Fresh Take: Jen Lumanlan of "Your Parenting Mojo"

Fresh Take: Jen Lumanlan of “Your Parenting Mojo”

Margaret: Hello everyone and welcome to “Fresh Take” from “What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood.” This is Margaret.

Amy: And this is Amy. And today we're talking to Jen Lumanlan. She is the host of the “Your Parenting Mojo” podcast, which Life Hacker named “Best Research-based Parenting Podcast.” Jen also runs a course called Taming Your Triggers, which helps parents understand why they feel triggered and to feel triggered less often. Jen holds a Master's in psychology focused on child development and another in education. Welcome, Jen.

Jen Lumanlan: Thanks. It's so great to be here.

Amy: So your work is based on research, which we all know - I'm all about that. I love the research.

Margaret: Amy's synapses are firing right now. Woo. She's like, I'm excited. Did someone say research?

Amy: Did someone say research?

Jen Lumanlan: I've listened to so many of your episodes and it comes through loud and clear.

Amy: But what I really like about what you do is that some of your work is sort of about questioning and dismantling some research, sort of at least calling out its blind spots. I wanted to start with this example, ‘cause I thought it was so interesting in your recent episode about the Louise Bates Ames books, which almost all of us have on our shelves. Like, your one-year old, your two-year old, your three-year old, that they're not all bad, but it's an example of how some of the standard parenting advice that we all think is gospel is maybe not so much. Can you talk a little bit about your approach?

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah. That was quite an episode. That was a solid two weeks of research on my part and digging through the University of California Berkeley's archives. I think what most parents don't realize is: those books were published in the 1980s and, and when they get recommended, people kind of say, “Oh, well, you know, you have to sort of disregard the outdated gender advice and ignore the parts that aren't useful to you, and the rest of it's really good.” And it turns out that the research that those books are based on was actually done between the 1920s and the 1950s. And in a very specific cultural context, right? Where we had very different fears about what it means to be an inclusive society than most of us do right now. And so the person who was doing the research, Dr. Arnold Gesell, that those books are based on, is coming at it from a perspective of: We want to understand what the average child is experiencing. Because if we strip out all of the effects of poverty and racism and everything else that some children experience and we look at only at middle-class white children, then we will understand what true natural development is. And then all we have to do is get the poor parents to parent their kids the way that middle-class white parents are doing it. And then everybody will be better off. And to me that's a really problematic approach, and parents don't realize that when, when they're looking at these books, that's what they're getting. Right? They're getting this parenting advice that's based on research from this period of time that's a hundred years ago.

It's not something that if we are looking for a society that truly welcomes everybody and where everybody truly belongs, it's not possible to strip out the problematic gender stuff, because that stuff is baked into the very research that those books sit on, and I think that the parents don't really realize that, and my hope is that if we do see that, then we can look at each child and say: what does this child need? Rather than comparing this child with this theoretical, middle-class white child from the 1920s that, you know, doesn't exist.

Margaret: Well, and I think that's really important - if I'm listening to this, having no familiarity with the topic you're talking about, I might think, Oh, I can do that for myself. I can strip out, I understand, I could recognize racism. I could recognize gendered stuff. But that your point is that it really gets down into like, what kind of child is fundamentally desirable and that you may not have, and I, let's say, may not have a perfect child who plays quietly. I mean, believe me, we've talked before on the podcast about the idea of the child who sits in the square at preschool being the only test of a good preschool child.

And I was two for three on children who would not sit on the square. And so it's not this lofty sort of political argument that you're making. It's a very practical argument that this sort of parents an imaginary child fundamentally.

Jen Lumanlan: Absolutely. And that by comparing our child with this imaginary child, we're doing our own child a disservice. Because invariably doesn't match up with that. You know, in the episode, I almost liken it to a horoscope. Where you can look at last week's horoscope and be like, “Oh yeah, that kind of fits. The horoscope is real. I just have to ignore all these other bits that don't really match.” And so they're about as an inaccurate as a horoscope. There's enough there that you can say, “Oh yeah, that, that really fits my child as long as I disregard that my child isn't actually doing these other five things.” And so yes, it does our own child a disservice and it also does all children a disservice in my opinion.

