Happy Parents Happy Kids by Ann Douglas

Author:Ann Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2019-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Taming the Guilt

* * *

Of course, it’s one thing to recognize that your expectations of yourself are outrageously unrealistic and quite another to figure out how to tame the resulting tsunami of guilt. Here are some strategies for doing just that.

Celebrate the fact that parents don’t have to be perfect. No one gets parenting right all the time. What matters is that you get the right stuff right as often as possible—which means ensuring that most of your child’s needs are being met most of the time. Loren used to feel a lot of regret about the way things played out back when her kids were younger. At that point, she was a single parent and “working really hard to take us from a very marginal lifestyle to the kind of lifestyle that I wanted for us.” As a result, she wasn’t able to spend as much time with her kids as she would have liked, and there were times when she fell short of her own expectations of herself as a parent. “I was reactive sometimes when I should have been more empathetic,” she recalls.

Eventually, Loren was able to shift the spotlight from all the things she’d done wrong to all the things she’d done right—and under really challenging circumstances, no less. Once that happened, she was finally able to see that the things she’d managed to do right were actually the things that mattered most of all: “My children have both told me that, no matter what, they felt loved. And, no matter what, they felt seen. And so even though it was far from perfect, we managed to stumble through together.”

Master the art of relationship repair. Everyone stumbles and everyone has to figure out how to get back up. That’s what parenting is all about. Part of “getting back up” means knowing how to get your relationship with your child back on track and teaching your child how to do the same. “Forgiveness on both parts is key,” says Noreen, mother of two preschoolers. “You have to hope your kid will forgive you for being human, and you have to forgive them.”

How you approach the actual apology may vary depending on whether you’re a mom or a dad. A 2015 study conducted by University of South Dakota doctoral student Eliann R. Carr found that while mothers place a stronger emphasis on “care reasoning” (“I did this because I care about you”), fathers place a stronger emphasis on “justice reasoning” (“I did this because it was the right thing to do”) when looking for a reason to explain their actions. She also reached an even more important conclusion regarding the impact of parental apologies, noting that “children equate a parental apology as a display of love.”

The takeaway message is clear: a sincere and heartfelt apology can go a long way in making up for the inevitable missteps and stumbles you’re destined to make as a parent. This is something that Mary, the mother of a seven-year-old, thinks about a lot.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.