Episode 65: How to Handle Lying with Vivek Patel (Feature on Fathers Series No. 4)
/We are now down to the last episode of the Feature on Fathers Series. I hope that through this series, Dads will feel heard and seen because you are. You are loved and you matter. If you feel that you are struggling in your parenting and in your relationship with others or with yourself, please don't hesitate to reach out and ask for help! I want you all to know that there's no shame in that. It is my mission to help parents find peace and balance in their parenting and in their relationships. I would be glad to help you even more.
And so, for the last episode of this series, we will be talking about lying. Although this topic does not focus specifically on fatherhood, it helps us handle something that might be triggering for us but is developmentally appropriate & important for our children. To help us with this topic, I have invited a great guest, Vivek Patel, who is a father and the genius behind @meaningfulideas handle on Instagram. He is also the host of a beautiful podcast called Gentle Parents Unite where he helps parents have a closer and gentle relationship with their kids.
Here is a summary of our conversation:
Why children lie (it's not what you think!)
The value of lying (beyond the "white lies" we all sometimes tell)
How lying can help us teach our values non-coercively
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen, and today we're going to be talking about lying here on the Balance Parent Podcast. So buckle up, we're going to rock your world. I have a really great guest today who is going to help us talk about this topic that can be super triggering for parents and it's also super developmentally normal for kids. So please welcome my guests Vivek Patel. He is the... the mastermind behind the @meaningfulideas handle on Instagram. He's also a beautiful host of a podcast called Gentle Parents Unite. Vivek, thank you so much for coming here with me. Why don't you tell me a little bit more about who you are and what you do?
Vivek: Thank you Laura. I'm still happy to be here with you. I've been following your work for a while and I really admire you and the stuff that you share and I really appreciate being on your show. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I learn a lot from you.
Laura: The feeling is mutual. You're one of my favorite parenting experts.
Vivek: Well, I'm glad, I'm glad and I shy a little bit away from the word expert. I hear that a lot, but really I think of myself as more of like an advanced student because I'm always learning, you know, and I think that's one of the things about me is that I really value my learning mindset and I think my learning mindset is one of the main things I wanted to pass on to my kids. You know, I didn't want to appear an expert to her either. I wanted her to feel like we were learning together through life and that's why I don't see I raised her. I say we grew up together. That's not how I talk about it. And I really like that. And she's going to be 24 like soon in a couple of months, she's going to be 24.
And when she was born, I remember looking into her. I... I was the very first thing she saw because I pushed all the doctors out of the way when... when she popped out. And uh and the very first thing that she saw was me. I went right into her face and I held her and I looked into her eyes And just for 30 seconds I just said, I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love. And then the doctors pushed me away and they took her and they cleaned her up and gave her to mom. But the very if that was your first experience and I remember almost psychically I could hear her repeat back to me. Thanks dad, I hear you. But if you treat me like most parents treat their kids, I'm going to hate you when I'm a teenager. Mm. And I said, oh, okay, noted, thank you very much. And that was really part of the impetus for me to parent in a very different way than everyone around me was parenting at that time. This in 1997.
So it was a long time ago. There was no internet to speak of. I didn't have Facebook groups. I was just kind of figuring it out. And I knew very clearly from the early days that what I really wanted to focus on was having a deeply connected trusting relationship with her and not to do anything that would damage that trust. And I wanted her to trust me deeply. I wanted her to feel accepted her deeply. And so I knew from the early days that any kind of punishment that I would give her, any kind of consequences, that I would give her any way that I would force her to do anything she didn't want to do or stop her from doing something she did want to do. We're using force that she would not trust me because I really didn't want that. You know?
And I could feel, and I think it would slip out. I would slip out sometimes because the old mindset was in me and more human and we're human. Exactly. And I have all that programming from my own past. But every time that would happen, I could actually feel the trust be damaged. I could see it in her eyes. I could feel it in the tone of her body. You know? And I was like, uh, I would react like that was like, okay there. I said it was okay, but make make, no, don't do that again.
Laura: You're reminding me of a conversation that we had once, I think in your Facebook group, which is a beautiful space to be in where somebody was asking about lying. And this is when we first connected about lying. And then I said that my first when I find out that my kid is lying to me and I was told a fib or whatever, the very first response on my lips and my heart is how I wonder what it is.
You know, that I've done to make it feel not safe to tell me the truth in this moment. Oftentimes I like then go like my apology like, hey, somehow I gave you the idea that I wasn't safe. That's all about trust, right, that they can't trust you with the information, you know, with the truth, but that spurred on a lot of conversations between you and me about lying, how you feel about lying and, you know, it's funny, I have some kind of radical feelings about lying, especially when it starts to develop, but I would love for you to share some of your views if you don't mind.
Vivek: Yeah, for sure. Well, one of my one liners, I read a lot of one liners because I really love them and one of my one liners is I didn't teach my kid not to lie, I taught her how to lie.
Laura: Love it. Yeah, I know that a huge portion of my audience just went like.
