Lesson from book- The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
PART ONE: YOUR PARENTING LEGACY
The first role models your child will have are you and your own parents. You must be conscious of the effect you have on your child, and make sure you do not pass on your inner critic to them.
When you feel anger or any other difficult emotions around your child, it is a good idea to think of it as a warning. Not a warning that your child is doing anything wrong, but that your own buttons are being pushed.
It can be difficult being a parent, and it can be easy to assume your feelings are simply a reaction to what’s happening in front of you. But you should remember that your feelings may be a reaction to what happened in the past.
If you stop to think about your irritation towards your child, you might realize that you are jealous of them. If you are, you need to own it and not act out negatively towards them because of it.
When you feel anger towards your child, ask yourself whether the feeling entirely belongs to the present situation and your child. If it does not, stop and ask yourself why you are stopping yourself from seeing the situation from their standpoint.
Parents should always be prepared to make repairs when they hurt their children’s feelings. This is not only important for your child’s emotional well-being, but also for their sense of security.
I began to see the point of what I was doing with my son. I was able to turn my discontent into hope and gratitude. I was closer to Toni again, as I was more interested in and present with my son.
It is common for a parent to withdraw from their child at a similar age to when they were abandoned. If you are experiencing resentment towards your children, it may be because you were abandoned as a child and not considered in your parents’ lives.
It is important to be comfortable with your child, and to make them feel safe and welcome. The words you use are a small part of that; a bigger part is your warmth, your touch, your goodwill, and the respect you show them.
Remember your very first memory. What emotion is predominant in your memory. How does the memory influence how you parent. If anything comes up when you do this exercise, be proud of yourself for having spotted it rather than feeling like you will collapse under the shame.
Our inner negative voice is formed by our childhood experiences, and it can be difficult to shake off. We are formed into adults by our childhood experiences, and it is difficult to change this.
When you notice how you talk to yourself, it gives you more choice about how you listen to that voice. You can try not to engage with it or argue with it, but instead treat it like a difficult work colleague who you shake off by acknowledging what they’ve said.
We should not judge ourselves or our children, because it is not helpful. Instead, we should praise effort and describe what we see and feel. It is far more encouraging to describe and find something specific to appreciate than to judge.
It is important to observe and appreciate what you get right instead of focusing on what you make and do. Notice the difference in how it makes you feel. Be less judgemental of yourself and your parenting skills.
The family environment is what makes up being a family, and it is important that your children have a safe and stable one. I will be looking at how to build a family environment where your children will thrive.
The people in your child’s life are extremely important. They can be a source of richness and love, or a battleground. It is important to have awareness about how you behave in these relationships, and how your children react to you.
It is important to be respectful of your child’s other parent, and to appreciate their good points. A child is more than a mere catalyst for change. If you were to look at becoming a parent selfishly, a child is a source of enrichment.
It’s not always easy to create a smooth-running, cooperative relationship with an ex. And when one is lacking, all we can do is try our best not to run down the other parent to our child, or ourselves.
It’s impossible to protect your child from all pain, but you can help them cope with it by being with them and with their close friends when they feel it. By being open and accepting of what they show you and what they feel, you can keep them company through their pain.
The transition from being a couple to becoming a family of three can be difficult, and it can lead to resentment between you and your partner. But you can learn to accept and embrace change.
When arguing with your child, start with how the issue makes you feel, not with an attack or by blaming. This is the ideal style of arguing, as it is not about winning, but about understanding.
When there is a mediator present, the conversation might sound like this: He wants me dead. No, I don’t, I want his jacket. Same thing. The mediator explains that it is not the same thing but for you, Keith, it feels like the same thing.
When discussing a difficult subject with a loved one, consider the other person’s feelings, define yourself and not the other, don’t react, reflect, and embrace your vulnerability.
When it comes to maintaining goodwill in a relationship, the two main ways are to respond to bids for connection and to find solace in each other rather than seeing the other as an adversary.
Being kind is not about being a victim or being unassertive. It means explaining how you feel and why, without blaming or insulting the other person. It is important to understand how your family members feel, even if you feel differently.
