Proactive demand drops - podcast episode
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Speaker 3: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Low Demand Parenting Podcast, where we drop the pressure, find the joy, and thrive even when it feels like life is stuck on level 12 hard. I'm Amanda. Eman author, autistic adult, and mom of three. I'm not here as an expert, but a fellow traveler. Together we're learning how to live more gently, authentically, and vibrantly in this wild
Speaker 4: parenting life.
Speaker: We're going to talk about letting things go proactively, not just letting them go in the moment. So this is a key shift and so many people that come to me who have been doing low demand.
For a long time and are experiencing their own burnout, they're feeling resentful and exhausted and [00:01:00] overwhelmed and thinking, this is not doable, Amanda, when I start letting things go, it just means that more and more piles up on me, low demand for my kids means high demand for me, and I'm dying.
Anybody resonate with that feeling? If you have felt like this whole low demand lifestyle thing is really just parents do everything for their kids, then this is the conversation for you because we are going to talk about letting things go wholeheartedly, proactively on purpose for everyone. We're going to get into the durable drops so that you can start to experience some ease and joy yourself.
It's The reason I put ease and joy in everything that I do is because when people come into low demand and they're only experiencing , increased intensity, overwhelm, and more demands on themselves, then that's a good sign [00:02:00] that we need to get into the proactive part of low demand. So there are a few steps to dropping demands proactively. The first step is to recognize that you can never anticipate all the demands, especially in the beginning when you're just getting your head around.
What is doable for your kid and what isn't? Where their actual capacity is versus what you expected of them, when there's still a pretty big gap between what you think they should be able to do or what school thinks they should be able to do, or the world thinks they should be able to do and where they actually are, like when you're living in the gap.
There's going to be a lot that is going to come up in the moment, which means that like every day you're of figuring it out. Okay? What is doable for you today? How do I make this wake up? Like, how do I get you fed breakfast?
How do we move our bodies from bed to [00:03:00] an eating space? What do you do all day? We're just asking big questions like what is actually doable for you? And there's gonna be a ton of demand dropping in the moment. So I wanna talk first about that, that the big goal is to get proactive. The big goal is to release things durably, but it is also okay to let things go in the moment.
And this is a big place where we've been led astray. We've been told that. If you say, "Hey, it's time to get up. You need to get ready for school," and your kid is like, you know, F you, mom, I'm not getting outta bed. That that right there is a power struggle that they need to know that you are in charge, that you will hold expectations, that you're not gonna let them off the hook.
They need to know that you are the powerful parent and that you'll get them where they need to go. That's what we've been told. We've been told that this is a power struggle and that we have to win it. And that if we don't win it, that something is at stake. Their safety, their respect for us, their [00:04:00] connection to us.
And the truth is that right there you have a gap. My expectation is that you would get out of bed right now and come downstairs, suite. And capacity is, I'm telling you that I can't. And from a nervous system perspective, that can't is, that doesn't feel safe for me right now. I can't access that. Boom gap.
What do we do when there's a gap? Well, the world says we gotta push 'em. They've gotta get outta bed now! We have to hold this! What We're going to practice. Just something to try on. I'm not saying you have to do this. This is the low demand way and I am presenting it to you as a possibility.
You're gonna meet them where they are in the moment, right there "f you, mom. I'm not getting out of bed." "Okay, I get it. Getting out of bed is too hard right now. I wonder if I could bring you breakfast right here." You're immediately thinking, what do I let go of? So you're in [00:05:00] the moment, which means it's stressful.
You're nervous system is reacting. You're scared. You might be feeling grief. It's all gonna come up in the moment. It's never pretty. There's no beautiful, smooth, ease and joy way to drop things in the moment. But when you let that go and you're like, "okay, no problem. I can bring you breakfast today. What do you want?
Maybe something that you can eat in bed. Maybe you need a few more minutes to rest. Maybe making it to school on time is not a reasonable expectation for today. Maybe I need to call in the teacher and tell them that you're gonna be late." Whatever you need to do to drop that demand is what you do in the moment you let it go.
Why? Because that builds trust, because it acknowledges where your kid is at today. Because pushing them in that moment is only going to break down trusting connection and take you further from where you actually want to go. And this is incredibly hard. We can't always do this. You're not a [00:06:00] bad parent if you push. Judgment and shame and shoulds have no place in this model.
