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Hi, this is Janet Lansbury.

Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I'm going to be talking about a tendency that many of us have as parents that can get in our way and get in our children's

way. What it really is is letting our fears and concerns color our views of our children so that

we're not really seeing them clearly. We're kind of jumping to conclusions, often turning

positive traits actually into negatives. So I want to get

into some examples of that and try to explain how we can be aware of this and work on not

letting it get in our way or in the way of the relationship that we want to have with our child.

So the reason I want to talk about this today is that it's been coming up in notes that

you've sent to me lately and in a post that I actually just reposted on Instagram called

Stop Worrying About Your Sensitive Child. That post is about how sensitive children

and I was one of them, I still consider myself a very sensitive person, how we tend to

worry about them, how we tend to feel like we have to compensate for their sensitivity, maybe walk on eggshells

around them rather than giving them the boundaries and honesty that all kids need, feeling

worried when we're expecting them to assert themselves and they're not doing it.

Sensitivity is, to use an overused expression, a superpower. It's the reason I'm able

to do the work that I do. It's compassionate. It's empathetic. It's intuitive. It's all these

things we want our children to be. But when it shows up, we tend to doubt our children and maybe try to fix that.

Wish that they weren't so sensitive or so emotional. I got a note about that from a family who's

concerned that their boy, actually the mother is saying that the father is more concerned than she is,

...