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Parenting Strategy 1:
Have a Plan and Know Yourself
BY ARLENE F. HARDER, MA, MFT
"Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children and no theories."
—John Wilmot
"When we become a parent, we bring with us issues from our own past that influence the way we parent our children. Experiences that are not fully processed may create unresolved and leftover issues that influence how we react to our children. These issues can easily get triggered in the parent-child relationship. . . . At these times, we're not acting like the parent we want to be and are often left wondering why this role of parenting sometimes seems to 'bring out the worst in us.' "
— Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell, Parenting From the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive
When you bring your baby home from the hospital, it's understandable that your main focus is how you’ll get through the next few months with little sleep. From then on, it can seem that all you're doing is responding to the challenges of your child’s changing needs. To solve the immediate parenting issue of the day—from teething and toilet training to homework and peer pressure—you read child-rearing books, attend parenting classes, and get advice from grandparents and friends.
In the rush and stress of your life it is difficult to step back, take a broad view of where your parenting is heading, and consider what it is that you want for your child when he or she becomes an adult. Yet many parents find that parenting is much easier if they have first laid down a blueprint against which they can evaluate both the way in which they interact with their children and the behaviors they support or discourage.
In fact, life is easier for anyone if they have some idea of the kind of person they want to be. As the old saying goes, if you don't have a good sense of where you're heading, you just may end up some place you don't want to be.
Time to come up with a strategy
Okay, here you are, somewhere in the process of playing The Parenting Game, and you and your child (as well as your child's teachers and friends) are all either very happy with how things are going, a little concerned about some minor problem, or caught in continual battles of one kind or another.
What to do? If you were a coach, which in many ways you are, you would have a game plan against which you could evaluate whether you were even headed for the right goal post. And believe me, knowing what direction you're heading can make all the difference in the world.
So it doesn't matter where you are in the game (though certainly the earlier the better), now is the time to develop an over-all strategy for how you'll play this challenging, frustrating, often-changing, and often-rewarding game.
Creating three game plans
It has been my observation that the best way to come up with permanent rules for bedtime is not when you're putting the kids to bed, but after you've struggled with them and they're finally asleep, or at least quiet. Then take the time to sit down and make some plans for what will work in the long run.
I realize that with today's time pressures it can seem as though there's never enough time to sit down and do any planning, but a coach who only reacts to the current play on the field and doesn't make plans when the team isn't playing, will have a hard time of controlling, let alone winning, a game.
Okay, if I've convinced you to take the time, now let's look at what kind of plans you need to make. There are actually three kinds, each one has a decreasing order of complexity. After you've done the first one, you'll find the next plan to be easier—and you'll discover that the final plan, which includes daily discipline issues, including rules about bedtime, will be much, much easier, though admittedly not necessarily a piece of cake.
 Long-range goals
Parents can get so caught up in the daily routines that they forget that the specific current challenge is played out in the foreground of a much larger arena. That arena is the kind of person you want your child to be when he or she is an adult. If you want your child to be just like you, and if you are resourceful, resilient, compassionate, kind, skilled, thoughtful, loving, etc., the chances are good that not only will your daily coaching be successful, but it will lead in the end to producing the results you want to see in your adult children. (See How to Shape Your Child's Brain and Change the World and Parenting Strategy 8: Live Your Values, Express Your Highest Qualities .)
On the other hand, if you're like most parents, you may never have thought much about the values and ideals you want to express, let alone help your child develop. So how do you go about discovering what these traits, values, qualities, etc. would be like?
One way is to look around you and notice the characteristics of competent and self-confident people you know. The people I admire have many positive traits, a few of which are that they:
 Respect and accept themselves as wonderfully unique people who recognize their value as human beings equal to, but not greater than, others
Have an open mind and are tolerant of views that differ from theirs and recognize the good in others
Are compassionate and generous to those less fortunate than they
Handle commitments with minimum stress and in a timely fashion
Search for truth and practice their beliefs every day
Are honest in their dealings with others and have a high degree of integrity in everything they say and do
Are concerned about the environment and strive to make a difference in the world for future generations
Intermediate goals
Once you've set down (preferably in writing) what you want for your child in the long run, you're ready to focus on the current developmental stage in which you are playing The Parenting Game. To guide your planning, This is when you can use as a blueprint the affirmations appropriate for your child's age. You can access these in the links for stages on the left of this page.