Amy: So in 2022, the CDC actually took crawling off its lists of milestones that pediatricians should no longer - there were several things they took off - but the sort of headline one was crawling. We're no longer going to measure for or tell parents that your baby needs to be crawling by like, you know, X months, nine months, or whatever it said.

So that's sort of proof that scientific opinion can evolve, can change its mind, and that that can be a good thing. Do you think that was a good change? Was that a good removal of a milestone?

Jen Lumanlan: It does all the time. Because, because what does having that standard do? Right? All it does is makes parents worry. “Yeah, but my child isn't crawling by this certain age.” I looked at a bunch of studies on all kinds of topics from movement, like what milestones should my child be doing at certain ages related to gross motion development to potty training. And if you look across the body of research on any of these topics, all you see is disagreement.

You see so much disagreement in what even should the stages that the child is going through be? If you don't prop a child up to sitting, then the stage where the child sits and then topples over doesn't exist. Because the child can just sit up by themselves and then they don't fall over because they have the arm strength, because they got themselves there.

Same with potty training. There's like 27 signs that a child is ready to potty train, and zero agreement on how many need to be present and which ones need to be present. So if all we have a disagreement, why are we basing so much of what we do around these arbitrary developmental milestones?

Margaret: But let me ask, as a parent of a child who had subtle developmental delays that were hard to pick up and that I do think some interventions were helpful for getting at an early age, that I was glad we kind of caught this issue of developmental delay when we did - that those markers for picking up on those developmental delays were these kind of textbook milestones. So how do those two ideas meet? Where do they come together?

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah. I love that you're asking that question, and that's actually something that's very close to home for me at the moment. I discovered through the course of researching podcast episodes that I'm autistic. And I had no idea. Nobody had any idea because you know I'm textbook a case of - I do well, right? I did well in school, right? I'm a highly productive, focused individual. There's no reason that anyone ever suspected that I would be autistic.

And it turns out I really struggle socially. So if anybody had looked to see, is this child having a hard time, right? Not necessarily comparing me with an average, but is this child having a hard time? And have we tried everything that we can think of to adjust the environment, to shift how we're interacting with this child in our home? And is that helping?

In my case, it wasn't a sensory thing, but many children have sensory struggles, right? Have we already addressed all of the sensory challenges that our child may be facing and is the child still struggling? And if so, then we can look to: okay, what else is going on? And you know, to me the whole concept of a diagnosis is very difficult because it sort of assumes there's normal neurotypical people on one hand, and there's non-normal neurodivergent people on the other hand, when I see it as much more of a continuum - that in some ways I don't struggle at all, in other ways, I struggle a lot, and for different people it'll be completely reversed from the ways that I struggle. And all of that gets lost when there's two buckets of people, the neurotypical people and the not neurotypical people.

But I really see that the way that we should be looking at this is: what is going on for this child - are this child's needs being met? And if we're seeing them struggle, that's a sign that their needs are not being met. And that's where we need to start looking to, you know, what can we do in the home, in our relationships, to meet this child's needs more often? If we still can't do that, then that's, we're gonna start to look for, for therapies, interventions, and so on.

Amy: You know, you had said that my favorite part of those Louise Bates Ames books, and the thing you sort of said like, “Ah, this part does kind of hold true,” is that your child, a child, switches back and forth between periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium. And these books are sort of like, “Six is easy, seven is hard, and then eight, they’re easy again.” Yeah. It's clearly not that simple, but it has, you know, held true in my life and I found it comforting to read, like, this is supposed to happen. They're gonna round the bend and be really hard for six months and come back.

So it seems to me like that's a milestone. What you're saying is if there's only disequilibrium, if there's never a correction where they are well adjusted, then that's the milestone you're looking for, for them to sort of return.

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah, and also, is there sort of general struggle, right? Like, does it always seem hard? So some people don't necessarily go through the cyclical, it's just like, it's hard all the time, right? Like, my kid is always hitting me. Well, why is that? That's the real question to ask. When I start working with parents, their first question is, you know, “How can I get my child to stop doing this thing that's driving me up the wall?” And my first question is, “Well, why is the child doing this thing that's driving you up the wall?” Because that's what we need to work on, not the how to get them to stop. The unmet need that underlies that behavior that they see, the only way that I can express that behavior is to hit you because I don't have the language or the mental capacity to be able to explain, I'm having a really hard time at school, or I feel like my sibling’s getting more than I am and I'm feeling jealous. Right? They don't have the capacity to be able to explain that to us, so they hit us instead.

