The Inside Game Of Parenting - Episode: 120
Most dads don’t lose it because the situation is too big.
They lose it because something inside them takes over before they can choose how to respond.
In this episode, Tommy breaks down the inside game of parenting: the thoughts, fears, and pressure that show up when your kid is upset, disrespectful, disappointed, or struggling. Wanting your kids to be happy, respectful, successful, and tough is not the problem. The problem is when those desires turn every hard moment into a test you feel like you have to control.
Highlights:
• Why your kid’s mistakes can feel like a problem to solve
• How good intentions can turn into pressure, anger, and overreaction
• What is often sitting underneath a dad’s anger
• Why small parenting moments can start to feel like big future warnings
• How to stay steady without giving in or coming in hot
• Why your emotional capacity has to come before your kid’s emotional capacity
Practical takeaways:
• Pause before you fix, correct, or lecture.
• Look for the fear underneath your anger before you act.
• Let your kid feel disappointment without making it your job to erase it.
The next time your kid sets you off, start with what is happening inside you. Get steady first. Then handle the kid in front of you.
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SPEAKER_00
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Geary. This show is gonna give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community, and most importantly, your family.
SPEAKER_00
Alright, what's up? Episode 120. Last week I had a parenting situation that I want to tell you about. Our typical afternoon routine during the school year is that I'm at home when our eight-year-old gets off the bus and she kind of hangs out, gets some things done around the house, hangs with friends, and then Brenda picks up our three-year-old on her way home from work. But on this day, plans changed. I had to go pick up our three-year-old, which meant that our older daughter had to come with. So she gets home, she gets off the bus, and I said, Hey, we gotta go pick up your sister. And it was like I told her someone had died. Big tears fell to the ground. You always do this. I'm supposed to be playing with my friends right now, they're all going swimming. Now I can't. Total meltdown. The first thing that comes into my head is this tense worry that I need to fix this. Maybe she can still play. I can ask a neighbor to watch her. Maybe there's some kind of workaround. All this going in my head. And then I'm like, Tommy, don't do this. This isn't an emergency. She's just feeling disappointed. It's okay. And this is one of my default reactions whenever someone is upset or disappointed. I want to fix it right away. So I notice that. As I catch myself from reacting there, frustration starts to show up because now I'm thinking, what the hell is wrong with her? Like, this is such a small thing. It's gonna take 20 minutes. Let's just get in the car, go, it's not that big of a deal. We gotta pick up your sister. I pause there. There was that anger, I didn't react to that anger. What I was noticing was that this these were the external things happening. I told my daughter, plans changed. She got upset, she threw her whole tantrum outside of me. But internally, my brain, my nervous system is reacting like something had really gone wrong.
SPEAKER_00
Felt urgent, pressure, discomfort. And I think this is something that I missed for a while in my parenting, and I think a lot of parents miss this, is that we have these hidden desires for our kids. I want my kids to be happy, I want my kids to succeed, I want my kids to be hard workers. These hidden desires have a dark side to them because in these moments of difficult parenting, those are the times when we start to teach our kids how to handle difficult moments in life. So I'll tell you what I did with this one because I didn't totally get it right, but first I want to run through some of these desires that are noble but can have unintended consequences. So that first one that I said, I want my kids to be happy. When kids are sad, when they're disappointed, when they're struggling, if you have this desire, you probably rush to fix it. We try to get them out of the pain. And when we try to do this too quickly, we're sending a message, a hidden message, that disappointment and negative emotions are a problem. If you play that out long term, it has the potential for them not to handle disappointment well in life. In the future, there are gonna be moments in life that are disappointing. Not getting into a the college they want, breaking up with a partner, a job loss. Those are things that happen. But if our kid hasn't learned how to feel disappointed, they can get stuck in those difficult times. They can turn into blaming other people or circumstances or complaining that they were treated unfairly. When they're feeling those negative emotions, instead of owning their circumstances, they can lose confidence in themselves. Shit's gonna happen in life, they're gonna not get what they want sometimes, and we want them to feel bummed, but move on to the next step, understand what they can control. So that's one of the desires. We want our kids to be happy, and then when they're not, we move into fix it mode really quickly. We want to let our kids feel disappointed, be there with them through it. It's gonna make them stronger when they are older in life and life throws curveballs at them. They'll be able to handle their disappointment, they'll be emotionally stronger.
