Ep 62: Mothering, Not Smothering: Power With When Your Child is Struggling

This episode is the second part of the discussion we started in the previous episode. We’re unlearning adult supremacy together by naming the fear and loss we feel around relinquishing some of our power in order to share it with our children. This episode is about replacing that fear with aligned, adaptive, and liberatory actions so you can power-with with your child. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend listening to the previous episode first and then coming back to this one, if you’d like. 

We all want our kids to be safe. You love your child and you know that racism, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, and other forms of systemic oppression have real material, life-or-death consequences depending on how your child looks, loves, and sounds. But when fear fuels your desire to protect your child and this fear is in the driver’s seat of your parenting 100% of the time, this fear can keep you stuck teaching, molding, fixing, controlling, coercing, and managing your child and their schedule 100% of the time. Power-over, which you and I are trying to unlearn, becomes justified as the norm in your parenting. Then, parenting unintentionally takes on the role of policing. Mothering (gender inclusive) becomes Smothering as my teacher Linda Thai would say it. Because when you take full control and power-over your child, there’s no room for them to unfold and unfurl into their fullness. 

What I’m proposing here is, by all means, protect and prepare your child for the real world. But not from a place of fear-based power-over policing. Because I know you don’t want to perpetuate this oppression in your own home. And your child’s development thrives when you join them, not control them. For your child to grow up to be whole, to be free, and to be resilient, they need you to be a partner, not a police officer

[INTRODUCTION]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

Welcome back to Episode 62 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.

In this episode, you and I are going to explore one action to power-with with your child when they struggle. You’ll also explore the science behind how power-with nurtures your child’s motivation and perseverance. You can prepare your child for the real world using power-with. This way you get to practice what feels aligned with your values and promote your child’s development at the same time. If that sounds generative to you, let’s get started. 

In my day-to-day job when I’m not facilitating workshops for therapists and teachers, I get to sit on the floor with caregivers and their young children in our therapy sessions. It’s been 15 plus years and it’s still one of my most favorite things to get out of bed and do. But there’s one thing that makes my whole body turn upside down and ties my stomach into a tight knot. It’s when a child screams at the top of their lungs “I hate you” at their caregivers. Or when they communicate the same sentiment with their behaviors like hitting, throwing, biting, shutting down and so on. For a moment, the whole room becomes so silent that I can almost hear hearts breaking. If this situation lands for you too, I’m sending you so much care right now. It hurts and you’re not alone in this. Like most families that processed this heartbreak with me, you might feel like everything you’ve done and sacrificed for your child is for your child’s best interest and for their future. So that they won’t have to experience the same hardship you did. So, of course, it hurts when your child doesn’t seem to appreciate what you’ve done for them. And you know this…when the pain settles and you’re grounded again, this pain can help us understand that doing things for your child’s best interest isn’t the same as doing things with your child and co-create what’s in their best interest. Still with me? 

Besides holding space for your hurt, as a therapist, I must be an interpreter for our tiny humans too. Using developmental psychology to interpret those hurtful words and behaviors that say quote unquote “I hate you”, I believe it’s our tiny humans’ best attempt to articulate “I hate being invisible. I want to be seen by the person I love the most. See me, hear me, love me. Trust me enough to make room for me to participate in our relationship.” A plea for power-with. A bid for connection. 

As told by his mother in Joyful Militancy or his own words in another beautiful book Trust Kids, Uilliam (Liam) Joy Bergman, an unschooler, recalled telling his mom when he was nine years old quote “I don’t need to be empowered by adults; I need them to stop having power over me.” End quote. Period. Mic drop. 

Our children are ready and eager to join us and participate in their own growth. When it’s adaptive, we can compost our fear that creates the urgency to control, shape, and mold our children ALL the time. We can get out of the way and make some room for our children to join us, to power-with with us. So that they can have room to exercise autonomy and agency, room for their humanity, dignity to be witnessed, room to honor whatever higher calling they came into this world with. They’re ready for you to show them through practicing power-with that you trust them to bring what they have to the table too. 

How do our children grow up to trust themselves? It begins right here when you trust them enough to power-with with them, most of the time.   

Other options for power-with

There are many ways to practice power-with that we have already explored together in previous episodes. For example, when you feel the urge to control, teach, fix, manage, and coerce your child, you can pause, re-center, and re-align by asking “what does my child need from me right now? For me to show up with “I got you” or “I get you?” You can explore this invitation more in Ep 37: Where do I start “meeting my child where they’re at”? Another invitation is asking “is it more adaptive to support my child to be survival smart or liberation smart right now?” You can explore this invitation more in Ep 47: How to Practice Social Justice Parenting Today. You have options to play with because I know one framework might not land as well as the other. Speaking of options, in this episode, I have one more invitation if you’d like to add it to your toolkit. As always, please nurture what resonates. Compost the rest. More importantly, adapt it and make it Your method. 