Margaret: I wanna talk more about that specific aspect of your work when we get back. We're talking to Jen Lumanlan and we'll be right back. So this idea of behavior is something that we talk a lot about on the podcast and how to get at what's beneath, what's sort of triggering behavior is, it's obviously a concept we've discussed and we've mostly heard about as parents. But taking the example of a child who's hitting - it can be hard and I think it can feel to parents like: I gotta add this to my list, too? Now I'm getting hit in the face and I have to like do this deep exploration? Sometimes with a kid who is not very verbal or has trouble communicating their needs. And so for a parent who's facing that kind of situation, where do you start? And how do you start in a way that doesn't feel like, “I can't do this,” which I'm very sympathetic to.

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah, actually, it's interesting. I'm writing a book at the moment on the intersection of parenting and social justice, and the basic idea is that we have all these social challenges out in the world on one hand, and we're struggling with our children's behavior on the other hand. And it seems like those two things are unrelated and I see them as intimately related. And the ways that we interact with our children today will shape how they go out into the world. And in the book I came up with the idea of this “needs cupcake.”

And so when we start thinking about needs, when we start learning about them, we can find lists of needs online. There's usually, like, 70 things on that list. And it's like: how could I possibly know which of these 70 things my child is trying to meet at any one time? And what I realized is that the vast majority of the time, our children are expressing and have very few needs. And so it's very often the same three to five needs coming up over and over again.

And I call that the cherry on top of the cupcake. And so for each child, it's gonna be different, but commonly it might be something like autonomy, right? “I wanna be the one who gets to make decisions over what happens in my life.” Connection with the parent. Safety would be another good one. Joy and movement. “I want to play.” And so we're seeing these things come up over and over. And then underneath the cherry is the frosting, and there's kind of the next five needs that they most often have. And underneath that is the cupcake, which is kind of everything else. And so when we're thinking about our child's needs, we don't have to do this in the moment when it's like: my kid's hitting me, what could their need possibly be? We can do this now, today, when we’re having a good day.

Margaret: This is always good. Don't do it in the moment when you're getting hit. You're not talking about the cupcake.

Jen Lumanlan: No, that's never the time when you're gonna figure out anything super productive for the first time. It's very difficult to learn something when you're in a stressful situation.

So take a pen and piece of paper and just draw a little cupcake and draw the cherry on top. Just think about: “What needs is my child most likely trying to meet most often?” And then underneath that, “What are the next three to five?” And then underneath that is all the other possibilities. And from there we can stick it to the fridge, and in that difficult moment, if we can’t remember, we can look at that and say, “Oh, autonomy. They wanna decide, they wanna be the one who gets to make this decision. Is there a way I can meet that need and also meet my need for whatever is going on?” Because that's where I think a lot of parenting advice kind of falls down. It's like, let's meet the child's need, but well, my need just falls by the wayside. No. I see those two things as equally important, and we need to find ways to meet both of our needs.

Amy: So let's talk about that because we did an episode about breaking patterns where we talked about trying to do something differently than maybe our parents did with us, or even that we've done in the past.

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah, I thought that episode was really cool.

Amy: We discussed in that episode whether we can ever truly change our reactions. Reactions - you're not gonna be able to change that. But you can change your response. You can slip a piece of paper in there. So I wanna talk about, I guess both” How do you put that piece of paper in there? Or is there actually a way for us to start changing our responses?

Jen Lumanlan: Um, yeah. I love that slip of paper analogy because I think that that implies a very, very thin space, which seems doable. Right?

Margaret: We like doable. We like very doable.

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah. So I think that that moment is the critical moment and creating that space where we can breathe, where maybe right now all there's enough space for is the words that are about to come outta my mouth are not gonna be helpful and I can't stop myself from saying them. That's where a lot of parents start. And then it becomes, “Okay, I have enough time for a half breath, and then I'm still going to say the thing that I'm gonna say.” And then it becomes a breath. And in a breath, you actually have time to check in with yourself and with your child and say, “What's really going on in this situation?”

