Young Kids, Old Parents: The Double Squeeze | Maggie Dent | Club Sandwich

What we actually know, especially four year old girls, are way smarter than you can give them credit for. She might need to know when you might need a drink of water, she could go and get it. Or she might need to know there's a certain song that she could find that she knows her grandfather loves. So we need to give her some tools with which to be part of the journey rather than just thinking she's over the side there and I have to do it all.

That's the one, Sarah. I love that one because that really, that's the trusted voice. Cause I can read all the science and I can listen to the experiences, but I can tell you that sometimes we need to validate that. Raising little humans into big humans has always been a bit messy and a bit difficult and complicated. And I think that the pressure that's been put on today's parents to get it right, to get it perfect was, or to compete with other people's kids is putting incredible pressure on them. And then this happens, you know, where you've got that sandwichy thing happening. And I think sometimes I thought it was when they're really little, you know that they can be exhausting and everything. But I've run into some families who've got a whoopsie and a teenager with mum in perimenopause with two elderly, you know, grandparents who aren't well. Yeah, I don't know how you juggle that many balls in the air.

Yeah, that's it.

I've got one in ours, too. He landed on Halloween, which was even more horrendous.

I think they come for a special reason.

And also before the pressure on, you know, or the opportunity for women, whichever way you want to put them together to work more means that, you know, they tended to have more children. And so when we had that, like, you know, five or six kids, and then you have some elderly, you know, parents who aren't doing well, you've got a few to share that load. But I'm seeing, you know, two siblings, and one of them lives in England, navigating really difficult stuff on top of. Come on, let's be honest, the world's pretty crappy at the moment. Sarah and I feel the pressure is it's been around for a while. I think Covid put all this enormous pressure on us and scared the bejesus out of us, and it caused all sorts of extra layers of developmental challenges for our kids that are still kind of flowing out. And then, of course, on top of that, you know, we now have a genuine challenge to survive. Everything's made it harder. And then, of course, on top of that, landed the phone that steals our time from doing what we want to do the best we can. And that's love the people we love the most.

Yeah. So what it really did was tip. We had to tip all our kids even further into the digital space, which meant the handheld screen. I'm not ever going to say there's anything wrong with hours of watching Bluey on a tv. Seriously. No. No child's harmed by high quality TV programs. But we handed over those other things because it was just really difficult. But what also happened in that space was it kept our kids inside. So what happens was they weren't playing as much, they weren't outside as much, they weren't talking as much. So we now have teachers of 5 year olds who've been telling me now, probably it started before COVID but it blew up after that. The four developmental things that aren't happening anymore, they come with so many less words. So that means it's harder to learn to read, but it's also harder to negotiate friendships if you don't have enough words. Second, can't initiate or sustain play. Cause they haven't had enough practice. The third one is their self regulation is much more, you know, underdeveloped, if that's a thing, because everyone's been super stressed. And then the one underneath that, my brain's juggling it around and around and it will land in a minute.

No, no, it's their gross and fine motor skills. So you can't sit in a chair.

Without a strong core. So we have children falling out of chairs now. We have children who can't grip a pencil. We have children who can't hop or skip. And it's a combination. You know, we kept them safe as we were told to, so we gave them those. But that in that window also meant it was really hard to take them back out of that world. And it happened for our teens as well as our little ones. And I feel that the challenging behaviors we're seeing in our schools are because our kids are less resilient, less socially and emotionally competent. And we've got to return play to its feral right of place outside as much as possible because it's much better for all of us. So we all got chucked into a really stressful environment. And I'm not sure we really fully recovered from it. So everyone's more anxious.

Oh, it is. But also, there's another thing that seems to have pervaded the parenting landscape, and that is that you have to be like the parent that never allows their child to feel sad or disappointed or upset, or else they've got to be, like, calm and Zen all the time. And what we actually know is that you cannot learn how to overcome frustration, disappointment, being rejected by anything without experiencing it. So that's accelerated these fragile kids. I mean, I've been. You know, I'm pretty sure you're aware that Joe Brum has created an amazing series with Bluey. But when I was chatting to him on my podcast about the importance of play, which of course has catapulted us back into healthy, imaginative play, I said to him, can you do one about the pass the parcel rubbish? And he said, what do you mean? Because apparently it wasn't as much in Queensland as it was in other states. And that is that the old game for our kids under five when you had to pass the parcel with the music and you stopped and everyone. There was no prize till the end. But as we wanted to not let our kids be sad at a birthday

we just put lots of little. Well, to be honest, quite crappy.

