Good Inside with Dr. Becky - Is It Okay To Quit?

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Whether it's a soccer team, piano lessons or sleep-away camp the decision to let your child just "quit" can be tough choice to make.  You question - did you do the right thing?  Should you have pushed them to stick it out?  Will this be an indicator of how the rest of their life is going to go?   Deep breath, we are all in this together.  In this episode, Dr. Becky talks it through with a mom who is questioning herself.  Is it more important to have them stick to their commitments or better to prioritize our relationship with them? Join Good Inside Membership: https://bit.ly/3cqgG2AFollow Dr. Becky on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbeckyatgoodinsideSign up for our weekly email, Good Insider: https://www.goodinside.com/newsletterOrder Dr. Becky's book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, at goodinside.com/book or wherever you order your books.For a full transcript of the episode, go to goodinside.com/podcast

I'm Dr. Becky and this is Good Inside. I made a choice about how to handle this. I'm not sure it was the right choice and it's one of the things I'd love to talk to you about, which is kind of the broader question of, when do you let your kid quit something? So when I think about this topic of quitting, of stopping something after you've started it, so many things come to mind.

I think about sports. I think about certain activities. I think about friendships. And recently I was talking with a parent who brought to me their child's sleep away camp struggles. Here, mommy and daddy. I hate it here. I've not made any friends, but I've tried.

And if you have even a little love in your heart for me, please come and pick me up. We'll be right back after this. Quick note. Paid partnerships keep the good inside podcast free for our audience. I want you to know that I take partnerships seriously because I take my relationship with you seriously. So I only partner with brands that I trust and feel great about using in my own home. So if you're like me, when you hear the word vitamin, you say to yourself, yeah, I probably

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and their vitamins are super easy on my stomach, which for me is a big difference from others I've tried. The parallel founders are good inside podcast listeners, and they wanted to give the pod community 15% off their first three months. So use code goodinside15 at parallel.co. That's p-e-r-e-l-e-l.co. I'm Dr. Becky, and this is Good Inside. I'm a clinical psychologist, I'm a mom of three,

and I'm on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children. So I recently spoke to a mom who was dealing with sleep away camp troubles. In this mom's town, many of the kids go away for part of the summer, where they're with other kids, where they're seemingly going to have fun, to enjoy activities, and to foster their own sense of independence. But what about when your kid writes you a letter saying they're not experiencing any of those benefits of sleep-boy camp, that they actually are having a miserable time and wanna come home.

So, Dr. Becky, this weekend I went to kind of an end of season barbecue and no kids were allowed. And so as the evening kind of went on, people started pulling out their phones and reading letters that they had gotten from their kids at camp. They were really funny.

They were kind of exactly what you'd expect. And I couldn't share mine. I sent my 10-year-old daughter to sleep away camp for the first time this summer. And the letters I got home were not anything like the letters that my friends were reading around the table. I asked my daughter if I could read it to you, and she said she wanted to read it to you herself.

So this is an example of a letter I got from my 10 year old. Here, mommy and daddy, I hate it here. I've not made any friends but I've tried. I've really, really tried for you, but they just don't like me. I can never sleep here. As I was up till 5'30, the fifth night in a row. I'm having dreams for you guys coming and tell me that you hate me, I have to stay here for the rest of my life. The food is so gross. When a girl even found a dead larva in her broccoli, and my body doesn't work the way it normally does, I'm also getting really pale.

You have to take me home. Swallowing hurts a lot, and I really hate my life. Please don't think I'm being a drama queen because this is the truth. And if you have even a little love in your heart for me, please come and pick me up. So this is the kind of tone down letter. I started getting an outpouring every day of very dramatic emails. My daughter was going to drama camp. She loves theater, musical theater especially. I didn't see camp, sleep away camp is punishment. I also didn't go to sleep away camp as a kid.

It was not a thing that everyone I knew did where we live now. Everyone goes to sleep away camp. All her friends are at camp. Not the camp she went to, but they're all at camp. camp, all her friends are at camp, not the camp she went to, but they're all at camp. I made a choice about how to handle this. I'm not sure it was the right choice, and it's one of the things I'd love to talk to you about, which is kind of the broader question heart, like, sank, hearing that letter.