Vivek: Yeah, exactly, but that's the idea behind one liner and you know, the idea behind that is it doesn't mean that I actually want her to lie to me, or that I want her to go through life managing her situations are in life by lying. That's not the idea behind the idea behind it is to understand that truth is a very relative thing, and that there is a difference between a lie that's used to manipulate and the lie that's used to protect oneself. Perhaps there is a lie that maybe it's a lot of a mission, like, I don't want to share everything that I think and feel with every person I interact with, right? I want to use some discernment around that. And so when I say, I taught her how to lie.
What I really mean is let's learn about the discernment necessary about what we share with people and what we don't share with people and how we share it with people so that we can keep ourselves safe so that we can form deep relationships with the people that we really trust and we can have a certain, you know, wariness about the people that we know could use things against us and then every situation we're in is different and every person we interact with is different and requires a lot of subtlety to teach that kind of discernment and that kind of self awareness to kids. It's so different than just making a rule saying don't ever lie. You can't really teach that kind of subtlety and discernment and you use the word Guide earlier, you can't really guide your kids through understanding the complexities of life with hard and fast rules. It's not really effective.
Laura: in a black and white world where we need to teach them about the shades of gray that are there for sure. I really like that word discernment. I mean we talked about this in lots of different contexts with our kids, teaching them to be a discerning consumer of media, tuning in, listening to themselves, figuring out how to keep themselves safe. Yeah, I really like the way that you're framing this.
Okay, so but then what about the, you know, lots of us grew up and have the idea that lying is bad, that when people lie to us, we feel disrespected, we feel um valued whatever it is. Like what do you think about this, this kind of idea? This idea that lying is bad. I don't actually think lying is black and white like that. I think most people at some point or another lie throughout their lives and not necessarily in a malicious way, But do you think about the morality of lying?
Vivek: Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think morality in general is another area of non black and whiteness. You know, I think there are some things that are clearly always going to be damaging to people. And there are things that notice, I didn't say wrong, I said always going to be damaging right, and that's important because what I'm... I'm not looking at so much some system of morality. I'm looking at what... what's an actual impact on the other humans in my life? How am I impacting them and what kind of person do I want to be? And what kind of relationships do I want to have? And what kind of impact do I want to have in the world? And I call these the self reflective questions that I ask kids all the time. I don't want them. I don't want to impose my sense of morality and values on them. I want them to think about. I want their sense of morality and values to come from.
What kind of person do they want to be and what kind of experiences do they want to have in life and how do they want to impact themselves in the world and other people? And I think that's where a lot of morality comes from. And you know, I think that for me, I don't want to hurt other people. I don't want to cause damage to them. I don't want to make their lives less happy and less enriched. I want to nourish other people. I want to help other people find their truth and find joy in their lives and live a meaningful, authentic life and this is what I want. So if I'm lying to somebody and the damages trust with them, it makes them feel hurt or unseen.
You know, if it makes them feel like they can't be themselves or they can't trust me or they can't trust themselves or whatever, then that's not what I want to do and that's not how I want to walk in the world. This is kind of how I think of morality. I think morality as more of like a living thing about my expression in the world and that's what I want to do, teach kids to and want them to know. I want them to know what kind of person do you really want to be? Not what kind of person do you want to be, but what kind of person do you really want to be from your heart.
Laura: Curious, open, What kind of relationships do you want to have?
Vivek: What kind of impact do you want to have on the world on other people? These are really deep questions that I think young kids can understand these questions. People often they go, well when my kids 10, maybe I can ask them that kind of question, but I interact with two year olds this way and they get it. They really do you know when they don't have the judgment attached to it, when they don't have the force attached to it? They really get it.
Laura: They do, and they don't have they are unencumbered. I think young Children are unencumbered by society and by a lot of culture in a lot of ways, they can see themselves a little bit more clearly. They can see relationships more clearly because they don't have all this other stuff layered on top of it, that we have all the should and all of those things that society gives us. Do you know what I mean?
Vivek: I totally know what you're saying. Yeah, those layers, those layers we get those layers early on, don't we?
Laura: We do. They start coming you know, as we move out of our families and out into the world or even in our families if we have, you know, we as parents are, you know, we all have moments of unconsciousness where we transmit our layers are lenses, are views down to our kids, you know, we all do. Yeah.
And so I want to ask you then because I agreed with everything you were saying is so beautifully put. So and I think we can all agree that there are times when lies can absolutely be do imagining to authentic relationships into trust. Are there times when they're not? Are there times when they serve healthy function in our lives? You mentioned before keeping ourselves safe? But what about in relationships?
Vivek: Yeah, for sure. Well I'll give you a great examples... example just the other day, my wife was yesterday, day before yesterday. My wife was telling me that she's going to be giving up this for lent and that for land and she wants to do that. I'm not Christian And I don't follow any organized religion and I don't do things like that. And I've been married for 27 years now. So for the early part of our marriage, if I thought that was something, you know, like that didn't make sense to me, I would just say, yeah, that doesn't make sense. Why are you doing that? And there was a lot of disconnection that would come from that between and what happened was yesterday when I heard that those thoughts came into my head.
I could hear them from the past, and I was like, but that's not the kind of person you want to be. And I edited myself. Did I lie? Did I withhold the truth that I would hold my thoughts? I don't know, was it? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe, but I didn't do that. What I said was how can I support you and what can I do? I could be your accountability partner and maybe I can help you through it. And that's how I responded. And she was all over me. She was like, oh, thank you, that's so great, I love that. You know?
