When “Good Behavior” Comes at a Cost: How Behavior-Focused Parenting Disconnects Families

Episode 208: When “Good Behavior” Comes at a Cost: How Behavior-Focused Parenting Disconnects Families

Are you wondering why your adult child won’t talk to you—even though they always seemed like the “easy one” growing up?

In this episode, we explore how parenting that focuses only on behavior—obedience, manners, doing the “right” thing—can lead to emotional distance between parents and their adult children. This kind of behavior-focused parenting often results in adult children who perform in their relationships rather than show up authentically. They become experts at people-pleasing, suppressing their true feelings, and maintaining the image of being the “good” child… all to preserve attachment.

If you've been feeling rejected by your adult child, or like you're walking on eggshells around them, this episode will help you understand the root causes of that disconnect.

You’ll learn:

• Why focusing only on behavior creates emotional disconnection
• How attachment needs drive children to “perform” instead of express themselves
• The long-term effects of emotional suppression: defensiveness, stonewalling, performative gestures
• Why many adult children feel lost in their relationships—even when they’re “doing everything right”
• How to shift from behavior control to emotional connection
• What “differentiation of self” looks like in parent-adult child dynamics
• How to begin rebuilding trust and repairing relationships without needing to control the outcome

This is especially for you if you’ve searched for:

• “how to reconnect with an estranged adult child”
• “parenting adult children relationships”
• “why does my child hate me”
• “emotional healing for moms”
• “healing after estrangement”
• or “how to fix a broken relationship with adult child”

You’re not alone. Many parents find themselves here—and there is a way forward.

Ready to take the next step?
Visit tinagosney.com to learn how you can work with me as your family relationship coach. I help moms like you move from fear and confusion to clarity and connection in your relationship with your adult children.

 Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs. 
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Connect with us:

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tinagosneycoaching/

 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinagosneycoaching

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 Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach. 
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Transcript

