Many parents that I see in my practice struggle with kids who won’t listen and/or kids who “can’t” do developmentally appropriate life activities. This ranges from kids who refuse to brush their teeth to kids who refuse to get off devices to kids who refuse to go to school entirely. These refusals are not due to children being bad or wanting to punish their parents. Instead, they are due to low levels of age appropriate frustration tolerance, because the child feels discomfort brushing teeth, or going to school, or putting down their device, and doesn’t know how to handle it.
Low frustration tolerance in kids is linked to parents’ discomfort with setting and enforcing consistent boundaries, which ironically is often due to parents’ desire to be more loving, flexible, and warm than their own parents were. Let’s look at how this works in some real world examples.
- Your small child doesn’t want to brush his teeth. You come up with 15 different games and none of them “work.” (Here, “work”= your child will readily and happily do it). The only thing that “works” is you brushing your child’s teeth while he watches the iPad. When you mention this to the pediatrician at your child’s six year checkup, the reaction is so bad that you stop doing this. Your child feels completely unable to tolerate the boredom of toothbrushing and starts to throw tantrums instead.
- Your child loves his iPad and you love the quiet time that it gives you. All well and good until the first time your child tantrums when you remove the iPad. You decide, “What does it hurt anyway? I don’t want to make this a bad night.” This iPad habit metastasizes into a screen time addiction by the time he is 10 that threatens your basic sanity and makes you scared to ask him to ever stop gaming, even for dinner.
- Your child is shy and doesn’t want to go to school. You decide the school doesn’t understand your child and start to homeschool “just until the end of the year.” In September your child cries and screams about returning. You say yes even though the thought of homeschooling depresses you and makes you very anxious. You wanted to return to work but now you feel trapped.
In all of these situations, there was a window where your child could have learned to tolerate distress if boundaries were kept firm. For example, if your child does not brush his teeth (even while crying about it), they do not get the reward of their their next valued activity, e.g., screentime or a game. Or you take away your child’s device despite them yelling about it. Their access to their device is predicated on whether they put it down calmly when you give them a five minute warning. Or you drop your child at school with a warm and firm hug and a goodbye. You focus on teaching them social skills, whether with workbooks or a psychologist, and you do not even consider keeping them at home and stopping your own work.
If setting boundaries in these ways sounds cruel to you, it is extremely likely that you were raised in a cold and authoritarian home where you had to follow rules no matter what. This type of home leads to parents who swing 180 degrees in the opposite direction and are unable to tolerate their children’s complaints or discomfort because they overidentify with their kids. Despite that they are much more warm and loving than their own parents were, they cannot see that this context matters. In any moment that they deny their children anything, they feel they are putting their kids in exactly the type of cold, rigid environment that they so disliked in their own childhood.
In reality, children develop low frustration tolerance because of the parent’s own low frustration tolerance for the child’s distress. Parents don’t see this because they feel their own distress tolerance is very high. After all, don’t they run on 4 hours of sleep because their child wants to come into their bed every night, or watch only crappy kids’ TV because their kids like it, or eat things they dislike because it’s what their kids like? Meanwhile, these parents aren’t seeing that their frustration tolerance is actually as low as that of their kids, but only in the area of a complete inability to tolerate their kids’ discomfort or negative emotions.
If you let your children run the show, refuse to do basic age appropriate activities, and treat you poorly (I discuss this last one here), and you believe this is due to the fact that they are a Highly Sensitive Child or have sensory issues or anything else, ask yourself whether your child acts equivalently with all adults in their life. If there is even one adult, a teacher or grandparent or camp counselor, who gets better behavior from your child, I am willing to bet anything that this adult, or the environment they are in (e.g., school, camp), is much better at setting and enforcing boundaries than you are at home.
Kids need boundaries to develop an ability to deal with distress. Frustration tolerance is a key aspect of maturity, whether this is maturing from a baby to a toddler or from a college student to a person working in an office and supporting themselves financially. You, as their parent, can give them the gift of NOT BELIEVING YOUR CHILD (read this about overvalidation) when your child insists that a developmentally appropriate task is impossible for them. You need to be confident in them for them to internalize this confidence themselves. You need to take a tone of “Of course you can brush your teeth. I have full faith in you and when you do it, we can read our book and have a nice bedtime.”
Note that if your child has a developmental delay and cannot actually brush his teeth unaided, this is a different story. But this would also be a child who has extreme motor skills deficits and would likely be in occupational therapy. I am not discussing this situation, although, here too, we would be focusing on incremental progress toward a goal of mastering independent self-care activities. I am discussing a situation where a child’s desire to avoid discomfort combines with a parent’s fear of being triggered by their child’s distress to create a perfect storm where the child’s avoidant behavior is allowed to run unchecked.
If you felt uncared for as a child, do not project this sadness onto your child. Even just because you are reading this parenting post, it is highly likely that you are attuned to your child and deeply care about their emotional health. But projecting your own past experiences onto your child (I discuss this here) may make you much less able to create and enforce healthy, normative boundaries that indicate to your child that you are confident in them and their ability to learn, grow, and tolerate the normal discomfort and distress of daily living. Many parents who grow up in dysfunctional families of origin have no idea how to be firm without being mean. Try just stating what you need from your child and why, succinctly, and then adding, “I love you.” This will come out very differently from what you heard growing up. For instance:
“You will brush your teeth yourself and I will get you in two minutes. I love you! See you soon for our show.”
“Yes, you need to go to school. You can certainly do it. I need to work and you need to learn at school. I have a feeling this will be a good year for you overall. Tell me how it goes later today. I love you!”
“You need to get off the iPad now. I’ve told you those things are addictive and I gave you your warning. I don’t want to take it away fully, because I love you and I know you like your game. So hand it to me and we can have a good night.”
Remember, rather than being cruel and arbitrary, as your own rules in your family of origin may well have been, boundaries are a positive and healthy gift for your kids. Setting boundaries actually makes your child feel MORE confident. After all, they trust you implicitly, and if you deeply believe they can do something, this is a powerful and persuasive message. Children internalize boundary setting and learn to set their own internal boundaries, also known as self control. (Read here about when kids doubt their own ability to self-regulate.)
Share with your partner if you struggle with boundary setting. Discuss openly why you each (or at least one of you) feels viscerally impacted by your child’s expressions of discomfort. This can facilitate a healthier relationship where one parent doesn’t feel the other is a wimp and unable to discipline, but rather can deeply empathize with the origin of this “softie” behavior. Try out new ways of interacting with your kids, that promote confidence, independence, and scaffolding for the development of self-regulation. And till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Frustration Tolerance Is The Gift That Keeps Giving.