Shownotes
Children’s threats: What they mean and how to respond
"If you don't give me a lollipop, I won't be your friend anymore.”
Said to a sibling:
“If you don’t come and sit down, I'll take your toy.”
“If you don't give me candy before dinner, I'll hit you.”
Has your child made threats like this (or worse ones) when things don't go their way?
Whether it’s yelling, “I’ll never be your friend again!” or threatening to hurt you, hearing these words can stop you in your tracks.
Why do our kids say things like this? Where do they even get the idea to use threats, when we've never said anything like this to them and we don't think they've heard it from screen time either?
In this week's episode we'll dig deeply into these questions, and learn how to respond both in the moment the threat has happened - as well as what to do to reduce future threats.
You’ll hear:
- A step-by-step strategy to deal with a real-life example - from the parent whose child said "If you don't lie down with me I will shatter your eyeballs!"
- The phrases we use with our kids that might unintentionally encourage this kind of behavior
- Specific, practical tools to use in the moment - and long before tensions escalate
Are you ready to turn these tough moments into opportunities for deeper connection?
Tune in to the episode today.
And what happens to you when your child threatens you?
Do you lose your mind?
Do you freak out that you might be raising a child who needs help to defuse violent tendencies, and then yell at them because their threats are SO INAPPROPRIATE?
Hopefully this episode reassures you that that isn't the case. But that may not eliminate your triggered feelings - because these don't always respond to logic.
If you know you need help with your triggers but don't know what to do, come to the FREE
Why You're So Angry With Your Child's Age-Appropriate Behavior - and What To Do About It (without stuffing down your feelings and pretending that you aren't angry) masterclass.
Finally understand the causes of your triggered feelings and find out how to feel angry less often - in just 36 minutes. Watch the recording anytime it's convenient for you, then join me for a FREE LIVE Q&A session and coaching from 10-11:30am Pacific on Thursday February 6. (We'll send you a recording in case you can't attend - although you have to be there to get your questions answered and win great prizes!)
Click the banner below to learn more and sign up.
Other episodes mentioned:
Jump to highlights:
03:03 Introduction of Reddit post about a child threatening his parent
19:27 The child listens but doesn’t do what they’re told
36:21 Recognizing the signals
42:42 Recognize the background stress
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[accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]
Adrian 00:03
Adrian, Hi, I'm Adrien in suburban Chicagoland, and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child. From tooth brushing to sibling fighting to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you're facing that hadn't seen possible before. If you'd like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not. That's less than one minute long that describes what's happening and email it to support@yourparentingmojo.com and listen out for your episodes soon.
Jen Lumanlan 00:53
Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. If you don't give me a lollipop, I won't be your friend anymore. Maybe said to a sibling. If you don't come and sit down next to me, I'll take your toy, perhaps, said to you. If you don't give me candy before dinner, I'll hit you. Has your child ever threatened you for doing exactly these things or something like them, or maybe even they've threatened something worse? Do they threaten you for taking away things that they want, like sugar or screens, or for refusing to do something that they want you to do. If so, you are not alone. And if you have no idea what to do about this behavior, you're also not alone. When I asked my listeners in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group about whether their children ever threaten them, a bunch of people raised their hands and said, yep, this happens at our house all the time. It also seemed as though parents felt very conflicted about how to address the topic, especially when they haven't modeled this kind of language at home. In this episode, I'll help you to understand where these threats come from and how to handle them in a way that feels good to you and also reduces the number of times your child says these kinds of things to you. I should say at the outset that the strategies I'm going to talk about in this episode are for children under the age of about 10 who might be threatening harm, but you either know they won't carry it out, or they don't have the access or ability to actually carry it out. Your preschooler might be able to follow through on a hit, and it might hurt, but it likely won't cause serious damage. They may even cause more serious damage accidentally. I've heard of parents who get a broken nose when they are behind their child and their child arches their back and the child's head hits the parent’s nose. These kinds of things can be hard to deal with, but they're a relatively expected part of childhood and are covered in this episode. If your child is making credible threats of serious physical harm against you and you believe they might carry it out, then this is beyond the scope of this episode, and I'd suggest that your first call be to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. I'll put a link to their website in the show notes for this episode. I also want to point out we're going to mention violence in this episode, including sexual violence. So if this would be difficult for you today, then I'd invite you to come back to this episode on a day when you