Why Understanding the Need to Both Like and Love Your Child Is Crucial to Raising Healthy Families
Browsing through the stacks at the library recently my eyes caught the title of a book. Liking the Child You Love, by Jeffrey Bernstein, sat resting on the shelf, beckoning to me. Fortunately I haven’t hit a wall with my children where liking them as people is an issue. Do I like all of their decision? No. At first I thought I didn’t really need to read this book – no problems here. But then as I flipped through the pages I was struck by the similarities between the ideas in this book and emotion coaching parenting, and I knew I wanted to add to those ideas I try to utilize with my kids.
The Importance of Liking Our Kids
Even those parents who love their children with every fiber of their beings sometime struggle with liking their children. It doesn’t sound nice, comforting, or even very parental, but it is a reality. The importance of making sure our kids know we really like them (and really feeling it) is significant in our parenting. Dr. Bernstein points out that liking our kids is really much more difficult than loving them. Liking our kids is a direct relfection of how we parent them – so much of it is up to us.
The importance differentiation needs to be made between disliking our children and disliking their behaviors. All too often we get those confused. We start to assign their behaviors to their being – and we use ill logic. No – we wouldn’t probably choose friends who make poor choices to be primary influences and relationships in our lives, but our kids don’t get that choice. Parenting is a role you don’t get to assume just when it feels good.
Most importantly it is often our own reactions to the behaviors that are directly contributing to those negative thoughts about our kids. Consider a child who draws on the wall and two possible reactions and thought processes from parents.
- Jimmy is so naughty! He never listens to the rules and he always finds a way to ruin something in the house!
- Jimmy keeps breaking the rules I have set about the house. What do I need to do to clearly teach him to take care of our home and follow house rules?
In the first response, the feelings of the parent are all negative toward the child. It is a sweeping coloration of him as a young boy – and not a very nice one (and one that many parents can probably identify with feeling at one time). The second reaction is a balance. It acknowledges that Jimmy is not behaving appropriately, but it then also puts the responsibility on the parent for improved teaching.
Our children are very perceptive – imagine if Jimmy could hear those parental thoughts and how they might make him feel about himself? We don’t always have to say it out-loud. Our kids know what we are thinking about these things.
Dr. Bernstein’s 9 Toxic Thoughts
Dr. Bernstein outlines 9 toxic thoughts that parents have about their kids and that contribute to situations where parents don’t feel like they really like their kids. When we as parents let toxic thoughts rule our parenting style, we end of not liking our kids, or ourselves, very much.
- Always or never trap: Susie always talks back. Johnny never listens. When we trap ourselves into labeling our kids we build on those toxic thoughts, and we trap our kids into the idea that they can’t change.
- Label Gluing: Lazy, irresponsible, and careless are adjectives that don’t help your child improve. Along the lines of the always and never statements, labeling doesn’t build a healthy relationship and it doesn’t teach our children how to do better.
- Seething Sarcasm: Aren’t you helpful (when the child clearly did not help with dishes) is not a tool of effective communication. Sarcasm can be funny when both parties are in on the joke, but with kids it can hurt feelings and teach them to hide their true emotions.
- Smoldering Suspicions: When a child breaks our trust it can be hard to let them earn it back. However, constantly questioning them and labeling them as a liar, untrustworthy, or worse, only shows your dislike – it doesn’t teach them how to do better next time.
- Detrimental Denial: Vastly different from the other examples, parental denial of a child’s misbehavior is just as thwarting of healthy parenting. It can be hard to admit when your child does something wrong, but denying it only sends the message to your child that they don’t need to take responsibility and that it is OK to manipulate others.
- Emotional Overheating: Their misbehaviors keep building and suddenly you feel yourself losing control and lashing out at them. This is a common way parents vent frustrations, bursting out in anger, making threats, or using physical punishment. These emotionally charged outbursts fail to teach children how to deal with emotions.
- Blame Blasting: You did it wrong again! You make me so mad! Blaming children for the emotional overheating or overreactions might make parents feel less to blame in the confrontation, but doesn’t solve anything. The focus needs to shift away from who did this to how can we resolve this in order to evoke positive changes.
- “Should” Slamming: You should know this by now. Statements like this undermine our kids. Yes – we probably often feel like they should because we feel we have told them too many times already – but obviously we need to do something more. Parents need to be careful to spend more energy on why our kids are struggling than with the standards we think they should have met by now.
- Dooming Conclusions: This is like hypochondriac parenting. One bad grade in school means that a child’s future is doomed. Dramatic and dooming conclusions don’t allow our children to make mistakes and move forward.
The 9 toxic thought parents have as outlined by Dr. Bernstein probably strike a nerve at least somewhere along the way with most parents. We are parents – not perfect people. I really found myself reading through this book and realizing it was a reflection of average parents’ bad days. The takeaway lesson for me was to heighten the efforts I make as a parent to do more than provide average reactions on bad days. My kids’ reactions and behaviors start with me – and when I infuse their behaviors with negative (toxic) thoughts and reactions, it is a combination that rarely leads to any good.
Parent Frustration Syndrome (PFS)
I really did appreciate the real-world examples in this parenting book, and feel that it did reflect emotion coaching and a parenting style that would encourage emotional intelligence in both me and my children. However, I have a hard time embracing one more syndrome. Dr. Bernstein coins the term Parent Frustration Syndrome (PFS) as a way to describe the overwhelming feelings of frustration that parents often face.
To me it seems a little redundant. Parenting does encompass frustration. It also encompasses joy, blessings, anxiety, and almost every other emotion known to man-kind. Bernstein describes this as a syndrome in part because if there is no problem, there is nothing for which to work. When we have an ailment, such as PFS, we seek treatments and strategies to get over the issue. Think of it as an ailment, think of it as a journey – just think of it and consider applying some of these techniques for teaching yourself how to parent and like the relationship with your child a little more.
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