Turn towards bids for your attention and connection from your family members, whether they are your spouse, children, or parents. This is a major part of relationship maintenance.
The most important thing you can do for your child is to respond to their feelings, whether they are big or small. This is the basis of good mental health, and it is by responding to your child’s feelings that they will learn to have a healthy relationship with how they feel.
Parents should not ignore or deny their children’s feelings. Ignoring them can be harmful to their future mental health. When other people, especially our children, are unhappy, it can feel like the right thing to do to ignore their difficult feelings. But ignoring them does not make them go away.
Containing means that you can acknowledge and validate all your feelings. If you can do this for yourself, you’ll find it natural to do this for your child as well. You can take a feeling seriously without overreacting and remain contained and optimistic.
We need emotions, even the inconvenient ones. We should try not to be distracted away from them or to deaden them, but instead to heed them and use them to work out what we need so that we can be aware of what we want.
Feelings and instincts are closely linked, and if we deny how a child feels, we are in danger of dulling their instincts. It is important to acknowledge their feelings and not to get into a battle about them.
It can be difficult to accept your child’s feelings, as it was for Kate to accept hers. But if you remember that feeling sad is a part of life, and that being told off for feeling sad is still within you, you will not be able to be an adequate container for your child’s emotions.
It’s important to be in the habit of talking about feelings, both yours and your child’s. It’s easy to say, You seem happy about that, but it can feel harder to acknowledge difficult feelings, or feelings you wish your children did not have.
The human trait of expression through storytelling is a way of taking ownership of the things that scare us because the more we express ourselves about these things, the less scary they become. We must allow our children to have their feelings about their world and not be in denial about them.
When your child is not happy, you want to make them feel better, which may make you feel better in the short term, but it makes your child feel unheard, unseen and lonely.
The therapist and Lucas found out that it was not so much that his parents went to work that was the problem, but that he felt so very alone with how he felt about it.
It is important to take your child’s feelings seriously. Words alone do not go far enough; deeds go further. You cannot delegate love – a certain amount of child-minding, yes, but love, no. You must not procrastinate about giving that love: it won’t wait until the weekend.
When dealing with your child’s feelings, remember to consider rupture and repair. Being sensitive to your child’s feelings and following rupture with repair is always better than stand-offs, battlegrounds, and winning and losing.
It is important to acknowledge your child’s feelings, even if they are different from yours. Denying your child’s unhappiness doesn’t make it go away, but it does dig it in a layer deeper.
When we feel bad, we do not need to be fixed. We want to be felt with rather than dealt with. We want someone else to understand how we feel so we do not feel lonely with that feeling.
When children are very young, they may talk about ghosts or monsters under the bed. Rather than dismissing the idea that there are monsters under the bed out of hand, name the feeling the monsters seem to be representing.
It is important to accept your child’s moods and all aspects of how they experience their world. If you treat your child’s sadness, anger, and fears not as negatives to be corrected, but as opportunities to learn more about them and connect with them, you will deepen your bond with them.
It is important to listen to your child when they are feeling a difficult emotion, and to validate how they feel. Say things like, You have really been missing out on time with just you and me lately, or It’s not fair that all the visitors coo over the baby and seem to not pay enough attention to you.
When you try to block out a negative feeling, you remove positive feelings as well. When you are wishing for your child’s happiness, it is not about having stuff. It is about the quality of their relationships.
When a child feels something, no matter how inconvenient, I must name the feeling, check with them if I’ve got it right, and validate how they are feeling.
Empathy is the process of feeling with someone else. It is not about giving up your own point of view, but about truly seeing and understanding why the other person feels as they do.
Distraction is a tactic that parents use to divert their children from having an experience. It is rarely appropriate, as it is a trick that will not help your child develop a capacity for happiness.
It may be difficult to deal with a child’s distress if their parent goes out of the house to work. You must be there for the child, be attentive, and be mindful of your own discomfort. Do not overreact, stay calm, and do not leave the child alone to cry.
It is important to accept our own feelings, and the feelings of our children, rather than denying them. By helping a child put their feelings into words, we help them process them as well as find acceptable ways for them to communicate what they feel.
