The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
How to Ditch Power Struggles #63
In this episode, Jon unpacks the moment every parent dreads—when a child looks at you and says, “You can’t make me.” Rather than framing it as defiance or disrespect, he explores what’s actually happening in a child’s nervous system when power struggles show up. Parents will walk away with a calmer lens, a clearer understanding of why control battles escalate, and practical ways to lead with confidence, reduce friction, and protect connection—without giving up boundaries.
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There's a moment that every parent knows. You ask your child to do something small. Put on their shoes, clean up the toys, turn off the show, and they look straight at you and say, You can't make me. And suddenly your chest tightens, your voice shifts, your brain jumps ahead to the questions that you didn't ask for. Where is this coming from? Am I losing control? Is this who they're becoming? This episode is about that moment. Not the words themselves, but what's actually happening underneath them. Because what sounds like defiance is often something else at its core. A nervous system under pressure, a brain in survival mode, a child protecting themselves in the only way they know how. Today, we'll look at what's happening in your kids' brain when they refuse, why traditional discipline often makes it worse, and why power struggles emerge without anyone meaning for them to. And we'll talk about the deeper questions beneath it all. That one that makes this so personal for parents. Sounds good to you? Let's get into it. We didn't add it. It was just like our house is super old and kind of cobbled together over the last hundred plus years. And this room was very much not designed to be temperature controlled when it was originally built. It's just single-pane windows all the way around. You can see them next to me if you watch any of my videos that are recorded on YouTube and things like that. Lithout a screen. And I have to have that so that I can access some different pieces. Anyway, you don't care about that. But what this means is there's little gaps. And so the weather report from the porch this morning when I got out here to start working on some stuff. I'm working on this quiz that you guys are gonna really, really love. It's this, it's all about parenting types, and uh it's yeah, it's awesome. But anyway, I came out here really excited to start working, and there was, I'm not kidding you, there was an inch and a half of snow in my office, like just piled up next to my chair. So that's the weather report. I had standing snow in my office this morning. It's melted now, and I mopped it up. But yeah, it blew in overnight because if it blows just the right way, it can actually get snow through the cracks, and it was enough to accumulate a good half inch on the floor this morning next to my chair. So it is chilly out here, but I got all the lights on, I got all the heaters on except for the loud one, and I'm just excited to be hanging out and talking about power struggles. Uh, it's hard to say like one moment when of a story that I can tell about a power struggle. I have power struggles with my four-year-old, almost four-year-old, basically every day. Or I shouldn't say I have power struggles, I have moments when like I am offered a power struggle. And that's the first thing that I want to say before I even get into the questions, is that one of the core like mindset shifts that I changed and that changed me forever was flipping in my brain this idea that a power struggle is something your kid does to you. Uh, that is, in my humble opinion, categorically false. Power struggles, by their very definition, require two people to be struggling for power. And as parents, we need to remember that we have power, we don't need to struggle for power. And if our kids are engaging in power struggles with us and we are struggling alongside them, if we are getting big to try and you know overpower them or or just kind of like outwill them, then we are in many ways like feeding into that power struggle. And actually, we are putting fuel on that fire. And so uh I can tell you the times recently when I was depleted, when emotionally I was not there. My personal parenting type is the type that does tend to get in the most power struggles. And so uh, whenever I I am not in a good and healthy place, if I haven't slept enough, if I haven't eat eaten enough or eaten well, I will get into a place where like the power struggle just feels inevitable. And my three-year-old, almost four-year-old, is also in a developmental stage, as well as his personality, and we'll kind of talk about that a little bit in this episode as well. Uh, his personality is just one that he kind of sees things as like the way he wants to see them, and and he wants to go along with that. And so, you know, I'm just trying to think back in the last like even for like dinner time tonight, he wanted spaghetti for dinner, and we didn't have plans for dinner, so we're like, okay, I mean, like, it's so rare that he gets to choose dinner that we're like, okay, we can have spaghetti, and then like we finish making the spaghetti, and he's like, actually, I want um shaped pizza pieces of pizza. I want to make pieces of pizza and cut them into shapes with a cookie