Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How to Teach Our Children Emotional Resilience with Dr. Becky Kennedy

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

In this episode, Sharon talks with Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist who was recently named “The Millennial Parenting Whisperer” by TIME Magazine. Dr. Becky and Sharon have a conversation about communicating the tough topics with our kids; how and when to share current event news so they feel safe. Dr. Becky argues that it’s not always the information that feels scary and off-putting, but the act of having to process it alone. As parents, it's our responsibility to support our children through our loving, supportive presence and guided conversations. Children need to learn distress tolerance in order to accomplish big, meaningful things, and we help by teaching them AVP: acknowledge, validate, and permit. Acknowledge that something is happening inside of you, tell your feelings why they make sense, and give your body permission to feel what it’s feeling. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. I have a fantastic show for you today. I am chatting with Dr. Becky Kennedy. She runs a platform and has a podcast called Good Inside, and she is one of the most trusted experts out there when it comes to children's psychology. And boy, does she have a lot of wisdom to share. So let's dive into this episode. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for joining me today, Becky. I'm so happy to have you here. I am so happy to be here, truly. I was so excited to have this on my calendar today. Yay. Well, I wanted to have you on because I know a lot of people in my community are parents, or they are friends with people who have kids or they have, you know, children in their lives that they love.

And I often field questions about how to handle some tough topics related to parenting. And I feel very, very ill-equipped to answer those. I am not a parenting expert. Maybe you could make us feel better about this. I feel like most parents are just kind of winging it. I mean, yeah, I think especially because we have kids who are so different from us, we're raising them in a time that's obviously different from when we were raised and each kid needs something so different. So no matter what knowledge we have, we're always pivoting and iterating and learning so much along the way. So yeah, we're all doing our best. That's it. And people who are not familiar with you, what do you do? Yeah. I am Dr. Becky Kennedy. I am a clinical psychologist. I specialize in parenting, anxiety, and resilience. And I am also, very importantly, a mother of three. I have a 10-year-old,

a seven-year-old, and a four-year-old. And I really mean this. I just love thinking about people and family systems and why all of us do the things we do. My baseline assumption for every human at every age is we are always doing the best we can with the resources we have available in that moment. We're all good inside. And so it leads me to be very curious about why all of us, me included and our kids included, do all types of things that are not so good on the outside, right? That gap kind of is always where I love to live. And so when people ask me parenting questions, it actually just allows me to activate my curiosity. Like, oh, that's so interesting. Why is your kid doing

that? Why are you reacting that way while knowing everyone's trying their best? And we can all, if we learn more, probably, I don't even want to say do better, but just show up in a way that we know feels better to us. And therefore it probably feels better to our kids as well. So I work with families. I work with kids. I work with people who don't have kids kind of along that journey. I know I have really gotten a lot out of following you on Instagram. And I really love your, just that you give people really practical solutions of like, here is a script you can use. Here are some words that you can say to your child in this moment. And I love how practical it is versus just the super high

level thinking, theoretical thinking, which is useful, but is not always super applicable in the moment when your child is having a difficult time. No, that's my biggest frustration with anything I attend is I love thinking deeply. I love it. I love it. But then usually I think, well, how can I translate that deep thought into a very, very practical strategy that I feel like I can do? So I do feel like it's my responsibility to give that translation to parents. I would love to start by talking about a subject that comes up very often for me. People ask me about, and I really would value your expertise on this, which is about talking to your children about the news and what is age appropriate.

