3 Reasons Your Toddler Rejects You for Their Other Parent
4/21/202627 min
When a toddler plays favorites, it stings. One parent writes: "It feels as if I'm being rejected when I'm the one who's with her all day, putting so much energy into her care. It make me feel that I'm insufficient as a parent." Janet unpacks the surprising reasons behind parent preference —and the mindset that makes it stop.
Janet's "No Bad Kids Master Course" is available at NoBadKidsCourse.com and JanetLansbury.com.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJanet Lansbury· Host0:00
[gentle music] Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I'm gonna be talking about an issue that comes up very often in my world. It even occurred in my own family. It's the situation where our child seems to reject one of us as parents, if there are two parents, and prefer the other one. This could become a conundrum for both parents, but especially the one that's feeling rejected, right? There are some really understandable reasons why children do this, and the way to help a child pass through this kind of behavior is actually much simpler than we might imagine. Like everything I share, it's a mindset. It's an understanding of what's actually going on here. And this parent who wrote to me actually phrased it that way, that to feel better, they wanted to understand what was going on. So I'm excited to get into this topic today, and here's the email I received. [gentle music] "Hello, Janet. I've been a fan of your podcast for years. I'm sort of an early childhood nerd and listened frequently, even before I had a child, but now I have one, and I have a question. You must receive thousands of questions, and I understand if there won't be space for this on the podcast, but I haven't heard you talk about this and thought others might be dealing with this issue as well. My husband and I have a 21-month-old whom we both adore.