Be an Intentional Parent
There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.
Ayelet Waldman
Being an intentional parent takes self-awareness to our triggers and what we bring to the job of parenting.
Instances when our children do something that is not a significant interruption, and we react in a way that feels out of control is a trigger.
Alternatively, there are other moments when we make decisions for our children based on what we lacked as a child.
Whatever trauma we had as children that did not get resolved we carry within, and it impacts choices we make now.
It also can affect how we respond to our kids when they are emotionally charged. We can react calmly or irrationally depending on if they are bumping up against something in us that wasn’t resolved.
Without awareness, we might recreate our childhoods emotional pattern while attempting to do everything differently.
An excellent example of this is that I have a client whose father grieved the loss of his father who died when he young his entire life. This lifelong response to his dad dying affected my client as a child significantly.
In a tragic twist of fate, her children lost their father at a young age.
Now my client is desperate for her kids not to relive the life her dad did, so all types of therapy have been employed.
The youngest son is not responding well to the push to resolve his grief issues about his dad, and it is creating an emotional impasse between mother and child. While her intentions are loving, the discord is growing.
In this example the mother is forgetting that her child is not her.
Her son does not have the same wounds and probably processes grief entirely differently.
To someone on the outside this is not difficult to figure out, but when it is you that has been affected in some way from childhood, it gets a lot stickier to be able to pull apart the layers and see what is yours.
We make all sorts of well-intentioned decisions for our kids.
There is no way to parent perfectly, and we all will make mistakes, but when we sit with what is ours to own and what is not it makes the job of parenting much clearer.
Goodness knows i remind myself of this on a weekly basis as i pick apart my childhood from what I am creating for my son.
As parents, we are intentional about what doctors to go to, what school to send our children, what sports to try, food to eat, but the most profound impact we will have on our children is what relationship we have with them.
It is time to be intentional about recognizing what we are bringing to the parenting plate.
Call me and let us figure out if your parenting is working for your particular child.