Accidentally Inviting the Outcomes You're Trying to Avoid

Well that backfired!

When we parent out of fear, our short-sighted reactions can add fuel to the fire. This can create unintended consequences, like MORE helplessness, MORE sibling resentment, and MORE attention-seeking.

In this episode, I cover where this starts, two extremely common examples, and what to do instead.

IN THIS EPISODE I SHARED:

• The Boomerang Effect: What you push away, comes back full force
• A parallel to the movie- Monsters, Inc.
• The "Veruca Salt" mentality we're all afraid of

DON'T MISS:

• How the best of intentions can actually create MORE entitlement or sibling rivalry

// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //
Dr. Shefali Tsabary books

// CONNECT WITH DANIELLE //
Website: parentingwholeheartedly.com
IG: @parent_wholeheartedly
APPLY: parentingwholeheartedly.com/apply

Transcript

Danielle Bettmann  0:04  
Ever feel like you suck at this job? Motherhood, I mean. Have too much anxiety and not enough patience? Too much yelling, not enough play? There's no manual, no village, no guarantees. The stakes are high. We want so badly to get it right, but this is survival mode. We're just trying to make it to bedtime. So if you're full of mom guilt, your temper scares you, you feel like you're screwing everything up, and you're afraid to admit any of those things out loud. This podcast is for you. This is Failing Motherhood. I'm Danielle Bettmann, and each week we'll chat with a mom ready to be real, showing her insecurities, her fears, her failures, and her wins. We do not have it all figured out. That's not the goal. The goal is to remind you, that you are the mom your kids need. They need what you have. You are good enough, and you're not alone. I hope you pop in earbuds, somehow sneak away, and get ready to hear some hope from the trenches. You belong here, friend, we're so glad you're here. 

Danielle Bettmann  1:14  
Hey, it's Danielle. Your Positive Discipline Certified Parenting Coach for strong-willed kids ages two to 10, I help defeated parents find validation, support, and proven techniques to parent their strong-willed kids with composure, connection, confidence, and cooperation through a four-month group coaching program I have based off of the Wholehearted framework I developed over years of working with families one on one, and if you just found the podcast, go to failingmotherhood.com to view a playlist of our most listened to episodes, as well as where to start if you have a strong-willed child. 

Danielle Bettmann  1:46  
Now, I want to start this episode by answering a question that I got last week. I did share in the last solo episode that Failing Motherhood is coming to a close. This episode, the one you're listening to right now is episode 193. We will finish in May with the 200th episode on the five-year anniversary of Failing Motherhood. Now, the question I got was if it will still be available to be able to listen to old episodes. And the answer is yes, you will be able to listen to all of the 200 episodes. They will continue to be available wherever you are listening to this on Apple podcast Spotify and will stay there for all of your listening pleasure to go back and start from the beginning or find any of the things that you missed or need to hear again, it will be there for you. So as we wind down, I will have a series that I'm really excited about in April, and a couple of interviews in May, as we wrap up that are going to mean a lot to me. So I'm so glad you're here, and I hope you will stay with us as we wrap up the pod. 

Danielle Bettmann  3:00  
So today I am finally tackling a topic that I have had on my list to chat about here for the longest time, and it's a very common phenomenon that you may not realize is happening in your own home, with your good-intentioned parenting almost backfiring. So I want to bring it to your attention, to share two examples of how this might happen and what to do instead. Now, I was first introduced to this concept way before I became a coach, when I started reading books by Dr. Shefali Tsabary. If you have not heard of her, she has amazing books. I will link them in the show notes, The Awakened Family, The Conscious Parent, and all sorts of great books, but in one of them, and I can't remember which one I tried looking at before we started, she shared a story of working with a family, and the mom had a very bad experience in high school, and she was bullied and she didn't have a good friend group. So a huge priority for her when she was raising her son was to be able to help support him, to make good friends, be a good friend, and feel supported throughout high school and have a much better experience than she did, great intentions. So she signed him up for a lot of things to be able to make friends. She was very vigilant in asking him who he was friends with, what they were doing, signing him up for things, setting up his social calendar schedule, putting a lot of things on there for him, and just really kind of pushing for this friend group. And over the years, as he was in high school, he really started to resent it. He started to pull back from these efforts from his mom. He felt like they were not aligned with the people he wanted to be connected with, and the way he wanted to be spending his time. It became a point of contention, and eventually, he started pulling back so much that he isolated himself and kind of took on some of the more really introverted traits and kind of stuck to himself. 

