Teaching Kids Self-Compassion in Real Time
As parents, we all know the drill: a child who doesn’t want to get ready in the morning, or forgets his lunch, or makes everyone else in the family late.
If there is a single experience that better defines frustration in parenting, I’m not aware of it. As a result of the morning dance—beginning with toddlers who don’t-want-to-wear-pinks-shoes-today-and why-can’t-they-have-blue-shoes-right-now to teenagers who don’t want to get out of bed and certainly don’t want to be seen with you driving them to school—we spend years as parents nagging, fighting, pleading, cajoling them to JUST GET READY SO WE CAN LEAVE BECAUSE WE ARE GOING TO BE LATE!
So much of this is normal. For better or worse, it’s the dance we do when we are responsible for someone who does not carry the burdens around time and space and schedules that we do as adults.
Parental responses to this usually alternate between 1) anger and frustration and 2) problem solving with schedules and checklists. This is also very normal – attempts to prepare our children for the larger world and to teach them that being late has consequences, etc.
But over time, by only swinging back and forth between anger and problem solving, we miss the opportunity to teach our kids something equally as important: self-compassion when we aren’t perfect. When we don’t want to go to the meeting today. When our inside reality doesn’t match demands from the outside. When we just feel a little over it all.
If we are only trying to raise kids who are punctual and able to meet obligations 100% of the time, then these strategies make sense. But if we want to raise kids who are able to meet the totality of human experience (i.e, does anyone really ever operate that way without eventually being crushed by anxiety and stress?), then we need other strategies.
We need to remind ourselves that part of our job as parents is to also teach our kids to become adults who lean into the discomfort that so often comes with reality. We need to raise humans who can ask themselves questions like, “Why am I having so much resistance to this thing?”, “Is how I’m feeling and indication of a change I need to make?”, and “If I truly do need to do this thing (e.g., a meeting), how can I take myself there kindly and compassionately?”
In order to do this, we need to engage more creative, expansive strategies beyond anger and problem solving around one specific outcome (i.e., being on time). This creative expansion can look like many things. For example:
· Choosing to be late on days when it isn’t super important to be on time, so that we can sit and breathe with our kids and teach them to choose peace for our bodies and minds in the moment. Or better yet, deciding every now and again that we are going to chuck school and meetings altogether and have a breakfast date or play hooky. Used sparingly, these actions can teach our kids that it’s not about perfection. We can teach them that sometimes, we get to choose ourselves.
· Asking, “What is going on in your body in these moments of stress? Tell me more about how you’re feeling about having to get to school on time. etc.” The goal here is not to convince our kids that being on time is important. They already know this. The goal is to teach them the skill of navigating contradiction: what do we do when we know something is important while we also have mixed feelings about doing that thing? Most adults feel this contradiction daily, but few of us were taught how to manage it. We were taught instead to ignore it and keep going. How can we teach our kids differently? Often, we don’t need to have all the answers. Just acknowledging that such a contradiction exists can make a huge difference.
· Once we understand more about what’s going on, changing statements like, “But it’s going to be a great day! You love recess!” to “I hear you. I hear that things feel hard right now. How can we make those hard things better?” In saying this, we can remember that there is so much that children do not control. They spend most of their waking hours being told what to do. This is not easy. We need to find creative ways to give them more control over things that matter to them. For example, one day, my son shared that if he was able to pour orange juice in his water bottle, he’d feel better. In addition to having something nice to drink in class, the act of conscious, harmless rule breaking was helpful to him.
It’s been a challenge for me to remember that there are multiple things I am trying to do as a parent. Yes, it is very important to prepare and teach our kids how to be on time and meet deadlines, etc. But perhaps it is just as important to teach them how to live with themselves. Helping our children learn to manage internal states—especially when those states contradict one another—is critical.
The best part of all this? Engaging these strategies helps me in the moment, too. So often in the mornings, I am on auto pilot, hearing the voices of my parents and other adults in my head about why we have to be on time. Taking a moment to stop and question these voices is as valuable for me as it is for my kids.
Because it turns out, as parents, we need a lot of self-compassion too.
Gail Cowan, MSW, is EOI’s Director of Development. A former therapist, she also runs her own coaching business. Find her at www.gailcowan.com or gail@eyesopeniowa.org.