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Empowering Kids to Make Amends with the Three Rs: Reflection, Repair and Responsibility

ABOUT THE BOOK

Parenting is one of the toughest things we can do, but with the help of clinical psychologist Dr Laura Markham, you’ll discover a whole new parenting approach that will leave you feeling confident and relaxed, and your child wanting to behave.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Laura Markham writes extensively about parenting as the editor-in-chief of AhaParenting.com, the website of Aha! Moments for parents from their child’s birth through the teenage years. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University and has worked as a parenting coach with countless families. The mother of two children (and aunt to nine more), Dr Laura is a leading advocate for both parents and children. The author of hundreds of articles on child-raising on a number of parenting websites, she serves as an expert for Mothering.com and Pregnancy.org. Dr Laura lives in New York City with her husband and children.

Tens of thousands of mums and dads enjoy Dr Laura’s ‘Inspirations for Busy Parents’ emails, available at AhaParenting.com. You can also join her community on Facebook (www.facebook.com/AhaParenting) and follow the latest research in parenting via Twitter @DrLauraMarkham. Contact Dr Laura at www.ahaparenting.com/Peaceful_Parent_Happy_Kids.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

Calm Parents, Happy Kids

‘Dr Laura Markham offers us suggestions that help us create strong relationships with our children. If we all followed Dr Laura’s original and authentic advice, we would indeed change the world.’

‘Calm Parents, Happy Kids can change your parenting life. Dr Laura Markham shares an invaluable set of insights that are new to the world of parenting. She will show you how to deliver your love and guidance in a truly nurturing way, and how to avoid parental burnout in the process.’

‘Dr Laura teaches by example, holding parents with compassion as she gives them priceless, easy-to-use strategies to create a secure, healthy attachment with their child.’

– Lysa Parker and Barbara Nicholson, founders of Attachment Parenting International and authors of Attached at the Heart

‘Dr Laura Markham’s guidance on fostering connection and coaching instead of controlling are important ideas, and they can make a huge difference in your life as a parent. Her explanation of why parents need to regulate ourselves first – before we can help regulate our children – is a revolutionary idea. Read it and you’ll see why she calls her work “Aha! Parenting.”’

‘Dr Laura Markham’s work is practical, easy to apply, and transformative. Get a cup of coffee, find a comfy chair, and be prepared to get great advice from a wise, new friend and fellow parent.’

‘A much-needed resource ... encouragement and actionable, doable advice for parents to strengthen their connection with their children and take care of themselves. Clearly helps parents see how what they are doing today impacts and influences what happens tomorrow, yet the tone is gentle and nonjudgemental. Such a user-friendly format for (often) weary parents.’

‘Dr Laura Markham’s compassion, wisdom, common sense, love, and understanding radiate in each carefully chosen word, example, and suggestion throughout this well-written, easy-to-read, delicious book. From her chapter on effectively managing anger, ‘Listen to your anger, rather than act on it,’ to my favorite quote, ‘Your child is acting like a child because he is one,’ you’ll know you’ve found your parenting bible. Thank you, Dr Laura.’

‘My entire family dynamic has positively changed, and I attribute it mostly to Dr Laura Markham and AhaParenting. com. I suspect you will not think it corny when I say you are changing the world.’

‘I’ve searched high and low for parenting guidance that is sensible, simple, effective, and adaptable. That does not heap guilt upon me. That strikes a chord so it’s easy to remember when I need it most. I have found it in Dr Laura Markham. My relationship with my four-year-old has improved a thousandfold since trying your methods. The way you teach this simple message of love has made it revolutionary for me.’

‘Following your advice has meant our son rarely has tantrums anymore. Dr Laura’s advice really works and makes being a parent (and a child, I’d say) much better. I don’t pretend I am perfect all the time, but she helps me learn and do better by my son.’

‘You have enabled me to change myself, something I never thought I could do. Your writing taught me to really reflect on who I was first, which was key to my ability to reflect on myself as a parent.’

