Good Inside with Dr. Becky - Revisit: Is It Okay To Quit?

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

This is a repeat of an earlier episode. Whether it's sleep-away camp, soccer team, or piano lessons the decision to let your child just "quit" can be a tough choice to make. You question: did you do the right thing? Should you have pushed them to stick it out? Will this be an indicator of how the rest of their life is going to go? Deep breath, we are all in this together. In this episode, Dr. Becky talks it through with a mom who is questioning her decision about summer camp. Is it more important to have them stick to their commitments or better to prioritize our relationship with them?Our podcast feed has gotten a little unruly, so in an effort to curate it for you, we are picking a few of our must listen episodes from the back catalog for you to enjoy. We will continue to rotate these episodes as the season unfolds. And as always, for more parenting scripts, resources, and full access to the entire podcast catalog visit goodinside.comJoin Good Inside Membership: https://bit.ly/3q3KHMMFollow Dr. Becky on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbeckyatgoodinsideSign up for our weekly email, Good Insider: https://www.goodinside.com/newsletterOrder Dr. Becky's book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, at goodinside.com/book or wherever you order your books.For a full transcript of the episode, go to goodinside.com/podcastToday’s episode is brought to you by SEED: Dr. Becky is someone who likes to say it how she sees it. And poop problems are something she sees in her own home and in so many family homes. Poop resistance, poop anxiety, poop pressure, poop withholding, poop tears, poop that’s too hard. So if poop can be a problem, what’s a possible solution? Adding in Seed’s PDS-08 — the clinically studied 2-in-1 daily probiotic and prebiotic that helps your kiddo …“go”. As a clinical psychologist, Dr. Becky loves science. She loves evidence. Seed is a true science company and in a recent clinical trial, children experiencing intermittent constipation taking Seed’s PDS-08 saw significant improvement in healthier, more frequent bowel movements. With 9 probiotic strains and a meaningful dose of prebiotic fiber, you can support your child’s overall health with PDS-08 and improve their poops! It's a win-win. Use code GOODINSIDE for 20% off your first month of Seed's PDS-08 Daily Synbiotic plus Free Shipping.

I'm Dr. Becky and this is Good Inside. I made a choice about how to handle this. I'm not sure it was the right choice and it's one of the things I'd love to talk to you about, which is kind of the broader question of, when do you let your kid quit something? So when I think about this topic of quitting, of stopping something after you've started it, so many things come to mind.

I think about sports, I think about certain activities, I think about friendships, and recently I was talking with a parent who brought to me their child's sleep away, camp struggles. Here, mommy and daddy, I hate it here. I've not made any friends, but I've tried. And if you have even a little love in your heart for me, please come and pick me up. We'll be right back

after this. Hi everyone. So our podcast feed has gotten a little unruly. And in an effort to curate it for you, we're picking a few of our must-listen episodes from the Back Catalog for you to enjoy. We will continue to rotate these episodes as the season unfolds. And as always, for more parenting scripts, resources, and full access to the entire podcast catalog, visit GoodInide.com. I'm Dr. Becky and this is Good Inside. I'm a clinical psychologist.

I'm a mom of three and I'm on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children. So I recently spoke to a mom who is dealing with sleep away camp troubles. In this mom's town, many of the kids go away for part of the summer, where they're with other kids, where they're seemingly going to have fun, to enjoy activities, and to foster their own sense of independence. But what about when your kid writes you a letter,

saying they're not experiencing any of those benefits of sleep away camp, that they actually are having a miserable time and want to come home? So, Dr. Becky, this weekend I went to kind of an end of season barbecue and no kids were allowed and so as the evening kind of went on, people started pulling out their phones and reading letters that they had gotten from their kids at camp. They were really funny, they were kind of exactly what you would expect. And I couldn't share mine.

I sent my 10-year-old daughter to sleep away camp for the first time this summer, and the letters I got home were not anything like the letters that my friends were reading around the table. I asked my daughter if I could read it to you, and she said she wanted to read it to you herself. So this is an example of a letter I got from my 10 year old. Here mommy and daddy, I hate it here. I've not made any friends, but I've tried. I really, really tried for you, but they just don't like me. I can never sleep here. Last night I was up till 5.30 with the fifth night

in a row. I'm having dreams for you guys to come in and tell me that you hate me, I have to stay here for the rest of my life. The food is so gross, when girl even found a dead larva in her broccoli, and my body doesn't work the way it normally does, I'm also getting really pale, you have to take me home. Swallowing hurts a lot and I really hate my life. Please don't think I'm being a drama queen because this is the truth. And if you have even a little love in your heart for me, please come and pick

me up. So this is the kind of tone down letter. I started getting an outpouring every day of very dramatic emails. My daughter was going to drama camp. She loves theater, musical theater especially. I didn't see camp, sleep away camp is punishment. I also didn't go to sleep away camp as a kid. It was not a thing that everyone I knew did where we live now. Everyone goes to sleep away camp. All her friends are at camp. Not the camp she went to, but they're all at camp.

