‘I just want them to be okay.’ Why rescuing our kids can get in their way.

My son has never been a maverick. Let me be clear. He is cautious and ponders his choices deeply; this allows him a kind of wisdom that is hard to come by at the ripe old age of ten.

I have noticed in the past an instinct to circumvent, to avoid, to sidestep risk. But as he has matured his relationship with avoidance has mutated, taking on a very different look and feel. Lately, his relationship with avoidance has begun to also feel like a habit; one that he relies on with greater frequency.

On this particular Sunday I just had a feeling, those restless moments of static where you can tell something is about to crescendo. I told my husband before we left the house for our son’s soccer match, “he will either get sick to his stomach or pretend he is injured in order to avoid playing today.”

Maybe it was a mother’s intuition.

My son loves playing soccer. This is one of his primary identifications at this tender age where the drive for tribalism reigns supreme. Right around ten our children evolve into what we call the “Latency Age” of development. This is the time when peer groups become a central drive in your child’s life. This is why your latency age child begins to deepen his or her emotional investment in their friends. Fitting in becomes salient to their sense of social survival.  Every time you see a gaggle of boys or girls roaming the school campus or the mall that is an example of the primary drive for tribalism. To that end, this group of boys has become a pack and the dynamics are just about as near to perfect as you could possibly wish for as a parent in a team sport environment.

But latency age is also a boarder town, a sprawling three-year emotional tundra where the mind, brain and body are neither small child nor adolescent. Latency age children crave freedom and yet also fear the loss of parental anchoring. In latency things start to feel more “serious” and expectations increase exponentially. This is often the period of time where you will start to see more blatant psychological processes emerge, such as anxiety.

This is also when sports emerge from the cocoon of early childhood, where effort and attitude trump merit and skill; to the brutal but honest reality that competition is fierce. Children must fight for their time on the field. It’s in the realm of this emotional boarder town where risk and courage converge to shape and sculpt how my son will respond to life challenges, to new levels of intensity, and to the pressure of uncertainty. All the qualities that are directly correlated with resiliency, grit, and adaptability are being formed and shuffled out in this critical period of development.

We were about half way to the soccer complex when I heard my son start to move uncomfortably in the back seat.

“I think I am getting car sick, my stomach hurts.”

My husband and I had already agreed that we would have to let him navigate this directly with his coaches. We would not rescue him from his feelings. We would neither insist that he get on the field or give him assistance in telling the coach if he wasn’t going to play.

But let me be clear, every cell in my body wanted to rescue my son, to tell him he can just skip the game, avoid the feelings, and circumvent the challenges that face him internally. I wanted to bend the outside world to align with his needs. But I’ve been at the game of self-reflection for long enough now, and so I also understand that doing so (rescuing him) would be a short-term solution. When we rescue our kids from their emotions we embroil them in the intricate and sabotaging dance that psychologists refer to as enabling. “Fixing” this for my kid doesn’t help him become stronger and more psychologically resilient. It will cripple him; emotionally handicaps him in ways that will negatively influence his development. We had to let our son fail or succeed on his own merit, by his own compass. We had to give him the space to fail or he will fail to grow.

Upon reflection, I now see that there were likely other episodes of avoidance that rivaled this one, but at the time I was naïve and thought, “maybe he is car sick.” Denial is a convincing mistress; it seduces us into the illusions of our wishes and fantasies. I hold no advanced degree on being human, just because I make a career of observing the process of human beings.

So let’s really unpack why the consistent use of avoidance is such a debilitating form of self-protection for our kids to snuggle into during latency age?

Well, lets start with the far end of the spectrum: Avoidance is a pre-requisite in the development of phobias. It’s way too simple to just assume phobias are something you catch from your genes. The vast majority of research on the role of genetics in the onset of psychiatric disorders suggests that while psychological trends do run in families, the onset is tied to a complex and nuanced interplay between nature and nurture.

To that end, phobias are something you develop through your consistent reliance on avoidance. You court phobias by using avoidance as your primary mode of controlling your feelings. Phobias are about control and narrowing the aperture on your emotional lens by avoiding and cutting out any stimuli that make you feel uncomfortable. Today it’s the soccer game, and some might argue, big deal let him skip the game if the pressure is too much. But tomorrow and all the days still tucked beyond the horizon it will be something else that rattles his nerves, makes him flinch. And here’s the kicker, with regular use of avoidance, your capacity for emotional tolerance atrophies. In other words, as you rely more and more on avoidance to manage your emotions, you end up be coming less capable of handling even the smallest of provocations.

