Welcome back to the Simplicity Parenting podcast with me, Kim John Payne. This is a special episode, one of two or three episodes that are going to take up this theme of how to raise an emotionally resilient child, teen tween. It's based on my last co-authored book that I authored with Luis Fernando Llosa.
And the subtitle of it kind of describes, and describes it quite well, I hope, is Empowering Your Kids to Navigate Bullying, Teasing and Social Exclusion. This theme is coming up more and more in our schools I think largely because with the anxiety, stress, the pace of life that is happening for so many children, what's going on is they're trying to control whatever they can control in a world that feels out of control to them. It's too much, too fast, too sexy, too young, and they're getting overwhelmed.
And so the default position is that of trying to over control. And a big part of over controlling is what we call teasing and bullying. And I'll come to that more fully later.
In the first part of that book, there's a section on what to do and what not to do. And I want to do some reading from this. And this will be followed in other episodes.
And these will be slightly longer episodes as sort of podcast specials. I'll be following it up with some reading of some of the stories or a particular story from the book, because these stories are designed, there's 10 of them actually, to be read aloud stories to your children if they're struggling with the myriad issues around their social life with friends and with classmates. Then these read aloud stories are designed exactly for you, for us as parents.
And they're written with dialogue. They're real life stories. They're not made up in any way.
And that's to come next. But first of all, let's establish a baseline. Reading from the book now.
Every parent dreads the moment when their child says, Mom, I'm being left out of everything. I don't have any friends. So many emotions and questions flood in.
First, well, comes the instinct to protect. Is someone picking on my child? Do I need to speak with someone at school? Just exactly what's going on here? Then memories from our own childhood bubble up to the surface. Oh, I know all about this.
I remember it exactly like it was yesterday. Or it makes me feel sick just thinking about things that can happen. Or I recall feeling different from everyone and feeling really lonely.
Or perhaps we struggle to relate to our child's situation, because that can happen too. Inner thoughts, we might even say out loud, I was socially okay when I was a kid, and I still am. Or what's wrong with my child? Where did all this come from anyway? Mixed up with this jumble of thoughts and concerns is the urge to blame.
Why is the school not doing anything? Is it those mean kids again? They're so out of control. What kind of dysfunctional homes do these nasty kids come from anyway? Why keep getting announcements about inclusion and diversity, and yet this happens? What gives? Now a small voice may even question your child's story. Can it really be that bad? Isn't this just kids being kids? Maybe my son, my child, just needs to toughen up a bit and work it out for himself.
Hmm. Once you get through the initial shock of learning your child is unhappy and being targeted, self-doubt and concern can sometimes set in. Why didn't I pick this up earlier? Am I losing touch? What have I done wrong to raise a child who doesn't know how to fit in? What am I supposed to do? Should I step in? I don't want to be a helicopter parent, but... Hmm.
All this. It's very understandable and you're not alone. So here is a message to panicky parents.
Not now. The first thing you need to do is to contain the clamoring fears, judgments and opinions that well up inside you when your child finds the courage to tell you something is wrong. Avoid, as best you can, asking questions.
Try not to convey that you're anxious and triggered, potentially. Those troubling thoughts that manifest as a nagging voice inside your head, don't let them take over. Tell them calmly and firmly, not now.
Tell those thoughts not now. You're not denying or suppressing your very real concerns, but rather simply directing them to take a back seat. One parent's mantra in such a moment was, Not now, I'm with my child.
I particularly like that. This strategy helps you become more present in the moment, which is what your child needs most of all. When children feel shaky, vulnerable and emotionally lost, they look for someone to be there for them at a time when others in their world are decidedly not.
I've gone into a catastrophic preparation mode many times when one of my children says, Dad, I've some really bad news. But when I've been able to defer my reaction and focus on listening carefully to the details that they're providing in the situation, I've been in much better shape to offer loving presence and support. So that's a major message, right? That of just being present and deferring the worries and just really listening to your child.
So back into the text. Is something going on? Children seldom come right out and say they're being excluded, teased, bullied, but their behavior can tip you off. Now, whether your child is an extrovert, friendly, outgoing, enthusiastic, or an introvert, shy, quiet, pensive, those natural characteristics become exaggerated if they're socially struggling.
