A parent writes to Janet that she’s alarmed and heartbroken about the wedge that’s developed between her and her 4-year-old son, “a very sweet, genuine, kind little person,” due to his increasingly unkind, hurtful behavior. This mom feels she’s tried everything and yet her son continues to hit, kick, pinch, scratch, and run away from her and her partner. The boy also makes threats like, “I’m going to punch you,” sometimes following through. This mom suspects that two situations may be causing her son’s behavior: “His sister is 18 months and speaking in short sentences, which I’m sure is a momentous change for him;” and “he is embroiled in ongoing conflict with two boys in his mixed age Montessori class. I say conflict, but it might be bullying.” She’s at a total loss and hoping Janet can offer her clarity and perspective.
Transcript of “Mean Kids”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
Today I’m going to be responding to a note I received from a parent. She’s concerned about these mean behaviors of children at her son’s school and how this is affecting him and his behavior with her at home. She feels heartbroken. She doesn’t know what to do for her son and how to handle what’s going on when he seems to be taking his feelings out on her.
First I’d like to start with this note I received. This parent says:
Dear Janet,
I’m writing to you on my phone in the dark from my bed while on family vacation, desperate for help. I’m terribly stuck in a heartbreaking dynamic with my little boy, and no matter how much I re-listen or reread, I can’t break out of it. I’ve started letters to you so many times over the last four years since my son was born and never sent them because we’ve always been able to work it out. I’ve read your books, listened to almost every podcast, listened to your audio tapes, followed your social media, and have taken your online class. Since becoming a mother I’ve tried to absorb as much of your teachings as possible, because they work. And they have worked for us beautifully, until now.
My son is exceptionally bright, especially with math and language. This makes him a lot of fun. He’s been a very sweet, genuine, kind little person who listens very well since he was nine months old, is actually pretty reasonable for a small child, and is beautifully thoughtful about the world. But lately our world has turned upside down as new unsettling behaviors are emerging that are, frankly, blowing my mind and leaving me at a loss.
Two things are happening for our son right now. His little sister is 18 months and speaking in short sentences, which I’m sure is a momentous change for him. The second is that he is embroiled in ongoing conflict with two boys, five-and-a-half and almost five years old, in his mixed-age Montessori class. I say conflict, but it might be bullying.
For six months to a year now, my boy’s been coming home imitating these boys, mostly one I’ll call Sid. One bucket of behaviors is physical: hitting us, kicking, stepping on our feet to hurt us, pinching, scratching, running away. We dealt with some of these when he was two, but with consistent, kind, firm boundaries, they all subsided. Now we can’t shake them. Sid’s parents are divorcing and he’s been acting out at school, threatening to hurt children, “punching” them, spitting, using language like “kill,” and creating games that involve chasing, fighting, and throwing in jail.
My son is quite taken with this boy’s behavior and first started imitating the way he eats. I tried to be chill about the eating because I remember you said imitation is normal and a sign of developing empathy. But then our son would come home very surly and angry at us in an unfamiliar way. He’d say he was going to punch us in the face or he’d actually punch us. I’d do the, “Whoa, buddy, I can’t let you hit me. It seems like you’re showing me you’re angry?” I dropped the “I can’t let you” and tried, “Oh wow, you’re showing me you’re angry. Yeah! You’re so angry, you want to punch me,” or “Oh, I see you’re using those angry words.” And I’d try to respond with an energy and tone that matched his but was dialed down. It sometimes works in the moment, but the cycle continues.
Things escalated one day after dinner when everything seemed fine. We were headed upstairs to play before bed, just the two of us. He didn’t want to pick up the food he threw on the floor and ran into the other room. I went to help him get upstairs. I was in a good mood, had taken the food thing lightly, and entered the room from a playful place, and he kicked me. But it wasn’t the kick that did it. It was this face he was making. It was this cringey fake smile, and he was sort of rolling his head around slowly. He wouldn’t look at me. It sounds silly, but it wasn’t. It was intensely communicative, almost like a display of disgust. I was confused, not understanding what was happening.