What are some practical strategies we can use when big, scary things are happening in the world? Let's use the framework of this big international event that really commanded so much media attention recently, which is the U S evacuation from Afghanistan. Such an important topic, such a perfect intersection of the areas you and I love to think about. So I guess first things first, and this really does mimic usually how I think about anything with our kids is first let's zoom out, right? Because I think we have to ask ourself more often, what am I trying to do with my kids? Like, what is the big picture? Because we're all parenting

in the moment, but we're parenting for the long run, right? We're parenting our kids in a certain way when they're five, because we know that it shapes who they're going to be when they're older, right? So how do we digest the news? What do we watch in front of them? What do we talk about? What do we avoid? What do we kind of just go for in terms of discussion with them? And if I look down the road for my own kids, what I hope for them long-term, and this will

help inform then where I would start when they were younger is I find it's a huge priority in our family is just truth over comfort, truth over comfort. And I think that applies to a million things. And it definitely applies to talking about things in the news. That doesn't mean I talk to my four-year-old at the same time I'm talking to my 10-year-old. I think those are often pillars we're debating with our kids when we talk to them about the news. Do I just want to keep this super comfortable, super, super comfortable, or do I they view the world around them and what they're willing to see versus turn away from, I hope instill deep in their body is truth over comfort, that I will notice things that are true in the world, even if they make me uncomfortable, or even if they lead me to feel personally uncomfortable because I have to question something I thought was true or my own privileges or

anything else. So if that's what I want for my kids down the road, what does that look like early on? Well, I think when our kids are young, we often assume that kind of the best strategy is to kind of protect them. And Sharon, you and I have talked about these two words before, and I just think since we talked about it, I'd never thought about it before, but the two words are protect versus prepare, right? Are we protecting our kids from kind of hard truths or are we preparing our kids for hard truths? No, not flooding. I'm not sitting down my four-year-old and like showing him a video of the suicide bombing. Like that's not helpful for him. But I think these general principles inform some strategies and more practical scripts we can get into, which is

our kids need to develop the skill of engaging with tricky realities, inconvenient truths. And if they're not developing that skill in the safety of their home with us. And they don't pick that up somewhere along the way at age 18. It's not like a college course, right? It's an emotion regulation ability to say, we can talk about hard things that make me feel uncomfortable. So this is as much tolerance I have for talking about anything without getting strategic. I don't know if you're there too. You there? Yeah. No. Okay, good. Let's get strategic. Okay. So let's take the Afghanistan withdrawal, right? I think the first skill we have to develop with our kids when talking about anything tricky, the news, puberty, anything is a little bit of a preamble of something like, hey, I want to talk about

something that feels important. And in our family, we talk about things that are important, even if they're uncomfortable, but it might feel a little kind of tricky or sad or awkward, whatever it is to discuss. And I just want to kind of get both of our bodies ready for that. Ooh. Right. And I'm really saying to my kid, this is not going to be a normal conversation. We're not talking about screen time. Now we're not talking about your bedtime, right? We're getting the body ready. And I actually find for me that gets my body ready, kind of prepares me for something that still feels uncomfortable for me to talk about. Then I think we want to check in with our kids to kind of see where they're at. Just because we haven't talked about something with our kids, it doesn't mean they don't know about it. They saw us

kind of watching something. They heard something on the bus. They heard an older kid talk about something. They saw a headline in a newspaper and just, it's kind of like living in the back of their mind. So I might say something to check in, like the United States had a withdrawal from Afghanistan recently. I'm just curious if even any of those words you've heard recently, just asking, right? Because I think we want to, we have to do a little bit of a dance of presenting information to our kids and kind of scaffolding their ability to talk about hard truths. My child says, and I believe them, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not going to launch into every detail. I'm going to start with something manageable, right? So I think, and that starting

point, depending on how often in your family you talk about current events, depending on how integrated that is, that's a more important starting point than the numerical age your child's at. Because if in my family we talk, and I'm guessing in your family, Sharon, you probably talk about the news and politics and government like all all the time. Yeah. So your child at age five, right. Like probably was ready to have conversations that another child at age nine wasn't right. And that doesn't mean that family's bad at all, but we don't want to overwhelm our kids. We want to scaffold that. So prepare your child for the conversation, say something like, I want to talk about something that might feel a little tricky. It might feel a little uncomfortable and then check in about some basics, use that as a starting

