Obedience Is Not a Dirty Word

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1:41Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I'm going to be talking about a topic that I don't believe I've ever spoken about here on this podcast in all my 10 years of doing this. The topic is obedience. So I've been sharing this respectful parenting approach inspired by Magda Gerber and her Rye approach. I've been sharing this since 2009 online. And almost all of my posts, I don't know, 600 or something, they are mostly still on my website. And you can read them for free, just so you know. Some of them have long, long comment threads, 200 comments, some of them. Everybody was really engaged in reading articles back then.

2:29Now, maybe not as much, but it was an interesting time and I learned a lot. And one of the things I learned or one of the things I noticed is that this word obedience was a bad word to people. People considered, and maybe this is still going on, that obedience is this terrible thing. You should not be going for obedience. an obedient child isn't a good result to have. It means we're being too strict. Maybe you notice this still happens. Ideas seem to get taken to an extreme, right? I guess that's what kind of feeds the algorithm of extreme ideas. But it seemed like, again, obedience had become this terrible thing that how dare you want obedience as a parent.

3:14But when we really consider what that means. And the dictionary definition I checked is compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another's authority. So there was this sentiment at the time when I was starting, and maybe this is still going on, where people were believing that it was this negative thing that we should actually want a child who's obedient, that we should actually want children who aren't obedient, who always question authority or aren't expected to respect the wishes of an authority or their parents. But that's not really true for most of us. I don't believe that.

3:56While I may not be going towards obedience in my mind when I'm setting limits with my children and making requests of them, it's an end result that I want, not just with me that my child wants to comply to my requests, but I want them to show that to other people. I want them to respect authority, follow rules, follow laws, all of those things. And maybe there are a lot of people that still don't want that result, but for those that do, we can have that in a way that's very relationship-centered, that builds our bond, and those are the things that I'm putting out there. That the best way to teach kids to respect other people is to not only respect our kids, but to show them what it means to respect another person through our boundaries.

4:48That's basically my discipline approach in a nutshell. So that's the topic that this parent brought up. And I thought it was so interesting. She admits that she expects her children to be obedient. And again, that's definitely not a wrong thing to want or expect. So here's her note. Hi, Janet. Thanks for your kind contributions to making parenting easier. I'm wondering about your views on obedience. We were just out for a walk and I asked my almost four-year-old not to walk through a shallow creek in his shoes and he did it anyway. I was immediately annoyed, but thankfully my husband was with me so we could try and co-regulate.

5:31We talked about it, and there were a few things I found hard. One was that I expected obedience, as my parents did, and felt disrespected when he did not obey me. Two was that I immediately catastrophized and thought about other scenarios where it would really matter if he didn't obey. Three, he has runoff in car parks, etc. when I've told him to stop, so I'm already twitchy about this. But there's a strong element of wanting the obedience I had to give as a child. It happens when I ask him to put on shoes, or not go outside just yet, or get dressed. I want him to do it immediately, and I get annoyed way faster than I'd like.

6:18I try to offer help rather than lay down the law, but it often still becomes a battle because he just isn't interested in doing what I say or wants to do something else. I'm wondering if you could help me recontextualize the situation so that I don't respond by being immediately furious. For context, I know that a lot of it is about my dysregulation, and I also know he has had a hard time in the last couple of years with the big move just before his baby sister arrived. He then started preschool, and his sister has epileptic seizures that come out of nowhere, and she and I disappear to the hospital.

6:57So much of this hasn't been handled well by me, and I'm doing lots of work on it. But I really find that the ideas of obedience and disrespect run deep, and really create a block for me and prevent the kindness and connectedness I so deeply value. Thanks so much. So yes, this parent is speaking very honestly and stating something that I think many of us do believe in our hearts, which is that we want our child to be respectful and obedient when requests are reasonable, when leadership is fair and just. So not just across the board to anyone, but when it's appropriate and reasonable, absolutely.

7:41There's nothing wrong with wanting that. And this parent also knows that she is getting touched off by this. She's getting, I don't know if we want to call it triggered, but she was obedient as a child. She said, the obedience I had to give as a child, it's touching something off in her when her child isn't showing this obedience that she had to display. So as we've been talking about in the last several episodes, knowing that we're triggered by something, knowing that something is very important to us from our childhoods is really valuable information to have and will guide us as to how to go forward and get what we want.

