028: Is It Okay For My Child to Experience Guilt and Shame?

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Many of our issues as adults can be linked back to circumstances or events in our childhood that led to some form of guilt or shame, where we were not able to process through those emotions in a healthy way. The echoes of these feelings touch our daily lives, affecting us and the people around us. Many experience guilt and shame as such negative emotions, it’s no wonder we want to go out of our way to help our children avoid these feelings.

There is a slight, but important nuanced difference between guilt and shame. Once we understand this difference, we can address these feelings from the correct perspective, helping our children work through their guilt or shame, so they don’t carry those things with them indefinitely. In this episode we talk about the origins of shame, the positive side of guilt, and how we, as parents and examples to our children, can begin to let go of these feelings for ourselves.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• Guilt is focused on the actions but shame is about identity.
• When you believe that you’re bad and that you do bad things, that belief will perpetuate that behavior.
• Looking at things objectively is a tool we can use as parents to help us have more control over the way we express our emotions.
• We have to be conscious of the story we’re telling ourselves about our child’s identity.
• One of the most powerful things you can do for your child is to set aside purposeful time to remind them of who they are.
• Recognizing responsibility is a skill that has to be learned.
• When you don’t feel like you’re not as good of a person because of what you’ve done, you have the freedom to act responsibly and to correct it.
• Guilt is a much better teacher than shame because it leads us to seek out responsibility.
• Sometimes, the things that bother us about our children are things that we feel shame about.

Show Notes

• 03:00 Ben: Rachel, can you give a simple definition for guilt and shame?
• 03:34 Rachel: Guilt is when a kid says, “I did something bad.” Shame is when a kid says, “I am bad.” They take on what they did as part of their identity.

Guilt is focused on the actions but shame is about identity.

• 04:00 Ben: Shame tells you that you are a person who does the bad thing, and this story perpetuates the behavior and makes it worse. When you believe that you’re bad and that you do bad things, that belief will perpetuate that behavior. It’s like saying, “Yes, you did this, because this is who you are.” That’s the story you’re telling yourself. Guilt tells you that you’ve done the bad thing, but this story helps you be responsible for the behavior and make it right. It does still point out that you did it. “Yes, you did this, and you can make it right.”
• 04:45 Rachel: It doesn’t change who you are.
• 04:49 Ben: I hope those definitions help. That’s going to be the foundation for what we talk about in this episode.

Developing a Healthy Relationship With Mistakes

• 04:56 As parents, how can we help our children have a healthy relationship with their mistakes, their misbehavior, to experience the right kind of emotion when it comes to those things? I want to start with our reactions. This is different from doling out a consequence. In the moment, the misbehavior is going on or has just happened. How do we react to that? Obviously, we want to be careful. Our facial expressions, our posture, and our tone can communicate to a child that we are disappointed or that we feel angry with them.
• 05:47 While it’s okay for us to feel our emotions, what the child experiences when they see the visible expression of those emotions is that their behavior is causing a disconnection between them and us. It feels almost impossible sometimes, but the more we can keep from having an outward expression as a reaction of our emotions, the easier it’s going to be for them to feel connected to us. That connection is going to be important in us being able to help them walk through that mistake, that failure.
• 06:41 Rachel: I’ve been trying to distance myself from what the boys are doing or the destruction they’re causing, almost like I’m an outside observer instead of somebody who owns this stuff.
• 06:58 Ben: Don’t hear, “You shouldn’t feel angry,” or, “You shouldn’t feel disappointed.” Don’t suppress your feelings. This is a great thing after the fact, after you’ve walked through it. You can say, “When this happened, I felt angry.” They’re going to look back and remember how you expressed those feelings. It feels so impossible sometimes, and for myself, 95% of the time, I feel like I don’t have any control over how I react in the moment. It’s something I want to work toward and improve on.
• 07:49 Rachel: To provide a little hope here, it’s not the end of the world if we don’t react the right way. One time, our oldest son was only six, and he was playing around in our laundry room, which is where I keep some bottles of essential oils. I use it with our laundry. He was being really rough, and I had warned him not to be rough in there because there are breakable things. Sure enough, he knocks down a whole bottle of really expensive essential oil. I stood there and looked at him and then I screamed this awful scream. I didn’t say anything—I just screamed.
• 08:31 It was right after our twins were born, and we were sleep deprived and all kinds of stuff. I felt like I had nothing left. I remember his face, and he took off running. He’s definitely a “flight” kid whenever there’s danger, and it was really bad. The important part of that was coming back and reconciling it.
• 09:06 Ben: Like I said, I have a 5% success rate with this practice currently. After the fact, we get an opportunity to reenforce our child’s identity, remind them that we love them, that their behavior isn’t attached to our feelings about them, and the worth we assign to them.

