Parenting Blog

“How would your life change if you genuinely accepted yourself, just the way you are?" -- Dr. Tara Brach.

Today we're exploring the 9th commitment from 10 Commitments that Will Make You a More Inspired Parent -- and a Happier Person -- in 2010:

Commit to radical self-acceptance and compassion.

If you're like most parents, it can be a challenge to stay calm when your kid acts up.  We often find ourselves flooded with anxiety: if he keeps doing this, he'll NEVER learn to ____________ (fill in the blank). He'll never be responsible enough to hold a job, control his temper, be a grown up! 

Most of us know that our anxiety gets in the way of helping our kid learn and grow. And that it comes from an unforgiving place inside us, a place of fear, of not being a good enough parent or a good-enough person ourselves. We know that kids need love, and the worse they act, the more they need love.

But loving unconditionally is hard for most of us.  Choosing love and kindness when we want to scream can take Herculean strength.

There is a secret that makes it easier to be the kind of parent we want to be, though.  And it has nothing to do with our kid.  The secret is to love and accept ourselves completely. When we can bless even those unforgivable parts of ourselves with understanding, we're more able to love our child.

Want to feel more love in your heart?  Give it to yourself! To love is a verb, an action we take. Yes, love can just happen – but we only make more (and feel more) by giving it away. And we can only give our children as much love as our own hearts can hold. 

Go ahead – stretch your heart.  Every time you feel bad, for any reason, offer yourself love. Especially if you messed up royally.  Meet that imperfection with compassion.  You’ll be amazed how your parenting transforms.

“Although few parents purposely raise their children to lead lives of quiet desperation, the parent who raises her child without taking the time to know his heart may discover that she unwittingly led him straight down this path.” – Laura Ramirez

I shouldn’t have to remind my children to do what’s right. They should know by now.

Of course. But knowing what’s right and wanting to do what’s right are two different things.

My children should WANT do right. Their good intentions should win out over their darker impulses.

Of course. But do yours, always?  How long did it take you to WANT to do right? Do you ALWAYS do right?

But I’ve taught my children what’s right. Why can’t they do what I say?

Because for us humans to do right, our hearts need to WANT to.  That's the secret of free will -- it starts in the heart. The more unhappy your child’s heart, the more unhappy her behavior.

Why’s her heart so unhappy?  She knows I love her. What’s her problem?

Human hearts are 100% a product of our experiences in the world, which aren’t wholly positive, even for the luckiest person. Who among us feels 100% lovable, that we’re more than enough, exactly as we are?

How do I change my child’s heart, then?

By embracing your child and accepting him exactly as he is. Stop sending him the message that he has to change to be ok.  Once his heart stops struggling for a foothold, it can relax into love.  Humans who feel good about themselves WANT to do right.

I don’t have time for all this “heart” stuff. Why can’t my kid just behave?

Your kid can “just behave,” as soon as his heart can choose love. Your choice is to help that process, or hinder it. We don’t have to like the way humans are built, but like ignoring the laws of gravity, ignoring the way humans are put together doesn't give us the best results.

I think kids should just behave. 

As a parent, I often do too.  But as a mentor to my children, I want the best long-term result, not the best short-term result. That comes from going beyond the behavior to the heart. 

It shouldn’t be so hard to make my child change.

Actually, it’s impossible to make anyone except yourself change. But the minute you change, everyone around you changes.

This is a dark view of human behavior.  It means I can't control my child.

Actually, it's a supremely optimistic view.  True, you can never really control anyone -- those are the rules of engagement.  But there is no limit to your heart's ability to love your child, or anyone else.  The heart is the source of all miracles.

"A journalist visited a town famous for its rampant unhappiness to see if he could understand its origin. Walking down the street, he noticed a man ahead of him. Suddenly, a little man, no more than a few inches high, appeared and ran up the man's leg.  He started sticking pins into the man and sewing things to him. Instantly, the man was covered by these tiny tailors, all sticking him with pins.  He looked completely miserable as he shuffled off. The journalist saw this happen to one person after another, until he was ready to give up and go home. The town was completely infested with tiny tailors; no wonder everyone was unhappy. Then the journalist noticed one woman covered with tiny tailors who apparently said something, and the tiny tailors just melted away. The journalist ran over to her. 'What did you say to get free of them?!" he exclaimed. 'Oh,' she answered, 'It was nothing. I just told them I've decided to stop measuring myself.'”  -- Guy Finley

Most of the time when we find ourselves anxious or unhappy, it's because we've been measuring ourselves and come up short. We're constantly comparing ourselves to an ideal in our minds of what we should be.  Unfortunately, no live human can ever live up to an ideal. 

