FamilyLife Today®

Sissy Goff: I say to parents a lot of times, I want you to let the bottom 20% go. It came from a conversation with an anxious mom who was spinning with her mind inner words. At the end, I literally chased her out of my office saying, "Let the bottom 20% go!" Because I just thought you have to let go of something. You cannot keep stressing and focusing with your kids, making a huge issue out of everything, because it's impacting your relationship.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I’m Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

We have a guest back in the studio today that our daughter-in-law said I would listen to her every single day.

Ann Wilson: She said that. And she’s not saying that about us, trust me. She picked up Sissy Goff’s—who we're talking about—her book called *The Worry-Free Parent*. Sissy, welcome back to FamilyLife Today.

Sissy Goff: Thank you. I'm so delighted to be with y'all.

Dave Wilson: Sissy, is anybody out there that doesn’t worry?

Sissy Goff: No, I don't think so, in this day and time. I read in the research a definition of anxiety that said anxiety is a response to cumulative stress over time. Isn't that our world? I mean, that is what we are living in.

Dave Wilson: We talked yesterday—and if you didn't listen yesterday, please go back and listen to that episode—but as we closed the segment, you had mentioned a favorite bedtime ritual for people with anxiety. So before we get into the day, give us this little tip.

Sissy Goff: It's what I tell kids to do all the time, but I think it works for grown-ups. I do it myself, too. It's called the "Three Doors" technique, or the "Three Doors" game if you're talking to kids. You picture three doors, literally, in your mind, and it's three places you love and feel safe.

When we're anxious and spinning out, anything sensory-related is helpful, which is why, side note, I love the game 5-4-3-2-1 with kids where we say tell me five things you see, four things you hear, three things you feel—tactile—two things you smell, and one thing you taste. When we're thinking in the sensory realm, we have to be present to the moment. When we're anxious, we're in the past or the future; we're not in the present moment.

So with Three Doors, what you would do is, say you picked a grandparent's house, you would walk in the front door, think about every single thing you see from the right all the way around you to the left. What does it look like? What do you hear? What do you smell? Then you make your way slowly through the whole house, doing the same thing.

Most kids say to me, "I never make it to the third door. I fall asleep before I ever get there," because it's a place we feel safe and our body relaxes. Again, when we're thinking about what my grandmother's house smelled like when I first walked in, you're focused on that, not, "Am I going to fail the quiz?" or, "Is my child going to have anyone to sit with at the lunch table tomorrow?"

Dave Wilson: You write in your book, and we all know, we're living in a very anxious time. I'm not saying our parents didn't worry, and I know they did, but the world is swirling in such a way. One of the things you write about is how anxiety affects us as parents. Talk to us about that.

Sissy Goff: I'm going to talk about five ways it impacts us, and then I'm going to talk about five types of parents I see the most in our office. The first is that anxiety distracts us because, like we're talking about, we're not in the present, we're in the past or the future, and kids long for us to be in the present.

They want us to be there with them. Again, it can even be that we're trying to problem-solve or think of something helpful, but still, we're not with them in the moment.

Ann Wilson: So you're saying, let's say a husband or wife comes home from work, but they're not present because they're still back at the job. Could that be a sign of anxiety?

Sissy Goff: Absolutely. If he's rehearsing what happened in the board meeting when he felt like it didn't go the way he wanted it to, or he didn't give the right presentation, that's exactly what's causing it.

Dave Wilson: So how do you stop that?

Sissy Goff: That's where we go back to breath prayer if we can, grounding, which is the 5-4-3-2-1, or there are a lot of different ways we can do that. Then, trying to flip the thought. Stop, drop, and flip, like we talked about in the last episode.

We've got to really fight it. If we're not proactively doing something different, that worry's just going to take over until we're eventually distracted because we have to be. The alarm goes off, and we have to get up out of bed, or whatever it is.

Dave Wilson: I'm sure some listeners are old enough to remember when we didn't have these cell phones that I'm holding in my hand. I remember when they first came out, my thought was—and I'm sure I wasn't alone, I think it was even promoted that way—now my life will be so much simpler. How wrong was that? It brings everything right in front of us at all times. So you can get so nervous and worry-filled and distracted 90% of the time, right?

Sissy Goff: I feel like my parents were distracted by any plethora of things growing up, but they didn't have the phone that they were checking as they were bathing me or putting me to bed or any of those things.

I mean, y'all know with grandkids, my little nephews that I'm with a lot, I have to think, "Put the phone down. Flip it over." I mean, I get so mad at myself sometimes because I'll be sitting there, and I remember thinking one time when I was with my oldest nephew, when Henry is watching a show and has asked his mom and dad and I to watch a show with him, and we are on our phones, if he thinks, "I can't wait until I'm old enough and I can hold a phone and watch TV at the same time," it breaks my heart that I do that. I just want to put the thing away.