To get an overview of how words of encouragement are important for developing the skills your child needs if she or he is to become a resourceful, resilient, and compassionate adult, take a few minutes and view Words of Encouragement, a Flash presentation of affirmations we all need.
Short-term goals
Now you come to what is the easiest part, relatively speaking, of The Parenting Game. That is, this is easy if you've first developed long-range and intermediate goals. These immediate goals concern the rules about bedtime, discipline, clothes, jobs, homework, and all the small interactions, and differences of opinion, that occur between parent and child.
Understanding Yourself
Once you understand the overall way in which you want to parent and the needs of your child at a specific stage of development, I believe that if you apply the parenting strategies I suggest, you will do just fine.
But also remember that players learn from watching others play, from studying how the best players use their skills to win. And children learn from watching their parents, which is why I include in this first strategy the important recommendation that you understand yourself as well as you can.
You see, I have long noticed, in both myself and my clients, that when we are able to tune into ourselves, we can better tune into our children. And while understanding oneself in order to understand the other person is an important ingredient of any good relationship, it's essential for parents.
Further, when we are comfortable with our strengths and frailties, we can better help our children develop a realistic evaluation of their strengths and guide them in overcoming their weaknesses. When we know how to manage our emotions, we will better know how to help our children manage theirs. When we demonstrate love and respect for our partner, we model for our children how good relationships work. When we forgive our parents, we make it easier for our children to forgive us. When we communicate clearly, we are teaching those vital relationship skills to our children.
In other words, the more we are able to be the best we can be, the more we can help our children be the best they can be. But let's face it. We don't always do our best for our children. We are impatient and speak to them in a tone our parents used that we swore we'd never use on our own children. We don't know how to get them to listen to us, and probably don't do a good job listening to them. In other words, we often aren't the kind of parents we want to be. Why aren't we? I think there are four primary reasons:
1. Everyone has an ego, a temperament and a personality style
2. Everyone grew up in a family and no family is perfect
3. Some people have family secrets
4. Some people have unresolved trauma and loss
Everyone Has an Ego, a Temperament and a Personality Style
Let's begin with the ego. We all have one, but some of us are able to keep it under more control than others. However, whether or not our ego helps or hinders our relationship with our child has a great deal to do with the degree to which we understand it. An ego built up by parents who convinced you you couldn't do anything wrong can create problems when your child points out flaws you are unwilling to acknowledge.
Another difficulty with parenting can stem from your temperament, your natural tendency to respond to the world in a particular way, and your personality style. You may approach life eagerly and not have trouble encouraging your child's inquisitiveness, or you may be highly cautious about new experiences and find it difficult to have your child move into the world with confidence. You may be an introvert and find an extroverted child on your hands that you don't know what to do with, or vice versa. And certainly being a pessimist or an optimist impacts the way you react to your child.
In my own case, I was born with a "fast-responder" temperament. When something would happen, I would immediately size up the situation and know what I thought about it. When I would ask my husband, who has a more easy-going temperament, what he thought about what a child had done, or about almost anything else, he found it easy to say that he didn't know. He hadn't made up his mind. Hadn't made up his mind? Well, I had! That doesn't mean I couldn't back down if the situation changed, but my natural tendency to respond quickly often caused me to react rather than reflect more thoroughly, as the situation might have required, and as I have, fortunately, eventually learned how to do.
In much the same way that we are born with temperaments, out of our experiences we tend to develop a personality style. My choice was toward having an obsessive-compulsive personality, with its perfectionist component, which fit in well with my temperament, but needing to be in control too often caused me to be out of tune with my children's needs.
Everyone Grew Up in a Family That Wasn't Perfect
Family systems therapists use the term “multi-generational transmission process.” when referring to the way in which we pass on traits to our children. In other words, when we leave our nuclear family and move out into the world, we take with us the customs, rituals, beliefs, attitudes, and discipline techniques our parents passed on to us. Our parents got these from their parents. Our grandparents got them from them our great-grandparents. And you will pass on to your children what you know about life, love and everything else.
Do you always leave a large tip because to do otherwise would feel "wrong?" Perhaps the motivation for your generosity today began when an ancestor struck it rich and, because of his basic good nature and a genuine concern for others, decided to share his wealth. Philanthropy became a family tradition and teaching your children compassion for the less fortunate is a high priority for you.