cutter. And we were like, Okay, first of all, we've never even heard of this before. Um, where did you hear about this? Where did you come up with this idea? And second of all, the pasta is like literally on a plate, like ready for you to eat. What do you mean you now want pizza shapes? But he was like, no, this is what I want. And I had a moment in that I had a I had a choice in that moment. Like, do I do I end around and figure out a better way through this, or do I just go, no, you said you wanted pasta, and here's the pasta, and you have to eat it, and I'm big and you're little, and I'm smart and you're stupid, and all that stuff from Matilda, if you guys remember that movie. And I'm happy to say that I was in a healthy enough place that I was like, huh, that's an interesting idea. Can you show me what shapes and like can you draw those shapes? Can we turn your pasta into those shapes? And I tried to work within what we already had, or oh, that's a good idea for dinner, maybe tomorrow or the next day. And in the process of kind of working through that and just bringing the temperature down, we were able to get around that kind of inevitable power struggle. But it's not always that way. There are some times when he just kind of entrenches himself, and and I got to use everything that I'm gonna talk about in this episode. And so I want to jump right in with question number one with Marissa, and this one comes from the membership. Actually, multiple questions come from the membership today. Uh, I've been doing a lot more in the membership lately, just kind of checking in with people and DMs and stuff like that. It's a it's a cool opportunity because it's a limited group. Not everybody can get into the membership, it's only open at certain times and I cap it at a certain capacity because we do group coaching in there where like I don't want 50 people on a group coaching call with me because it just gets too overwhelming. And so, you know, I like to keep the membership at numbers where, you know, five to ten people are on a group coaching call and we can really have conversations and go back and forth with people's problems, and also that my DMs don't totally overwhelm me because I don't really respond to DMs in Instagram as as much as I try to. I can't really, but in the membership, I respond to every DM. So anyway, this is one of them. Uh Marissa said, Okay, so my five and a half year old has started saying, You can't make me. That's where I got it from the uh intro, by the way, to literally everything shoes, brushing teeth, getting in the car. And it feels like aggressive. Like he's trying to dominate the situation. I don't know. I grew up in a house where that kind of talk would have been shut down fast. And now when he says it, it's super triggering to me. I usually say something dumb in 90s, like, wanna bet. Obviously, I'd rather have more calm and collected response. So, what am I supposed to say instead? Marissa, I I think this is a great question, and I I love the honesty that, like, yeah, you know, I just like wanna bet. Uh, I have also been there, I have said that, I have had that posture. And I think where I would start here is by saying what we say is in in all aspects of parenting, is far less important than how we say it. And this cuts against the parenting scripts that are pushed. And I give scripts, but I really I think what I when I give scripts, I really want you to like embody that it's it's as much how I say that thing as what I'm saying. Because you can say all of the right gentle parenting words or whatever, and it still be really rough because that's not really how the tone that you need to set. And that's the main thing about power struggles, right? We have to approach the tone and we have to approach the state that our kids in rather than approaching what they're saying. In a lot of ways, what our kids are saying in this moment, you can't make me, or I don't want to, or whatever. Like these things that they're saying are actually not thought through. They're not carefully constructed, you know, in order to trigger us, they're not some sort of manipulative power play. They are just our kid is having a really hard time, and they are responding to us or reacting in our presence, and we're experiencing the outpouring of that. So I would first stop by just pausing, right? Pause for a second, collect your thoughts so that you don't respond with the you know, the challenge. Wanna bet? Because that's the that is the immediate power struggle. Like, like if you want a recipe for a power struggle, no, I don't want to, well, I'm gonna make you. Like, that's a power struggle in a nutshell, and nothing that happens after that point will be in a regulated state for you or your child. So I would pause for a moment, I would slow everything down, and I would say, I hear that your body doesn't want to be pushed right now, or I hear that you don't want to put your shoes on, or I hear that you aren't ready to leave yet. I'm not here to force you or to overpower you, I'm here to help you because we need to go. So you just state the thing. And and and one of the big pieces here is again the confidence that we have. I think if we approach this with kind of a uh an insecurity that our kid is going to just overpower us in some way, then we are going to get defensive and we're gonna double down and we're