I made a choice about how to handle this. I'm not sure it was the right choice, and it's one of the things I'd love to talk to you about, which is kind of the broader question of, when do you let your kid quit something? Well, I mean, first of all, my heart, like, sank, reading, like hearing that letter. And it also, like, really, really hits home because literally in my walk over here, I was talking to my husband about sleep-boy camp options for my daughter who is saying she might want to go next year and who is just very particular about the types of people she feels comfortable with and also can often interpret ambiguous social stimuli as hurtful or as excluding.

And so while my older son is at sleep-boy now, and I really don't worry about him because I feel like his favorite activity is making new friends. Like when I heard your daughter's letter, I was thinking like so much of my daughter. So first of all, I guess just like what's going on for you about this, what happened when you read this letter, like you have so much information about her and the information around like how you reacted to this also really matters.

So like let's start there. It was really hard to get these notes. It was actually really hard for me to be separated from her. I mean, when we dropped her off, she got out of the car willingly, but I wasn't actually sure if she would get out of the car and how I would behave, like I wasn't going to shove her out, you know, so it was like there was this dance when we dropped her off of I don't actually know if you're going to camp because about a month before camp, she started coming up with reasons that she shouldn't go and

I finally said which the camp told me not to I finally said look give it a week If you really don't like it, let's have a conversation about it, but like give it a week and go and really try and My daughter makes friends pretty easily. She's pretty outgoing. But once she decides she's not gonna like something, there's like no changing her mind. She played travel soccer all last season and really hated it.

Even though she was the one who was insistent, I didn't want her to play travel soccer. She just is very competitive and she wanted to try out for the team. And when she made it, of course she was playing. In that case, I was like, look, you tried out for the team, you made the team, you have to stick with it. You've got to play the season.

They're counting on you. This is what we're doing. You don't want to play next season? Fine. Camp I felt a little bit different about. My husband wasn't bearing the brunt of a lot of this. The calls were all directed at me. Because I had said, if you really hate it, we'll have a conversation.

She turned that as, you're going to pick me up and you're a liar if you don't pick me up. When she started calling me, I pick up the phone and it would be, why don't you love me? Why did you lie to me? I mean, I would have very calm chats with her on the phone. I have to talk to the counselor. I have to talk to the head of the girls camp.

I'm like, look, she needs a friend and she needs activities that she's really wants to get out of bed for every day. She can't be that she's locking herself in the bathroom at 5.30 and crying. I tried to be an advocate for her for four or five days over a long weekend. But they kept saying, it's fine, it's fine. This is normal. This is just typical home sickness. Please don't take her home. And so, at a certain point, I'm like, do I listen to the people who deal with us all the time and see this all the time? Or do I listen to

my kid who's desperate to come home? Who's just miserable? So, I mean, this whole situation can be applied to so many other things in life. But there is something about sleep. Boy camp where I feel like there's this assumed success, it's like a kid stays like there's some preferable outcome and some failure if they leave. And again, this happens to be a personal topic because the boy camp was not for me. And I'm someone, I would describe myself as like a pretty confident social, independent person and looking back on the years I went. And then finally the year I said like this is my last year, like I would have been fine without going to sleep with a camp. I would have separated. I would have gone to college. I would have done other things. But being separate from your parents when you don't feel like essentially emotionally safe or secure is like a very, very different thing,

then staying on a team when you have like the safety and security of your parents and home to come home to every single day after practice, right? And your kid is 10, like that's still really young, arguably even when people are 16 and 19 and 30 if they don't feel like they have a secure base to come home to doing something uncomfortable, um, is, is just scary and not exciting. And so I guess first things first, I think it's important to throw to the side, the idea

that there's any one outcome that's like better or more at least superior or superior from like a character building perspective. And as a mom of a daughter just like you, sometimes I think the most important thing for my daughter to learn early in life is like there's a time when I'm allowed to say no stop. I don't want to do this anymore. And like those words can be listened to, right? And It can be listened to, right? And so, so what next? I mean, I really don't think there's one right outcome. I guess I would say like I really understand, you know, the, the choice to take a kid out of camp.