Looking at things objectively is a tool we can use to help us have more control over the way we express our emotions.

• 09:48 Be more objective and try to imagine yourself as an observer. You’re just making observations about facts. When you do feel emotions, one of the great things you can do for yourself is to be aware of what you’re feeling and then try to understand why you’re feeling that. In that instance, Rachel felt angry and desperate. She already identified that we had just had the twins and she was feeling overwhelmed. There may be something else going on.
• 10:28 When we’re trying to leave the house and our oldest son, like he does almost every single time, remembers as we’re walking out the door that he wanted to pack some stuff in his backpack, and we’re already running late, the anger I feel in that moment isn’t because of that. It’s because I don’t want to be late, and I don’t want to be late because I don’t want to disappoint somebody. I can trace it away from my child to the real root of that.
• 11:02 Rachel: Then you’re getting into your shame stories too. This is huge. If we’re willing to trace those reactions back, we can see where a lot of them come from. It’s a scary thing to do, but it’s a good thing.
• 11:21 Ben: Megan in the chat says, “I’ve gotten pretty good about not saying anything in reaction to the things that are done and said, but my face is very, very expressive. Any thoughts/tips on not having a facial reaction?” I want to be careful here, because I don’t want it to seem like you can’t have any kind of reaction. It can be healthy for our children to see us have emotional expressions on our faces, but we just want to be aware. When you react, you want to be aware of how your child receives that. Reinforce their identity and teach them through practice. They’re going to make mistakes all the time, so you teach them by consistently coming back and saying, “You know that I love you. You’re my child, and I’m so glad to be your parent, regardless of what you did.” Doing that gives you more room to be expressive.
• 12:41 Rachel: A helpful thing is to know what we’re thinking in that moment. It’s hard when we’re in our high-emotion moments, but it’s helpful for us to be aware of what we’re thinking. If the story we’re telling ourselves is, “Wow, he’s such a bad kid,” that’s going to come across. We have to rewrite that story into something that says, “He is a really good kid who forgot who he was for a minute, and he did something I didn’t want him to do. I still love him, but he needs to know that he has to make amends for this now.”

We have to be conscious of the story we’re telling ourselves about our child’s identity.

• 13:24 It’s easy, especially when we were shamed as kids, to fall into the mindset of, “He’s just a bad kid.” When we’re in our anger moments, we can’t always control the story we’re telling ourselves.
• 13:44 Ben: There’s a thing Rachel’s said before, and this is something you might need to repeat to yourself. That is, “When a child knows better, they will do better.” That knowing isn’t always understanding the rules, necessarily. Sometimes, the knowing is them remembering who they are. When they make a mistake, sometimes it’s pretty obvious that they’re not old enough to know better. I still need to teach them. Sometimes, it’s something where they really do know better, they’ve learned the lesson enough times, but in that moment they’re forgetting who they are and that they belong to a family.
• 14:41 Even though they know the rule, they don’t yet understand why the rule is important, which makes it easier to break. Telling yourself that in those moments is really helpful, because it causes you to dig a little bit deeper and say, “Why did they do that?” I can’t remember which book this was in, but I think it was Parenting Without Power Struggles where they talked about how, sometimes, we’ll do this thing to ourselves as parents where we say, “Well they should/shouldn’t do that.” The book encourages us to flip that around.
• 15:24 For example, when the twins keep getting out of their beds when they’re supposed to be laying down to take a nap, we always get onto them. They always get in trouble for getting out of bed—they should stay in their beds and they should go to sleep. Flip that around and say, “They should get out of their bed and break the rules, because not taking a nap when you don’t feel sleepy and you’re a three year old kid with all this energy and you’ve got another three year old kid in your room to play with is a lot of fun. There’s no reason to lay down.” Tell yourself the opposite story and try to understand it that way, because it can help those emotional reactions.
• 16:09 Rachel: It’s not bad for our children to see our emotions, but it’s important for us to be aware of the story we’re telling ourselves about the situation.