Danielle Bettmann  5:17  
So what ended up happening is she inadvertently created the thing that she feared. She pushed so far that she ended up getting the result that she wanted to avoid in the first place, and ended up creating this isolation that she really, really didn't want for him. So what we're describing is a dynamic where a certain behavior becomes so emphasized and focused on and almost pushed away from the parent that it ends up being a boomerang, and it comes right back, and it comes right back full force. And that is not the goal, not the win, not the vibe, right? We don't want to do that. That is when we look back and we have lots of regrets, and we can then see in hindsight what happened. We want to be able to recognize this on the front end and avoid creating the same type of dynamic and going through these pitfalls with our kids, and with our families, right? But where does this start? 

Danielle Bettmann  6:26  
It starts with value, a good intention, care, concern, a love. It comes from the parent wanting to break the cycle, noticing and realizing a deficit from their childhood, and wanting to rewrite, course correct. Maybe the parent had a particularly bad experience, and they want their child to avoid having to learn that lesson the hard way as they did, so they become very vigilant to course correct this behavior. When it arises, it is on their radar, and they are very quick to intervene and respond to that behavior. 

Danielle Bettmann  7:15  
Now the problem comes in because if you are raising a strong-willed child, they are particularly driven and motivated by having their needs met of attention and control. And it does not have to be positive attention. Negative attention works. It's kind of like in Monsters Inc., when they are running the business off of the screams, that's strong-willed kids on negative attention when they switch to laughter that's the positive attention, and that works even better. However negative attention can be a huge motivator and driver of their behavior, and whether or not it perpetuates and continues. So when a parent is very vigilant to hyper fixate on a particular behavior that is a trigger for them, and then they react with a lot of attention to that behavior, it inadvertently perpetuates a very reactive dynamic so the child either continues to do it, or they're not able to take accountability skill build, know what to do differently next time. And then that boomerang comes back, and sometimes it ends up escalating to the point of creating the result we were trying to prevent. 

Danielle Bettmann  8:38  
So let me play out two ways that this happens that come up a lot in my work with parents. So number one, probably the most popular time that we end up talking about this dynamic is when a parent shares a fear of creating an entitled child, right? The Veruca Salt mentality, if you will, from Willy Wonka, the parent is very, very driven and motivated to not create a selfish, spoiled, entitled, bratty kid, right? So they are triggered by that child's tone, by any perceived disrespect from that child, and from behaviors that appear they be ungrateful, and selfish behaviors. And let me be the first to say if this is coming from a child under the age of when their frontal cortex or the frontal lobe is developed, this is developmentally appropriate behavior. It is, you know, low-level caveman behavior that a lot of us still fall into as adults. So this is not an alarm. This is not uncommon. We should expect kids at a certain age to struggle with and show and exhibit a lot of these behaviors, because the way that they develop, their development is egocentric. It starts with understanding their own needs, and then they can broaden their horizons and start to understand being in other people's shoes and being able to be empathetic. So when these kids exhibit these developmentally appropriate behaviors, it triggers the parent who is extra worried about or fearing or aware vigilant of those behaviors and wants to course correct it. So that ends up creating a lot of overreacting because it elicits a more visceral, emotional, split-second response from the parent. They end up having a lot of lectures, a lot of back and forth to the behavior, and because it is getting a lot of negative attention, it's getting fed. 

Danielle Bettmann  11:09  
Have you heard that phrase, like, what you focus on, you see more of that is very true when it comes to behavior, not necessarily an end-all be-all phrase because I have a whole thing about ignoring, but if a child learns this behavior, gets a lot of one on one attention from my parents, when I whine, when I complain, when I cry, when I throw a fit on the ground. I still might not get what I want, but it gets a lot of attention. And I like the attention that makes me feel good, that reminds me that my parents have my back, and they're going to be there for me and I'm going to be okay. So I need that. Why would I begin reacting any other way? That also creates a pendulum swing of guilt that rushes in for that parent, because if they really don't want to see all of these ungrateful, disrespectful, selfish type behaviors, and it is creating a lot of drama, they'll begin to not be able to say no, just to avoid the meltdown, or because they know they've been really hard on them. And so then they swing to the other side, and they try to do really nice things, but then it backfires and blows up in their face, and they get resentful, and then they swing back over to being more strict, and then they come back to being way more kind, and they're not able to say no when they need to. They're not able to hold consistent boundaries. 