Pregnancy is a good time to think about your relationship with your child. You can reflect on how you want to aim for a relationship that is honest and open, rather than confined by roleplay.
When you become a parent, you begin to form a bond with your baby that can strengthen with every year. This bond can continue to grow as you keep up with each other’s lives and concerns.
The process of being given so many rules and advice about pregnancy is similar to the one about parenting. It can give you the impression that there is such a thing as an optimal pregnancy, which may inadvertently lead you to believe that there is such a thing as a perfect parent who produces an impeccable child.
The most helpful magic is to think of your experience of pregnancy as affecting the foetus, as though the environment of the womb is telling the baby a story of what they will find after they are born. If you enjoy yourself, feel relaxed, and eat well, the story you will be telling them is one that they, and you, will want to continue after the birth.
The habit of optimism where your children are concerned is necessary. You must believe that they’ll develop and learn, and that they’ll get the hang of things. You can get into this habit during pregnancy.
As you think about your unborn baby, observe how you are thinking about them and how this might influence your future relationship. Talk to your foetus out loud to help you strengthen your bond.
There are two main types of parents: regulators and facilitators. If you are a regulator, you prefer to get your baby into a routine. The regulator philosophy is that children feel safe and secure if the same thing happens at the same time every day, because the child knows what’s going to happen and there are no surprises.
The facilitator and the regulator are two different parenting styles. The facilitator feels that her identity is enhanced by pregnancy, while the regulator may feel that her identity is threatened. The facilitator may regard birth as a mutual transition in life for her and her baby, but the regulator may see birth as merely a potentially painful event.
The parent-child relationship is a very important one. It is important to understand that children need to be understood, not manipulated. They need to be loved and accepted, not feared and controlled.
It is important to forgive yourself if you feel your attitude is wrong in pregnancy. Remember that you did what you could for yourself with the knowledge and resources you had at the time.
The birth is a real life event that may not go according to plan. There is a lot of sympathetic magic needed to get you through the birth and the first few days, and you should follow that which feels most like reassurance.
Your baby’s birth may not stick to your plan. A planned epidural may not be possible, and a natural birth may end up as an emergency Caesarean. But planning may help you get closer to the birth you want, as long as you are flexible about possible, necessary changes.
After giving birth, parents may feel guilty about or let down by their birthing experiences. But remember, there is no such thing as perfect. All of life is about getting back on course each time the path takes an undesirable turn.
The breast crawl is a example of how babies can do things on their own. They can find the breast all on their own, and start to suckle, at thirty-five minutes after birth. This has been proven in multiple studies.
Breast-crawl research and practice shows us that it’s okay to watch our babies and learn about what they can do and what they need by observing them. When we watch them, we can take our cues from them in a more natural rhythm of give and take rather than just doing stuff to them.
After the birth, you may feel a rush of love for your baby, but it may be difficult to believe that you love him or her immediately. You may feel like a freak or the only one who feels how you do after the birth. But you need to accept where you are rather than berate yourself for not being where you think you should be.
Lie down on the floor and imagine what it feels like to be lonely, hungry, thirsty, uncomfortable, and without words. Imagine what it feels like to be body and feelings, unable to sit up or roll over, and unable to feel that you belong.
It can be hard to give time, respect, and warm responsiveness to your child when you are running on empty. You may feel like you were not given those things by your parents.
When you are having a hard time, you need support from others. This may include practical help, such as someone guessing what you need and offering it, and emotional support, such as not being overwhelmed by your child’s feelings.
The birth of Charlie was extremely traumatic for Sheena, and she went into denial about being a mother of twins. She did not feel like her son, and she could not feel for him. As a result, it was easy for her to distract herself and run away from him.
The most important people in a child’s life are their parents. Everyone needs a primary bond as a safe anchor in their life. Parents need to feel like they’re priorities for their children, not just tasks to be delegated.
The support diagram is a way of illustrating the support you will receive from your family and friends after the birth of a baby. It can be used to help you identify any gaps in your support network, and then take steps to fill them.
The first experience of anything forms the deepest impression. If you were born and raised in a safe and loving environment, you will feel like that is what life is like. A baby comes into the world an environment synchronized by nature to their needs. They must signal to us what their needs are. It is up to us to read their bodily cues to decipher what they need.
