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When you regain balance, your heart melts towards your child and you’re reminded once again that you can be the peaceful parent you want to be and maintaining that warm connection becomes a lot easier! Your child again feels warmly held within the security blanket of your loving connection. Children need to be reassured of their warm loving connection to you often. Prevention is the best medicine, give your child smiles, connection and appreciation before they ask for it.
“Smiles and positive looks are the most vital stimulus to the growth of the social, emotionally intelligent brain.” – Allan Schore
We all know that appreciation isn’t quite as satisfying after we’ve demanded it! When your tank is filled, you’re reminded that the chaotic behaviour was only a symptom of your child’s unmet needs.
Loving yourself really matters. “Good relationships depend on finding a reasonable balance between being able to track your own feelings at the same time as you track other people’s.” – Sue Gerhart, author of Why Love Matters. Our children need for us to be able to cope with the big feelings in us and in them. You can absolutely trust that the internal changes you’re making in re-parenting yourself (healing the hurts of the child that you were) will result in a lessening of the stress and pressure between you and the children, resulting in more harmony and happiness in the relationship. It’s so empowering for parents when they start to realize that the difficult feelings that arise in situations with their child actually stem from their own childhood.
Children need to be reassured of their warm loving connection to you often. Prevention is the best medicine, give your child smiles, connection and appreciation before they ask for it.
You aim to identify and relate to the emotions that drive your child’s behaviours, knowing that this builds secure attachment and a strong foundation of emotional and social intelligence
When they can hold that the connection is warm and available, life is full of excitement, fun and play, they tend to feel brave, confident and independent and their focus reaches out to learning, exploring and conquering.
So keep bringing the focus back to self-love, self-soothing and self-regulating to continually bring your relationship back to balance.
Neuroscience now confirms that we need to self-regulate to be able to regulate our child’s big emotions.
Building secure attachment with yourself. When a parent honestly explores the emotions that constantly arise in response to their child, they gain the shift of perspective that allow them to respond to their child’s needs rather than react to their behaviour in any given situation.
When your child expresses upset, for many parents feelings arise from their body memory; they’re old feelings, the same feelings that they felt when their parent reacted to their upset as a child.
When your child can access their attachment needs, this leads to more balanced behaviour.
The guilt! You hear yourself say, through gritted teeth, “I’m asking you nicely, will… you… PLEASE…”, knowing well that, to your child, it doesn’t feel very nice! Containing your frustration, you ask again, with less patience and more intensity. You cringe as you hear yourself utter those same words that YOUR parent spoke! Eventually you snap at your child and they become quiet. You’ve regained control, you’re back in the driver’s seat. Peaceful parenting has gone out the door, but finally it’s quiet, she’s got it! But what message has she really received? Now you feel guilty!
The ideal. You care for your child’s emotional and creative self-expressions. You know that children who live in a culture of respect, love and empathy have a huge advantage in developing a positive relationship with self and others.
Knowing and owning our emotional triggers better equips us to respond to our child’s painful feelings with greater empathy and understanding.
This article originally appeared in Issue #3 of The Natural Parent Magazine.
Genevieve Simperingham, Dip. Psychosynthesis Counselling, Certified Parent Educator and Instructor and co-founder of The Peaceful Parent Institute – www.peaceful-parent.com