And some tools that I found really helpful in that moment to make that pause bigger are something like wearing a hair tie on your wrist and transferring it over to your other wrist when you're feeling dysregulated. Because it takes a couple seconds to do that. Having the hair tie there reminds you of your intention: Why am I doing this work? Why is this important to me? What's important to me? My relationship with my child is the most important thing. Okay, I'm feeling dysregulated. I'm feeling tension in my shoulders, my chest, wherever I hold that tension. I'm noticing those signs and I'm using that moment to transfer the hair tie over. Okay. What's really going on here? We're having a hard time.

Margaret: So to be super practical about that, you're saying basically: my tween comes downstairs after I've been cleaning all day and making dinner and doing things for, and says, “Where is my thing? You always move my things!” And my reaction is gonna be like, “You ingrate. Let me tell you and give you the list while I scream about all the things I've done.” Just pulling this as an example. I mean, of course I would never do this…

Amy: No, no, no, no. Somebody else.

Margaret: “Let me scream at you all the things I do, and how dare you speak to me that way, blah blah blah.” The moment - I have the hair tie on my wrist, I'm going about my day - the moment the kid emerges with the obnoxious statement, that's the moment you're saying I go to my hair tie?

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah. Yeah.

Margaret: Because that break in the action makes me say I am in control of myself, whether or not this tween is in control of themselves.

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah. I am a little hesitant to use the word ‘control,’ because I think control is sort of a veneer. Parents are like, “I need to be in control!” when actually, if you peel that back, there's a whole lot of fear underneath there about what might happen. So I try not to use that word ‘control’, but yes, your teen is coming out of their room and you know, “You move my stuff!” And immediately you notice tension somewhere in your body. Can you point to where you would feel that tension?

Margaret: My shoulders would probably be it. If I'm thinking about it. Yep. Just thinking about it is making my shoulders go up.

Jen Lumanlan: So, so as soon as you notice that, then you're gonna see your hair tie, remind yourself of what's most important, which you may choose to say to yourself: “My relationship with my child is the most important thing,” or whatever resonates for you. As you're moving that hair tie over, you're taking that deep breath, and from there it's like, “Okay, if my relationship with my child is the most important thing, how do I wanna respond?”

And it can be helpful - I don't like scripts because they don't meet our needs, because we all have different needs, so how can a script possibly identify your needs - but a starter script can be super helpful. So if we come out with something judgmental like “You always” or “You never” or all the judgmental stuff we say, then it just, you know, it keeps the conflict going.

Whereas if we say something like, “Oh my goodness, you sound super frustrated,” you're observing something. Or: “Seems like you're having a really hard time right now.” Or if you are already dysregulated, “It seems like we are having a hard time right now.” So this is not your thing you need to fix - this is our thing. This is our thing that we're gonna work on together.

Margaret: Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Amy: There's so many more questions I have about this. We're gonna take a quick break. We're talking to Jen Lumanlan. So you're talking about: the most important thing is the relationship with the child, which I like that. I'm gonna put that with my hair tie. I do wear a hair tie in my wrist all the time, ‘cause I'm always 10 seconds from a meltdown.

Margaret: You're already halfway there.

Jen Lumanlan: Halfway there. You're ready. You might wanna change its color or something to provide that visual cue.  

Margaret: I wanna say, I thought you were gonna say snap the hair tie on your wrist to like, wake yourself up. This is so much less violent. You just move it to the other wrist.  

Amy: It occurs to me like, ‘cause you're saying that the relationship with the kid is paramount, and I definitely try to make that the thing that's paramount, but sometimes when I'm feeling triggered - and I wanna talk about whether that's really the right word for this situation - my paramount thing is like, “You have to learn that you can't talk to me that way.” Like, I need to redistribute the authority around here. You don't get to talk to me like that. I didn't talk to my parents like that. And this will not stand. That becomes most important thing in my head, which is probably counterproductive to my long-term goal of more peace. What do you say when somebody's goal is: you can't talk to me like that. How do we sort of redirect that?

Jen Lumanlan: That's not something to do in the moment necessarily. That's a much longer term work - to look at where does this stuff come from? This stuff comes from hurt that you experienced when you were a child. That if you had ever said something to your parent that your child has just said to you that was not okay. It was not okay to express your thoughts, your ideas, your opinions. And so when that's the model you grew up with, as soon as your child says that to you, of course it's triggering, right? That is trauma. And when you're alluding to the definitions here, when we say triggered, we're specifically referring to something that reactivates a trauma that we have experienced.