And it also, like, really, really hits home because literally in my walk over here, I was talking to my husband about sleep-boy camp options for my daughter, who is saying she might want to go next year, and who is just very particular about the types of people she feels comfortable with, and also can often interpret ambiguous social stimuli as hurtful or as excluding. And so while my older son is at sleep way now and I really don't worry about him because I feel like his favorite activity is making new friends.

Like when I heard your daughter's letter I was thinking like so much of my daughter. So first of all, I guess just like what's going on for you about this? What happened when you read this letter? Like you have so much information about her and the information around like how you reacted to this also really matters. So like let's start there. It was really hard to get these notes. It was actually really hard for me to be separated from her. I mean, when we dropped her off, she got out of the car willingly, but I wasn't actually

sure if she would get out of the car and how I would behave, like I wasn't going to shove her out, you know. So it was like, there was this dance when we dropped her off of, I don't actually know if you're going to camp because about a month before a camp, she started coming up with reasons that she shouldn't go. And I finally said, which the camp told me not to, I finally said, look, give it a week. If you really don't like it, let's have a conversation about it. But like, give it a week and go and really try.

And my daughter makes friends pretty easily. She's pretty outgoing. But once she decides she's not going to like something, you know, there's like no changing her mind. She played travel soccer all last season and really hated it, even though she was the one who was insistent, I didn't want her to play travel soccer. She just is very competitive and she wanted to try out for the team and when she made it, of course, she was playing, you know. But in that case, I was like, look,

you tried off for the team, you made the team, you have to stick with it. You've got to play the season, they're counting on you. This is what we're doing. You don't want to play next season? Fine. Camp, I felt a little bit different about.

And my husband wasn't bearing the brunt of a lot of this. Like the calls were all directed at me. And because I had said, if you really hate it, we'll have a conversation. She turned that as, you're gonna pick me up. And you're a liar if you don't pick me up. So when she started calling me, you know, I pick up the phone and it would be,

why don't you love me? Why did you lie to me? I mean, I would have very calm chats with her on the phone. I have to talk to the counselor. I have to talk to the head of the girls camp. I'm like, look, she needs a friend and she needs activities that she's really wants to get out of bed for every day.

She can't be that she's locking herself in the bathroom at 5.30 and crying. I tried to be an advocate for her for four or five days over a like long weekend. But you know, they kept saying, it's fine, do I listen to the people who deal with us all the time and see this all the time? Or do I listen to my kid who's desperate to come home? Who's just miserable? So, I mean, this whole situation can be applied

to so many other things in life, but there is something about sleep, boy camp, where I feel like there's this assumed success if like a kid stays like there's some preferable outcome and some failure if they leave. And again, this happens to be a personal topic because the boy camp was not for me. And I'm someone, I would describe myself

as like a pretty confident social, independent person and looking back on the years I went and then finally the year I said like this is my last year. I would have been fine without going to see if I would have separated. I would have gone to college. I would have done other things. But being separate from your parents when you don't feel like essentially emotionally safe or secure is like a very, very different thing. than staying on a team when you have like the safety and security of your parents and home to come home to every single day after practice. And your kid is 10.

That's still really young, arguably even when people are 16 and 19 and 30 if they don't feel like they have a secure base to come home to doing something uncomfortable is just scary and not exciting. And so I guess first things first I think it's important to throw to the side the idea that there's any one outcome that's like better or more really superior or superior from like a character building perspective and as a mom of a daughter just like you sometimes I think the most important thing for my daughter to learn early in life is like, there's a time when I'm allowed to say, no, stop. I don't want to do this anymore. And like those words can be listened to, right? And so, so what next? I mean, I really don't think there's one right outcome. I guess I would say like I really understand, you know, the choice to take a kid out of

camp. And I think especially if you live in certain towns, like you feel like there's like a shame in that, you know, or you go to the barbecue and I was like, my kid loves camp and you're like, oh God, like did I do something wrong or something wrong with my kid? And I'm guessing there's a part of your daughter always in life that it sounds like Kenoshi is and is like not terribly concerned with like doing things the way that everyone else does things. I don't know is that oh a hundred percent Right, I'm guessing you love that about her. Yeah, I mean she did say to me the other day She's like mom and I the only person who can't make it at sleep away camp.

