30 Mar How to be a Better Parent so Children Thrive

Parenting advice is everywhere. Especially about parenting without yelling! The best advice I have for this is to look within. How to be a better parent so chidren thrive involves assessing our own habits, how we manage stress and most importantly how we manage through and recover from life’s challenges. To parent without yelling, you have to go within. 

Yelling at a child is a good indication that we are being hijacked by one of our saboteurs, more about them later. Yelling inflicts pain on the receiver. Words and the energy they are delivered with matter.

As a parent we are quick to help our children when they experience physical pain. If something “hurts” we take some sort of measure to alleviate the pain.

Physical pain is easy for parents to remedy.

When my children were younger my daughter broke her arm more than once, broke her finger on a trampoline… it was actually pointing in the wrong direction and required surgery. But the worst was when she was working at a day camp and cut her finger while cutting watermelon. She severed the nerve and almost cut an artery requiring delicate surgery.  Each time I was quick to act to take care of her physical pain. 

But what about tummy aches? Headaches? This type of pain can be caused by any number of things. We first look to the physical; is it dehydration, not eating enough, not eating well? A flu bug? What we need to consider is that these types of pain can also be caused by mental or emotional pain. This applies to both children, and yourself.

Mental pain is different as it is not easy to know if someone is experiencing this. And it is equally not easy to know what to do about it. Parents that model and teach children how to navigate through mental pain are helping their chilren thrive!

Mental immunity and mental fitness are keys to good health and parenting.

Have you ever heard of the term “mental immunity”? I first heard about this concept in “the Book of JOY”. A synthesis of discussions between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Mental immunity helps us avoid mental pain. Note here that mental pain often takes much longer to heal than physical pain.

Mental pain can be caused by suppressed emotions, unexpressed fear, an overly active amygdala, hormone imbalances, stress, lack of motivation, social anxiety and so much more. Strengthening our own mental immunity is key to good parenting!

1. First we need to identify the negative emotion. Many people cannot identify what emotion they are feeling as they were not taught this as a child.
2. Feel the emotion and notice the impact on the body. Identifying sensations associate with an emotion helps us to identify it more quickly in the future.
3. Understand what has triggered the emotion. What event, or which belief is it that we have that brings this emotion to the surface.
4. Acknowledge how it makes us feel. Label how we are feeling and observe it outside of ourselves. We are not the emotion.
5. Accept that we feel this way.
6. Take action to shift to a neutral state of mind and body. Our brain does not make good decisions or take good actions when it is in an excited state. It is the way we are wired. Calming the mind, calms the body and leads to good decision making.

For me, I consider myself lucky. My mental fitness was strong as I had already been working on my mental fitness for several years. At the same time, my children were entering their teen years. Parenting teens has its own challenges, we parents need to be present and have a strong relationship of open communication to support our teens.  To stay out of despair and help my children thrive, I had to keep working out in the mental fitness gym! 

Unless you are living in cave, or under a rock, every one of us will experience set backs and suffering.  It is what we choose to do when we are suffering that is going to make or break us. If you have low levels of mental fitness, the likelihood is that your relationships will suffer.

Mental fitness takes time to develop and practice to maintain.

There is no magic pill one can take to have good mental fitness – just like physical fitness. To build mental fitness you need to know what muscles to work on first. Shirzad Chamine, the founder of Positive Intelligence, outlines a process for people to shift out of saboteur mode, and access their sage powers in challenging situations. Engaging in specific mindful practices, positive psychology, embodiement and visualization work boosts mental fitness and mental immunity.

The mental fitness muscle we start with is our judge! Counter to physical fitness where we want to grow muscles, in the judges case we want to settle it down. The judge is good friends with your amydala. They are friends and it takes time to decouple these two. The judge often keeps us from thriving, let alone impacting our children’s ability to thrive.

We “workout” to intercept our judge and stop it in its tracks before it impacts our actions. The next step is to work on diminsihing the strength of our sabouteurs. Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions in the way you handle life’s everyday challenges. They represent automated patterns in your mind for how to think, feel, and respond. They cause all of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness.

We then strengthen our sage powers, developing new habits and methods to approach daily challenges. New habits require a commitment and also time to take hold. For this reason we commit to working out daily for at least several weeks. 

Parenting requires a good level of mental fitness. 

Parenting is challenging in that every child is different. Each household has different nuasicances, no two families have the exact same experiences in life. Parenting is not simple, no matter where you live, or  what socio-economic bracket you are in. There are pitfalls at every stage is child’s maturation to adulthood.

“Knowing oneself” I believe is key to parenting success. To know oneself means we understand both our positive and negative attributes. We recognize them and we have the ability to work with our negative attributes so they do not overtake our parenting. These negative attributes are an opportunity for our own growth!

Children prosper and thrive when parents have high levels of positive intelligence.

Parenting with positive intelligence gives children an easier path to understanding and managing their own emotions. It also positively impacts the child-parent relationship as both parties have a common language to talk about challenges. 

I think we can agree that our children are not “just like me”. They are growing up in a booming technological age that at times is not easy to keep up with. Information is everywhere and the information that exists is not always accurate. This can be confusing and challenging for teenagers that are becoming adults. Parenting with strong mental fitness has never been more important. It will help you assist your child through their emotional ups and downs and to navigate the changing landscape they will be adults in.

And remember, building your mental fitness improves not only your mental immunity – it reshapes your responses to everyday life and reduces the frustrations that come with challenging parenting moments, allowing you and your children, young or adult, to thrive.

So where do you stand?

1.  Do you know your top saboteurs? Try this free saboteur assessment.

2. What do you do to keep yourself free from parenting in saboteur mode?

3. Would you like to improve your mental fitness? If the answer is yes join me on my next workshop or course.

Balance on my Friends, Annette