You see why I'm guilty of things?

We want them to be happy at the birthday party. And so it comes from a place of enormous love. However it can, like I said before, you've got to be able to learn how to navigate losing and not getting what you want, which is really where I think some of the confusion is, is I'm gonna cave into the biki before dinner so that I don't get that little meltdown. But that then means that your child has an opportunity to experience feeling disappointed with your boundary. And so I'm just going to know if I pester you Enough. You're going to cave all the time. Well, that child's going to be finding it even hard in a workplace environment when someone says no. So it's an actual fact. Healthy parenting means there are moments that they won't like us. They can have big feelings and it's quite healthy. And I feel we've got to restore that little bit of common sense back into how we raised today as kids.

Totally.

It's never always been a magical, mystical. I'm going to throw you into the feral field of daisies because there's prickles there.

Yeah. And I also think we had to move. I mean, let's be honest, the last century, and I'm afraid some of it is still embedded into some of our schools where behaviourism is seen to be the only way that we raise kids who can behave well. But what we know is behaviourism works great for rats, but it doesn't tend to create long term benefits. Because if you punish a child, especially a small child who actually hasn't got the cognitive capacity to make a better choice and threw that truck because they were frustrated, if you punish them then you're gonna risk damaging the relationship they have with you. But you also haven't given them another tool to what to do if they get frustrated again while they're holding a truck. So it's about building skills. And I feel that when we remove punishment, people felt you just had to be nice. No, discipline. Discipline is actually where we teach and we hold boundaries.

Yeah. So if they have actually thrown one already, obviously we go and make sure that whoever's had the truck land on them is okay. So we go to there, but we come back over with a really clear voice. That's dangerous. We don't throw things and then we just sit with them for a moment in that space. But the next time they. When you get frustrated, next time maybe stomp your feet. Should we practice stomping your feet. Let's stomp our feet. Can we do that? Okay. So next time it comes up, it takes a few goes. It's one of the things, you know, when a child's biting everyone, they're not. They're not wanting to eat people. There's a sensation that's happening when they bite that's feeling good within that child. It's not an evil or bad child. It's a child developmentally appropriately using their mouth.

Yes, there's a whole lot. And of course, our job is if we bite them, we actually don't teach them another way of handling that. We're actually condoned it and said this is the. What we do forward. Which of course has probably happened to some of us. And secondly, it's when we understand it through the developmental lens. So often the behavior our children, particularly under five and then early adolescence, is a response to stress. It's a way of trying to discharge big energy out of the body. The nervous system's flooded. And when it floods, it shuts down the front of the brain. Which is why so often, if you say to a child having a tantrum in Woolies or Coles or Aldi or iga, I've covered them all. We need to recognise there's something. It's what's under the behaviour is what. Our job is to find out what that is.

Yeah. Now we. And you know where there are days, seriously, we can pick them up, tuck them under our arm and head for the car. But what we don't do is shout at them or hit them when we get there. We just take them somewhere safely. We might start humming a song. If we're actually code, we might just start breathing ourselves. But the idea is, you know, all of us have put a knee in a kid's tummy sometimes to get him in that car seat. Because we seriously have to get to the doctor.

Right. The one, you know, the arching back one. They've all done it.

But what happens when they've done that is we might give them a tickle or a cuddle and we do something. So it's the. The difference is the hard stuff still happens, but we do it with less shaming and less physical punishment and less pain. However, they still need the boundaries. We just do it without those things. And no, you won't feel good and you will want to eat chocolate. And I just say get the best possible chocolate you can because it's a health food really.

Yeah, it's good chocolate.

