwhelmed to, “We’ve got this!”
Read more at: www.sarahrosensweet.com
![As parents, we all face challenges, but what happens when traditional parenting approaches don’t work?
That’s why my client during this call, Samantha, is actively transitioning to a Peaceful Parenting approach.
We’re talking through how those challenges can feel even more intense when your child is more sensitive and needs additional attention and understanding.
Join us to discover major tips for a more peaceful parenting journey.
Go to https://link.chtbl.com/Z_YOP4jb to listen to this episode now, and share it with a friend you know needs to hear it too.
[ID: Photo of child and parent arguing on a blue background. Audiogram reads, “Yeah. The fact that he brought it up again tells me that he’s got some shame around it and feeling bad about it. So we don’t need to bring it up in a corrective way. I’m going to exaggerate for the purposes here, but, you know, yesterday when you bit me, biting is not okay. We don’t bite in our house. We don’t want to do any of that. He already knows that, right? There’s no information gap where he thinks biting is okay. So the healing that has to happen is around he needs to feel like, back to the beginning when we started talking, he needs to feel like you still think he’s a good person and that’s why he brought it up, because he feels bad about it. So you can say to him and he says, oh, what did he say again? Remember yesterday when I bit you? Yeah. And he said, I’m a bad boy. So you can say there’s no such thing as bad boys. Mhmm, that is, yeah. They’re only boys who sometimes are having a hard time.”]
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