Children become emotionally fevered. They get upset much more quickly than is normal. Now, the extroverts, they act out.
Extroverts sweat it out. Their emotional response is to get hot-tempered, rowdy, noisy, angry, and larger than life, and they push hard against restrictions and rules. They are, in effect, saying, get out of my way.
Introverts, on the other hand, introverts get cold and shivery. They fall back. They pull back even further from relationships, and they become withdrawn and sullen and maybe even stubborn, and they're prone to recall and decry past hurts and problems and times when they felt, you know, like they felt undervalued or unseen.
Now, with both types of kids, concentration changes. Social stress can make it hard for your child to focus. You may notice a difference in the way they play.
They become more vulnerable and reactive or thin-skinned. Their ability to concentrate can plummet. They can become easily distracted, flitting about from project to project, bird-like, never landing long enough in one place to make much progress.
Alternatively, if they normally tend to bury themselves in tasks and projects, they may become hyper-focused and inflexible when they're upset, and they kind of try to shut out the world. That's what I've noticed often. Another thing I've noticed is that transitions become harder.
Kids who are under too much social pressure are much more easily triggered during normal daily transitions. For example, young children may refuse to leave a play date, oblivious to the discomfort that their tantrum causes their host, family, and bedtime transitions also, which were perhaps occasionally tricky, become much more problematic. Now, as I mentioned before, controlling behavior spikes.
One clear sign that there is social trouble brewing is when a child tries to exert control over all aspects of family life. That can also spill over into school. They might try to dominate play with siblings and become irate when things don't go exactly as they're dictated.
Other control issues manifest as problems with food and sleep. Your child may refuse to eat, and food they normally ate with a minimum of fuss before or no fuss. Sleep may become problematic.
They kind of absolutely insist that you lie beside them until they fall asleep, which can take hours because of their looping worries keeps them awake. Your child may try to dominate conversations and insist on having the last word. You may get calls from teachers concerned that they're talking back and having difficulty complying with requests.
Alternatively, they may peel away from the group and group activities at home and at school, preferring the relative security of solitude. As we shift our thinking, we come to understand that our children are not simply misbehaving or isolating themselves. They are trying desperately sometimes to exert control over a world that is spinning out of control.
Once we recognize what's going on, our frustrations can quickly give way to a deeper sense of compassion for what they're going through. Look, even if your child commonly exhibits some of the difficult behavior described in what I was just reading, be on alert if it suddenly worsens dramatically, if their reactions become unusually intense and disproportionate. They are likely to be being teased, excluded or bullied.
Without making it too obvious, see what you can find out from their friends' parents, speak to their teachers, observe their behavior around other kids, but most importantly, move in close. Spend time doing some of their favorite things. By doing that, you create a warm, shared space in which they are much more likely to open up and open up to you about what's troubling them.
Strengthening family base camp. When life gets shaky for your child out there in the world, it's important to make their life in here, within the family sphere, much more solid. You may be tempted to direct your attention to what is happening at school or in the neighborhood, but what kids need most is for you to wrap them up in a big, puffy blanket of care and familiarity.
At some point, your child will have to journey out into a more difficult and demanding social environment, a world that can be cold and unwelcoming. In this book, you'll find a rich selection of stories you can read with them to support them on that voyage. However, the tools and strategies you collect from these tales will be more useful and effective if you first devote time and effort to connecting with your child in a more conscious way.
One couple I met whose nine-year-old was feeling isolated at school told me that they increased their daily attention and provided their child with a more well-stocked family base camp. Long afterwards, when she was a teenager, she told us that spending all that time with things that she enjoyed doing with us during that socially traumatic period gave her the strength and confidence to face any challenges that arose. The things you do with your child do not have to be elaborate or complicated.
That's the beauty of it. When things are going wrong for a child, their lives feel out of shape. Normal is exactly what they need.
Go on bike rides, hikes with them, set up family game nights, read out aloud, or bake or cook a meal with them, or launch into that tree-fort project that you've been putting off forever. One dad I worked with learned that his son, Tommy, was struggling to make friends in a new school. He asked Tommy to help him build a ramp in their driveway for Tommy's BMX bike.
