Your Kid's Non-Negotiable Needs

I'm Dr. Becky, and this is good inside.

You know, I have three adult kids, and when I was a parent, I didn't know what their needs were. I had my own issues that I hadn't worked out, you know, from my own trauma in childhood. And then when my children showed issues, I naturally assumed there was something wrong with them rather than asking myself, what is it in the parenting environment that is not meeting their needs and what can I do to bring myself into a more grounded and understanding place so I could actually be meet their needs rather than demand that they need my expectations? It's a totally different way of parenting.

We'll be right back. So I recently sat down to talk with Dr. Gabor mate, someone whose work has had a profound impact on so many of you. And I'm excited to share this conversation with you. Dr. Matei has had a highly varied career. He started out as an English teacher, then he returned to medical school to work in family practice, and then he spent 20 years working in harm reduction clinics in Vancouver's downtown Eastside. We're going to touch on many important topics today, such as sleep training and the relationship between resilience and empathy. But first, let's jump right into a conversation about so called oppositional defiance disorder that Gabor and I started having in the booth before we realized we had even started recording.

I feel like my passion project are kids I call deeply feeling kids who are often labeled with oppositional defiant disorder or some other awful set of terms which just even forces a parent to look at their kid more as a bad kid and obviously, as you know, just further identify that way. And yeah, when those parents hear like, I like your kid, you have a great kid, they're struggling. They're really struggling. We're gonna figure it out. But I like your kid. They're like, wow, nobody has said or insinuated anything like that. And it is relieving. Like, wait, maybe I don't have a budding sociopath. I just. If I can make some changes, everything can get a little bit better. Right now.

We haven't started the interview yet, have we?

Oh, no. Now we should start. Hi.

No, I was only gonna say because as far as I'm concerned, oppositional defined disorder doesn't even exist, you know?

Well, we're recording, so let's, let's keep. This is like music to my ear. My words, when people say that is like, I fucking hate those words. So you have a. You have a nicer way of saying it. Tell me about oppositional defiant disorder.

So when we define or when we diagnose a child with oppositional defiant disorder, we're assuming that the child is a disorder, some kind of a quasi disease or dysfunction of the brain or the mind. Not only does it unexist in real life, odd. It can't even theoretically exist. And here's why. If my foot was broken, would it make any difference to the brokenness of my foot, whether or not I was talking to you, whether or not even knew you? If I had a flu, would it make any difference whether or not I was talking to you or whether even I knew you? No, because those are disorders within my own body. But could I oppose you if I didn't know you? Could I oppose you if we weren't in a relationship of some kind?

No, there's nothing there.

You can't. So opposition by definition happens in a relationship. So that's the first point. If that is the case, why are we diagnosing the child instead of diagnosing the relationship? That's the first point. The second point is who are these kids who are oppositional? They're kids who've lost their healthy, trusting contact with adults, and therefore they don't trust adults. It's very natural not to obey somebody that you don't trust. But the lack of trust, the lack of relationship, wasn't the child's fault it happened. It wasn't the parents fault either. Actually, it happens in a culture where kids and parents are increasingly alienated from each other for all kinds of reasons. If I were to push on you right now, either emotionally or physically, you would oppose me. You'd resist me. So this resistance on the part of children has to do with the degree of pushing they received on the part of adults. And so the adults shift the behavior. The kids change almost immediately.

I couldn't agree more. And you know, I always think when people tell me my kid's been diagnosed this way, almost just very practically, the way I'm thinking about my kid, the way I'm describing my kid, does it make me want to be close with my kid, feel on the same team? Or does my framework make me just not like my kid? And I try to tell myself with my own kids, like, until I'm in the first framework, I shouldn't do anything because like, nothing good comes from the second framework. And I just don't know anyone who's like, my kid is oppositional defiant, like, what? Oh, how amazing are they? Like, inherently, it makes you. It reinforces the dynamic that got things there in the first place. And Then also a kid is growing up with, you know, being looked at as a bad kid. That's the image reflected back to them. And I mean, I know what it's like even as an adult when I've been struggling in any relationship to be looked at as a bad person. And it's eviscerating, or if somebody's pushing.

On you and we use this interesting phrase, this kid is acting out. What do you do with the kid when they're acting out? Why don't we think about it first? What does it mean to act out? Like, when I say acting out, most people think the kid is oppositional or obstreperous or rude or aggressive or something's wrong with the kid. But if you look at the actual word acting out, it actually means something. When do we act out? We act out when we don't have the language to say it in words. And what they're acting out are the emotional needs and their emotional frustrations. So our job as parents, educators, psychologists is not to chant, fix the child's behavior, but to understand the message that's being acting out.

