EPISODE 04
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:04] RA: As parents, there is a lot on our plate, and the guilt and the shame that we can feel of our house isn't perfect and spotless, can be overwhelming. Even more so, if you have something like ADHD or depression.
On today's episode of The Little Tots, Big Talks podcast, we have somebody who is an expert in helping parents work through that feeling of overwhelm and letting go of a lot of that shame and guilt. KC Davis is a licensed professional counselor. I originally found her on TikTok, where she currently has 1.4 million followers. She is also an author with a book on the USA Today Bestsellers List called How to Keep House While Drowning.
In today's episode, we cover all these things. How do you let go of some of that shame? How do you start to organize and keep yourself from feeling so overwhelmed with everything that there is to do? Also, how do we start teaching kids these lessons now so that they don't feel that same guilt whenever they get to be older? Let's get started.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:07] RA: Alright. So, KC, thank you again for doing this. I'm so excited to have you on here. I've been following you on TikTok for a while and just love your content. By watching your follower count increase, it seems like you're reaching a lot of people and touching a lot of people. So again, I'm really excited and thank you for doing this.
[00:01:28] KCD: Of course. Thank you.
[00:01:30] RA: For those who don't know you, could you introduce yourself? Who are you? Why should they listen to you? All that good stuff.
[00:01:40] KCD: So, my name is KC Davis, I'm a licensed professional counselor, and I run a platform called Struggle Care, which is primarily about helping people that have functional barriers, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, or just maybe some support deficits, really deal with self-care in regards to cleaning or hygiene or feeding themselves. So, some of those basic things that really can get pretty hard at times, dishes, laundry, all those sorts of things. We're all about sort of reconceptualizing those care tasks from chores and the external motivation to do them because you should or because that's what real adults do, into looking at them as just ways of caring for yourself and being kind to yourself, and that you are a person that deserves to be taken care of and have a functional space and all of those great things.
I'm also a stay at home mom of two. I have a 14-month-old and a three-year-old, and they are incredible, and beautiful and wonderful. I wrote a book called How to Keep House While Drowning, it's on Amazon. I have some workbooks and some cool templates and things on my website. So, that's kind of what I do. I take care of my kiddos, I make TikToks, I somehow squeak out a book hoping to grind out some more.
[00:02:54] RA: Wonderful. Yeah, and I think that is what really drew me to your work is this idea of letting go of that pressure. So many parents and now that I'm a new dad, I experienced that pressure that everything has to be done. The dishes have to be done, we have to do laundry four times a week, because every time the baby spits up, we've got to clean that. The house needs to be spotless for all these people who are wanting to visit, which I've kind of left out because we're in a pandemic, and people can't visit as much. But it needs to be spotless for them. I think that social media has a tendency to further make that pressure, it just increases it.
I noticed that in your platform, it really helps parents maybe see that, yeah, we don't have to be perfect. It's okay to let those dishes sit in the sink for a day.
[00:03:47] KCD: Yes, totally. I have a lot of followers that have mental health issues or chronic pain. But I also have a ton of parents that follow me, who – and I even mentioned this on my website, you can be someone of healthy body, sound mind, great support system. But you throw in a big life change, like having a baby, moving to a new city, losing a spouse, one big life change can completely strip you of most of your coping skills and bring out things that maybe you didn't know were there before.
A lot of people struggle with things like the dishes piling up, and they don't realize that it's such an issue for them, because they've always been able to just keep on top of the dishes. Throw a newborn in there or a pandemic or both, and now you can't keep on top of the dishes and you're realizing I never realized how much anxiety I have over this. Or I never realized how much I connected being on top of housework to my worth as a person. I mean, so many moms comment on my TikToks and say, “I'm holding my six-week-old baby and I can't get on top of the dishes and there's laundry everywhere. The house is a mess and I feel like I'm failing.” So, there's this huge connect with parents with this idea of being in this struggle when it comes to caring for our homes.
[00:05:03] RA: What do you say to those parents who say, “I feel like I'm failing at this.”
[00:05:10] KCD: Well, that's when one of my core pillars or principles is that care tasks are morally neutral. There's nothing about dishes that makes you a good or bad person, a success or a failure, and I read a blog the other day, and I wish I could remember the author because the title was, housework is not motherhood. I think that's such a powerful message.
Motherhood doesn't have anything to do with how good you are at laundry, or being tidy or being organized. It doesn't have anything to do with that. It has to do with attachment and responsiveness, and discipline, and love and safety, and all these things that quite honestly, take an intense amount of energy. So, I think that there's this huge push to help parents realize some of these things that we think are really, really, really important, can really be deprioritize, because you're going to need that energy to focus on the things that actually impact your child long term.
The other reason why – and I started posting some things about how can we help our kids? How can we raise our kids to have a healthy relationship to things like chores and cleaning and hygiene? Because what I noticed is, so many of my followers that have a difficult relationship with caring for themselves have that relationship because of something that happened in their childhood, and on both sides of the spectrum, right? I have people whose parents were hoarders that now have a lot of anxiety over cleaning, and I have people whose parents were neat freaks, and they weren't even allowed to play with toys, because it would mess things up.
So, it just sort of dawned on me that the way that we treat and model care tasks in front of our children has a huge impact to their later functioning.
[00:07:04] RA: Absolutely. I think, I see that a lot and not just in care tasks, I think in a lot of different areas is when we're raised a certain way, then we either – one of two things happens, either we carry that on, or we go the complete opposite side of the spectrum, right? I could definitely see that with cleaning, too, with keeping a house straight, is that families with hoarders, it might be, “Okay. I never want to live in that again and now I'm never going to have a mess in my house.”