‘Dr Laura, I tell everyone I know and even strangers about your peaceful form of parenting. Instead of creating blow‑up moments, you are creating connections, loving times, and sharing real emotions with our children. Thank you, Dr Laura Markham, for bringing so much knowledge and love to parenting.’

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Published in 2014 by Vermilion, an imprint of Ebury Publishing Ebury Publishing is a Random House Group company

Laura Markham has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

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And for parents everywhere,
Whose love is shaping the next generation,
and transforming humanity:
Our future rests on your shoulders.

One generation full of deeply loving parents would change the brain of the next generation, and with that, the world.

FOREWORD

My next-door neighbours taught me a great lesson one morning as I watched David teach his seven-year-old son, Kelly, how to push the petrol-powered lawn mower around the garden. As he was showing him how to turn the mower around at the end of the lawn, his wife, Jan, called to him to ask a question. When David turned to answer the question, Kelly pushed the lawn mower right through the flowerbed at the edge of the lawn – leaving a two-foot-wide path levelled to the ground!

As soon as David saw what had happened, he began to lose control. He had put a lot of time and effort into making those flower beds the envy of the neighbourhood. The moment his voice climbed higher in a semi-rage towards poor Kelly, Jan quickly ran over to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘David, please remember … we’re raising children, not flowers!’

I’ve devoted myself for more than 40 years to inspiring and empowering hundreds of thousands of people who want to achieve their professional and personal goals. And for most people, one of their most challenging goals is to raise a thoughtful, productive and compassionate child – and to enjoy an authentic, intimate, joyful relationship with that child right through the teenage and young adult years. And, as I’m sure you know, it is not an easy job.

Every day in my workshops I see adults struggling to heal and overcome the limiting effects of their own childhood wounds. Did these people have bad parents? No. Like most of us, their parents were good people who were limited by their own upbringings, who often forgot they were raising children, not flowers – or who simply never learned how to be good parents.

The parents I teach and coach often strain to break these cycles, to create a fresh start with their children, but the best intentions are not always enough to heal old scars. We want to be inspired and calm parents, but our speedy culture and our stressful times make it, well, just plain hard. We’re sometimes so bogged down by our own emotions and pressures that the slightest mishap by one of our kids will send us over the edge. And we can recite, as we go over that edge, the litany of what we needed to do to be better parents: be more patient, be less stressed, stop yelling, be more encouraging and supportive. Yet all of us find achieving these goals much harder than it sounds.

The parents who succeed seem to have a secret. They’re more peaceful, calmer, but they also stay more connected – to their kids and to their own inner wisdom. They aren’t just more patient – they seem more present and joyful with their children. This, of course, produces better-behaved kids – so there’s less need to work at being patient through clenched teeth. When their kid accidentally mows down the flowers, they already remember that what’s most important is how they’re raising their children, not how beautiful or impressive their flower garden is.

Calm Parents, Happy Kids is a book that lets us inside this secret of successful parenting. Dip into any one of the thorough, practical, inspirational chapters, and Dr Laura Markham shows us how to replenish our spirits so we can give our kids the best of ourselves, not what’s left of ourselves. Chapters like ‘Calm Parents Raise Happy Kids’ remind us of this profound but often neglected truth.

The parents I know don’t have much time to read. The beauty of this book is that Dr Laura includes Action Guides. Each of these nuggets of wisdom is short enough to read at one sitting, whether before bed, waiting in the car, or while you’re trying to calm yourself down before re-engaging with your kid. Step-by-step blueprints like ‘How to Keep Your Cool When Your Kid Melts Down’ and ‘Use Connection to Make Bedtime Easier’ are simple enough to absorb and implement in the heat of battle.

The battle, of course, is never actually between a parent and child. That is just the after-manifestation of a battle that is waged inside the parent. Giving our children the best of ourselves requires that we do some inner work, resolving the conflicts, which is never an easy challenge. But what better motivation to engage in that work than our love for our children? Dr Laura offers parents a repertoire of strategies to heal our own wounds and deepen the inner connection with our own true selves and thereby make it easier to create our longed-for deeper connection to our children. It really is true, as she reminds us, that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Having Dr Laura Markham on your bedside table is like having an angel on your shoulder, whispering useful secrets in your ear. These are the secrets every mother and father needs to know to become a more calm and effective parent – and as a result, a happier person.