But long before phobias will surface, the use of avoidance debilitates and causes emotional paralysis in the wake of strong internal feelings of doubt and fear. Avoidance shackles you to fear and develops into phobias once your emotional aperture cannot be narrowed any further. It’s a fatal attraction where self-sabotage is baked into the courtship. You hold the hand that holds you down.  

I have reassured my son that the feelings he is experiencing are typical and normal. Everyone feels anxious at times in his or her life. Everyone grapples with self-doubt. But it is how he chooses to respond to these feelings that ultimately shapes and influences his future.

These emotional challenges are what Latency age of development teaches us as we pass through to the even more complex phase that follows, adolescence. If we rescue our kids from these lessons, they will be ill equipped for the next stage of development. Each stage builds on the last one. This is another reason avoidance is so tricky. You end up missing a lot of the valuable lessons that were baked into the previous stage.  I have to let my son feel these feelings, be exposed to the discomfort and navigate his own way through it.

If I fix this for him he will retreat further and further into these patterns. But if I don’t, he at least has the opportunity find his way towards greater and greater sources of courage, strength, and fortitude. These are the ingredients that make up grit and resilience. Grit and resilience are hard earned characteristics. No one becomes gritty and resilient through relying on avoidance as their go to defense mechanism. Avoidance atrophies our strengths, it allows life to push you around, steer your mast, and ultimately shape your life.

As his mother I have to continue to expose him to environments and experiences that he would refuse on his own. And then be there, metaphorically and figuratively, but not try and choreograph the outcome. With most things in life, but especially fear and our relationship with avoidance, exposure is key. And so while I still have a modicum of control over my son’s schedule, I’m committing to exposing him to as many uncomfortable scenarios as I can.

With this focus in mind, I immediately enrolled my child in jujitsu. This is another activity he has sworn he does not like and has, up to this point, refused all invitations to “try it.” Often times with latency age kids fear and anxiety are masked as certainty. My son will insist, “I don’t like jujitsu!” And I gently remind him that he has never done jujitsu so he cannot make an informed, let alone impassioned decision about whether or not he likes it.

With emphasis and consistency I tell my son, “You should be suspicious of your certainty. Often that means we are operating from fear.” I want my son to grow more and more confident in the face of uncertainty, knowing that he can emotionally and psychologically handle anything that comes his way. To need certainty in order to take risk dooms us to a life on the sidelines. But all the good stuff comes from climbing out on the wire, wobbly and unsure but full of promise.

I can see him navigating that border town between self-doubt and self-assuredness. Something in the way he carries his body tells me he’s going to find his way. But I can also see his fears and doubt. It’s nestled in behind the watery blue of his eyes.

My instinct is to make him comfortable. But ultimately I have to let him wrestle with those beasts. Or they will own him for the rest of his life; his own monsters and demons will enslave him. All I can do is be with him while he navigates what he feels.

Exposure to risk, fear of failure, and self-doubt are the teachers who rule the kingdom of latency age development. We must allow our children to be exposed to the edges and corners of development for those are the wounds and scars that shape our future self. Without pain and the emotional infrastructure it serves to shape inside of us we will be doomed to the confines of certainty and safety.

Let me be perfectly clear, if you notice these tendencies in your own child(ren) and you do nothing else, exposure is plenty. Keep on widening the circle that your child has to navigate. Let them figure it out. Resist the urge to rescue your kids from their feelings and the events that trigger these difficult feelings. The first and most important step is for us to let our kids fail. Put them in as many environments and situations where they will be stretched, challenged, and forced to face their feelings using new and creative solutions.

That being said, here’s additional strategies I am implementing:

  1. I am being more mindful of the pockets of development where I can stand back now and allow my son to figure it out on his own. I am trying to identify where I am accidentally reinforcing this style of behavior by engaging in rescuing behaviors. I’m discussing avoidance in this essay, but you will find your own pockets of “rescuing behavior” with your children. Observe those intersections and make shifts accordingly.
  2. We are doubling down on our nightly mindfulness practice with our son. Ten minutes. Please don’t shape your child’s mindfulness practice around the premise of thinking positively or forced gratitude. Just begin to guide them in the process of being present in what ever it is they feel. Resist the urge to shape your child’s emotional reality, to herd them towards some mental space you want them to embody. Let them start to learn how to tolerate exactly where they are. 
  3. I bought several children’s books on worry and anxiety. All the books focus on the fact that his feelings are perfectly healthy but how we respond to our feelings is where we can get into some trouble. We will read these together at night and practice the tools and techniques suggested in the books.
  4. I’ve added a nightly magnesium supplement to his routine.
  5. I’m making sure he gets adequate hours of sleep per night.
  6. I’m making sure that he has adequate time to move his body in nature each day (team sports, hiking, swimming, playing in neighborhood, etc.). At least 30 minutes a day after school where he can discharge energy.
  7. I bought a journal for him to write and express some of his feelings. And no, I won’t go and secretly read it.

