“Skip!” A Therapist’s Thoughts on Distress Tolerance

By: Brooke Riffe, LCSW-C, RPT-S

It’s finally summer!  That means driving my son to summer camp, instead of waving goodbye as he gets on the bus.  This provides such a welcome opportunity for talking that we don’t normally get.  We’re on the way to golf camp, in traffic inching down 97, and I decide to turn on a throwback, Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill album.  About 20 seconds into the song, my 12-year-old shouts “SKIP!” from the backseat.  Skip? I think, skip “All I really want”? I tell him, one does not simply skip any track from Jagged Little Pill, and he asks if he could borrow my headphones to listen to his own music.

It occurs to me then, that when I was younger, I listened to Jagged Little Pill on a cassette tape from the backseat of my mom’s car.  The album was released in 1995, so I was 8 years old.  In contrast with my son, my older sister was usually in the front seat and made all the music selections.  There was no way I could have requested to skip any song, not only because I wouldn’t make it past the gatekeeper of music (my sister), but because you couldn’t easily skip a track on a cassette tape.  You had to hit fast forward for just the right amount of time, then hit play, then rewind or fast forward more depending on where the song was at.  As you can imagine, this could cause some strife between one mom and three sisters trying to listen to music.  Instead, I would just sit and stare out the window and wait for a song I really liked.  In short, I found a way to cope with the frustration of not always getting my way.

Think about how much technology has changed, specifically with listening to music.  We used to have to wait for a song on the radio, or listen to a whole album, or go through the tedious process of fast forward, rewind, pause, play to get to what we wanted.  That is annoying, but I think it also built up a considerable amount of distress tolerance.  That was just the way it was. 

In a lot of ways, the choices and innovation we have are great.  We can upload, download, and stream music from various apps on our phone.  We can create specific playlists for everyone in the family and take turns listening to each one’s preferences.  We can skip tracks on albums that we don’t like or just listen to part of a song (we can also listen to the same song dozens of times if we want.)

The increase of choice also increases our ability to express how we feel about something.  While I got to practice distress tolerance plenty as a younger sister with no control of the music, I also didn’t get to advocate for myself.  I just had to accept that I wouldn’t get what I wanted.  The implications of that could be a whole separate post.  I think it’s great that my son feels comfortable to request a song skip.  

I do wonder; however, how much the opportunity for kids to practice distress tolerance has decreased with the increase of ease and accessibility.  Could you imagine being on a road trip with your siblings and everyone can just plug into exactly what they want?  That’s great for parents, there’s way less arguing.  But we’re also missing so much opportunity to work through conflict and come to compromise.  

This isn’t a reflection on how we should go back to the old ways.  As I mentioned, I think it’s great that kids have more choices and opportunities to advocate for what they want and have their needs met.  But I do think it’s important to think about all these micro-opportunities we had as children in the 80’s and 90’s to practice distress tolerance and think about how we can make things a little less easy for our kids so they can have the opportunity as well.  

I’d encourage you to think about your routines and about ways to introduce opportunity to practice distress tolerance at home.  I think we need to be more intentional, because there isn’t as much opportunity. For my family, we have a bad habit of all looking at our phones while we watch a movie together (I know, I know).  So, we usually put our phones in a different room so that we can pick a movie and focus only on that.  On road trips, we take turns listening to preferred music as well as having conversations.  We try to balance time everyone is doing their own thing, and we’re doing things as a family.  As I said, we don’t have to back pedal in time and buy a bunch of cassette tapes (if you even can nowadays).  But we can think about lessons we learned without even realizing we were learning them, and how to apply that today with our kids.

I don’t think kids are necessarily more dysregulated than previous generations.  I think we have better vocabulary and awareness for noticing children’s needs.  With that, we do provide opportunities for our kids to experience fuller emotions than a lot of us were able to.  It might FEEL like kids have less distress tolerance, but I think it’s more that we have more choices and ways to meet needs, so that they don’t get as much opportunity to practice.