Towards A Middle Ground Approach to Parenting

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A few thoughts about getting to a middle ground approach:

In my last post I talked about finding a middle ground approach between very strict, directive parenting, and focusing mainly on building self esteem at the expense of limit setting and accountability.  Where to start?  Often when I am working with parents I find that they feel very worried about whether they are doing a good job, whether other parents know more intuitively how to parent, whether other people's children are just better behaved than their own.

When parents talk about this I get a very strong sense that they are feeling a sense of shame, and that they personally are "not good enough".  They are often much harder on themselves than anyone else would be towards them. It makes me think that a good place to start is for parents to find a way to be kinder to themselves.  This reminded me of some things I have been thinking about in my own life.

Sometime around New Years my 24 year old daughter asked me if I had made any resolutions.  I was surprised by the question and said I don’t tend to do that, but I wondered if she did.  She told me that she regularly makes resolutions 3 or 4 times a year, and proceeded to tell me about her current one.  I was so impressed by her self-insight, wisdom and this practice of resolutions.  I decided that I would make a resolution this year to be more compassionate to myself.

I often advise parents I am working with to be compassionate towards themselves. How can I advise others to do it, if I am not practicing compassion towards myself?  Also, how can you actually make yourself be more compassionate towards yourself, how does one operationalize it?

I started to read a few books on the topic; I’ve been thinking a lot about it and talking about it with my husband and close friends.  (I’ll list some of the books I am reading below.)

One approach I decided that I could do was to look at myself with curiosity, not judge what I was noticing, but let myself be interested in it, in a kind, empathetic way that I would use towards others. 

I decided to try to meditate every day, alternating between a few guided meditation DVDs that were recommended to me. (See below)

The very first time I did it I noticed that during the meditation, when my thoughts were wandering, as they naturally do for everyone during meditation, I was even sometimes having imaginary conversations in my mind with different people in my life about what they thought about what I was thinking.  I was very taken aback; I was imagining other people’s judgments about my thoughts.  It was all coming from me. I thought about it, gently, for a few days and I realized I don’t really want so much of my thinking time to be spent like that.  And I try to notice when I am doing that, and let it go.

Around the same time, I had a day where I had no scheduled appointments, and a long list of non-urgent things I wanted to do.   In my head I started making a schedule of how I could get the most things done, in the most efficient way and I started to feel very anxious about everything I had to get done.  In the spirit of noticing with curiosity I stopped, and thought, “wait a minute, this is a day with no scheduled commitments,  nothing on my things to do list is urgent, but I am about to make it a very stressful day”.  And I changed my plans.  I thought about what actually needed to be done in a timely way, and what I felt like doing, as opposed to what I felt compelled to do.  And I kept reminding myself that nothing I was doing was urgent.  I had a calm day.

A few days later I thought to myself, in a gentle way, “You know, I think 80% of my stress is self generated". I just let that thought sink in.

Last weekend I was having a hard time with something, and I found that I was constantly ruminating about the problem.  I did talk about it with my husband, and then said, “okay, enough I need to focus on something else”.  As I did other things I realized I was having conversations in my head about it with the other players and I would keep getting more and more anxious and upset.  I decided at one point to just write out those ruminations in a letter I would not plan to send.  I found the process amazingly freeing.  And I was able to make a choice to stop ruminating.

In keeping with my current, "being compassionate to myself" theme, I know that I can’t always stop and be curious and not get lost in my own self-judgmental thoughts.  I can’t always keep perspective about what stress is coming from a really urgent situation or a self generated urgent situation.  And I certainly don’t want to be harsh about the times when I can’t be compassionate!  It’s a process, and the goal is to be noticing, to be kind to myself, and make some small changes, as they feel manageable.

I realized that this whole process is very relevant to what I was noticing when meeting with parents. Brene Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, in The Gifts of Imperfection writes about shame.  Shame is the feeling that we are bad, as opposed to the idea that sometimes we might behave badly.  Shame is a horrible physical and emotional feeling and we generally try to avoid it like the plague. 

