Hi, this is Janet Lansfury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I'm going to be talking about some of the positives. Believe it or not, in our children's challenging, concerning or disagreeable behavior.

My hope is that what I'm going to share here, which is also a lot of questions and things from my inbox, little pieces of some of the notes parents have sent to me, I'm hoping to help you feel safer, less threatened, and less frustrated by your children's behavior.

I also want to clarify that there's nothing wrong with feeling annoyed and frustrated and upset by the things our children do and say no matter what parenting advice we follow, we're going to feel like that sometimes, because we're not robots, we're human beings.

But if our goal is to ameliorate the behavior, then the quickest and most thorough way to do that is to respond in a safe, even empathetic manner so we can be curious as to the cause, what the behavior is expressing, and therefore resolve it.

Okay, so first I just want to reiterate that nothing that I share is intended to cause people to feel ashamed for reacting in normal ways.

This isn't about blame or shame. It's only about practicing a perspective that will empower us and help us to feel better.

So the first idea I want to share is that behavior is a positive sign that children do feel a sense of safety with us because they're bringing it to us, they're bringing their discomforts to the people they're closest with.

That is the ideal model for us as parents throughout the years. We want to be that person for our children. That's what the parent child relationship is really all about.

So here's a question I got through an Instagram message that talks about this. I'm a nanny seeing a 19-month old boy. He's mostly well-behaved and it's very pleasant to take care of him.

But when the mom is around, he doesn't agree with anything. He doesn't want to get changed, doesn't sit to eat, etc. He refuses everything.

Also on the weekends, when she takes care of him, I can hear him giving her very intensive hard times. She is suffering and I don't know how to help.

She tries to avoid coming when I'm there so I at least can have my quality time taking care of him. He turns into something uncontrollable.

I know he wants attention, but it still looks too much like how he reacts with her.

So this is very, very common that a child is a different person when they're being cared for by someone other than the parent.

When children bring the feelings outside of home or with that parent, it can commonly mean one of two things.

Either that situation, if it's a preschool, let's say, that environment is overwhelming and just regulating for the child.

Maybe they could handle it at another phase in their life, but at this time when they're having trouble, they're signaling that they can't meet this challenge.

Maybe it's too chaotic, there's too many bodies in the room and our child is extra sensitive to that.

The second possibility is that our child has tried to share it with us, but feels for some reason that we are not able to handle the feelings or were too overwhelmed.

This happened to me when I'd had my third child and my oldest daughter who was nine at the time had never shown negative behavior other than with me and her dad, the people that she trusted.

But suddenly she was doing some things at school and it came back to me and I realized, and I written a post about this called the Easily Forgotten Gift,

I realized that, oh no, I've been so overwhelmed with my baby and my second child and her transition to the new baby that I haven't really been there for my oldest daughter.

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