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Welcome to the Parenting Without Power Struggles podcast. I'm Susan Stiffelman, author of Parenting Without Power Struggles and Parenting with Presence. As a family therapist, teacher, and parent coach for over 40 years, I've helped thousands of families raise kids with more connection and ease. and fewer power struggles.

And I get to share some of what I've learned with you here. In this series we talk about real parenting struggles and practical ways to address them based on decades of experience and study in attachment theory, neuroscience, internal family systems, mindfulness, polyvagal theory, and of course decades of clinical practice.

You'll hear conversations with guests like Dan Siegel, Janet Lansbury, Mona Delahooke, Tina Bryson, Ned Hallowell, and many others, along with episodes where I answer questions from parents like you. At the heart of my work is a commitment to helping you be the calm, steady, loving, captain of the ship for your children and teens.

Managing dysregulation, your kids and your own, so that you can raise confident, resilient kids who feel safe, seen, and heard. Secure and open to your loving support. You can find out more about my work at SusanStiffelman.com where you can explore a library of masterclasses on everything from meltdowns and chores to helping anxious and sensitive children thrive along with lots of other wonderful parenting resources.

Now let's get started.

I'm so glad to have recorded this podcast with Tracy because. A new fresh perspective. And her, she's in the middle of parenting. She's got a 12-year-old, and we're talking here in this upcoming episode about meltdowns, which is a topic near and dear to the hearts of most parents. Unfortunately, it's something that we.

Inevitably have to deal with whether the meltdown is dramatic and huge and chaotic, or it's shrunken and contained some children to meltdowns really become a shutting down. So have a listen to this great episode, and then we'll come together for the wrap up.

Tracy Gillett: Thank you, Susan. All the better for chatting here with you here today.

Susan Stiffelman: So Tracy do you wanna just say a couple things about you for the people in our audience who don't know about Raised Good and the wonderful work you do and then we'll jump into talking about meltdowns?

Tracy Gillett: Yeah, sure. I would love to. So I'm Tracy, I started a. Blog back when my son was a baby and he just turned 12, so a little while ago now he had, we shared mother's Day and his birthday this year. I started writing about motherhood when he was just a little baby because I was. Coming across different ways of parenting that were surprising me.

Tracy Gillett: So I was doing things that that were not mainstream and I was finding how much joy it was bringing me and how much connection it was. I. Creating between me and my son, and I just really wanted to share it with parents. I often felt quite alone in the way that I was parenting, and so I was also searching for the community that I was looking for.

Tracy Gillett: So yeah, it started out as a little blog and it just has turned. It's just. I couldn't have imagined how it would snowball. So I feel very fortunate I get to talk about things that I'm passionate about and connect with parents and really find common ground on our journeys and support one another and, try to recreate that sort of village that we've lost.

Susan Stiffelman: And I love that it's you refer to it sometimes as simplicity parenting or natural parenting. And I know I would've been looking for you as a mother, even though I was a therapist and I'd been a teacher. 'cause I did feel like I was an island in a lot of ways. I was homeschooling my son and trying to be more present and handling sleep differently than a lot of the people in the neighborhood.

Susan Stiffelman: And an outlier. I think you, you offer a great service to parents who are. Gravitationally pulled to that kind of sensibility and

Tracy Gillett: Oh, thank you. Thank you, Susan. Yeah, I called it natural parenting when I started because. And it's not because we need to, I don't even really like labels.

Tracy Gillett: I like parents to just, I wanna just light a path and say, this is how it works for me. We co-slept from night one. We breastfed beyond babyhood. We chose not to follow traditional discipline techniques, and this is how it looks. And if this is something you're interested in, then here's how it can look and here's how much joy it can bring.

Tracy Gillett: And it's become a little bit controversial in our world. So I'm more than happy to be out there and advocating for parents because this is how we are designed. To parent, and it's how our children are expecting to be parented, which is why I use the word natural parenting. Like how would we parent if we were just dropped on a deserted island?

Tracy Gillett: What would we do if there were no books and experts and society telling us what to do? What would our natural instincts tell us?

Susan Stiffelman: Nice. Nice. That's beautiful. I hadn't heard you say it that way before, so thank you. Yeah. We're doing a class together at long last and I know it's gonna be fun and great.