The key is that whoever you're co parenting with, and to all the solo parents out there, I just double huge Maggie hugs. Because seriously, you deserve gold medals if you're co parenting with someone. Instead of sitting down to look at how we can fit all these wonderful extracurricular activities and experience of pure joy and delight and fun for our children, I want you to sit down and say, what is it you would like to do for an hour and a half a week? And we put that in the diary first. Now, whether that's, you know, you got a dad who loves Lycra and wants to ride 150Ks at 5 o' clock in the morning. Well done. Let him do it. But what is it that you also need? And one of the hardest ones I find is mums still finding it hard because they feel I'm being selfish. And when I reassure them that you can't pour from an empty cup that you want, you will be the mum. More likely you want to be. And so it's this whole. It's a mind shift because we've been conditioned that we've got to give them everything. And I talk about it when I was running women's retreats, you know, watch out for the burnt chop syndrome. And what that is is that when you dish up dinner, you just have what's left over. Or the burnt chop, if you love a burnt chop, go first.

You have what's. Because your job is to Put everyone, including the dog, quite often ahead of yourself. We've got to stop that because what's that? Modeling? It's modeling a lack of worth of our own selves, which our kids need to see us valuing ourselves. So one of the things I say, if you're going to lose your schmick and you can feel yourself getting to the shouty place, remember, half of this is triggered by imprints from childhood. If you can put your hand up and go, hold on a minute. Oh, wow, I'm starting to get really stressed here. I'm gonna take myself in my bedroom so I can calm down and I'll be right back out. Right. And just close the door. And that's when you find the chocolate. But you also can just regroup yourself, because what happens when you come out and it doesn't take a lot. You've regrouped. Cause you have a mature prefrontal lobe. They don't.

And as you come out, what have you modeled to your kids? That even grownups can have moments where their big feelings come out and that, wow, look what they're doing. So we are actually modeling a healthy way that there are always going to be times that conflict will happen, but we need to be able to then come back and repair ruptures, which of course, isn't what we used to do.

Yeah. Go. Wow.

That wasn't. Oh, that wasn't. Those words aren't words. I want out my mouth and I'm going to try harder.

Oh, no. And of course, when you've actually done enough sort of work on your own triggers. And I think we all need to recognize we get triggered by slightly different things. See, I'm not triggered by untidiness. Just doesn't. Relaxed houses in my world were just one of the ways I kept my stress low. But I have, you know, I have a. I know quite a few. I'm not going to throw them under the bus where if the house is untidy, they cannot calm themselves down. And I need to value and respect that as their way of coping. But every now and then I say, can you just try a little bit of relaxation? Can we just leave those toys? Because quite often when the toys are still out on the floor, especially when it's, you know, magnetic tiles, And Duplo and Lego, they go to it in the morning and straight away back into playing. Can you shut the door? Just try shut the door. You know, have the kitchen sparkling, you know, shiny. Don't look at it, but just shut the door and see if you can do it a few times. Because every habit we have can be unhabited. I know it's not an English word, but every single thing we are driven by is just a neural pathway that's extremely strong. And so the other way around, homes. And how do we. Not only is it. How do we become. Around our kids, one of the biggest ones is we need to lighten up. Laughter is the fastest way to release stress out of ourselves. And I feel that when we can find the ridiculousness in ourselves and our children will come with us and, you know, it doesn't matter. I have a lot of knock, knock, joke books in my grandkids, cars. And we tell lots of silly things. We sing silly songs deliberately.

And of course you need to do it when you've got grumpy teenagers and of course they'll just roll their eyes, but you will loosen the tension in

It's jokes, all of those things, but also, what is it cultivating? It's cultivating a sense of humor, which I think the world's lacking at the moment, let's be really honest. And it just doesn't land in a Christmas box under the tree. And it's when we have those opportunities for sharing even fun facts and fun things. Now, this is about. The only way I like some of the social media platforms is because they have some hilarious dog videos.

And I am a dog freak and I love them and I share them quite often with my boys or with my grandkids. And yes, they'll say it's AI. And I said, I don't care. That's just made me laugh. Right.

Absolutely. Can you see what I mean? If we're sharing funny, funny memes with each other, we are lifting each other. And I have a. A very special friend who's fighting cancer, breast cancer. And her. And I have a hilarious, wicked sense of humor. And I. I can't help her all that much with what she's going through, but I find the funniest things every now and then and send them to her.

