A friend of mine found herself at odds with her toddler.\u00a0Seems the young lad had taken to bullying other kids, especially\u00a0girls, including his baby sister. Though her efforts\u00a0were guided by parenting books and her best judgment, my\u00a0friend felt like \u201ca terrible parent.\u201d Naturally, she turned to\u00a0Facebook for advice.<\/p>\n
The resulting flood of comments from her Facebook\u00a0friends included personal reassurances, parenting materials,\u00a0personal testimonies and straight-up advice. It was all fairly\u00a0predictable and carried the tone of \u201ctalk more with your son\u00a0about the inappropriateness of his socially unacceptable behavior
\nand go easy on yourself when you lose it and act out\u00a0how angry you are at him.\u201d Reading through all of it, I kept\u00a0picturing my friend scouring through each post, hoping to find some relief to her quandary. The whole thing seemed\u00a0quite familiar to me.<\/p>\n
My wife and I have reared three sons and a daughter. All\u00a0are now adults and successfully \u201claunched.\u201d Each one is\u00a0flawed in the customary human sorts of ways, though much\u00a0less than I am. As such, you might consider them \u201cnormal,\u201d\u00a0if normal is \u201caverage.\u201d And, you might think that my wife\u00a0and I did a good job in parenting them. Well, OK. But, I\u00a0can tell you, there were many occasions when I felt like a\u00a0terrible parent. I felt inadequate. I felt frustrated with myself\u00a0because in those days, as a professional providing family life\u00a0education and marriage and family counseling to a host of\u00a0people during all of those years, I held myself out as the expert.\u00a0I was supposed to know this stuff. So why was I struggling\u00a0so much to get it right? Why did I Wnd it difficult to be
\nconsistent? Why was it so easy for me to lose my cool when\u00a0things did not go as I expected? I did not know it then, but\u00a0the root of it was in my own fear of inadequacy. I was afraid\u00a0I couldn\u2019t be a good parent, and by extension a good person.\u00a0I was afraid that my child\u2019s misbehavior would reveal\u00a0to everyone just how inadequate I felt. It took many years\u00a0for me to come to this realization and though I continued\u00a0to feel inadequate, I learned\u00a0that this acknowledgment
\nwas full of hidden blessings.\u00a0Rather than running from it,\u00a0I learned to embrace it.<\/p>\n
I share all this with you\u00a0now with the hope that you\u00a0might come to understand\u00a0this sooner. Perhaps you will find as I did that there is great benefit to feeling inadequate,\u00a0namely, that you are drawn to look outside of yourself for\u00a0answers as did my Facebook friend. I found it necessary to\u00a0trust my wife and trusted friends. My prayer life intensified\u00a0and became more consistent. I more quickly acknowledged\u00a0my missteps with my children and asked of them their forgiveness\u00a0more readily.<\/p>\n
And then, something else happened. My children began\u00a0to realize the same in their own lives. They found it easier\u00a0to accept their troublesome self doubts or fears, their disappointments,\u00a0their personal failures. The fear of such things\u00a0was driven out from among them and replaced with mutual\u00a0respect, which may be the most precious form of love we can\u00a0offer one another.<\/p>\n
As to the plight of my Facebook friend, I might suggest\u00a0that she deal with physical behavior by speaking a physical\u00a0language. Talking to a child about the child\u2019s behavior is\u00a0OK, but connecting to that child emotionally by acting out\u00a0our good intentions for them is better. If a child is feeling\u00a0displaced (and every toddler with a newborn sibling feels\u00a0so) affirming that child\u2019s place in the family and reinforcing\u00a0their secure emotional attachment to the parent will do the
\nwork of processing such feelings, as well as open the door for\u00a0meaningful and productive talk. Holding and touching the\u00a0child, establishing direct eye contact, speaking slowly and\u00a0clearly, and providing separate time and space set aside with\u00a0that child are all vital to this processing. Most importantly, I\u00a0would encourage my friend to examine her own feelings and\u00a0use this opportunity to discover more of what she finds most\u00a0fearful, and why.<\/p>\n
Brien R. S\u00f6rne is the host\u00a0of “Tallahassee Talks with\u00a0Brien S\u00f6rne” which airs\u00a0Saturdays 9 a.m. on 93.3FM\u00a0and Saturdays 9:30 p.m. on\u00a0Moose Magnificat online\u00a0radio.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A friend of mine found herself at odds with her toddler.\u00a0Seems the young lad had taken to bullying other kids, especially\u00a0girls, including his baby sister. Though her efforts\u00a0were guided by parenting books and her best judgment, my\u00a0friend felt like \u201ca terrible parent.\u201d Naturally, she turned to\u00a0Facebook for advice. The resulting flood of comments from her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":525,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[201,122,200,199],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-self-help","tag-doubt","tag-family","tag-parenting","tag-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":744,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions\/744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}