And I was like, no, but I didn't have other examples of people who didn't make it. What do you think she's really asking there? Is there something broken about me? Yeah. Is there a reason, you know, she has a lot of anxiety around people not liking her? And I'm always like, you know, half of someone liking you is you liking them first. Which does not always apply as a grown-up,

but I do feel like we're kind of predisposed to like someone, if they get off an energy that they are interested and curious about you, and you're like, okay, I can give you like the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. You're curious about me. Well, I think, you know, it's coming to mind for me right now is I think especially women girls early on in some ways, I don't know, for pre-determined to or we just have

so much early wiring to like gaze out first instead of gaze in first. What does this person think of me? Right. What are the expectations this person think of me? Right, what are the expectations of everyone else of me? And even that idea of am I the only one who couldn't make it at camp? It's just interesting to me, the wording choice versus, am I the only one who felt a camp wasn't right for me?

That's actually like a very different way of phrasing it. Like in my mind, much more empowered or, you know, does that person like me versus like, do I like that person? Do I want to be close with that person in what way? Do I want to have a friendship with that person? I think I have this a lot with adults like you, you see in my private practice and especially these young women on these dating apps and so many of them, you know, we're like, oh, does he like me?

Does he like me? Is he going to text me back? And there wasn't any data to suggest that this person was like likable to my client. Like they didn't seem particularly compelling, they weren't treating them so well, they were mostly ghosting them like us. And when I remember asking, like, do you, like, do you like him?

And they were like, I don't even know, I don't even know how to answer that question. Like, what do you mean? And I was like, so foreign. So I think, I think one of the most liberating things as a parent is to remind myself, I don't have to put so much pressure on any individual decision.

If instead I become a little bit more focused or invested in the process under the decision. So instead of, are you staying or you're not staying? And I don't know how much contact you had. And I'm not even sure what decision you ended up making. But believing her, that seemed really, really evident in her letter. Like she was kind of saying, do you believe me?

And believing is a really, I think, interesting thing between kids and parents because I believe we're all just desperate to be believed until, like, feel seen in that way. And that's such a basic human need that all of us, kids and adults will always escalate our expression of our experience if we don't feel the original experience was seen or believed in the intensity we felt it. And so some people might call that dramatic or manipulative or making a bigger deal out of something than it is. I think that's the least generous interpretation. I think the most generous interpretation is, oh, the person didn't get the very real relational experience they needed. It doesn't mean anyone's a bad person on the other end, but that need to

feel believed and feel seen is so great that I will do anything in the service of that experience. So, saying to your daughter, I believe you, like I believe you that you're up early, I believe you that you're crying, I believe you that this feels really, really bad. And if this is a real time conversation, a lot of kids will say right away, okay, so you're gonna pick me up, right? And sometimes it's not such a dire moment. It's like, okay, so you're gonna let me watch another TV show.

And you have the opportunity to really differentiate those two things, which I think is really important, which is, whoa, I'm actually not talking about the decision yet about leaving. I'm not talking about the decision yet about whether, I'm gonna let you watch another TV show, what I'm saying. And I want you to really hear this is I believe you that this is as bad as you said.

I believe you that you really wanna watch a TV show. And really like siloing that at first, I think is what all of us at any age, like really, really need. And then it also helps both people clarify how much of this decision is actually just about feeling seen and how much after we have felt seen in that way is actually really about this individual decision. Hey, so I want to let you in on something that's kind of counterintuitive about parenting. The most impactful way we can change our parenting actually doesn't involve learning any new parenting strategies.

The most impactful way we can change our parenting is by giving ourselves more resources so we can show up as sturdier so we can show up as calm amidst the inevitable chaos. It's what our kids need from us more than anything else. This is why I'm doing my mom rage workshop again. I'm doing it again because it is one of my most popular ones to date. It's coming up July 19th, but no worries if you can't make it live. It'll be available as a recording for whenever you have the time. I promise it's really the best investment we can make not only in ourselves, but also in our kids. Can't wait to see you there at GoodInside.com. So I brought her home. I think what you're saying about believing is really like spot on.

I don't think I articulated it quite that way, but for her it felt like I don't want that legacy of I want to build trust with you. And I want you to feel like when you say I need help that I I am on there for you. I mean, that hit home with me too. As you said that, I see it at home with you. As you're talking. And I think that we all do this thing. As parents, I call it the fast forward error, but we have a situation where our kid is struggling today. Then we fast forward some amount of time. Sometimes it's as short as three months,

but sometimes it's like 30 years. It's anywhere in between. In this case, you're like, I need to have a kid who goes to college. She has to learn how to cope with things and go to college. So we somehow back into and so, I'm going to write back, hey, it's not that bad deal with it.

