Combating Parent Fatigue – Step 1: Staying Sane
Joanna Hulton, Ph.D., practices and teaches eclectic parenting psychotherapy, integrating psychoanalytic psychotherapy, attachment theory, and brain development. Joanna Hulton, Ph.D. has dedicated herself for the past 35 years as a teacher, workshop leader, and practicing psychoanalyst.
Parenting can leave adults feeling exhausted, especially when a child’s emotions stir up their own unmet needs. Learning to listen, accept feelings, and set limits can help children develop a stronger sense of self while helping parents grow more self-aware.
“Parents and teachers need to eradicate the insanities so insidiously hidden in their everyday speech, the messages that tell a child to distrust his perception, disown his feelings, and doubt his worth. The prevalent, so-called “normal” talk drives children crazy, the blaming and the shaming, preaching and moralizing, ordering and bossing, admonishing and accusing, ridiculing and belittling, threatening and bribing, diagnosing and prognosing.” – Haim Ginott
This quote, taken from a book first published in 1972, captures my attention in a new way. Always a fan of Dr. Ginott, I realize that his efforts at that time to educate adults around the needs of children left an essential gap. How do we help parents and teachers eradicate these insanities? If sanity depends on trusting one's inner reality, aren't we forgetting something essential? Are we asking adults to understand children without having been fully understood themselves? What should we do?
The need to be understood
Being human is not so easy, especially when one feels misunderstood. As children, we awake each morning ready to take on the essential task of early childhood: to be known. It sounds simple, but, alas, many things may have prevented it from happening genuinely. So many of us grew into adulthood with inauthentic selves, not even aware of how that may have happened.
How is it that so many of us lose ourselves while growing up? An adult patient once declared, “I need you to understand me so that I will know who I am.” Understanding ourselves comes from feeling understood as children, but being understood can be quite difficult if one's parents are not fluent in “childrenese,” or if they are overwhelmed with their own parenting agenda.
For parents, “the days are long, the years are short,” as one mother put it. Parents themselves are challenged each day as they prepare their children for school and beyond. Every day brings new tasks and conflicts that require us to dig deep, a process one parent describes as the continual opportunity to “kick open the doors to the primordial stuff of my own childhood.”
In my previous article, I described how everyday experiences in your early childhood created the template that you use daily to solve the challenges of parenting. Most of these experiences lie waiting for reactivation in your unconscious. “The unconscious mind,” as David Brooks describes it in The Social Animal, “is most of the mind − not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain's work gets done . . . the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made.”
Over time, you will discover that the daily interactions with and efforts to understand your children will influence you both consciously and unconsciously, uniquely enabling you to become more self-aware. The ultimate achievement of this greater self-awareness is the opportunity for you to know your most authentic self.
Feeling happy, sad, angry and afraid
A prerequisite to authentic humanity is the full expression of the four basic emotions − happy, sad, angry and afraid. Much of our current culture readily supports only one emotion, being happy. Children are rarely told that happiness is something they should not feel. Instead, this emotion or feeling state is usually accepted, many times allowing parents the opportunity to feel competent and happy themselves. (An exception to this rule: a child's expression of happiness is not welcome if it leads to over-excitement or unbridled expansiveness, which I will address in a future article.)
But it is when children bump into experiences that induce sadness, anger and fear that parents resort to responses that can inhibit authenticity. How many times have we heard or said, “Don't be scared, there is nothing to be afraid of,” or “You are angry over that? I'll give you something to be angry at!” and “Why are you so sad, will this make you feel better?”
Reflecting on your own past
Take some time to reflect on your earliest memories concerning the four basic human emotions. There is a good chance that you were not encouraged to express all your feeling states as you were growing up. We inherited the widely accepted conventional wisdom: “Children are to be seen and not heard.” And as a result, many of us had little encouragement to talk about our feelings. The parenting wisdom passed down to us may be causing conflicts: On the one hand, we want our children to express themselves; on the other, we may worry that they are too precocious or disrespectful.
I before we
As it is for many children, the expression of true feelings, happy, sad, angry and afraid, is compromised by adults who are unable to tolerate the idea that children may have feelings separate from them. Many worry that they may be failing if kids don't see the world through a similar lens. Children must have opportunities that help them express feelings of their own in order to navigate their world.
The expression of authentic feelings, fully felt, helps us know who we are so that we can become our own best authority. Children need to be able to confidently articulate a sense of “I” before they can successfully engage in the cooperative experience of “We.”
I said no!
Here is where it begins. With the word “No,” the typical two-year-old, with increased motor skills and a need for independence, begins practicing over and over again, trying to be a separate person with his own ideas. Seemingly overnight, the adorable child becomes a terrible tyrant − defiant, uncooperative and intolerant of frustration and disappointment. The word “NO!” becomes the toddler's all-important cry for independence.
Our need for control starts in toddlerhood as we attempt to separate and individuate from our parents. It is during this developmental stage that children declare their autonomy. “No, I do myself. Let me.” Having opposing feelings is an excellent way to initiate separation and individuation. The parent who accepts and understands feelings while limiting behavior remains reliably there, as the child shores up a sense of self. It is here that the confounding conflicts with our kids require us to dig deep.
What you resist will persist
As mentioned before, children use the word “I” so that they can comfortably engage in the cooperative experience of “We.” Each and every time we tell a child to stop feeling what they are feeling, we invite temper tantrums, enabling them to fight for what they believe in the moment.
A steady denial of feelings causes a lack of confidence and worry. Do I really know what I am feeling? How am I supposed to express myself? Who am I? And because kids have a ferocious need for self-identity, they will persist in getting you to understand them. The more resistance to their opinions, the longer the meltdowns.
In the absolutely brilliant book, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, students of Ginott, thoroughly explain, step by step, how to communicate effectively so that kids will listen and cooperate. A powerful 3-step process successfully acknowledges feelings without having to necessarily agree with them:
Listen to all feelings
Accept all feelings as valid, give the child what they want in fantasy.
Limit behavior
Yet, even with the best information and intentions, we resist. We decide that the way we have been taught is the only and correct way to be. Many of us are still under the spell of the autocratic parenting we inherited. At the same time, our children's emotions force us to look at our own human needs for acceptance as we struggle to be authentic. Consider how many times today your adult feelings may have been expressed and then denied by a spouse, boss, parent or even your own child. Well-meaning others trying to help in all the wrong ways can leave you feeling more frustrated than if they hadn't tried to help at all.
It might have sounded like this: That's crazy, you are being ridiculous, try being more positive, you are making a mountain out of a molehill, get over it, act your age, you are always complaining, you are overreacting, you don't know what you are talking about, you are too sensitive.
As it is with kids, a steady denial of our feelings can cause a lack of confidence, worry and even anger. Do I really know what I am feeling? How am I supposed to express myself? Who am I? And because kids are actively seeking self-identity, they will persist in getting you to understand them even when you are struggling to feel understood yourself.
It is easy to understand why so many of us are floundering and exhausted as parents. Let's talk. Sending me your comments at JoannaHulton@thechildrenspeaceinitiative.org will guide future articles as we combat parent fatigue together.
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Joanna Hulton, Ph.D., Family Therapist, Author & Educator
Joanna Hulton, Ph.D. has dedicated herself for the past 35 years as a teacher, workshop leader, and practicing psychoanalyst. She is committed to improving children's self-esteem, feelings of personal efficacy, and ability to learn by transforming the role of family, school, and community. Her interdisciplinary approach inspires her ongoing commitment to exploring ideas and issues from multiple perspectives. As such, her mission is to support the implementation of community programs that promote the mental health of children, as well as the adults in their lives.