Co-author, Chicken Soup for the Parent’s Soul and Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul

INTRODUCTION

Secrets of Calm Parents

Parenting is one of the toughest things we do. The pressures of everyday life leave many parents feeling guilty, plagued by a sense that we could do a better job if only we had a little more time, were a little less tired, or simply knew where to begin. Human beings weren’t designed to handle the amount of stress our modern life loads on us, which makes it difficult to hear our natural parenting instincts. It’s almost as if we’re forced to parent in our spare time, after meeting the demands of work, commuting and household responsibilities. Even worse, our culture erodes our relationship with our children and woos them away from us at too early an age.

But there are parents who raise wonderful children, without a lot of drama. They seem at peace with themselves as parents. Their children seem to be thriving. What are their secrets? What exactly makes their children grow into terrific teenagers and adults? What if you could find out what they do, and put it into practice with your own children?

You can. These parents have a secret. In fact, they have a whole secret life, inside their heads. They talk to their children differently. They talk to themselves differently. They’re approaching the whole experience of parenting from a new perspective. You might say they’ve had some big Aha! Moments that have shifted the way they raise their children. This shift changes the way we perceive and respond to our children on every level, but we can condense it into Three Big Ideas. Big ideas, but simple and replicable – for every parent.

THREE BIG IDEAS

1. Regulating Yourself

Most parents think that if our child would just ‘behave,’ we could maintain our composure as parents. The truth is that managing our own emotions and actions is what allows us to feel calm as parents. Ultimately we can’t control our children or the hand life deals them – but we can always control our own actions. Parenting isn’t about what our child does, but about how we respond. In fact, most of what we call parenting doesn’t take place between a parent and child but within the parent. When a storm brews, a parent’s response will either calm it or incite a full-scale tsunami. Staying calm enough to respond constructively to all that childish behaviour – and the stormy emotions behind it – requires that we grow, too. If we can use those times when our buttons are being pushed to reflect, not just react, we can notice when we lose equilibrium and steer ourselves back on track. This inner growth is the hardest work there is, but it’s what enables you to become a calmer, more peaceful parent, one day at a time.

The Aha! Moment here is that an adult’s calm presence has a more powerful influence on a child than shouting ever could. Your own emotional regulation – a fancy way of saying your ability to stay calm – allows you to treat the people in your life, including the little people, calmly, respectfully, and responsibly. That’s what produces children who are emotionally regulated, respectful and responsible. Part 1 of this book will give you the tools to manage your emotions, even on those days when your child pushes all your buttons.

2. Fostering Connection

Children thrive when they feel connected and understood. Parenting effectively depends above all on your connection to your child. Period. Otherwise we have little influence (‘My kid won’t listen!’) and parenting becomes an exhausting, thankless task. Children need to feel deeply connected to their parents or they don’t feel entirely safe, and their brains don’t work well to regulate their emotions and follow parental guidance. So focusing first on connection produces children who are not only happier, but easier. Ready for the Aha! Moment? This loving connection that makes our hearts melt is what puts the joy back into child-raising. In Part 2 of this book, you’ll see how to strengthen and sweeten your connection with your child.

3. Coaching, Not Controlling

Small humans rebel against force and control, just as big humans do. Luckily, they’re always open to our influence, as long as they respect us and feel connected to us. What raises great kids is coaching them – to handle their emotions, manage their behaviour, and develop mastery – rather than controlling for immediate compliance. Thoughtful parents know that what they do today either helps or hinders the person their child is becoming. They ‘emotion-coach’ so that their child develops the emotional intelligence essential to managing feelings and making wise choices. They use empathic limits rather than punishment – even just time-outs and consequences – to coach their child’s development of self-discipline, rather than simply forcing their child into obedience. They’re guided by core values so they don’t compromise on respectful relating or family time, but they also don’t sweat the small stuff. That makes for calmer parents and happier children. The Aha! Moment here is that the coaching approach that works best in the long-term to raise happy, responsible adults is actually more effective than traditional parenting in producing self-disciplined, cooperative kids in the medium term. Part 3 of this book will show you why – and how you can raise that child.