It may be that your great-grandmother was nicknamed "Rock of Gibraltar" because she was the one who kept the family together after a fire destroyed the family business. As a result, for four generations your family has counted on the women to save them in times of crisis. Today, as you become aware of how the men in your family tend to always defer to the women, you may want to reconsider this family dynamic.
Not everything you do can be blamed on a weak grandfather, of course. The farther back in history you go, the less ancestors will exert much influence on the current generation. Nevertheless, it was in your family of origin where you developed a sense of who you are, it is where you learned to trust, or distrust, the world, and where you gained skills and developed defenses in dealing with the world. As in all families, there were both positives and negatives and these factors may help, or they may hinder, your effectiveness as a parent.
Fortunately, you are not destined to repeat the patterns of your parents and grandparents. You can create a new way of being in the world, a new way of parenting so that you can raise children who are resourceful, resilient and compassionate and who are able to pass on positive traits to their own children.
If you want to stop the process of transmitting negative family dynamics to your children, the first step is to explore the rules and rituals in your family of origin, as well as the primary stories and myths under which you operated. (See How Family Rules Profoundly Affect Our Lives, How Family Rituals and Customs Reinforce Family Rules, and What is Your Family Myth?.)
One of the best ways to take the most helpful customs, traits and strengths from your family and leave the rest is to use the articles in Stage 7, The Rest of Life.
Some Families Have Secrets
While some family traits are observable for everyone to see, other undercurrents in the family arise from the keeping of secrets. For example, as I write in What is Your Family's Myth?, the purpose of the secret of my grandmother's suicide was to shore up my father's position in the family. It did that, but it also skewed my approach to parenting and limited my ability to truly understand him until long after I left home.
The way in which family secrets reverberate through the generations is well described in the article "Ghosts in the Therapy Room" by Evan Imber-Black in Networker Magazine, May/June 1993:
"Touch a family deeply and you will find a secret — kept from the welfare department, the therapist, the boss, the neighbors, the children, the husband, or even from the secret-bearer him- or herself. There are secrets the whole family keeps from the outside world out of blurred feelings of self-protection and fear of stigmatization: that a daughter was born seven months after the wedding; that a supposedly English grandfather was a light-skinned Creole from the West Indies. There are secrets kept from children out of an illusory hope that they can be protected from pain: that a son is adopted or that a father was imprisoned for drug-dealing. There are secrets everyone knows, like alcoholism, that keep a family from reaching beyond its rigidly defended borders for help. There are secrets like AIDS or sexual orientation kept out of fear of losing a job, an apartment, a friendship. There are secrets the powerless keep from the powerful, and others, like incest and wife-beating, that the powerful use to keep the powerless isolated.
". . . Secrets can grow like weeds through the generations, sending unexpected tendrils into every corner of a family's life. They require at least avoidance, at worst outright lies that can become a habit, branching into seemingly innocuous areas until whole dimensions of life are off-limits to spontaneous talk. Secrets shape not only relationships, but inner lives. 'If you knew, you would not accept me,' think the secret-keepers, while those kept in the dark grow worried and confused: 'Something's wrong, I'm not supposed to notice, and it must be my fault.
. . . Too many family secrets revolve around around violence and abuse, whether incest, spouse battering or child abuse. The burden of silence is worst for children, whose loyalty to a parent often overrides even their own safety. Exposing the secret can mean dismantling the family, but sometimes it can mean saving the family from self-destruction.'"
If you discover, in the process of exploring your family of origin, an old secret you didn't know about, or if you are ready to acknowledge a secret you've been keeping that has prevented you from being the parent you want to be, I highly recommend you carefully choose a professional or friend with whom you can begin to explore the impact the secret has on you and your family.
As Imber-Black, the author of the article noted above, wrote, " If cultural norms once made shameful secrets out of too many things, many clients now struggle with an equally rigid assumption, fostered in part by the mass media, that opening secrets—no matter how, when or to whom—is morally superior and automatically healing. . . . In most cases the secret should eventually come out, but there's a tendency to have it happen too quickly and assume that confronting and disclosing alone will do the trick."
You don't do yourself or your children any favors when you try to keep secrets, for "secrets can be handed down through the generations like booby-trapped heirlooms." But it is equally important to be respectful of secrets and realize that it takes work to slowly peel away the layers that have been erected to protect the secret. It is worth it, but it's not a fast and simple process.