Invitation: Replace fear with action

The invitation goes like this: when my child struggles, support, not save. When my child struggles, support, not scold. 

When you see your child struggling, you might feel the urgency to move in and take control over the situation which might unintentionally result in you controlling or powering over your child. And depending on your upbringing and intersecting identities, rushing in to take control of the situation might look like either saving or scolding your child, neither of which is power-with. But it’s human, right? You love your child. Why would you want to see them stress and struggle?

Please reflect along if you’d like and see which pattern- save or scold- resonates with you.

Saving your child puts a spotlight on you. Just like the saviorism that you and I know, the spotlight is on the savior instead of liberation. The spotlight is on the savior’s intention, action, fear, discomfort, and feelings instead of on the person with less power and privilege in that situation. In parenting, “saving” your child when they’re struggling means asking “what do I do to protect or prepare my child?” so much so that you unintentionally forget to check in with the person with less power and privilege aka your child and ask “what is my child needing?” Again, fear pushes your intention to help your child into power-over.

On the other hand, scolding your child when you see them struggle is another form of spotlighting yourself instead of your child. Your child’s stress and struggle stir up worries and fear inside of you that spotlight your old belief that goes “well as a parent, I’m responsible for my child’s success. So I’m going to scold, mold, and even punish my child so that they won’t struggle like this or make the same mistake again. I must teach them a lesson.” And we don’t question what lesson our children are learning from us when we’re scolding them or teaching them using fear or force. They’re learning obedience, docility, and compliance, at the expense of learning creative problem solving, self-compassion, self-trust, and learning from their mistakes. 

Whether you’re saving or scolding, you might have already noticed that both are different flavors of power-over because they focus on you and the oppressors’ indoctrination that makes you and me believe that we must teach, fix, and mold our children for them to be successful in air quotes. Neither option leaves room for our children to join us, power-with and make decisions with us, and co-create a plan together. 

To pivot away from save and scold, the invitation is for you to offer your child support when they struggle. Offering support simply begins with you stepping back from the urgency to move in, fix, mold, and control your child…the “what do I do as a parent?” and instead ask “what support does my child need right now?” 

Nat’s stories about saving and scolding

And it’s worth reiterating that saving and scolding is very human and oftentimes it comes out of love when we see someone we care about struggle. In my family, it’s actually my parents’ version of saying “I love you.” But you know we’re Asian so we just don’t say it directly like that. I’ll share some lighthearted examples from my parents so you can catch your breath after all the reflection I’ve invited you to do. Then, I’ll share a brilliant example from a bad a-double-s mom in the Come Back to Care newsletter community. 

My mom’s comfort zone is saving and my dad’s comfort zone is scolding. When I was in my first year of college, I broke up with my first official boyfriend. He was thee bad boy, so handsome but so wrong for me in every possible way. My mom saw me struggling with this heartbreak and it was baby Nat’s first heartbreak…you can imagine the drama. My mom went into save mode where she would buy me all my favorite food. Very sweet. And I was so deep in my heartbreak drama that eating was the last thing I wanted to do. My mom would get so mad at me, saying “I’ve sacrificed my time to buy these snacks for you and you’re not even grateful.” I mean her point was valid. What I wish was that she asked me what kind of support I would like that would make me feel seen, heard, and held aka power-with. The spotlight was on her and her sacrifice instead of on me and my needs. 

My dad, on the other hand, would go into scold mode, teaching me a lesson to make sure I won’t find myself in the same struggle ever again. Before I started Come Back to Care, I left a teaching position at a prestigious university and an internationally known home visiting program. Can you imagine an immigrant leaving her full time position and steady pay checks? It was scary and stressful building Come Back to Care from scratch but every fiber in my body felt so at ease at the same time. It was exactly what I needed to do. I was video calling my dad in Thailand, wanting to let off some steam and complain about how hard it was. Oh my, big mistake. Because he loved me so much, seeing my struggle sent him straight into scold mode where he gave me a big, long lecture about entrepreneurship, marketing, and other business-ey things. He was dropping gems but they weren’t exactly what I needed to be seen.

Clearly, my parents’ efforts came from a place of love. I knew they loved me. But isn’t it more powerful to feel that they love me?

An example of power-with

Now back to you, my dear co-conspirator, and your parenting. I’ve got one power-with parenting example that might spark some inspiration in your parenting playbook. 

Earlier in the summer, I offered free one-on-one Zoom support sessions to my newsletter subscribers who’ve been doing organizing work in solidarity with Gaza. They picked a spot on my calendar and we had a 30-minute session together on Zoom to co-create a parenting plan together. Shannon scheduled a call with me and kindly gave me permission to share her story with you. 

Shannon, a fierce matriarch of her neurodivergent family, wanted to explore ways to support her middle schooler so that they would finish their homework. And in Shannon’s own brilliance, she shared with me that she decided to do what’s called body doubling during homework time with her child. That means Shannon arranged her schedule so that when her child was doing their homework, she was right there doing her own work in the same room. It’s like they were having a co-working session together at home. 