Susan Stiffelman: And we picked a topic that. We both felt need some attention meltdowns because there's so many parents who have absorbed culturally what they think they should be doing when their child refuses to climb up off the floor in the supermarket and let go of the bag of cookies, there's so much programming that comes at us, and then of course there's the star and the clocks and the things that we feel we're getting, whether they're real or not.

Susan Stiffelman: So we wanted to talk about what's going on for a child when they're having a meltdown. And then in the class, of course, we're gonna flesh out all of these ideas. What's going on in you and how can you be more regulated? How can you prevent them? What are the indications that a storm is coming?

Susan Stiffelman: But let's just talk for a minute about what is. What a meltdown is.

Tracy Gillett: Yeah, for sure. And I love that we've, we circled around and came onto this topic because this topic encompasses so many different aspects or skills or ideas that we can bring into our parenting. And yeah, meltdowns are completely normal.

Tracy Gillett: They're, our, we have these children who are born with 25% brain development. So much happens in those first thousand days. In those first three years, we end up with 80% brain development by the end of that thousand days. And within those first three years, really the main part of the brain that's developing is the emotional brain.

Tracy Gillett: And so we have these big emotions in really small bodies. And they need to come out. Sometimes emotions are meant to move. But our kids haven't had any practice with what do I do with frustration? What do I do with anger? What do I do with disappointment? How can I fix this? And all behavior makes sense when we've got enough information and that's really what we're, what we'll be diving into in the class, obviously.

Tracy Gillett: But, I think meltdowns. When we can understand why our child is having this, when we can dispel the myth that our child is trying to manipulate us and just get what they want then it can really help us bring so much compassion to our kids. Help us figure out, who we need to be in that moment for them that we don't need to fix it.

Tracy Gillett: We don't need to put the cookie back together or fix the broken toy. We can be there for them in those big emotions. But that's hard for us as well. And I think we often think that to be a good mom means that we have a good child. And a good child is one that behaves and is quiet and cooperative.

Tracy Gillett: And that's not who little

Susan Stiffelman: kids are. No. And they can't be. They're not built to be. And you used a couple of words in there, compassion, for instance. And in the past couple of years I've been going deeper into internal family systems, which is a model of psychotherapy I've been getting more training in.

Susan Stiffelman: And one of the tenets of that is that when we can be in self capital S, then we have compassion, curiosity, connection. Clarity, courage, calm these sea qualities. And it's so aligned with what I've been saying all these years about being the captain of the ship. I've been talking about being the calm, compassionate, confident captain of the ship.

Susan Stiffelman: So it's these pieces are falling into place. So what we're talking about, or one thing we wanna talk about is how can we be in that self? If you're familiar with IFS, that capital s the captain, what happens to derail us from that? And I think you touched on it, which is I need my child to be good in some respects so that I'm a good parent.

Susan Stiffelman: And let's talk for a minute about the narrative that goes with the meltdown and the self. In the insecurity that parents often feel when their little one isn't, or their 12-year-old. By the way, it doesn't, meltdowns happen to older kids too. Sort of the narrative that makes us, makes it very hard for us to stay calm and present and offer that co-regulation that will settle things down.

Tracy Gillett: Yeah, and I love that you bring that up, saying that 12 year olds have meltdowns too because Yeah, we had a big one on Friday and and you are captain of the ship. I remember hearing that when my son was about two and that really. How it's something that I've taken with me the whole way through my parenting, and I often think of different stages of our kids' childhood as like training us for the next ones.

Tracy Gillett: And so when my kid was having a meltdown on. Friday he's 12. And so the emotions and the complexity of what's going on is so much more than the broken cookie when he was two. But I'm like, ah, I'm so grateful that we figured out how to deal with. Those big emotions when he was that age because it's like training wheels and practice for life as we go on.

Tracy Gillett: And the meltdown that he had when he is 12 is gonna prepare him for when he is 17. And a girl breaks his heart or he doesn't get the job, or he doesn't get into university, or whatever the thing is. And we all have meltdowns. I have meltdowns as a grownup. And we need that support to come in around us.

Tracy Gillett: But our society is very uncomfortable with big, messy emotions, and we want everything to be neat and tidy. We really glorify independence and our kids being able to do things for themselves, but we've lost the. Knowledge, that independence being able to self-regulate to some ex, as we grow up.