feel more resourced. I actually found an old Reddit post that I want to think through as an example of how to understand what's happening in a situation where a child is threatening us. This post is actually the third result on a search for what should I do when my preschooler threatens me, and I'm going to use it for our analysis, because it has enough detail to understand a fair bit about the dynamic between the parent and child. You might want to listen carefully as I read the post and see if you can figure out what's happening before I explain what I see. The subject is 3.5 year old giving violent threats. And here's the rest of the post, I have a very intelligent, strong willed little guy that has an opinion about dang near everything, and assumed he has just as much, if not more, authority than any given adult. Sounds on par for a three-year-old, right? His language skills have always been impressive, and he seems to remember complicated words and phrases used months ago, and will recall them at just the appropriate time. He also likes to be rocked before bed every night. Whether it's because he cherishes the snuggles or the chance to stay awake for a few minutes longer is yet to be determined. I assume a little of both. But the other night, he was being rude and obstinate, and I warned him that he needed to work on showing me he could be a better listener and be respectful, or he could continue doing what he was doing, and I would leave him to put himself to bed. He didn't take the path I'd hoped for naturally, and I knew I needed to follow through to show him I was serious. So I said, okay, good night. I love you, and stood up to leave. Instantly, he screamed a guttural no, and began the full on crying fit and yelled, you're not listening to my words. I will rip you to shreds. And while I was trying to figure out what the actual heck, they didn't actually say heck, but what the actual heck was coming out of his mouth, he then proceeded to tell the cat to bite my knee off. I have bad knees. And as a cherry on top, he said, I will shatter your eyeballs. First of all, I'm not sure where he's getting these phrases. They seem kind of specific, and I'm trying to think if we watched any movies recently that would have said such a thing. But like I said, his memory is ridiculous, and he could be pulling something out of his pocket he's been holding onto for months. It's not the first time I've heard him say violent things, but usually he's talking to his toys, and the threats are a bit more generic, I guess. Second of all, and this is the heart of the matter, is this typical, or is my kid letting me know he's got a violent side we need to treat? TLDR, I'm trying real hard to not be raising a future serial killer. Okay, so we're going to take a close look at what's happening in the situation, and we'll start with the parents perspective. I'm going to refer to this parent as Luna, as that is part of their username, and I'm going to assume, for the sake of this discussion, that Luna identifies as female. Since I've talked about this, a good deal with female identifying parents, and they seem to have an especially hard time with this behavior. Most of the content in this episode is applicable to parents of any gender. Let's look at the issues related to mothers first. I think there are two important reasons why female socialized parents have a hard time with threats from children. Firstly, we're socialized to take care of everybody else's needs before our own, and if we have a child who's so dysregulated they're threatening us with something between not being our friend anymore and hitting us, then clearly there is something wrong, and it's probably something that we are doing wrong. If we were conditioned to believe that when everybody else around us feels calm and happy and content, then we have done a good job. Anyone expressing discontent seems like a failure, and it must be our failure. This can be especially pronounced if our parents had a lot of disagreements when we were young, and our role in the family was to moderate their fights. In the Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode number 13, from 2021 which was called Triggered all the time to emotional safety, Parent Crystal shared how her parents would get into a huge fight and she would disappear into the kitchen to make tea for everybody to try and placate them. Her parents were supposed to be the ones who helped Crystal to feel safe, but instead, Crystal tried to soothe herself by getting them to stop arguing, because their arguing felt so unsafe to her. When we've grown up in this kind of environment, a child's dysregulation over something like screen time or candy can remind us of how unsafe we felt with our parents in childhood, which triggers us so we may then say things to our child that we don't mean, and then we go into a guilt and shame spiral because we know we didn't want to speak to our child in that way. We might even yell at them, but in that moment, we couldn't stop ourselves, maybe we even threaten our child. And of course, then we feel terrible about it, because it's just adding fuel to the fire and shows our child that threats are appropriate tools to use. The other way that women seem to experience this kind of behavior as more difficult than dads do is because mothers are judged a lot more by their children's behavior. What a child eats or doesn't eat, how they're dressed, whether they play nicely with other children or use tools like threatening violence, reflects on our ability as a mother. Our culture spends a lot of time and energy telling us that our value as human beings is equivalent to our value as mothers. So when our children use this kind of threatening language, it's easy to see how our value, both as mothers and as humans beings, seems threatened.
