Find the Honest place
"Everything comes from an honest place"
honest 1 of 2 Adjective
hon·â€‹est ˈä-nÉ™st
1 a: free from fraud or deception: LEGITIMATE, TRUTHFUL
-an honest plea
-an honest presentation of facts
Underneath everything your child does and says there is a reason. Your child is learning how to identify what they feel, want and need and how to meet that need.
Despite how it feels at times, your child is good and doing their best with what they have and with what they know. Given the right information and enough experience with that information, your child will make appropriate choices.
Oftentimes children struggle to properly identify how they feel, to understand why they feel what they feel and to know what to do with the incoming sensory information. As a result, children attempt to meet their needs in the only ways they know how. Naturally, those ways are not always appropriate.
​
As parents, one of our (many) primary jobs is to help our children learn how to effectively and appropriately meet their needs in a way that respects others and themselves. That first requires helping our children
​
...Find the Honest place .
An Open Letter
Dear Parent/Grandparent/Teacher/Therapist/Mentor...
​
"Do the work."
Working with kids and teens is not easy. Spend any time around a child and you will quickly come to see that raising children is not for the faint of heart. Parenting is hard. You will find yourself doing and saying things that you never thought you would do and say. For some parents, parenting is even harder than the average parent, depending on one's background, attachment history and personal experiences that shape how we relate to one another and how we handle conflict and distress.
Some individuals are more equipped to deal with tension, chaos or difficult emotions. For some of us...not so much. Depending on family dynamics and personal experience, some of us lack the internal resources and skills to handle: temper tantrums, shutdowns, panic attacks just thinking about going to school, lying when you know full well your child did it, second hand embarrassment when your child with autism commits a social faux pas, or when your child curses for the first time or says, "I hate you and you are the worst parent ever!" Of course there are a multitude of transgressions our children make that each parent can recite off that make our blood boil or shut us down.
​
Just like any other relationship, we come to our relationships with our children with our own "stuff." This includes our own perspectives, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, ways of dealing with hard things, internal skills and resources, as well as the lack thereof. Finding the honest place for our children requires us to do the hard work of working through our own stuff.
​
What makes you anxious or scared? What makes you angry? Where in your life have you felt hurt? Abandoned? Betrayed? How do you handle conflict? Can you ever be wrong and admit it? Do you seek relational repair, or do you instead need others to seek you out to repair?
​
Our kids will inevitably draw out from within us all of the emotions...good, bad and ugly. How we respond will be dependent on how we have done the hard work of processing and making sense of our past experiences of close relationships that shape who we have become and who we hope to be.
​
Sincerely,
Another Parent