Tina Gosney: 0:00

What if I told you that focusing on your child's behavior and just their behavior might be the very thing that's damaging your relationship with them? I'm Tina Gosney, family conflict coach, family life educator, and today we're diving into a deep, hard truth, how behavior focused parenting quietly fractures your family relationships from the inside out and you don't even know it. This is not just about raising children, small children. This is about parenting across the lifespan. So if your children are no longer children in your home that you're raising, but they're now adults in the out in the world raising their own children, this still applies to you. I want you to imagine a child standing on a stage all alone, dark stage, but there's a spotlight right on them. They're saying everything right. They perform beautifully. They smile, oh. They get their lines perfectly, or they play their instrument perfectly. They bow just when they're supposed to. They stand up straight. They look beautiful or handsome. You are so proud of them. You're beaming with pride at how amazingly talented your child is. And then the curtain goes down, and what happens? They are an anxious mess. They're trembling, they're exhausted. You know what the worst thing is is there don't they don't know if you love them for who they are or for how well they perform. This is what behavior focused parenting creates. It's a performance based relationship. Most parents believe they're doing the right thing by focusing on behavior. After all, isn't it our job as a parent to raise a responsible, respectful and well mannered adult? Isn't that our job? Yes, it is, but not the cost of the child's emotional self and their authentic self. I do want to pause here for just a moment and give a little spotlight on generational parenting transmission. You pass down what you know, so did your parents, and so did their parents. And if you are between the ages about 40 to 60 right now, you your parent most likely focused on behavior parenting. They focused on your behavior and parenting your behavior and punishing and rewarding your behavior. So this is probably how you were parented. And if this is you, I'm sending you so much love and grace right now. You did what you knew as a parent how to do you thought you were doing the right thing. We now know that behavior based parenting is not really what children need, and I'm going to show you why in this podcast. Because when you focus only on behavior like good grades, polite words, a clean room, saying the right thing, looking the right way, you might get obedience, but what you're not going to get is emotional honesty, true connection. You're not going to get a child who feels safe being themselves, their true, authentic self, because they're hiding the human part of them, the messy part of them, because they think you can't handle it, and they think that they might be rejected if they show that side to you. So instead, this child learns how to suppress their true feeling in order to keep the attachment with you. They want to keep that intact, and they're often doing this without even their own knowledge, because they started doing these things before their brain was able to hold on to memories. Before the age of five, they already, probably already had these survival tactics in place in their life, because for a child, attachment is survival. So if being good is what gets them love and approval and connection, they're going to do whatever it takes to stay good, even if that means betraying their authentic self. So if we fast forward a couple of decades, two or three decades, now, we're looking at an adult who does everything right. They follow the rules, they say the polite things, they keep the peace, they avoid conflict. But what's happening when the curtain goes down and the spotlight is off of them? What happening is what's happening underneath the surface. There's anxiety and there's just exhaustion and chaos, because these adult children often feel confused in their relationships. They don't know how to be their authentic self and to be their vulnerable self and to have true connection in their relationships with their partners and their own children. They might be defensive with you and with other people, and not even know why they're being defensive. They just. Know that they just don't like what's happening, and something feels like it's hurting them, and they need to be defensive. They might be emotionally disconnected from their own needs, and so they just go around trying to fill everybody else's needs. They may have learned these covert survival strategies like stonewalling, you know, putting up a wall and closing themselves off when, when life feels overwhelming, especially emotions feel overwhelming. Sometimes. I've met some people who the slightest bit of emotion overwhelms them and they need to shut that down. You're going to have a survival strategy that looks like this, performative gestures to meet expectations. This is like, you know, they're checking all the right boxes and making sure their life looks good from the outside. How many times have you watched, you know, 20/20, or a Dateline episode about the family that had everything that looks so perfect from the outside, and then you find out what was happening on the inside? Yeah, that's what's happening here. You might have someone the survival strategy of people pleasing to stay safe in relationships, this is a true form of self abandonment. People do not ask for what they need because they're so concerned with feeling everybody else's needs that they don't even know who they are without someone else around, that they can serve and do things for and give to so that they can get the validation back for themselves to have their confidence, and that's how they find their stability. Is through other people telling them that there's that they're good. You might find someone who's defensive. So instead of being really honestly vulnerable and sharing the truth, they're going to hide behind defensiveness. You know, I think the worst thing of all