I Swore I’d Never Say That

Why do we find parenting so challenging? In our devotion to our children, we may set high standards for the level of care we give them—standards that are incredibly difficult to meet. We may think we are supposed to know how to parent, often telling ourselves things like, “My mother didn’t need a parenting class to raise me. I’m a smart person, why do I feel so clueless?” But the daily challenges of parenting are enormous, and we’re often not supported well enough to handle those challenges with the patience and caring we desire. We need support. We need energy. We need time to talk, play, enjoy one another, solve problems in our families, share meals together, be neighbors and friends and learn new things. We need time to care well for ourselves and for our loved ones. 

The times when children need our reassuring support and attention are often the most difficult for us. We may feel uncomfortable, edgy or even helpless when children cry. We may find their sudden outpourings of emotion overwhelming or embarrassing. We may think because we are raising children in a “tough” world that we need to train them not to show such vulnerability or abandon. We have strong limits on our tolerance for children’s feelings because we may have been threatened, ignored, shamed or punished when we tried to express the hurt we felt as children ourselves. Because those feelings were never heard, our children’s emotions trigger the heat from that backlog of hurt we’ve had to store and manage all these years.

How can parents learn to handle the stresses of parenting? Parents benefit greatly from having someone to listen to them as they talk about and release the emotional tension that builds up in their lives. Obtaining this attention for themselves allows them to provide emotional support to their children. Most of us were taught to keep feelings at arm’s length, or to keep them to ourselves. But feelings are a big and essential part of being human, and expressing these feelings is how people recover from the hard things, big and small, that happen to them. Both children and parents need relationships that are safe enough to offer room for the unguarded expression of the feelings that are stored after frightening or challenging moments.