You are allowed to parent in any which way. But what I'm offering to you is that you can, and in fact, it is beautiful, it is research based and it is deeply aligned to drop in the moment. But we're here to talk about how you go from dropping in the moment, which is where many of you may be, or what low demand has been for you.
Up to this point, we're gonna talk about how to take drop in the moment to ease and joy, because nobody feels ease and joy when their kids says, "F you, mom, I'm not getting out of bed." And suddenly you've gotta serve them breakfast in bed. You've gotta figure out what to do if you're late for work, and they're late for school. You've gotta deal with communication from school, like all of that is so stressful and it brings so much mess into your day. And so of course it feels terrible. Dropping demands in the moment almost always feels terrible for you [00:07:00] and for your kid because their, you also feels bad to them. They do not want to respond to you that way.
They do not want to have a meltdown. They do not want to call you names. They do not want to be letting you down day after day after day. That feels bad, and if you are stuck there, this next shift is for you.
The key to creating a lifestyle that actually works, that feels good, is learning how to notice, "Hey, a lot of mornings my kid can't get out of bed," or I'm just using this as one example.
You can replace it. We started with mornings because when the morning starts off terrible, it's so hard for our nervous systems to recover. Starting off the morning in a way that actually works for everyone in the family is so powerfully transformative. So we started off with like, how do I get cereal into your [00:08:00] belly in a way that does not lead to a meltdown?
How do I get coffee into my system so that I can actually be a functioning grownup who has a brain online? What does it look like for us to just get through the first hour of our day without anybody getting pushed out of their window of tolerance? So we started there, and this doesn't happen in the moment.
It doesn't happen in that first hour of the day. It happens in the other 23 hours where you're getting curious about how do I let the things go that are coming up day after day after day? How do I let them go in a way that works for me? And for my kid.
So let's talk about what proactive looks like. And I wanna talk about this "can't get out of bed" scenario. So your kid can't get out bed. The first thing to do is think about all of the demands that are involved in getting out of bed. There's a verbal interaction with [00:09:00] mom or dad. Maybe you turn on the light or you pull off their covers.
There's sensory aspects of a change in light, a change in temperature. There's just the pure expectation, the demand itself, that sleep is over. It's a transition, it's going from one state to another. Often we feel really cozy and safe first thing in the morning, unlike falling asleep, when we wake up from sleep our nervous system has done all this work, and we don't want to move into a day with tons of demands and expectations, so. You're gonna start by just looking at all the things that could be too hard for your kid. And these are the two categories that I introduce in the moment. What is hard? Which means, you know, no one likes getting out of a warm, cozy bed, but it's doable for your kid.
That's not the core. That's not what's really pushing their nervous system. What's really pushing them is that verbal interaction from you, especially around a [00:10:00] demand or an expectation First thing in the morning, "Hey, it's time to get out of bed." You are gonna be the demand detective.
You are gonna figure out what are the things that are too hard about this expectation, and how do I let those go? And then you come up with a plan that is doable for you. So there are these two pieces of getting unstuck that always have to go together. What is too hard for your kid and what matters most for you.
So it's those two things in concert that lead you to knowing what to drop. Too hard for a kid; matters most to grownup. And they're both hard. Like, I'm not saying this is easy stuff, that's why we're gonna focus on something really concrete that's coming up over and over again, so that you can be that detective and, and kind of a scientist and-- like try things out and it may be hard for a while as you learn to speak this whole new language of your kid's nervous system and attuning to their [00:11:00] capacity.
We have been sold a lie, my friends. Getting unstuck involves divesting, getting out of this whole mindset that we have been taught.
And especially when your kid is a teen or a young adult, you've been living in this mindset for sometimes multiple decades with this kid. So it's gonna take time. For you and your child to learn a new way. So first of all, tons and tons of grace and understanding for yourself that this is hard and that it's confusing and that it takes time.
But I wanna tell you the shoulds of developmental milestones, expectations of what a good adult or a young adult, or independence, what all of that looks like. That stuff's made up. It's just made up. Based on any number of systems that are trying to churn out cogs for the wheel. [00:12:00] So it's made up based on what a business will need and or even a fictional business because there's tons of ways to make money that don't involve having a boss and clocking in nine to five and there are so many ways, but.
