It’s often said that we’re living with our best teacher, and nowhere is that truer than as we raise our children. No one else can awaken the kind of primitive, overpowering love we feel for our kids, and no one else can frustrate us the way they can.
Even though we know it’s important to be the one “in charge, we often lose our footing, slip-sliding into situations that find us frantically trying to scramble back into the driver’s seat to regain our authority. But when we’re in reactive mode, it’s pretty hard to feel like we’re the ones steering the ship. Many parents feel that their kids are often the ones running the show, and in an attempt to take charge, they resort to threats, loud voices, bribes or name-calling.
After losing our cool, it’s easy to feel remorseful and to make promises to ourselves that we aren’t going to let our kids throw us off center so badly the next time they disobey or misbehave. But without doing something different, promises alone won’t keep us from falling prey yet again to adult temper tantrums.
The solution to losing your cool isn’t to simply take a deep breath or count to ten. It’s essential to address the underlying cause so you can truly solve the problem, rather than find a band aid big enough to handle it temporarily.
When you find yourself starting to lose your cool, try to identify the stressful belief that’s triggering your anger or frustration. What thoughts were running through your mind when you started to fall apart? It might be, “Billy should come to the dinner table the first time I call him,” or “The kids shouldn’t bicker and fight every time we get in the car.” When you slow down and tease out the thought that triggers your reactivity, you’re already on the road to being able to take a step back from it and see if it’s entirely true.
By looking for the story we tell ourselves about how our children should be or behave, we begin to neutralize those triggers that generate our anger, hurt, or worry—all those emotions that contribute to us losing our cool.
It’s not easy to resist the temptation to take our children’s misbehavior personally, or turn it into a pronouncement about our well we’re parenting. But what freedom comes when we learn how to question the beliefs that cause us to react, instead of responding as that calm, Captain of the ship. We don’t have to be held hostage by a fiery temperament or stressful parenting life.
By looking at what you’re making a child’s frustrating behavior mean and being willing to look at how your story may be untrue, you will have started down the road of keeping your parenting cool.
If you’d like some additional support, check out my Master Class on Keeping Your Parenting Cool.
