When Parents Stumble…

by Nicholeen Peck

While exiting a subway stairwell in Boston, my friend stumbled on a bump in the concrete. She fell forward. I was concerned for her. However, her reflexes kicked in and she pulled herself back to upright and she didn’t get injured. We both smiled and laughed about the incident. But, had she not had reflexes that kicked in so quickly, we would not have been laughing and joking about watching where we step.

There are so many stumbling blocks for parents nowadays that make parenting less enjoyable and sometimes even painful. But, just like my friend, it’s possible to prepare for potential parenting stumbling blocks by proactively working on healthy, supportive, parenting reflexes that can keep us from falling when hard moments come. Here are some common, modern parenting stumbling blocks and ways to prepare to either not stumble at all or to recover quickly when starting to fall.

Stumbling Blocks & Reflexes

Even if your parenting stumbling block isn’t listed here, understanding this list and corresponding strengthening parenting reflexes can prepare you to more smoothly navigate future parenting obstacles.

1. Stumbling Block – Acceptance and Approval: In my book, Parenting A House United, there is a whole section dedicated to the importance of parents accepting the shortcomings and mistakes of their children and not taking misbehavior personally. Acceptance is a principle, a choice, and a vital key to calmness. However, modern parents often seem to stumble in their roles and responsibilities as parents because they are looking for acceptance and approval of their actions from their children.

Example 1: A parent tries to act like a child’s friend to gain acceptance. This action actually damages parent and child roles and identity and can lead to relationship, behavior, and attachment problems.

Example 2: A parent doesn’t correct a problem behavior because the child acts like they don’t approve of the parent when the parent corrects the child. This passive parenting action is rooted in the parent trying to please the child instead of teach the child. Attachment, relationship, and good teaching are sacrificed for emotional gratification or insecurity.

Reflex – Strengthen Identity by Understanding Parental Role: Parental confidence is founded in the truth about who they are and how to live their parent identity. Parents are so many things to their children, but primarily, when the children are young, they are teachers. A good reflex to maintain is a reminder that as a parent you need to not be afraid of the child showing emotional disapproval when teaching needs to occur. If a parent doesn’t fulfill their parental role properly the whole family falls into dysfunction.

2. Stumbling Block – Distractions: So many things can demand our attention. Phones and business meetings can seem urgent. However, over time, when all of those urgent calls, appointments, projects, meetings and text responses get piled up, very rarely are they important in comparison to the real-life connection and training that our children need from us.

So many parents see the problem with distractions that their children have, and voice that to me. However, they aren’t often ready to take the hard self-governing look at themselves to see if they need to remove distractions in order to facilitate a better relationship too.

Reflex – Weekly Meetings: Prioritize by doing regular inventories of your time and your relationships. One of the best things that my husband and I did when we were raising our young family and foster children was to have a weekly couple’s meeting. During this meeting we not only went over the schedule and issues with the children, but we talked about the quality of our relationships and how to better prioritize our time and attention on the family.

3. Stumbling Block – Taking Things Personal: Above I mentioned that having a tone of acceptance toward your children meant that a parent doesn’t take misbehavior personally. Even though I quickly mentioned it, I must explain that the worst parenting choices and parenting misbehavior usually happen because a parent chooses to read too much into a child’s misbehavior (taking things personally). The parent chooses to take harsh words or emotional outbursts from a child as true or indicative of the condition of their relationship, when emotions are very often overreactions or even manipulations. These simple, emotional deductions to misbehavior by the parent create detachment and relationship strain and don’t usually solve the heart of behavior or relationship problems.

Reflex – Stay in Front Brain: Mastering your own calmness by engaging in good self-talk and descriptive thinking is a good practice to get into to stay in your front, problem solving, brain when your child is screaming at you from their back, emotionally reactive, brain.

Example: When a child is trying to start a power struggle, think, “This is a power struggle. They are just trying to be understood. But this isn’t the productive way to get understood. What do I need to teach them? What is our plan for reminding them to choose calmness?” These proactive thoughts lead the parent’s brain into a productive, action-focused mode that can also help to steer the child toward calmness.

4. Stumbling Block – Talking Back: Every child must try it; sometimes multiple times throughout different phases of development. And, children with higher levels of anxiety likely try it more often. However, it isn’t good for social training, problem solving or relationships to get into a habit of talking back. Some people have really active brains full of questions, but that doesn’t mean that they should think that they get to take control of every conversation or relationship by demanding answers to all of their questions instantly.

In an effort to help children feel understood, parents often get sucked into debates and arguments with their children when they could avoid these non-productive forms of communication by teaching a very productive skill.

Reflex – Disagreeing Appropriately:  Proactively learning and teaching the skill Disagreeing Appropriately frees parents and children from the arguments and power struggles that can result from controlling back talk.

5. Stumbling Block – Being Unplanned: There are so many things in life that require planning that sometimes parenting becomes somewhat ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” in their parenting interactions. Most parents hope that good parenting skills will come intuitively, born out of love for their child. Yet, so often, because of lack of parenting skill planning, parents end up showing their worst behavior to their children. Many parents have said to me over the years, “I never knew that I was capable of such emotion until I started parenting. I’m a monster; even though I didn’t ever plan to be one.”

No one plans to become a monster. In fact, it’s just the opposite. But, without planning, we can get desperate and end up misbehaving as parents.

Being unplanned leads to other stumbling blocks like parenting inconsistency, creative parenting (trying to ‘mix it up’ to have the parenting manipulation feel fresh to you or to them), bad parent behavior, and being too unpredictable. A good plan increases predictability, which also decreases anxiety for parents and children and leads to healthy repetitive skill development for the whole family. Be careful about resisting repetition. That is another common stumbling block that is the result of not knowing the power of a plan.

Reflex – Proactively Practice:  Learn and regularly practice the principles and skills that you need for your own self-government and communication so that you know what to do in the minute and what to revert back to if you stray from your plan. Proactively planning communication skills like how to accept “no” answers and how to follow instructions, etc, as well as the parent skills like doing a proper correction or effective praise bring parents and children peace and focus during parenting interactions.

6. Stumbling Block – Giving Child Excuses: We love our children so much that we naturally give them the benefit of the doubt. However, just as it isn’t developmentally and behaviorally healthy to blame others for your own choices, it’s also harmful to raise a child that doesn’t know how to take responsibility for their own choices. Many parents unknowingly teach their children not to take responsibility by always looking for a person who ruined their child by teaching them a bad behavior.

No matter who taught your child the behavior, the child ultimately chose to do the behavior and needs teaching, not excuses. Giving excuses to children creates passive people who end up thinking that everything happened to them; instead of becoming people who look for where they can improve in any situation. Don’t look for blame. Just describe the behavior and teach them how to fix it for next time.

Reflex – Consistently Correct: Correcting children with through the lens of personal choice/agency and teaching the child that it’s healthy to be corrected, instead of something to be feared is ultimately liberating for the child for their entire life. We shouldn’t be afraid of corrections. We should be afraid of not figuring out how to improve ourselves.

We will all stumble at times, whether we are perfectly planned or not. This life isn’t about never stumbling. After all, without the stumbles we wouldn’t learn to look before we step. But, if we know the stumbles ahead of time, then it could be possible that we can have the proper reflexes to catch us from falling.

The whole point of this article is to warn you about the bumps in the concrete. I’ve seen so many people stumble and fall now, that maybe I can help you prepare not to fall, or maybe even not to trip in the first place.

No matter the stumbling block, there is hope. Come to the Teaching Self-Government online Parenting Mastery Training. Details Here.