What’s Different About This Book

Most parenting books focus on changing the child’s behaviour. And yes, this book will help you support your child to become his or her very best self. But we’ll be approaching this from the perspective of our Three Big Ideas: Regulating Yourself; Fostering Connection; and Coaching, Not Controlling. You’ll find that each of these Three Big Ideas is a constant thread throughout this book, as well as being the focus of Parts 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Because you’ll have to manage your own triggers and emotions to effectively coach and connect with your child, you’ll find consistent reminders to Regulate Yourself so that you can return to a state of equilibrium before intervening with your child. Because Connection is at the very heart of peaceful parenting, you’ll find an emphasis throughout this book on staying fiercely connected to your child, whether you’re trying to get her out of the house in the morning or keeping him from hitting his brother.

The third, and longest, section of this book – Coaching, Not Controlling – does focus on your child. But instead of tips to control or manipulate his behaviour with punishment and bribes, you’ll find step-by-step blueprints on how to coach your child to support both his short-term and long-term development into a more confident, resilient, self-disciplined, emotionally intelligent person. We focus on your daily interactions with your child, which fall into three basic categories, each of which is explored in its own chapter. Here’s a preview of each chapter:

• Emotion coaching. Young children’s brains are still growing, like their bodies, so their rational brain centres haven’t yet learned to moderate their strong feelings. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we give our child constant messages about feelings – implying that they’re either dangerous or simply part of being human. I’ll give you hands-on tools to coach your child so that she can better manage her emotions, and thus her behaviour.

• Loving guidance. Children rely on us to guide them in this big and confusing world. Unfortunately, our own childhood experiences and cultural messages tell parents to guide with punishment, force, and control. Instead of threatening (‘One, two, three …’), or manipulating, we’ll get to the root of your child’s behaviour – the feelings underneath it. I’ll help you address those feelings and nurture your child’s emotional intelligence, so she can learn to manage her own emotions, and therefore her behaviour, which is what creates self-discipline. If you’re looking for a more positive approach to discipline that helps kids want to behave, this chapter is for you.

• Supporting mastery. Children are naturally curious, but too often we undermine their desire to learn. Building on the foundation of connection, emotion coaching and positive guidance provided in this book, the last chapter gives you tools to protect your child’s natural curiosity and support his emerging passions while encouraging the confidence and resilience he needs to succeed in life.

As we consider each of these topics, we’ll apply our Three Big Ideas to transform every interaction with your child. In each chapter, I’ll suggest specific nuts-and-bolts ways to put these ideas into real-life practice as your child moves through each developmental stage. Reading through the developmental stages will crystallise for you why the way you soothe your infant and handle your toddler’s tantrum helps develop her ability to tolerate frustration at four, get along with her sibling at six, or stand up to the mean girls at eight. In fact, while this book ends at age nine, you’ll understand how to avoid raising a child who slams out of the house when she’s 12 or experiments with drugs at 15. Each chapter finishes with how-to Action Guides – concrete game plans that help you solve the everyday challenges of raising children. I hope you’ll experiment, play and adapt them to your family.

In each chapter, you’ll also see how to use these same Three Big Ideas to help you find more peace, confidence and joy as a parent. It’s hard work. But you’ll be rewarded. As you shout less and connect more, your child will become more cooperative on a daily basis. But even more important, you’ll see him thrive, growing into a happy, confident, self-disciplined person. The good news is that this is the easier way to parent. Shouting, threatening and punishing can ruin anyone’s day. Calm parents find it much easier to be calm and patient. Why? Because this kind of parenting creates a better parent–child relationship, which produces better-behaved children – and parents who enjoy their child more. Calm parents have actually found a way to put the joy back into parenting.

