Change Your Parenting? Change Yourself

There are a lot of sources for parenting advice. It has been a booming book industry for the past few decades and now, with the popularity of lifestyle advice on social media, parents have no shortage of resources for finding tips and scripts for how to interact with their children.

For me, however, the most important factors that help evolve my parenting, have very little to do with the ways that I interact with my children, and have EVERYTHING to do with the ways that I treat myself. Consulting resources that help me relearn how to think about my life, about life in general, and understand my feelings has led to a slow change in my behaviors. This change is true throughout my life, including my parenting.

I have always been a pretty informed parent. My first son was born years after I completed a degree program in Child Development and I had already been working with children for a decade. My knowledge and my general approach to interacting with children hasn’t changed much in that time. However, I have changed and grown a lot, particularly in the past couple of years, and that alters the WAY that I enact my knowledge through my behaviors. As a simple example: I’ve always known HOW to move a toddler through a transition, but now I’m more likely to be able to do it without losing my patience (and ending up with a racing heart, clenched teeth, and sweaty pits) than when my first was young.

And this may sound like an over-simplification, but as I spend more time on myself, my kids get easier to manage. And don’t kid yourself; while you may have your kids’ long-term success in mind, parenting advice is almost always about making your life a little bit easier right now. There is no sustaining way to adopt new parenting practices that will make your situation easier without also adopting new perspectives (and maybe practices) that will make it easier to BE YOU.

Here are some of the things that I’ve changed my perspective on, that, consequently, have changed the way that I interact with my kids:

Recovery: A couple of years ago, when I was raising a kindergartener and two infants during the height of the pandemic, I saw a meme on social media that presented this nugget from a neuroscience standpoint: You’re not just resting, you’re recovering. And something in me clicked! Of course! My nervous system was working overtime trying to meet all of the very time-sensitive demands of my children and my job. Focusing my quiet moments on allowing my nervous system to “recover,” helped me stave off the sense that I was being lazy or shouldn’t need to rest. It was easy to say that my very concrete and real nervous system needed to recover to get back to normal functioning. I could be more engaged with my children when my nervous system was relaxed and stable.

Rest: Tricia Hersey’s work with The Nap Ministry (and her subsequent book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto) changed the entire way that I think about the value of resting. Through her teachings, I was able to recognize how capitalism benefits from my exhaustion. That changed the whole narrative for me. I no longer had to force productivity for the sake of being “good” or doing “well.” Always one to be ready to fight the machine, I was able to slowly make changes to my lifestyle to allow for rest. In my last few months at my previous job, I was repeating to other people “Urgency is a tool of white supremacy” at least once a day, in order to slow down the pace of expectation for ourselves and others. We can work at a functional speed and still accomplish things. We don’t always have to be sprinting. That simple shift allowed me time to stop and breathe throughout my day, thereby helping me maintain a more stabilized nervous system. When I shut my computer at the end of the day, it was much easier to shift my full attention to my children and be truly present with them, instead of in a divided mental state that left me unable to access my intentionality or avoid frustration.

Resetting: This is the most recent concept that I have learned, but oh how I wish I’d learned it first. My life would have been much easier if I had read KC Davis’s book How To Keep House While Drowning years ago. Her work has so much wisdom in it, including renaming chores as “care tasks,” and declaring that care tasks are morally neutral and not doing them doesn’t make you bad. She also introduced me to the reframing of cleaning as a “reset.” I’m not cleaning the kitchen before bed because I want to be a good girl and a good wife and a good mom. I’m resetting the kitchen before bed so that the kitchen will be functional for me tomorrow. Simple as that. With that alteration in my thinking, I can do as much as I have the energy for at the end of the day and feel prepared to start the day the following morning. The great irony is that, since adopting this new way of thinking, I have actually become more efficient at completing the full reset most days.

Rejuvenation: This is more of a long-term commitment. After dealing with burn-out and compassion fatigue, the only way that I could achieve rejuvenation was to undergo a complete life change. I dramatically scaled back my focus on my professional life (ultimately jumping into a new career) so that I could focus on myself and my family. This left me with more mental space to really benefit from the guidance of my therapist of nearly two years, to heal the wounded parts of my inner child (sounds woo-woo, I know), to support my spouse through his own mental health rejuvenation, to catch up on major life projects that had been back-burnered so long that they had congealed, and to be emotionally present with my children. I have been rejuvenated and I can see how much more is possible. The path ahead of me feels suddenly more clear.

And in changing my outlook and my approach to recovery, rest, resetting, and rejuvenation, I have become a pretty different person. I feel things differently: I’m not numbed out anymore. I can calm myself from upset much more quickly, and often, I can avoid it altogether. I’m a kinder spouse. I’m more comfortable making new friends. I can handle conflict and take new risks. I’m not tired all the time. Sure, I become tired every day, but it is not that pervasive, chronic exhaustion that had become so normalized. And ultimately, it allows me to consistently show up as the parent that I want to be WITHOUT taking a major toll on my own wellbeing. Two years ago, I was operating at a constant deficit. Now, I’m making withdrawals and deposits on my energy bank at a steady, regulated pace. There is no quick fix to changing your kids, without first thinking about how you’re changing your parenting, and there’s no quick fix to changing your parenting, without first thinking about how you’re changing yourself.