We, we can have a very similar big reaction that isn't triggered by trauma. Maybe we are just super tired and super hungry and we're hangry and all this stuff is happening. We haven't exercised, and we can call that flooding. If it's related to some sort of trauma that we've experienced, then we can call it triggered.

So yes, you experienced some sort of trauma that is impacting your ability to show up for your child in the way that you want to. And I think that goes back to your pattern breaking episode where you talked about: can we really break these patterns? And you were arguing, I think Margaret was arguing, that we can't, and I listened to that and I thought, “Oh, but I've seen it.” I've seen it happen because the parents that I work with usually come to me and say, “Just gimme the knowledge,” right? Just gimme the little nugget of information that's gonna get me to stop feeling triggered and things are gonna be better. And that's a cognitive shift. That's a shift that's happening in my brain.

But what I see is that parents need a non-cognitive shift, which is a shift that happens in their bodies. And so it's like: I don't just remember to do the right thing to say the right thing, you know, trot out the right script at the right time. But actually something is different in my body, in the way that I show up in these situations. And that comes from healing the reasons why we feel triggered in the first place in community with others, and processing that in community with others. And all of a sudden it goes from, “Yes, I know the right thing to do. I can trot it out at the right time,” to “I'm just different in my relationship with my child.”

Margaret: Interesting. I think what I was arguing in the episode, and I think it may be, there may be overlap in what we're saying to some degree, is that I guess I feel that my triggers, the things that trigger me - and it's not necessarily with my child, it might be with a parent or a sibling or people who I have long-standing patterns with - that this slip of paper for me works really well as an analogy because it's like - that trigger is out of my control. The part of it that's out of my control, I can't change the fact that someone might comment on my weight, let's say, every time they see me. And that is triggering for me as something I've tried to let go of myself, but I cannot control the fact that people wanna greet me by saying, “You look like you've lost weight,” which I would love for them to stop doing, but that what I need to kind of control about it is that I can't control the input, that I can only control my response, I guess. Are you taking it another step that I can somehow rid myself of the phase that I have a feeling about people commenting on my weight?

Jen Lumanlan: Exactly. I'm inserting a step in between those two, right? So, yes, you're right. You can't change what somebody else does. You can ask them…

Margaret: You can ask them many, many times.

Jen Lumanlan: Yes. And sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. And yes, you get to decide how you are going to respond when they say that, right? Am I going to let it send me into a tizzy? Am I going to pass the hairband across, remind myself this is not about me, this is about them. And from there, how am I going to respond to this? And in between those two things is the non-cognitive shift. And an example I love to use is from a parent whose own parent was an alcoholic, right?

The parent basically doesn't remember – the parent that I worked with - you know, their childhood. And she said, I've been in therapy over this so many times. The therapist is always like, “This is about your mother, right?” And I'm like, “No, how can this always be about my mother?” And she said, I knew I needed to forgive my parent, but I couldn't convince myself to do it.

And it was through being in the Taming Your Triggers workshop and seeing hundreds of parents introducing themselves and saying, “I'm triggered by this. I'm doing the best I can. I'm at the end of my rope.” And all of a sudden she sees her own mom as this struggling 20-something with a whole bunch of unresolved trauma, and she's like, “I didn't convince myself to forgive her, I just became forgiveness.” That's the non-cognitive shift, right? That that's the difference between trying to get somebody to say something different and controlling my response to them. That's the thing that happens in between those that changes the way we show up in that relationship, and so now she's not carrying all the weight of that in every interaction she's having with her own daughter. Yes, she still feels flooded sometimes. Yes, she's not fixed completely. She still feels triggered sometimes, but she is triggered far less often because she has made that non-cognitive shift, which happens in community with other people. It was created in community, in relationships, you know, the trauma was. So it makes sense that it's healed in community with others as well.

Margaret: Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Amy: So eventually the goal can be to become –

Jen Lumanlan: It’s profound stuff.

Amy: It is profound stuff. And we can move beyond sort of, I mean, I always thought that slip of paper was like, “Oh, there I go. There's my shoulders, there's the thing, I'm feeling it.” And just noticing the feeling already sort of cuts its powerfulness in half. Like you stand outside it for a moment, which is huge progress.

Jen Lumanlan: Right, right. And that's massive.