And so, you know, some people might think that we have to share every bit of what we think. Was that a lie? I don't think so. Was that discernment? I think so. Um when I was in junior high school, I was bullied relentlessly and I had a very hard childhood. I was bullied at home and I was bullied school and I was just bullied all over them and I have that victim mentality was was really strong with and a lot of the time when kids would come up to me and say things to me and ask me questions and prodding questions or ask me where I'm going or what I'm doing, you know, just to keep myself safe and not get beat up every day. A lot of the time I would lie. Yeah, imagine being too. I mean I also lied to my parents about it because I didn't feel safe to tell them about it.
And so that's a different kind of law, right? So the lie at school was keeping me safe. The lie at home probably wasn't keeping me safe and I would like to have been more felt more free to be able to share it. I wouldn't share it with my dad because I would feel dismissed and I wouldn't share with my mom because I could feel how much it hurt her. It was very different reasons. But in both cases, I would hold it and I held a lot of that inside of myself.
So there's a lot I wish that I had been able to not hold. But the lying, there's those kids at school kept me alive in a lot of ways. And imagine if I was told when I got home oh Vivek, you shouldn't lie. It makes you a bad person. It's a bad thing to do. And then I go to school and I would have this whole conflict around that. How could I resolve that would be so hard for me to have resolved.
Fortunately I didn't have that or at least I don't remember having, but yeah, I mean there are some example and then there's like a whole range of stuff in between that, you know, I would think of my kid being in a difficult situation and in the moment, the only thing she could think of to get out of it would be Allah you know, like I think there are situations where not telling the complete truth to the person in front of you makes a lot of set.
Laura: I think so too. But this was something that as I moved into my teenage years, my mom taught me to do that. She said overtly, I will always be the bad guy for you whenever you need an excuse to get out of something, you can always blame it on me. I mean, so like I had friends who wanted to talk on the phone all night, but I wanted to do my homework and go to bed, right? So my mom and I had a hand signal for when I wanted to get off the phone and then she would say “Laura it's time to get off the phone”. Just this beautiful moment of grace. Was it a lie? Yeah. Kind of was it, you know, would it have been better if I could have authentically held that boundary with my friends maybe? But at the same time like learning to set boundaries authentically and compassionately hold them. It's really hard. Like I teach adults how to do that. It does.
Vivek: It takes time right?
Laura: It does. It takes time. And so I've always felt really grateful for my mom that she taught me, you know I mean? Yeah, I guess it was like she was always willing to be the bad guy for me that she was always willing to kind of engage in this kind of co-conspiracy kind of thing between, you know, the two of us. Yeah, it was... it was beautiful and this is one of the things that I think with the black and white thinking abound lying. Like, I don't know, I also knew like if I was at a party in a situation that didn't feel good, I could blame it on my parents, always parents.
Vivek: Yeah, for sure. And I think that if we want to teach our kids about that strength of holding boundaries and having confidence in ourselves, forcing them to do it through a system of right and wrong and morality isn't the way to do that anyway. Right. I actually think that your mom probably felt so safe to you that if she said, you know, another way to look at it might be this. And I wonder if you could explore this idea also that you wouldn't have felt judged because of the openness that she had. But if she insisted on it and told you were wrong for the other way, then you would have had to close yourself off to her as a guide.
And I think in the system of parenting that I teach, one of the things I talk about is the three main relationships that parents have with their kids that replaces the control authority based relationship. Because a lot of the time when we do this gentle conscious parenting stuff, we talk about what not to do right and say don't do the punishment, don't do the consequences. Don't do authority, don't do forest, but we always talk about what to do do. I called it, don't do what they do do. And uh, which is one of my fun concepts that I like.
And so I think that one of the do do is what relationship do we replace it with them. Because you hear a lot of people say, oh I can't just be my kid's friends. And I actually think there's some truth to that. I don't think just a friend is enough to contain the vastness of the intensity of parent child relationship. So I have three relationships that I talked about and they are the relationship of model guide and friend and none of them have authority and because all of them are mutual. We're each other's models for each other's guides and we're each other's friends.
But each of those things I pay real attention to and I think about when I'm interacting with my child in this moment, how am I model, how am I being a guide? How am I being a friend and all three of those things, they compensate for each other. They work with each other and they overlap with each other. And the guide relationship is really super important. And in the guide relationship I want my kid to trust me. I want her to trust my guidance and anything that I do that pushes her away from trusting my guidance, I'm destroying that.
So I want to do things because I want to teach her things. I want her to pass on values. I think it's worthwhile To pass on. I mean when my kid was born, I was 28, that means I had 28 years of mistakes that I've been reflecting on. I didn't want that to go to waste. I wanted to pass it on to her. But how can I do that if she would do the eye roll and resist me and no. And then you want to do the opposite.
The other day, my wife was looking out the window, it's snowing like wild here in Toronto and she said, hey, there's this, there's a kid out there running around without a hat on. And I said, oh, I bet his parents told him to put his hat on. That's why he's not wearing his hat. Because when kids get told things and you can see this in your own kids, if you watch them, when they get told something from an authority figure position, they immediately want to resist.
