Attuned Parenting: Lessons from “Your Kids Don’t Suck” on Building Safe Relationships with Your Children
By: Eden Amital (LSWAIC)
I’ve recently started listening to a life-changing podcast: “Your Kids Don’t Suck: Cultivating Closeness with Your Kids through Non-Coercive, Conscious Parenting.” The hosts–therapists and parents Cara Tedstone and Rythea Lee–are committed to promoting collaboration and mutuality in their relationships with their children. Listening to them and their guests discuss their internal processes and the deep connections they have with their children takes my breath away.
Instead of focusing their time and energy on controlling their children’s behaviors, Cara and Rythea continually return their attention to their own emotions and triggers. I am struck by the immense effort and practice required to cultivate true relational safety amidst significant power disparities between adults and youth. And yet, they’re doing the work and showing us all that it is possible for parents and caregivers to create radically accepting and safe relationships in which their children can come to them with any and everything without fear of being judged, shamed, punished, or controlled. By consistently divesting from their own beliefs and judgments about who their children should be and what their children’s behaviors say about who they are as caregivers, and being curious about their and their children’s inner lives, caregivers can have a tremendous impact on the mental and emotional health of their children.
So what is it that Cara, Rythea, and other parents and caregivers are doing that enables them to meet their kids with so much acceptance, curiosity, warmth, and non-judgement?
Being a safe and accepting caregiver is a lot like being an effective therapist - both make efforts to “empathically attune.” In therapy, a clinician strives to feel into “the client’s intentions, feelings, and perceptions, developing a feel of what it is like to be the client at that moment. At the same time, [they] retain a sense of self, as opposed to being swamped by or ‘fusing’ with the client’s experience.” This mental process–“the capacity to understand and interpret–implicitly and explicitly – one's own and others' behaviour as an expression of mental states such as feelings, thoughts, fantasies, beliefs and desires”–is referred to in psychology literature as mentalization or reflective functioning.
Caregivers who are able to both conceptualize and reflect on their and their child’s inner worlds are more likely to raise children who are securely attached and capable of self-regulation. Secure attachment is predictive of positive outcomes throughout life stages: low parental reflective functioning is predictive of “anxiety disorders, impairment in emotion regulation, and externalizing behaviors” in children. In other words, children, adolescents, and young adults cannot self-regulate unless they learn how to through consistent co-regulation with safe and predictable attachment figures.
How can caregivers strengthen their capacities to both connect with and defuse from their children’s emotions?
Clarify Your Values: Reflect on your core motivations and values as a caregiver and your ability to prioritize your relationship with your child. Consider using Cara Tedstone’s workbook (Re)Parenting With Mindfulness: 30 exercises to support parents in nurturing respectful relationships with their children.
Reflect on Your Early Attachment Experiences: Consider your relationships with primary caregivers during your formative years. Were your interactions with caregivers characterized by warmth, responsiveness, and validation? Recognize how your past experiences might influence your approach to parenting and reflect on your interactions with your own child to ensure they align with your values.
Practice Mindfulness: Consider taking a Mindful Self-Compassion course. This practice enhances parent-child co-regulation and supports the development of adaptive emotional regulation strategies.
Tune In: When big feelings come up in you and/or your child, tune in with curiosity. Ask, “What unmet needs is my child’s behavior communicating? Notice your own feelings, memories, and judgments that arise in response.
Adopt a Nonjudgmental Stance: Use open-ended questions, affirmations, and reflections to understand your child’s perspective.
Listen Without Fixing: Focus on listening non-judgmentally: your presence and understanding are often more valuable than immediate problem-solving. It can be really painful and scary to hear your child sharing about things that upset or distress them and to be with them in those feelings - and that’s when they need your grounded acceptance and validation the most!
Seek Feedback: If you have the emotional capacity to do so, consider asking your child: “Is there anything that you feel scared to talk to me about? What do you wish I understood better?” Listen attentively and compassionately and reflect what you’re hearing back to them to demonstrate understanding. And thank them for sharing!
Apologize: Relationship ruptures are inevitable–it’s the repair that is crucial, and the most effective apology is consistent behavior change over time.
Seek Support: Consider seeking out additional support and resources, such as individual therapy, support groups, and/or parent coaching–your needs and feelings matter. Parents are so often undersupported and burnt out–you deserve all the support, care, nurturing, and understanding you can get!