[00:07:34] KCD: Yes, exactly. I often say to people, it's important, I read this somewhere and so I don't want to take credit for the thought. But this really impacted me not around cleaning, but just around some other parental issues I went through as a child. It said, “Your job is to be the parent that your child needs, not to be the parent that you need it.” Because sometimes we overcompensate because if we remember feeling unsafe in a disorganized house, we overcompensate and go, “I would never want my child to feel unsafe.” And so, there might be a small mess somewhere and we sort of freak out about that mess, because we love our child so much, but we forget that our child doesn't have the same context that we had, right?
Was it really the mess that made you feel unsafe as a child? Or did your mother have a mental health problem, or your dad was absent? There's something unstable about the parent and the attachment itself and that mess was a side effect of that. But you've now associated those feelings with the mess, whereas if you're doing the work, to be loving, and kind and safe, and have gentle discipline, and respectful parenting and attachment, your child isn't going to experience a little bit of mess in that way. So, I've really had to unpack some of those things, because I sometimes want to be the parent that I needed, when I need to be the parent that my child needs.
[00:08:57] RA: Yeah, the idea of parenting per the child and every child is going to have a different need as far as the parenting style, right? There's some kid that needs a little bit more structure, there's some that don't need as much, and I think when we come into it saying, “This is exactly what's going to happen, and this is exactly what we're going to do it the same way every single time with every single kid”, it really sets us up for failure in a way, right? It sets us up to say, “Wow, why isn't this working? Because it worked before or it worked with that child and this situation?” I think that bringing in what you're saying there, which is really I'm parenting myself, and I'm just kind of projecting that onto my kids.
[00:09:38] KCD: Exactly.
[00:09:42] RA: I guess for you, it sounds like you've done some of that work. How do you help other parents start to identify that in themselves and start to kind of move away from that?
[00:09:50] KCD: So, the first big shift that we need to make as parents is away from this idea that our primary job is to elicit compliance from our children. That like my success as a mom depends on a clean room from my child, right? Because I always say that if you win the battle for a clean room, but your child isn't equipped with the relationship to care tasks that they need to function later, that's not a win. That's not just care tasks. That's everything, right? Good grades, respect, these things, is that my job isn't to do figure out whatever it's going to take to elicit the behavior I want to see, and we do this out of great motives.
Okay, you need to know these things in order to succeed in life. But sometimes the methods we use work for the wrong reasons. Yes, I can get my child to be compliant, if I spank them, and they're afraid of me, or if I yell at them, and they're afraid of me, or if I threaten to take away the things that they love. Okay, well, now, they're just going to do something because they want those things back. And then we're going to release them into the world at 18 and there is not going to be someone there threatening to hit them if they don't do their homework, or take away their Xbox if they don't clean their room.
It's hard because you maybe won't get some of the behavior that another parent will get in terms of compliance if you choose to go the long-term goals. So, looking at, okay, then what's my role? I really can't control my child's behavior and that's not my job. My job is to teach and model and to create a safe environment where they can learn from me.
[00:11:35] RA: Yeah, I love what you said and I think this idea that we can absolutely get compliance from kids, especially when they're really young, and they don't have as much of a voice. I think we sometimes start to pay for that just compliance focus when kids get into be teenagers, and they can start to speak for themselves and have a little bit more strength in them. But as you were saying, compliance, we can get that compliance. I started finding myself thinking compliance at what cost, right? We can get that immediate compliance with yelling or threatening or spanking. The reason parents do it is because it works in that moment.
[00:12:10] KCD: Yeah, and we see something, like our definition of working is the compliant behavior. So, if we talk about, okay, give your kid two choices. You can either do this or do that. And then they don't choose the choice we want. We go, “Well, that didn't work. That didn't work.” And it's like, “Well, what do you mean by work, though?” So, I think that that's a hard shift to make.
[00:12:35] RA: Yes. Well, I think, yeah, it's what is our goal for our kids? Is it just to have a clean room? Is it just to get good grades? Is it just to do everything that they're told to do? Or do we want them to develop skills like time management and conflict resolution, and an ability to make and maintain friendships and relationships. And those skills take a lot more work and effort. I think, with parents, I find that there's this focus on again, of doing all the chores and maintaining a house and keeping everything clean. Plus, I'm trying to be this perfect parent, the Instagram mom, and then I have this child who is doing these things that are feeling challenging to me. I just don't feel like I have the time or the patience to be able to do that.
[00:13:22] KCD: The pressure is so difficult. I mean, not only do you have sort of the internal fear and feeling as though you're failing, because you can't seem to get the sort of behaviors that you think are what's going to be good for your child in the long run and you start to worry, “Well, what if they never have a clean room? What if they could never get good grades? What if they never learned not to hit little Johnny on the playground?” So, you have this internal fear of failing. You have this internal wrestle of the power dynamics. I should be respected, I should be treated this way. And those are very difficult, particularly if you have any kind of trauma in your background. Then there's this external pressure. The way that I respond to big feelings and tantrums and meltdowns and things, if I respond to my child in a very gentle and respectful manner in a grocery store, I know that parents are going to look at me and think, “Why can't she just get her child under control? She's permissive. What do you mean you get down on the ground and just allow them to flail there until the feelings have passed?” That's so hard, because I'm already struggling with, am I good enough mom. And now all these people in the supermarket are staring at me.
[00:14:29] RA: Everybody has a parenting opinion.
[00:14:32] KCD: Yes, absolutely. So, when I think when I tried to talk to people about how can we help our kids have a healthier relationship to care tasks. It's about moving away from the punishments and the rewards and the star charts, because those things run the risk. They're not bad, they're not wrong, and my kids are very young. So, I can't say that I'll never use punishments and rewards for things. But the risk that we run is making everything this external motivation. I have to do it. I should do it. It's what I need to be doing. Instead of sort of doing the really, really difficult and muddy work of teaching our kids that these tasks are about caring for ourselves, about caring for our family, and it's hard for many ways. Because one, sometimes it's just faster to do things yourself when they're really little.