I love the way you described acting out. I've never heard it described that way. And it's so true with, you know, thinking about not having the language. I've always thought about kind of quote acting out as, I don't know, it's like the feelings or urges or sensations inside my body that I haven't yet developed skills to contain. Not like suppress in my body, but just allow them to live inside my body. They're so overpowering, those skills that they literally explode out of me as a hit, as a scream, as a f you or whatever, however. However it comes out. But I think we come together here, right? And seeing these behaviors are a sign of what our kids are struggling with or need, not a sign of who they are.

No, generally they're acting out their unmet needs. I mean, they're acting out their frustrations. And we get frustrated when our needs aren't met. So in this culture, parents are not educated about children's needs for healthy development. They're educated about how to get the kid to behave, about how they want them to behave, which runs contrary to the child's needs. And if you gardener or if you raise animals, you have to begin with understanding what are the organisms needs for development. You're not going to grow a healthy garden if you don't know what your plants need. And it's the same with parenting. Children are born with certain non negotiable Needs. When I say non negotiable needs, I mean needs that nature evolutionarily programmed into them. You meet those needs, those children will grow up beautifully. If you don't meet the needs, they're going to have problems and then we're going to diagnose the kid with the problem instead of recognizing how. Like with my children, you know, I have three adult kids, and when I was a parent, I didn't know what their needs were. I had my own issues that I hadn't worked out, you know, from my own trauma and childhood. And then when my children showed issues, I naturally assumed there was something wrong with them, rather than asking myself, as I was finally guided to looking at what is it in the parenting environment that is not meeting their needs, that is causing them to behave in certain ways? And what can I do to bring myself into a more grounded and understanding place so I could actually meet their needs rather than demand that they need my expectations? It's a totally different way of parenting.

Yeah. And so I want to double click on that for a second. Non negotiable needs. I'm sure listeners are saying like, oh, can he. Like, I want to write them down. Right? Like, what are children's non negotiable needs?

There are four basic ones. The first one is for an attachment relationship image. The child feels absolutely secure. Attachment is a very powerful dynamic in human life because attachment means the desire to be close to somebody for the sake of being taken care of or for the sake of taking care of the other. And human beings need each other. So our brains are wired with a powerful attachment circuit. Now, the more immature you are, the more helpless and dependent you are, the greater your attachment needs. So infants have absolutely infinite attachment needs. And that attachment needs is not just for physical nurturing, but for emotionally being held and seen and accepted. The second need is that inside that relationship, the child should have rest. And rest means the child shouldn't have to work to make the relationship work. It's not that I'll accept you and love you and like you if you behave such and such, if you're cute, if you're smart, if you're compliant, no, there's nothing that you have to do to make this relationship work. The third need is the child has an absolute need to be able to experience all their emotions. Our brains are wired by evolution. For joy, for play, for love, for grief, for fear, for panic, for anger. These are all essential emotions for survival. When parents are told that angry children should be punished for being angry, what you're Telling the parent is, is that the child is not allowed to experience their emotions.

One of the things I think that I know parents find so illuminating because it's not explained to them is there's a difference between behavior and feelings. So I think it, you know, I remember a parent sitting. I was kind of saying something similar one day in my private practice, and parents like, oh, so it's okay my son just hits people. I was like, no. Well, first of all, I don't even know if it's okay or not okay. It just happened. Like when my coffee spilled, it wasn't okay or not okay. It just happened. But sure, our kid needs our protection. Then to stop themselves from hurting someone and stop someone else from being hurt. That is separate from the emotion of anger that they haven't learned the skills yet to regulate.

Absolutely. And I completely agree with you. And there's two things I would say in response. One is, if a child, for example, is habitually hitting other kids, we have to ask why? Because that is a very frustrated child. And why is that child frustrated? Because their needs aren't being met. Of course, you don't allow kids to hit each other, you know, so you work with them. You're very angry right now. No hitting, but you're very angry right now. So you don't punish somebody. You don't allow the behavior, but you don't hold the emotion against them.

And just differentiating these things, again, is not taught to us. When we take a baby home from the hospital, not only is a kid not bad for having a tantrum, but here's something else important. When my kid has a tantrum, that doesn't mean I have to change my rule.