Laura: Of course they do. Like that's a human thing. Yeah, sure.
Vivek: Yeah, exactly.
Laura: I mean, I still feel that in me sometimes, like if I'm walking down the hallway and the sign says wet paint, like I'm like, but you know, is it really like I've done it for me to do exactly that, but Okay. Yeah, So I love this idea of how to teach values without collusion and control. I love this. Okay, so now we've been kind of high level, been talking about the theory, you know, the kind of the theory background piece of this. Can we get down into some of the when lying happens in our daily lives with our kids. Especially a lot of my listeners have young kids. One thing that is coming up for lots of parents right now is kids lying about washing their hands.
Yeah. You know, so hand washing is big right now, we're in a pandemic. There's pressure, their stress on us as pants, make sure our kids are washing their hands, they feel the pressure. Of course they resist it, right? Of course they do this job is to resist. And so then we know they didn't wash their hands or they didn't wash their hands and sing the whole abc song, you know, whatever. How do we handle it? When we say a parent goes in and says, did you wash your hands? And the kids like, yeah, I wash my hands and we know they did not really do first of all, don't ask some questions that you already know the answer to that. Don't invite a lie, Right? But let's say we did. We invited them. Why?
Vivek: Sure? Well, it's going to happen, right? It's going to happen for sure. There's no way around it actually. It's an inevitable thing to happen. So there's a couple of things I would address. First of all, I like what you said earlier, which was when that happens to take that moment to reflect how have I contributed to this. I think this is really important.
Not I noticed I said contributed also, and the reason I use the word contributed is it's not laden with a lot of blame and shame. And I'm really, really, really careful about that, both with myself as a parent and with my kids. I don't want to take blame and shame onto myself and I don't want to put it on there.
Laura: But that doesn't mean shame. Shut us down. They shut down growth and learning. They do and we know not to use it with our kids, but often we use it with ourselves.
Vivek: Often we use it with ourselves.
Laura: We learned that's what we have in our upbringing, you know? Anyway, go ahead.
Vivek: Thank you. And that's why I love the word contributed because it's less, it's got less charged to it and it helps me look at it, right? It helps me look at it honestly. So that's my first thing. My first thing is ah ha okay, so this is happening. How have I contributed to 100% we have? So that's one thing and that's another thing. Like if I had shame attached that, I couldn't say it with joy 100% I have and then look at it, really look at it, I couldn't do that If I had blamed, I'd be like, have I don't know what have I done? I'm a terrible parent comes the guilt and the worries and yes, so I always go number one inside.
The first step is to give myself love and compassion. Always, always, always. And to be honest with myself, this is always where I start because then when I, when I'm in that state I'm more settled, I'm not in a rush, I'm not trying to pressure it because that's always gonna push our kids further away.
Second thing is as soon as they lie to recognize there's a real emotional relational thing happening at that moment. You know, you can't force emotions away. You can't convince emotions away. So let's start by relating from that same place. Okay, you didn't wash your hands. So I'm really glad that you told me. I really appreciate when you tell me, I mean, you did wash your hands. I really appreciate you telling me what you did.
You know, that's really great. I'm glad you wash your hands because I know you care about the safety and that's great because again, it's that thing I want them to be safe, right? I want them to feel safe to tell me they didn't wash their hands. Why didn't they wash their hands? What are they feeling? There's definitely a cause there. And so for me, what I do is I don't want to address it at the moment. And I know that goes against a lot of the way people think because they're going to the common phrases, then you're condoning it and they're going to do it more in the future. But if you actually look how things turn out, the exact opposite is true when we do that, they do it more in the future because they know that they have to keep lying to be able to do what they want to do.
Laura: It's like a classic phrase, what we resist, persists.
Vivek: Yes, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. I mean for me when I was young, like in my early teen years, I went through something like three years, four years where I never brush my teeth because my parents would always push me to brush my teeth and they would come in, they would check and they would ask me and they would check and they would check the toothbrush and they would smell my breath and they would just so what I did was I would put a little toothpaste in the quarter of my mouth, I would put toothpaste on the toothbrush and rinse it off. And I would push slash water all around the sink and I would say I finished and they would come and check. Okay, good. But they're good. You brush your teeth and this is my, this is my rebellion, right?
Laura: Oh my gosh. I can just imagine little you doing this effort, some lies take. It would've been easier to brush your teeth. But there was something getting in the way. Yeah.
Vivek: That's the thing. And I did not want to brush my teeth, had nothing to do with the teeth. One of my sayings is the question isn't, how do I get my kid to brush their teeth? The question is, how do I get my kid to love their teeth? And I think it's similar with the hand washing. If they're resisting the hand washing, they ain't loving it, they don't understand the context for it, They haven't made the context something that they own that's important to them.
That matters to them, you know, and that's what I would like to work on with kids. Like how can I help them develop this healthy habits in a way that self-sustaining. I don't have to constantly be checking over their shoulders and they don't feel like they have to hide it from honestly that hiding it doesn't go away just like continuing the same path. It really does. Especially the continuing the same path that created in the first place.