They enjoyed working together so much that they started to construct other equipment, and before long, several other neighborhood kids joined in. Now, not only was the father spending more time doing the things with his son they both enjoyed, but he was also indirectly helping Tommy form new relationships outside the school. Armed with confidence and buoyed by those new friendships, Tommy had a much easier time making new connections at school.
When you spend more time deepening your connection with your child, you lift their spirits as well as your own, because at the very moment they're feeling most vulnerable, your actions convey a very clear, unwavering message. I see you, I value you, and I most certainly love you. We live in a time when myriad advertisers and multiple devices compete to capture our children's most valuable commodity, their attention.
However, when your child is being picked on, it's important to hit the pause button, not just for screens and social media platforms, but for all types of busyness that crowd and complicate their lives. When a child feels left out or is being teased relentlessly, the stress they feel doesn't merely affect one part of their life, it spills over and their emotional riverbanks flood into every corner of their life. This experience is not exclusive to children.
We all know what it's like to be inundated with worries. But children aren't equipped with the proper defenses to handle the deluge. They haven't yet developed full executive function in their brain, to see the big picture and keep things in context.
To help our children process what they're experiencing, we need to stop the world. We have to create a space in which our children can speak, be heard, and be comforted. Stopping the world doesn't mean altering the healthy daily rhythms of family life.
On the contrary, kids need more routine and familiarity in a socially stressed time. Quite simply, we must put down the computer, put away the smartphone, if our child wants to speak to us, or even go so far as to take a mental health day away from work, in order just to hang out with your child. Some parents push back against the deluge of daily emails and texts by turning off notifications and making a sacrosanct promise not to look at their phone when their child is with them.
Others choose to read their kid a story and tuck them in at every night without fail. One father, who had a very fast-paced, high-pressure finance job, told me he postponed a business trip in order to be at home while his daughter was going through a particularly tough patch. I'd never have done that before, he confessed.
But the time I spent hanging out with her, goofing around, just melted my heart. During that long, uninterrupted weekend they spent together, she disclosed things to him that he had no idea that was going on. He said, It came out in little bits here and there.
As each day passed, she told me a little bit more. They decided to invite her mother over, that the parents were divorced, to hear what was happening and help them figure out how they could turn the situation around. Mum, Dad and daughter developed a solid plan that helped her resolve her social dilemma.
He said, Authorizing myself to postpone the trip and to spend time, and all that time with my daughter, was the highest-yield investment I'll ever make. That made me laugh when he said that. The next section.
Dial Back Life I've received countless calls from distressed parents, despairing the emotional toll teasing and exclusion has taken on their child. They ask questions such as, Can you help give our son confidence to join in? Or, Is there a way I can coach my daughter to stand up for herself? Understandably, they desperately want tools to deal directly with their child's problem. But before I talk about tools and strategies, I always say to them, You know what? First, we need to explore your family's pace of life to see if we need to dial things back a bit.
There's little sense in pouring more water into a cup that's already overflowing. Sure, we can come up with common sense strategies to help the teasing and the marginalization and the not fitting in. But if life is moving too fast for a child, with too many activities and too little time to decompress, the tactics will not have a container to hold them.
All that effort will become spillage, and it may increase your child's feeling of hopelessness. You know, the question becomes, Do we want to spend more time mopping up the spillage? Or do we simply want to put our hand on the tap and turn it down? Now, in my book Simplicity Parenting, it provides details and strategies for dialing back the frenetic pace of life. And many of you know that book.
But here in brief are three strategies that will help strengthen your child's emotional resilience so that they can better face and overcome teasing, exclusion, bullying, marginalization, and just social difficulties in general. So number one, increasing rhythm and predictability. In a child's school life, transitions, arrivals, departures, class changeovers, and recess times are when teasing and other social problems often occur.
They are also times that are most changeable and socially unpredictable. There's really nothing that a parent can do about what happens at school because it's outside our circle of control. But we can counterbalance the instability by making extra effort to create a home that is as secure and as predictable as possible.