You Can Be a Calmer Parent

Providing a loving, compassionate, scream-free, judgement-free household has not just been a gift to my children, but a gift I have given to myself. I have grown by leaps and bounds not just as a parent, but as a person as well. I am so grateful for Dr Laura Markham, who has been a shining light in my life.

This book has grown out of my work with thousands of parents through the Aha! Parenting website and in private coaching. I’m trained as a clinical psychologist, specialising in child development and parenting. I spend my days thinking about what helps children thrive, and I work with parents to help them raise happy, emotionally healthy, self-disciplined kids.

The more parents I meet, the more convinced I am that all parents are doing their best for their kids. But most parents haven’t been given the information they need – to help their child grow into a wonderful human being. In fact, parents hear a lot of counterproductive, even destructive advice that ends up making parenting a struggle:

‘The best way to stop a tantrum in the supermarket? Tell him you’re going home and just walk away. Believe me, he’ll follow!’

As I’ll explain, many of today’s common child-raising practices create unnecessary struggle and tension between parents and children. We’re told to control our child’s behaviour, but how? Force works only while kids are small, and when we don’t respond to the needs and emotions driving that behaviour, the problems worsen. Meanwhile, we’re unwittingly sabotaging the healthy emotional development we all want for our children. Worse yet, this can erode our empathy for our child, because instead of following our instincts – which, naturally, tell us to respond to the needs of our little one – we harden our hearts. Over and over, I hear from parents who wish they had understood the ideas in this book when their child was born. Calm Parents, Happy Kids is designed to help you create an exceptional relationship with your child – and, in the process, to raise a happy, self-disciplined, emotionally healthy human being.

The Embrace of Great Love

Whether you’re looking for scientific research to guide your parenting decisions, wondering how to handle a specific challenge, or ready to tear your hair out, you’ve come to the right place. No one is completely calm all the time, or we’d all be enlightened. Every time you choose to treat yourself and your child with more compassion, you take a step towards inner peace and more happiness.

As you make your way through this book, please remember to give yourself credit for every bit of progress in the right direction. All change comes one step at a time. Life is simply the slow accumulation of moments, and each moment gives us a new chance to change directions. Even if we change our reaction to only a few things that happen today, we’ll find ourselves heading in a new direction. Before we know it, we’re in a whole new landscape.

We all want to raise children with whom we stay close, children who adore us, children who carry on our legacy of love when we’re gone. We all want our grown children to flourish with the roots and wings we gave them, to look back on childhoods brimming with the love and laughter of parents who made them feel so good about themselves that anything seemed possible. Every day of your kids’ childhood, you’re creating that future.

There are no perfect parents and no perfect children. But there are many families who live in the embrace of great love. This book is dedicated to you creating one of those families.

PART ONE

REGULATING YOURSELF

One of the pieces you provided that seemed to have been missing before was that I needed to help myself, and give forgiveness and patience to myself, as much as I was trying to do with my daughter. And I needed to learn, really internalise, that her acting up was not a reflection on me or my parenting (at least in most cases!) but rather on how she was feeling and what her needs were at that moment.

Calm Parents Raise Happy Kids

There’s an old saying: Raising children is the toughest work there is. But why is it so difficult? When I ask an audience this question, parents usually propose two reasons. First, because the stakes are so high. And second, because there are no clear answers about how to do it right.

One answer is right and one is not so right. The stakes are certainly high. But we actually do know a great deal about how to raise a happy, responsible, considerate, emotionally healthy, self-disciplined child. There is a great deal of valuable research on this most important topic, and parents will be delighted to learn how sensible it is. Over and over, studies show that parents who respond with warm, respectful attunement to the unique needs of their individual child, setting limits supportively and coaching their child’s emotions constructively, raise terrific kids. Sensible, but hard. As every parent knows, the hard part is managing our own emotional triggers so that we can make this a reality even some of the time.