Our Response to Their Mistakes

• 16:26 Ben: This is different because our response is what we do after the fact to pick up the pieces and make things right. I want to talk about consequences vs. punishment. In our home, one of the values we have is that punishment doesn’t have a place because it’s not a useful tool in helping our kids learn the things they need to learn and grow beyond their mistakes and misbehaviors. Consequences, however, are a very useful tool. In almost every case, there is some kind of natural consequence that comes as a result of them making a mistake.
• 17:09 One of the examples is being goofy at the table. Our five year old will dance around and be silly, and we tell him beforehand, “If you do that, you might knock something over. This is not the appropriate place to behave that way because there are too many things that can go wrong.” The consequence he experiences from behaving that way comes when he does knock something over, and now he has to clean it up.
• 17:41 Rachel: If it’s milk, he doesn’t get another glass of milk.
• 17:44 Ben: “We’re not going to do that. I’m sorry you spilled your milk, but…”
• 17:50 Rachel: “That was your glass, and you just spilled it because you were being silly.” They go through seven gallons of milk every week.
• 18:08 Ben: That’s a natural consequence. In some cases, it’s not quite as obvious, and we may need to get a little more creative about assigning some kind of consequence. Sometimes it’s indirect. With our oldest, we’ve noticed that when he has his screen time for too long, he will be more hostile toward his siblings because he gets really focused on this game. We’ve said, “If you’re going to be hostile toward your brothers after you play your game, we’re going to have to cut back on your time so it doesn’t have that affect on you.” Sometimes, we’ve assigned a consequence that didn’t have anything to do with the offense, and our oldest has called us out on it. He’ll say, “What does that have to do with it?” I’ll ask him, “Okay, what do you think is a better consequence?” He becomes a part of that conversation with us.
• 19:20 Rachel: Sometimes, we’ll even give him a choice.
• 19:38 Ben: This is part of our reaction that we were talking about, but it’s also part of our response.

Make observations and objective statements.

• 19:47 We don’t make subjective value statements, like, “You’re such a bad kid,” or, “You’re so clumsy.” Those things are not objective statements.
• 20:00 Rachel: Things that point at them, like, “You were so silly that you knocked this over.” Just observe.
• 20:15 Ben: “You were dancing in your seat, and your foot hit the glass of milk and it fell all over the table.” That’s an observation. Speaking that way keeps us from assigning any self worth or value to what they did, and that’s really important.
• 20:44 Rachel: There are times when we want to say, “I feel angry that you want to be so silly at the table when you know what can happen.” It’s totally fine to say something like that, because you’re taking responsibility for your own emotions. You’re not pointing at them as a “bad kid.”
• 21:04 Ben: There is some nuance in there. If you say, “You make me angry when you do this,” then you’re putting the responsibility for your feelings on the child. Instead, say, “I feel angry when this happens.” We can’t always control the way that we feel. We can control the way we react. We don’t want to suppress or deny our emotions, but our emotions belong to us. The goal isn’t to try to stop feeling a certain way when certain things happen, but the fact that you feel a certain way in a certain situation is not the fault of the child. It happens to be a fact that you feel a certain way in a certain situation.
• 22:01 When you’re connected and your focus is on the relationship with that child, if they see that when they do something, you feel a certain way, and they don’t like that emotion for you, they might adjust their behavior because of that relationship and because of what they want for you. That’s something they can decide for themselves. You don’t force that on them. Don’t say, “I don’t want to feel angry, so you need to stop doing that.” It should be about the consequences, the relationship.

Responsibility

• 22:46 This is where guilt as an emotion and an experience can be really helpful and good. Guilt leads to responsibility. The definition of guilt is this—“The fact of having committed a specific or implied offense or crime.” It’s really cut and dry, “the fact.” This happened. I like that because there’s no room for identity in that definition. When guilt makes that statement and says, “You did this,” responsibility picks that up and says, “You can do something about this. You can make it right.” It’s not about value, but it’s about recognizing the fact and taking on the responsibility of knowing that you can make it right.

When you don’t feel like you’re not as good of a person because of what you’ve done, you have the freedom to act responsibly and to correct it.