And I think especially if you live in certain towns, like you feel like there's like a shame in that, you know, or you go to the barbecue and I was like, my kid loves camp and you're like, oh, God, like, did I do something wrong or something wrong with my kid? And I'm guessing there's a part of your daughter always in life that it sounds like Kenoshi is and is like not terribly concerned

with like doing things the way that everyone else does things. I don't know, is that? Oh, 100%. Right, I'm guessing you love that about her. Yeah, I mean, she did say to me the other day, she's like, mom, I'm the only person who can't make it at sleep away camp. And I was like, no, but I didn't have other examples of people

who didn't make it. What do you think she's really asking there? Is there something broken about me? Or is there a reason, you know, she has a lot of anxiety around people not liking her. And I'm always like, you know, half of someone liking you is you liking them first. Which does not always apply as a grown-up, but I do feel like we're kind of predisposed to like someone if they get off an energy that they are interested and curious about you and you're like, okay,

I can give you like the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. You're curious about me. Well, I think, you know, it's coming to mind for me right now is I think especially women girls early on in some ways, I don't know if we're pretty determined to or we just have so much early wiring to like gaze out first instead

of gaze in first. What does this person think of me? Right. What are the expectations of everyone else of me? And even that idea of am I the only one who couldn't make it at camp? It's just interesting to me the wording choice versus, um, am I the only one who felt a camp wasn't right for me? That's actually like a very different way of freezing it.

In my mind, much more empowered or, does that person like me versus, do I like that person? Do I want to be close with that person in what way? Do I want to have a friendship with that person? I think I have this a lot with adults like, you see, seeing my private practice and especially these young women on these dating apps and so many many of them, you know, were like, oh, to see like me, to see like me, is he gonna text me back? And there wasn't any data to suggest

that this person was like likable to my client. Like they didn't seem particularly compelling, they weren't treating them so well, they were mostly ghosting them, like I was, and when I remember asking, like, do you, like, do you like him? And they were like, I don't even know, I don't even know how to answer that question. Like, what do you mean? And you're like, I don't even know. I don't even know how to answer that question.

Like, what do you mean? And I was like, so foreign. So I think one of the most liberating things as a parent is to remind myself, I don't have to put so much pressure on any individual decision. If instead I become a little bit more focused or invested in the process under the

decision. So instead of are you staying or you're not staying and I don't know how much contact you had and I'm not even sure what decision you ended up making, but believing her like that that seemed really, really evident in her letter. Like she was kind of saying like, do you believe me? And believing is a really, I think, interesting thing between kids and parents, because I believe we're all just desperate to be believed until, like, feel seen in that way. And that's such a basic human need that all of us, kids and adults, will always escalate our expression of our experience if we don't feel

the original experience was seen or believed in the intensity we felt it. And so some people might call that dramatic or manipulative or making a bigger deal out of something than it is. I think that's the least generous interpretation. I think the most generous interpretation is, oh, the person didn't get the very real relational experience they needed. It doesn't mean anyone's a bad person on the other end, but that need to feel believed and feel seen is so great that I will do anything in the service of that experience. So saying to your daughter, I believe you, like I believe you that you're up early. I believe you that you're crying.

I believe you that this feels really, really bad. And if this is a real-time conversation, a lot of kids will say right away, okay, so you're gonna pick me up, right? And sometimes it's not such a dire moment. It's like, okay, so you're gonna let me watch another TV show. And you have the opportunity to really differentiate those two things, which I think is really important, which is, whoa,

I'm actually not talking about the decision yet about leaving. I'm not talking about the decision yet about leaving. I'm not talking about the decision yet about whether I'm going to let you watch another TV show, what I'm saying. And I want you to really hear this is I believe you that this is as bad as you said. I believe you that you really want to watch a TV show. And really like siloing that at first, I think is what all of us at any age really, really need. And then it also helps both people clarify how much of this decision is actually just about

feeling seen and how much after we have felt seen in that way, it is actually really about this individual decision. You know I'm someone who likes to say it how I see it. Well, here's something I see in my own home and in so many family homes. Poop problems. What kind of problems? Poop resistance. Poop anxiety. Poop pressure. Poop withholding. Poop tears. Poop that's too hard. I mean, I could go on and on, but I know that millions of children struggle with this, so I'm thinking you get it from experience.

So if poop can be a problem, what is a possible solution? Well, adding in seeds PDS-08, the clinically studied two-in-one daily probiotic and prebiotic that helps your kid go. As a clinical psychologist, I love science. I love evidence and seed is a true science company. They're not messing around here. In a recent clinical trial, children experiencing intermittent constipation, taking seeds PDS-08, saw significant improvement in healthier, more frequent bowel movements. With nine probiotic strains and a meaningful dose of prebiotic fiber, you can support your child's overall health with PTSD and improve their poops.