8:23Because really, that's kind of getting in the way our subjective perceptions and our emotions around what that particular issue is. In this case, her child not being immediately obedient. I actually wrote back to her, but I kind of did it at the last minute. I do a lot of these on the fly. Some of you may have noticed. She didn't have time to respond. But this is the question I asked her, just so you know. And maybe other parents want to think about it for themselves. I said, hi, I'd love to try to respond to this in a podcast. If you get this note soon and have a chance to respond, it would be helpful to know how your obedience felt to you as a child, anything that comes to mind.

9:08So that's what I want to ask this parent. And that's what I think could be helpful to any of us with any kind of behavior that sets us off, that we had to perform as a child, let's say, or that we were criticized for, for not doing or for doing. What are your feelings around that? What does that bring up for you? Because when we're triggered, what's happening is those feelings are getting touched off. So it's not just the behavior itself. That behavior might not bother someone else as much, but that behavior bothers us because it's touching off our own childhood feelings around it. And in a sense, we're kind of reliving those.

9:53So, you know, one of the more authoritarian ways of parenting is that obedience is not expected and worked towards, but demanded from the get-go. And if we don't comply to that as a child, then we are shamed, we are punished. We feel that disconnection with our parents around that experience because we're not being accepted for where we are right now, which is just not able to do it yet. Whatever that is, our impulse getting in the way, our immaturity, our feelings of needing to be different than our parents, our feelings around transitions that are going on that are making us uncomfortable. And on some level, we really want to share that with our parents by just not doing what they say so that they can reach out to us a little more and help us and connect with us there.

10:49That's not a conscious process that children have, but all of those things can come up for us. So it's always worth looking at, what are my feelings about obedience? Besides that, I really want it and expect it because I had to have it. How did that feel as a child. And when we can get in touch with that part, and I love my friend Elizabeth Corey's way that I've talked about here and talked about with her here as my guest for several episodes and also just about her because I love this idea of writing from the feeling. Just sitting down and writing not, well, my parents wanted me to be obedient and they got really mad at me if I wasn't, but actually write from the feeling, oh, they don't like me, they're being mean, they think I'm bad.

11:40Whatever comes up when we're writing from that actual feeling, from taking ourselves back to it, that can be illuminating and help us to understand how much of this is about us. Because overall, what I see here in this parent's note is that their wants or needs are at odds with each other. This parent needs obedience. There's nothing wrong with wanting that or needing that. Growing up, managing money was not something I was particularly concerned with. I'd do a few odd jobs around the house, some babysitting. The money came in and I spent it. Of course, that doesn't work very well when you're an adult and you have to start juggling monthly bills.

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14:29This parent is also going through a lot of stressful situations, the transitions, her daughter's health, needing to take her to the hospital. And then she also expects obedience because of her childhood experience. She expects that, of course, that's the right thing to do. And if you don't, you're wrong, you're bad, you're ashamed, you're punished, you're afraid. Fear is a big one underneath all of that in any trigger that we have usually. So this parent really wants that. And her child wants something else. Her child wants the parent's help. The child wants the parent to see him and connect with him where he is and help him do the right thing.

15:16so that he knows that she's there for him. And that when he has impulses to do inappropriate things or things his mother just doesn't want him to do, like not put his shoes on or decide to walk through the creek with his shoes on, that she's there for him to help instead of being mad at him for doing it for whatever reason. And so this is a kind of bid for connection. Look, I'm just not getting it together right now. Could be the baby, could be the school, could be the move, could be everything. Just could be that I feel that you get so mad at me. It's making it hard for me to get it together.

15:57I'm rattled underneath this. I look very intentional and very disobedient and wrong, but underneath it, I'm rattled. I'm off kilter. I need your balancing. So those needs are conflicting. And unfortunately, what happens when our needs are conflicting with our child is that we, being the mature adults, have to be the ones to shift. When there's a power struggle, it's up to us to shift it, avoid it, end it. Our child cannot be left with that responsibility. They're just not up to it. So this parent realizing that I have this need for my child to be obedient, this is where this is coming from, all these feelings around it, but my child is needing something else.

