Jamie StoufferI assure you that it's not just you. Most parents feel frustrated, impatient and unable to understand what comes next at many points along the way. One of the greatest challenges in parenting is discipline. To discipline means to teach, implying that our children are learning something from our response to the situation. This isn't always easy and I frequently hear from parents who wish, after they had calmed down, that they had done something differently. Why is this such a difficulty for us? According to the book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High by Patterson, Greeny, McMillan and Switzler, there are several reasons:
1.) We're designed wrong. "Two tiny organs seated neatly atop your kidneys pump adrenaline into your bloodstream. You don't choose to do this. Your adrenal glands do it, then you have to live with it." The brain diverts blood away from needless activities, like thinking and processing information and feeds the areas needed to get you out of this dangerous situation such as your legs and arms. This puts us in the place of parenting with the same capacity for thought a monkey might possess. 2.) The pressure is on. Usually the conflict, difficulty, problem or situation comes out of nowhere and we are left searching our bag of tricks and tools to find something that will work this time. What do you have to work with?
Twenty minutes after it's all over, we often come back to our senses and ask ourselves, "Why did I say that? Why did I react that way?" 3.) You are making it up as you go along. There is a significant lack of parenting models displaying empowered and effective parenting. They are hard to find with people with advice fitting into several categories: a. In the same boat still trying to figure it out b. Older with children are grown and gone and they remember how easy and enjoyable parenting was c. They don't have children but feel the need to share what they would do given your situation. "Practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect,” state the authors of Crucial Conversations. First you need to know what to practice. and in parenting on the fly sometimes you don't. You may have never actually seen how a certain problem is handled best. You may have seen what not to do as modelled by a host of friends, colleagues, and yes, even your own parents. In fact, you may have sworn time and again not to act in the same way. Given that we don't often know what to do, we search for answers, solutions, support and information. We read books, watch parenting programs, attend classes, ask others and then in the moment, we wing it, and as Patterson and his colleagues put it we are "multiprocessing with a half starved brain. In our doped up, dumbed down state, the strategies we choose... are perfectly designed to keep us from what we want." Maybe this sounds familiar... Darcie is the mom of three year old Matt. It is 5:30 p.m. and she's just off work. She picked up her son at daycare and has stopped at the local grocery store to pick up something for dinner before going home. Matt is asking for everything he sees: spaghetti, crackers, cookies, balloons, a flashlight, candy, pop, toy cars, juice, frozen hamburger, apples, bread... The list goes on and Darcie, who at first calmly focuses on her shopping and kindly says no explaining that they are going home for dinner, begins to lose her patience after the 53rd item and her responses become shorter, her voice harsher. By the time they get to the till, where stores keep a little bit of everything that can possibly make this mom's life difficult, right where a child in a shopping cart can reach them, Darcie is frustrated and tired. She has had a long day at work and wants to be at home. Matt seems intent on making things as challenging as possible and is now whining, getting louder by the minute. Stop Remember that by now Darcie is operating with the mental functioning of a small primate. What behaviour might you expect in this situation? What things have you said or done in a similar situation? Maybe your children are well past this stage and you now look back on it fondly dreaming of the day when your child's needs were so easy to meet and distracting them from unwanted behaviours was like a magical tool that no longer works. Let's look in a Brian's house where his 15 year old daughter is arguing with him about whether she can go to a concert with her friends. Recently, she has consistently missed curfew and she is presently grounded for three days. Brian believes that because Kate knew the consequences when she decided to come home late, she also knew that she would be grounded and miss the concert. Kate is whining and at first Brian stays calm. He explains to Kate why she can't go. He is rational and fair. Kate begins to raise her voice, cry and then proceeds to throw a tantrum any toddler would be proud to call their own. Brian is tired of saying no, he's tired of being in the same room with Kate. He wishes there was a simple solution. He's frustrated and unsure how his sweet daughter has turned into this raving lunatic and he doesn't know where else to go. Again, keep in mind that once he engages in the struggle with his daughter, he is functioning at a sub-par mental capacity. By understanding what takes over when we react to a situation with our children, we have gained crucial pieces of information. We need a plan. Because we know that we are not capable of making great decision in the moment, we need a course of action that was created while we were calm and thinking was easy. This means mom and dad need to sit down together when they are not frustrated and angry and decide what their discipline plan looks like and how each parent will follow it. And how they will support one another when the plan needs to be implemented. Most importantly, we need remain calm, not engage in the outrage, step back and remember to breathe. No one is better at pushing our buttons than our children mostly because they spend so much time with us. Part of our perfect practice is recognizing what is happening before we get into it so that we can remain in possession of our fully operational thinking abilities. It's impossible for one person to escalate a situation alone and when mom and / or dad remain calm, they can watch without participating in, or contributing to the drama. Now that you understand better what is happening, what will your perfect practice look like this month?
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