Dear Parent/Grandparent/Teacher/Therapist/Mentor...

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"Do the work."

 

Working with kids and teens is not easy. Spend any time around a child and you will quickly come to notice that raising children is not for the faint of heart. You will find yourself feeling emotions you never expected to feel, and doing and saying things that you never thought you would do and say. Some individuals are more equipped than others to deal with tension, chaos or difficult emotions. For others, raising a child is harder than the average caregiver, 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.

 

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, lead us to run the opposite way or shut us down completely. 

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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. 

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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? 

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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. It is okay to acknowledge what we don't know or that we just don't know altogether. No parent is perfect. No one has it all together. It is okay to acknowledge our shortcomings, our missteps and those moments we royally messed up. However, let yourself learn. Let your child teach you...about themselves, about how they see and experience the world, and even how they experience you. In the long run you will find your relationship with your child can be, and most likely will be, stronger for it.

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Sincerely,

Find The Honest Place