Right?

My boundaries. I always say to parents, like, don't dictate my kids feelings. They're allowed to be upset when I make a decision. And their feelings don't dictate my boundaries. Nobody's bad. It's inconvenient. It's not pleasant. Like, I don't like that moment with my kids. I'm not like, ugh, how amazing is this? No, it's like, oh, okay, I gotta get through this. But nobody's in the wrong. Nobody's bad.

No, that's right. The whole label bad already reflects a certain way of looking at something, you know, and there really are no bad kids, you know? Now the fourth need of children, so the attachment relationship, the rest. And the fourth one is free, spontaneous play out in nature. And free, spontaneous play that emerges from the child is not programmed for them by some External institution or toy. It's more essential than intellectual stimulation because the emotional scaffolding of our brains provides the template for healthy intellectual development. And so in our kindergarten, in our schools, and in our homes, there should be far more emphasis on spontaneous creative play than on the teaching of facts or the teaching of technology. Why do they play? Because this is how they develop into adults. And we've taken that away from our kids. So those four needs in our society are frustrated in so many ways. And then we wonder why so many kids are diagnosed with this or that so called disorder. And then we're trying to treat the kid and medicate the kid instead of looking at the environment and the context which creates the problem in the first place.

Yeah, people ask me a lot. I'm sure they ask you too, like, is it harder to parent these days? Is it harder? We see all these statistics of kids and the things they're struggling with and suicide rates and teenagers. And one of the things related to your last point about play and also just related to attachment and what kids want more than anything else is to feel connected to their parents. And I know you're open about parts of your parenting too, but one of the things I think about a lot is what percentage of the time when I looked at my parents, did they have a device between me and them? Like literally it was zero. There weren't devices you could carry around. What percentage of the time that one of my kids looks at me, do they not even see my face? But might they see literally something blocking their attachment with me? Not only their screens. My screens. Right, yes.

Look, parenting is much more difficult than it should have been or designed by nature. If we understand human evolution, then for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings and our precursors lived in small band, hunter gatherer groups where children were always around their parents. And even our own species, Homo sapiens. No. In the United States today, 25% of mothers have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. The mother doesn't intend it that way. It's economic constraints that force her to go back to work. But it means that the children loses the relationship, the constant contact with the parent that his her. Their system naturally demands for a much longer period of time. And even parents who are able to stay home, they're very stressed. They don't have the support of the community, the clan, the extended family. They're isolated.

So we have a good inside community. There's so many parents, and I asked them to share questions for you. Let's hear from Megan.

Hi, my name is Megan and I'm a mom to a three and a half year old and a two year old. My question is for Dr. Gabor mate. As it relates to sleep training, specifically the Ferber method or other forms that are more or less that. My understanding is that he used to advocate for it and promote sleep training as a physician, and now he believes that it's harmful to an infant's development and their long term emotional health. So my question is, does he believe that sleep training is detrimental to development in an environment that otherwise promotes a secure attachment with primary caregivers? And what would he say to all the parents who have practiced sleep training their children? I personally have sleep trained one of my children and not the other. I'm curious to know what he says about the long term impact of sleep training on the one child I did sleep train.

Yes. First of all, we have to say that sleep training or the desire to practice it is very understandable. In our society, when we were parenting in as communities and as groups and extended families, parents had other adults to hold the kid while they're rested. So how we evolved is there was no need for sleep training. A bear doesn't have to sleep train the bear cubs, cat mother doesn't have to sleep train the little kittens. Kids don't need to be trained how to sleep. They know how to sleep. It's just that they have needs. And one of their needs is that attachment relationship. And that attachment relationship is not timed by the hour. You know, so when they're lonely, they cry. That cry is designed to bring the parent to pick them up and to hold them. So Dr. Spock, who for decades was the parenting maven to millions of parents, talked about the chronic resistance to sleep of the infant. The infant doesn't have resistance to sleep. The infant just sleeps when they want to sleep and they want to be awake when they're awake. And as they grow older, they learn to sleep through the night. Spock's advice was that how you resist the tyranny of the infant, that's what he called it, is you put them in their beds, you walk out of their room and you shut the door and you don't go back. In other words, you ignore the child's desperate cries for attachment and being held. So what are we teaching children? Why are kids crying? Either because they're physically uncomfortable or hungry or because emotionally they need you. When you don't meet that need, what message does the child get that the needs don't matter, that they don't matter that their emotions will not be responded to from the physiological level. The kid is stressed, that's why they're crying. When the kid is stressed, Cortisol, the stress hormone, is coursing through their body. When you pick up the child, the cortisol level go down. When you don't pick up the child, the stress gets worse until the child gives up, becomes apathetic, and goes back to sleep to escape from the distress. Now, you've trained them to sleep. You've also taught them that their emotions, their very existence, doesn't matter to you. Now, this is in a very. This is a very stark way of putting it. However, it's not the only factor. So if parents absolutely have to sleep during their kids because their life is impossible otherwise, I'm not here to blame them for that. It's not the way it ought to be. Our culture really lets parents down by putting that kind of pressure on them. What? For example, if there was decent child support so that parents didn't have to go back to work, then they wouldn't have to sleep all night. Then they could look after their kids. So this is not personal parenting failures. We're looking at a whole culture that just doesn't value the importance of connected parenting. But if you are in that situation, at least recognize that you are, whether you like it or not, hurting your kid and compensate for it during the day. Hold them a lot, really respond to them, attach with them, connect with them, attune with them, then you're mitigating the harm.