point. And then we can get more specific. But I think those are the two foundational steps before we do anything else. So do you recommend letting your children watch the news? If you are watching the news, cooking dinner, you have what your favorite news channel on in the background, or you're sitting down, you're watching it. What are your thoughts about letting children watch the news? So what I would say there is we know what the news on TV, you just don't know what's going to come up, right? So there's going to be something could be unexpected. All of a sudden there's a news story about rape. So I think you have to ask yourself, like as scary as the news could be, is my child ready to digest that with me? So for example, like, and again, I'm going to use ages, but these are

ranges, not any truth, right? Sure. I can't imagine letting my five-year-old just watch a news program where anything could happen. My 10-year-old still feels kind of young, but my 10-year-old and I, we just, I feel like we have a really long history of talking about so many tricky topics. We've digested a lot together. I also feel confident in my ability. Should something come up that's very disturbing, turn off the TV or pause it or go and say to him, hey, they just talked about someone being killed. Let's talk about that. What happened when you saw that? Wow. That's scary, huh? I feel pretty good about my ability to pause what I'm doing and prioritize kind of emotionally processing that.

Not saying, oh, don't worry about that. You don't have to think about things when you're that young, or that would never happen to you, right? Those things won't be helpful to a kid. If a kid is exposed to something that's scary, they need an adult to be present in that experience, not to take them out of it, but to provide emotional support around it. So I think we have to ask ourselves as parents, do I feel like I'm working that muscle, which we can still work. It's like going to the gym. Like, can I work that muscle? So if the news is on and my child sees something that I know, Ooh, that is out of kind of the realm of what might, you know, usually come up at the dinner table. Would I go to my child's room and say, hey, earlier today we were watching the news and I know you heard this word, murder. We've never

really talked about that word before. Do you know what that means? And if my child says, I don't know. If my child hears the word murder and I'm not prepared to tell them it's when one person kills or ends the life of another person, then I can't say it's okay to expose my child to that potential because, and this is a much larger point, but I think it's so powerful and it's something we often, we rarely learn. Events aren't what's traumatic to kids. What's traumatic is processing something overwhelming when you're alone. The aloneness is what's traumatic. It's how events get processed in our life. And if a child sees something, maybe it's an earthquake, right? Maybe it's a tornado and they talk about this many people died. Maybe it's something seemingly much smaller. It's a, someone stole something from

a store, but it makes my child think like, oh, what if I'm in a store and that happens? They just feel scared. An event in and of itself doesn't kind of mess up a kid. Feeling alone with a scary feeling is what is really overwhelming for a child because then a child's left to their own devices to try to understand this, to try to make sense of safety in the world, to try to make sense of, oh, is something wrong with me? Did I get that right? Did that really happen? They fill with self-doubt. Sometimes they blame themselves

because they don't have sophisticated coping skills to manage something that's so overstimulating. So we as a parent have to kind of know, I need to be hearing what my child might be hearing and then go to them, not to invalidate, not to say, don't worry about it, but essentially to say that likely brought up some feelings here. We can talk about them. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs.

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Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Do you feel like there are things that parents can watch out for that might be good indicators for your child is not ready to process an event like this, or maybe they are ready. What I'd say there is let's notice where our kids are at and scaffold that ability. Cause I think we want to raise kids who can again, see the world for what it's at, what it is and digest information, like you said, right. Um, as in 2020 vision as much as possible. So what I'd say is notice how your kids pay attention to books, pay attention to movies, TV shows. And my kid was like this,

right? So I remember watching cars with my oldest son when he was four, he was always scared of movies because there's always something potentially scary that could happen. He was always aware of that. Cars is a movie that like most two-year-olds watch and just, you know, love. Yeah. He was maybe, maybe five. He was old. And there's a scene where the truck, the animated truck starts to close its eyes and just kind of starts to swerve around the road. And there were other kids were with, they were like laughing. It was very funny. My child ran out of this room screaming, he's going to crash. He's going to kill people, you know? And it was like, done, done. Okay. So what does that tell me? That my child is very attuned to risk in some ways, emotional realities in the world. My child is going to see something and feel the emotional intensity of that. So what I think about