I think that's what happens, when they're really little, and they're in the phase where they want to help and they want to participate, nothing they do is actually helpful. So, it's hard to let them help and I don't mean we need to all the time. There are plenty of times that I say to my toddler, when she says, “I help. I help. I'm a big helper.” I say, “No, thank you, sweetie. Tonight, mommy's just going to get dinner done really quickly.” That is totally okay. That is also self-care for me, right? Because if I say, “Okay, let's do it.” And I'm dragging my feet, and I'm frustrated, like, that's not going to be helpful experience to her anyways.
[00:16:03] RA: They're going to pay attention and they're going to feel that.
[00:16:05] KCD: Yes, but I do try to use a lot of those opportunities to take a deep breath, regulate myself and say, “Okay, I know this is going to slow the process down and make my kitchen messier and potentially not taste as good.” But the benefit is that I feel like if I can get her buy in at this age, when she's excited about participating, that that will hopefully carry on when she's older. Because I think the risk is, we sort of push them to the side when they're little, and then when they get old enough to do it right, we're like, “Well do it. Why aren't you participating?” But they haven't had that practice of what it means to ebb and flow with the family, and so then they don't necessarily connect that.
[00:16:46] RA: Right. I think that carries, there's so many different areas and facets of children and development. I mean, most of brain development happens before five years old, right? Of course, the brain changes throughout our entire life, but the major functions of the brain are developed by five years old. If we can help build foundational skills, at these young ages, when kids are excited, and eager and curious and willing to try and learn and practice these things, then it builds that foundation that we can then build on.
[00:17:21] KCD: I still let them be kids, right? I don't expect my kids at this age to be doing chores and I mostly clean. But I do try and take care of the house in front of them. I don't want them to think that there's like a care task fairy that they go to bed every night, and they wake up and everything is new and clean, and this is just how my life will be forever. I want them to see me doing those things, and they can participate some when they're interested, and then they will wander off when they're disinterested. Sort of understanding that that's developmentally appropriate, and not pressuring them to know. Keep helping, nope, keep helping.
So, allowing them to see me do that, but also trying to model that this isn't – I don't want to always model it as this is so frustrating. “Oh, what a mess. I hate this part of my life.” Because I don't want to give the impression that like, “Yes, this is the part of life that sucks.” Because she doesn't know that. She thinks standing on a stepstool and throwing laundry into the washer is the best thing she's ever done.
[00:18:19] RA: Absolute.
[00:18:20] KCD: So, I want to do those things in front of them. I want them to see me, I'm not going to overdo it with, “This is so much fun”, but it's just a part of life and I want them to understand it's functional. Their play area is the place that I focus on getting their engagement in. I mean, not the little one, she does understand, but the older one. So, watching the way that I speak about mess, I started to notice that I always said the word mess, in context with being frustrated and saying something negative. “Be careful, you're making a mess. Don't do that, it's making a mess.” I was like, Gosh, no wonder so much of us grow up and feel like it's not okay to make a mess or leave a mess.” So, she started walking into a playroom and going, “Wow, so messy!” I started making sure that I was talking about where is it okay and good to make a mess and where do we want to try not to make a mess.
When she would make a mess at dinner, and just at her age, when they're little I let them play on their food and stuff. But if she is purposefully smearing, putting on her face, I might say, “Okay, dinner time is not a time where we try purposely to make messes. It's good to make a mess when you're playing. It's more helpful to try not make messes when you're eating dinner. You can make a mess on accident, that's fine.” So, just telling them that and when they say, when she says, “Oh, it's so messy in here.” I started saying, “That's awesome. You must have had so much fun in here.”
[00:19:50] RA: I love that shift and pulling – it's my favorite when kids start to be that, basically, our own recording and they start repeating us and what we've said, and we started saying, like, “Where did they get that?” And then we say, “Oh.”
[00:20:05] KCD: That was me.
[00:20:05] RA: “That was me. I did that.” And then what I love there is that, it's easy to say, well, no, it's not that or trying to change the behavior. But instead, you tried to shift that pattern, and instead of just saying, “No, it's not a mess.” You said, “Yeah, that's an awesome mess. This is a good mess.”
[00:20:25] KCD: Yeah, it's good to make messes when you play. It means you’re having fun. And then talking about, my channel for adults is all about seeing care tasks, not as moral issues, but just functional issues. By doing your dishes, it's a functional task. There's no right or wrong way to do it. You're not a success or a failure, if you don't do it, or if you do, do it, or if you do it great. So, having those conversations with my three-year-old about, okay, we need to tidy up. Why? Well, because then we'll have more space to play. Because then we'll know where our toys are and it will be easier to play.
Even at her age, she's catching on to, she will bring up herself, “Let's tidy up.” And we'll do it together, and she will participate for a few minutes, and then she'll start rolling around the ground, and I'll do the rest of it. I'm resisting my urge to go, “Nope, we're still cleaning. Nope, we're still cleaning”, because I know it's developmentally appropriate at three years old to put a few things in a bin and then lose interest. And I don't want to turn it into a power struggle, or something that she super dislikes doing. As she gets older, there will be an appropriate shift of responsibility from me doing to her doing it or us doing it together.
We're trying to create a framework where she sees cleaning, picking up as something immediately connected to her needs of that space. And to me, that's the long-term goal, to have children who turn into adults that see why they want to get these things done, the purpose of getting these things done, and also doing them together. A lot of the people that listen to my channel are easily overwhelmed with the things that the multiple steps of cleaning. They'll say things like, “My parents never taught me how to clean. They just expected me to have a clean room.” I've heard heartbreaking stories, and I'm sure their parents would be heartbroken to hear the stories of sitting in a room with a trash bag crying because they were truly just overwhelmed.
So, doing things at her age, at three, doing things with her, not just leaving her alone, and I think we'll probably do that for a long time, doing things together.