Jen Lumanlan 08:02
A lot of parents feel concerned about where this kind of language comes from, and you heard that from Luna as well. In some cases, the path is relatively easy to follow. If we're threatening our child on a regular basis, we can see how they might use this kind of language with us. Even if our threats are delivered in a calm way, like if you don't brush your teeth now we won't read stories tonight, we have to acknowledge these really are threats. Our child may be feeling much more dysregulated when they speak to us, which makes their words come out with much more force and passion, but the language is the same as we've been using with them. It's not uncommon for parents to describe a threat their child has made and say, well, I've never used language like that with them, when actually we may not have used that specific threat. We have modeled the process many times. We just call it logical consequences, as if there was something logical about the threat. I often find it really puts things that we say to our children into perspective when we hear another adult saying them to us, or when our child said something to us. I remember when Carys was about three, reading in a popular parenting book that children get tired of hearing us repeat our requests over and over again, and so we should use a single word if we restate our request. So if we ask our child to put their shoes away, and we look back five minutes later and they haven't done it yet, instead of saying I asked you to put your shoes away or why haven't you put your shoes away yet, we should just say shoes. One day, not long after I started using that tool, Carys and I were sitting on the sofa in the morning, and I was working, I think she may have been doing some kind of screen time, and she asked me to get some blueberries for her breakfast. And I said, Yeah, I'll do it next time I get up. 10 minutes goes by and I hadn't gotten up, and I'd also forgotten about the blueberries. She looked over at me and she said, blueberries. I was totally shocked at first and then kind of amused. I certainly did not like being spoken to in that way, and that was how I learned to try to put things we say to our children through a filter of what it would feel like to say or receive the thing I'm about to say from another adult. So when we say something like if you don't brush your teeth, we won't read stories. We are training them to use threats, even if that wasn't our intention. Our child may also have heard their parents threaten each other and understand that a threat is a way of using power over another person. In a moment when they think they don't have very much power and they want to have something or make you do something, we can see how using a threat can seem like an appropriate choice when the child has heard other people using them for this effect. Children might also pick up this kind of language from media like TV, YouTube, video games, or from the playground. While I think it can be helpful to reduce the number of threats we're making towards our child and toward our parenting partner when our child's around, I don't think it's super helpful to spend a whole bunch of time worrying about where they might have heard this outside of these relationships. We live in a culture that says violence is not okay, and then practices violence on a routine basis. In his excellent book and talk, which I have quoted from before, indigenous Australian author Tyson Yunkaporta says that “Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug. Violence is part of the pattern. The damage of violence is minimized when it is distributed throughout a system, rather than centralized into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions. If you live a life without violence, you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spheres of your existence.” In every newspaper on every day around the world, acts of violence are described awful violence that humans commit against each other. The countries that many listeners of this podcast live in, try to keep their hands out of direct fighting, but the violence is still there, even if we don't see it every day. So where does this come from? When parents have been telling kids not to be violent for decades, how do we end up with 20% of surveyed female college students reporting they've been raped during college, and over half of women and almost a third of men have experienced sexual violence, including physical contact, during their lifetimes. How can we spend so much time and energy telling people not to be violent and yet still be surrounded by so much violence? I think we can understand quite a bit about this from the Reddit post. So let's return to the end of the post so we can figure out what was happening and what are the points at which things might have gone differently along the way. I see five of these potential turning points. So we're going to start at the fifth and work our way backward. And I'm doing it this way because Luna posted about wanting to know what to do about their child's behavior, which is usually the problem that parents come to me with as well. The fifth turning point was obviously the biggest one, and it happened when the parent said, okay, good night. I love you, and stood up to leave so the child can put himself to bed. The child responds with a loud no and a full on crying fit and the threat of physical harm to the parent. When I see posts like this in online communities, it's fairly common for the parent to say something like it just goes from zero to 60 immediately. And it sort of seems like that in this example, even though Luna doesn't use those precise words. Luna says a calm good night, and the child immediately responds with the over the top, loud wailing and threats. And it seems like getting the child to stop making threats is the thing to fix. After all, the thing we said to them right before, okay, good night, I love you was not unreasonable, right? I'm gonna leave us hanging there for just a minute in terms of what we should do after we hear something like that from our child. This was the fifth of our potential turning points. Because the fourth of these turning points was a really big one that could have had a profound impact on how the fifth one turned out. So we learn about the fourth potential turning point in Luna's statement, but the other night, he was being...