The four main styles of forming bonds are secure, insecure/ambivalent, avoidant, and dismissive. What you want in your baby is to foster a secure attachment style. To do this, you must be more thoughtful and self-aware about how you are with your baby than if empathic responding comes naturally to you.
When you are a baby, your needs for closeness and sustenance are usually met, which helps you feel secure and optimistic. As you grow up, you learn to trust people and get on with others, which helps you have a nice life.
The belief that you will be ignored and overlooked is a result of the inconsistent care you received as a child. You may not think of yourself as an okay person, and you may not assume that most other people are good and trustworthy.
If you were often left to cry it out and no one answered your cries, you would eventually stop trying to get people’s attention. You would believe you had no influence over others, and you would grow up seeing yourself as a loner.
When babies are distressed, they sound desperate. This is because they are. It helps if you know that wants and needs are the same thing for an infant. A baby cannot survive without you. If you try to block out a coercive cry, you will have to shut down parts of yourself to do it, which will cause you to feel unsettled and even despairing.
We can never be perfect parents, and we will inevitably make mistakes. What we can do is attempt to care for, respond to, and react appropriately to facilitate the development of our children’s sense of security.
During pregnancy and after the birth, it can feel as if everything you felt before was multiplied by ten. Your feelings may seem exaggerated, but they are just an exaggeration of what you already feel.
Loneliness is a common feeling among parents, and it can be a sign that you need to find more socialization. However, it can also be a sign that you are expecting to be rejected, which can lead to rejection becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It can be difficult to join new groups, and this is especially true for people who have been isolated. It can be difficult to overcome the instinct to avoid social interaction, and many people find themselves thinking they are either too good or too bad to fit in.
Loneliness is a common feeling among new parents. It is dangerous to feel isolated, and you should be prepared to recognize when you are lonely. You should understand what loneliness does to you and learn to overcome it.
Post-natal depression is a common cause of depression after the birth of a child. It can be difficult to identify, as it can appear like everyone is fine, when in reality, the person is suffering from depression.
It can be helpful to find a narrative that makes sense of your feelings, like Paula did. Even knowing there is a narrative that would make sense of how you feel, even if you do not know what it is, can be sufficient.
Do not be afraid to talk about your experience and your feelings after a baby with other mothers. They are not right or wrong, they are just different. Do not keep them to yourself.
A guided visualization is an exercise that helps you explore your hidden depths. You will be asked to visualize a scenario in your mind’s eye, and the idea is to really explore it to try to find out what’s going on in your hidden depths.
The early years are extremely important when it comes to instilling a sense of security in your children, but it is never too late to attempt to repair any damage that may have occurred during those years if your child is older.
The most important indicator of good mental health is a strong bond between parent and child. Humans are pack animals, and we have lived in tribes for millennia. We are wired to bond with each other. The most primary bond of all is that of child and parent, parent and child.
Gestures and facial expressions are the first form of communication between a baby and their parents. If you just want to gaze at your baby and have conversations with them, this is exactly what you need to do. This develops your relationship and helps strengthen your bond.
It is important to allow yourself to be impacted by your children. Let them influence you, and you will be modeling how to be influenced, which is important so that your children allow themselves to be influenced by you.
The synchronization of breathing is a very early form of dialogue. It may be part of how we bond with our children. Singing together is a form of breathing and playing together.
The parent-child relationship is one of the most important in a baby’s life. When mothers and their four-month-old infants show patterns of turn-taking between give and take, watching, listening and responding, researchers can predict that when the baby is a year old, Mum and baby will have a secure attachment bond.
When it comes to dealing with your children, you must remember that you were not always treated with respect. If you were not listened to or considered as an individual, you may have diaphobia, or a fear of being impacted upon by others.
I realized that I never really listen to my son, as I don’t consider he may have something to tell me that I don’t know. I realized that I never really listen to others, as I don’t consider they may have something to tell me that I don’t know.
When we ignore our child’s bids for attention, we are telling them that they do not exist. This is why some infants seem to give up. By not responding to enough of our infant’s cues, we accidentally teach them not to try.