[00:22:36] RA: It's hard to hold on to that mentality for a three-year-old because they're starting to talk so much that we get this idea that they're just little adults. And we forget that there's still so much development. I talk about, most people know now that the brain doesn't finish developing till 25, and a three-year-old has 22 years of brain development left. If you think about it, I mean, it's hard to wrap your head around it.
[00:23:04] KCD: Well, not only that, but the attachment development in those first five years, if you don't get that right, it's very hard to override that in those, even in the 22 years after that. So, I tried to keep in mind, whatever we're doing, that the relationship takes precedent over the task. That doesn't mean obviously that there aren't times I get frustrated, or tell her, “Good God, just go watch TV so I can get this done.” But I think that remembering that right now I'm trying to – it's okay for her to be a kid. I don't have to turn her into a mini adult. You brought up a great thing about one time I had someone comment and say, “How could you forget that a three-year-old doesn't know how to clean? She's so little.”
But I appreciate what you said, which is like, “Okay, but my child now that she's speaking, will sometimes say and do things that blows my mind, that she understands those things, that she does those things, that she's capable of those things.” So, it is difficult to remember. I have kind of a funny story that happened the other day when my kids love to take all the diapers out of our diaper bin and throw them all around and we let them.
[00:24:14] RA: Of course, because that's fun.
[00:24:15] KCD: Yeah, seems like fun. There was one time where I was cleaning up something and she said, “Can I help you?” I said, “Yes, you can help by putting all those diapers back in the bin.” She walked over there and looked at them and went, “It’s too big. I can't. I can't pick this up. It’s too big.” My initial response was, “Yes, you can. You are capable of picking up something and putting it in a bin.” And she goes, “No, I can't. It's too hard. It's too big.” What I was hearing was, it's too much and it's too much work and I don't want to do that much effort. So, I was kind of getting a little frustrated with her. And then I stopped and sort of checked my assumptions about what that meant. Kids are so literal at that age. If you say, “Take all of those diapers and put them in the bin”, she actually heard literally put them all in your arms at once and then carry them to this bin.
So, I stopped, she said, “I don't know how.” Instead of being like, “Oh, my God, yes, you do.” I said, “Okay. Just pick up one diaper.” And she picked up one diaper. And I said, “Yes, you did it. Now put the one diaper in the bin.” She put it in the bin, and I said, “See, you just have to do that again, just pick up another diaper.” And she did it. After sort of walking her through doing it one at a time a few times, she kept doing it and that she got them all in the bin and she went, “I did it!” My mom was visiting and my mom even commented, like, “She's so tickled and proud of herself.” It was at that moment that I realized that she wasn't unwilling, she was overwhelmed. We forget that they need things broken down that small.
[00:25:57] RA: If you throw mental health disorders like ADHD, and it's even more important to break things down like that. I think, I love that story so much, because there's just so many little nuggets in it. But that idea that it'd be easy to get pulled into and say, “Yes, you do know how to do this. I've seen you do this before. What do you mean? It's simple. Just grab the diaper and put it in there.” But by taking that second, and taking that breath, and kind of swallowing that anger for a second, saying, “Okay, what is he really saying here?” And it was, okay, I'm trying – she has a picture in her mind of trying to grab all these things in her arms, and trying to carry them to this bin and that would be hard. She can't do that. But one at a time is very doable.
I can see taking that into a bedroom and saying, “Okay, instead of just having to clean up your entire room”, which, I had the exact same experience when I was a kid. I remember cleaning rooms was just an awful experience for all of us. And my brother and I, we shared a room, it was a nightmare every time. But it was clean this room, and for us, it's this whole room. It's just so much. But if it were broken up into tasks of okay, first, let's just take the clothes and put them in a hamper, and then breaking that up into the next strategy. And that can even broken up in more. So first, we're just going to put the shirts in the hamper, or just put the red shirts in the hamper. It can just be broken up into little tasks. For a three-year-old, that's what they need.
[00:27:30] KCD: I'm trying really hard to make sure that they are of course going to have experiences where cleaning up a mess or care tasks are associated with mom being frustrated. Because that's life. I'm not trying to never be frustrated with them. What I'm trying to do is create enough positive associations that their only association with care tasks won't be, “Oh, yeah, that's the stuff that sucks to do.” That's why I think we have this sort of saying that neurons that fire together, wire together.
If your only experience with cleaning your room is your parent yelling at you, or you feeling lonely or lost or overwhelmed, if that happens enough times, as an adult, you could walk into a messy room and start to feel all those same feelings, even though no one's yelling at you, even though no one expects you to clean it, even though there's nobody living there but you, we can attach those same experiences together. So, I know that my child's childhood, there will be plenty of fights about rooms, and there will be plenty of back and forth and tensions and things about participating in our family. So, I want to make sure that I'm consciously giving them other positive and morally neutral experiences with these things, so that they get released to the world, believing that care tasks are functional, and having the motivation to want to care for themselves and for their family.
[00:29:05] RA: Yeah. Yes, it's so important to understand that nobody's going to be perfect with this stuff and we're all going to get frustrated and angry sometimes. That's just part of life, and there's going to be some conflict between parents and kids. It just exists. It’s just part of being a parent. But yes, I it's about that net positive. It's about trying to make as many of those positive experiences as we can and I say the same thing when I talk about teaching kids in school, and there's this focus that by the time they get to kindergarten, they have to be able to write their name, they need to count to a thousand, they need to be able to name all their letters and maybe even a couple of languages. What I want them to focus on is, yes, that stuff is a byproduct, but make sure you're making it fun. If you can create a love of learning and a love of curiosity, and yes, they're still going to be able to kind of do those things, then that's just going to make it much easier and better when they actually get into school. There are so many days where they're like, “This is just too much homework and I don't want to do that.” And we're going to have those arguments. But the general theme and the value there is learning is fun and I want to do that.