gonna try and aim for that aggression because that's what we do when we're scared. And we get scared of the situation. And I think about parents who like, you know, I've used this example in the past, but like parents who are trying to leave the park and I or or trying to get out of the library or whatever, whatever place, public place usually, and they're trying to get out without a scene. And they're actually kind of like held hostage by their kid because their kid is like, I'm just gonna scream and melt down and all this stuff. And the parent lacks the confidence to be like, no matter what happens here, I'm still the parent and I can still move them out of this uh dysregulated zone, and you know, I can do an emotional regulation game or I can do this or that or the other, and I can move them through this thing. And because the parent lacks that confidence, what winds up happening for that child is that the child just like senses that indecisiveness in the parent, that kind of waffling, and then they like really double down on the power struggle. And so one way of diffusing a power struggle is just to be very clear in what is going to happen, and then your kid will not feel the I don't want to say like feel the freedom, but like they won't feel the space for them to really push back. Now, I think also we have to appreciate that kids who are five and a half, but especially kids who are younger who do the power struggle thing, like the three, four-year-olds who do the power struggle thing, like those kids a lot of times need that autonomy seeking. And so we have to create space and like places for that because if it's coming out when they're putting on their shoes, and the places that often comes out are like at the dinner table, right? Like you can't make your kid eat, and they know that, and so then they like they push you in that spot. But but really anywhere where a kid has any place to push back, they will if they don't feel like they have enough agency and autonomy over their life. So I would start with, you know, I hear again, not you can't make me. Don't engage that. If you are going to engage that, you engage that with curiosity. But I wouldn't even start there. I would start with I hear that you really don't want to do this. Your body doesn't want to leave right now. I'm not here to force you, I'm not here to overpower you, I'm here to move you through this. And then I would pause like 10 to 15 seconds before I said anything else. Because it's not about immediate compliance. And I think this is where we as parents who grew up as children in the 80s and 90s, like it was kind of like when I say jump, you're already in the air. Don't even ask how high, right? Like you when I say jump, you jump and you don't hesitate. That is how a lot of us were raised. And so we assume that when the power struggle begins, and then we then hold the boundary, that they're immediately going to like double down and they're gonna say, no, no, I'm not going to do it. I think you leave the space because more often than not, you need to let yourself calm down from that very triggering experience for anybody who is who grew up in a household where that would never be tolerated. Remember, when our kids do things that in our own childhood home was not tolerated, that is automatically triggering to us. So not only are you giving your nervous system a sense a chance to settle, you're also giving their nervous system a chance to make a choice. And so rather than amplify this limbic state by getting big or getting aggressive, which then sends them deeper into their dysfunction, you're interrupting that escalation loop, and it trains both your brain to not be reactive and also their brain that you are not going to just like grab them and haul them away. And I think that is a huge, huge piece here. You have to get to a place where there's trust, and until that trust is built on the reality that you aren't going to force them physically to put their shoes on or something, which by the way, like I also appreciate that there is times when my three-year-old or almost four-year-old does not want to go to school and he has to go to like his brothers have to be at school on time, and I have to pick him up and carry him to the car. Like, that's not really what we're talking about here. There there are times when like things have to happen and we can apologize and we can reconcile and we can work with that, but like I'm still even in that case not getting in a power struggle. I'm not getting in like an argument with a with a four-year-old with a dysregulated four-year-old. I think if we're doing that, like we have to know how futile that is. One of the early things that I talked about in Whole Parent was don't fight with lizards. And the idea that your child has a wizard brain and a lizard brain. The wizard brain is the thinking brain, it's the human, it's the you know, logic and reasoning and thought and forethought and ethical thinking and moral consciousness. And then the lizard is just like survival mode and it's just like acting, and it's just a like lashing out and fighting everybody. And if you argue with a child in that state, you're arguing with a lizard. Don't fight with lizards. I almost had t-shirts made back in the day. I'm glad that I didn't because it wound up not being something that I say constantly all the time. But um