• 24:01 Rachel: Our boys hit each other every other minute. Somebody’s mad at somebody, and somebody punches them in the face. Sometimes they laugh about it because it’s kind of funny to hear the smack sound on somebody’s face, but other times, somebody gets hurt and they’re crying. You can use guilt instead of shame. Shame would be an angry face that points a finger at a kid and says, “Look what you did to your brother! Don’t you feel bad about that?” Approaching that from a guilt place looks like coming in and observing.
• 24:43 “Hey, your brother is crying. I saw your hand hit him. How does he feel?” Ask them questions about those kinds of things. This is a tough one for us. Ben, especially, gets angry when they hurt each other. This is just a normal part of sibling relationships. I think back to me and my sister. We were girls, but I still remember punching her a few times. This house is full of testosterone and impulsivity. Approach that from a less angry place. If somebody’s really hurt, then of course we have to address the hurt one first. We should always address the hurt one first anyway, because otherwise the one who did the offense gets all the attention, and that can have repercussions.
• 25:48 Ben: In that instance, you’re inviting them to be an outside observer with you. You say, “Okay, let’s rewind the tape and watch and make observations about what happened.” Recognizing responsibility is a skill to be learned. Some children can learn it naturally, but many need to be taught and walked through that. How many adults have you worked with who were really bad about recognizing their responsibility?
• 26:35 With almost every single job I’ve had, and this is not just in the secular realm but even in churches, I’ve had coworkers who were really bad at taking responsibility. The root of that is, most of the time, shame. If they take responsibility, it means they’ve done something wrong. They’re afraid that means that they’re a bad person. They don’t want anything to do with that. It’s much easier to point the finger and protect my identity. Taking responsibility is an important skill.
• 27:26 Recognizing responsibility is one thing. When you seek out responsibility, it helps you to feel more powerful. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter whether you do something right or wrong in a situation. It gets more and more complex. It’s not just what you did, but sometimes, it’s what you didn’t do. Sometimes, it’s what you didn’t do that didn’t seem like a big deal, but because you didn’t do it, somebody else did this thing, and now it’s turned into this big explosion. It’s easy to point the finger at the person who seems like the most likely suspect for whatever it is that went wrong, but when we seek responsibility, we are actually more powerful in that situation.
• 28:15 We can say, “I may not have been the one who caused it to blow up like this, but what role did I play in it? In the future, how can I avoid that?” When we experience shame, we don’t get to go through that process. We never get to learn and grow from those mistakes.

Guilt is a much better teacher than shame because it leads us to seek out responsibility.

• 28:57 Terence said, “This is a skill I never learned and I’m still trying to figure out.” That sounds like something a responsible person would say. It’s something you continue to learn. The skill of recognizing and seeking responsibility is something you’ll continue to grow in, especially if you’re purposeful about it.
• 29:26 Rachel: If we’re not willing to examine our own shame stories and dig back into some of those, I don’t know that we’re ever going to come to a place where we’re completely comfortable doing that.

Shame From Other Sources

• 29:48 Ben: Sometimes, the shame our child experiences comes from outside the home, whether it’s with friends, the parents of their friends, a teacher or administrator at the school, or people who are teachers at the church. It’s important for us to keep an eye out for some of the signs that our child may be experiencing shame. Some of the signs may be that they don’t relate to us the same way they usually do and they seem a little bit distant. They may get touchy about something that, normally, they wouldn’t get touchy about. You might notice sudden change of behavior, that all of a sudden they’re acting like someone they’re not. They may seem depressed.
• 30:41 Their interests may shift rapidly. These aren’t all necessarily symptoms of this. It’s like when you’re sick and you have some symptom, so you look it up on Google and it says that you’re dying. Dr. Google says that if you have stomach pain, you probably have something terrible.

If you notice symptoms of shame, it’s worth investigating, and that’s why it’s so important to keep communication open.