[00:30:13] KCD: Yeah, and one of the things that I picked up actually, from Janet Lansbury, and talking about cleaning and care tasking with kids, is not to interrupt the play, particularly at my daughter's age. If she's engaged in something, she's doing her work like her brain is creating so many connections when she's sitting there playing independently. If I interrupt this play time that she's enjoying and go, “Okay kids, fun is over, we all have to clean right now. Why? Because mother has arbitrarily said so.” I'm setting it up for them to see taking care of their space as the bummer that gets imposed on them by the person that has more power.
I have some cool videos on my TikTok and on my YouTube where I sort of demonstrate, okay, I'm watching my kid play, I'm watching her play, and then she stops playing with the blocks and turns around and says, “I want to paint.” And I take that opportunity to say, “That's a great idea. Let's tidy up our space, and then mommy will get the paint out.” So, trying to catch them in that transition. So then, we tidy up, we tidy up and you can see her do the same thing. Three minutes in, okay, I want to paint now. I want to paint now. And that's when I can still have boundaries and limits, I can say, “When we finish tidying, mommy will get the paints out.” I'm not saying that I cater to her every whim or anything like that. You know what, she can choose to come and participate or she can choose to sit there and whine about the paint, that's fine. Both of those are acceptable choices.
But I will point out, this will go faster if you help mommy, we’ll get closer to the paints if you help mommy. But that's one of those examples of I'm not focused on how do I get her to clean? How do I get her to stop whining and clean? Because that's not the value I'm trying to build in that moment. By the time her brain is fully functioning, she's going to know how to pick up an item, if she's got the right relationship to those tasks. If the barriers in her life, like maybe ADHD or things like that have been addressed, so at this moment, the value is, let me demonstrate to you how this clean space is functional to you. We're not doing it because mommy likes to look at it better or because mommy doesn't want to deal with her anxiety over the mess. We're doing it because we're going to have more space to have fun once this is done. And you can participate or not participate, but we're not going to move on to the paint until we've done this because this is the right thing to do now.
[00:32:42] RA: Absolutely. How do you find in your own life that she responds to that?
[00:32:48] KCD: She responds really well. It's been such a pleasure. With the first one and the older one, you never know, like, how much of this did I do? And how much of this is just this kid's temperament? But she responds really well to it. I don't think – the fact that my three-year-old will say of her own volition, “Let's tidy up mommy”, she's already beginning to recognize when does this space become not functional to me. Because every time she suggests, let's tidy up, or I suggest, let's tidy up, we do it together. She doesn't get into this space where – because a lot of times kids will say, “I don't like it this messy, but I also don't really want to clean it, or I don't know how I'm overwhelmed with it. But the fact that she knows that help is there, I think that she's starting to recognize, okay, she's building that internal responsiveness to, when is the room not fun for me anymore? Or when do I want to do something that's going to require some more space? Or when can I not find my toys, because they're not all in the right bucket. That's my goal, that she sees these things as functional, so that she has intrinsic motivation to clean her space, to care for herself.
[00:33:59] RA: Yeah. That intrinsic motivation is just so important and it's so valuable to get kids to say, “I want to do this because it feels better, or because this is part of being a member of our family”, as opposed to, “I'm going to do this because I either, one, don't want to be yelled at or don't have to deal with the fight or because I'm going to earn this star.”
[00:34:22] KCD: I think that they still are maybe not going to ever want to clean something or want to do the dishes because to be honest, I don't want to do those things.
[00:34:32] RA: I hate dishes.
[00:34:33] KCD: But like you mentioned, their brain isn't fully formed until around 24. So, if I go their whole 18 years, and they never have a clean room, but I've instilled a healthy and functional relationship to those tasks, I can be confident that one day, when it becomes important to them, they will have the skills to care for themselves and I can trust that I don't know of any person absent functional barriers, that doesn't just realize as an adult. I enjoy my space more when it's functional. So, I know that she's going to have that moment. If she has that moment, and she has a real distressing relationship to cleaning, it's going to be hard.
If she has that moment of wanting that, and she has a barrier, like ADHD or mental health that we haven't addressed, it's going to be hard. If she sees it as this moral failing, she's not going to want to reach out for help. But if she has this positive relationship to caring for herself, she sees it as a functional issue, one day, she will care.
[00:35:42] RA: Yeah, and you've avoided a lot of those conflicts, so the relationship is so intact, and you've been able to focus on so many other things at the same time, as we can get pulled into, with just talking about from my story, it was sometimes cleaning room was an hour's long battle, and instead of spending those hours just fighting over a room, that can be spent elsewhere, too, which goes back to that self-care that you were talking about earlier.
[00:36:13] KCD: We consider feeding ourselves a care task, and we do the same thing with food, like we try to avoid all power struggles about eating. So, the way that we do it, and I learned this from – I took a course from Feeding Littles about toddler feeding, and they had a great philosophy that lined up perfectly with the way that I think of things where they said, “Your responsibility is what you're going to serve them at what time. And their responsibility, their realm of control is, how much of that they're going to eat and what of that they're going to eat.” So, we took that to heart in every meal, and that we occasionally have a snack time or a meal, and I say, “Well, what do you want? Pick something tonight.” We're not rigid. But I choose what's on the plate and I always try to give them one safe food I know they want to eat, and then they get to choose. If all she eats is bananas, she never touches the vegetables. I don't sweat that because what my aim isn't compliance and vegetables. My aim is a healthy relationship with food.
Because I can trust that if she has a healthy relationship with food, there will come a time in her life where she will want to be healthy, she'll want the function of I don't want to be tired all the time. I want to be healthy. I want my cholesterol managed. I want the energy that I feel when I eat fruits and veggies. So, I want to prioritize that we serve dessert with dinner. I don't want her to think that there are good foods and bad foods. I don't want her thinking that getting sucked into a diet culture really, really early, I want her to have the autonomy to learn when my body tells me I'm full, so I can stop, and when my body tells me I’m hungry.
[00:37:59] RA: I want you to talk about that one, because I know some people are going to hear that. They're going to be like, “You do what?” You serve dessert with the food.