is that people don't feel safe to share what they really think or feel because they were taught that it was never safe. And again, I'm sending so much love to the parents here, because you were probably just doing this because you thought this was the way you were supposed to parent. I had a mom once tell me, she said, My daughter is so respectful and kind, and she has always been that way. She's never talked back. She always does what I ask. She was the perfect child, but now she's grown up and she is so distant from me, I don't feel like I even know her. It feels like we just talk around things, or we just never even dive under the surface of anything. This is the heartbreaking cost of behavior focused parenting. You might raise a compliant child, and be given all the kudos for that. You get lots of social rewards for having a compliant child, and so does your child, and that's probably why they keep doing it. But you lose the connection with the adult that they become, and they lose the connection with themselves as well. So I want to clarify the difference between attachment and connection, because attachment is instinctual. This is the attachment that a child needs to have formed with a caregiver. When they come into this world, a child will do anything to preserve that, even at the cost of their own authenticity. So for children, parents are their literal lifeline. Parents are their survival. These are the people that keep them alive. Their unconscious brain knows this, even though their conscious brain does not have the language for it, but their conscious brain, or their unconscious brain, knows I need to keep these people happy, because they keep me alive. And what they do in order for you, their parent to accept them and to keep them alive, are a lot of different things that I'm going to tell you about in just a second, but they are biologically wired to preserve that connection with you, that attachment to you. At all costs. Rejection equals danger and death. So what they don't know how to be safe without you, emotionally or physically. So children don't usually reject their parents as children, they adapt themselves to be fit, to fit in to the parents world. When love or approval feels conditional, a small child quickly learns when mom smiles, I'm successful. Dad withdraws when I cry, I'm safe when I'm helpful. So they start suppressing parts of themselves, they amplify those acceptable traits, and they perform competence or cheerfulness. This is sometimes called the development of a false self. It's this protective adaptation to preserve the attachment with the parent. It's like the attachment goal is saying, I'll become what you want me to be if you just stay with me and keep me alive. Another thing they do is they suppress their emotion. If a caregiver is or a parent is overwhelmed, if they dismiss them, you know if they dismiss their attention or their emotions, or if that caregiver or parent is uncomfortable with emotions, children very quickly learn, oh, my sadness is annoying to you. My fear makes you afraid, and that's too much for me. My needs are a burden to you. So they will stop crying, they minimize distress, they become prematurely independent, and they avoid asking for your help. We can look at the this through an example of this idea that you should let your child, your baby, cry themselves to sleep. Okay? So often, parents will use this technique of letting their child cry themselves to sleep, and after a few nights, the child sleeps on their own, and the parent thinks, oh, look, this was it worked. No, I don't have to go in there. And, you know, they don't have to sleep next to me, or I don't have to do all these things to get them to go to sleep. What actually happened was that child has learned that when they are in distress, no one's going to come and help them, and so now they need to take care of themselves, and we're beginning to create a person, a child, with an avoidant attachment pattern, and that attachment goal is, I'm not going to need you, and if I don't need you, you're not going to reject me. It's a very much a keep people at a distance. I'm going to be super hyper, independent. That's an avoidant attachment pattern. Another thing that small children will do is they intensify the emotion. So this is the opposite of avoidant. This is an anxious adaptation. So if your caregiver, your parent, is inconsistent, that child learns, hey, sometimes you're going to respond, sometimes you don't, so I have to work super hard to keep you close to me, because I feel better when you're close to me. So they're going to heighten those distress single signals. They're going to cling to you. They're going to become hyper vigilant to you and focus on your mood, because that tells them what to do. This is very closely associated with anxious attachment patterns, and this goal is to keep you close. And if I don't let you go, then you're not going to disappear. And if I can keep you close, then I'm safe. In homes with a lot of stress or trauma or emotional instability, children might find themselves becoming the caretaker. They might find themselves being a mediator between their parents. They might be the responsible one. It often shows up as them looking like a really easy child and so independent and mature, but this is often called parentification, and this child is trying to stabilize you so that they still they feel safe, but they're also being robbed of a childhood, and this isn't fair to the child. They also will internalize blame. Instead of saying, my caregiver or my parent is wrong. They're saying, No, I am wrong. They take all the faults on themselves. You'll see this often when parents get divorced, and how children will blame themselves for their parents divorce, they'll say, This is my fault. If I were better, this wouldn't have happened. This allows them to have a sense of control, like, if it's their fault, then they can just be better and they can fix it. And so they they're thinking, Okay, if I can change myself, then you'll stay and I can keep you from the time we are very, very small, before