The should's mindset says, "well, what about a boss one day?" "Well, they need to be able to drive." "Well, they've gotta be able to... fill in the blank." What are the half toss that you think an adult needs to be able to do in order to function? I bet if you made a list of all of those and then went into any late diagnosed neurodivergent adult group, you will find a collection of humans who cannot meet those expectations, who have spent.
Decades of their life with diagnosed and undiagnosed mental health problems with tons of shame, with tons of self doubt, and a very critical inner voice. You will find a group of [00:13:00] people who can't and who live with the expectation that they should be able to. That is what neurodivergent adults have to share, is that when your kid is a teenager.
Or when they're a 5-year-old, that is the time, whenever is the now that is the time to begin to align with their actual capacity. Because we have so much lived experience that says it does not actually work to continue to hold these high expectations and stay invested in the shoulds. It just creates so many people who feel deep down like they are broken and not enough, and a failure.
It is not working. It is time to get aligned with our kids. When we get into proactively releasing a demand , I wanna dig two levels deeper. So in every situation, let's take "get out of bed. It's time for school." That is a concrete demand that in this [00:14:00] moment is too hard for your kid. And so you might let that go. The work that you're gonna do is levels beneath that so that you can show up to that demand differently the next time. So then level below is, what is the belief that you have about what the good life looks like that is generating that demand? So let's say as a teenager, the belief might be "teenagers need to take responsibility for themselves. They need to grow up and start living in the real world because we don't have much time left. They need to learn to respect others and not be so self-interested and do what they're told.
Maybe that's the expectation, right? Like that's what a good teenager looks like. But where I wanna point you is even a level below that positive belief about, this is what people are supposed to do. There is always more living underneath that is particular to you. [00:15:00] This is about your story, your survival, what you've faced, what you've lived through, your trauma, your pain, your fear, and it often is a deep desire to protect yourself or protect others from the pain that you've lived through or that you're afraid they're gonna live through.
And I like to call this the deep need . it's the real why that's generating this demand in the moment. So it might sound something like, "when I was your age, my parents kicked me outta the house because they. We're in such crisis. I had to go live with my aunt and I got my way through high school working two jobs. You don't know anything about survival. I need to toughen you up because the world is not nice. You need to be ready to face a brutal world that's going to try to destroy you, and I don't want that for you. So get out of the bed." Right? Like [00:16:00] that's the stuff. It's not about "get outta bed right now."
And it's not about the everybody, like everybody needs this. This is your story. This is your deep stuff. That's the stuff that's generating the demand. And in the moment it's all there. Yeah. All three layers are showing up when you walk in that kid's room and are like, "Hey, get outta bed. It's time to go." It's all there. So knowing that all of that is under there, no wonder we can't just drop the demand in the moment and feel great about it. Of course not. That's impossible. we have to have spaces to do that deep work. That might be a therapeutic space, that might be a space of other people who've lived through the trauma or the life that you have that can validate what you went through and help you see the difference between you and your child or the world that your child is facing.
I don't know what it looks like for you, but that stuff needs to come out and be held in supportive community. [00:17:00] The expectations we need to interrogate. Where did this expectation come from? Who is it serving? And if it's not doable for my kid, what does it look like for me to let all that go and say, "go away shoulds! I care about this kid in this life, helping them thrive in the only way that they can, which is their way." And then once we, we kind of work our way in reverse, like we do the deep work, we interrogate all those shoulds and then we get back to the, "it's time to get out of bed. You need to eat your breakfast."
There are usually a hundred ways that you could drop those demands. You could have a robe right by their bed that they can put on or a blanket, so that that transition from warm cozy sheets to the rest of the world is not so hard. You could play music instead of having your voice be the one to get them out of bed.
If that's a more calming, soothing way. You could [00:18:00] work with them proactively and collaboratively to figure this out together. "Hey, what are your ideas about making it easier to get out of bed? I can tell it's too hard and I wanna support you, but I don't wanna push you too far or make you feel like I don't respect or trust your process."
That is the way forward, but it has to come from that deep work underground.
