Helping Our Kids Starts With Helping Ourselves

When something isn't going well with our kids, it's pretty natural to start with the kid.

How do I get her to stop melting down?

How do I get him to listen?

What should I say when she talks to me like that?

How do I get them to stop fighting?

What consequence should I use?

I've asked those questions, too.

But what if sometimes we're starting in the wrong place?

What if, before asking How do I change what my child is doing?, we got curious about what their behavior is doing inside of us?

I think that's where some of the most interesting work in parenting begins.

What happens in us?

Maybe your child rolls her eyes and you instantly feel disrespected.

Maybe your toddler screams in the grocery store and you feel your entire body tense.

Maybe your child is disappointed in you and you have an almost unbearable urge to make it better.

Maybe they're angry and you become angry right back.

Or maybe conflict makes you shut down completely.

Those reactions don't come out of nowhere.

We enter parenthood with entire lives behind us.

We were children once, too.

We learned what happened when someone was angry. What happened when someone cried. Whether adults apologized. Whether mistakes were safe. Whether feelings were welcomed, fixed, dismissed or punished.

We learned what it meant to be “good.”

We learned what happened when we disappointed someone.

We learned whether love still felt available during conflict.

And we carry all of that with us into parenting, often without realizing it.

Until a small human pushes exactly the right button.

That's where I get curious.

Not:

What's wrong with me?

And not:

What's wrong with my child?

But:

What's happening inside me right now?

Sometimes a child's behavior touches a fear, belief, expectation or old pattern we didn't even realize we were carrying.

And what comes up for one parent may be completely different from what comes up for another.

That's one of the things I love about coaching.

My job isn't to tell a parent who she should be or hand her the “right” parenting response.

It's to help her slow things down, get curious about what's happening beneath the reaction, and discover what it means for her.

Because when we begin to understand what's happening inside us, something changes.

Awareness gives us choice.

If I don't know that my child's anger activates something in me, I may simply react to it.

If I begin to recognize what's happening, Oh. Something about this is really activating me, there's a little space between what happened and what I do next.

Not always a huge space.

Sometimes approximately three seconds. 😂

But there's space.

And in that space, I have a little more choice.

How do I want to show up here?

That doesn't mean I will always get it right.

I don't.

Understanding ourselves doesn't turn us into endlessly calm parents who speak in soothing voices while our children throw shoes at the wall.

We're still human.

We will get triggered. We will react. We will have moments we wish we'd handled differently.

And then we get another opportunity for something incredibly important:

Repair.

This work can start before your baby is even here.

This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in working with people who are preparing for parenthood.

We spend months preparing for babies.

We research car seats and strollers. We prepare nurseries. We think about feeding and sleeping and childcare and birth plans.

All important things.

But there's a whole you coming into parenthood, too.

And you can start getting to know her now.

You can begin noticing how you respond to stress, what you've carried with you from your own childhood, what you hope to carry forward, and what you might want to do differently.

You don't need to figure all of this out before having a baby.

I'm 52, my children are 11 and 9, I'm a certified parent coach and I'm still figuring myself out.

I think that's part of the point.

We're not preparing ourselves so we'll become perfect parents.

We're getting to know ourselves so that when parenting inevitably brings us face-to-face with parts of ourselves we weren't expecting, we can meet those parts with curiosity instead of shame.

And perhaps have a little more choice about what happens next.

Because sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for our children doesn't begin with changing them.

It begins with understanding ourselves.

// Prepairent

Preparing ourselves for the relationships that matter most.