It's important to know that the big daily rhythms that provide the when things happen and the little rituals that give the how things are done make so much difference. It creates security, allowing a child's nervous system to relax and revive. And its importance really can't be overstated.
Number two, dialing back after school and weekend activities. Children who struggle socially need extra time to decompress. Simple as that.
Cutting back on the number of play dates, after school clubs, and weekend activities they're involved in will help alleviate their anxiety. One shouldn't stop everything, of course. Your child can remain involved in some activities, particularly those that boost their self-esteem.
But concentrating more on family-based pursuits such as games, hikes, home-centered projects can have a calming, comforting effect. If they're used to a fast-paced life, they may initially complain that they've got nothing to do, but boredom can be a gift. As they experience more downtime, children will search for things to do and they will likely become more innovative and creative out of just the necessity because there's nothing better to do.
Becoming involved in here, like in here at home, where it's safe and relaxing, is just what they need when they're not being seen and treated well out there at school, which is where there's the social pressure. Finally, number three, filtering out adult information. We should moderate and filter what we say in front of our kids, especially when they're being teased and excluded.
Our children want us to acknowledge their social difficulties that they're going through and may, of their own accord, bring them up, but we shouldn't broach the topic repeatedly ourselves. Every time these stressful situations are discussed, our children relive them emotionally. They experience the release of adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormones.
We want home to be a sanctuary where they can seek support and relief, so try to keep things light and fun. You can check in with your child from time to time and let them know they can always speak with you about things that are going on, but take care not to process your emotions and worries about their woes and the things that are going on in front of your kids. Avoid judging.
When a child has laid out their world bare to us, we need to treat them sensitively and respectfully. If we immediately demolish aspects of what they're going through with comments and advice and judgments, they may feel even more lost. It's better to reassure them by agreeing that what's happening is not fair and offer them help and help to change what's going on by working out ways to deal with their situation.
However, it's critical to withhold negative comments about the situation and the other kids that are involved. Judging those who are judging is a toxic cycle that we don't want to model for our children, the other children and their families. Speaking harshly about the perpetrators of exclusion is not at all helpful.
It's especially true if you demolish the children who are doing the excluding. Even though it sounds counterintuitive, children often worry about their parents hating the kids who are leaving them out because they may be secretly hoping that one day these same children will include them. And if that happens, they don't want to be stuck between new friends and parents who don't like them.
Alternatively, your child may join in with you labeling and psychoanalyzing the kids who are tormenting them. This can make things worse if your child develops an image of those kids as monsters. That'll make the situation scarier and even more irredeemable.
In other words, we need to help them avoid the emotional maze and find a straightforward path. It's also tempting in our effort to protect our child to have concerns or even trash or trash talk the families of the perpetrators. But much of what we know about other families is either second-hand information or often conjecture.
Even if we're confident that our opinions are well-founded and accurate, expressing them doesn't help our child feel more secure. The school. This is actually a tough one.
We trust a school to keep our kids safe, right? When things go wrong, we tend to react strongly. We suffer from a toxic mixture of disappointment, anxiety, vulnerability, and anger. Our anger is an emotional attempt to redress an emotional imbalance.
Just like we tend to shout when we don't feel we're being heard, we often lash out at others when we feel hurt. When faced with an institution, the school, that we feel is ignoring or not addressing our concerns about our kids' treatment by others, we can become frustrated or maybe even enraged. Even though it's difficult and at such times we need to seek emotional balance, on one hand, we want justice, but we'll frighten our kid if we become enraged and react against the teacher or the school.
And no matter what we feel, our child still has to spend six to eight hours a day in that environment with that teacher or administrators that we are actually railing against. No teacher or administrator is in the profession for money or fame. A vast majority of educators care deeply about the children they teach and try to ensure their classrooms are socially healthy places.
Most schools are basically safe. It's the buses, the hallways, the bathrooms, locker rooms, and of course, during recess, that problems occur. And yes, they're a part of school.
I get that. Because of this, it's better to be inquisitive when approaching educators rather than accusative. Yes, you may need to get your perspective across, that's for sure, but teachers are very likely to have their own way of seeing things.