Listening is about allowing the other person to impact upon you, and not about waiting for a gap to speak back. It can be scary to allow yourself to be impacted, but it is worth it.
If you are physically close to your child but are missing their cues because you are on your phone or computer, it will trouble them. You are depriving them of contact, and you are creating an empty space inside them.
The process of dialogue between a baby and a parent begins from birth and does not stop. It begins with the baby’s signals, and the parent responds by turning towards them. The baby and parent develop a unique pattern of being together.
When a baby has a low impact on their parents, it is often considered a good thing in some childcare philosophies. But manipulating a baby into having the least effect on you is dehumanizing. You need to allow your baby to impact you.
It is important to explain to your child what is going to happen, then leave a space for them to respond. This will help them become accustomed to the turn-taking between you and them, and they will eventually help you with tasks.
To become a better listener, consider how you listen and observe when you are listening well. You’ll realize that what happens is you notice the movements, tone, gestures, and expressions of the speaker, and you concentrate on what is being said.
If you don’t respond to a child’s bids for attention, they will make those bids louder or naughtier. Negative attention from a parent is better than no attention at all because at least then the child knows they exist in your mind.
The more you invest in your child, the less they will need to catch up with you later on. It is more pleasant for both of you to play with or read to a child than it is to spend the time telling them to be quiet and sit still.
It is natural for a child to prefer their parent and members of their own family to other carers. The more secure they feel in their bond with you, the easier they will separate to form strong bonds with others. Do not be in a rush for your child to develop a strong attachment to you.
When we adopt the habit of listening and allowing our child to impact upon us, parenting becomes rewarding. When you invest in helping your child feel connected and engaged with you and with any activity they do or that you do together, you are investing in their future mood.
When your child is feeling relaxed, they are also likely to have a relaxed temperament. The more relaxed your child is, the more their default mood will be relaxed rather than anxious or angry.
The parental sleep obsession is easy to understand because having interrupted sleep can leave you exhausted. But we should not try to push our children away when they want to sleep, because this will make bedtime feel lonely and rejection.
The best way to invest time with your baby is with empathy. You should sleep with your baby, or at least stay with them until they fall asleep, to help them learn to associate sleep with feeling loved and safe.
There are alternatives to sleep training, such as co-sleeping, where you do not separate at night so the baby does not feel abandoned and alone. But not everyone is able or wants to sleep alongside a baby.
Sleep nudging is not about ignoring your baby’s communication. It is about nudging your baby to sleep within their tolerance and not outside of it. It is important that your child feels secure throughout the process.
The sleep-nudge process takes longer than sleep training, but it is worth it. The result will be more long-lasting and makes separating to go to bed easier for children as they develop.
When the child is in charge of how they separate, they are less likely to become insecure and clingy than when the parents leave them before they are ready. Do not push your child to do things before they are ready, as this will only lead to frustration and resentment.
It is difficult to know whether to rescue, encourage, or just observe your baby or child when they are helpless. By watching your baby or child for cues, you will be able to get it right most of the time.
Play is important for children. It helps them learn how to concentrate and make discoveries, and it helps them connect ideas and feed their imagination. Play is the foundation for creativity and work.
When children are given too many options, they become overwhelmed and frozen. They don’t want to make the wrong choice, so they end up not participating in the activity at all. You must put in the time with them anyway, so invest it positively at the beginning.
Children thrive when they have multi-aged playmates. Put a couple of very young toddlers together and they’ll be more likely to have parallel play than to play with each other. Age-mixed play teaches children how to play in a way that playing with their own age group does not.
Don’t interrupt a child when they are concentrating. When a child is bored, have faith and tell them that they will find something fun to do. Boredom may be a necessary component of creativity.
We must learn to treat our children’s feelings as part of a supportive, loving relationship. We must treat infants and children with consideration and respect, but we must still set boundaries.
Your child’s behavior is primarily influenced by the people and culture around him. You must ask yourself what your child’s behavior is trying to say, and help them communicate in a more convenient way.