About the Author: Dr Sarah Sarkis

Sarah is a licensed psychologist living in Honolulu, Hawaii. Originally hailing from Boston Mass, she has a private practice where she works with adults in long-term insight oriented therapy. She works from an existential psychology vantage point where she encourages her patients to “stay present even in the storm.”  She believes herself to be an explorer of the psyche and she will encourage you to be curious about the journey rather than the destination.  She emphasizes collaboration, partnership, and personal empowerment.

She approaches psychological wellness from a holistic and integrative perspective. Her therapeutic style is based on an integrative approach to wellness, where she blends her strong psychodynamic and insight oriented training with more traditionally behavioral and/or mind/body techniques to help clients foster insight, change and growth. She has studied extensively the use of mindfulness, functional medicine, hormones, and how food, medicine and mood are interconnected.  Her influences include Dr.’s Hyman, Benson, Kabat-Zinn and Gordon, as well as Tara Brach, Brene’ Brown, Irvin Yalom and Bruce Springsteen to name only a few.

Please visit her website at Dr SarahSarkis.com and check out her blog, The Padded Room

2 Comments

Sarah

This article was interesting for me on several levels. First, as an Occupational Therapist working with young children, I see how parenting styles influence a child’s willingness to try solving novel problems as early as age 2. Second, thinking about the pre-teen experiences of important adults in my life, I now see clear connections between their early experiences and later anxiety/ phobias (in one case) and resilience/grit (in the other).

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Linda

It all sounded great until I saw how organized and timely she lead his life. Sometimes through our own need to be controlling and dominating we make our kids feel insecure.
Some kids are just more into attacking life more than others. We don’t need to pressure our kids… it’s efforts can result in lack in confidence. No one wants that.

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Melbourne, Adelaide … Will you join us? 

The @resilientkidsconference is coming to Melbourne (15 July) and Adelaide (2 September), and we’d love you to join us.

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For tickets or more info, search ‘Resilient Kids Conference’ on Google, or go to this link https://www.resilientkidsconference.com.au/conference/.
We have to change the way we talk about anxiety. If we talk about it as a disorder, this is how it feels.

Yes anxiety can be so crushing, and yes it can intrude into every part of their everyday. But the more we talk about anxiety as a disorder, the more we drive ‘anxiety about the anxiety’. Even for big anxiety, there is nothing to be served in talking about it as a disorder. 

There is another option. We change the face of it - from an intruder or deficiency, to an ally. We change the story - from ‘There’s something wrong with me’ to, ‘I’m doing something hard.’ I’ve seen the difference this makes, over and over.

This doesn’t mean we ignore anxiety. Actually we do the opposite. We acknowledge it. We explain it for what it is: the healthy, powerful response of a magnificent brain that is doing exactly what brains are meant to do - protect us. This is why I wrote Hey Warrior.

What we focus on is what becomes powerful. If we focus on the anxiety, it will big itself up to unbearable.

What we need to do is focus on both sides - the anxiety and the brave. Anxiety, courage, strength - they all exist together. 

Anxiety isn’t the absence of brave, it’s the calling of brave. It’s there because you’re about to do something hard, brave, meaningful - not because there’s something wrong with you.

First, acknowledge the anxiety. Without this validation, anxiety will continue to do its job and prepare the body for fight or flight, and drive big feelings to recruit the safety of another human.

Then, we speak to the brave. We know it’s there, so we usher it into the light:

‘Yes I know this is big. It’s hard [being away from the people you love] isn’t it. And I know you can do this. We can do hard things can’t we.

You are one of the bravest, strongest people I know. Being brave feels scary and hard sometimes doesn’t it. It feels like brave isn’t there, but it’s always there. Always. And you know what else I know? It gets easier every time. I’ve know this because I’ve seen you do hard things, and because I’ve felt like this too, so many times. I know that you and me, even when we feel anxious, we can do brave. It’s always in you. I know that for certain.’♥️
Our job as parents isn’t to remove their distress around boundaries, but to give them the experiences to recognise they can handle boundaries - holding theirs and respecting the boundaries others. 