with him, even at that age is how important it is for me to talk about the feelings that watching cars, this might seem weird, but that gets him more ready to process current events, right? If I can't help him there, I'm not going to help him overhearing some real event that happened in the world. So what I would say to parents is we want to build our kids' ability to kind of talk about uncomfortable emotions that happen outside of current events that aren't so visceral, that aren't so visual, right? Even if it's how do we talk as a family about the fact that my kid was left out and wasn't invited to a birthday party? If we can sit at the table and say, yeah,

that felt really bad. I get that. I'm right here for you. And so that's what I would tell a parent that rather than just thinking, is my child ready to watch these stories? What are the signs? I would actually bring it down to kind of a more foundational level. How does our family talk about uncomfortable things? And can we kind of work that muscle of not just making things better and not just saying that doesn't matter, but of really building tolerance for distress, because that's what you need to watch the news and not immediately jump to a bias is to say, there's just distress here. I'm going to tolerate it and pause and be curious about it without making a kind of judgment that makes me immediately feel kind of okay again, because that's part of my job to help you

understand the way you feel watching different things. So that immediately makes me think a kid at any age is going to be more ready just because the context has been set up for them. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. And what is your opinion about watching things versus reading about things or being just informed about something from a teacher or a parent or whatever? I guess there's increasing levels of kind of sensory intensity, right? So talking about it with someone is the most controlled narrative. Reading about it, I think is a little bit more of a visceral experience and certainly watching it has the highest kind of loading in a sensory way, right? And I think maybe there's this like arc that we can think

about as parents, right? I don't know if my child's ready to talk about what happened in Afghanistan. I don't know if my child is totally ready to know about a historical event, about another event. Well, maybe we start with talking, Hey, I want to tell you about this thing that happened. I'm going to say it really simply and you can ask questions and we'll go from there. And then again, it comes back to using your child's reaction as a guide for what should happen next. Let's go to the shutdown reaction. Mom, don't talk to her. I don't want to know about these things, right? That's kind of your child's way of saying my body is shutting down because this feels so overstimulating. So I think we could say, okay, it feels like too much right now.

You and I can talk about this another time. You're kind of leaving open that possibility. But nobody, when they're overstimulated, gets any benefit from someone kind of continuing the thing that overstimulates them. They just shut down further. So respect that. Some kids ask questions. And I think it's when kids ask questions that we as

parents are really confronted with our conflict about sharing with our kids, right? Here's the things about kids' questions that I think is really important. When kids ask us questions, they've already considered a wide range of answers. So either I'm leaving my child alone with that wonder, or I can connect to it and leave them less alone. It's not information that scares kids. It's the absence of information and feeling alone, wondering about information. You know, we've talked about this before that it's so important to prepare your children for the time that they will be processing this information without you. And that it's probably going to come more quickly than you think, especially in the age of cell phones and everybody has a Chromebook from school or an iPad. Even if you have a careful lockdown

on those things, their friends, parents may not. And so their ability to find things out, see things that maybe you'd prefer that they don't, that information is probably going to come more quickly than any of us would prefer. And teaching them these skills to be able to know where can I get information? Who can I trust to help me with this? That is so, Who can I trust to help me with this? That is so, it just seems so integral to equipping your children. I totally agree. Right. So again, and just for anyone where these two kinds of ideas are new, am I preparing my kid or am I protecting my kid? I don't know if we've ever been able to protect kids from life hardships. Like I haven't lived any other lifetime, but this one, but I think everybody right now knows in the information age, like you can't protect kids from getting information.