The behavior continued upstairs. I don’t remember what I did, but eventually it came out that Sid had chased him and pushed him down that day and that Sid did the smiling-while-being-mean thing. My son was telling me about it, but then withdrawing again and making these weird faces. Something just struck me and I started crying. I think in that moment it’s because I was afraid my son was more hurt and bothered by this child than I had realized and that I hadn’t kept him safe. But this may have alarmed my son and further alienated him.
All of this behavior is continuing, with new behavior almost daily that is coming from this boy and the other boy. As validation, we were at a birthday party for a girl in his class and I saw her doing a “Sid thing.” She invited my 18-month-old to touch a pretty party favor bag, saying again and again, “Do you want this?” When my daughter reluctantly went to take it, she snatched it back and said, “Nope, you can’t have it!” and walked away. My son did that to me today, asking me if I wanted to spend time with him and then revoking the invite. I said, “Oh, that’s a so-and-so thing. Yes, I saw her do that to B. at the party.” My son said, “Actually, that’s a Sid thing.”
Everything between us has gotten very messy now. Now, he often is very angry at me when he sees me, runs away from me, says he doesn’t want a hug. He frequently speaks to my husband and me in a very rude tone. He gets really upset over small things and sort of fake cries. He hits and kicks. He’s doing a lot of baby talk. He acts out in public only occasionally, he behaves well at school, so I’m grateful he feels safe with me to let it out, but I’m all over the map with this behavior. Sometimes I’ll say, “Oh, I see you’re that angry guy right now, yeah?” or “You’re being that Sid guy?” Other times I’ll say, “I don’t want you to speak to me that way.” Still others I say, “This is unacceptable.” I’ve talked about how in our family it’s important to be kind to one another. I’ve expressed empathy with wanting to hit or hurt or act out when you’re mad or sad or jealous. I’ve tried just loving him through it. None of it works long-term, and a lot of it gets us stuck more and more.
And this kid will not open up and talk to me about his feelings anymore. When he ran away from me at pickup on a rainy day, I didn’t chase him, but sort of said, “Hey buddy, what’s going on?” He told me he just really wanted to run. So we made a plan for him to run in circles in the mud, which was away from cars, while I put his sister in the car. Great, but that only works 5% of the time.
I’m also doing the thing where I bring up the Sid issues and the fact that his sister is more demanding now during a safe, quiet, together time. Trying to, in a low-pressure way, lay the groundwork for him to open the floodgates for these feelings then or at a later date. But he’s very avoidant. If I ask him directly, “It seems like you’re angry at me, honey. It’s okay to be angry at me. Can you tell me about that?”, he’ll look away from me, wiggle away, and say, “I don’t know,” to every question or start whispering very quietly under his breath or say something that doesn’t make sense. I’m worried that my intense reactions have unsettled him and made him feel afraid and ashamed. He’ll do a very fake nonchalance act that makes him seem like a teenager, not a four-year-old.
I’m not ready for this wedge. I want to protect my relationship with this precious being who’s only four years and three months old. I already feel like I’m losing him. I can’t get perspective on this. How serious is this situation at school? How can I repair with my boy if I’ve made him feel unsafe with me? How do I hold boundaries around this behavior? Can you please help me see it, and him, more clearly? My perception is totally clouded with fear, worry, and simply being aghast, and I’ve lost all perspective.
I wanted to respond to this one, first of all, because she brings up so many themes that I experience in myself and a lot of parents. One of them is that she really has a very good sense of what’s going on here intellectually. She has it in her mind. She does understand, but she’s not letting it be a part of her, she’s not understanding this in her heart. And therefore she’s not quite where her boy needs her to be for him to be able to move through these behaviors more quickly, with that sense of safety that I know this mother wants for her child and we all want for our children, to feel safe with us. He’s showing that he does feel very safe with his parents, all the signs are pointing to that. But she can help him not have to keep bringing these up and not having it last so long and getting so escalated by really seeing with her heart what she already knows objectively. I’m going to explain what I mean by that.