All behavior is communication, so behind any behavior you will find the feelings that lead up to it. Once you discover the feeling behind a child’s behavior, you can put the feeling into words, and they will have less need to act out on it.
The game of winning and losing can become entrenched, and this damages relationships. By dominating a child, you teach them to dominate. If you act as though a large part of childcare is imposing your will over your children, the patterns of relating that your child will learn from that are potentially harmful.
Sometimes we tell ourselves stories about the future: what if the only way our child will ever eat is when he is sung to at the same time. What if he never learns to sleep in his own bed. But these stories are just that: stories.
The four skills of socialized behavior are tolerance, flexibility, problem-solving skills, and the ability to see and feel things from other people’s point of view. These are developed by modeling good behavior, and children who naturally mimic those around them may develop these skills early.
Children can be extremely frustrating, and it can be difficult to understand them. They are not machines, and they do not behave in a manner that’s convenient for others because their parents are lax. They behave in a manner that’s inconvenient because they cannot yet handle the challenge of doing something new.
Children learn how to say please and thank you from how they are treated. They learn how to feel gratitude and respect when they are shown them.
When your child acts out in frustration, it is probably due to similar circumstances. They may cry or sulk or scream, kick, hit, throw things or even throw themselves about so much they hurt themselves.
When it comes to dealing with Aoife’s tantrums, it is important to understand that she is not being manipulative or difficult. She is simply reacting to being rushed and afraid of being alone.
When you want me to stop doing something, whether it’s playing or running around, give me a warning. I need a specific warning for each thing: to stop playing, to put on my coat, to get in the pushchair. I need a space to take each thing in too.
As a parent, you must always be prepared to spend time with your children. It is better to spend that time positively by pre-empting trouble than negatively after the trouble has arisen. If you go too fast for the pace of your child, if you don’t verbalize their feelings for them, if you don’t warn them about your plans, you will instead find yourself spending time telling them off.
If you want to change a situation your child often finds difficult, or you know there’s a potentially tricky new situation coming up, it can help to stop and imagine what it’s like to be your child and to imagine what they would say if they could identify their feelings and articulate them.
When a child is upset, it can be hard to put their feelings into words. But when you do, they will find it even harder to find the words, so it is up to you.
It is important to remember that children’s behavior is often due to something that you, as a parent, have done. It is natural for parents to want to find a certain certainty about why their child is crying or refusing to do something, but it is okay not to know and to stay curious.
Everyone needs attention, and if a child is receiving enough attention and feels secure that attention is there when they need it, they don’t have to develop maladaptive ways to get it. If your child is doing something inconvenient to get attention, ask them to ask for some attention.
When your child has a screaming fit, they are not trying to annoy you. They are being themselves, and they need help to articulate their feelings. If you feel an older child is trying to play you and their tantrum seems more like amateur dramatics than an actual tantrum, say how you feel.
Children learn the skill of describing how they feel and what they want when they see you model this for them. When they are young, they do not have the words to explain how they feel, so they express their feelings through their actions.
If you feel you cannot cope with your child’s behavior, seek professional help sooner rather than later. The longer we have habits that are not helping our relationship with our child, the longer it will take to untangle them.
The three main approaches to discipline are being strict, being lax, and collaborating. Being lax means never setting any standards or expectations for your child. This may be the best solution in some situations, but it is not a good long-term strategy for a relaxed relationship with your child.
The collaborative method is when you and your child put your heads together to solve a problem. It is not about giving in to your child, but about finding a solution together. It is about trying to find a solution to the problem that your child has presented you with.
When dealing with a child’s tantrum, remember that they are not enjoying it. They are not doing it because they want to do it. They are just being their feelings, their frustration, their anger, and their sadness.
If your child frequently has tantrums, it is a good time to think about what might be going wrong and what you could do differently. If the triggers are things like overstimulation or too much noise, you can take steps to avoid or limit those situations.
When dealing with children, it is important to remember that they are not always being annoying or behaving badly. They are just communicating with you in a way that they haven’t learned yet.
Parents are often irritated by the crying and whining of their children. This is because they feel it is a criticism of their parenting skills. However, it could be that you are annoyed because you don’t want to be taken back to the pain of re-experiencing old feelings of fragile vulnerability.
