When Your Child Pushes Back: Big Developmental Stages Bring BIG Everything
Teen modeling practicing a supported Push somatic movement with Caroline
Big developmental stages bring BIG everything
From womb-to-walking (0–2 years), through early childhood (3–5), middle childhood (6–11), adolescence (12–18), and early adulthood (19+), you can expect cognitive, emotional, and physical transitions. Whether or not you remember your own developmental stages, your kids might be showing you BIG feelings, behaviors, impulses, confusion, asks, demands—and big needs for connection.
Parents, are you ready to handle what your kids are trying to tell you?
It’s necessary to establish boundaries, consequences, and limits, in developmentally appropriate ways. Those things matter. But before we get to correction, channeling or consequence, there's often another question underneath:
Is my child asking me to connect?
“See me. Hear me. Notice me.”
“Put down your phone and look at me.”
“Heads up. Be solid for my Push!”
Before the boundary, there may be a bid for connection. Young children, and even older children, likely won’t communicate their developmental needs through calm, articulate language. Sometimes the communication comes through behavior, movement, intensity, neediness, anxiety, opposition, demands, or an enormous reaction.
Understanding the communication does not mean giving a child everything they demand. Boundaries and limits still matter. But connection helps the parent understand what is underneath the behavior and how to respond. Before healthy boundaries can be established, children need to know they can Push and receive your steadiness and presence. Before they can Push, they need to know they can Reach for you, and you show up.
The Push Is Not Something to Stop but a Place for Parental Presence
Winnicott, Bowlby, Mahler and a stream of other longtime attachment, relational and developmental theorists support the developmental need to connect-and-push away (Pull and Push), to seek support and find oneself, through a caregiver’s welcoming of child’s unique expression and preference.
As shown in the blog photo, Push is a somatic, relational practice involving power differentials—the child pushes into the steady support of the elder/parent/helper. The parent doesn’t push back. Instead, they “receive the communication” from the next generation: a need for connection, a testing of limits, a discovery of self. The child's expression is met with curiosity, creating space for a newfound sense of “me, not me.”
In other words, even though our culture emphasizes the “calm,” a young person doesn't simply need to "calm down." Sometimes they need an experience of meeting something solid.
They push.
The parent/elder stays present.
The parent doesn't collapse, overpower, shame, or disappear.
There is strength and connection at the same time. And that's a very different experience from simply telling a child to regulate themselves.
Kids Aren't the Only Ones Who Need to Learn New Movement Patterns
New movement patterns aren't just for babies. They're for all bodies.
Raising children often activates a parent's own developmental history. Therefore, parents, when your child's intensity hits your nervous system, you're not responding from a blank slate. Your own body has a history, shaped by multi-generational, cultural, and systemic patterning. M-Bodied Therapy & Coaching invites parents to explore relational, developmental somatic movement practices to:
Redo what they didn't get
Become more prepared to embody the pause that creates space for connection, catching, and channeling
Parents Need More Than Cognitive Parenting Tools
Parents can go to a parenting workshop or listen to a podcast and understand attachment. They can read about nervous system regulation. They can memorize calming techniques. They can intellectually understand trauma responses. But when your child is screaming, pushing, withdrawing, demanding, or melting down, knowledge of how to become the holding environment, the responsive parent, has to become embodied. Your parent-body needs to know more.
It’s lovely to know the psychoeducation, but the shift happens within the actual relational somatic experience. The question you ask yourself becomes:
Can I get my own redo, so my child gets to experience something new?
Can I stay present enough in my own body to support my child's body and experience?
The Parent as the Steady Elder for the Calm and the Messy
As children grow and develop — from womb-to-walking and beyond — they depend on parents and other familiar caregivers who have the built-in power differential. In other words, it’s not ideal for kids to raise kids, who are power equals. Children need a steady elder to mirror, mold and model embodiment into adulthood.
And, while synchronicity is nice, research shows that 70% of our close relational dynamics include mismatch. That means being out of sync with each other will happen. Valuing the “messiness” in a system isn’t something to be avoided but embraced as a path to deepen individual and collective growth.
There will be times when children need an elder who can be solid enough to meet their intensity without becoming overwhelmed by it. That doesn't mean being rigid or authoritarian. It means offering tenderness, steadiness, and strength.
When so much of relationship involves mismatch, the elders in the system need more than calming techniques. The M-Bodied parenting approach teaches parents to recognize the developmental rhythms of:
connection
agency
opposition
individuation
separation
This is where the Push practice—used only in relationships with a built-in power differential, such as parent and child—becomes developmentally meaningful rather than simply a movement exercise.
What If the Behavior Is Communication?
Instead of immediately asking: How do I stop this behavior?
You might consider asking: What is my child communicating through this behavior?
Maybe they need connection, help organizing a big feeling, permission to assert themselves, a safe place to push against something solid, help finding their own agency, a parent who can stay present through disagreement, and the list goes on.
And importantly: The answer won't always be "yes." This is not permissive parenting. Connection doesn't mean removing limits. Connection is what makes a healthy limit possible.
An Embodied Approach to Parenting
M-Bodied Therapy & Coaching offers neuroaffirming, attachment-based psychoeducation alongside relational body-based practices. These early relational embodiment practices are offered as symbolic "redos" that support nervous system functioning and healthier relationships. M-Bodied helps parents develop more embodied options for responding to themselves and their children.
M-Bodied helps parents and caregivers:
recognize nervous system, developmental, and trauma responses with greater clarity
understand attachment as an ongoing relational practice
notice what their own bodies are communicating during challenging moments
develop body-based co-regulation practices that support both parent and child
become more steady, responsive, and connected when their child is having a BIG experience
Then your beautiful ending:
Body to body. Heart to heart. Life force to life force. 🌟
Family Therapy and Parent Coaching Support in Atlanta and Virtually
Sometimes what looks like defiance is also development. Sometimes the push isn't asking you to move away. It's asking:
Can you stay?
Can you be solid?
Can you meet me here?
And sometimes, the most powerful thing a parent can offer isn't another instruction. It's the embodied experience of:
I'm here.
I see you.
You can push.
And I'm not going anywhere.
Your child doesn't just need you to understand their behavior. They need your body to be able to meet what their body is communicating. 💛
M-Bodied Therapy & Coaching offers parenting support in Atlanta and virtually, helping parents develop greater embodied capacity for connection, co-regulation, boundaries, and the developmental journey of raising their unique children.