What a win-win, right? You use code GoodInside for 20% off your first month of seeds PTSD daily, sendbiotic plus free shipping. So I brought her home. plus free shipping. So I brought her home. I think what you're saying about believing is really like spot on. I don't think I articulated it quite that way, but for her it felt like I don't want that legacy of I want to build trust with you and I want you to feel like when you say I need help that I am, I'm there for you.

I mean that that hit home with me too. As you said that, I see it at home with you as you're talking. And I think that we all do this thing as parents. Like I call it like the fast forward error, but like we have a situation where our kid is struggling today. Then we fast forward some amount of time. Like sometimes it's the shortest three months, but sometimes it's like 30 years, or anywhere in between. And in this case, you're like, I need to have a kid who goes to college. Like she has to learn how to cope with things

and go to college. And so we somehow back into and so, like I'm gonna write back, like, hey, it's not that bad, like deal with it. I'm actually responding to my fear that my kid's not going to go to college. I'm really not responding to the fact that my kid is having a hard time at 10 years old in sleep. I can't.

And I think I know I do this. We think we all do this where we respond to our kid based on our anxiety and fear, not based on the information in front of us. And when we do that, like, we just missed out on a million things. I think number one, we miss out on the opportunity to build a child's skills for later in life, right? Because when you act that way, you just layer on your own anxiety to your kid, that's never helped a kid. And I feel like was often. It's like the trust in yourself. Like I feel like this about my daughter, like she's seven

and things can be a little trickier for her than at least my older son. And like something I really trust, it's like I trust my ability to like parent her. Like I do. And like I don't know exactly what outcome that will lead to, you know, maybe a bunch of things will always be harder for her, but I trusted in her childhood years, I mean, and beyond, like, will build skills together,

like, we'll go through important experiences together. And that's going to really help her. And when I fast forward in her case from like seven to 30 or your daughter from 10 to 18, like, you miss out on this period of time where you could tell yourself, like, I have eight years just used to college. Like, I trust myself. I trust her. I trust development. I trust our relationship. Like, I trust that we'll be able to do a lot in those years. So that at 18, she's not in the same place, you know, as age 10. And whenever I say that to myself, I find, I find I get myself like a lot more freedom to make the best decision in the moment, not the decision that kind of temporarily quells my fears about the future. And I mean, for what it's worth, and I don't know how much it's worth, because I really don't think there's ever like a right way, like

I would have made the same decision. Thank you for this. I needed the validation. I needed to feel like, yeah, I made the right choice. So we're just maybe not right. I don't know. There was a right or wrong choice here, but there was a choice I could I could live with. And I think this was the one. It sounds like the right choice, like for you to make. You know, that's the right we have. And there's so much the two of you. I'm sure we'll talk about related to this. And you know, there's such an opportunity, I'm just thinking about this now that I'm saying it.

Like there's such an opportunity for the two of you to like build skills around what happens because you have a relationship that feels safe to her. Right? Like we always have to feel safe with someone to be influenced by them, to talk more to them, to tell them more, to take in more. You have to have that safety. And so hearing what you said, like I just can picture

maybe that moment that I don't want to have. And I want to have encoded in her memory. It's like I really reached out for help to my mom. I was feeling awful. And I was left alone. That like builds the opposite of safety. That builds fear like within our closest attachment relationships. So the fact that you prioritize that safety, I think says a lot about, you know, how the two of you will be able to build from this. So I want to end with some general takeaways, not about sleep away camp, but about the topic of sticking things out versus stopping. First, believing your kid.

Believing your kid actually isn't always the same thing as making a certain decision based on that believing. In this conversation, believing that your child was miserable was aligned with the decision of taking that child home. But believing can also look like saying, I believe you that you don't want to go to school. I know that that's real. I also know we're going to get through it. 2. Being brave doesn't always mean sticking something out. Get to know what's really happening with your kid.

And trust that being brave can mean sticking something out, and it can also mean stopping and leaving. 3. There's nothing more powerful than our alliance with our kids, especially as our kids get older. Remembering that our connection with them is really the only strategy we have reminds us to pause, listen, and believe their experience. Thanks for listening. To share a story or ask me a question,

go to goodinside.com, Backslash Podcast. You could also write me at podcastatgoodinside.com. Parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world. And parents deserve resources and support so they feel empowered, confident, and connected. I'm so excited to share good inside membership. The first platform that brings together content and experts you trust with a global community of like valued parents. It's totally game changing. And if you're looking for a smaller next step,

go to goodinside.com to sign up for my free weekly email. That's always filled with practical actionable strategies and scripts. You don't want to miss it. Good Inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom at Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhi, Julia Nat, and Kristen Muller. I would also like to thank Eric Koebelski, Mary Panico, Jill Kromwell Wang, Ashley Valenzuela, and the rest of the good inside team. And one last thing before I let you go. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves, even as I struggle, and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain good inside. you