A friend of mine found herself at odds with her toddler. Seems the young lad had taken to bullying other kids, especially girls, including his baby sister. Though her efforts were guided by parenting books and her best judgment, my friend felt like “a terrible parent.” Naturally, she turned to Facebook for advice.
The resulting flood of comments from her Facebook friends included personal reassurances, parenting materials, personal testimonies and straight-up advice. It was all fairly predictable and carried the tone of “talk more with your son about the inappropriateness of his socially unacceptable behavior
and go easy on yourself when you lose it and act out how angry you are at him.” Reading through all of it, I kept picturing my friend scouring through each post, hoping to find some relief to her quandary. The whole thing seemed quite familiar to me.
My wife and I have reared three sons and a daughter. All are now adults and successfully “launched.” Each one is flawed in the customary human sorts of ways, though much less than I am. As such, you might consider them “normal,” if normal is “average.” And, you might think that my wife and I did a good job in parenting them. Well, OK. But, I can tell you, there were many occasions when I felt like a terrible parent. I felt inadequate. I felt frustrated with myself because in those days, as a professional providing family life education and marriage and family counseling to a host of people during all of those years, I held myself out as the expert. I was supposed to know this stuff. So why was I struggling so much to get it right? Why did I Wnd it difficult to be
consistent? Why was it so easy for me to lose my cool when things did not go as I expected? I did not know it then, but the root of it was in my own fear of inadequacy. I was afraid I couldn’t be a good parent, and by extension a good person. I was afraid that my child’s misbehavior would reveal to everyone just how inadequate I felt. It took many years for me to come to this realization and though I continued to feel inadequate, I learned that this acknowledgment
was full of hidden blessings. Rather than running from it, I learned to embrace it.
I share all this with you now with the hope that you might come to understand this sooner. Perhaps you will find as I did that there is great benefit to feeling inadequate, namely, that you are drawn to look outside of yourself for answers as did my Facebook friend. I found it necessary to trust my wife and trusted friends. My prayer life intensified and became more consistent. I more quickly acknowledged my missteps with my children and asked of them their forgiveness more readily.
And then, something else happened. My children began to realize the same in their own lives. They found it easier to accept their troublesome self doubts or fears, their disappointments, their personal failures. The fear of such things was driven out from among them and replaced with mutual respect, which may be the most precious form of love we can offer one another.
As to the plight of my Facebook friend, I might suggest that she deal with physical behavior by speaking a physical language. Talking to a child about the child’s behavior is OK, but connecting to that child emotionally by acting out our good intentions for them is better. If a child is feeling displaced (and every toddler with a newborn sibling feels so) affirming that child’s place in the family and reinforcing their secure emotional attachment to the parent will do the
work of processing such feelings, as well as open the door for meaningful and productive talk. Holding and touching the child, establishing direct eye contact, speaking slowly and clearly, and providing separate time and space set aside with that child are all vital to this processing. Most importantly, I would encourage my friend to examine her own feelings and use this opportunity to discover more of what she finds most fearful, and why.
Brien R. Sörne is the host of “Tallahassee Talks with Brien Sörne” which airs Saturdays 9 a.m. on 93.3FM and Saturdays 9:30 p.m. on Moose Magnificat online radio.