I also wanted to respond to this because I think I can do what she asks here. She says, “Can you please help me see it, and him, more clearly? My perception is totally clouded with fear, worry, and simply being aghast, and I’ve lost all perspective.” So I do believe that I can help this parent see more clearly and get more perspective, which I think will be all that she needs. Because she does have a very good relationship with him, clearly. Now, I don’t have a magic wand to make this all go away and change, unfortunately, but I believe I can offer her this perspective that she’s asking for.
The first thing I want to say is that children are very good at this: they offload. They offload feelings, experiences through these kinds of behaviors that this family’s experiencing right now. Which I know are not ideal, and obviously there needs to be boundaries and all of that. But I recommend seeing this as this wonderful thing children do. They don’t let things fester and feelings and fears hang around and get distorted into all these different things. At this young age, they offload it right away. And that’s what he’s doing. The kinds of things they need to offload are when it’s challenging, when it’s different, when it’s scary, when it’s disturbing. Those are the things that they need to get out of their bodies, offloading them to the people they trust most—their parents. And you’ve heard me say here, probably, that that’s why I love working with young children, because they’re so clear in this. And if they’re showing these behaviors, you can know that they’re offloading some feelings or offloading something they’ve experienced, sharing it, getting it out of their body. So that’s what this boy is doing, I believe.
What she says about him is that he’s exceptionally bright. “This makes him a lot of fun. He’s been a very sweet, genuine, kind little person who listens very well, is actually very reasonable for a small child, and is beautifully thoughtful about the world.” So what is all that saying? He’s a sensitive character, he feels things deeply. And he’s also, as this parent notices, probably feeling off-balance with all these exciting developments that are happening in his sister. Developments that I imagine don’t go unnoticed by his parents and all the other people his family’s in contact with. She’s saying sentences, she’s clever. So yeah, that’s a little scary, right? It’s a little unbalancing. And that makes him even more vulnerable to what’s going on at school. Which I believe is the key issue that’s happening here, as this parent seems to know too.
Enter these two older boys. There’s maybe a year age gap at most, but age gaps are more impactful in these early years. So of course, these older boys, they’re going to be a big influence. And she says, “Sid’s parents are divorcing and he’s been acting out at school, threatening to hurt children, ‘punching’ them, spitting, using language like ‘kill’ and creating games that involve chasing, fighting, and throwing in jail.” Any one of those behaviors would be disturbing on its own for a young, impressionable child, but all together, this is a lot for him to try to handle and figure out. And the offloading makes perfect sense. He’s got a lot to offload just being in this situation with these children.
I remember my son at four getting fixated on the idea that he might go to jail. I’m not sure where it came from, I was trying to figure it out. It could have even been Curious George, which has some of that in the books, believe it or not. Or maybe it was someone at his preschool, because he was grouped with older kids like this boy. But there was no convincing him that he wasn’t going to jail. And at some point I just had to start holding space for him to feel that. Ah, you got this idea that you could go to jail, that’s so scary. And then of course something like, I promise I will always keep you safe. But allowing him to share that.
Now this little boy, we could see it as he’s doing a beautiful job with this offloading, which will look like this need to repeat and imitate the behaviors as they’re coming up for him. All these behaviors he’s absorbed and had to try to make sense of. They don’t make sense to him, and this is likely, I’m imagining, the first time this boy has been exposed to kids behaving in these really unkind ways. What is this about? What’s going on here?
And the interesting thing is that those kids at school, they’re also offloading. They’re offloading feelings and perhaps behaviors shown to them by very influential people in their lives. Most likely parents, unfortunately, who maybe in Sid’s case aren’t giving him the safety he needs to process and offload all the grief and loss he’s experiencing due to his parents’ divorce. Because that’s the thing, kids are resilient and they can handle just about anything, if they have safe adults who will allow them to offload their feelings around it. And that’s why I hope this parent will proceed without fear, knowing that she can do this. This is where I want to circle back to her. This isn’t a crisis, this is a need to offload. And when we can bring a sense of safety and acceptance to his experience, this too shall pass.
