Secrets of the Motherworld – Détails, épisodes et analyse

“I would like to hear your thoughts on how parents can speak about the elephant in the room. 

My daughter is 15 and we have experienced school refusal for some years now. The lockdown has been great for her and she has enjoyed it. And yet. I know we, as a family, have colluded in her avoidance of any difficult  subjects. 

She rules the household.  If something comes on the TV and she doesn’t like it, we switch it off. We are pretty much forced to focus on the positive of everything. 

She suffers from anxiety and I hate to upset her. However the whole family is walking on eggshells around her. 

To be honest, I don’t think this approach has improved her. She now believes that can’t cope with anything difficult and yet, as a child, she was able to cope with lots of different things. 

I am worried about what will happen when school begins in September and we are forced to confront the school refusal and the fact that my child has narrowed her world.

I myself am coping with the death of my mother and my father’s ongoing health problems and so I’m finding it stressful to only speak about life in a positive way. It’s all a mess and yet from the outside we look like a happy bouncy family.”

My 13 year-old daughter is overweight and I don't know how to handle this. 

We have always had food problems in the family as  my husband has battled with his weight all his adult life. He is a great cook and I also battle with my weight. My daughter doesn't really care about her weight and just wants to be free to enjoy her food. I find it a huge burden to try to manage her weight as well as my own and I'm becoming resentful. I've always been very careful to talk about 'health' and not 'food' or 'weight' but it is failing. She is very confident and declares that she is skinny. She knows she's not skinny so she is just being defiant in the face of pressure to conform to  her super-skinny friends. 

I just don't know how to handle it, she is at an age where she can access food so my control over the issue is diluted. Until now I watched her  like a hawk and kept her weight in check but now, finally, just as she has more freedom to eat more, she has suddenly tipped into being overweight for the first time in her life. 

It's not a lot overweight but it is there. I don't know what to do - please help! 

“My child is very anxious about the coronavirus. 

I'm a nurse and she doesn't want me to go to work. I take all the precautions and I have explained this to her but she just becomes more anxious if we speak about it. 

Should we speak about it? 

She has episodes of crying and anxiety at night when I'm away working.”

“Any advice for a 14 year old son who won't stay at home during the coronavirus lockdown? I have a husband who is considered vulnerable. 

When we first went into lock down he was willing to stay at home then he got bored after a few days and started disappearing. I rang the school and they said I have to parent my own child but how can I make him stay in when he refuses to do anything I ask? 

My friend told me to ring the police every time he goes. I just don't know what to do.” 

Stella  mentions the film “My child the rioter” in this episode : http://www.ollylambert.com/mychild

“When our daughter went to school dressed as The Gruffalo (for World Book Day) another child dressed as a Disney princess commented ‘...she’s dressed like a boy’ and my daughter became immediately self-conscious. 

The majority of girls were dressed as Disney princesses, our daughter would probably have been delighted to go as a princess but in my desire to show her an alternative (I’m not a Disney princess fan) I feel like I’ve subjected her to unhelpful comments. She was excited to go as and enjoys dressing up as The Gruffalo at home. 

Is it ok as parents to encourage our kids not to feel like they need to be like everyone else?

I’m currently in control of buying costumes and toys and veer toward gender neutral (she’s nearly 4 years old) am I hindering her emotional development by not buying into the Disney princess world? Am I being too controlling? 

Even when she dresses up like a Disney character (Moana) I encourage her to say ‘I’m a superhero princess’. I want her to feel there are no limits on who she can be. I’d love it if she grew up to be whatever made her happy; if this is DJ-ing on the Island of Ibiza, brilliant! 

I desperately want her to never feel she needs to follow the crowd but don’t want to be an overly controlling mother and subject her to unhelpful small minded comments.” 

“I never thought this will happen to me. I had a family, we were not perfect together but it worked and we were good at raising our sons. I still wonder how my husband as a stay-home dad found the time and the space to cheat on me. He even brought the woman to my house under the excuse that they were working on an art project together, she was around our kids and met me! So many lies.... and I thought we had an honest relationship, that we were partners, I trusted him completely. 

It's been 2 months since he moved out. For my youngest son the separation has brought some benefits, he is more independent and tantrums have improved, I think my husband was smothering him a bit, he could be overprotecting. For my oldest son it has been harder, he asks so many questions about what happened and I actually follow the advice I heard on this podcast about speaking with him about his father's affair. It helped him when I told the truth with a neutral stand, thanks for that episode! 

They have a very close relationship with their father and sometimes I felt that I had to compete for the same kind of relationship with the kids, however the separation has allowed me to have the space at the end of the day to just enjoy each other’s company and build a different relationship than the one we use to have and I like that. 

I try to keep in mind that they need their father since he has been very involved in their lives since they were babies but at the same time I have to make changes around the house and in our logistics because he simply doesn't live with us anymore. 