SPEAKER_00
Alright, the next desire that I want to explore the hidden side of it is the desire for our kid to be a good person. I was coaching a guy last week, and he was telling me I almost strangled my teenage son in front of his friends, and he didn't do it, but that's how he was feeling. What had happened was that his 14-year-old son wanted to go play with friends at the park, and his wife said, Yep, go for it, just make sure your chores are done first. Son said, chores are done, left. Then his wife realizes that the chores weren't done. So she texted him, said, Hey, when you're back, you've got push-ups to do and you gotta get your chores done. That's one of the boundaries that they have set. The son texts back, I'm tired of this. This is bullshit, you're always nitpicking me. And he kind of went off. And when my client found out about these text messages, he got pissed. What he told me was, it pisses me off when my son disrespects me, but when he disrespects my wife, my anger just goes through the roof. I can definitely relate to this. I know that when my girls are yelling and not listening to Brenda, I can come in pretty hot to shut it all down. So that's what this guy started to do. He hopped in his car, he's driving to the park to pick up his son on the drive. He's ramping himself up, but he noticed that this was happening. We had coached around this before, that his brain will quickly go to he's disrespecting me, he's disrespecting my wife. And when we've coached on it, underneath that anger is a fear. The fear that he's not gonna be able to go through life like this. If he constantly disrespects and blames people, he's not gonna be able to be a good person in the world when I send him out there to get a job or to go to college. So he caught his anger, he caught his fear on this drive, and he did something really cool. He texted another dad. Actually, the dad that he texted, he had met on the Grand Canyon trip. Both of these guys were on the Grand Canyon trip last month and they had built a relationship, had some talks about parenting, and he texted them, hey, got a quick second. They hopped on the phone. The cool thing about this conversation is that when you speak to someone that's outside of the heat of the moment, someone that it's not their kid, they usually have a calmer perspective. So the guy said to him, What do you think your kid is actually trying to communicate right now? And my client said, He's probably trying to communicate that he wants independence. He's a teenager, he's trying to establish his identity. Saying those things out loud took him off the ledge a little bit. He didn't back away from discipline, he just did it from a different emotion. He still picked up his son, had him do his chores, had him do his push-ups, but because he wasn't trying to strangle him, they had a good 40-minute calm conversation about what was going on. So that desire, I want my kid to be a good person. When we hold on to it too tightly, everyday things start to carry too much weight. Messy rooms, bad grades, lack of effort, not listening right away, disrespect. Suddenly, those things start to feel like signs that the future is going to go wrong. Our brain creates this false future. If they disrespect me today, how are they gonna operate in their career? If they have a messy room, they're gonna be a slob forever. If you're thinking that this isn't you, I'm not projecting out into the future in those moments. My kid just shouldn't disrespect me. If you're responding with anger quick reactions, you probably have these underlying fears. Anger is a secondary emotion, there's always some emotion underneath it. If we're not careful to manage this desire for my kid to be a good person, we'll react quickly, and then we end up being an example of exactly what we don't want our kids to be. If we're yelling at them, if we're not listening to them and just telling them what to do, are we respecting them? Are we being a good person? So that's the second desire. Good intentions, but also the possibility of slipping into a parenting style that we don't actually want to use, the example we don't really want to be.
SPEAKER_00
A few others we went over, just want my kids to be happy, want my kid to be a good person. Another one that's very similar is I want my kid to be successful. Another one that I have, I want my kids to have good friends. I want them to have healthy social circles. The dark side of this is that if they don't get invited to a birthday party or something happens between friends, I can come in and make it a lot heavier than it needs to be. Another big one that I see a lot is that I want my kids to be resilient. I want them to be tough, be able to handle difficult things. I want them to be hard workers. Then when they aren't doing those things, if they're complaining about the cold or they're struggling in sports or avoiding the hard practices, not working on their homework and going through the challenging problems. If we're holding on to this desire to be a hard worker, to be resilient, we can come in hard on them. We can put pressure on, be less patient instead of supporting them, coaching them, encouraging them. So those are most of the desires. When these desires aren't being met, if we're not conscious and managing our minds and our emotions, we can make small things our kids do mean something has gone wrong and will overreact.
SPEAKER_00
So back to my daughter, right? She needs to come with to pick up her younger sister, she's flipping out. What did I do? I sat down. That was the first thing. It's actually a tactic that I picked up from the calm parenting podcast when your kids overreacting and all worked up. Sitting down helps communicate calmness. It helps my daughter feel like I'm not gonna bite her head off, and it also helps me to relax a little bit. And then I just started repeating back what she was saying that she thinks she never gets to play with her friends, that the plans changed really quickly, that everyone's gonna go swimming and she doesn't get to. I was kind of trying to buy myself time a little bit, communicate that I was trying to understand her, but also like what the hell am I gonna do in this situation? Repeating some of the words she said. She kept yelling. I told her, hey, you got a choice here. You can make this a huge deal and fight it, or you can decide to roll with this change. I didn't want to fight fire with fire, and I also didn't want to give in and fix this disappointment, so I just kind of sat there. Then she threw out an idea and she said, Can I watch something while we go pick her up? And I told her, We don't usually watch stuff on short rides. In my head, I'm like, Are you freaking kidding me? Just get in the car. And then she asked, can we compromise? And we had actually been talking a lot about compromise lately. I did not want to. I was like, I can't believe she's throwing this back at me right now. Don't give in. But I decided to say okay, fine, you can watch something on the way there, but not on the way back. And she totally shifted. She hopped up, said okay, went and grabbed the tablet for the car ride, and my brain immediately went to shit. I just gave in. She should have just listened to me the first time. Did I set a bad precedent? Questioning all of my parenting. But then another part of me said, you know what? That actually went pretty well. She learned to compromise. I didn't totally flip out. Not sure if that was the perfect parenting tactic, but we're gonna chalk this one up as a win. I think
SPEAKER_00
this is a big part of parenting, partly helping kids build emotional capacity, helping them feel disappointment, frustration, anger, embarrassment, teaching them how to do that while keeping a relatively cool head. But doing that requires parents to build emotional capacity first. And that's been a huge part of me learning how to be a better dad. And it's a lot of what I work on with men that I coach. We're not taught how to build this emotional capacity, but it is something that we can learn pretty easily. Listening to this podcast, you're already learning it. So the next time your kid pisses you off, remember it's an inside game. First job, manage your own emotions, manage your own brain, and then the situation in the external world will start to take care of itself. I gave you a couple tips in there, what my client did, what I did, but the main thing that we both worked on is this emotional capacity to not react quickly.
SPEAKER_00
All right, that's what I got for you guys today. Have an awesome one and I'll catch you next time.
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