Regardless of your child’s unique challenges, if you want to parent well, you have to work on yourself too. A child doesn’t cause the anger or anxiety that hooks us into power struggles; that comes from our own fear and doubt. Our own childhood experiences, our own early traumas – major and minor – are part of who we are. What’s more, these are the parts of us that take charge whenever we’re upset; so when you’re angry or frightened, you’ll know that almost always it is an early bad experience driving your reactions. Children have a way of triggering those unhappy feelings from our own childhoods, so the only way we can be calm parents is to mindfully prevent old feelings from causing new problems.

In fact, the things we most want for our children depend on our own inner work. We all want to raise children who are happy people, loved by others and lucky in love. If we can reflect on our own early childhood relationships and learn to nurture ourselves, we can offer our child – you can offer your child – the secure connection that will provide a foundation for loving relationships for the rest of her life. We can’t control what happens to her. But we can make it likely that she’ll surround herself with people who treat her well and help her find deep meaning in her life.

We also want to raise children who can manage their behaviour, both because they will be easier to live with and because that’s our job as parents. We know how to raise those children, too. When we regulate our own emotions, our children learn to regulate their emotions. That allows them to regulate their behaviour, presuming they’re connected enough to us to want to.

Finally, we want our children to be successful. Not necessarily in the sense of earning the rewards offered by our society for achieving, but in the sense of discovering, honing and sharing their unique gifts throughout their lives. We know how to help children do that too. Much of it has to do with managing our own anxieties, which leaves our child free to discover for himself and helps build confidence and resilience.

Some children are born with more difficult temperaments, and for those children our inner work as parents is even more important. But regardless of what your child brings into the world, the way you respond to her will shape her ability to make the most of her life. Your child will delight and exasperate you, thrill and annoy you. By accident, really, your child will ask you to grow, too. If you can notice when you’re triggered and restore yourself to equilibrium before you take action, if you can soothe your own anxiety, if you can reflect on your own experience and make peace with it, you can raise happy, emotionally healthy children who are successful in every sense. You can become a calm parent, raising happy kids.

Your Number One Responsibility as a Parent

Your child is fairly certain to act like a child, which means someone who is still learning, has different priorities than you do and can’t always manage her feelings or actions. Her childish behaviour is guaranteed, at times, to push your buttons. The problem starts when we begin acting like a child too. Someone has to act like a grown-up, if we want our child to learn how! If, instead, we can stay mindful – meaning we notice our emotions and let them pass without acting on them – we model emotional regulation and our children learn from watching us.

There’s a good reason why the airlines tell us to put on our own oxygen masks first. Kids can’t reach those masks or be relied on to use them properly. If we lose function, our kids can’t save us or themselves. So even if we would sacrifice ourselves to save our kids, it’s our responsibility to put on our own masks first.

Kids can’t manage their own rage by themselves either. They can’t find their way through the tangle of jealousy that pushes them to whack their little sister. They need our help to handle the fear that we don’t love them because they somehow just aren’t quite good enough. They know that if they were good enough, they wouldn’t want to hit their sister, or sneak those sweets or throw themselves down on the floor and scream. But they can’t help themselves, however hard they try not to. (A bit like when we eat that extra piece of cake.)

So just as with the oxygen mask, it’s your job to help your child with his emotions, which is what helps him with his behaviour. Unfortunately, when you’re stressed out, exhausted and running on empty, you can’t be there constructively for your child any more than if you black out on the plane.

That’s why your first responsibility in parenting is being mindful of your own inner state. Mindfulness is the opposite of ‘losing’ your temper. Don’t get me wrong – mindfulness doesn’t mean you don’t feel anger. Being mindful means that you pay attention to what you’re feeling, but don’t act on it. Anger is part of all relationships. Acting on it mindlessly, with words or actions, is what compromises our parenting.

Emotions are useful, like flashing lights on a car dashboard. If you saw a blinking red light in your car, you wouldn’t cover it up or tear out the wiring that caused it, right? You would heed the information and act on it, for instance, by taking your car in for an oil change. The challenge with human emotions is that so often we’re confused about what to do when we feel them. We’re hardwired to respond to all ‘negative’ emotion (those blinking red lights in your psyche that light up throughout your day) in one of three ways: fight, flight or freeze.

