Episode 271: Dysregulated Adults: When Your Teen Pushes Every Button You Have

Cynthia Yanof (0:08)

Welcome back to Feeding The Mouth That Bites You, a weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world. I'm Cynthia Yanof, and as always, I'm joined by psychologist and author Dr. Ken Wilgus.

All right, Dr. Ken, how are you?

Kenneth Wilgus (0:23)

I'm good.

Cynthia Yanof (0:24)

How are you?

Things are going good. They're swimming over here, swimmingly.

I was thinking about, say we're going to talk about dysregulated parents and we're going to laugh about how much you dislike the word dysregulation. But before we get there, I was thinking about this and we have this friend, and when we all had young kids, this guy struggled and I don't believe you listen to podcasts. If you do, we love you if you know who you are, but I doubt it. But this friend of ours, he would get wound up, he went from to 90 as a parent. We all had little kids at the time, this is a long time ago, and I'll never forget we were on this trip and there's several families and so he's talking to his kid, this isn't his kid's name. He's like, all right, Mark, well, put that away. Okay, Mark, I need you to put that. Mark, put it away now. My kids would drop to the ground, what just happened? We would laugh, not really, but we would laugh and be like, it is like everything's cool, we're going to go on a picnic to like, I'm going to burn down this house if everybody doesn't obey me. And it was the most shocking thing as an adult to watch, but then watching it like from a kid's perspective. Now, I will tell you this, his kids were not impacted. They were like, and they just carried on with their little day. My kids and our friends' kids were under the couch, like, I don't know what just happened, but this is going down. And when you and I decided we're going to talk out of dysregulated parent, that's the first example that came to my head.

Kenneth Wilgus (1:54)

Very common.

Cynthia Yanof (1:56)

A good dad has great kids now, we're all fine, everybody. But it was so shocking because I hadn't seen anything like that. And so when I think about a dysregulated parent, that's what comes to my mind. When you think about a dysregulated parent, what comes to your mind?

Kenneth Wilgus (2:14)

You know, probably that. I mean, that's a pretty good example, but I would call that a very angry parent, a parent with an anger problem.

I keep joking about it, but the problem I have with the term dysregulation is that your example is a dysregulated parent, a parent who might have shown a bit of upsetness and my tone of voice might consider herself dysregulated, a parent who stormed in with a gun and pointed at his kids as dysregulated. There's this implied, instead of trying to be a good mother and father, you should be basically a therapist and view all things as clinically and objectively and not personal as you can. I don't think it's possible or is it helpful. The example you gave is a good one where he's increasing, he's not going to say, you're right, I'm dysregulated. He's going to say, I told him three times and he just looked at me or whatever that tells the story of that event that he's going to say, that's why I got upset.

Cynthia Yanof (3:17)

Well, is what you're saying is the reason it frustrates you when you talk about it, because I'll tell you what, you don't have to listen to many parenting podcasts to hear, I mean, everybody's talking about dysregulated kids. Are you saying that what you struggle with is that it comes from this perspective of saying, it excuses behavior in some ways because it can't control it, it's clinical, they're dysregulated and you're saying, no, no, no, we're not excusing behavior.

It's just who I am, I'm just dysregulated sometimes and it's clinical versus owning it and saying, that is a problem, I've got to deal with it in myself and or my kids. Is that what you're calling it?

Kenneth Wilgus (3:52)

The context that I first heard dysregulation was from Dr. Brazelton back in the 1900s. He came to the University of Texas, did a great demonstration with film, look it up, of infants and demonstrated what I had never known before, is that if you really do pay attention to infants, there's a point when they do get stimulated or scared and they try to hold it together, they try to regulate and then when they lose it, they start crying because they are dysregulated. It was a very helpful way to think about it. I never considered that very often children, as infants, are trying to maintain regulation. Well, like everything else, terms get spread across to all kinds of things.