Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child by Ross W. Greene

Author:Ross W. Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

- Chapter 7 -

PARENTAL ANGST

In the first few chapters of this book, we considered your role in your kid’s life and your options in trying to fulfill that role, with an emphasis on your role as partner. Then you read a lot about how to solve problems collaboratively, and in the last chapter, you learned about the potential difficulties involved in doing so. Now we’re going to talk about you a little more, because this chapter is about one of the greatest impediments to the partnership you’re trying to create with your child: your anxiety.

It’s good that you’re taking your job as a parent seriously and that you’re concerned about your kid’s outcome. And it’s also good that you don’t want your kid to make the same mistakes you did, or do irreparable harm to himself or his future. But if your anxiety gets the better of you, it can blind you. It can make it hard to see the forest for the trees. It can cause you to hold on too tight or push too hard. It can make you see red, make you overreact. It can cloud your judgment and cause you to respond more urgently than is necessary. It can prompt you to take the express bus back to the Dictatorial Kingdom.

What’s making you anxious?

• Feeling that your kid isn’t turning out OK, isn’t making the most of his opportunities, or is having trouble meeting more than his share of expectations.

• Feeling embarrassed by your kid or that the expectations he’s having difficulty meeting reflect poorly on you and your parenting.

• Feeling that, despite your best efforts, things aren’t getting better.

Because you have a lot riding on that kid, it’s easy to have your outlook on life heavily influenced—too heavily—by how your kid is doing. His high school investment club came in first place in the state? You’re floating on air. He flunked his math test in the seventh grade? Disaster. He’ll never get into college! Not a good one anyway. He doesn’t have proper study habits at the age of six? Catastrophe. Better get that squared away now, or it’s going to be ugly when he’s eighteen!

But as we’ve already established, your parenting isn’t the sole determining factor in what your child does and how well he does it. Given that you’re not the only influence in your child’s life, and that your gene pool can express itself in highly disparate ways, that kid of yours is a reflection of a lot of things—again, a symphony of factors—many of which are not necessarily your doing and are not totally (or even sort of) within your control. For some parents, that diffusion of responsibility is a relief. For others—perhaps those who operate under the illusion of complete and total control and feel that if they just blow their horn hard enough, they’ll be heard above the din—it only produces more anxiety.

It’s certainly your role to exert some influence when your child is heading in a direction that causes you or other adults concern.

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