Parenting Blog

My Aha parenting moment this week came when my 13 year old ignored me.  She and a friend had watched a dvd over the weekend that needed to go back to the store.  It was her responsibility, of course, but I offered to return it while I did some errands.  I dropped it in my bag, and promptly forgot about it until I was walking back into the house.  Now, the video store is only a block away, so it wouldn’t be a big deal to go back out.  But I was tired and it was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d been willing to do her a favor, but since it didn’t work out – all right, since I hadn’t followed through on my offer to her – I thought it should be her responsibility to return the dvd.

Which might have been fine, except that my daughter was in the middle of a new book that just came out, one she’s been waiting months for, and she was at the climactic point.  So when I told her that she should walk the video back to the store before we ended up owing a late fee, I don’t think she even noticed that I was talking.  She looked at me blankly, said “uhuh.” And went back to reading.

Now, I’m a pretty calm and patient mother.  Normally I would have handled this differently.  But I got mad.  I raised my voice to her, which is something I almost never do.  She apologized, put her book down looking a bit hurt and unjustly maligned, and went off to the video store to return the dvd.  Meanwhile, I was left wondering why I had gotten angry at her. After all, I could have accomplished the same objective calmly, without upsetting either of us. Which is, of course, what I’m always advising other parents to do.

Now, I’m a psychologist. I know that anger is always a defense against some more threatening feeling that we don’t want to feel.  So I make it a practice in my life to notice when I get angry.  Rather than acting on that anger, I try to pay attention to what’s under it.  Am I hurt?  Afraid?  Sad?

Sitting there, I realized that my daughter ignoring me gave me the message that she didn’t care about my needs, my being tired.  I had taken on the job of returning the dvd, and it was my obligation to complete that job.  The fact that she was lying on the couch, happily reading, while I was exhausted, was irrelevant. My needs weren’t important.  

Feeling that my needs didn’t matter made me feel unloved and unlovable, which hurt.  In fact, it hurt so much it made me angry, and I yelled at her.  

The first Aha moment was realizing that none of this was objectively true.  In fact, my daughter is generally very considerate towards me.  She was simply engrossed in her book and not focusing on me. In other words, her behavior was information about her, not about me, or my lovableness.  So why had I interpreted it this way?

The second Aha Moment for me was when I realized that my reaction went straight back to my own childhood, when I often felt that my needs weren’t important.  It still hurt.  In fact, it hurt so much that when I stumbled across it here and now, I automatically shifted into anger so I wouldn’t feel the hurt. My poor daughter just happened to get the brunt of it.

So I sat there on the couch feeling how much it had hurt to get the message that my needs didn’t matter when I was a kid, how much it hurt to feel so unloved and unlovable.  I tried to resist the impulse to blame my folks, who were doing the best they could.  I tried to stay out of anger altogether, which is just a tempting way not to feel the hurt. And when my daughter walked back in the door, I apologized for yelling at her, and gave her a big hug.

My daughter was fine.  To her this was no big deal.  We had a nice evening together.  But I spent the evening wondering, what if ALL the things we get upset about in our current lives can be traced back to our childhoods?  What if all our annoyances, all our judgments, all the baggage we carry around instead of forgiving, what if ALL of that is just a defense against feelings from childhood that hurt too much to tolerate them?  What if every time we yell at our kids, we’re sacrificing them to the wounds from our own childhoods, the wounds we can’t bear to face, so we respond instead with anger?  READ POST

"At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled." -- Marshall B. Rosenberg   READ POST

Are you a working mom who employs a nanny to care for your kids?
Are you a nanny?  READ POST

"Only Connect." -- E.M Forster  

Have you noticed two recurring themes in these daily inspirations? 

The first theme is that when we feel good, we're better parents.  Quite simply, we can only give what we have inside. That's why so many of these daily emails are about how to take better care of and manage ourselves.

The other theme is that parenting effectively always depends on our connection to our kids. Without that connection, we have little influence ("My kids won't listen!") and, frankly, parenting becomes an exhausting, thankless task.

Deepening our connection with our kids and keeping it strong as they grow is the work of parenting.  Of course kids need guidance, but that only sticks if the connection is there to support our teaching.  As our infants grow into toddlers and start to require limits, how do we maintain a strong connection while setting those limits?  Can we keep the connection solid as our child starts daycare or preschool?  As our kids move into the school years and out into the world, how do we stay connected so we can enforce high expectations?  And as our kids evolve into teenagers -- when we get fired as the boss -- how can we make sure we have a good enough connection with them so that we get rehired as consultants?

Welcome to the work of parenting.  Of course, that's where the rewards are, too.
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