It's impossible. It only gets easier and easier. So we can't protect them from that. We can prepare them. And I think about this a lot with my kids, even though my oldest one's only 10, I want to be the first one in, like, I want to be the first one in on so many tricky topics. It disturbs me, the fact that some random kid at school or someone he hears who's a stranger on the street is going to be the first one in.

This will be the first piece of information on some different topic, right? So let's take something in the news, Afghanistan, right? I would want to say to my child, hey, when you go to school today, when you go to school this week, you might hear kids talking about Afghanistan and what happened when the U.S. troops started withdrawing. There's so many different things I could share with you about it. What I want to say as an overall kind of piece of information is there's a lot of things you might hear that are going to feel scary and sad. A lot of those are true. You might hear things that aren't true, but it's a pretty awful situation there. Yeah.

And I wanted to let you know that so you're prepared. I'm also prepared to give you more information, but I want that to be from your wanting to know more, not from my assuming you want to know more. So I'm happy to answer now that you have this baseline information, any additional questions you have. So at least the first time you're talking about this, it's with me at home. And then to really trust your kid, your kid may say, yeah, okay, that's enough. I don't want to know more. And then I might say, okay, if you hear things at school, I'm someone you can always come to or what happened? What do you mean? Right. That was the first time or how bad was it? And then I'd kind of go back to that a little bit of a formula. I like having formulas. It helps me through emotionally overwhelming moments for me. Okay.

Well, let's get our bodies ready. It's not something we talk about every day. It's not something we see every day. And it's really, really sad. Not sad as in they don't have, you know, something at the store you wanted, like a level of sad, that's totally different. And then maybe I'd share a little more and then say, what is that like to hear? Like what's going on? How scary does that feel? It's right. And kind of what we're really doing then is what I think is really important. We're building a kid's tolerance. Yes. Processing distress, just saying this is really upsetting for me too. At least we're here together and the different feelings you have or questions you have or thoughts you have or worries you have about it. Just know you're not alone. I mean that, what do you want from a friend when you're going through

a divorce or your parent dies or your child's in the hospital? You want a friend to say, I'm here for you. Yeah. And just to literally show up both physically and metaphorically, you know, if your parent dies, you want your friend to actually show up physically at that funeral, or if they can't metaphorically show up for you in another way, like calling or whatever. And I actually want to use that just because I think adult examples drive home what our kids need. We often forget like our kids are more like us than they're like other animals, right? So if you had a parent who died, nobody's taking away the fact that that happened and no one's taking away the pain. And if anybody tried to, it would feel so off-putting or if someone didn't show up or

saw you on the street and walked away, kind of avoided it. Cause I go, I don't know if Sharon wants me to, to bring it up. I think you'd be like, yeah, like the bringing it up. Like it already happened. Like, like I know it feels awful to be left alone in a truth. And if we think about something like talking about the news to our kids, again, so we don't have to force it down their throats, but as they get older and as they know more and see more and inevitably hear more, it's the aloneness and the ignoring that feels off-putting and feels scary.

It's not the information. My dad passed away a number of years ago. And when you have a loved one who dies, and I think this applies to children too. Children can actually handle understanding that somebody has died. It doesn't mean that they won't feel sad feelings. We want to protect them from those sad feelings. I absolutely understand that as a parent, like it actually hurts you to watch them hurt. Um, it's very uncomfortable as a parent to watch your child suffer, but none of my friends said anything that took away the fact that my dad died.