If I were her, I would reach out to the school with my concerns and my belief that there needs to be more supervision if possible, so that this little boy doesn’t have constant exposure, even if he seems to enjoy these boys. Because for children with their peers, especially when it’s an older, influential peer, and even more so if it’s their parents, when these people have unkind or unpredictable or puzzling behavior, it can be like when we’re watching a scary movie or there’s a scary event in the news that we’re exposed to that’s making us so uncomfortable, but still we can’t look away. That’s what happens with kids.
It’s that perspective that I feel this parent doesn’t quite have. She understands it intellectually, but it’s not in her body and heart. And when it is, she will see this is not as hard as she believes it is. It’s not complicated. And it will help her feel close to her boy again and him to feel close and safe with her.
This mom says, “My son is quite taken with this boy’s behavior and first started imitating the way he eats. I tried to be chill about the eating because I remember you said imitation is normal and a sign of developing empathy. But then our son would come home very surly and angry at us in an unfamiliar way. He’d say he was going to punch us in the face or he’d actually punch us. I’d do the, ‘Whoa, buddy, I can’t let you hit me. It seems like you’re showing me you’re angry.’ I dropped the, ‘I can’t let you,’ and tried ‘Oh wow, you’re showing me you’re angry. You’re so angry you want to punch me,’ or ‘I see you’re using those angry words.’ And I’d try to respond with an energy and tone that matched his but was dialed down. It sometimes works in the moment, but the cycle continues.”
This is where I have the sense that this parent is trying at something that she doesn’t really feel and believe. She’s trying to say the words, she’s trying to get the right tone. And that will only take us so far as parents. That’s why you’ve heard me say that I’m not a fan of all the scripts that are given. Scripts are only helpful as an example, but if our heart’s not there, if we’re not feeling it, it’s just not going to work in a sustainable way. It’s not going to get us what we want, which is for our child to feel safer and therefore the behavior eases. And it’s also a lot of effort for us. It’s frustrating. How do I say this? Oh no, I just said that word and I shouldn’t have. None of those words matter, what matters is what we’re feeling.
If I was going to ask this parent questions, the first thing I would ask her is, When you say those things, when you respond in those ways to your son, what are you feeling then? What does it feel like for you? Because what will help is for us to feel genuinely, Oh whoa, this is not my boy. There’s something going on here. All this effort that she’s putting in is so commendable, but I have the sense there’s something getting in the way of her really being open to why her son is suddenly doing this stuff. I can’t say what that could be for her, but a lot of things would make sense, right? It’s scary behavior. It’s intimidating. It’s not something most of our parents would ever have allowed us to do. But all those things are getting in the way of what we need, which is that curiosity, from a place of being on our child’s side, on our child’s team. It’s curiosity that stems from trust, really. Trust in our child as a good person, that good person we know, who’s very thoughtful about the world, who’s clearly got to be going through something really challenging.
And then when she realized what he was being exposed to, I would bring empathy for that in right from the beginning. So instead of just saying, “Ah, that’s a Sid thing,” think, Whoa, that’s some scary, uncomfortable stuff you’re saying or doing. Is that coming from Sid? Ah, that’s not okay of him. I’m really sorry you’re going through that. I can’t let you do it to me, but I see you’ve got experiences you need to share. If Sid’s doing that, that’s not okay. It’s not okay for anybody. And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still like him, but please know that none of what he’s doing is about you. It’s about him being quite miserable right now. That’s what makes kids act like that. Do you feel like you can handle this? It’s got to be hard, my love. I’m not saying to say those words, but have that kind of attitude. Because, again, this parent understands all of this. She’s put all the pieces together, she’s just not feeling the whole yet. And when she starts feeling it and speaking from that place to her son, responding from that place, that’s when she’ll be able to help him and get rid of what she calls “the wedge” between them. And when he made that scary face that she was very disturbed by, understandably, Yikes, that’s some disturbing stuff that you’re getting from him. I’m sorry, baby. I’m here for you.