we have language skills. Children are looking for safety and survival in their parents and in their caregivers. And they do not have the language to know what you are speaking to them, but they do read other things. The way your voice tone shifts, your facial expressions, how your energy changes, they read tiny, little, micro signals of anger or withdrawal or acceptance, they are hyper attuned and especially unpredictive environments. All children do this, and we keep those same markers, body language markers as adults, in as we communicate with each other, but we also rely on language, and often our body language is more reliable than our words are, unfortunately, so from an attachment standpoint, these things that I just went through, the ways that children will adjust themselves to fit to what the parent wants them to be. They are not flaws. They are intelligent. Different survival strategies, they are showing a very intelligent brain that is keeping its person alive. Children are not trying to manipulate. They are trying to preserve an attachment. But the deeper layer is the attachment. System does not prioritize authenticity and connection. It prioritizes proximity. Authenticity becomes safe only when attachment feels secure. So all of these adaptations that I just went through, people pleasing, emotionally shutting down over functioning, anxiety, conflict avoidance, difficulty knowing who am I really? This is how it shows up as an adult, all of these things that we struggle with as adults. These are the very strategies that once protected children, even you as a child, but restrict you as an adult. So this was attachment. Let's go into connection. Connection is built on mutual emotional safety. It allows a child to show up as their whole messy, human, emotional, real self and still feel loved. There's a book that I loved, and I think that I have probably talked about it on the podcast before, although I can't remember. So it's if it's been that long that I can't remember, then it's a time that I talk about it again. This is Becky Kennedy's book called "Good Inside." I give this to all new parents. She sees behavior issues as you are a good person who is having a hard time, and she focuses this on children, but it is good for everybody, because how often as adults are we a good person who's having a hard time, and if we focus on that behavior first, that's not so good. We're not seeing the person behind the behavior and what their true need is. As a parent, part of your growth is learning to detach from controlling your child's behavior and instead differentiate, see them as a separate, sovereign human being with their own thoughts, feelings and choices. It is not your job to control who they become. You are not failing. If your child has big feelings, you as a parent, as a person, as a human, are growing. If you can stay grounded while your child disagrees with you. That is emotional maturity, and that is a really difficult and courageous parenting for grown children. Now, when I say that behavior based, parenting is not the real focus, I know some of you feel your body tighten a little bit because you're thinking, Okay, wait a minute, behavior doesn't matter. Well, of course it matters, but behavior is just information. It's not the root. So if we are just chasing behavior, we are only managing symptoms. And when anxiety in the system stays high, the behavior will simply reorganize around that anxiety. I'm going to show you what I mean by that. So research and attachment theory shows us that children's behavior is deeply connected to that perceived safety that they have in their relationship. And when safety increases, defensive behavior decreases. And now the question is shifting from, and so now the question that we're asking is shifting from, how do I stop this behavior to what's happening in this attachment system right now that is a very different target families, and that includes our children of all ages and both parents. Families are not a collection of individual people living together or related to each other. Families are emotional, one emotional unit, and our emotions feed off of each other's emotions, and so when anxiety enters the family system, it ripples through everybody, and everybody reorganizes in some way to try to get that emotional unit to calm down. I often hear as when I'm talking about parenting, a parent say something like, I can't let this behavior go. If I don't correct this, then I'm a failure as a parent. I am failing. So I want to be so gentle here, because it likely, this likely means that you were taught that good parenting means shaping behavior and monitoring it and fixing it and preventing future mistakes, and that feels like safety to us as parents. That feels like good being a good parent. But here is what family system research tells us the emotional tone. Of the parent has more long term impact than the moment to moment behavioral correction. So when that anxiety in the family system rises, everyone's functioning drops, because we're all trying to manage the anxiety. When one person lowers their reactivity and starts responding more maturely, that system begins to stabilize. Your job is not to eliminate every unwanted behavior. Your job is to become the most emotionally mature person in the room, which is not that is not failing, that is leadership. So if you're thinking that this sounds like permissive parenting, I am not talking about permissive parenting, because that avoids boundaries, because that parent is uncomfortable putting in boundaries. Children need boundaries. They thrive with boundaries. What I am describing, though, is boundaries without reactivity. There is a difference between you can't do that because it makes me anxious, and I need to control the situation. And this that doesn't work in our home, and I can hold on to that, and I can be steady about that while you have a problem with it, research consistently shows that children, even adult children, respond better to a calm, predictable structure than to anxiety driven control. This is not about removing the