None, you know, none of my mom's friends said anything that took away the fact that my dad died. None of my mom's friends said anything that took away the fact that her husband died, but just showing up again, like food, a card, a note showing up at the funeral, whatever it is, just their presence actually is almost like a balm to that difficult emotion. It doesn't take away the loss, but it just makes it a little easier to bear. There's feelings and then there's reactions to feelings and how a feeling ends up feeling in our body is always a combination of the two. And the thing that makes a feeling feel worse than anything else is aloneness in it, because that's the abyss and aloneness through literally being alone, through feeling judged, through feeling invalidated, through feeling shame. And when instead of aloneness,

we're met with loving, supportive, compassionate presence. I feel like you said a bomb. I always picture it. I feel like it cushions it. Like it makes it stay as bad as the feeling could be, but it doesn't add any of the elements of a reaction to the feeling that end up intensifying our pain. And this all goes back to what we started with. How do you talk about the news? Guess what? There's things in the news that are sad, that would make you mad. And I'd actually say with grief, right? I would want my kid to feel sad. And I know that sounds sadistic, so I don't mean it like that. But I want my kids to be able to learn how to feel sad in life because guess what? I don't know any adult who's like got that sadness out of me when I was a kid. Nope, never came again. Like you have all the range of feelings in

adulthood as you do in childhood. You either are prepared to know how to talk to yourself and be kind to yourself when you have that emotion. you could essentially say, I've had experience with this feeling and I know as awful as it is, it eventually ends. And there's some things here and there I can do. Maybe it doesn't make it better, but at least it doesn't send me down a, you know, down the rabbit hole. And you can't learn how to manage the feelings you didn't experience in childhood. Like it just, it doesn't, you don't learn emotion regulation in a course, you learn it through experience. You have to go through that tunnel. And so things like someone died, things like I was exposed to some news story that's really awful. I think as a parent, you have to say to yourself, that's not a parenting fail. I'm not messing up my child.

My child has an early experience with the feeling. Would I have wished that on them? my child has an early experience with the feeling. Would I have wished that on them? No, no. And now that it's here, I have an opportunity to say, my child's going to learn how to process this feeling in as healthy as a way as possible. They're going to have an early building block. Maybe heck they have a leg up on this feeling. It's unfortunate that they felt it so early, but this can be a source of their resilience going forward. If I help them learn that this feeling can be felt, it's not going to overwhelm them. And how do feelings not overwhelm us? We have a partner next to us and that's us for our kids. I love that. I have talked about this on my show before as well, because I feel like there are many adults, maybe through no fault of their

own, maybe from the way they were raised, who have a lack of distress tolerance. And they have a lack of being able to, as you so beautifully put it, to be able to tolerate and see the truth because of how uncomfortable that is. And distress tolerance is not a way to make the distress go away, but it allows you to sit with that feeling and then be able to build resilience, channel that into something productive. That feeling of being horrified that something terrible has happened can be incredibly useful in affecting change in the world, et cetera. And if we have no distress tolerance, it will be very, very difficult for us to accomplish big, meaningful things. Yes. Right. So can you give us maybe a few more tips about how we can help raise kids who can tolerate distress? I think the best

strategies for helping kids build distress tolerance are the exact same strategies that help us build distress tolerance. So talk about bang for your buck when you can do the same thing for us and our kids, we're really accomplishing something, right? So this is my go-to distress tolerance skill for myself. And one I really try to teach my kids, right? I call it AVP because I like a good acronym, right? So that stands for acknowledge, validate, permit. And I'll go through that, how we'd use that on

ourselves and then really how we could use that in the exact same way with our kids. And it comes from, again, the understanding that feelings don't want to be made better. Feelings want to be less alone. They want to be seen just like we want to be seen by a friend, right? You want to be seen by a friend, right? You want to be seen by a partner for, oh, you took out the garbage today. I really appreciate that, right? Like you want to be seen, right? Same with our feelings. So let's say, oh, I'm, you know, I had a bad day at the office. Now I'm stuck in traffic and I go into my house and we all know we're just going to be ready for one thing to happen. And I'm going

to explode on someone that I love and don't want to explode on. So I might do this AVP. I live in a building. So I'm going up my elevator. I'm going to do this. Acknowledge. Acknowledge is naming something happening inside of you. You don't even have to use fancy kind of feelings words. It doesn't have to be, oh, I'm anxious. Like it could just be, I have a racing heart or I noticed I'm feeling really amped up right now. That's acknowledging. Next step, validate. Validation is really the process of telling your feelings why they make sense. And that phrase makes sense. I swear our body lights up when we use it. It's just exactly, I think what our feelings are looking for. So I had a bad day at work and I was stuck at traffic. And actually, now, I think what our feelings are looking for. So I had a bad day at work and