Those strategies work well in most emergencies. But parenting – despite our fears – is not usually an emergency. Usually, in parenting and in life, the best response to upsetting emotions is to reflect, not react. In other words, don’t take action while you’re triggered.

You can count on finding yourself hijacked by fight-or-flight hormones at times, but if you can train yourself to notice when you start to lose it, you have the choice to return yourself back to a state of equilibrium. That calm place inside ensures that our actions are wise and loving.

But what happens when we just can’t get there? When something our child is doing is driving us crazy and all our efforts to calm down aren’t working?

Breaking the Cycle: Healing Your Own Wounds

In the absence of reflection, history often repeats itself … Research has clearly demonstrated that our children’s attachment to us will be influenced by what happened to us when we were young if we do not come to process and understand those experiences.

The eminent psychologist D. W. Winnicott made many wise observations about parents and children. My favourite is that children don’t need perfection from their parents. All we need to do is to avoid harming them and to offer them the ‘ordinary devotion’ that has always been required of parents.

Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds. First, there is nothing ordinary about devotion. Devotion, as parents know, is walking the floor at 2.00am holding a screaming baby with an ear infection. Devotion is forcing yourself into the kitchen to make your kid’s dinner after a long day, when all you really want is to curl up on the sofa and zone out. Devotion is taking off your jacket on a cold night to tuck it around a sleeping child in the back seat of the car. This ordinary devotion is the same intense love that has caused parents throughout human history to hurl themselves between their child and danger, from flying glass to enemy soldiers.

But even if we express our devotion in our willingness to put our children first, it is still not easy to be a ‘good enough’ parent. Even a devoted mother or father often inadvertently hurts or scars a child. This includes parents who adore their children, who would be completely heroic and self-sacrificing if the situation called for it. Why the gap between our intentions and our actions? The reason is that while we would never consciously hurt our child, so much of parenting, like every relationship, happens outside our conscious awareness.

The truth is that virtually all of us were wounded as children and if we don’t heal those wounds, they prevent us from parenting our child as we truly want to. If there’s an area where you were scarred as a child, you can count on that area causing you grief as a parent – and wounding your child in turn.

We can all think of examples: the father who unwittingly repeats his own father’s judgemental parenting with his own son. The mother who can’t set limits on her children’s behaviour because she can’t bear their anger towards her and ends up raising self-centred, anxious kids. The parents who work overly long hours at their jobs because they doubt their own ability to be interested in (translate: to love) their infants. For all of us, the task is to consciously examine our own scars – some modest, some more painful – so that we don’t inflict new ones on our children.

The wonderful news is that being parents gives us a map for where those scars are and a chance to dig deep and heal ourselves. Our children have an uncanny ability to show us our wounded places, to draw out our fears and angers. Better than the best Zen master or therapist, our children give us the perfect opportunity to grow and heal. Most parents say that loving their children has transformed them: made them more patient, more compassionate, more selfless. We’ll always experience heightened sensitivity around the issues that shaped our early psyches, but as we heal the lingering hurts, our behaviour is no longer driven by them and we find that these scars inform us, motivate us and make us better parents.

So, how can you heal your own childhood issues and become the parent you want for your children?

• Parent consciously. If we pay attention, we’ll notice when our child pushes our buttons. Not that kids don’t act like kids – they always do. That’s age appropriate. But what bothers some parents would be greeted by others with a calm, warm, humourous attitude that helps kids want to behave. Whenever we get ‘triggered’, we’ve stumbled on something that needs healing. Seriously. Any time your child pushes your buttons, he’s showing you an unresolved issue from your own childhood.

• Break the cycle. Use your inner pause button. You don’t have to repeat history with your kids. Even if you’re already well down the wrong path, stop. Take a deep breath and hit the pause button. Remind yourself of what is about to happen unless you choose another course. Close your mouth, even in mid-sentence. Don’t be embarrassed; you’re modelling good anger management. Save your embarrassment for when you have a tantrum.