I'm actually responding to my fear that my kid's not gonna go to college. I'm really not responding to the fact that my kid is having a hard time at 10 years old in sleep-o-ay camp. And I think, I know I do this. We think we all do this, where we respond to our kid based on our anxiety and fear, not based on the information in front of us.

And when we do that, like we just missed out on a million things. I think number one, we miss out on the opportunity to build a child's skills four later in life, right? Because when you act that way, you just layer on your own anxiety to your kid. That's never helped a kid. And I feel like what's often missed also

is the trust in yourself. I feel like this about my daughter, like she's seven and things can be a little trickier for her than at least my older son. And like something I really trust, it's like I trust my ability to like parent her. Like I do. And like I don't know exactly what outcome that will lead to,

you know maybe a bunch of things will always be harder for her, but I trusted in her childhood years, and beyond, we'll build skills together. We'll go through important experiences together, and that's going to really help her. When I fast forward in her case from 7 to 30, or your daughter from 10 to 18, you miss out on this period of time where you could tell yourself, I have eight years just to go to college. I trust myself. I trust her. college. Like, I trust myself. I trust her.

I trust development. I trust our relationship. Like, I trust that we'll be able to do a lot in those years. So that at 18, she's not in the same place, you know, as age 10. And whenever I say that to myself, I find, I find I get myself like a lot more freedom to make the best decision in the moment, not the decision that kind of temporarily quells my fears about the future. And I mean, for what it's worth, and I don't know how much it's worth, because I really don't think there's ever like a right way. Like I would have made the same, I would have made the same decision. Thank you for this. I needed the validation. I needed to feel like, yeah, I made the right choice.

So we're just maybe not right. I don't know there was a right or wrong choice here, but there was a choice I could live with. And I think this was the one. It sounds like the right choice for you to make. That's the right we have. And there's so much, the two of you, I'm sure we'll talk about related to this.

And you know, there's such an opportunity, I'm just thinking about this now that I'm saying it. Like there's such an opportunity for the two of you to like build skills around what happens because you have a relationship that feels safe to her. Right, like we always have to feel safe with someone to be influenced by them, to talk more to them,

to tell them more, to take in more. You have to have that safety. And so hearing what you said, I just can picture maybe that moment that I don't want to have. I don't want to have encoded in her memory. It's like I really reached out for help to my mom. I was feeling awful. And I was left alone. That builds the opposite of safety. That builds fear within our closest attachment relationships. So the fact that you prioritize that safety, I think says a lot about how the two of you will be able to build from this.

So I want to end with some general takeaways. not about sleep-boy camp, but about the topic of sticking things out versus stopping. First, believing your kid. Believing your kid actually isn't always the same thing as making a certain decision based on that believing. In this conversation, believing that your child was miserable was aligned with the decision of taking that child home. But believing can also look like saying, I believe you that you don't want to go to school. I know that that's real. I also know we're going to get through it.

that that's real. I also know we're gonna get through it. Two, being brave doesn't always mean sticking something out. Get to know what's really happening with your kid. And trust that being brave can mean sticking something out and it can also mean stopping and leaving. Three, there's nothing more powerful than our alliance with our kids, especially as our kids get older. Remembering that our connection with them is really the only strategy we have reminds us to pause, listen, and believe their experience. Thanks for listening. To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com-podcast.

You could also write me at podcastatgoodinside.com. Parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world. And parents deserve resources and support so they feel empowered, confident, and connected. I'm so excited to share good inside membership. The first platform that brings together content and experts you trust with a global community of like-valued parents. It's totally game-changing. And if you're looking for a smaller next up,

go to goodinside.com to sign up for my free weekly email That's always filled with practical actionable strategies and scripts. You don't want to miss it Good inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom at Magnificent Noise Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhi, Julianna and Kristen Muller. I would also like to thank Erica Belsky, Mary Panico, Jill Cromwell-Wang, Ashley Valenzuela, and the rest of the good inside team. And one last thing before I let you go. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves, even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time

on the outside, I remain good inside. you