It is very hard to overcome the betrayal, the hurt and the broken heart when you have to still see him and talk to him almost every day. I don't want to introduce massive changes in the kids’ lives but the truth is that I would just love not to see him anymore for the rest of my life. I know that this is not possible and every time I see him I feel that I take a step back in my process of continuing on with my life. I don't want to depend on him to take care of the kids while I work full time and I'm trying to take more time to find alternative solutions but is terrible hard for me. I do it for my sons because if it were for me I would banish him from my life for good today.”

“I have been feeling burned out of parenting. It’s increased along with my age and I wonder if it’s because I had my 15 year old at age 42 that now developmentally, I’m ready to retire and become a grandmother. I have for so long been proud and grateful for being an “older mom.” Now this last year, my 20 year has totally mellowed and is more of a young adult. My 15 year old does some behaviors has some attitudes towards me that don’t rise to any level of concern and are mild in comparison but I’m easily discouraged and feel burned out.

Is this a phenomenon? Is there a shelf life for parenting?”

“My ex transitioned to a woman 4 years ago and I am concerned about the impact this is having on my children. They meet her every week but the emphasis is always on my ex – how she is now a woman; the latest clothes she has bought and how they fit her etc etc.

My children love my ex very much but I fear that they are silently confused and afraid to discuss their distress out of loyalty to their ‘Dad’.

I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how to handle this.

“I screwed up when raising my first child. I am still not quite sure what has been going wrong. I do a lot to figure out how to be a good parent and work hard to understand her. I read tons of books, listen to podcasts, took child development classes at the community college, and do personal work. But I have not been able to get things right with this super bright, stubborn, independent and strong willed child with a highly sensitive nervous system.

Adults who meet her are thoroughly impressed by her self possession and sophistication. But she came out of the womb scowling at me like she knew I was going to do it wrong. When she first began to read, she picked up my parenting book, read through it and declared that I did it all wrong. She also told me around age 7, that I want people to think I am a good parent but I am just faking it. There was a lot of yelling at her at an early age as she seemed a lot older than she actually was--she had complex sentences before 16 mths old. And as she grew, there was more yelling as I didn't know what to do with this very powerful, mercurial, very demanding, and spacey child. In addition, I was more stressed and probably depressed as an early parent and my partner wasn't a very good help. I realize I lacked warmth, playfulness and the relaxed affect she probably needed. I tried to foster closeness and do mother-daughter activities, but she was fairly withering and dismissive of my attempts.

She is a teenager now but her personality and attitude now is as much as it was as young child. She has resented me since she was little and she is now 15 and oozes disgust for me from every crevice. She has also developed anxiety and has some neurotic tendencies which seem due as much to her wiring as to my misattuned parenting. Furthermore, she is easily distracted and has problems with follow through (ADHD or willful disobedience?) so I feel I have to be very rigid and have firm boundaries or else things go awry.

Her younger brother has a very different, more resilient personality. He is happy go lucky, easy to connect with, playful and much less emotionally intense but no less curious, independent and bright. He also has a big personality and is by no means trying to be the "good child," but I figured out how to meet his needs early on so there is far less conflict. I don't have to be as restrictive with him as he is more cooperative, self regulating emotionally vulnerable, and has good follow through. The difference in their relationships with me is very obvious. She has played the role of the "problem" child all this time, even though I try to attend to her (maybe even more) as much as I attend to him. She sees the differences and believes it to be an issue of us liking him better, rather then him just being easier. She loves her brother but I am the lightening rod for both her pain and unreasonable demands. How do I change this dynamic? I am terrified that once she leaves home, she won't ever want to see us (me) again. But I am still challenged by her mix of personality traits.”

“I‘m scared that I won't heal fast enough I grew up with difficult family circumstances and a complete emotional neglect. In my early twenties I had five years of psychoanalysis and worked through my childhood experiences. For the first time in my life I felt truly accepted and understood; I thought I was healed.

A few years later I got married and we started a family, I was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude after our first child was born. As our family grew the demands became bigger; stress and exhaustion accumulated, and I discovered that the parenting model that I experienced is still inside me and very alive. This came as a huge shock and a surprise and with enormous guilt, shame and negative self-talk around it.

 I started doing everything in my power to be kinder, less reactive and triggered, I spend every spare second listening or reading something that might help me on my journey and I started seeing a therapist again (due to the financial and time situation only once per month though). I want nothing more but to be kind and loving mom, support my kids emotional needs and my kids to remember the joy and delight in my eyes when I’m with them, and yet I feel like I’m failing them every day.

I don’t know if I can heal fast enough to be the mom that they need.”

Lisa mentions the book ‘Playful Parenting’ by Laurence Cohen https://g.co/kgs/uEhu2F

while Stella mentions the book ‘All Joy and No Fun’ by Jennifer Senior https://g.co/kgs/D91Lzu