In Shannon’s example, her child is struggling with homework. Instead of going into save or scold mode of power-over policing, Shannon powered-with by providing support to her child. The support was using her presence by physically being there in the room doing her work with her child. She wasn’t there to surveil, monitor, punish, or control her child to get the homework done. Shannon shared at the end of our Zoom session that her child got their homework done and she got her work done too. And it was fun. Win-win. 

So that’s Shannon’s way of providing support to her child. That’s the Shannon Method. How might you adapt this plan to make it YOUR method of supporting your child when they struggle? What’s YOUR method of power-with as your child’s partner instead of as a power-over police officer?

By the way, Shannon has a beautiful blog and book about raising children to be environmentally engaged and conscious. I’ll link her work in the episode show notes for you. And while you’re checking Shannon’s resources, please sign up for the Come Back to Care newsletter too to get updates on when I offer the free Zoom parenting consultation again. I typically offer it two times a year to express my gratitude to the newsletter community. 

Child development science

If you would indulge me in geeking out about child development science for a moment. Let’s talk about what motivates our children to try something difficult and keep persevering. Many studies have shown that our children’s motivation and perseverance don’t really come from us lecturing them about work ethics or molding them into upstanding citizens. It’s quite the opposite. Children grow up to believe that “I can succeed in a task” aka self-efficacy when they feel safe enough to try things out, mess up, and get messy without being punished, shamed, or policed. And our children feel this safety to experiment and explore when you support them through power-with with them…most of the time, instead of automatically going into save and scold mode all the time. To say it another way, when you support your child through power-with, your child gets to test their own potential and trust in their own power. So, your power-with offers your child the psychological safety they need to develop self-efficacy or the belief that “I can succeed in a task.” One empirical research study found that high school and college students who believe that they can succeed in a task have high hopes. High hopes lead to higher academic engagement and higher academic success according to Dr. Dante Dixson at Michigan State University.

Similarly, when we power-with with our children, welcome their mistakes, and reframe mistakes as something useful for our learning, our children are less likely to fall apart when they mess up or when they suck at doing something new in the beginning. A classic study published in 1994 looked at how elementary school math teachers in the US and Japan taught differently. In the US, the focus was on finding the right answer. But in Japan, every mistake was honored, explored, and reframed as something interesting and useful. That’s beautiful, right? And the Japanese students in the study, of course, performed better. Some researchers call this approach positive error framing; others call it error training management. I’ll link these studies along with other resources in the episode show notes for you. 

My point in sharing these studies with you is that I wholeheartedly honor your love for your child and your parental instinct to feel responsible for their character, academic success, social skills, the list never ends. And the oppressors have lied to us that for our children to grow up and make it, we must teach, fix, mold, and shape them like we discussed in the previous episode. You and I were led to believe that our role is to power-over our children to keep them obedient, docile, and productive for the oppressors. And when we don’t power-over or police our children, are we even parenting? But in today’s episode, we got to explore other choices where you can power-with with your child as a more aligned and science-informed way to nurture their character and overall resilience. 

When you release the lie that your role as a parent is to only be a power-over police officer, it opens up so many other possibilities. Through power-with, you can be your child’s partner, co-learner, co-struggler, skill sharer, mentor, coach, or I don’t know positive error framer? Even in naming these roles out loud with you now, I feel excitement bubbling in my chest and delight…actually awe…in the possibilities of how you and I can show up fully and practice radical love through power-with with our children. And this is major, I know I didn’t grow up with this kind of love. You might have, or might not have as well. But the point is we…together…we get to practice this liberatory ways of loving right here, right now. 

So, my dear co-conspirator, as a partner who powers with with your child, most of the time, how would you describe your role? A power-with bad a double s? A partner in messy learning?  How would you describe your role? If you’d like to email me and share, I’d love to be your accountability buddy and you can email me at nat@comebacktocare.com. Or, DM me on Insta…do we still say Insta? At comebacktocare. 

If nothing comes to mind just yet, how about this role, a Keeper of the Sacred Flames?

To close out this episode, my Classical Chinese Medicine teacher taught me that parents are keepers of their children’s Sacred Flames. The Sacred Flames are something unique to your child that they came into this world with- their skills, talents, abilities, and ancestral blessings. And the role of a parent is to nurture these flames and support their children to be exactly who they are. Our role is to resist the societal conditioning that our children must be conforming to the status quo of success. Our role is not to shape and mold our children but to tend to their Sacred Flames. 

And to me that’s a beautiful imagery of power-with. My dear co-conspirator, I’m grateful that you’re here, remembering who you are, and finding your very own flavor of power-with.

I invite to you reciprocate with your time by leaving a review and rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Or reciprocate with your money by joining our Patreon. You can find all the details at comebacktocare.com/support.

And to join the newsletter and access our monthly community workshop, sign up at comebacktocare.com/newsletter.

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.