So this is such a thoughtful question for Megan and Gabor. One of the things that you talk about a lot, which I appreciate, is parents are not equipped or set up for any type of kind of success in the world we live in. Right. The demands on adults and on families versus the lack of, you know, support of any type always would mean if you're not set up for success, everybody in any situation would have to be making decisions that are less than ideal.

Exactly.

So I know for me, you know, as a pragmatist, what I would say to parents also listening is we do the best we can with the resources we have. And what I know from a lot of parents who have decided to sleep train is the version of a human being they could be while they weren't sleeping was really, really low. And if that's you listening, what I wanna say is putting any one decision aside, making a decision that you feel like, I have to do this, even though it doesn't feel good to show up for the other hours. I understand that. And those are hard decisions to make and decisions that you probably had to make. And I do think whatever research shows to me about sleep training, I have a hard time imagining that it's that versus things that are not able to be measured attuning to your kid during the day, like you said, picking them up, even saying, hey, last night you cried a lot, you wanted me and I didn't come. And I know that felt bad. And yes, for someone thinking I should say that to my six month old, yes, yes, you should. Do they understand? They do. Do they understand the same way a 16 year old would? No. But yes, they understand and they get it and that matters. And you did not, I'm just gonna say this, you did not mess up your kid forever if you let them cry when you needed sleep. And if it feels right, Megan, to say to your kid, even though they might look at you like, what are you talking about? You know, when you were a baby and you know you cried sometimes at night and I didn't come and I know at least the part of your memory that's with words doesn't remember it, but I remember it and it felt bad and I wanted to let you know that I know that felt bad and I love you like that. I always think about repair, like I think that matters. What do you think about that?

Well, I totally agree with you and that's what I was trying to say to the previous question is if you have to do it because the circumstances just constrain you to do it, at least realize what's being lost and compensate for it as best you can, you know, so. So sometimes we have to give up things that nature would have us do. And most parents, when you sleep in their babies, if you ask them how did you feel while you were doing it, their heart was breaking because their parental instinct was screaming for them to pick up that child. So if you really decide that you have to, just as you say, then Becky, at least attune with the child and empathize with them.

And I want to move to another question that's also about childhood. So this is the question I'm going to play. Let's listen it together.

I have a question for Gabor around building resilience and empathy in our kids. I love the way you teach resilience as the ability to tolerate discomfort. But for so many of us, resilience was taught as being tough, not letting things get you down, pushing through and often shutting down feelings. I've also noticed people that don't seem to cope well with discomfort, feel everything very deeply and have great empathy, but often as a result of codependency. So I'm curious to hear Gabor's thoughts on how to foster resilience and empathy in our kids simultaneously. Is validating feelings the key and is this enough?