Laura: Right now, It's small, it's washing hands but it grows its beers under the car seat. When team it gets bigger, it grows.
Vivek: Yeah. And so what I would do is I would in the moment I would really validate and connect, especially if that isn't how you've been doing because then they're like, oh this was different. My parents suddenly didn't push me away in the same way because that even just doing that once has an effect on the brain because it's new input. It's you know, there's like the thing that I normally have to guard myself against all of a sudden I don't and it's like this whole other way, the brain gets wired and you do that a few times and the kid starts to really trust that.
And then if they don't wash their hands and you can say okay, I can see you probably had a really good reason for not washing your hands. I'd like to hear about that. That's so interesting. I sometimes don't want to wash my hands also and I think that's a very natural thing, but sometimes not want to wash your hands. I'd love to hear about that. Maybe we can explore that and then what's happening is all of a sudden it's not scary for them to tell you they didn't wash their hands and and now that it's not scary to tell you they didn't wash their hands and they don't feel bad about the lie. Also because when they feel bad about the lie, like we said, it just persists.
Then you've created this whole environment and relationship of safety where you can actually explore why the washing of the hands is important without getting that resistance happening. And then you can really shift the behavior, You can really shift the choices. And maybe there's so many things that you can then creatively explore together will and they can tell you what they don't like about. A lot of it will come from the feeling of it being imposed upon them. So then maybe we collaborate on how can we do it in such a way that seems fun.
How can we do it in a way that seems meaningful? How can we do it in a way that has variety attached to it? Because there's a lot of ways to wash hands. You can wash your hands in the sink, you can wash your hands in the tub, you can wash your hands in a basin, living room, you can wash your hands with pink bubbles and you can wash your hands while you're putting stickers on the sink and you can wash your hands while singing a song and you can wash your hands while doing a dance, and you can wash your hands while I'm holding you upside down by your ankles. You know what I'm saying? Like there's so many ways that we can creatively brainstorm together and but it's hard to do that When the relationship to the issue and the relationship to us isn't at that point.
Laura: You know, I think it's really important to just pull out something because this was also beautiful. But the sense the feel I got, as I heard you talking about this was that this is not an emergency. This kid is going to be washing their hands for the rest of their life. They've got 90 years of handwashing ahead of them, that none of this is an emergency. And I know it feels especially with hand washing, I know it feels like an emergency right now because we're worried about germs and all of those things. There's this extra layer of living in parenting through a pandemic that's just there with this specific topic.
But I do think that many of us when we find the lie, when the light comes at us and we find it, we have our own stuff layered on it and it feels like an emergency. It feels like we've got to make sure they know that's not okay. We've got to teach them some lesson right now, right now in the moment, they need to make sure they know one, not washing your hands, it's not okay and to not lying about it is not okay. Like there's this urgency. I think that parents feel and I think, yeah, we all need to take a breath, None of this is an emergency.
This does not mean that they are going to be pathological liars when they grow up. It's quite natural that they don't want to do what they're told. Sometimes it's quite natural that you know there's lots of good reasons why a child wouldn't want to wash their hands or brush their teeth or you know, there's lots of reasons why they might hit their sister and then tell you they didn't. There's lots of reasons and lots of time to learn. Yeah, those things none of it's an emergency, you know.
Vivek: For sure. And I think that even if it is something that we do really want to teach them that feeling that's an emergency actually slows us down slows down the progress. It actually takes longer when we push and when we rush. So because the slowing down actually doesn't slow down the progress, it just slows us down. We're actually accelerating the progress by slowing down, which is kind of yin yang to think that way, you know, it's kind of can seem un intuitive on a surface level.
Laura: Yeah, Yeah, there's this analogy that I used to teach this, so if we're thinking about, we need to run a run one time around the track, right for super out of shape, we haven't run since we did our fitness test in high school, you know, we're super out of shape if we go and we're like, we just got to get this over with as fast as we can and we sprint and we got halfway around and we're like, oh my gosh, like I just got to take a break right now, I can't go on. If we had kept a steady pace, we probably would finish faster, you know? Before anyway I interrupted you. I'm so sorry.
Vivek: No, no, no, it's great. We were both going to throw analogies at it. Yeah, I know, but I want to talk about that one too, because then when we get halfway around, we're also throwing up and we're sick and we have a cramp in our stomach, right, and we never see that finish line and then we have to come back and try again and when we come back and try again, if we want full tilt again, we're not building up the muscles and the endurance that we need, you know?
Laura: And later on all the thoughts like, oh, I'm so out of shape. Like, you know, we layer it all on ourselves, all the shame, all the blame. Exactly. It just gets in our way.
Vivek: So let's say what happens is I have been running the track that way and I have been and I'm still not making it to the finish line. So then you hear this podcast, you're like, okay, wait a minute, I'm gonna run around that track differently this time. So part of that is acknowledging what I have been doing and how I have been running and slowing down, saying, okay, I understand that I did that because that's how I was taught. That's what I was. I always thought I had to force myself, but now I've heard this podcast, I'm not going to run that way anymore.
