In response to my assertion that kids are inevitably doing the best that they can do, someone will almost always ask a question about a child who is vehemently endorsing the opposite.
A child who is angry and making sure everybody around them knows it. A child who might be regularly yelling and screaming exact opposite words. That they want to fail, that they want to upset you, that they hate you, that they don’t care if anybody likes them or not, that they want to be stupid, that in fact they like being bad and mean, etc, etc.
For a parent who’s been trying to take care of a progressively more and more unlikeable child, this is a hard, hard place to be. How do you even continue to help a kid who is behaviorally and verbally screaming at you to stop helping them?
Well. This is a child who feels desperately alone and disconnected from everybody, so that’s exactly where I would start: on building connection with them.
Or possibly even a step before that, which would be on building up enough self-regulation to even approach TRYING to build connection with them. Building up enough self-regulation to be able to hear what they are saying through the “dysregulated kid translator”:
- “I want to fail” –> “I am terrified of failing so if I say I want it then maybe it will be less terrifying”
- “I want to upset you” –> “it already feels like we are so far apart that the chasm is uncrossable so I will try to convince myself and you that this is what I want”
- “I don’t care if anyone likes me” –> “I feel certain that nobody likes me and maybe I don’t even like myself so I’m going to try to choose to be lonely because that way at least I’m doing it”
Have you ever heard the stereotype of somebody saying “I’m breaking up with you” and the other person defensively saying “well you CAN’T break up with me because I’M breaking up with YOU!!” Or somebody being fired from a job and defensively saying “you CAN’T fire me, I QUIT!!”
This is like that same flavor of defense. “The world can’t make me lonely, I WANT to be alone! I’m not going to attempt that task and possibly fail, I WANT to fail!!”
And if it’s too hard to see or hear that defensiveness right now, that makes sense. You are exhausted and tapped out and chronically dysregulated from your child’s chronic dysregulation.
As much as humanly possible, let everything go that they’re doing. Keep them alive and work on taking loving care of yourself, so that you can climb out of the pit enough to work on taking loving care of them, so that you can connect with them again and they can realise that they don’t need those massive, prickly defenses anymore because it’s not them vs you and the world, but maybe, at least, them and you vs the world. 💕
(p.s. my book “your child’s point of view” doesn’t have an illustration of a dysregulation translator…but it does basically give you speech bubbles of what a kid might be saying or thinking for common parenting challenges on every single page)