Some People Experience Trauma and Loss
Often we aren't the kind of parent we want to be not because our family didn't encourage us enough, or because it hid a terrible secret, but because we once experienced a trauma that was not dealt with at the time. Perhaps there was the death of a parent or favorite grandparent or a bitter divorce. Unless we were able to make sense of such events at the time they happened, they are likely to reverberate when we least expect it. (See How You Can Shape Your Child's Brain and Change the World.)
Dan Siegel, brain researcher and author of Parenting From the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive and The Developing Mind, describes it this way
"During the trauma, an adaptation to survive can include the focusing of attention away from the horrifying aspects of an experience. Also, it may be that excessive stress and hormonal secretion during a trauma directly impair the functioning of parts of the brain necessary for autobiographical memories to be stored. After the trauma, recollection of those details encoded in only nonverbal form will likely evoke distressful emotions that can be deeply disturbing."
Imagine a little boy was trapped for several hours in a car in which his parents were killed. Unless he was given appropriate emotional support at the time, or has since been able to process his terror with professional help, the chances are great that, in the future, he is highly likely to unconsciously misinterpret a situation as being intolerably constricting, either physically or emotionally, even when there are many choices for getting out of difficult situations, or for escaping from danger. As a parent, he may be extra-ordinarily protective of his children and overreact to the slightest possible risk, or even when they simply ask for a little assistance. On the other hand, in those times when they really are in a dangerous situation, he may revert to a frozen state of panic, unable to respond and protect them from real harm.
What happens to the children because of this unfinished business of the father? It is likely the children also will have a distorted view of what constitutes danger and won't be able to respond appropriately to situations in which they feel trapped. "Borrowing" the feelings of helplessness their father couldn't tolerate, they will have fewer options for dealing with stressful situations.
Being Here Now, in This Moment, Can Be the First Step Toward Understanding Yourself
An excellent approach to the role you play in problems you have with your child, and even in problems you may have with someone else, is to turn off the automatic pilot that usually runs your life and pay attention to what is happening right here, right now. Not only is this method more immediately available than waiting for a weekly session with your therapist or a phone call to a friend, but it doesn't cost anything.
When you do this, you disconnect, at least temporarily, some of the neurons that have been stuck in old patterns of thought and old ways of being. You can then better open your eyes to what is really going on between you and your child, or between you and your partner. And the best and quickest way I know to stay in the here and now (and not in our past regrets and future worries, where we usually live) is to pay attention to your breath, not to the idea of breathing, but to the breath itself.
When you slow down to consciously take a few deep breaths, you may become aware of a profound reality that is increasingly overlooked in our hectic pace of attempting to cram more and more activities into lives limited by an allotment of only twenty-four hours per day. That reality is that if you constantly live outside this moment, rushing from one activity to the next, it's hard to know who the real person is that is hidden behind all your frantic activities.
If you choose to use deep breaths as a method of self-awareness, the next time you do it, notice that no matter how completely you fill your lungs, you cannot take a breath now and use it five minutes from now. Similarly, acknowledge to yourself that you could not have taken a breath five minutes ago for this moment's use. Each breath can only be used for one moment in time. The only time you have is now. You don't have the future until it arrives, and then it is now.
Therefore, by paying attention to this moment, right here, right now, you are getting a glimpse of who you are—not who you were or who you will be in the future.
And what if you discover you don't like who you are? What if you don't like discovering that your ego and lazy habits get in the way of being both the parent and partner you want to be?
Well, that's a good thing. Why? Even if you want to immediately become a better, more confident parent, with all the answers for how you can play The Parenting Game effectively, knowing who you today in this moment are gives you a starting point from which to set off in a new direction. Imagine trying to navigate through a city by pretending you're on a different street than the one you're on. You may want to be someplace else. You may be heading there. You may firmly believe that you'll like it better when you get there and someday may even reach your goal. Nevertheless, right now, you are where you are and who you are. Even if you're lost, acknowledging that fact can stop you from going around in circles.
So if you'd like to be in better control of how you respond to your children's needs and demands, especially when you're having a difficult problem with your child, I strongly recommend simply taking a few deep breaths and being aware of where you are, what you are feeling, and whether or not you want to continue reacting as you have in the past.
The journey of self-exploration does require effort and it does take time, but it only proceeds one step at a time and that is something anyone can do—right here, right now.
© Copyright 2005, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT
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