The book you wish your parents had read (and your children will be glad that you did)
10 Life Lessons from this incredible book
As a new parent, I have found myself being overwhelmed many times by the thought that I’m now responsible for a human being! A human being! Someone who is a part of the next generation — How do I ensure that I enable him to be the person he can be? We are not perfect ourselves, none of us are. We all have our flaws — so how do we enable our children to be the person they can be?
Parenting is a lot of work and it’s easy to get bogged down by the minutiae of day-to-day parenting like nappy changes, weaning or dealing with sleep-regression, and lose sight of the bigger picture.
As we continue to get swept through the highs and lows of the day, I got my hands on this book which helps parents take a step back, to figure what matters, what doesn’t and how to help our children to be the best version of themselves.
Here are a few lessons from this book that truly stuck with me-
- Children do not do what we say; they do what we do.
And we do pretty questionable stuff. So before we consider the behavior of our children, it is important to look within.
2. Watch how you talk to yourself
“It’s important to examine our own inner critic so that we don’t pass too much of its damaging effects on to the next generation. If we are in the habit of beating ourselves up in our head, our child is liable to adopt the same damaging habit.”
Our own lack of confidence, our pessimism, our anger or our defenses which block our feelings — children observe everything — even the non-verbal cues and learn to react to situations the way we do.
And that is why it’s important to watch ourselves closely and break the cycle. Often what we think is our natural parenting style might just be something which we inherited. Even our irritation with a certain behaviour might have less to do with the child and more with the way we have been brought up.
I had an incredible childhood, but my parents were always overprotective, which sometimes can be disempowering. In many ways I rebelled my way out but in many cases I succumbed.
As a parent I find myself stopping my baby a lot more than I actually should because I am always scared that he might hurt himself. Unknowingly an excess of care comes in the way of his learning. Call it a dad-thing or just the way my baby relaxes with my husband — he picks up skills a lot faster and gets to explore so much more with his dad.
I can’t be perfect but I started to look at my own behaviour more closely and make little amends wherever I can.
3. Our past comes back to bite us (and our children)
Sometimes children can trigger old feelings which we then mistakenly act on while dealing with them. The author (who is a psychotherapist) tells the story of her client — Oskar, who always felt his rage rise up if his eighteen-month old boy dropped food on the floor or left it. She asked Oskar what would have happened to him if he had dropped his food as a child.
Oskar remembered his grandfather rapping his knuckles with the handle of a knife then making him leave the room. After he got back in touch with what it had felt like for him, he found compassion for his own self as a toddler, which in turn helped him find patience for his child.
Sometimes these feelings are pushed down into subconscious. Sometimes they are just hiding in a corner for years till we notice them, unpack them and piece them together in the right way.
A good way to recheck our emotions is to always ask – “what would have happened if we did the same at their age?”
4. Don’t bad mouth the co-parent
You and whoever you live with is your child’s environment. Do we bring appreciation to the people close to us or are we habituated to dump our anger on to them? The love, goodwill and respect between coparents have a major influence on the child’s personality. But as anyone who has become parents can tell you — transitioning from being a couple to co-parents puts a strain in relationships. Conflicting parenting philosophies, lack of bonding time and time for our own self, compromised spontaneity, sleep-deprivation, unending parental exhaustion — everything takes a toll on a couple’s relationship. And just when we think we are getting used to it, the child does this thing called ‘growing up’ and everything keeps changing!
Life is never static and there lies the beauty of it! Embracing change does not mean we won’t miss our old life sometimes. But it does mean that we may need to surrender ourselves to the new one more often and enjoy what life has to teach us through our children.
The author also covers the dynamics of navigating through a toxic relationship or co-parenting with an ex — while trying to maintain respect. This is also important as sometimes we risk the child into thinking that their ‘bad habits’ have been inherited from the other parent, which shakes their self-belief and confidence of becoming their best version
5. How to argue and how not to argue
This is helpful in dealing with both adults and kids; and is also useful if children end up witnessing a disagreement
- Avoid playing fact-tennis: Fact- tennis is when we just start lobbing reasons over the net so as to one-up the other person, instead of finding a workable solution. One good way to avoid doing this is using I-statements, instead of You-statements, to explain how a situation made you feel.
“I feel ignored when you don’t answer me when you are on your phone.”
instead of saying “You are always ignoring me when you are on your phone.”
This helps in avoiding getting into a blaming cycle and makes it far easier for the other person to hear.
- Look, Squirrel! :When a child (or even an adult is upset), we might tend to distract them from the current situation. This might work sometimes, but you are not addressing the inner-hurt. It’s a manipulation technique which might end up annoying a person even more! Understand and empathise first. It is only then that they would feel light enough to be willing to get distracted.
- When working through a difference- work with one difference at a time and think what the argument is really about. Don’t save up old grouches and pour them out on the other person all at once.
6. Felt with, not dealt with
A baby is pure feeling — a bundle of feelings, if you like. When other people, especially our children, are unhappy, denying their difficult feelings is sometimes our default option. We don’t want the person we love to be unhappy, and being fully open to their unhappiness or their rage can feel dangerous and unsettling for us; it can even feel as if we are encouraging these feelings in some way. But when feelings are disallowed they do not disappear. They merely go into hiding, where they fester and cause trouble later on in life.