What if you decided to stop measuring yourself?  What if you just accepted yourself in all your imperfect glory, knowing that you'll keep growing, but you'll also wake up irritable some mornings, and forget something important at least once a week, and say exactly the wrong thing on a fairly regular basis?  What if you decided that your kids are okay precisely as they are, without you needing to perfect their table manners, make sure their clothes match, or insist they clean their rooms?  What if you allowed yourself to just love your kids, your life, and yourself completely --  messy imperfection and all?

Imagine how liberated you'd feel.

And you'd never need the tiny tailors again.

“Whatever they grow up to be, they are still our children, and the one most important of all the things we can give to them is unconditional love. Not a love that depends on anything at all except that they are our children.” -- Rosaleen Dickson

"It's not only children who grow.  Parents do too." -- Joyce Maynard

"Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."
 --  F. P. Jones

We've reached the final step of our Ten steps to Heal Our Ability to Love Unconditionally. 

Step Ten?
Repeat daily. Watch your life transform.

The only path to happiness is to love ourselves the way we are. And the only way to be a really great parent is to love ourselves the way we are so we can love our kids the way they are.

Nothing has to be different for you to love yourself completely.  What are you waiting for?

There is no such thing as a perfect parent. But it is entirely possible to be a better parent every day. After all, you have live-in teachers and 24/7 lessons!  Use your mistakes to your advantage. They aren’t mistakes if you learn from them, they’re life lessons in your parenting PhD. That’s why spiritual masters call it a Practice.  At first, it seems impossible. But it's like playing the piano. In the beginning, scales are a challenge. But if you practice, in a year you can play a sonata.

Just keep practicing, bringing awareness to every interaction, finding that moment of freedom between the stimulus (your child's behavior) and your own reaction.

Noticing is what gives us a choice next time. The miracle of one foot in front of the other, in the right direction, is that one day, you look around and all the scenery is different.

Enjoy the journey.  I'm honored to accompany you for this stretch.  And if you want to revisit our work over the past two weeks, designed to heal our ability to love unconditionally, here are the steps and links:

1. Forgive yourself for being human and therefore imperfect. Start by changing how you talk to yourself. Every time you notice self-criticism, remind yourself that your goal isn’t perfection, your goal is loving yourself and others.

2. Unconditional love is like a muscle. It needs a daily workout. Commit to treating yourself and everyone around you with compassion. No exceptions.

3. Forgive your parents for being human. Maybe you got the message that you were too needy, too angry, too selfish, too lazy, too careless...too childish?  Our parents, however well-intentioned, were products of their time, and most of us didn't get the message that we were wholly loved, human imperfections and all. It’s time to let that go.  Whose life is it, anyway? (Can’t forgive your parents, or someone else? That’s a defense against the pain of feeling unloved. Proceed to Step 4).

4. Heal your heart, heal your life. Find an hour by yourself. Light a candle and sit quietly.  Reach out to that child inside you who still feels unloved and feel his or her pain. Breathe. Reassure that child that he or she is completely lovable and loved. Be brave. Once you get through that pain you've been avoiding, you won't need to hang on to any kind of anger.  It may arise --you're still human! -- but you'll be able to notice it and let it go, rather than acting on it. That's why forgiving others heals us.

5. When you're angry, remove yourself from your child. Listen to your anger's messages about your life. Look under the anger for what's hurting or scaring you. Attend to healing yourself.  Then, and only then, reconnect with your child.

6. Notice that under your child's misbehavior there is always a reason, an upset feeling or unmet need.  (It may not be what you consider a good reason, but there's a reason.) Address that underlying reason, not the behavior.

7. Forget about teaching your child lessons unless you're in a state of love and can teach lovingly.  Anger and punishment are never based in love.  A teachable moment is always when both people are receptive and positive.

8. Deepen your connection to your child so you always see things from his or her point of view. Your unconditional love will flower.

9. Cultivate gratitude, all day, every day. Gratitude is the easiest path to love.

10. Repeat daily. Watch your life transform. The only path to happiness is to love ourselves the way we are. And the only path to being a really great parent is to love ourselves the way we are so we can love our kids the way they are. Nothing has to be different for you to love yourself completely. What are you waiting for?

My Aha Parenting moment this week came during a dinner party.  A conversation about the recent furor in the New York TImes and on NPR about Alfie Kohn and timeouts led to a discussion of discipline methods, including spankings. I felt compelled to point out that both timeouts and spanking are punishments, not discipline.  Discipline means “to guide” and there are more effective ways to guide kids than punishment.  As always in these social conversations where no one has hired me as their parenting expert, I tried to walk the line between saying what I think --  punishment gets in the way of raising cooperative kids -- and making other parents wrong.  I do understand, after all, how a parent can feel at the end of her rope and use a timeout.