Ann Wilson: Dave and I get mad at each other when we're watching a show together and we're on the phone. I'm like, "You're not even watching." I think it's become so normal for kids. As they're watching their show, the parents are scrolling. I'm guilty of that as a grandparent, too.

Sissy Goff: They're watching. It's a new thing that kids are saying to us in our offices: "I feel like I have to compete with technology for my parents' attention." And it's making us anxious; it's making them anxious, too.

Okay, so number two. Anxiety makes us attach future meaning to present problems. Because he is struggling in math, he will never be able to do high school math, he'll never get to college, he'll never have a job where he can provide for his family, because he can't do third-grade math.

I had a mom one time who came in and she said, "I really have gotten really concerned about my daughter." I said, "Tell me what's going on." She said, "We were on a trip recently and we were staying in a hotel room and she had some trash and she went to throw it away and she missed the trash can and she left it on the floor." She sat there in this pregnant pause and I said, "And?" She said, "How will she ever be a functional human being when she doesn't throw the trash away?" The leaps we take. We all do it.

I had a son who was diagnosed with ADHD. That was our conversation when we were going to bed. How is he going to get through school? Will he ever go to college? Will he ever get married? Why do we do that? He's probably doing great right now. He's doing phenomenal. He has had to work harder for things than other kids might have, so he probably is more resilient and has a better work ethic.

Dave Wilson: We do this so big-time with the idol of sports. If your third-grader or your seven or eight-year-old can't make a free throw or a layup, you're like they'll never be able to play sports at any level the rest of their life. They're seven years old. They could be in the NFL someday, but we do it.

We think if they can't—I was told this by a coach when my youngest was playing different sports, they wanted him to play soccer. I said, "How many games you play? Eighty?" I'm like, "Can't do it. Don't have time." He said, "He'll never play college sports in his life if he doesn't join my third-grade soccer team." That's what he told me. I hung up thinking, "He's probably right. Should we do it?" We didn't do it, and he played college sports, but it was just the worry, the anxiety, whether it's sports or academics or anything. We project it.

Ann Wilson: That's a good question to ask yourself: are you attaching future meaning to present problems? I think a lot of us are guilty of that one. It's easy to be. Instead of doing that, we should just do what?

Sissy Goff: Be in the moment. And we can go back to the truth that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope. In this parenting class we're teaching, I say to parents, I want you to think about what caused you to grow the most when you were growing up.

What did you learn from? What are you most proud of? Because probably the answer to every one of those questions involved hard things that you went through and that your parents didn't rescue you from.

Dave Wilson: I've always said this so many times. I'm going to write a parenting book called *The Five Gifts*—or ten gifts—*Every Parent Should Give Their Children*. The first one is adversity. It's all these gifts you never think of, because we think, no, we want to make it easier and better.

But the best character comes from hardest times. Again, you don't force your kid to go through something difficult, but when they do, you don't bail them. You walk beside them, but you let them grow through it. It's hard to do as a parent.

Ann Wilson: We just hate to see them in pain. But you're right; we grow the most sometimes when we're in adversity and hard things. We cling to Jesus more than ever when we're in those spots. Our faith grows so much. Okay, that’s two.

Sissy Goff: Three would be anxiety makes us angry. We're wanting good things for them and we feel like they're not happening, so I think it gets bigger and bigger inside of us and we end up getting angry when it's the last thing we would ever want to do. I always want parents to hear that because you're angry doesn't mean you're a bad parent. In fact, I think it means the opposite. I think it means you're anxious and are not stopping to process it, and so it's showing up that way.

Dave Wilson: I mean, when you are able to identify my anxiety, my worry, is having me react in a way that I shouldn't be, whether I'm yelling or getting angry, that's a revelation in itself to be able to connect those dots. What do you do? Do you stop? Do you pause? Do you take a breath?

Sissy Goff: I think you pause. You try to, with your spouse or with your family, have a code word that you can say that helps you as you're moving towards getting more angry. Then, I think you can do two things. I think if you're just angry in the moment, I think you could think about who do I want to be in this moment and what do I want my kids to hear from me?

I feel like a lot of times the anger right now is at ourselves. I think the way we talk to ourselves spills over onto the people that are closest to us.

Ann Wilson: How do you think parents can generally talk to themselves when it's in a negative way? What do they say to themselves?