back, you know, back in the early days of whole parent, 2020, what, three, 2022, uh, I was saying don't fight with lizards all the time because this was new. Like, like we weren't thinking about these things, but like I at least I wasn't. But yeah, I would just that's where I would begin. And speaking of beginning, I need to take a break, drink some more of this coffee because I'm yawning. I don't know why tonight. I said it and then I did it. Uh, I'm yawning tonight, even though I'm pretty awake, but it's just because sometimes I get out here and when it gets all warm and cozy under this hot dog lamp, then I get all get all yawny. Anyway, here's our first break. Listen to me talk about something, and then we'll be right back. Question two also comes from the membership. We're talking about power struggles today, and it is Jeremy. He graciously agreed to share his answer or my answer to his question here on the whole parent podcast. He said, Is there a point at which defiance is just personality? Because my daughter, who's seven, has always been like this, always pushing back, always questioning. Teachers say that she's quote strong-willed, but it feels like code for difficult. At home, it's constant negotiating, and I'm exhausted. I don't want to crush her spirit, but I also can't live in debates over the same thing every day. Where's the line between respecting autonomy and just letting the kid run the house? Because right now it feels like she has all the power and I'm losing it. Jeremy, as we've already talked about, but for the benefit of everybody else who's listening, um the first thing that I that I thought when I read this question initially was yes, there is a place for debate, for your child learning how to debate and stand up for themselves and push back, especially at seven. There is a place where them learning to self-advocate is a more valuable life skill than them learning to be obedient and compliant about all things. Uh, you don't always have to agree with them. You don't always have to quote unquote give in if they're asking to do something that is categorically dangerous, right? If my seven-year-old wanted to be on Instagram or something like that and have their own profile, I would say no. It doesn't matter how well they debated or how uh compelling or thought through their arguments. I do not think there is any world in which a seven-year-old could convince me that they should have an Instagram profile. And so uh I it there's definitely still a place for debate, but maybe we're getting too much debate. And so my guess is probably you listen to me too much and you encourage that debate, and now you got a debater. Uh, good news here first, and then we'll move on to the challenge piece. The good news. News is kids who are strong-willed, and I think especially girls, I don't think it's unfair to say that or misogynistic in any way. Um, when a girl is strong-willed, that that bodes well for her going forward. The world is a tricky place, and especially with people who like or desire to manipulate easily manipulatable people. Uh, I think not only about unhealthy toxic partners and domestic relationships, but also bosses who like to find people who are easily manipulated to doing extra work, to working off the clock, to doing work that is not assigned to them, um, to going kind of go not just go above and beyond, but actually get into a uh very unhealthy situation. I think about in jobs that I've had where sometimes I've been asked to do unethical or even illegal things by my employer kind of under the table, off the record. Ah, well, you could just, you know, do this or that or the other. Girls tend to be greater victims of this because we still have this very harmful subculture related to uh obviously assault, and that's deeply troubling in its own right, but also just in the cultural phenomenon or you know, cultural consciousness, this idea that girls should be meek and mild permeates our culture even if we are trying to do a lot to deconstruct it. It does not change the fact that that seems to be the default position even in 2020, almost 2026, which is deeply troubling. But also we have to be honest about the things that we want to change. So when you have a strong-willed daughter who likes to debate, who's seven, I say that child at 17 is going to have far greater out like positive outcomes if we again, as you said, don't crush her spirit, if we don't insist upon uh total and complete compliance and obedience, if we allow her to have some of that autonomy, if we respect it, but also appreciate that we're not gonna let a kid run the house. I understand that you say right now that it feels like she has all the power. Um maybe I'm betraying how much we've gone back and forth, but in our conversations, one of the things that I've pointed out is that often when we feel like our child has is running the house or has all the control, if we actually looked at that objectively, we realize that what we're experiencing is um a dissonance between what we expect of children because of how we were raised in the 80s and 90s versus what we are seeing in children. It's probably not that she's running the house, it's probably that she's standing up for herself more than you find to be uh what your expectation would have been. So I'm not saying that there aren't kids who do try and run the house. Uh I'm not