[00:38:08] KCD: I do. So, I went through my own process of sort of learning about the way that we work when it comes to food. One of the things I really want my kids to know, as I want them to know, there are no good foods or bad foods, because what happens is that if we view sweets, desserts, sugar, fast food is bad and we view veggies and things like that as good. Well, then if we’re going to have this restriction around, don't eat too much bad food, don't eat so much bad food. And then when we eat a bad food, we feel guilty. And then most of us are not very good at dealing with guilt, and we often will deal with guilt by doing something that feels good, which is going to be the sugar, or the feel-good food.
I would like them to see all foods as morally neutral, foods are just functional. So, we don't have treats, we don't have dessert, we just have food. And when she says I want to have a chocolate covered banana for dinner, I don't say, “No, that's sugar.” Or, “No, that's not good for you.” Or, “No, that's not healthy.” I just say, “No, we're going to have spaghetti or whatever.” And she'll say, “Why?” I'll say, “Because it's really important that we eat a variety of foods to get all the nutrients we need. So, if we ate a chocolate covered banana, we'd be too full to eat all of the awesome nutrients in the spaghetti and the vegetables and things like that.”
So, teaching again, that very basic, it's all functional. My body needs the minerals, and all those things from these foods, and so that's why we can't have this for dinner because then we won't have room for this. Trusting that – we don't do clean plate or any of that because I want my daughter to recognize when she is hungry and when she's full because our bodies really are pretty good about regulating sort of our setpoint weight and feeding ourselves, like giving us hunger cues when we need to eat, and we can really disrupt those patterns at a young age by saying you have to eat it all so that she's learning to judge when she's done eating by visually when the plate is full. That becomes the cue to her body that says, “I'm done. I'm done, I'm done.” Well, that's fine if you, the parent, are controlling her portions, but then she's going to be released to the world where they serve her some giant portion, and she won't know, her body will literally not give her the cues to stop until the plate’s clean, because that's the cue she's learned.
Whereas if I give her –
[00:40:40] RA: Sorry, I just did a video a couple days ago on that very subject, and I noticed that so many adults, were the ones that commented saying, “That was what I was raised. I had to eat everything on my plate, which is how I was raised.” Now, I don't know when I'm full.
[00:41:02] KCD: Before, I have to eat the veggies first. So now, I'm power eating through a food that I don't even want, I don't even need to get to the food I want, when it probably would have been healthier to just eat the food you want. It would have been like, such an easier thing. Yes, that's huge for us is recognizing, I'm full. Let me tell you, it's wild, because it's scary. Because at first, when you say there is no cap on, if we have a stack of cookies, and you ask for more cookies, I will literally give her cookies until she's done. The only cap we have is functional.
So, you can't have a fourth serving of blueberries because you will blow out your pants, right? I will tell you, it's scary at first because you think, well if I didn't have a cap on, on what she wants, because if she has three things on her plate, she eats one that asks for more, she can have more. She can have as many servings of that thing as she wants until she's full, even if she never touches the other things. And that's scary as a parent because you think, “Oh God, if I gave them that sort of radical autonomy, then they would never do anything, but eat the one thing that they want and they would eat it until they were sick and yada.” But let me tell you something, that my three-year-old will eat half of a cookie.
[00:42:11] RA: Wow.
[00:42:12] KCD: She’ll eat half a doughnut and give it back and say, “I'm full.”
[00:42:16] RA: I think, because kids, babies, they're born with a few main abilities, and one of them is to understand when they're full. One of our challenges with our baby has been the eating thing, right? Because you get all of these messages coming in and saying they have to eat every three hours, you have to wake them up, you have to feed them every three hours, and they need to eat this much amount of formula. There were moments where my wife was crying. And she wants me to share that. But –
[00:42:45] KCD: We all cried, so we get it.
[00:42:45] RA: But crying because he ate one ounce instead of three, and instead of focusing on, okay, well, he's probably going to eat again in another hour, which is him regulating his own body and saying, “Hey, I'm full right now. But I'll either get in here in an hour, an hour and a half.”
[00:43:03] KCD: Yeah, and those numbers by the way, were actually based on total 24-hour intake. A baby needs a certain amount of ounces in 24 hours, and what people did to make that easy for parents was they go, “Okay, well, then if they're supposed to eat 20 ounces, well 20 divided by 24 is this many ounces.” But that's not how babies eat, they'll eat an ounce and then an hour later eat four ounces, and then eat two, and then eat one, and then eat five, and then eat nothing for four hours and we're much the same. The other thing is this, I mean, it is a delightful experience to eat a doughnut, and if a donut is something you get very, very rarely. I don't know if you've ever experienced this, you'll shove that thing in even though you're still full, because it's such a rare treat.
But if you had free access to foods, like my daughter doesn't need eat the whole doughnut because she knows, doughnuts are always there. We don't have real tight restrict – not that she can – we don't have doughnuts at home. This is the thing we go out and do on weekends sometimes, but not that she can go in and get a doughnut from the pantry whenever she wants, because we still control when she eats and what's on the plate, and what's offered. So, we offer a wide variety of things. It's hard to let go of the control of wanting the result. The clean room, eating the veggies, doing the homework. But the reality is if we focus on teaching kids to have a healthy relationship to these items, most of that stuff will work itself out as they mature. I can’t expect my child to have that maturity now.
[00:44:41] RA: Right, though we'd love for it to happen, they just don't yet and it takes that time and it takes a lot of effort. Again, it's hard to make that – there's all the research behind it. Teenagers will usually make that decision for the instant gratification as opposed to the thing that's going to benefit me later on, and that's because that's where their brain development is. That part of the brain that tells me, “Okay, I should eat the veggies and then not the donut”, isn't there until 25. Or the better, to take it away from, and wheel more with your – instead of putting all the power on desserts. The reason that they're driving 85 miles an hour down the highway is because they don't think about the fact that I could have an accident. They think this is fun. So, a three-year-old has less power than that.