Sissy Goff: "I'm going to go back to all the things I botched today," or, "Because he or she is struggling with this, it must be my fault. I'm the one who started this." I would say—this is a very overgeneralization, so hang in there with me—but I read years ago that when something goes wrong in a boy's world, he blames someone else, and when something goes wrong in a girl's world, she blames herself.

I don't think that's always true. I think there are definitely men who blame themselves, but I think moms right now are angrier at themselves than I've ever seen. I think that's part of the anger with kids that's coming up. It's this "I'm a failure as a parent. I'm not getting it right, and I'm going to try harder."

It's like snow skiing. I love to snow ski. I'm not a great skier; I'm a very easy blue skier, but I don't fall much. But if I fall once, I fall five times, because I get tighter and more mad at myself. I think, "Point your skis down the hill! You're turning too wide!" I just start talking to myself that way. Literally, my body is getting stiffer and tighter, and then I end up falling again. I think we do the same things emotionally to ourselves. We get angrier at ourselves and angrier, and then the anger is going to spill over.

Dave Wilson: So you need to go in the lodge and have a hot chocolate, take a breath, start over. I'm sure you're familiar with John Gottman, who writes about marriage. I remember hearing him say that they'd wire up these couples and let them have a conflict, and he's observing and making comments. He said one of his famous quotes is, "Literally tracing their heart rate." He discovered that when a man's heart rate goes above 95, the next thing out of his mouth is going to be really stupid.

I found that fascinating. When you're in a conflict or whatever, but here's one of the things I thought was so insightful. He said, "So bad things happen when you're escalating; it's not going to go well." He said, "So here's what they do. They're filming this. They've got the man and woman wired up." He said they would send in one of their guys and say, "Hey, we have technical problems. We have to take a break for a second and then we'll regroup." They're like, "Okay." So they take off their stuff, they leave.

They literally take a break for ten minutes. It's all made up. There's no technical problems. They just want to show what happens when you settle down or take a break. So they put them back together, and it's a whole different conversation with a five or ten-minute break. That's what you're saying. Take a breath. You're going to stop this cycle you're on. For me, often it's take a breath and go, "What's true? The Lord says, Scripture says, why am I worried? Wait a minute." I will give a spin until I stop and do that. It's like the Word of God brings me back to center and says, "Okay, there's some things that maybe I need to do about this, but the worry that I'm feeling, that I'm carrying, that's making me yell or get anxious, the Lord's got it." So that's a big one.

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Ann Wilson: Alright, we’ve hit three. What’s number four?

Sissy Goff: Anxiety makes us micromanage. This is putting a light on things. In the absence of being able to control the big things, we lock into the little things and try to control all of those. We don't see detail. Everything has the same level of importance, and it's huge. And so we end up micromanaging kids, and I think that makes them feel anxious themselves. I think it makes them feel incapable. We're stepping in and trying to fix all the things.

I say to parents a lot of times, I want you to let the bottom 20% go. It came from a conversation with an anxious mom who just was spinning with her mind inner words. At the end, I literally chased her out of my office saying, "Let the bottom 20% go!" because I just thought you've got to let go of something. You cannot keep stressing and focusing with your kids, making a huge issue out of everything, because it's impacting your relationship.

Ann Wilson: So the bottom 20%—things like they didn't put the trash in the trash can?

Sissy Goff: There you go. Things that really don't matter. But what about the parent that's thinking, "But that does matter"? Well, that's where I really say to parents in my office, I want you to write down the top ten things that you're getting stirred up about and maybe even having power struggles over them with your kids. Rank them in order. Stop talking about the bottom two. Just stop.

Ann Wilson: Give us a few examples of what some of those power struggles may be.

Sissy Goff: Well, I think it could be their room, the cleanliness of their room. If they're an adolescent, stop talking about their room, because you have much bigger fish to fry. If they're younger, I mean, obviously, I think dressing appropriately is important, and we're in a hard stage for that right now.

But I think letting go of their style choices can be the bottom two sometimes, if it feels like they're wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt to school on a dress-up day, let the teacher deal with it.

Ann Wilson: One of my grandkids—I remember saying to my daughter-in-law because this little granddaughter started wearing her pajamas all day. Whenever she would start feeling anxious, she'd want to put on her pajamas. She’d say, "I just need my pajamas," and she'd go upstairs and put on her pajamas.

So she started wanting to wear her pajamas all day, and I said to our daughter-in-law, "Someday you're going to look back on this phase and you're going to be proud of yourself for just letting her wear her pajamas all day." She’s at the grocery store and she’s at the park in her pajamas, and who cares? Right, who cares? Sometimes we would like to wear our pajamas. We do, that’s what sweats are. Exactly.