• 31:15 Rachel: We have a pretty heartbreaking story about how we figured out that one of our sons was experiencing shame. It was our oldest son. He’s a very spirited and intelligent kid, above the level of his peers, and during his second grade year, which was last year, he was having a lot of trouble in school. He couldn’t really relate to people and was acting outside of who he was. He was putting his hands around his neck and acting like he wanted to choke himself, and he was saying things like, “I want to die.”
• 31:58 We set up a meeting with school administrators to talk about all of these things and hashed out in the meeting that he had wracked up 19 discipline referrals in 21 days or something, and we had seen nothing of that. Nothing came home, but when he would come home, he would say that he had a bad day. Sometimes, that would shift into, “I’m just a bad kid. I can’t do anything right.” We knew immediately that something was wrong, that something was going on that was telling him a story that was not true.
• 32:48 I was the one who was cornered at the school, because the administrators wanted to talk to me about one of the latest things that had happened. We had three of the kids home at the time because I was pregnant with our youngest, and I was trying not to pay attention to them but to pay attention to the administrators. The entire time, I could tell that they were talking about him as if he were this person they had built up in their minds. I knew, surely, that he wasn’t.
• 33:24 I went home and wrote a very long letter to all of the administrators and told them, “When all we see is a bad kid, that’s all we can expect.” A kid knows when you think he’s bad. We slowly had to walk him through this to a place where he could come back to who he was and feel certain of his identity. It took a lot of work. The signs for that were the way he was acting. He would say things to us sometimes like, “I just want to die. I don’t belong here.” That’s when you know there’s a really big problem and you need to figure out what’s going on there.
• 34:19 Ben: In that case, we recognized it. If we’d been purposefully paying attention, we probably could have recognized it a lot sooner. Once we recognized it, we opened up those lines of communication. It was a process. We had to meet him where he was, because he had already gone down that road of shame so far. We kept communication open and reinforced his identity, reminded him of who he was as much as we could, and we also got to the root of the shame. We had to work with him through that communication to discover where that story started and who was the original author.
• 35:14 Sometimes, the author of shame is not a person—it’s a situation. The person in the situation who maybe brought about those feelings maybe didn’t mean to give those feelings, but that was the story that was written and that perpetuated this belief and these behaviors, which reenforced this belief for others who were around him. You can see how it can snowball. Getting to the root of that was really important.

Our Kids are Watching Us

• 35:55 We’re an example to our kids. When we experience and act out of shame and our kids see that from us, they’re more likely to have the same kind of response to their mistakes and failures. They’re looking to us for how to react and respond to the things they do. They see when we make mistakes. We’re not as good at keeping that stuff hidden from them as we think.
• 36:28 Rachel: When we were going through that instance with our oldest, I remember the day the administrators caught me in the office and said, “We need to talk about Jadon.” I felt this immediate hot flush all over my body, because we had been in conversation about some of the things he was doing to himself, and I felt this immediate flush that I recognized as shame. Shame makes you feel weak in the knees. You break out into a cold sweat, because it’s got fear and discomfort in it. I recognized that one of my shame triggers is that I’m not enough. I’m not enough of a good mother to have a son who can do well in school.
• 37:23 Trace those stories back. I could have sat in that meeting and been defensive the entire time, and I know that part of me was for a while, but then I was able to breathe and tell myself, “This is not my fault. This is not a result of bad mothering or because he’s a bad kid.” When we try to tell ourselves that stuff over and over and we finally let it sink in, we can approach something like that from a place where we can think more clearly, see more clearly, and we’re able to help our child more.

Shame wants you to hide from trigger situations.