saying that there are kids who have a disproportionate amount of power for their size and age. But when you say I feel like she has all the power, I'm glad that you said I feel like. It feels like she has all the power and I'm losing it. She doesn't have all the power. You still have the power as the parent. And so here are a couple of real little things that we can do to not crush the spirit, to allow for the healthy flourishing of autonomy, but also still maintain that boundary that we are ultimately the one who is in charge here. And the first piece, three three steps here, the first piece is to recognize and identify and develop the confidence in ourselves that we are still the parent. Like the she cannot go out and get a driver's license, she can't go out and live on her own, she can't go out and get a bank account, we or she can't go out and do get a job, we are still the parent. And just because it feels like our kids have kids have much more autonomy than we had as children, does not change the fact that we are still ultimately in charge. Like they know that, it's us who needs to remember that. So, first and foremost, just remember like you're the dad. Like, it is okay to hold boundaries, to state rules, to do those things. You're not a bad dad. In fact, she is going to appreciate you for it. That leads me to number two, which is uh let's pre-decide ahead of time what's non-negotiable and then create choices within the boundary of the non-negotiable. This is again, I talk about boundaries all the time on the podcast. A boundary of the best example of a boundary is a backyard fence. Um, if you have a backyard, a good backyard fence that you're confident that your kids cannot get out of, you can let them run free and wild and do kind of whatever they want in the backyard, provided that it's a safe environment, right? Without feeling like you have to constantly monitor every single thing they do. Why? Because the backyard fence is there. That's the boundary. The boundary is to keep the kids inside where they have freedom. So find the places where your daughter can have freedom and then first find the places where your daughter, you need to have these non-negotiable things. You have to take a bath every night, but you don't have to uh take it at the same time. Or you have to bathe every night, but you don't have to take a bath, take a shower. Uh you don't have to do it at the same time, excuse me. You don't have to do it at the same time. You can do it, you know, before dinner or after dinner. Um, you got to brush your teeth every day, twice a day, but you can do it uh in the bathroom, or you can do it in your bedroom. You can have use this toothbrush or this toothpaste or this or this or this. You can create the non-negotiable and then create so much freedom and choice and autonomy inside of the boundary. And that will give her the sense and the feeling of having freedom and control, which is what she's looking for and what she needs, and what you need to keep feeding that strong-willed personality because it is a personality thing, right? And it was a positive personality trait. You can keep feeding that with twigs, and you know, feeding that fire with twigs and within the fire ring without just dropping a big old log on top of it that you know breaks breaks the containment of the fire and sets the forest ablaze. I think we can still keep a lot of really healthy choices. And then the last thing is just learning how to rephrase our language. Rather than using threatening if language, we just use clear when language. If we're struggling with our kid not cleaning up after themselves, and they don't want to. Instead of saying, if you don't clean up after, you know, clean all of this up right now, then no ice cream after dinner, or then, you know, blah blah blah blah, like whatever, just like list the consequence, list the punishment, whatever. Which invites them to see, like, oh, are they gonna follow through? Like, well, like maybe I should find out. You just say when. When you clean up your toys, then we'll be able to have ice cream. Or when you clean up your toys, then we will go and do this next fun thing. Rather than if you don't clean up your toys, we won't do that thing. When language is clear and leadership, if language is threatening, dictatorship. And so just learning to shift that language a little bit, and Jeremy, you already know this, but I'm also thinking about again the other questions and just power struggles in general. It probably the best advice that I can give you is to shift that language from if to when language, and it will go so, so far. Okay, let me take another quick break and take another sip of my coffee and come back for question three. The coffee is gone. I am warm, and we have one more question about power struggles. This one did not come from the membership, it came through the DMs, and it was Alyssa who said, I don't know if this is a regulation thing. It came after all of my emotion regulation games. Or if my kid just doesn't respect me, my four-year-old will look at me dead in the face and say no and then smile. It makes me feel insane, like he's enjoying it. I'll ask him to clean up or come to dinner, and it's an immediate refusal, and then I'm bargaining and threatening timeouts, and then I'm losing it. My husband says I'm overthinking it and he just needs to have