Rewiring Old Patterns Takes Time
I’ve been thinking about how we often feel our job as parents is to gain compliance. A parenting strategy that doesn’t offer compliance or immediate calm, can seem frustrating and counter-intuitive, since the thing we struggle the most with is to get our kids to do the things that need to be done. Although connection and compassion doesn’t equal immediate compliance and calm, it does create a healthy sense of safety and security from which your child can learn the tools they need to thrive.
My journey parenting three ND kids has been a wild, frustrating, beautiful, messy adventure. It’s been a lot of work on learning my own tools of self-compassion, regulation, and patience.
When my youngest was one, he would take a rolly polly off the ground and hold it between his fingers and say, don’t squish it, don’t squish it, and then - squish it. As he got older he would throw a block at my head, or cut the curtains with a scissors, or break an important item, and then immediately follow it up with, but it was an accident. We’d try to correct him, or punish him, and it would turn into anger or rage. So it looked like him doing something inappropriate, yelling it was an accident, getting corrected, and then a long and intense or rageful meltdown would follow the correction or punishment. It was exhausting and infuriating. Then I began my journey into “gentle parenting” and I began to meet his mistakes with compassion and understanding. “I can see that you feel bad about cutting the curtain. I know you’re a good kid who care about our things. How can we fix this?” And I would STILL meet with him screaming it was an accident and an intense meltdown. If I held on to the compassion and understanding the rage would turn to crying and intense sadness.
This is where most people get stuck. See, connected parenting doesn’t work, it just makes it worse. He does something inappropriate, calls it a mistake, and when you go to set boundaries or even offer compassion, he rages or melts down. Clearly, it doesn’t work for my type of kid.
But here’s where you don’t give up. This kid, who goes from doing something inappropriate, to rage, to meltdown, is actually going through a lot in his brain and body. What I’ve learned is that the “accident” is really his way of saying, I didn’t have the impulse control needed to pause between the idea and action long enough to realize it was a bad choice. The anger at being corrected was shame being triggered because I clearly didn’t want to cause harm, I just didn’t have the capability to make a better choice in that moment. And when your compassion came months or years after the same behavior had been met repeatedly with anger or disconnection, my brain jumped into the well worn neural pathway of mistake, shame, and anger.
It’s taken years, but we’ve both made so much progress. His body is unlearning the shame and pain of constantly struggling with impulse control, and I’m learning to hold space for it all, the anger, the tears, and when the storm has passed, we make amends, teach new skills, and provide scaffolds for the things we know will be challenging.
Don’t give up on connected parenting because you were nice and it still didn’t work. Remember, it has nothing to do with being nice, being in control, or stopping an emotion. It’s about connecting, understanding, teaching, and learning how to understand, embrace, and work with those difficult and messy moments of being human.