I'm going to take us think about a different way of running, I'm going to take that slower pace that laura suggested, and I'm going to just jog and then you start to jog, but even then you're still not in shape, it's still going to be hard, you're not going to look like what you wanted to look like, but at least you're going to get to the end of the track and then you do it again and then you do it again and you slowly build up the capacity and this is the thing with dealing with those feelings of emergency in a way that's non coercive and collaborative and connected, but you're always more effective, you know, and it's that thing, but do I believe that it's more effective? That's one of the first things, believing it, you know, if you don't believe it's more effective, you're not going to really try.
So let's first start with that. Yes, I'm going to believe that it's more effective to slow down and then recognize that it's going to be clumsy for a while, it's going to be difficult. I'm going to have that tendency to suddenly run again so let me slow down, let me keep going this pace and trust that you're building capacity because after 3,4,5 times doing it that way, you're going to be able to jog around and you're going to notice the scenery and you're gonna enjoy the wind on your face and you're gonna see the birds flying by and it's going to become a pleasant experience. We're pretty effortlessly.
It really wasn't pleasant, you know? And so I think that there's a lot to be said for that analogy, like we can really take a whole different approach, but it takes time and if it takes time for us to learn this new thing makes sense for us to recognize it takes time for our kids to learn anything. Right.
Laura: Yes. Absolutely. Okay. Yes. So and the one thing I just wanted to touch on and we couldn't almost got there a few minutes ago and I want to circle back to it, I do want to talk a little bit about maybe well, two things kind of the difference between lying pretending creative imagination, kind of kidding, joking, all of that nuance.
Like I think that is worth a little bit of a conversation, but also I'd love to talk a little bit about the developmental stuff that is happening when kids start lying, because I actually, when I see kids starting to lie, it lights me up inside there, like there to, you know, approaching three is really when it starts happening and it just, it's evidence of growing brain and growing sense of self. And I don't know, do you feel that way about life?
Sometimes Lies are super triggering with my kids. Like, I just, you know, it feels like, Yeah, it feels it brings up all sorts of stuff from my own childhood, you know? But with little ones that's fascinating to me, you know, it's much less triggering and that's the power of a mindset shift, you know? Right? Yes.
So I mean in terms of developmental appropriateness, like lying happens because their brain is developing in a new way and they have discovered what they think in their head is separate from what you think in your head and that they can have thoughts that are their own and you can have thoughts that are their own and that you can't read their mind and so that the concept of a lie emerges.
Vivek: Yeah, it's very much connected to them forming a sense of themselves, their self image. Because kids, you said for a long time they don't recognize that they're separate beings. I mean at first they weren't right. Like physically, literally they weren't and then suddenly they are, but for a long time they don't recognize that they're separate from us. And then that separation slowly starts to occur. They slowly start to recognize themselves as individuals.
And yet even as they grow older and they become individuals, they're never really separate individuals. None of us are really completely separate individuals. We're all part of an organic system and integrated system. You know, you and I are in different parts of the world and we're talking over zoom, but still, we're not separate from each other, entire. So there is a sense of us that separate and a sense of us that isn't. And that's a very subtle thing to recognize also, you know, like what in our family, what we did was we nurtured the independence at the same time as we nurture the interdependence and interconnectedness, you know?
So that even now, like I said, my kids, Well, we're going to be 24 soon. Even now, we don't fully feel like we're separate individuals entitled. We have this deep connectedness that's always there, and at the same time, my kid is extremely independent, she has her own thoughts, she has her own feelings and that's something that I also really worked at nurturing. And so when kids start to do things like lie or hide things from us, which I think is a little different from lying, because lying is like, telling something that's directly opposite to what happened.
Holding things back is something that we're like, I'm keeping something to myself that I don't necessarily want to share or don't feel like it makes sense to share. There's so many different reasons they can do it, but all of them, I think, have to do with exploring the mind, how it works, exploring language and exploring reality, exploring communication and relationships and what those things mean. And we want to be their partners in that exploration, you know, I think this is one of the main things, you know, like I want to be my kids partner in that exploration, and even the parents that I support, I support a lot of parents in this journey, making the transition from traditional parenting to non course of collaborative parenting.
And even in there, I want to be their partner, I don't want to be an authority figure, nobody's going to listen to me with an authority figure, right? I want to be their partner, I want to see their humanity, I want to see their struggle, I want to see their growth, I want to be a partner with them and it's the same thing with our kids. And so when a kid does something like that, my eyes light up . I'm like, this is an opportunity, this is an opportunity for me to connect, this is an opportunity for us to grow together.
This is an opportunity to explore what's going on in the brain. I would always talking with my kid about how fascinating the brain is and how fascinating the mind is and look at how it works and look at how we perceive things and we can think things and we have opinions, what is an opinion, What's a preference? There's such interesting things, you know, and when we can explore those things, suddenly it's not so personal that we're watching together, even as kids grow up, we're watching together, we're watching our minds develop and it's a beautiful thing.
So yeah, I totally dig it when you say that your eyes light up when you, when you see something like that, because there's so much richness in those things. If we take it that way, if we take it from the spirit of wrongness, if we take in the spirit of, like you said the emergency, we have to fix this now or we're going to catastrophes and it's going to be the worst thing and our kids are going to lie forever, then there's a lot of trouble that it's going to happen.