I was stuck at traffic. And actually now that I think about it, I didn't even have lunch today. And I just saw a text that, you know, my friends canceled the dinner I was supposed to have with them tomorrow. That was the one thing I was looking forward to. It makes sense that I'm feeling amped up. Now I hear people saying to me, but sometimes my feelings don't make sense. amped up. Now I hear people saying to me, but sometimes my feelings don't make sense. Your feelings always make sense as animals. We feel before we think. And just because our thoughts don't understand our feelings, our brain is just late to the game. It's not that our feelings are wrong. Our feelings are never wrong. We're animals. We feel so even saying I'm feeling amped up. I don't even understand why, but I'm remembering what that

Dr. Becky person said. My body has a reason why this feeling makes sense, even if my brain hasn't figured it out yet. And then that P-step, permission. And it sounds odd, but I give my body full permission to be feeling this feeling. When we get reactive and we can't tolerate distress, you think about all the things we do are kind of our feelings exploding out of our body. We yell at someone, we condescend towards someone, we punch a wall. It's kind of our feelings explode. When we give permission for our feelings to live inside of our body, they don't have to come out of our body as dysregulated behaviors. So how does that look with our kids? So my kid comes home and I don't know, how are we building

distress tolerance? I'm thinking, oh, I'm the only kid in my class who can't read, right? Let's go to that example. I can't read. I'm not, I'm so stupid. Oh, we don't want to hear our kids say that. But if I go to that AVP model and again, feelings feel hard, not because they're painful, but because they feel alone. So what do we want to say? That's not true. You're a great reader actually lowers distress tolerance. Now I'm building a pattern where my child has something hard that happens when they're 25. And it's basically like, where's the happy button? Where's the happy button in my life? You know what? There's no happy button. Okay. Sometimes you just got to get through the hard thing. So my kid comes home saying this, I'd go through that AVP,

acknowledge. You noticed a lot of your friends are reading. You're not reading yet. You're really noticing that. That makes sense that that would feel tricky. I'd feel really upset about that too. You're allowed to feel upset about that. It doesn't mean you're not going to learn how to read. It doesn't mean you're a bad student. It just means you feel upset and you're allowed to feel upset in our family. It's so odd that actually doesn't make it worse for a kid. It makes it so much better because when we show our kids, we're not scared of their feelings. They learn not to be scared of our feelings. But if our kids coming to us with a feeling leads us to essentially say, wait, but you're amazing at soccer. You're the best soccer player. What a kid really learns is, oh, wow, I guess not being an early reader

actually is as bad as I worried it was because my parent won't even name the fact that this is happening. I guess I really am stupid. Like it actually confirms their fears when we're not willing to acknowledge, validate and permit. Yeah. I think we feel like it's going to distract them and they'll stop thinking about that. Right. But you're so good at soccer. You've many other talents.

You're really good at drawing. We feel like that distraction will help them not dwell. That's exactly right. And yet this foundational idea to me is our body doesn't lie and our body doesn't forget. Once you've registered a feeling, it's there. You can't unfeel a feeling. It's just not a thing. So either that feeling, even if it gets distraction, comes up again and you know what it remembers? Aloneness because it never had connection. Gets bigger and bigger. Or it remembers being allowed to be there and someone else essentially saying, like, it's not like we say no big deal, but we kind of do like, oh, you're not reading it? Like we can talk