Well, there's no contradiction between resilience and empathy. In fact, the more resilient the person is, the more likely they're going to be able to be empathetic to others. So resilience is not pushing through. You know, in the book I gave the example of a very famous politician, Hillary Clinton, who the night she was nominated for the Democratic presidency in 2016, they had a video of her life shown on public television in front of the thousands assembled at the Democratic convention. And she was talking about how her mother helped her become resilient and tough. And the example she gave was that she's four years old, she's being bullied by neighborhood kids and she runs into the house to seek protection from the mom and the mom says, there's no room for cards in this house. Now you get out there and deal with those kids. And this was given as an example of resilience building. And the millions of people watching it, the commentators, the journalists, nobody realized that what was being celebrated is the traumatization of a child. Because a four year old child who runs for protection from mother is not a coward, she's a child. That's the natural thing to do. The real message to the child is that there's no room for your vulnerability. You have to suck it up. Sixty years later, the candidate becomes ill with pneumonia. Do you all remember what she did with it? She got feverish and dehydrated and she collapsed in the street. Her secret servicemen had to lift her into the van because she was sucking it up for the sake of continuum. That's not resilience, that's ignoring your own needs is what it is. Resilience is when you squeeze a rubber ball and it gets deformed and smaller. When you let it go, it bounces back to its original size and capacities. Resilience in human terms is the capacity to grow from negative experience, not to become more constricted. That's what resilience is. Now how you teach resilience is you teach faith in the person's capacity to heal and to understand themselves. And how you do that is by fully accepting and loving and supporting the child. And when you do that, they will also naturally develop empathy.

Yeah, like I, I Mean, going back to attachment and connection and aloneness.

Right.

When a kid is. Is really upset about something, they were bullied, they were left out. You know, they didn't make the soccer team. Their body's gonna remember whether that feeling was encoded in aloneness or encoded in attachment. And when. We all know there's power in numbers.

Right?

So your kid's body remembers your parental presence around that tough emotion, which inherently makes it, you know, a little easier to cope with over time. And so, yeah, the idea of resilience as not as toughening up. But I love what you said, too, of kind of expanding from an experience or growing or not being alone, you know, is a big difference. Just like I think empathy, there's a big difference too. Right? Empathy, to me, it's not feeling other people's feelings for them. Right. Actually, empathy requires really firm boundaries between what is mine and what is yours. So people who are empathic don't take on the feelings of others at all.

Right.

Maybe that's more, you know, codependency, if we had to name it as something. But empathy actually requires seeing, oh, that is that person's feelings, not mine. I care about that person. I care about those feelings, but I don't have to take them into my body and process them as if they're my own.

Exactly. And a lot of what people call compassion fatigue. I often say that nobody gets tired of being compassionate. Compassion is part of our nature. What they get tired of is taking on other people's problems because they lack compassion for themselves. You know, so that empathy is both fellow feeling with boundaries. It's not fellow feeling without boundaries.

So knowing that, there's a lot of parents listening to this, knowing that. Also, it's easy when we hear new information to go into, ugh, I'm the worst. I messed up my kid forever mode.

I know.

I can do that, too. Any. Any last kind of words for, you know, for the parents here?

Yeah. Well, I often talk to groups of parents or groups in which there's a lot of parents, and I say, if you worry about having screwed up your kids, don't worry about it. Of course you did. We all do. You know, we can't help it in this particular culture. I certainly passed on my traumas to my kids. First of all, look at yourself. The fact is, you did your best. We all do our best. Our best is constrained by what we know or don't know about ourselves when we become parents. When I became a parent, there's a whole lot I didn't know about myself and to the extent that I didn't, I passed on some of my issues to my kids. But they're also resilient. They were loved. It's not a question of are they without problems, do they have the capacity to work out those problems? So drop the guilt is what I said. Parents, you did your best in a very difficult culture in what I would say is a toxic environment for parenting in many ways, and stay open to your kids at whatever age. If you have to own what you missed or what you did that you shouldn't have done, own it. Your guilt doesn't help your kids. In fact, your kids don't want to be seen through the eyes of your guilt. Nobody wants to be seen as somebody else's mistake or somebody else's failure. Your kids don't deserve that. They don't need it. Then it's not good for them. Yeah, realize that you probably did missed some things that you ought to have done. You perhaps did some things that you shouldn't have done. But you did do your best and continue to do your best. It's never too late to develop a great relationship with your kids. Never.

I love that.

Thanks for listening. To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com podcast. You could also write me@podcastoodinside.com parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world and parents deserve resources and support so they feel empowered, confident and connected. I'm so excited to share Good Inside Membership, the first platform that brings together content and experts you trust with a global community of like valued parents. It's totally game changing. Good inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Jessie Baker and Eric Newsome at Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhi, Julia Natt and Kristin Muller. I would also like to thank Erica Belsky, Mary Panico, Ashley Valenzuela and the rest of the of the Good Inside team. And one last thing before I let you go. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain Good Inside.