consequences, but sometimes it feels like there's a middle ground here. Any advice? Well, the first thing that I will say is that laughing, smiling, all of these kind of strangely opposite reactions that we expect from little little humans, the toddlers, uh, these are almost never actually what we think they are. These aren't like manipulation or defiance or goading or you know, disrespect. They are just the sign of a very confused nervous system. Like the signals get crossed. It's very stimulating to stand up to your parents. It's can be overstimulating, and overstimulation can make kids do lots of weird stuff, like smile or giggle or laugh. This is the same thing that happens when a kid hurts another kid and then laughs and runs away. Uh, people are like, oh, are they like a sociopath or something? No, there's just their brain is just kind of going a little haywire in those moments. Very normal. The the places in the brain that are associated with big overwhelming feelings, big overwhelming feelings are all processed through the amygdala. This is something that I don't often talk about because we just think about the amygdala as the threat sensor. But all big overwhelming feelings are like um processed through the amygdala. So, like like massive amounts of joy also activate your stress response system, like, but just not in a way that's maladaptive, not in a way that like floods your body with cortisol, but it does activate your limbic system. Like it's processed through the limbic system. And we didn't used to know this, by the way. This is like the last five to ten years cutting science, that cutting edge science, neuroscience, that we've found that the amygdala has all of these kind of auxiliary features or features that go beyond what we expected them to be. And and this, but it does help explain what's going on, and that's that the parts of the brain that are associated with fear and and and overwhelm and laugh and mirth and and all of these different things can can kind of misfire and they can kind of fire inappropriately, and and that's why people will laugh at funerals. Or um, I had a friend who in middle school got in like more trouble than they were like like like so bad. It was like towards the end of middle school, it was like every threat in the book was laid out as sitting in the principal's office of like all that they had done this horrible thing, you know, broken so many school rules, and they're just like, and they're just laughing their head off in the principal's office. And the principal's like, you think this is funny, stop laughing. It's like, no, they were they were actually having like a nervous system response of laughing because it was so overwhelming that like that was all they could do. This is also why people laugh in scary movies, stuff like that. So uh don't take that as personal, it's not personal. You can help your child to understand later, hey, so when you smiled after saying no, it made me feel like you were thinking you thought it was a game. Did you think it was a game? And this is where we can lead with some curiosity, right? If we want to be be very clear. But I don't think that you absolutely have to go to consequences. I think, kind of in the same vein as what I just said in the question two, I think just the simple language change of of not threatening and bargaining, right? Threats and bribes are just two sides of the same coin. It's just bargaining. Um, threats and bribes, like those are all ifs, right? If you do this, then I'll give you this. If you do this, then I won't, then I'll do this to you. Like all of these things invite power struggles because they invite your kid to be like, well, maybe I won't do it, and we'll see what happens. We'll see if I still get it. And I'll be totally honest, I use if too much. Like I say if too much. I need to cut if out of my life. I don't want any more if in my life, but I say it too much, and I'll tell you right immediately, my kids catch me on it so quick because all of them, like my my nine-year-old is like the is is like the worst about this. He drives me nuts. If I say, like, if you don't do this on the count of three, you know, and and I I don't do this so much, but I've heard other people do it with him. But like the count of three thing, uh, it's I saw his grandparents do this with him. I heard his grandparents do this one with him one time not too long ago. They're like, if you don't do this in the count of three, you know, then you're gonna have to, I don't know what it was. It wasn't anything like horribly bad, some some consequence. And they're like, one, two, and he was like, I wanted to find. I asked him later, and I was like, You let him get to three. Like, that's kind of wild, dude. And he was like, I was just curious about it. I was like, why'd you let him get to three? And then he was like, I wanted to find out what happened when they got to three. And it's like that type of power struggle. It's like, okay, I know that the old school parents that are listening to this right now are like, yeah, well, they should find out. They should find out that you're in control and that you'll hurt them if they don't do fall in line and they respect means listening the first time, and like all this stuff. But like, or or hear me out, just don't go to a place where you have to be saying if like that. Like, go like lead