• 38:10 Ben: Maybe you had some kind of failure in the past or something that causes you to think that way. The story Rachel was telling herself was, “Maybe I’m not a good mother. Maybe I can’t handle this.” Where did that story originate? It’s a really difficult skill to learn, but one of the things that can help us as parents have a healthier relationship with the things in our past is, when we feel and recognize shame, we can make observations about the resulting behavior. We can make observations about our feelings. As an example, I’ve been eating a lot of junk food lately. That’s an observation.
• 38:59 I could feel shame about that, but then I would probably eat more junk food, because I’m trying to not feel my feelings of shame. I feel stressed and overwhelmed—that’s another observation. I have a lot of projects going on right now, which could be part of the problem. There’s more to that if I let myself dig a little bit deeper. What story am I telling myself? Why do I feel so overwhelmed? When I have too many things going on, I tend to shut down. Why does that happen? I’m digging a little bit deeper here.
• 39:41 I can’t remember a specific example, but maybe it came from several different instances. As a young man, I remember hearing that I’m not good at multi-tasking. I know that by the definition of multi-tasking, nobody can really multitask. You can only do one thing at a time, but it would be crazy to say that a person exists who only has one thing going on in their life at a time that they have to focus on. We are people who live in community, we interact with each other, and we have children, homes, cars, jobs, clients, etc. There’s always more than one thing to juggle and hold in your mind.
• 40:33 I’m saying this so you don’t get hung up on the multitasking thing. I totally agree that multitasking, when it comes to doing more than one thing at a time in a given moment, is not something that we’re capable of. Multitasking in the sense of having many plates spinning, like having a job and a family, and keeping up with those things, is something that we, as healthy adults, have to rise to the occasion of doing. That being said, maybe the shame in that situation is keeping me from even addressing the situation. I just feel shame, so I’m going to keep eating junk food and taking on these self-destructive behaviors.
• 41:26 That has an origin somewhere. Somewhere, I started believing this story that I can’t handle that, when the truth is, I am equipped with most of what I need to handle what may seem overwhelming. Whether that means I can make decisions about cutting things out of my life that I shouldn’t be focused on right now or that I can make decisions about strategies I can implement to make myself more efficient, I can work on problem-solving if I can overcome that shame. I can only overcome that shame if I can find that original story that I am believing.
• 42:15 Rachel: We have to be willing to dig into that. It’s really hard. I know that some of my shame triggers go way back. Somebody told me, “Big girls don’t cry.” Now, every time I cry in front of somebody, I apologize for it. I was told that repeatedly by my father. He didn’t like to hear crying.

Sometimes, the things that bother us about our children are things that we feel shame about.

• 42:56 One of the things that really bothers me when our boys do it is whining, and it’s because I have shame when it comes to whining. When I was a kid, I was shamed for whining. Kids do that.
• 43:13 Ben: Being shamed for something is different than somebody pointing out, “When you whine, it actually hurts my ears.” That’s an observation. It’s stating a fact. You can probably think back to things in your childhood where your parents probably didn’t know this stuff. They didn’t handle the misbehavior or the mistake in the right way, and they attached your identity to it. They might have made some kind of value statement about who you are because of what you did.
• 43:49 Rachel: It could be something as simple as, “Don’t be whiny.” I remember being told that as a kid, and I thought I was a whiny kid. I probably was. It really goes back to being aware of how we talk to our children. I believe that we’re all doing the best we can with what we have. Even when we’re searching our shame stories, we go back to the people in our lives who originally authored that story, and sometimes we have to go back into their story. I think of my dad, and I think of how he didn’t have a dad. He didn’t know what it was like to be a dad. It all makes sense to me. That helps us with our shame stories, too.

Tell a Different Story

• 44:50 Brene Brown is a shame researcher, and she just came out with a new book called Rising Strong. It was a fantastic book. Brene Brown has this thing she encourages people to do called a “stormy first draft.” It’s where we take any kind of misbehavior or wrong we’ve done and we record the story we’re telling ourselves. We were sitting in our church, and Ben’s a really talented worship leader and I enjoy leading worship with him. There’s a position available at the church, but nobody’s approached us. I was sitting there telling myself, “Oh my gosh, they don’t want us. They don’t like us.”
• 45:31 I started writing down my stormy first draft, because it was crap. People love us. We’re super awesome. It’s amazing, some of the things we can tell ourselves in those shame moments. I sat in church while the pastor was preaching and wrote my stormy first draft, because I knew that the story I was telling myself was not the real story. When we’re aware of those things, we can walk ourselves into a better place.
• 46:14 Ben: It’s such a funny thing, to think about it that way. We’re so used to telling the story, accepting the story, and moving on, never recognizing it for what it is. This is our subjective story about what’s happening to us. Even if that story is laced with fact, it’s important to recognize, “Where am I mixing facts with my own subjective ideas about this? Where am I mixing facts with my limited perspective?” Get into the habit of stepping back and saying, “What is the story today?” and reviewing that story and then be honest and say, “Okay, this story is probably crap.” It’s the first draft, and the first draft is always the one you throw away.
• 47:17 Rachel: The practice of this gets us conscious of our own shame triggers, which can help us in our parenting. Like I said, a lot of the things that end up bothering us or making us feel angry about what our children do have their roots in our childhood and some of the shame stories we have told ourselves.

