Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I'm going to be talking about, well, I'm going to be responding to some issues that parents have shared with me. Both of them, while they're quite different on the surface, both of them seem to stem from impressions that these parents got in their own childhood

that created discomforts.

And in one of these two cases, there was something somewhat traumatic involved.

So there can be a whole wide range for us as parents of things that went on.

And impressions that we got from them set us on a course

when we have our own children to want to ensure that we don't pass this on, that our child

doesn't have to feel the things that we felt that were uncomfortable for us. This is a goal that

parents naturally have.

And it's a laudable motivation that we want to do all in our power to ensure that a particular dynamic or quality doesn't get inherited.

Sometimes this isn't even about childhood issues, but it's simply ideas or values that we've

formed and embraced that have become really

important to us. But in the case of the two notes I'm going to be commenting on today,

these are stemming from childhood discomforts and perhaps fears of repeating these situations.

And the problem this creates for us is that almost no matter what we

say or do, it's our feelings, our fears and discomforts that our kids pick up on. And that overwhelms

everything else for them. They care how we feel. I mean, that's a good thing, right? And they're

very perceptive that way.

The problem is there's one thing we can say across the board in parenting,

and that is that our discomfort can't help but make our child uncomfortable.

It's almost impossible for our child to feel comfortable when we're not comfortable. And then when our child is

uncomfortable, their behavior is very likely to go off track or at least be annoying because they

keep kind of needing to try to make that discomfort in us disappear because it's uneasy for them. Naturally, they're looking

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