If we think that a way we have been approaching parenting isn’t working effectively, we jump to thinking we are bad, we feel shame and it's hard to actually do anything differently, tell other people about our struggles, and get help.  We judge ourselves so harshly as parents and assume everyone else is judging us just as harshly as well.

What if parents could make a conscious choice to be compassionate to themselves instead of harsh?  We could look with curiosity at parenting situations we are in, and think about what is happening, what is working, what is not working, and how in small ways we could start changing those things that are not working.  If it's hard to come up with some strategies, we could think about asking for help from someone who also wouldn't approach it in a judgmental way. If there is any unsafe parenting behavior going on, parents immediately need to get outside help.

However, I am referring more to the fact that most parents love their children, and do the best within their own abilities, experiences, knowledge and intuition to parent their children.  Maybe the best place to start is with compassion and curiosity.

Some books I have been reading:

The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown, Ph.D., L.M.S.W., Hazeldon, 2010

The Mindful Path to Self Compassion, Christopher K. Germer, Ph.D.,The Guilford Press, 2009

Far From The Tree, Andrew Solomon, Scribner,2012

Some Meditation Tapes

Meditation Made Possible Volume I, Bhavani Lorainne Nelson

The Mindful Way Through Depression, Jon Kabat-Zinn

Creating Calm in Your Life, Rivka Simmons

Mindful Meditation, Susan Wood

Thoughts on Parenting

In the past year or so I have thinking a lot about the issue people call “helicopter parenting”; the tendency for our generation of parents to be intensely involved in every aspect of our children’s lives. 

The book The Tiger Mom, by Amy Chua, addresses one helicopter approach but ironically it is also present in parents who focus strongly on self esteem, try to shield their children from all disappointment and distress, try to be their child’s “friend”, don’t ask their children to take responsibility for their behavior, or for chores around the house.

Parents I work with say “I would never have talked back to my parents like my child does, they wouldn’t have tolerated it.”  On the other hand when I ask if they really talked to their parents, they often say no. And, “after school I went out with my bike and my friends in the neighborhood and my parents didn’t see me until dinner.  They didn’t know what we were doing.”  These parents reflect with nostalgia on that sense of freedom, that ability to explore, and problem solve, but often also express a sense of sadness that their parents didn’t know they were being bullied, didn’t realize they sometimes got into real trouble.  Parents say “I wrote all my college applications myself, my parents were hardly involved at all” they rue the fact that there is an expectation on them to be so involved with their children’s college application process, but they also feel they may not have received enough guidance in their own process.

We live in a very different world now than when we were children.  With good reason there’s a lot more concern about safety.  It seems like it is much harder to get into a “good” college, and the expectations of the extracurricular activities, grades and AP courses on our children are so much higher than for us. It’s all very complicated and fraught.  But we tend to swing to the opposite extreme in an attempt to correct what we felt didn’t work for us.

In a great article in the Atlantic,  Lori Gottleib writes about the “20 something’s” she sees in therapy. They often don’t have the necessary skills for day-to-day living perhaps because they did not participate in chores at home.   They expect things to always be perfect for them perhaps because they were sheltered from distress by parents intervening on their behalf even into the college years. They were not raised with firm limit setting, so perhaps they don’t know how to handle disappointment and frustration.  These children fear making choices because they were given so many choices they began to fear choosing any option because it precluded other options.  They have expectations that everything will be perfect for them perhaps because their parents always emphasized how special they were and put building self esteem as the most important goal of raising children.

I started to think about all this and came to the conclusion that in the swing to put more focus on self esteem, be more involved in our children’s lives, make sure they get into good colleges, prevent some of the pain we experienced,  some of us swung to an opposite extreme of not setting firm limits with our children, not promoting appropriate age level independence and problem solving and therefore we now have a problem with our children being equipped to handle distress and disappointment as well as be able to independently problem-solve. I don’t think the answer is to swing to the “Tiger Mom” approach.

I have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to find a middle ground approach and I hope to share my ideas and thoughts about that in this blog.