Say No to “Mom Guilt”

• 47:45 Ben: There is something we have a tendency to do as parents, and moms especially do this. Have you heard of “mom guilt”?
• 47:52 Rachel: It’s not really “mom guilt,” it’s actually “mom shame.”
• 47:57 Ben: I think “mom guilt” rolls of the tongue better, and that’s why they use it. With all of the new information that’s coming out about child development and things you should be doing for your child, things you should stop exposing them to, life is so hard, and you feel like you have to make exceptions to these rules you have for yourself. You end up feeling shame about that. “I’m such a bad parent. I’m such a bad mom. I’m such a bad dad.” You have to stop doing that to yourself. You’re not a bad mother or a bad father—that is not who you are. What you did may not be in line with your values, but it may have been necessary for you to maintain your sanity.
• 49:06 Rachel: When I think of “mom guilt” and the way people use it, I think of it as the belief that we’re not doing for our kids what we want to do. It’s not necessarily something you’ve done. It’s something you haven’t done. That’s the way it feels. The root of that, at least for me, is that “I’m not enough.” That’s the story that I tell myself. “I didn’t spend enough time with my kids today. I missed part of their growing up years because I was working. I didn’t feed them as healthily as I should have today.” The root of all of that is that “I am not enough. I’m not a good enough mother. I chose work over kids today, and that makes me not a good enough mother.”
• 49:54 The “mom guilt” has it’s roots in shame, because one of the cornerstones of shame is that “I’m not enough.” I have a really fiery perspective on “mom guilt,” because I think culture does a really good job of making women feel shame because they’re not perfect, they don’t have everything together, and they don’t keep a perfect house and raise perfect kids. They don’t look perfect all the time when they go out of their house. I can get really bent out of shape about all this.
• 50:43 Ben: There’s such a powerful force. It’s not just culture. We can be guilty of doing it to each other. It’s from person to person, those conversations where a mom says, “I bought grass fed beef, and that’s what I’m feeding my kids now.” The other mother is sitting there thinking, “I can’t afford grass fed beef. Maybe I should stop buying beef. My kids need to have protein, so I guess I have to feed them the bad stuff. Does that make me a bad mother?” There are all of these forces working toward making you feel that shame. Fight that, reject it! The truth is, you’re doing the best for your child with what you know and what you have.

We need to write a different story.

• 52:01 Rachel: If that means that we have to get out a journal, talk about the story we’re telling ourselves, and turn it around to how much we have given up for our children and how much we have done for them, then that’s what we need to do. It makes it real. Saying, “I need to not feel guilty,” just perpetuates it. If we can really get down and dirty with all of that and turn it around to something good and beautiful, that’s how we can leave it all behind. If everybody were doing that, what a different parenting world we would live in!
• 52:50 Ben: We would probably stop doing it to one another, and we would probably change the culture.
• 52:56 Rachel: For now, the best thing we can do is, whenever we come in contact with people who are good at shaming, think, “They’re doing the best they can with what they have,” and let it roll right off. We don’t have to have shame anymore because we’ve rewritten those stories.

Teaching the Difference Between Guilt & Shame

• 53:21 Ben: Charla asked, “What’s the best way to make sure kids learn the difference between guilt from the consequences of something they did and the feelings of guilt for something they shouldn’t need to feel guilty for, like the kind of guilt moms feel all the time?” This is pretty much what we’ve been talking about. The word we use instead of “feelings of guilt” is “shame,” the identity piece. We’re teaching our kids, in part, by reenforcing their identity as much as we can, and helping them understand that when they do make mistakes, that doesn’t affect how we love and support them.
• 54:05 That’s one way to teach them the difference between shame and guilt and to help them not take shame on. Also, we can teach them responsibility and make observations instead of value statements, helping our children see that, when they make mistakes, it’s okay, and they can be responsible and make those things right. Doing that consistently can help them understand the difference between the two. There was a similar question from Megan, “Is it important for kids to know the difference between guilt and shame?” It absolutely is important, but it’s not going to come from sitting down and having a conversation and showing them the definitions of those two. It’s going to come from the practice of working through those things.
• 54:59 Rachel: When our son was experiencing the shame from school, he would come home every single day for probably six months, and we had to do counseling and all kinds of stuff. Every day, before I dropped him off at school, I would tell him, “Remember who you are. You’re strong, you’re courageous, you’re kind, and you’re my son.” Every day, we had to say, “What you do does not make you who you are. Who you are is never changing.” It was speaking life into who he was instead of letting that shame bring death.
• 55:47 Ben: Have you seen that video yet of a teacher who talks to his special ed students before class starts? He spends ten minutes complimenting them. This is similar to me in nature. Don’t compliment your kids to feed their ego, say, “You’re my son,” or, “You’re my daughter, and I’m proud to be your parent.”