Laura: Yeah, something like, as I was listening to you talk about this, there's this kind of this sense of openness, I think oftentimes when we hear like come from our kids, there's like this kind of contraction, we don't, that doesn't feel good. We don't like being lied to, We have all these slots about lying and I like the reframe of, you know that this is an opportunity, Here we go. Here. It is, this is it, this is our chance to get to know them better. We get to find out more about them. I get to that, that feels much looser, much less like a contraction. I think acceptance always feels a little bit better in the body, definitely resistance.
Vivek: Definitely. One of my sayings is relaxation is self preservation.
Laura: I love your little idioms.
Vivek: Me too, Me too. It actually came from, I'm a dancer and a martial artist and so I do a lot of physical stuff and I've been teaching both also for many years and in both of those arts, the dance I do as an improvisational dance form and we do a lot of lifts and a lot of flying all over the place and it's very, and there's no preset moose, you never know what's going to happen. And I remember there was a few years ago I was dancing with this guy And he had me up in his shoulders and was spinning me around and suddenly I slipped off and it's a long, he was like 6ft tall is a long way to fall and just like, and as I was falling, he was, he like caught me on his hip and then it caught me on his knee and it caught me on his ankle and kind of helped me to the ground.
So it wasn't as destructive as it could have been sometimes it asked, but after it was over, he said to me that I have dropped people before. I've never felt anyone be so relaxed during the descent. Everybody gets tense when they have that experience. And that's what I said to him. Yeah, because relaxation is self preservation but in order to do that, I mean I also have, you know, 30 years of martial arts training that I've overcome through training, I've overcome the instinct to tense up in those moments because it is a martial artist to if someone's throwing a punch at you and you tense up, you can't move as quickly, you're not going to make the right choice, your body's going to, you're going to get hit basically.
And so but if you're relaxed you can flow with the energy, you can flow at the moment and you can defend yourself and so in both of those situations, but it wasn't natural and both of those situations, I had to learn a new instinct. I have to train myself right? And I think one of the beautiful things about being human is we can actually choose the mindset we operate from. We can choose to act different than our instincts a lot of the time because a lot of the time our instincts are, you know, the revolutionary, their animalistic, they come from a past that doesn't necessarily exist anymore.
And as we understand more about how the mind works and how relationships work and how learning works. We can adjust the way we behave and the way we feel and the way we interact that's more in alignment with those things. Um and it's great we can train ourselves. So yes, even if we do tighten up when our kids lie to us, it's like tightening up when my students would first come into class, of course they're gonna tighten up. When you first grab them, we're trying or punch at them, right? They're going to tighten up and then we lead them through exercises on how to relax and how to receive it. And then we can do the same thing for ourselves that way. We can be much more effective in really connecting with our kids and guiding them through those difficult moments.
Laura: I love that. Okay, so I know at this point, you know we're kind of coming to the end of our discussion, but I know that their parents who are listening that are like but wait, what do I do then? You know, I know my four year old just hit her little sister and she said I didn't hit her or I've got two girls and they both have their own truths, our own realities about things that happened.
No, you said it first, know you were mean to me first, you know all of those things happened. What do we do when we're faced with the truth with the lower teeth? You know someone else's truth. What do we do in that moment where we saw you hit your sister and now you're saying I didn't hit my sister. What do we say? You know?
Vivek: Yeah. So for me, what I like to do with kids in those moments is I talk about the feelings, not the behavior and I think this is really important because even if they do admit that they hit them, like you can play them, even if you play them the video back and they say, okay, okay, I hit you haven't actually help this situation in any way.
You haven't helped them learn anything. You haven't helped them figure out how they might not want to hit their sister in the future. It's just not happening. But if we can let them know that we see their feelings. So this I didn't hit my sister. I said, oh, I can see that you were really frustrated in that moment and you're really upset. And then to the other kids, I can see that you really felt like you were hurt and you're really sad. I call it ping pong empathy. Well, we can give both kids, we can get both empathy.
Laura: in the therapy world. It's called multi directed partiality. But I like ping pong empathy. Way better.
Vivek: I really want things to be digestible, right? So that's why... that's why I love those phrases and we're not seeing anyone is right and we're not seeing anyone is wrong. And that's the key because as soon as one person is writing one person's wrong, we have an aggressor and the victim, even if we don't say the words were labelling the kids with our attitude and what I prefer to see as to struggling suffering kids that need a wise adult, a wise none of white as adults.
But a wise guide who can hold them in their emotional experience and help guide them through it because then they can see themselves, it's safe to see themselves. It's safe to evaluate because how many times do parents come and tell me well? But later on I can see that they feel bad and they tell me they feel bad about hitting their right because the feeling bad part when a kid feels bad on their own, that feeling of remorse is actually a beautiful thing because it's part of their inner compass, it's part of their conscience.
When I heard someone, I feel bad about it. I don't necessarily feel I am bad, but I feel bad about it because I don't want to hurt other people. And I think even little kids are like a lot of the time when kids hit and you say don't hit, They have what I call the laughed this laughter that comes out and they're like, do it again. I love to hit my sister right?
