Intentions to Up Your Parenting Game
Hello and welcome on this last week of January! How is your year going so far? Are you staying intentional?! I’ve been thinking and writing a lot this month about setting intentions and themes for the year. If that’s something that interests you, go back and check out my previous three posts for some discussion of this and suggestions of intentions for folks who struggle with anxiety or who had difficult childhood experiences. Today, I’m sharing some intentions or themes for those of us who want to up our parenting game in 2020.
As the parent of a young child myself, (My kid will be 6 next week! How is this possible?!) I know that the struggle to parent the way we intend to is very, very real. Raising tiny humans is extremely difficult and triggering in a lot of different ways for different people. So, if one of your goals is to be more of the parent you want to be this year, I’ve got some suggestions for intentions as well as action steps to get you closer to that goal.
The first suggestion I have for you parents out there is the theme of CONNECTION. The obvious interpretation of this is to connect more mindfully and meaningfully with our children and families, which I certainly would endorse. However, I think if you want to improve your parenting, you need to first CONNECT with yourself. We bring all of ourselves, our personalities, our baggage, our experiences, to this parenting thing we are doing, so lack of connection to ourselves is a recipe for mindless rather than mindful parenting. From my observation, and also from decades of parenting research, we know that we will tend to raise our children based on the model we saw growing up unless we make some active choices to go a different way.
So, this year, I’d encourage you to take some time with yourself, any other folks who are parenting with you, and possibly a counselor or parenting coach and really get connected to yourself as a parent. Maybe you’ve never thought about your overall parenting philosophy. Maybe you need to identify the things you want to change about your parenting style and make some plans and goals around those specific behaviors. Maybe there are certain things your kids do that are very triggering for you and you want to work on figuring out why you get so riled up. Whatever it is, I know you can do what you set your mind to. You can create a more peaceful and harmonious family life by getting more connected to yourself because parents set the tone for all of that. I’m not going to say that it’s easy, especially if you want to make some big changes, but I believe you can get to a very different place in your parenting over the course of this year if you put your mind to it.
Another theme you could consider, if it’s right for you, is LETTING GO. When you stop to think about it, raising children is nothing but a slow process of letting go. If you have carried and borne biological children, they started out life being physically inside your body! So, from the moment they came out, they were slightly less connected to you. No matter how you got kids in your house, each new stage of development requires parents to let go a little more. From learning to walk, to going to school for the first time, to learning to drive, and on and on; all of these moments are preparing both them and us for them to be (hopefully) functional adults.
As parents, this can be such a struggle. It’s hard to let our children go and allow them to make choices and mistakes on their own. They are our babies! I see it all the time in my practice. Parents want to help by sheltering their children from all pain, failure, and struggle, and I totally get it. Seeing our children upset or hurt is extremely painful for us, whether it’s bonking their head while learning to climb something at the playground or having their heart broken by friends or romantic partners. It’s natural to want to prevent these things, but at what cost in the long term? I believe that by sheltering our children from these events in their early years, we prevent them from building up their resiliency and decision-making skills. If we are always there to prevent bad things from happening, how are they supposed to learn what to do when they face setbacks as adults?
So, I would encourage you to look at ways you might be holding on to your kids in ways that may be ignoring their long-term interests. You may need to do some hard work on yourself in order to be able to let go and allow them the freedom to succeed and fail on their own, but I promise it will be worth it. And you’ll be there to support them in other ways as their biggest cheerleader and fan.
You may have noticed my two words, CONNECTION and LETTING GO, seem to say opposite things. As it often is with parenting, finding balance between two seemingly opposite concepts is part of life. I chose these two because I think they can also go together and complement each other. By connecting more with ourselves and what drives us as parents, we are better able to see when it’s time to let go a little more and allow our children to grow into the healthy adults we want them to be.
If you want to learn more about these topics, stay tuned to this space because I love talking about parenting stuff. I’m also going to share a few podcasts, books, and websites that have been and continue to be instrumental in my development as a parent. I hope you enjoy! As always, if these are topics you are struggling with, I would love to talk to you. You can reach out via email or schedule a consultation call on the scheduling tab above.
Until next week, take good care of yourself!
Meghan