When it came to dealing with Felix’s clinginess, Bella realized that she had repressed her own feelings about it for too long. She was finally able to feel the fear and sadness she’d felt when she thought she was losing her son, and it didn’t completely consume her.
All feelings, including those that may seem irrational, make sense once we find their context. If the context isn’t obvious, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one. The first step is to accept the child’s feeling, which will help you understand their behavior.
When families withhold information or have lies within them, even if they are not consciously aware of the truth, it will have an impact on the children. Because in their bodies, they can feel if something is not straightforward and in the open.
We cannot protect our children from the inevitable bereavements and calamities that life will throw at them, but we can be alongside them and feel with them. We can help them contain their feelings when calamities happen by reassuring them that they are loved and wanted.
All children lie, and all adults lie too. It’s great when we don’t, because it gives us a better chance to have proper dialogue and real intimacy. But we all lie, and we shouldn’t treat our children like the greatest sinners when they do too.
Lying is a form of self-soothing, and we must understand the feelings behind the behavior rather than condemn the child for committing it. If they cannot take in the enormity of it, like my daughter could not take in my aunt’s death, they will break it down into a goldfish or whatever their equivalent is.
When parenting a teenager, remember that you were a teenager yourself, and that teenagers need some privacy to form their separate identity. They may also lie or omit things to create space for themselves.
When children lie, instead of reacting, look to the reasons and feelings behind the lie or the behavior. If you understand and validate those feelings, you give them a chance to find more acceptable ways of expressing themselves and their needs.
When your child lies, remember that it is a developmental stage, they are copying you, they are creating their own private space, and they are lying to communicate a feeling or avoid punishment. If the lying is a problem, it’s better to problem-solve and find out what’s behind it than to be punitive.
Boundaries are important for any relationship. They are the metaphorical line you draw in the sand that you will not allow the other person to cross. Boundaries are important for children because they help them learn where to draw the line with others.
When dealing with children, you should always try to be firm, but friendly and calm. You should never make empty threats, but follow through with what you say. This will help them learn that you mean what you say.
Boundaries are about keeping your child safe, but they can also be about considering the environment and other people. They are about stopping the behavior, and they are about blowing a fuse if the boundary has not been put down.
When setting boundaries, it is important to be honest and explain how you feel. Do not pretend that your feelings do not matter, or that your preferences do not affect the decision.
You can get out of reason wars by simply describing how you feel and what you want. It is easier to negotiate when everyone shares their feelings instead of pretending everything is about a reason.
It can be difficult to set boundaries with teenagers. It is easier if you are already in the habit of defining yourself rather than them. But if you are not, it is never too late to start.
The conversation may go like this: What happens when you five boys get together. We start to joke and laugh. Then we start to dare each other. Then we just do it.
When you want to put down a boundary, define yourself and not the teen. Give your own feelings as your reason - because it is your feelings that are the reason. Don’t judge your child, and don’t pretend it is because of anything to do with them that they are not allowed on public transport at night.
The three-point plan about finding out what the inconvenient behaviour is communicating, then problem-solving, then brainstorming is not the only way to deal with it. Families find their own ways through these milestones, and their own ways to repair a rupture.
It may be difficult for you as a parent to be empathetic with your teenager’s desire to separate from you, but keep trying. And be optimistic: their frontal lobes will catch up.
When a teenager acts antisocially, we often blame them and their friends for getting them into that situation. But remember that they are just experimenting, and that you should not judge their experiments.
It’s important to spend time with your children, no matter their age, and to listen to them. The more connected you are with them, the easier it is to work through any problem and negotiate so you each get what you need.
To help your child understand what boundaries are, imagine they are a lodger who has come to live with you. You would still have house rules, but you would establish them by defining yourself and not them.
Having a child to me feels like walking down the road with your toddler. You are making very slow progress because their little legs can only take tiny steps. Then, for a short while, you will be going along at the same pace, and then they will overtake you and you’ll have to run to catch up.
The parent-child relationship is one of the most important and formative relationships of our lives, and we must continue to care for it by respecting it when our children are adults as well as loving them.
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