Unless you actually enjoy it when your kid is crying and sad, you’ve probably experienced a time when you had to refuse something they really wanted, and it was a painful experience.
One thing humans are great at is avoiding miserable experiences but learning to sit through discomfort is an important skill. Saying no to our kids—appropriately and with love—lets parents and children practice this skill.
In her latest podcast episode, child psychologist Dr. Becky Chambers offers three stories and three tips on managing this.
Valuing Someone’s Wants & Needs Doesn’t Mean Saying Yes
Dr. Becky explains a concept that sounds simple but is utterly revolutionary: when someone tells you no, it doesn’t mean they don’t love you, value you, or care about your feelings.
Her first caller explains that it’s important for her kids to feel seen, heard, and valued. Dr. Becky agrees, but she says we have to learn to separate valuing someone’s feelings from giving them what they want.
She offers an analogy: if, when your child is an adult, her partner has a want that your child doesn’t share in that moment — her example is going out to eat, but there are plenty of other situations in which we can imagine our teen or adult offspring being hesitant to say no to a partner or a date — you don’t want your child to feel like she has to either go along with the request or else feel that she’s invalidated her loved one.
Nor do you want your child to feel unloved because a partner isn’t interested in a given activity at this particular time.
Instead, Dr. Becky suggests using your words and actions to show that you see and care about your child’s wants and feelings, even if you’re telling them no. Her example:
“I know you want to watch another tv show. I get that that matters to you. I hear you. And, it’s bedtime.”
Define Your Job As A Parent
Dr. Becky says that for many parents, there’s an (incorrect) sense that it’s our job to stop our kids from having bad feelings.
Instead, she explains, our job is to set a boundary, validate the feelings about that boundary, then hold the boundary.
She responded to a mom who feels like she’s “always saying no” because her child has a string of requests from the moment she wakes up. Her child is highly sensitive, and she worries about meltdowns when she has to say no over and over, no matter how many times she also says yes.
She describes ‘tensing up’ when she prepares to say no.
Dr. Becky posited that parents don’t actually ‘tense up’ because they’re so worried about the kid’s reaction and don’t feel clarity about their job in that moment. She said:
“I have two jobs: boundaries and validation. My job is not to make my kid happy, my job is not to end their meltdown, and I promise you when you’re more centered and have more conviction in your job, which will take time…your kids reaction to your nos are going to change because they feel youre sturdiness, they feel your edge.”
Short-Term Convenience Vs Long-Term Capability
Dr. Becky addressed how parents, especially moms, may feel their worth is defined by how much they meet other people’s needs.
“So many of us have learned that our value is around serving others [and] distancing ourselves from our own needs,” she explains, adding that this causes us a lot of mental and physical health problems and that acknowledging our own needs helps make us capable of parenting.
She explained that it’s great to teach our kids to ask for help, but also important to teach them to accept that they won’t always have every demand met.
Denying a silly demand—such as the caller’s 6-year-old asking, “Mommy, can you throw away my wrapper?” when the kid is sitting a few steps from the trash can and the mother is in another room—makes things harder for everyone in the short term, as the mom now may have to deal with a meltdown, but in the long term, the child is learning resilience and how to handle a situation in which she has to clean up her own mess.
“Maximizing ease and happiness in childhood doesn’t create well-adjusted adults,” she declares, adding that it instead creates adults who are fragile and “have never developed a sense of their own capability.”
She calls this stealing kids’ competence.
Instead, she advises giving kids experiences that will teach them, when they encounter adversity, to remember that they’re capable of doing things they don’t want to do and that they’ve previously made it to the other side of a difficult situation.
More From Dr. Becky Chambers
There’s an important caveat to all this: Dr. Becky affirms that it’s okay to have days when you choose short-term easy, choose to block kids from painful experiences, decide to step in and make them happy just because it’s the simpler path.
Instead, she says, it’s an ongoing pattern that’s the problem.
You can hear the full Good Inside podcast episode here and Dr. Becky’s complete advice and reasoning. You can also check out the Good Inside podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. She also has a TikTok for quick parenting tips and shares even more advice and parenting hints on Instagram, as well as on the Good Inside website, where she offers parenting coach services.