And I know it helps.

So you can imagine what it can do in a home.

Yeah, that's really a biggie. But what we actually know, especially four year old girls, way smarter than you can give them credit for. So when you actually give her opportunities on having agency around supporting you and supporting your dad, it can make a world of difference that she might need to know when you might Need a drink of water. She could go and get it or she might need to know there's a certain song that she could find that she knows her grandfather loves. So we need to give her some tools with which to be part of the journey rather than just thinking she's over the side there and I have to do it all. Four year old girls can be super, super smart, but they also can do other things. What else could you do? What other pictures could you draw grandpa that would make him happy? Which of your toys do you think he'd like to have today? And it's about the play stuff around the edges. If she can get a toy that looks a bit like, make it look like it grandpa, she can then use the play as a way of also interacting the feeling she's got underneath everything. But also every now and then with the mum, she needs to be able to say, I need a hug, can you give me a hug? Can I have two hugs? I think it's a two hug day today. Right. And it might be a three hug day later. You know, like I just feel that they can be so tuned in and super aware. It's a bit like why we need to talk to kids about being what death is.

Yeah.

I was like what happened?

Yep. And of course that's, that's not going to work well because if they haven't got a bit of an understatement under five, the concepts of love and death and all those things are way too big for a child to be able to fully comprehend. However, they're starting to build a bit of a perception around what does that mean? And I mean you look how caring they are for a DEG bug do you know, like they just get really, oh, what's this about? So the whole thing is they're already getting a bit of a knowledge base around it. So what happens also under five is that when they lose something they love and this they can get equally as distressed if it's their favorite fluffy blanket that you Left in Bunnings overnight, which happened to me, it was like somebody had died. Seriously, that boy was just. We were stunning's very early the next day to retrieve it. So anything they love is gonna create big feelings cause I can't have it. So loss, this is the concept of loss and that's part of death and grief for sure. But as they get towards, you know, three, four and five, they're starting to see themselves as separate and they can start seeing things through a slightly different version. Even though the theory of mind doesn't really kick into around five. And I've recommended this for a long long time Having done over 250 funerals is that when children are a part of the process everything is easier for the grown ups. So when I would see a little toddler run down an aisle in a chapel and bang on a casket and say my Poppy's in this box.

Everybody is in a different space because there's the legacy of this man is this cheeky, gorgeous little toddler banging on his coffin. Or when I hear a breastfed baby burp in the middle of the ceremony and they're in the front row because life is this continual thing, right? It's not locked into boxes which is big. And this is why I've been saying for a long time if you have children who aren't naturally very empathetic and some of our rooster children who are feisty don't always have a lot of empathy. So I encourage them to get small pets because that the stroking of a small pet opens the heart to feeling connected and it's about building the empathy pathway in the brain. It's so good. And as I'm telling everyone in my audiences and then I hope it dies and they all look at me like I'm some wild awful old lady. But I want our kids to know that sometimes bodies stop working and that's what's called death. Not they passed over or God came and got them or they went asleep. I had a four year old had to do quite a bit of counseling on because he wasn't going to go to sleep ever again because they said his grandma went to sleep, she ended up in a box and she's in the grave. I'm not going to sleep anymore.

So we actually need to use appropriate terms and death died are really appropriate even from that age. This is passing over stuff is that's for a young child. What does that mean?

And then I think the other part to it is what do we do with that body and stuff? So we get them to understand that that's just one part of it, but also what happens after that is what we do as, you know, loving and respected humans. And I remember having done, you know, I've done that seminar for so many times. It's part of my resilience. One and I've had parents come up to me years later and say, oh, we thought that was a bit rough, Maggie. But we did it. And our guinea pig died. Cause I said, don't get a puppy or a cat. The damn things live too long. Cause Sarah says that's gonna die. When you're 16 and your grandparents are really old, you've just missed the boat.