about that. Like, that's okay. Like let's even, you can have feelings about that. It makes the feeling less scary. Right? So even if a kid is temporarily distracted, if we remind ourselves, you can't unfeel feelings, it's just going to creep up again. So one more distress tolerance kind of building exercise that I think every parent can do today comes from the idea that we forget how capable we are as compared to our kids. And I mean, even teenagers, but definitely young kids, any listener here with a young kid, if you think about the first half an hour of your young kid's day, like maybe they're changing out of their pajamas by themselves and putting on a shirt and brushing their teeth, and maybe they're pouring even their own milk or something. Think about how you do those tasks. Like you do that. You do those tasks mindlessly and effortlessly. Your kid is working at every single one of those

forget reading, writing math, like just everything that a kid is working on. We do with ease. And now if we bring this back to ourselves, imagine trying to learn a new skill. Like I think about myself learning to cook and I was only surrounded by celebrity chefs. Like when I burned garlic, you think I could tolerate distress if I was living in a house of people who never burned garlic? No way. It's just our experience. So what does that mean in terms of a concrete strategy? Start messing up more often about things in front of your kids or just highlight the mess ups you do have. I remember when my kids were getting ready to tie their shoes so hard. It's so hard. There's so many steps. There's so many times you fail and you have to do it again. I would kind of tie my shoes and mess up in front of them. That did more for my child than any YouTube video I showed them about tying their shoes. And we don't even have to make it up.

Like I could say, oh my goodness, I wrote this email to someone and, oh, I misspelled this word as this word. It was so embarrassing. Oh, no one's perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. Kids build distress tolerance by watching their parents struggle and see that distress is part of life. It's not something you're trying to always minimize or get rid of in life. And I think we can all do a better job of just being honest about our struggles or mistakes or even modeling. I'm going to do a crossword puzzle and talk out loud about how I can't get it. Or I am actually working on a yoga pose that I always fall in my head when I try it. And I try to actually do that in front of my kids

because they need to see me fall in my head. Right. So I think that that's another thing we could all do every day. And it increases our kids distress tolerance without even any didactic moment of teaching them a skill. And they don't necessarily even need to be experiencing distress, but they're watching you process what could be distressing to somebody like them. And it gives them skills for how to tolerate that more in the future. Exactly. Because if we think about really what happens when we're feeling distress, yes, there's the pain of distress, but for most of us, the hardest part of struggling with something is the self-belief that gets evoked in that moment. Something's wrong with me. I shouldn't

be having such a hard time. And so what you're doing when you model struggling or making a mistake in front of your kids is you're actually teaching a lesson that can never be taught through words, only through experience, which is all people have a hard time. Having a hard time is part of being a good, smart, accomplished person, right? And that's actually what your kids need to tolerate distress beyond the deep breathing, beyond the AVPs, beyond the other techniques is they need the self-belief when they struggle. I'm still a good person. Everyone has times like this. Oh my goodness.

So much wisdom. And you have a fantastic podcast. So if this was useful to people, if people want more information about parenting strategies, and I know so many people are going to have a lot of takeaways from this. Tell us about your podcast and where people can find you. Yeah. So it's called Good Inside with Dr. Becky. You can find it on any podcast platform.

And there are kind of, as of now, two different types of podcasts that you can find there. So I do a podcast where I answer three questions from real listeners who just called in and left voicemails. And so if you have a question that you would like answered on my podcast, please, please call in. I'm going to actually list the number right now. It is 646-598-2543. Just call and leave a voicemail and episodes kind of bring common questions together. Or I have other episodes where I

interview someone with a parenting question or just different people with different ideas. Sharon was a guest on that kind of deep dive episode. And those episodes are all kind of digestible, about half an hour and filled with strategies and tips. And then the other place you can find me is just goodinside.com. You can sign up for my weekly email with kind of tons of strategies and scripts or take some of my more deeper dive courses into a kind of really wide range of parenting and kind of self-care, self-growth topics. I love it. Thank you so much for doing this. This was incredibly useful. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Sharon. It's been really fun and such an honor. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review. Or if you're

feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.