“But how do you get them to behave, then?” asked a friend of mine – a doctor and the father of two teenage girls.  I suggested that building a good relationship with your child makes most discipline unnecessary. A good relationship with us is what makes kids want to behave.  After all, kids behave to please us, and because making the choice to behave gives them more satisfaction than misbehaving, at least as they get older.  Much the same reasons that adults choose to behave!

My doctor friend grinned impishly.  “Relating to kids is a lot of work,” he said. “And life is busy.  So you could think of punishment as a labor-saving device.”

We all had to laugh.  But that was my Aha Moment.   Because I realized that on some level he’s right.

I think the dirty secret of parenting is that we punish because it’s the easy way out.  When our child does something she knows is off-limits, our immediate impulse is fury.  We want to teach her a lesson she won't forget.  And as her parents, that's our job, right?

But cracking down at the moment when you and your child are both upset always backfires. When humans are in the flush of anger or fear, the learning centers of our brain actually turn off, so kids simply can’t learn when they’re being punished, even if they wanted to – which they don’t! So punishment is never an effective way to teach kids. A teachable moment is only teachable if the student is actually ready to learn.

So why do we continue to punish?  Because it’s a labor-saving device.  Not only is it easier than talking with our kids, being patient, and working to build a truly close relationship.   It’s also much easier than taking responsibility for our own anger.  

Anger is a defensive stance against emotions we don’t want to feel:  fear, sadness, hurt.  When we get mad at our kids, there is always something under it.  Did he wet the bed again? That triggers our fear that we’ll never solve this problem, he’ll be wetting the bed in high school.  Did she clobber her little brother and then lie to us about it?  She’s a pathological criminal in the making, or worse yet, she takes after her no-good father who ran off and left us. Was she rude?  That hurts! After all we’ve done for her?  Or it reminds us how our own mother smacked US if we were rude – so we feel like our kid’s got it coming.  

In all of these cases, we COULD be brave enough to notice our own emotional baggage that’s coming to light, and use the opportunity to heal it.  But that’s a lot of emotional work.  So instead, we get angry.  The best defense is a good offense.  We direct that energy outward at the obvious target, the kid who's triggering the anger. Punishment is indeed a labor-saving device.

I can hear some listeners thinking, “But sometimes the child needs correction!  It’s not all our own baggage.”  And yes, that’s absolutely true.  But the correction that works with kids is always most effective when it comes from love, not anger.  In our calm moments, every parent knows that.

We all get frustrated at having to give our child the same reminders, day after day.  Some of that is unavoidable:  We help our kids create positive life habits by ensuring, over and over, that they brush their teeth, hang up their jacket, and put the homework in their backpack.  That's just part of the parents’ job description, best accepted with a smile.

But the bigger challenges, like rudeness or hitting, aren't taught by "reminders."  Those are solvable only by going to the core of the feelings driving your child's behavior. When kids choose not to behave as we’d like, there’s a reason. It may not be what you would consider a good reason, but there’s always a reason.

If you can see the situation from your kid’s point of view, you’ll see the deeper issue behind his behavior, whether he’s exhausted and hungry, or swamped with desolation because the new baby is always on the lap that was once his.

Once those deeper issues are attended to, you can remind your child that his behavior isn't how your family treats each other, and brainstorm how he'll handle such a situation in the future.  Parents who love unconditionally guide their kids and set limits, but they stay emotionally connected while they do it -- both through the upset, and through the teaching that follows later, once everyone is calm -- sometimes hours later.

Showing up this way teaches your child emotional intelligence.  It’s truly healing for both of you.  You might even say that this is the real work of parenting.

That means, though, that we don't have the luxury – or the right -- to discharge our anger at our child by punishing.  Will you get angry?  Sure, as long as you're human.  Can you learn now to take a deep breath and a few minutes for yourself, instead of unloading your anger on this small person entrusted to your care and guidance? Then you'll be able to show up as a real teacher for your child, and help him process his upset constructively.  In the end, relating this way IS a labor-saving device, because it actually changes your child’s behavior. Research shows that punishment doesn’t.

If you make your teachable moments into learnable moments, your teaching will stick. And your child will get something even better than the lesson about behavior. The skills for emotional self-management -- and the unshakable conviction that he is wholly and unconditionally loved exactly as he is, including all those messy, passionate emotions that make us human.

Is it more work?  Maybe, in the moment.  But in the end your kid thrives, and you’re a happier parent.  So my Aha Moment?  The real labor-saving device is Love.