See? Thanks for that, Sarah. And when they've been through it, they know that their heart really hurts. They know that they have these big sad feelings. And we need to normalize that, especially for little boys. Because one of the big things that derails men later is grief and loss. If they've been conditioned that you've got to be stoic and you've got to keep it to yourself and you're not allowed to have these. What makes it harder for them to grieve? All sorts of things. I could tell you 100 stories from my palliative care days.

cry in front of your K. Because sometimes I've had kids say, well, my mum didn't really love her mum because she doesn't cry. And I know she's crying for hours at night in the bedroom. I said, no, let's be really honest and real. So what happens to children, probably up to six or seven, is when we lose someone we love. You can't put it down, it hurts. Grief is a bitch. It comes around and around and it's got all sorts of little tricky ways of tripping us up, but we can't put it down. Whereas children, what we call puddle hop, they'll be sad for a bit, then they'll just go off and play and completely forget about it. And then a little maybe later they'll pick it up again and so they can handle it. If we knew that they were going to be burdened by it continually, of course we would want to protect them. But we know that mother Nature has a beautiful way of them coming to terms with it gradually. And of course, I've worked a lot in early childhood when there's been sudden deaths. And the way that we helped a couple of the childcare centers was it was one of the educators who was killed in a car accident. And so, of course, the whole center, you know, they only had five educators, so one of them had died and the kids were, you know, and parents needed their kids to still keep coming, so they had these big, big, long chats on the phone. So they got two giant teddy bears as extra comfort bears, because if the educator was holding another child and there wasn't enough of them, then the kids cuddled up to a comfort bear. But, Sarah, what was beautiful is it didn't take long before the more attuned, emotionally mature kids were taking a cuddle bear and giving it to another child they thought was looking unhappy. So they actually step in to be able to facilitate comforting in a childlike way that doesn't add to the trauma of what was happening.

and kind of such a big window, because the adolescent way of processing, you know, grief and loss is so much more complex. You know, I've ended up having to write an ebook about it because it's quite a big difference between the way girls and boys will do it in lots of ways. But what we know is discomfort with emotions when we've normalized that. Yeah, and I guess that's the old English teacher in me is, you know, that's why we read good text that would let you go into an experience of characters who've just lost someone they loved, so you could get a taste of it in a, you know, virtual non. You know, non real setting. But it makes you think. And then when we have really good questions about it, and I feel many today's Parents don't want the big conversations. You know, you need to be talking about pornography with your kids. You do need to be talking about things that really are not okay, especially inappropriate, sexual.

But we also can actually be, when we're honest about it, the early stages of any major illness is when we have those conversations. We never quite know where this is going to go and our job is to be as supportive as possible. I feel it's when we deny it and we don't say anything. But it's not a long lecture along. It's got to be small, kind of. You can have a longer chat to a girl sometimes. For our boys, it's just they're the micro chats, you know, and they need to be reassured that you're going to be okay. I find quite often they're more worried about you than necessarily the older parent.

Sometimes it's sharing the stories of nearby other people whose grandparents have been through that one in that I call them tribes, your group with all the kids, friends and everything. When we're open and honest about those things and you tend to find that they're much more comfortable with it, you know, rather than, let's just not talk about it. So if you're, you know, the parent of your friend doesn't talk about it, then it's like there's something that you need to avoid talking about. Then that gets to be problematic when it's around a health issue. Because I had to do this at one point because I had to come home and tell my four boys that their beloved grandfather had died suddenly of a heart attack. And we all did. They all just sat on the couch and I said, yeah, Pops, Pop stared. Guys, she had a heart attack. But don't worry, he got his last load of wheat into the bin and you know how important that would be for our Pop. And there was this, you know, really intense quietness because he's so funny. They knew I'd have to do something funny or it wouldn't be authentic about my pop, their pot. And then we have to know that there's all sorts of different reactions. Some can burst into tears straight away. Some will go to their bedroom, some will get angry and someone would bury their head. And every single one of those is exactly what needs to happen right now. We don't have to fix any of that. We just have to hold the space. Yeah.

all the mommy used to having a death specialist mother who sometimes would pick them up with a box of warm ashes between us. They go, who's that? Oh, John Brown. Just dropping him off. And they go, oh mum, that's too much information. Ok. No, no, it's okay. Their family are really happy to see him and happy. Oh, mum, that's just.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Sarah.