I hear it all the time:
I don’t know why they act like this
One little thing can ruin their entire day
One minute they’re fine and the next they’re out of control
They’re only doing this to get attention
It’s like they go from zero to sixty
The longer I work with children and families, the more common these phrases become.
It’s no surprise that being a parent is a really hard job. Trying to juggle all of our adult duties while also taking care of our little ones is a tough act to complete day in and day out.
Kids do not mean to make our lives difficult. They are learning how to function in daily life with a brain that is not fully developed yet. They are doing the best they can with the skills they have.
As we think about our future selves, who will be enjoying a quiet home where children are no longer making messes or leaving clothes on the floor or hiding dirty dishes in the living room, I imagine looking back and hoping we didn’t focus too much on the negative and feel proud of the relationship we built with our children.
Our ultimate goal as parents is to be there for our children - through the ups and downs and everything in between. We want to be the person they call when they share the excitement of a new relationship or an achievement they have been working towards, and also the person they call when they experience their lowest lows.
We should be able to ensure that our children experienced the 5 Be With Attitudes coined by Dr. Garry Landreth in his Child-Parent Relationship Therapy trainings: I See You, I Hear You, I Understand, I Care and I Delight in You.
This does not mean that we always agreed with their choices or that we always made them happy or that we solved every problem for them. It means that we took the time to be present in the moment with them. That we admitted our mistakes and sought forgiveness from them. That we came from a place of curiosity and shared understanding. That we listened.
A positive parent child relationship is one of the key factors in a child’s future success. In 20 years from now, when we are reflecting on our early relationships with our children, what are we going to remember? What are they going to remember if we asked them?
The first step to creating or strengthening a parent-child relationship is to approach situations with empathy and attempted understanding. One way to do this is to learn about the brain.
As a parent, if we approach a challenging situation with our children from the curious aspect to understand the why, knowing that they do not have a fully developed brain/frontal lobe, it could help us provide empathy and support rather than frustration and dismissiveness.
Dr. Dan Siegel presented an easy way to learn about the brain and coined the term “Flipping Your Lid”. Flipping Your Lid is when our emotions hijack our brain and result in tantrum like or big behaviors (for both children and adults). The video below breaks this concept down in a way that is easily understood by both children and adults, so a mutual vocabulary is developed. This gives children a way to share how they are feeling when energy gets too big and adults can assist in a positive way with curious questions or support.
Learning about the brain and how our children experience emotions is just scratching the surface to strengthening the parent-child relationship. It is an important one that provides reasoning and understanding to the big, explosive behaviors we see in our children ‘for no reason’.
Brain based knowledge is a first step to beginning the journey of understanding and laying the foundation for an overall connected experience with our children. Parenting is no walk in the park and we learn each and every day different ways to mess it up. However, with the focus to develop a deeper and more connected relationship with our children, both parent and child will flourish in the relationship and make it one to be proud of 20 years from now!
-Kallie