[00:45:26] KCD: Yeah. I think that's always my key. By the time they develop the maturity to make mature decisions, the only reason they'll be unable to actually make the decisions is because they have a very complicated and negative relationship to whatever that thing is. That's going to complicate that decision.
[00:45:45] RA: Giving power to things can really be a part of this too, right? We give dessert, ice cream, that's what you're working towards. You eat all this food, and then you get the big reward, which is ice cream, or you get the donut. But when we take away that power, it really does, it makes it, it’s just a food.
[00:46:04] KCD: Yeah, you kind of have to make it boring.
[00:46:06] RA: I once read something, I don't know if it's true or not. But it was somebody saying that their parent, when they were growing up would say they would be eating like a bowl of green beans or something like that. They'd say, “Oh, Mom, can I have some green beans?” And they be like, “Oh, no, this is an adult food.” It got to the point where they're like, “No, I want green beans.” That would be really cool.
[00:46:29] KCD: Yeah, there's so much power and the taboo, the treat. That's a hard shift. I think for me, I struggle with not yelling, with being kind all the time. I mean, that's just – I think everyone probably struggles with that. I had an incident recently where they were in a sibling squabble, and I didn't want someone to get hurt, and I felt fear. So, I yelled really loud, and of course, the object was get them to stop doing that. But that's not helpful. It's not going to be kind, it's not going to give – it's not doing what I want, right? My goal isn't to just hijack their fight or flight response to get a behavioral compliance, which is what happens in that moment, which is fine if you need to stop them from running into the street, right?
I went back later and said, “Hey, mommy yelled pretty loud, didn't I?” And I just waited. I mean, I'm just so proud of her, because I've been trying so hard to focus to let go of whether they eat right or clean right or do any of this and focus instead on emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, boundaries, self-respect, things like that safety. She said, “Yeah, it scares me when you yell like that. I don't like it. You need to be calm.” Thank you, Daniel Tiger. I said, “Man, you're so right. You're so right. I'm going to work on that. I'm going to do the Daniel Tiger count on next time I feel that way.” She said, “Okay, thank you.” And then I always put in, and you're right, you deserve to be spoken to, in a calm, kind voice and I always tagged that on.
I've grabbed her by the arm before because I was frustrated. And she said, “You got to be gentle.” I'm so proud when she says those things to me, because I'm trying to raise a kid that knows that there is no authority beyond accountability. She gets to check authority when they are not behaving appropriately. I always use that line. I say, “You're right. Mommy needs to breathe and be calm and that was not gentle and you deserve to always be touched gently.” Because I'm trying to build a kid that when she gets into grade school, or she gets into a relationship, the idea that somebody would speak to her cruelly or touch her body in a way she doesn't like, would be so unfamiliar to her, so off the wall, like, for no second, would she stand for that. Because we never stood for it, that she is just going to be this little powerhouse, that she will speak truth to power, that it would just be so bizarre for a person to lay their hands on her and act like it was okay. She'd be like, “Oh, no, something's not right about this.” Even at my home when people made mistakes, they said, “Oh, you're right. No one should be doing this.”
[00:49:40] RA: So, have that assertiveness to sounds like to even be able to say, “Hey, don't do that.” The understanding that it's not okay, and she needs to let somebody know.
[00:49:51] KCD: Yeah. We do that bodily autonomy stuff with other things. When I get overwhelmed, I don’t want to be touched. And she says, “Pick me up, pick me up, pick me up.” I'll say, “Mommy doesn't want her body touched right now.” When her little sister grabs her hair, even though her little sister doesn't understand because she's very, very little, I'll look at her little sister in front of the bigger one and say, “She doesn't want her body touched right now and you have to respect when someone says that.” I guess my point in all of that is that takes me a lot of energy, a lot of patience, a lot of concentration. I don't have time to worry about whether you picked up toys or ate your veggies. Obviously, I care about those things, and I'm doing what I need to but like, I don't have time to get into power struggles about those kinds of things. I have far more important values to instill, and I need you to trust me and know that I'm for you.
[00:50:45] RA: Yeah, do we want a kid who's just going to eat veggies and have a clean room? Or do we want a kid who is going to be able to have healthy relationships and be able to talk to people and stand up for themselves and be assertive?
[00:50:55] KCD: Yeah, and you know what, I do believe that veggies are important, and having a functional space is important. But it's important, because you are a person who deserves to be healthy and have a functional space. It's not important, because you should do these things to be a good kid. If she grows up believing she deserves those things, and she has an uncomplicated relationship with those things, I really do trust that she'll be somebody who's capable of choosing the veggies and the care tasks.
[00:51:23] RA: Yeah, because you're teaching her the problem-solving skills, and that self-regulation and the ability to listen to her body. Because of that, I remember when I first started, as a therapist, one of my old supervisors said, “Sometimes we're just planting a seed.” With kids, it's a lot of that. We're planting these little seeds that eventually are going to blossom, and you'll see all these big changes, and it'll be like that switch flips, and all of a sudden, they're doing this thing, and they're like, “Wow, where did that come from?” And it came from all of these little things that you're doing, leading up to this.
[00:51:53] KCD: Yeah. I don't want parents to hear me saying, it doesn't matter what they eat, or if they ever clean, it's more about what is the best way to turn them into adults that are capable of engaging in these skills. I think some of the short term working behavioral compliance strategies, they just tend to backfire later in life for them. What you said really reminds me, I have a friend that's a therapist that does a motherhood coaching course. One of the things that she talks about, and of course, she got this from another source too, which I can never remember. I can never remember where things come, but I at least will tell you, I didn't think of it, which I think is the important part.
