A Parenting Resolution: Greater Honesty
As we start this new year, as children return to school and parents have a bit more time with their thoughts, I am thinking about the value of honesty.
Address what is in your current dynamic with your child.
Be willing to look at your experiences plainly and without fear.
As we return from holiday break, you’ve likely spent more concentrated time with your child.
It’s a good time to take inventory.
What’s working well?
Where have you found your child to be balanced, fulfilled, curious, delighted? What about you? Where are you feeling positive emotion in parenting?
What isn’t working well?
Where have you found your child challenged? And what about you? Where are you struggling?
Are you willing to take five or ten minutes to think through these dynamics, in the privacy of your own mind? To jot some notes on paper or in your phone?
Don’t try to solve anything.
Just be willing to acknowledge.
The nightly struggles for sleep. Your worries about development - academic or social or emotional, language or motor or self-regulation.
About what you’re hearing from your child about school.
About eating habits, about tech dependence, or sibling dynamics.
Your exhaustion. Your reactivity. The way the family trip went sideways a few times.
The moments you were proud of the way you responded.
The scenarios when you were not so proud.
One of the most valuable things you can offer yourself, and your child, is the willingness to be honest and try to process your emotions and your experiences with greater consciousness.
When you do this, you gain capacity.
To parent with more presence, patience, and connection.
To repair when necessary - with your child, with your loved ones, with your own self.
To access solutions.
Many parents are engaged in everyday challenges that corrode their relationships - with their children, with their partners, and with themselves.
Focus some light and attention on your experiences with your child and as a parent over the last few weeks.
Celebrate the good.
But be willing to acknowledge all of it.
Just that simple act of acknowledgment - in the interiority of your own mind, in dialogue with another supportive adult - will help you.
Start with some honesty this new year.