One of the most powerful things you can do for your child is to set aside purposeful time to remind them of who they are.

• 56:40 Rachel: When you say, “You’re my son,” you communicate that he is loved no matter what just because he’s our son.

Shame Cycles

• 56:50 Ben: Terence asks, “If my child keeps punishing himself for something he did wrong, how do we get him to move past it in a positive way?” It sounds like something we’ve experienced with our kids before, where there’s this shame loop going on. The only way to break that is reenforcing their identity, and sometimes you have to be more persistent with that story than the story they’re telling themselves. You’ve got to drive that story home, and then point them toward whatever mistake it was and say, “It’s okay that you did this wrong, and it’s okay to admit that you made this mistake and to be guilty of that mistake.”
• 57:48 I feel the distaste with that word “guilt” because it’s been associated with shame so much, but it really is just the fact that the child committed this offense. It’s a fact. When you can accept that fact and you realize that it doesn’t affect your identity, you can take responsibility for it and make it right. You are powerful to do that. You’ve got to be so persistent with those stories.
• 58:21 Rachel: When we’re adults and we’re caught in a shame loop, the best thing we can do is identify those shame triggers and explore the story that we’re telling ourselves. We have to be willing to walk into that crap. It’s stinky and messy.
• 58:49 Ben: Sometimes, it’s easier to leave it and not to get into that stuff. When somebody breaks a bone and it’s not set correctly, I don’t know how much they still do this, but it it’s going to heal back and cause problems, sometimes they’ll break it again so they can set it back the right way. When you dive into those places where you feel shame and try to find the root of that, it can feel very much like re-breaking a bone. Something that’s already done a little bit of healing but has left you with a limp, it’s like breaking that again and experiencing some of that pain again so you can set it back the right way. Don’t go through that alone. If you can, find people who will walk through that with you.
• 59:56 Rachel: Or go to a therapist, if you need to. There is no shame in needing extra help, whatever that looks like.

Advocate For Your Child

• 1:00:11 Ben: Bryan asks, “How do you deal with others unnecessarily shaming your child for something they shouldn’t feel guilty for? How can you tell, and when should you intervene?” This is interesting. We kind of answered that, but we didn’t go this far. When you get to the root of it and you discover where that story originated, it’s within your rights as a parent to approach the person from whom that story originated and set the story straight, not in a bullying way. Say, “This is the story my child is believing about himself because of this situation, and this is not a true story, and it needs to change.”

It’s within your rights as a parent to intervene in a situation where your child is not powerful or influential enough to do that for themselves.

• 1:01:17 Rachel: For us, that looked like me being up in that school every single afternoon, telling them, “This is the story of who he is. He is not a bad kid.” I was advocating consistently, I wasn’t just doing it for my son. I was doing it for other people’s sons who maybe don’t have the time to do that. When an administration is willing to see a kid as a bad kid, that needs to be changed. I wasn’t just doing it for him, but for the other kids who were “bad kids.” I wrote letters, I sent stuff to school board members—all kinds of stuff. Our son had to change teachers. We’re in a much better place than we used to be.
• 1:02:13 Ben: Even still, that environment is not perfect. You have a lot of control over your own environment, but you don’t have control over the school environment. There’s still a lot of work that has to be done. At the very beginning of the school year, we got a letter from the principal outlining a discipline plan that they’re implementing for all of the students. There were some good things about it, but built into it, there were things that would point children to a false identity for themselves based on their behaviors.
• 1:02:53 There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. You’re not always able to shape that environment and protect them fully from those things. Where your child needs help, needs somebody to come in and advocate for them, you as the parent have the right to do that. Eventually, hopefully, your child gets to a place where they’re taking on that skill for themselves. They’re able to recognize the false stories, and they may still have to put up with some crap from people who don’t get it. At least they’re not telling themselves a false story, because they’ve done the work of learning those skills, learning what they should take responsibility for and what’s true and what’s not true.