Parenting is hard. Beautiful, exhilarating, healing, and wonderful… but hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It is gruelling, dirty, emotional, frustrating, and unbelievably exhausting. But it’s getting easier. Not easy by any stretch, but I am beginning to feel like we could live through it. Like all of us – the whole family. This is not just because the children are getting older, although in some ways that helps. What has changed is my approach. Or rather my understanding of what it means to be a parent. And I fervently wish that this shift had come earlier.
My understanding of parenting was that my job was to raise my children into responsible, capable adults. To shape each child into the beautiful potential I could see in them. This seems to be a common perception of parenthood, but it is one that causes an incredible amount of grief and frustration, for both parents and children. It imagines that children can be made into something they are not. But children are not bonsai trees – they are wildflowers. And the potential I could see was my own wishful thinking, or my own misguided beliefs of what children SHOULD be, or my interpretation of society’s expectations. I believed that their failures were mine and that my worth as a parent could be measured by their success with fitting into the world.
It wasn’t until fairly recently that I started to understand that the real responsibility of parenting is to be with our children. To build secure and trusting relationships with them, where they feel loved and accepted for who they truly are. To help them find their full potential in ways that make them feel accepted and empowered. To listen to their own inner wisdom, so that they learn to do the same.
This goes against so much of traditional parenting advice that tells us that children need to be trained – sleep trained, potty trained, trained in social skills and listening, and drilled in math and reading. If we let our children lead, they will run all over us, they will become whiny and incompetent, or worse, sociopathic monsters. In short, they need to comply. Modern parenting advice throws in the need for children to be guided through emotion regulation – we are more focussed on mental health and recognize the need for leniency in responding to outbursts in young children. But this is still missing the point. Like in other areas of our life, this is putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. What we need is to re-imagine parenting.
I have two children, both boys. Both active, sensitive, intellectually gifted individuals, who couldn’t be more different from each other. And we’ve tried it all. My youngest, 10, is naturally compliant and goes with the flow. But my oldest, 13, is what some experts call ‘strong-willed’. He questions everything and outright refuses to do anything that doesn’t line up with his values and interests. He is curious, and generous, and quirky. People like him. But he is exhausting. Even just watching him is exhausting. He gets 10 000 steps in a day without leaving the house. He paces while he thinks and reads books in fancy gymnastic poses. He wakes up, every day, ready for battle. He is going to change the world.
The first thing he set out to change was our parenting. It took a very long time, but he has finally succeeded in doing so. With help from experts, and therapy, and research, and soul-searching, we have finally found a way to parent him that is working. In order to do that, I had to let go of conventional wisdom, society’s expectations, and my own need to be right. It has not been an easy journey, but it has been worth it in so many ways. I needed a new way to look at the world, at relationships, and at parenting. But this way of parenting isn’t new. It’s out there, in various forms. We have been lucky enough to work with Jennifer Kolari, of Connected Parenting, who started us down the path of what I will call a relational style of parenting. Jennifer has provided insight, tools, and support that have carried us through incredible trials in parenting. More recently, I discovered Sonali Vongchusiri, of Raising Your Strong-Willed Child, who is running a series of interviews with a panel of peaceful, connected, and relational-style parenting experts. This has been a crash course in understanding and insight, and it has been a game-changer.
I would say my philosophy around parenting started to change about three years ago. I started to ask myself in every situation, “What does my child NEED right now? How can I best SUPPORT him? How can I answer this with LOVE? How can I increase CONNECTION in this moment?” And that shift has made all the difference. Just today I listened to an interview with Juliet Marciano, who defines behaviour as “the communication of an unmet need, an unlearned skill, or an unsolved problem.” Punishing children for their behaviour solves nothing. No matter how atrocious their behaviour might be, it cannot be improved by harsher discipline or more consistent consequences. Children need to feel heard, understood, and valued for who they are.
As parents of children who push limits and fight hard to get their own way, we sometimes fear that if we let them continue on in such oppositional and disrespectful ways, they will surely land in jail. And certainly, the behaviour needs to change. We cannot send children out into the world with uncontrolled defiance, violent tendencies, and a complete lack of regard for others. Nor should we feel compelled to submit to our children’s angry outbursts at home. However, if we are seeing those behaviours, and we have tried reactive strategies for controlling them without success, it is time to think about a new strategy. I contend that jails are full of people raised with strict parenting and harsh discipline, those with no discipline or support, and those with needs that fall outside of traditional expectations. What jails are not full of are individuals whose parents made the effort to truly understand them, who advocated effectively for their individual needs, and who maintained strong connections despite challenging circumstances and behaviour. That is not to say that loving your children will keep them out of jail, and I mean no disrespect to loving parents whose children have ended up in the system. I only mean that keeping sight of that perspective helps me stay centred when I feel like unpunished behaviour is ruining their future.
So many parents come under fire when their children misbehave – not only are parents exhausted and hurt by their children’s actions, they are criticized by those whose job it is to support them. Sometimes, in extreme situations, we have to let go of the well-meaning advice of friends and family, leave the experts who continue to push strategies that are ‘the only way to curb this behaviour’, and push back against systems that advocate for more consistency and consequences. Clear expectations and consistent consequences landed my family in the horrendous position of choosing between hospitalizing my son or allowing him to destroy our house and the people who live here. He spent three days in a psych ward, which was the low point in my parenting. But it gave me the shake I needed – we were on the wrong path. I was not prepared to lose my son to a system that was clearly not designed to meet his needs. And so we committed to re-imagining.
Parenting is relational. By it’s very nature, it requires flexibility and collaboration. Sometimes it is worth losing a battle to win the war. We need to let go of our need to control our children, and instead work with them to find and create strategies that work. In our house that has meant backing off from almost all struggles. It has meant that easing expectations and requirements has allowed us to rebuild those frayed bonds. We have explicitly explained that we are backing off in an attempt to rebuild relationship. There are minimal expectations that are rigidly enforced, but not in punitive ways.
There will be no tolerance of violence. Violence will be met with restraint. Calm, neutral, and compassionate restraint that ends as soon as possible, even it that means leaving him to calm down on screens. There is no ‘consequence’ for the violence once he is calm – only a discussion about what happened and an exploration of how it affected the different players. And amazingly, the violence has disappeared.
Disrespect is accepted and discussed when everyone is calm. Disrespect in the heat of the moment has not decreased, but interactions in other situations have become much more pleasant, and the expression of authentic gratitude has emerged on its own.
Family Activity is required, but not enforced. That means that on some days, we are forced to forgo an activity, with discussion. But it has also provided opportunities for discussion about why we value family time and has allowed the boys to express their support for that, even when it sometimes infringes on their other wishes.
We are working with the boys to find systems that encourage them to build the skills and values they will need to be successful in the world, even if they aren’t yet ready to practise those skills independently. Their motivation to engage in this way is inconsistent, but they are learning to take responsibility for their own choices.
I am not perfect. I mess up and blow my top here are there. But I have gotten better at catching it quickly, and going back to repair. I won’t say that this is an easy path, but it’s one I wish I had adopted earlier. It feels better. It lines up with current research. If every decision in the world were made by following a priority of love and connection, what a wonderful world it would be. Let’s start to make that a reality by teaching this priority to our children, moment by moment, so that they carry it out into the world and help shape the future into a more compassionate and loving place for all of us.
Out of the Well 