structure. We need structure. It's about removing the fear from the structure. I have talked to many parents who feel so afraid for the harmful choices that they have their child is making sometimes that child is an adult, sometimes they're a teenager, and my heart goes out to those parents, because that is really, really scary. And if that is you, I feel the weight of that. And when your child is doing something that's risky or self destructive. Your nervous system is on fire. It goes into emergency mode. Of course it does, because you are wired for survival and keeping your child alive, even when they're an adult. But here's what we know from decades of family systems theory research is that when anxiety escalates in one part of the system. It spreads through the whole system, just like I said before, and when you have this high intensity pursuit of your child's behavior, changing your child's behavior, when you lecture, when you threaten, when you over function for them, it increases their resistance and their secrecy. When you lower your reactivity, your reaction to their actions, it does not mean that you are approving of their harmful behavior, but it means you stop adding more anxiety into an already anxious family system, sometimes the most powerful intervention in a situation like that is your own ability to stabilize yourself. If you see things happening in your family and you are wondering if this is your fault, I want to tell you this is not about blame. This is about influence, blame is always going to look back. It's going to point a finger to the past and say who caused this, Whose fault is this. Influence looks forward and it says, here's where we are. How can I shift now? Every family operates within an emotional system, and our culture increases that anxiety. Social media increases that anxiety, the political tension and parenting expectations are increasing anxiety right now you are swimming in forces so much larger than you, but the empowering truth is in every emotional system, the person with the most self regulation has the most stabilizing influence, not because you are controlling other people, but because you don't amplify fear. And when you shift from this behavior control to emotional leadership, you move from chasing outcomes to changing the climate in your home, and climate shapes behavior far more powerfully than correction ever could. So I've spent a lot of time telling you what you should not be doing and all the after effects of behavior focused parenting. So what do we do instead? I'm going to give you four things. First, validate emotions over behavior. When you see that your child is upset, don't jump to fix it or correct it. Start by naming it and validating what they feel. You seem really disappointed. That makes sense. I'm here. I'm right here with you. Number two model emotional honesty. And I think this is really a difficult one for a lot of parents, because you're raised to ignore and abandon your own emotions, and so if that is you, you've got some emotional work to do to in order to to really be able to embrace this one modeling emotional honesty, because this looks like sharing your own feelings in a regulated way, saying something like feeling really sad today. I'm not mad at you, I'm just really sad. I need some quiet time. If you can do that and keep your emotions and deal with them yourselves. They don't drive you around. They're sitting in the passenger seat while you're in charge of your life. The third thing is reward authenticity, not performance. Reward effort, not performance. Celebrate when your child does something hard, no matter if they succeeded at it or not, tell them, I love to see you work so hard you've developed such good skills when you know how to stick with something that's hard. It doesn't matter what grade you got, it doesn't matter how you performed. You just did something hard, and you should be proud of yourself. Share that with them. And the fourth one, and I can't emphasize this one enough, because we we just measure ourselves according to how our children we think turn out. And I have issues with even that phrase of turning out, you need to let go of being a good parent. Your job is not to produce a well behaved child, it's to nurture an emotionally healthy human who knows how to be in a relationship with themselves and with others. And when you use your child's successes and the way that they're behaving to validate yourself. That's so unfair to them, it puts so much pressure on them. Relieve them of that anxiety of providing you your worth, because you already have your worth, you're already good. Remember, do the work. Do the work to find that goodness within yourself. Now if you are starting to see the ripple effects of behavior focused parenting in your adult child, and you want to rebuild that safety that they never got, I want to help you with that. If you need to find your value, your internal value, if you need to find your emotional self that was self abandoned, this is what we work on. I coach parents just like you that are ready to step into their true authentic self. They're ready to stop walking on eggshells and start building real, honest connection with their adult children. You can go to Tina gosney.com to learn more about how you can work with me. It is not too late to repair something that you missed. I don't believe it's ever too late. I mentioned just a second ago that I have issues with that phrase turning out like somebody's turned out a certain way. I don't think we ever turn out anyway. I think we're all a work in progress our entire lives. I don't think it's ever too late to repair something that was missed. It's never too late to stop the performance and the attachment based performance and start the true differentiation connection. Thank you so much for being here with you today. If this podcast has spoken to you, will you please share it with somebody else who needs to hear it? They will thank you for it. Thanks for being here with me all the way to the end of this podcast, and I hope that you will join me in the next episode.