And this is so common that I actually have a name for. I just called the lab and I'm fortunate that the Facebook group that I admit you mentioned, gentle parents unite. It's also the Facebook group that I admin and we have a beautiful admin team and we have 77,000 people at the moment in that group. So for a long time I've been watching quite a large sample size and that laugh is one of the most common thing. And we can easily think that our kids actually want to hurt that actually what's happening is they're protecting themselves big this regulation to exactly.
Laura: I can't think of myself that way. So I need to think about myself some other way.
Vivek: Exactly. And when they calm down and they feel more regulated. I like that word, thank you. Then the feeling like, oh, I wish I hadn't done that comes to them. And that feeling I actually like to sit with my kids and I don't want to rush them out of that. I said, yeah, yeah. I can feel that you feel that way. Thank you for sharing that with me. I'm really glad you shared that with me.
You know, because then they have a chance to self reflect. I don't want to say seed. Then you should, you don't want to feel that way. You shouldn't hit your kid. I'm not gonna, shouldn't get your sibling. That's not going to help. But I just sit with him in that because then they can tune into that feeling more. But in the moment, in the moment I want to relate to the feelings. I don't need to tell them it's wrong in that moment.
Even if later on, I'll say, hey, you know where you really felt upset? That time? I could really see the felt upset and it's natural to feel that way. And you lashed out at your sister in that moment. It was really hard, you know? And I wonder how you feel about that. Even then, I'm not going to tell them it's wrong. You're going to see what.
Laura: They know what's wrong too. Even the littlest kids, you know, I don't want to hurt what they love. Yeah.
Vivek: You said that so beautifully. Yeah.
Laura: Don't they know they already know and if they didn't know they wouldn't be lying about it, you know, to Exactly we don't need to teach. I just that's the thing that they're lying. If they thought it was OK, they wouldn't be lying about it lying about because they already know. So there's no lesson that needs to be taught there. In my opinion, they already know.
Vivek: And the key for me is helping them tune into that intercompany. Yeah.
Laura: That's so different from shame. Shame is about I'm bad, I'm wrong sitting in a place of discomfort of having made a mistake with loads of just compassion for your imperfect humanness. Yeah, that's a skill. That's a skill of practice that most grownups are still learning. Yeah, for sure. For that space to our kids too.
Vivek: Which is why I... like I said earlier, which is why I always start with giving ourselves compassion, even if your kid lies and hits the other kids. It's weird to think about it. The first thing I do is I give myself compassion when I see that, you know, when I see one kid hitting another, the first thing I do is I give myself compassion because it helps me slow down and helps me more self aware. And then I engage with them from that place because if I'm giving myself compassion, that's what's going to flow out of me towards them.
Laura: That's what I teach too. We're so in sync on that. I think about compassion. If I want to be compassionate with my kids, I have to be a font of it. And so has well up within me from me to them. And so yes, I do a regular, I have a self meditation, a self compassion practice and to help me with this because a compassionate response is not my default. My default is blame and shame judgment, that's my default. That's what I learned growing up it is. And so I practice this outside the moment. And I have a, you know, whenever I'm doing a loving kindness meditation for myself, I always have my hand over my heart. So then any time stuff starts happening with the kids, my hand goes to my heart and it just reminds me, okay, we're okay.
Vivek: Beautiful.
Laura: None of this means that we're bad moms. None of this means our kids are bad kids. Yeah. Okay. And then we have way more resources available to us.
Vivek: Beautiful. I teach something called the Microsoft compassion and it's that exact same meditation but done in single moments throughout the day. Single talks throughout the day. Yeah.
Laura: I didn't know that. Yeah. You know, stopped at a red light. Great. Get cut off in traffic there. Loving kindness. Loving kindness to me. Loving kindness to you. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. I mean, I think if this is the mindset that we want, we want to view the world through the lens of compassion, we have to consciously pull that lens up over and over again and have a well, kind of just like with the running the track, it's exercise, its practice, right? And Oh yeah, okay. Well I feel like this was a great conversation around lying and that there's not an emergency with it, that it is a normal human behavior that there are shades of gray and we don't have to have black and white thinking around it. Yeah.
Vivek: And I just want to say, you know, for those parents who do have a strong value around it, I don't think that we're saying you shouldn't have a strong value around. Um, I think it's wonderful to have values and we want to pass them on to your kids and even in that case wrong, this is not the way to go about. It will be much more successful in passing on that value through modeling through gentle guidance through empathy and acceptance than you will in 100.
Like it's 100 to 1 then you will ever by using any kind of wrongness or rules or telling them how would you feel or okay, I don't trust you. I always want my kid to feel I trust them more. Even if they lied, I don't want to feel that they feel that I trust them and you'll get much further end and passing on that really important value by doing it this way, then you will the other way. It's so beautiful to take that approach.
Laura: I really appreciate you kind of putting that at the end. That we are not saying you have to give up your values, it's changing the way you impart those values. Yeah, beautifully said, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this time with us. I really appreciate it.
Vivek: Wonderful. I've had a great conversation. I was so great every time we interact Laura and I love this conversation it was still flowing and we really resonate. So I really appreciate it.
Laura: I always feel that way too. So thank you for spending this time with my community.
Vivek: Wonderful.
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All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.