Tracy Gillett: But even then, I think it's so healthy to lean on other people. So we're really trying to encourage that the whole way through. But the path to that true independence is dependence on us as parents, and that can feel really heavy to be needed. I've never. I've never been needed in the way that I'm needed now as a parent.

Tracy Gillett: And it, as a new parent, I remember feeling gosh, to be needed in this way. It's, it really blindsides you. Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Stiffelman: Then to see for a child who's having a meltdown or even a teen, the level of desperation, because it is like the ground just fell from under their feet. There is nothing solid there except us.

Susan Stiffelman: Yeah, in many respects. Now, of course we do come preloaded with a capacity to adapt and, but what we. What we all wanna offer our kids on the days that we're able, when we're not spent and exhausted and overwhelmed, or sad or anxious, or all the other things that might make it harder. We want to offer them the message because we are an interdependent species that I.

Susan Stiffelman: You can borrow my regulated state, it's on loan, check it out. And again, sometimes that's not possible. And when it's not possible and we join them in the meltdown, which happens to the very best of us, now we've got a little and a big human being just screaming, yelling, slamming doors.

Susan Stiffelman: Then we can make repair.

Tracy Gillett: Yeah, and I love repair. That's one of my favorite parts of parenting. And I think I don't always say this in my mind, but I think when we can realize how important repair is to a relationship, I'm like, when I messed up with my kid. Good job. That's awesome. Now I get to repair with him.

Tracy Gillett: Yeah. I get to be imperfect and show up because when we repair with our kids, we really show them how much bigger the relationship is than any mistake, and we show them how to problem solve and we show them that they can grip onto things. I often think of, if we're trying to be perfect parents, which doesn't exist, and it's actually not optimal for our kids.

Tracy Gillett: My son loves rock climbing and when he was little, especially I would see him, climbing the walls. And you need something to grip onto. You need those cracks and crevices and those imperfections in that wall. If you're trying to climb a glass wall, you need to be Spider-Man. Like you need to be some kind of superhero.

Tracy Gillett: And in relationship, we need those imperfections, those cracks and crevices and for us to mess up and for us to own that and then show up and genuinely apologize. Yeah. And a lot of that wasn't modeled for us. When we were kids. So a genuine apology is not, I'm so sorry I yelled, but it's just 'cause you hadn't cleaned up your toys.

Tracy Gillett: Yeah. It's just, I'm so sorry, I yelled. That must've been really scary for you. Yeah, and I'm working on it,

Susan Stiffelman: beautiful.

Tracy Gillett: Yeah.

Susan Stiffelman: Hey Tracy. I'm so excited that we're gonna get to do this together, and I hope for those of you who feel that you'd like more support, check out the class susanstiffelman.com.

Susan Stiffelman: For those of you who just wanna take what you've learned today and heard today and see what you can put into practice, by all means, please do that. And Tracy, we will meet soon. And thank you so much for your wisdom and for sharing it in such a loving and clear and. Beautifully articulated way.

Tracy Gillett: Oh my absolute pleasure.

Tracy Gillett: And I can't wait for next week. I love meeting with parents and we're all in this together, so Susan and I can't wait to support you on your journey. See everyone.

I hope you enjoy that. Gosh, I love talking with Tracy and I love that we can look at the big picture of the meltdown in terms of how normal it is, how we feel when it's going on, what's going on in our child, how the brain is trying to grow and develop through these experiences of frustration with our support, all the better.

And sometimes we can't offer that support. And so we wanna talk about repair. So if you're interested in this topic, we're gonna go into it in great depth for 90 minutes and the recording is available as always. In fact, most parents watch the recording 'cause they can't always fit in the class when it's live.

That's fine. You can submit a question in advance and remember. Take to heart, whatever sits right with you. I'm very much about trusting ourselves and our instincts. Sometimes our instincts fly in the face of a lot of the noise from the outside people telling us what we should do, what, how we should be as parents.

But ultimately, you know your child best and the more you can stay true to yourself, your intuition and res, if something resonates with you, then try little things to put into practice. Things you'll hear, you've heard today in this. Episode and there's lots more support for you at susanstiffelman.com. I think we have at least 40 other masterclasses with wonderful people on very important parenting topics, so I hope you'll check that out and I look forward to staying in touch.

Remember, no matter how busy life gets, look for those moments of sweetness and joy. Stay well, take care, and I'll see you next time.