But she talks about shifting the idea that parenthood is like being a carpenter, where you're whittling away and you have control over every stroke of the knife. If you just take each step exactly right, you will end up with the picture you want, and that's how a lot of us think of parenting. We agonize over, “Well, she needs the formula, or is it breast milk? Or should we do baby led weaning? Is she too messy?” We agonize over these things as if we could just get all the steps right, we would get the right product. She says we just shift our idea of a parent from a carpet do to our gardener, that yes, we have a set – we have these responsibilities of planting the seed, tilling the soil, watering the ground. But there are these other variables that we don't have any control over. You can do your part completely perfect. But you can't control a drought, or a monsoon, or a snowstorm, or a rodent coming along and digging up your seeds.
I think it works both ways about I'm going to do this planting and this tilling and this caring, but that flower may not bloom until they're out of my house or years from now. Whether or not that flower blooms, won't just be because of my hard work. There are other factors that I don't have control over. But that doesn't mean that my little slice of responsibility is any less important, and it doesn't mean that I could – you can certainly screw up your slice of responsibility so much that even the best weather couldn't help. But I think that's always been so helpful of thinking of the long game and what kind of person am I creating, who they are, not just what they do.
[00:54:24] RA: I love that analogy so much. I'm going to steal that. I’ll try to remember to cite you, but I'm the same way I can ever remember who.
[00:54:31] KCD: Don't cite me, because I can't remember who it came from either.
[00:54:34] RA: I'll say that I heard from somebody that heard from somebody.
[00:54:38] KCD: Yeah, there you go.
[00:54:39] RA: Yeah. But I love that analogy. I'm going to use that because I think that is really the message that I think, really, that if we culminate this entire conversation is what it's about, right? It's these little conversations, these little moments. It's not necessarily saying you have to clean. It's, “Hey, let's clean because this is what we want to do.” And then not trying to force it, and that helps build these small little moments that eventually grow into have the potential to grow into much more. It can be about taking care of things at home, it can be about learning, it can be about how we can maintain friendships. All of these things are just small little lessons are not just a onetime lesson, and we're done. It's a culmination of everything.
[00:55:27] KCD: It brings – I know, we're sort of nearing the hour. But it brings to me a story of, there were a lot of struggles that I had in school regarding doing homework. I mean, I never did homework. I know now because I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, and so I think a lot of it had to do with once – it's once I'm out of the class, it's all dead to me. But I loved learning. I loved learning, and I sat in class in the front, and I listened to those lectures, and I loved doing that. I was really grateful that I wasn't overly punished about not doing the homework, that that didn't create all of these really negative grades. Because at the end of the day, even though I didn't have good grades, for a lot of my – I mean, I had passing grades, but they weren't amazing.
When I got to college, and I had to teach myself how to study and all these sorts of things, I actually ended up going to grad school, and rediscovered how much I loved learning in grad school, and I just think back to how like there was this flame of loving to learn. I wasn't good at all of the behavioral compliance that school asked of me. But I loved to learn and there were so many ways that people could have snuffed out that flame by trying to wrench behavioral homework compliance from me, or sitting, or how I behaved in class, or any of these things. They could have killed that flame. I'm so glad they didn't. I'm so glad that because I kept that intact, I learned the other skills later when it actually mattered to me.
So, I think we just want to preserve that little flame, whether it's eating, care tasks, school, you can't protect that precious little flame, because if you protect the flame, they will develop the skills when it matters to them.
[00:57:18] RA: Absolutely. I'm very glad that nobody put that flame out for you too. Because it's helped you to have this platform, right? It's helped you to become where you are and helped so many other people. I think, yes, we need to protect and help kids without having all of these power struggles and turning things into this, “I hate doing this”, because then it just has a chance to backfire later on. I think you said it best.
As we kind of wrap up today, and I know we could probably keep going forever. So, I'm going to make myself make a stop. As we got to wrap up today, if you had one piece of advice for a new parent or a new preschool parent, what would that be for you?
[00:58:05] KCD: So, as a one stop shop, one of the things that I found incredibly helpful, I think I'm going to give two resources, right? The No-Drama Discipline by Dan Siegel. I got it on audiobook and on a road trip or something, I listened to it. I didn't even finish it but that reconceptualize my whole approach to parenting. It made it make sense. Some of these objections that we feel and sort of a knee jerk reaction are really explained there, and then I also started listening to Janet Lansbury is podcast when she goes through very specific scenarios. And so, I think there are so – I would love to give like a one-line Zinger, but I couldn't tell you which one concept would be the advice. But if you're hearing this and you're thinking, I want to lean into this as a parent, those would be my two kind of go to places to start for both the theoretical orientation and just some really cool practical examples that help sort of solidify that.
[00:59:08] RA: I can say that I recommend No-Drama Discipline, probably a hundred times a week. I love that book. It's so great. Him and Tina Payne Bryson have some of the greatest parenting books out there.
Again, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate you taking the time and again, I know we can keep – because our subjects, we just kept kind of going and I think there was so many things we could cover, but could you tell everybody where can they find you?
[00:59:31] KCD: Yes. So, I am @domesticblisters on TikTok, and I'm @strugglecare on Instagram and Facebook. TikTok is my main channel. So, if you want to see my sort of daily videos, that's where you want to find me. I have a website which is strugglecare.com. I have a book on Amazon called How to Keep House While Drowning, which is an excellent book for any new parent, or really any parent in general. It's not parent specific, but trust me, it's very germane. So, those are the places that you can find me.
[01:00:01] RA: Awesome. Thank you so much.
[01:00:03] KCD: Of course. Thank you.
[OUTRO]
[01:00:05] RA: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Little Tots, Big Talks Podcast. If this episode was helpful for you, and I truly hope it was, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review. If you are looking for more free tips, you can always pay me a visit on TikTok @preschooltherapy, on Instagram @preschooltherapist, or if you're looking for more in-depth information and support, consider joining my membership program. You can get more information and sign up by visiting preschooltherapist.com and click the membership link. Take care and I’ll see you next time.
[END]