I've been in countless parent-teacher meetings when there's an underlying tension about whose story is right. With both parties convinced that the other is not seeing the reality of the situation. Sometimes, I actually ask for a pause while we surface this dynamic by saying to the parent or guardian, no one knows your child in the family constellation as well as you do.
No one. And then to the educator, I'll often say, no one knows this child in the classroom constellation as well as you do. And then to both, what a great team you all make to work things out because we all know and we have a different sort of perspective on what's happening, but what a strong team we are.
I feel compelled to add here that I have actually known of situations where a teacher's behavior is belittling and bullying, though this is rare. When it does occur, it's often unintended and unconscious, and when it does arise, parents are absolutely well within their rights to raise concerns and insist on a thorough review, informing both the teacher involved and the administration. Nevertheless, still, the inquisitive versus inquisitive principle still applies and helps us stay balanced and have a better chance of being heard by those with whom you have to approach and interact, calling it what it is.
I use the term bullying and bully less frequently as my understanding of the true dynamics of social conflict develops. Most children I work with prefer the word teasing or left out. Bullying, it's a really heavily loaded word.
Kids often avoid using it unless it's really bad. They may say it when they've heard adults using the word repeatedly. However, when I talk to adults, the term I prefer to use, the terms are exclusion or, in particular, hyper-controlling behavior.
In doing so, I don't mean to minimize the harmful nature of marginalization. It's important to be more specific about the underlying motivation of the kids who are doing the teasing. Kids who hyper-control are looking for power.
They seek it in a number of ways. They may, for example, try to derail classes at school, habitually drawing attention to themselves, and attempt to dominate parents and other family members. Anyone who tries to hyper-control, I guess, deserves to be understood as well.
The use of the term hyper-controlling allows us to separate the child from their behavior. When we step away from judgment, we begin to focus on what's important, figuring out why they are over-controlling. If the ultimate aim is for all the kids involved to shift out of unhealthy dynamics, we need first to understand why these patterns of behavior are playing out.
If teachers or school counselors can use the term hyper-controlling when speaking to a parent or child who is the central perpetrator of a teasing situation, they're less likely to meet denial or defensiveness from a parent. They're more likely to be able to work together on a plan that encompasses all those aspects of a child's life in which boundaries and support are needed. In my counseling practice, I've seen many disoriented children who hold on to life too hard in an attempt to hyper-control their environment.
When we dialed back what was overwhelming them, they began to relax and rewind, and, well, unwind. Some examples of effective strategies for hyper-controlling kids offer them help with academic learning, dial back homework, significantly increase rhythm and predictability in their lives, of course cut out violent video games, reduce screen time, slow down the pace of life by reducing the number of after-school commitments, carefully plan recess times, and bring in student helpers from upper grades to support healthier play and improve peer relationships. I seldom refer to children who are being teased or excluded as victims or being victimized.
The term I suggest, these terms, I beg your pardon, these terms suggest that they're passive and may suggest that they're somehow to blame for being teased or bullied. I prefer to speak to children being targeted, marginalized, or excluded. An excluded child is being dehumanized.
While dehumanized is not a word that fits easily into conversation with kids, it's the truth, it's the undeniable truth and can guide our thinking. Children who are excluded or marginalized are being denied their basic humanity. It can become an unconscious habit for a group of children to see a marginalized child as being less than, not worthy, and ultimately not as human as us.
Clearly, it's up to us to help our children see the humanity in all people. As educators and parents, we carry this as a sacred responsibility. In all the hurt and the complications of social crisis in our lives and in the lives of children, we need above all to hold on to the vision that everyone involved has the right to be heard and the right to be treated like a human being.
Now, this may sound obvious or even lofty or philosophical, but when you hear these stories in the emotionally resilient tweens and teens book, they will, and as you read it to them, they'll begin to sense that they're not alone, that there's hope and that they can be valued for who they are. So, that's the reading of the first chapter or the first section of the emotional resilience book. I hope that's been useful.
This was a special podcast. It was a longer podcast. And of course, you may have paused it as you go through because we're used to the smaller ones, but I wanted to take the time to read that in context and really have that stand alone without breaking it up in my reading.
Okay. So, I sure hope that was helpful. Bye-bye for now.