Danielle Bettmann  12:36  
That ends up perpetuating entitlement because entitlement is a child believing that their needs trump everyone else's, and that is true when they're little, but not as they get older, but it is the parent's job to be really mindful and setting those boundaries and being able to continue to up the ante of expectations in a way that doesn't feed and fuel the fire they're trying to put out. So that's one example of this fear of entitlement creating the boomerang where it comes back in full force and creates and perpetuates exactly what the parent is trying to avoid. 

Danielle Bettmann  13:24  
The second example that comes up a lot with clients is sibling relationships. I have a client that's in mind right now who shared with me that they had a horrible relationship growing up with an older brother, and it's extremely important to them because they have three kids. Their oldest is a boy, then they have a middle that's a girl, and then another baby. And right now, they're really focused on having a healthy relationship built up between these two oldest siblings, and it's extremely important to them that the little sister is safe with her brother, and that they're able to get along. And that is very worrying when they kind of start to panic at the slightest sign of sibling rivalry, aggression, and conflict, which is, again, we will say, developmentally appropriate, right? Every kid, every sibling, dynamic, no one's immune to going through those bumps in the road. I would argue conflict is an opportunity to skill, build, teach, and learn, not to be feared. But if this is very important to that parent, it is understandable that they get very triggered by what feels like evidence that they are going down the wrong path and that their daughter is going to end up having the same problems that the mom experienced. So it makes sense that they're intervening, and they're intervening quickly, and they are very vigilant to course correct this behavior. However, the problem comes in because the oldest child, the son, starts to put together the pieces of the message he's receiving from the parents, overreactions and lectures and things, assuming this daughter is the favorite child. I am not good enough and never will be, and that leads them to resent the younger siblings, right? They start to resent the parents because it feels very unfair how they're being treated. After all, they're really hard on him. And then, you know, because of also her age, not very hard on her. How is the child supposed to rationalize through that in a mature way when they are four or five, right? They can't. So they come to their conclusions. And then that creates a lot of defensiveness, where the older sibling starts acting out, either continuing to act out or starting to act out and escalate what they're acting out of and the conflict in the sibling rivalry out of defensiveness, trying to prove their worth, trying to earn back what they feel like they need to with love, belonging and attention from the parent, and they're trying to communicate what they perceive to be unfair treatment, and kind of wave that flag to their parents, or they still just really want that toy and don't know how else to solve their problems because they're being told they're doing it wrong, but they don't know how to do it right. 

Danielle Bettmann  16:37  
So then guilt comes in from the parent, they get very frustrated by these vicious cycles of correcting this behavior over and over and over without improvement, and that fuels frustration, which fuels disconnect from the relationship with that older child. Now the inadvertent result that can happen is a lifetime more of this sibling rivalry, or even worse, you know, tense or fractured or nonexistent relationships between the siblings and the family later on down the road, which is exactly what that parent is working to avoid. They don't want strained sibling relationships. They want them to be connected and feel safe with each other, but this Boomerang is coming back in full force and inadvertently creating that outcome. 

Danielle Bettmann  17:35  
So the goal is to be self aware as a parent, the goal is to understand validating your triggers and your understandable fears and vigilance coming from really well intentioned places. But the goal is not to parent out of fear if these skills, these principles, these values, are so important to you as a parent, that means it's even more important to know that you are approaching intervening and responding to that particular behavior In the most effective way, not throwing spaghetti at a wall, not inadvertently creating this boomerang effect. It is so important for you to feel equipped and have the peace of mind that you're on the right track, to not be just reactive, but preventative and solution-oriented, if you're still looking for ways to be able to improve your experience of parenting, to feel much more calm and confident and work on these behaviors at the same time and be able to feel okay when their behavior isn't okay and triggering you. Then start with my free master class, Calm and Confident, how to master the kind and firm approach your strong, willed child needs without crushing their spirit or walking on eggshells at parentingwholeheartedly.com. 

Danielle Bettmann  19:12  
Stay warm, stay safe, stay sane. Have a great week. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Failing Motherhood. Your kids are so lucky to have you. If you loved this episode, take a screenshot right now share it in your Instagram stories, and tag me. If you love the podcast, be sure that you've subscribed and leave a review so we can help more moms know they are not alone if they feel like they're failing motherhood daily, and if you're ready to transform your relationship with your strong-willed child and invest in the support you need to make it happen, schedule your free consultation using the link in the show notes. I can't wait to meet you. Thanks for coming on this journey with me. I believe in you and I'm cheering you on.