A child needs us to be a container for their emotions. They need us to acknowledge and validate their feeling and put them into words for them. They need to feel a spectrum of emotions, not just happiness, in order to appreciate true happiness. We need to understand why they are angry, even if we don’t agree with them, its important not to get overwhelmed by them.
And we can do this for them only if we are able to do this for ourselves.
7. Diaphobia – Fear of dialogue or turn-taking
Were your opinions taken into consideration as a child? Were you allowed to affect your elders through dialogue or were you simply told what to do?
Sometimes we can’t bear to be told anything, much less if that’s something we already know. It could be because it was met with the same hostility when we tried telling something to our elders. You often might have heard phrases like — “Don’t try to act over smart!”, “Don’t give back answers”
This shuts children down and in turn reduces their patience to be told anything. Children need reciprocity — a sort of give-and-take attention, in order to learn. And that is how they bond. If you push them away long enough, you might stop being the person your child may want to share their thoughts with.
“You want to be the person your child can talk to. If you tell them they are silly to complain when granny made them a nice lentil stew, they may feel they can’t tell you when the creepy piano teacher puts his hand on their leg.”
So next time pay close attention whether you talk at them or talk with them.
8. All behaviour is communication
The author says that there is no such thing as ‘bad’ behaviour. There is only behaviour that is inconvenient to us. Every behaviour is a form of communication and it does not happen in isolation. We, or the situation the child found themselves in, might have a role to play in it.
We might often not understand the cause but we can try to help it from escalating further.
The author gives the example of her daughter Flo, who she takes to swimming every week. One of the weeks when she couldn't make it, her husband took Flo to swimming. Everything went well till her husband turned back to take the stairs after the class. Flo started throwing a tantrum and would just scream No!! when her dad tried to take her home. The more he would force her, the more she would scream and fight it.
Both were pretty cross with each other by the time they reached home. When the author asked to narrate what exactly happened, she realised what the issue could have been -
Flo is used taking the stairs when she goes to swimming class with her mom, and then taking the lift up when they head back home.
“You were really looking forward to pressing that lift button, weren’t you?” asked the author.
Flo nodded.
“And there was no way dad could have known our little ritual, since you could not tell him.”
In that one sentence, Flo felt her feelings validated, and also understood her dad’s side.
- Children do not learn flexibility automatically.
- When something in their ritual changes, they need time to process it. They need us to communicate this to them in the best way possible- even if they might not fully understand.
- They can’t be rushed — not because their behaviour is ‘bad’. They don’t know how to do it just yet.
- Even when children learn how to talk, they do not fully learn how to put their feelings into words. They need us to do that for them so that we help them understand what they might be going through.
- We might not always have the time or energy to slow down with them and think at their level, but we can try. Children WILL need time — unfortunately there is no other way around it. We just need to decide whether we want to spend that time positively before an inconvenient behaviour arises, or do we want to spend double the time negatively after the situation has escalated.
9. Lying
We all lie. So try not to overreact when your children will. We often send mixed messages to children by asking them not to lie, and then lie ourselves.
We ask them not to lie but also tell them to pretend to be grateful for a gift they did not like.
Children lie for different reasons — sometimes these are fantasy lies, sometimes they do it for attention or sympathy, and sometimes they do it because they are scared of us or because we can’t be calm and non-judgmental.
Sometimes it is tough not to react adversely to their lies, but we also need to remember that if we are too extreme, we might close our channel of communication further, and they might just start getting better at hiding things.
Sometimes when they tell us something, it is tempting to tell them what they should do, but if possible, hold back, so that you instill confidence in your child rather than disempowering them. If you are a sounding board rather than an oracle, your child is more likely to keep telling you the truth.
10. Love and boundaries
Boundaries are important for any healthy relationship. But we need to make it a habit to use these boundaries to define ourselves and not the child.
So instead of saying “You cannot play with the keys” say “I cannot allow you to play with the keys.”
Don’t say “You cannot watch one hour of cartoons, you’ll be tired”. A child would think they definitely can watch much more than that. Instead say, “I’m not comfortable allowing you to watch so much television. I need you to turn it off for my sake.”
Also, put a boundary down much before your actual limit, otherwise our reaction would not be as calm and firm as we want it to be.
Make a boundary and act on it. Sometimes allowing it and sometimes not, will send mixed messages to your child.
Rupture and repair
In the end, no matter what we do, relationships are bound to have their ups and downs. We are bound to make mistakes. But we need to remember that it is never too late to repair and work on our relationships to bring in the happiness we crave for. We can always try to repair, change and restart — And even if it takes time, it will definitely get better than what it would be if we never acted on mending our mistakes.
There is no rule book that says that if we do all the above things, the child will become the best version of themselves. There is always the big debate of Nature vs. Nurture. But by doing these, we are at least trying to increase the possibility of it ❤️
Happy Parenting!