And she says, “This kid will not open up and talk to me about his feelings anymore.” She talks about how he ran away at pickup and she didn’t chase him, but just said, “‘Hey, what’s going on?’ He told me he just really wanted to run, so we made a plan for him to run in circles, but that only works 5% of the time.” Yes. Understanding what this boy’s going through, feeling quite overwhelmed with all that he absorbs from these children, all he knows is that he wants to run. He doesn’t know anything beyond that, he doesn’t know what’s going on for him. All he knows is, I’ve just got to run some of this out. So I don’t think he’s holding back with her, I think he’s telling her exactly what he knows.
And then she said she asked “Can you tell me about that?” in reference to his anger, and he said he has no idea. And I’m sure he doesn’t have an idea. The thing is, I don’t really believe this is anger, but more like fear that’s expressed as anger. A lot of fear, it’s so uncomfortable what these boys are doing. And he’s in this scary movie with them all day at school. She asked, “Can you tell me about that?” She said, “He’ll look away from me, wiggle away, and say ‘I don’t know’ to every question or start whispering very quietly under his breath or say something that doesn’t make sense.” Yes, so he can’t make sense of what’s going on with him. That would be a lot for even the brightest, most intuitive child to make sense of. Especially when he kind of feels he’s quite wrong for being like this, that blocks him, just as it blocks us to what is going on with him. When we see it as this icky behavior, Cut that out!, and they feel that about themselves, they’re not going to be able to go beyond that. So yeah, I can imagine the whispering to himself and saying things that don’t make sense. He can’t process it, and he’s still so in it.
This is where she says, “I’m worried that my intense reactions have unsettled him and made him feel afraid and ashamed.” And I would love to take any fear out of that on this parent’s end and just say yes. Yes, this is her heart telling her, right there, how to reach him. And she can do that just by seeing this and then responding to him—with all of those limits still on his behavior—but with much, much more openness, curiosity, and understanding. There’s no need to worry about this when we do that.
She said, “He’ll do a very fake nonchalance act that makes him seem like a teenager, not a four-year-old.” This one goes right to my heart because the sadness in that, right? That we’re faking nonchalance because we’re kind of falling apart inside, so we do the opposite on the outside. That’s what little kids do, they’re so obvious in that way. He doesn’t feel nonchalant about it and he doesn’t want to have to fake nonchalance with people that he needs and loves more than anything in his world. That’s not him right there. That’s him trying to hold it together, very sad and afraid underneath. Seeing underneath to that is how to remove the wedge and reach him.
And then this parent also asked, “How do I hold boundaries?” Don’t try to put boundaries on the words. I would see those as windows inside of him, to be curious about. Instead of “You’re angry,” maybe something like, “This boy here is saying things that don’t sound like my son, telling me you feel like hurting me. It must be so hard to hold that inside you. Don’t worry, I’m not going to let you hurt me, my love.” And when kids tell us they’re going to do stuff, it is this golden communication that means that they really don’t want to do it. They just want to be seen and heard as on the verge of doing that. And the exact response they need is, You want to hurt? Don’t worry, I won’t let you hurt. But that must be hurting you to want to do that. Don’t worry, I’m not going to let you hurt me.
She says, “I’m also doing the thing where I bring up the Sid issues and the fact that his sister is more demanding now during a safe, quiet, together time. Trying to, in a low-pressure way, lay the groundwork for him to open the floodgates for these feelings then or at a later date. But he is very avoidant. If I ask him directly, ‘It seems like you’re angry at me, honey. It’s okay to be angry at me.’” Again, so much positive effort on the part of this parent. Seeing this more clearly and as something that’s not a big, scary thing, as she worries it is, but something that actually makes a lot of sense and is very healthy will help her to maybe say something instead, in these quiet moments. Like, “You’ve been behaving in ways that I know aren’t like you. I just want you to know I love you and I will do everything I can to help you feel safe. You are always safe with me and loved by me.”
I really hope some of this helps. Again, I wish I had a magic wand, but there’s a greater magic actually, that we all have, and that’s seeing beyond the icky things that are happening with our child on the outside to what our child is offloading here. And in this case, there’s a lot. This boy has safe people to do that with. So for that, he is very, very, very blessed.
Thank you so much for listening. We can do this.