16:49So this is not going to work for us. I'm going to have to be the one to give my child what they need. And when I do that, I'm actually going to end up, not immediately, but very soon, getting what I need, which is a child who obeys my requests, because we really will get that. And it really is right to want that, I believe. And the thing is, we can give that to our child, that lesson about obedience that works, we can give that to them without them having any of those other feelings around it that we had. The disapproval, the shame, the fear of maybe the punishment, the distancing. We can give our child all of the positives of obedience without any of that stuff, if we do it the way that works for them, which is when you're showing you might not be obedient, when there's temptations out there, like the stream that I really want to walk in with my shoes on, or I don't even really want to, but I just kind of have to do this because my parents said no, get their attention in some way unconsciously.

18:02Again, I don't want anyone to think that kids are just, you know, manipulating us this way. That's not at all true. It's never about that with them. There's always these questions behind everything they're doing. Like, how are you going to stop me? Can you stop me? Can you help me? Without just getting mad at me for not doing it right. And we can answer those very affirmatively. we can answer those once we understand what's going on. So kind of having the expectation, because this is what's been going on right now, that he's not going to be able to obey in certain situations. He just can't right now.

18:39Too many transitions, too much of a sense that he loses me whenever he goes to that place and he's kind of got to keep figuring that out on some level. He needs me to see it and stop him. So when we see him starting to go towards the creek with his shoes on, there's no such thing as too early to stop our child from doing that or to help them not do it. Right when I'm saying like, oh, I see you're going to go to the creek. Hmm. I don't really want you to have your shoes on there. I'm already walking towards him. Ah, so you want to do it? Nah, I'm not going to let you. Come on, my dear. We're going to take these off.

19:18Or you can walk over here. I'm holding his hand. Maybe I have my hand on his back. And I'm not mad at him because I realize this is what's been going on between us. And it's not an uncommon thing. Children do this, especially in transitions and all these things. You've heard me talk about this a million times. And this thing of the catastrophizing, yes, that's what we do. And it's part of that fear place that we go to. And there's a real risk there, right? We don't want our child to run off in a car park. I was crazy about car parks because I know that cars back out and they don't see children.

19:55And I was terrified of that, honestly. So I always had my child's hand as they're coming out of the car. And maybe they didn't want me to sometimes. And I insisted because I knew that they couldn't necessarily obey me if they got an impulse to run off and I wasn't going to risk that. So be prepared, be ready, set limits early, be there for him so that you're showing him what he needs to do and that you're going to help him when he can't help himself or when he has temptations. We're not going to let our child fall into that trap of upsetting us because they're not being obedient because their instincts aren't always obedience.

20:37But then what happens is every time we do this, the way that I'm suggesting, which is being on our child's side, having their back, setting the limit early, early, early, as early as we can so that we don't get flustered, so we don't get angry. Every time we do that, there's something in our child's heart that just relaxes and shows them that we're people they want to respect and obey when we ask something of them. It's that trust that builds. Not that he doesn't trust his parent now, but he needs to feel more of that. That nothing he does will turn his parent on him. And I know she doesn't want to be that way.

21:20So what I'm saying is like her feelings are typical and so are his. But we unfortunately have to be the ones to change when our needs are at odds with each other. We're the ones that have to be that bigger person. And it comes from understanding why this matters so much to us. And also realizing that we maybe don't want our child to have that same experience. We want them to have the obedience, but not all the feelings around it that we had. So I really hope this helps. I hope it makes sense. There's a ton more about this in No Bad Kids. And of course, for the deeper dive, for the comprehensive understanding that can really become a part of you.

22:02My No Bad Kids Master Course is at nobadkidscourse.com. My book, No Bad Kids, is available everywhere. My website, everything's still there free to read. Maybe you want to take advantage of that if you just type in the search, discipline, boundaries, or obedience even. You will find a lot of resources. Followed up with a lot of questions that parents have, many of them that I answered. So thank you so much, everyone, for listening for all these 10 years. It's been a joy, and I really hope to keep going. I've also got an exciting book that I'm writing right now for Random House, and it's going to be out in about a year.

22:43I can't believe it. So you're going to hear more about that soon. This is going to be almost like an encyclopedia of everything I've shared, and especially focused on how this begins and how the way that we perceive our babies can help us to stay on this track. But most of all, this book is focused on how we can do and worry much less and enjoy more, feel more fulfilled in our parenting journey all the way through. Thank you again. We can do this.