with curiosity. So, but in order to lead with curiosity, you have to think about your kids, you have to experience them on their own terms, understanding that the smile, this is why I started here, is not manipulation. Like the overwhelmed nervous system is not manipulation. So instead, what I would do is again shift your language. And then I would also appreciate that with a four-year-old, a lot of times no is just like I don't know how to do it, or it feels overwhelming to do it. Like when you tell a four-year-old to like clean up all the toys, like they look at the room and they're like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be a huge deal. I don't know even where to begin. So no. And by the way, other people who struggle with executive functioning, I'm talking to the ADHD people like me. We also do this. We're like, I need to start in that task because I have no idea how I'm gonna get through it. We don't even want to start. And so one of the other things that we can do is take it, we can shrink those tasks to more manageable sizes. All right, I need you to put all of the stuffed animals away. And when they're done with that, okay, now I need you to put all the paper uh in the trash, all the garbage in the trash. And I need you to put all the markers with their caps on them in the R pin. And you break this task down piece by piece, and then it becomes a teaching moment where it's not a power struggle, and you're not saying, if you don't, this is what I'm gonna do. You just say, when you do that, then we'll be able to move on to the next fun thing. Well, I want to do the next fun thing right now. We're not doing that right now. We have to finish this first. And and you can kind of go through that, and and so I I would say it's not a middle ground, it's just a better way of approaching like your role as the leader in your household. Instead of being like the the one constantly fighting everything all the time, be the person who is willing to adjust on the fly, who is willing to really take a situation that doesn't seem to be going well for your kid, and and alter your own language and your own response to it so that you can get to a place where it's more adaptive for them, and that it's healthier for them, that it feels like they can have some semblance of of autonomy in the midst of that. But really, I mean it sounds crazy, but one of the best things that you can do in these moments is just to stay calm because what they're looking for in those moments is the dysregulation from you. So yeah, I I know this is kind of a roundabout way to answer the the same like a question that maybe maybe there's something deeper going on here, but I really think it just begins with us responding more effectively and and not just not being as triggered in these moments when our kids are getting dysregulated, when they're kind of losing it, when they are going all out and melting down over nonsense, foolish stuff. I hope that that helps you again with power struggles. Uh, that's kind of all that I have for you today. Uh I hope that it gives you a clearer understanding or perspective on how to handle power struggles. I think the three main takeaways would be number one, we can change our language so that we can just be more adaptive in how we respond to these things. We cannot invite power struggles with phrases that are either threatening or bribes or just kind of uh essentially giving our kids choices about things they don't have choices about. So, one, we can adjust our language. Two, the most important piece of this is that we need to stay calm ourselves in these moments because power struggles feel so triggering to those of us who were never allowed to, you know, be defiant, who were never allowed to push back, who were never allowed to negotiate, who are never allowed to uh say no. And those are things that we ultimately want for our kids. And that's that's number three here, and that is that you know, if we do have proper boundaries and if we do language in a way that is healthy, and our kid still has places where they push back, that's actually not a horrible thing. That's actually a good skill for them to learn. Learning how to negotiate and stand up for themselves is are positive skills, you know as a parent that you are ultimately in control. And if you need to just remind yourself of that today, remind yourself of that today. You are the parent. You will make it through. And if you let your kid push back more now, they're gonna have a lot better outcomes later on. You just have to know how to how to navigate that. Have the confidence to do that. Alright, that's what I got for you. And I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some if you particularly like one part of the podcast or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, of following me on social media, of getting the emails that I send out. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. The last thing you can do is go down to The link show notes at the bottom. 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Five bucks a month is very, very small, but it goes a long way when it's multiplied by all of the different people who listen to the podcast and sending that over to me. I get all of that money. It's just my way of being able to produce the podcast, spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.