Every time we hold a boundary, we are giving our kids the precious opportunity to learn how to hold their own.

If we don’t have boundaries, the risk is that our children won’t either. We can talk all we want about the importance of boundaries, but if we don’t show them, how can they learn? Inadvertently, by avoiding boundary collisions with them, we are teaching them to avoid conflict at all costs. 

In practice, this might look like learning to put themselves, their needs, and their feelings away for the sake of peace. Alternatively, they might feel the need to control other people and situations even more. If they haven’t had the experience of surviving a collision of needs or wants, and feeling loved and accepted through that, conflicting needs will feel scary and intolerable.

Similarly, if we hold our boundaries too harshly and meet their boundary collisions with shame, yelling, punishment or harsh consequences, this is how we’re teaching them to respond to disagreement, or diverse needs and wants. We’re teaching them to yell, fight dirty, punish, or overbear those who disagree. 

They might also go the other way. If boundaries are associated with feeling shamed, lonely, ‘bad’, they might instead surrender boundaries and again put themselves away to preserve the relationship and the comfort of others. This is because any boundary they hold might feel too much, too cruel, or too rejecting, so ‘no boundary’ will be the safest option. 

If we want our children to hold their boundaries respectfully and kindly, and with strength, we will have to go first.

It’s easy to think there are only two options. Either:
- We focus on the boundary at the expense of the relationship and staying connected to them.
- We focus on the connection at the expense of the boundary. 

But there is a third option, and that is to do both - at the same time. We hold the boundary, while at the same time we attend to the relationship. We hold the boundary, but with warmth.♥️
Sometimes finding the right words is hard. When their words are angry and out of control, it’s because that’s how they feel. 

Eventually we want to grow them into people who can feel all their feelings and lasso them into words that won’t break people, but this will take time.

In the meantime, they’ll need us to model the words and hold the boundaries firmly and lovingly. This might sound like:

‘It’s okay to be angry, and it’s okay not to like my decision. It’s not okay to speak to me like that. I know you know that. My answer is still no.’

Then, when they’re back to calm, have the conversation: 

‘I wonder if sometimes when you say you don’t like me, what you really mean is that you don’t like what I’ve done. It’s okay to be angry at me. It’s okay to tell me you’re angry at me. It’s not okay to be disrespectful.

What’s important is that you don’t let what someone has done turn you into someone you’re not. You’re such a great kid. You’re fun, funny, kind, honest, respectful. I know you know that yelling mean things isn’t okay. What might be a better way to tell me that you’re angry, or annoyed at what I’ve said?’♥️
We humans feel safest when we know where the edges are. Without boundaries it can feel like walking along the edge of a mountain without guard rails.

Boundaries must come with two things - love and leadership. They shouldn’t feel hollow, and they don’t need to feel like brick walls. They can be held firmly and lovingly.

Boundaries without the ‘loving’ will feel shaming, lonely, harsh. Understandably children will want to shield from this. This ‘shielding’ looks like keeping their messes from us. We drive them into the secretive and the forbidden because we squander precious opportunities to guide them.

Harsh consequences don’t teach them to avoid bad decisions. They teach them to avoid us.

They need both: boundaries, held lovingly.

First, decide on the boundary. Boundaries aren’t about what we want them to do. We can’t control that. Boundaries are about what we’ll do when the rules are broken.

If the rule is, ‘Be respectful’ - they’re in charge of what they do, you’re in charge of the boundary.

Attend to boundaries AND relationship. ‘It’s okay to be angry at me. (Rel’ship) No, I won’t let you speak to me like that. (Boundary). I want to hear what you have to say. (R). I won’t listen while you’re speaking like that. (B). I’m  going to wait until you can speak in a way I can hear. I’m right here. (R).

If the ‘leadership’ part is hard, think about what boundaries meant for you when you were young. If they felt cruel or shaming, it’s understandable that that’s how boundaries feel for you now. You don’t have to do boundaries the way your parents did. Don’t get rid of the boundary. Add in a loving way to hold them.

If the ‘loving’ part is hard, and if their behaviour enrages you, what was it like for you when you had big feelings as a child? If nobody supported you through feelings or behaviour, it’s understandable that their big feelings and behaviour will drive anger in you.

Anger exists as a shield for other more vulnerable feelings. What might your anger be shielding - loneliness? Anxiety? Feeling unseen? See through the behaviour to the need or feeling behind it: This is a great kid who is struggling right now. Reject the behaviour, support the child.♥️

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