Sissy Goff: All right, what’s our number five? The five is that anxiety causes us to lose our warmth and our joy. It steals it. I read in the research that anxiety in kids is often—not always, please hear me say not always—but anxiety in kids is often linked to a lack of parental warmth.

I don't believe that is because the parent is not warm as a person. I believe it's because when we have spun out to that place where we're not present, we can't access our warmth. It's so hard to connect with them. Again, kids are longing for that from us.

It's interesting as we're talking about all this, one of the trends that we see with kids today is the lack of self-regulation. One of the best ways kids learn that to control my own emotions is to be with a grown-up who's in control of theirs and listening to me and with me in whatever I'm feeling. Attunement is what that's called.

Ann Wilson: Sissy, how practically can you do that? Let's say you're trying to get out the door to go to school, and one of your kids is having an absolute meltdown because they don't want to wear a pair of shoes or they don't want to wear a coat today. You're going to be late, and they're just on the floor screaming, crying, hitting their sibling. How do you put that into action right then?

Sissy Goff: A couple of different things. Maybe you, if you have a friend who could drive the sibling to school, you have somebody else take the older sibling who's mad that they're not going to be on time, or a spouse if your spouse is there.

Then I think part of your bottom 20% that day is you let go of getting to school on time and you sit down on the floor with them and you say, "I know it's hard sometimes to get dressed for me too, and I want to do the same thing. You know what? Let's take three deep breaths together right now. What is something you've learned about God lately that helps?" or let's say a Scripture together.

Then it may take, it may mean you're 15 minutes later, but the school will be okay, especially at the age your child would throw themselves on the floor. The school's going to be okay and the tardy really doesn't matter. I definitely have gotten angry with my nephews before because they weren't moving fast enough. One time, my oldest took my face in his hands—he calls me Diddy—and he said, "Diddy, it's okay." I was like, you just get so convicted so quickly.

Ann Wilson: I remember reading a book by Jean Lush once, and she said her child was wanting to tell her all about these things going on, and Jean, the author of the book, the mom, said, "I was so anxious because all these things were going on, and so she was rushing her child through the story. Like, okay, okay, okay." Her daughter said, "Mom, I need you to lie down in your soul first."

She said it was so convicting that she said, "I'm so sorry, tell me everything." A teacher had made fun of her that day, and she said, "I almost missed it because I was so distracted with something else that was going on."

Dave Wilson: That last one got me. I mean, they all did. I've done them all. But I know that I'm not a warm person. None of us are when we're carrying something. Usually that carry is private, it's secret, nobody knows what it is, it's sort of you alone.

When you're able to share that with somebody—if you're married with your spouse, maybe even as a parent with your child like you just said, "I'm anxious too, I'm feeling this," something happens to your soul when you confess. When you share it out loud, and then maybe the other or yourself goes vertical and says, "Okay, I need to take a breath."

Because when you said earlier we're going to be tardy today, I know there's so many parents like, "Never! That's a never!" And you're saying, you know what? It isn't the most important thing in the world. For some of us—I'm not wired that way—but there's some that would say, "No, that is too important. You don't ever do a tardy. You don't ever get a C. You always get As." There's part of us that has to go, what really, really matters? Because you want to be known and you want your children to feel love and warmth, not rigidity and coldness that's all tied to anxiety. That's great wisdom.

Ann Wilson: I think too, as we talk about that last one, the thing that came into my head was the Fruit of the Spirit. Think about the first ones: love, joy, and peace. I don't know about all of you, but I have to have Jesus to bring that Fruit of the Spirit into my life.

It does come when I'm connected to Jesus, talking to Him throughout the day, giving Him my burdens, my cares, my worries. Then He can carry it so that I can experience love, joy, and peace, and our kids pick up on that.

Dave Wilson: What a great day with Sissy Goff. There is no one better, I don't think, in the world about helping us as parents. Again, her book is called *The Worry-Free Parent: Living in Confidence So Your Kids Can Too*. Who doesn't want that? Go get your copy by clicking the link in the show notes at familylifetoday.com.

Ann Wilson: One of the questions we get most often this time of year is, "What study should we do with our small group?" Honestly, if you haven't done the new *Art of Marriage*, it's been refreshed, redone, and it is awesome.

Dave Wilson: You should do it. Give it a shot. You can do the *Art of Marriage*, and if you want, maybe you want to do a parenting study. We have the *Art of Parenting* or *Vertical Marriage*. They're all video studies and workbooks, and they're on sale right now through the end of August. 25% off. That's a deal. I like sales.

Ann Wilson: Me too. So go to familylife.com/shop, pick out whichever small group study you want to do, and go watch God work in your life, and even more importantly, in the lives of those that you're leading. familylife.com/shop.

Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Crew ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.