• Understand how emotions work. Anger is a message that something isn’t working in our lives. The problem is that it’s also a biological state that doesn’t help us find the best solutions. When we’re in the grip of the chemical reactions that make us ‘angry’, we do and say things we would never choose to do otherwise. When your body and emotions are in fight-or-flight mode, your child always looks like the enemy. Take a breath and wait until you calm down before you make any decisions or take any actions.

• Hit the reset button on your own ‘story’. If you had a painful childhood, you can’t change that. But what you can change is what you’re taking with you from that childhood: your ‘story’. You do that by reflecting on it, feeling the painful feelings, but also considering new angles. If your father abandoned the family and you concluded that you weren’t good enough, it’s time to set the record straight and understand, from your adult vantage point, that you were more than enough and that his leaving had nothing to do with you. If your mother hit you and you concluded that you were a bad kid, a more accurate understanding would be that your mother was frightened and would have hit even the most angelic child in the world. You were just like any child: reaching out for love and attention in the only ways you knew. Coming to terms with your story and rewriting it can be a painful process, but it’s liberating. It’s also the only path to being the calm parent you want to be to your child.

• De-stress. We all have a harder time being the parent we want to be when we’re stressed out. Develop a repertoire of habits that help you de-stress: regular exercise, yoga, a hot bath, meditation. Can’t find the time? Involve the whole family. Put on some music and dance together, go for a walk, put everyone to bed with books early on Friday night for a quiet, relaxing evening and catching up on your sleep. Prioritise slowing down and you’ll find ways to do it.

• Get support in working through old issues. Every parent needs support and a chance to talk about the hard work she’s doing. Sometimes we can do that informally with friends or relatives. Sometimes a more formal ‘listening partnership’ with another parent, as advocated by Patty Wipfler of Hand in Hand Parenting, can be a lifesaver. You might want to be part of a parenting support group or community. If you feel stuck, find a counsellor to help you move forward more happily in your life. There’s no shame in asking for help; the shame would be in reneging on your responsibility as a parent by damaging your child physically or psychologically. If you think you need help, please don’t wait. Reach out now.

No parent is perfect, because humans are by definition imperfect. No matter how much we work on ourselves, we will not always impact our children positively. But every time you pay attention, hit your inner pause button and manage your stress, you’re becoming more peaceful and calm. And that gives your child a greater shot at happiness.

Winnicott was right. Our children don’t need perfection from us. What they need is a parent who embraces growth, makes amends and opens her heart when it wants to harden.

How to Manage Your Anger

This approach is so powerful and has been life-changing for me. The best part about it is that you don’t have to be perfect. You have to be real, honest and able to say you were wrong. Instead of creating blow-up moments in your day you are creating connections, loving times and sharing your real emotions with your children. These real moments teach our children how to be the best they can be, not perfect, just real.

As long as you’re human, you’ll still sometimes find yourself in fight-or-flight mode, and your child will start to look like the enemy. When you’re swept with anger, you’re physically ready to fight. Hormones and neurotransmitters are flooding your body. They cause your muscles to tense, your pulse to race, your breathing to quicken. It’s impossible to stay calm at those points, but we all know that clobbering our kids – while it may bring instant relief – isn’t really what we want to do.

So commit now to no hitting, no swearing, no calling your child names and no threats. What about screaming? Never at your children; that’s a tantrum. If you really need to scream, go into your car with the windows rolled up and scream where no one can hear; don’t use words, because those make you angrier.

Your children get angry, too, so it’s a double gift to them when you commit to constructive anger management. You not only don’t hurt them, you offer them a role model. Your children will certainly see you angry from time to time and how you handle those situations will teach them a lot. Will you teach them that might makes right? That parents have tantrums, too? Or that anger is part of being human and that learning to manage anger responsibly is part of growing up? Here’s how:

• Take five. Recognise that an angry state is not the best place from which to intervene in any situation. Instead, give yourself a time-out and come back when you’re able to be calm. If your child is old enough to be left for a moment, you can go into the bathroom, splash water on your face and do some deep breathing. Just say, as calmly as you can, ‘I am too angry right now to talk about this. I am going to take a time-out and calm down.’