Amy: “Here I am really being very angry about this,” and then reentering the moment, you know, half as angry ‘cause you noticed you were feeling angry. But you're saying you can eventually maybe go even further to not feel as angry in the first place. Wouldn't that be nice?

Jen Lumanlan: Yes. Through the non-cognitive shift, which we can't predict how and when it's gonna happen. It happens differently for different people, takes different amounts of time. This person, it happened on day one, where they see these introductions being made. For other people, it's when somebody else poses a question and somebody else says, “Oh yeah, this is like this for me,” and then I'm like, “Wait, that's a trigger for me and I never realized it before.” And so again, that being in community just kind of speeds up the entire learning process. So it's amazing.

Margaret: I'm just thinking about this as we're talking about it. I think that the shift in behavior - putting the piece of paper between - can inform that shift you're talking about, because going back to my example, when I first drilled down and did some work on like, “I'm not gonna think anymore for the rest of my life about how much I weigh because it's something I spent too much of my life thinking about, and I'm putting that aside.” I did that work for myself, but as I trained myself to respond to other people very neutrally about it, it made me feel less hostile towards them also. Like, I think the behavior and changing the behavior, it takes the power out of it. And it does inform the shift that you're talking about to a certain degree, which is like, I'm not actually triggered as much as I used to be by people commenting about my looks or my weight because I've just gotten used to responding to it very neutrally, and I think it's helped make that shift. Does that make sense?

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah, it does. And the key is to make sure that it's not that you're stuffing that down. It's not that it's still there and I'm just pretending it's not.

Margaret: Right, right. That it just feels like, “Oh, the sting's coming out of it.” Yeah. I think it does. I think it does. As I think about it, I mean, I'm literally thinking of it as we're talking about it and it's not that deep. I mean, there's other things that I have that are deeper that I'm probably just like, let's paper over that for now. But I think the practice of changing response can be helpful in getting you closer towards making that shift.

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah. I one hundred percent agree and I guess I would point to research on mindfulness practices and specifically on gratitude and sort of loving kindness meditations where you're sending well wishes out to people who are kind of a benefactor, someone who's kind of been, you're in a good relationship with, a neutral person, a difficult person, and that sending those well wishes to a difficult person can actually change the way you perceive that person. And so, you know, yeah, I definitely see it the same way.

Amy: Jen, I'm sure so many people listening want to know more about everything that you do, so start by telling us about the Taming Your Triggers workshop, and then tell us about your podcast and all your work.

Jen Lumanlan: Yeah, so everything I do flows through yourparentingmojo.com. And I've got a couple of things that may be of interest to your folks. And so the first of these is, I know that “my child not listening” is a key trigger for very many parents.

Amy: Yes. Yes.

Margaret: Amy agrees. Okay. Cosign. Yes.

Jen Lumanlan: So I compiled a list of 13 reasons why your child doesn't listen and what to do about each one. So for each one it gives, you know, what's actually going on here, from the super basic, they just didn't hear you, which you might think you yelled loud enough, but actually my husband has this amazing ability to ignore things happening right next to him, and sometimes our children do too. So from that through to understanding the child's needs, the child’s need isn't being met, and everything in between. So, “13 Reasons Why Your Child Doesn't Listen and What to Do About Each One.”

And so your listeners can download that at yourparentingmojo.com/whatfreshhell. And so, yeah, super special just for them. And then if they're interested in taking Taming Your Triggers, that is gonna open up February 19th through March 1st. And, yeah, we basically walk you through where is this stuff coming from, like, we so briefly touched on Amy's example of, well, you know, where is this stuff coming from? I couldn't have said that to my parent. Well, yes, and that hurt. That hurt you. So let's understand more about where these triggers are actually coming from and start the process of healing that. And also let's learn these new tools. Let's learn how to create the pause and widen the pause and move into understanding: what am I really feeling? What is my child really feeling? How can I identify my child's needs and also identify my needs so we can actually find a way that meets both of our needs? Um, so that's available as well at yourparentingmojo.com/tameyourtriggers.

Margaret: Fantastic. I really enjoyed this conversation. It really made me think, and we will link to Your Parenting Mojo on our show page. And Jen, thanks so much for talking to us today.

Jen Lumanlan: You're welcome. That was so much fun. Thank you.

Amy: Thanks, Jen.