What about internally driven demands? The demands that our kids create for themselves. this is often a stuck spot for parents of teenagers. But also it can happen with little ones. Like I remember when I first started this, one of the big demands that my kid was having a hard time dropping was around like, they love to be creative and to cut things out and to make 3D models of things.
And they wouldn't stand up or they wouldn't look right. And it was leading to these epic meltdowns. And I was like, "how do I drop this? I don't want you to make 3D cardboard creations. This isn't me, this is all you kiddo. I can't let this one go." [00:19:00] So. What do you do when it's not your demand, when it's your kids' demand?
I wanna start with acknowledging that if you have a really highly sensitive nervous system, either because of developmental trauma, attachment trauma, PDA . If you've got a highly attuned.
Highly sensitive nervous system. Just wanting to do something can be pushing them over the edge. And that is so hard. It's so hard. It's just suffering upon suffering. And so first of all, there's that naming. There's that witness of like, "oh my gosh, my poor sweet darling. You are suffering. You are suffering.
And I am so sorry." and sometimes that means your kid is in burnout. And their capacity is so low and their nervous system is so heightened that pretty much anything can be a trigger that will push them into threat response. No wonder [00:20:00] just the desire to create a cave for my stuffed animal is pushing me over the edge.
I'm, I'm in full meltdown over this desire. Then you drop as many other expectations as you can in their life to support the things that they want to do so that they can have enough inside to show up for their own life and to do what it is that they are internally motivated and driven to do.
That's one model. I wanna talk about teenagers specifically, because by the time our kids are becoming teens and young adults. They've had enough of the demands. The in the moment concrete asks that were too hard for them.
They have totally absorbed the shoulds of , "I am supposed to be a person who...", and then all the things that fill in there. And now they have their own deep stuff. They have their own pain, they have their own trauma, their own fears. That's reality. That's all on the inside now. [00:21:00] It's the kid's own desire that's pushing them too far, or that's the demand that you can't drop.
And on some level that is a piece of the legacy of being whatever they are, disabled, neurodivergent, traumatized in the world that we live in. And so your coming alongside that in compassion and understanding and deep acceptance of the very legitimate feelings that they are having about their identity and their challenge in the world is where you want to be.
You drop the demand that they handle it well, and you make loads of room for them to have all of the behavioral expressions of that, that they need to, whether it means that they need to scream at you, you don't correct them if they're using rude words. You don't push them to get past their emotions faster than they need to.
That's where you create tons of room for them to [00:22:00] express whatever they need to, it's the long game of dismantling the shoulds. And I encourage you to start with yourself. Your teen will learn more by you breaking out of your own box. And experiencing your own freedom, owning your life and what is doable for you, do that and then walk beside them as they figure it out on their own.
We cannot remove the pain and struggle of this from them. We get to make space for it to be hard. In our own little world we create an alternative reality where they are good enough just the way they are, where they are loved exactly the way they are, and we help them to advocate for themselves to drop demands and increase accommodations so that they can stay in their window of tolerance and achieve whatever their version of a beautiful, thriving [00:23:00] life looks like.
If there's one thing that I want you to do as a parent, it is, is believe yourself.
You have been sold a bill of goods that doesn't work for you, doesn't work for your kids, is not based on science and is not creating a thriving adulthood or, or parents or " leaders who know what it means to show up as their full selves and to be. Agents of good in the world, that is not happening.
So let's say, "Hey, this whole thing's broken. I'm gonna do it differently. I'm gonna believe myself when I'm like, Hey, this whole thing's a crock. I don't believe any of you experts. I'm doing it my own way." If you stand up and say, "I'm gonna do it differently" and then do it, that is what I want for you from this.
And I promise you that that work is liberatory. I promise that it will get you caught up in larger movements of justice and [00:24:00] world changing. It never ends with us, it ends with us helping others break free. So. So believe yourself and then bust out and bring others along with you.
And we're all gonna make a new world.
Speaker 2: If this podcast is speaking to your soul, you can subscribe through wherever you get your own podcasts. Even better if you feel the nudge, head on over to Apple Podcasts in particular and leave us a review. It's such a helpful way for new people to also get to experience what this podcast wants to bring into their lives.
I'm Amanda. Remember, it takes great strength to let things go. I'll see you next week.
