Am I a Bad Parent?
/Am I a bad parent? A play therapist’s amazing discovery that most problems come from your being actually too good of a parent!
Many parents experiencing problems with their children who are wondering “Am I a bad parent,” are feeling a lot of parenting guilt and tend to blame themselves for their child’s issues: “It must be my fault my child is misbehaving because I am a bad parent… there must be something wrong or bad about me…” These thoughts and feelings are very powerful and common… But my amazing discovery after almost 10 years of specializing in play therapy and parenting counseling with families with children, is that 95% parents who seek therapy are loving, dedicated, intelligent, hard-working kind and sincere. They have only the best of intentions for the children. But ironically, paradoxically and amazingly, it is their great love and great intentions that is actually causing the problem! They want so much the best for the children, and are so dedicated, that their great love and zeal leads them to overdo things a little bit, put too much pressure on their child and have higher than necessary expectations. I call it over-do-it parenting! So you see it’s not because you’re a bad parent! It’s because you’re such a great parent! You are just missing a few skills and you need to balance things out a bit better. The great news is that with only 2-3 months of parenting counseling together with play therapy, I can almost always resolve the problem entirely! Let’s see some examples of how this works.
Am I a bad parent mistake number one: too much bossing and micromanaging:
As a parent you probably want your child to behave well… You want him or her to do the right thing, be respectful, make wise choices, get along with others and avoid mistakes. Since children because of their age are not very knowledgeable about the right way to behave, you may as a parent feel it’s necessary to guide your child along the right path, which tends to take the form of simply telling him what or what not to do. Since children tend to make volumes of mistakes and they require many years to learn, most parents seem to follow a tendency of being driven to become overly bossy and micromanaging of their children. They really have the best intentions, but overdoing the bossing even just a little bit can really backfire. The reason is because every child needs a healthy dose of that great golden goal: self-determination! A child needs a feeling that he can be to a certain extent the boss of himself, that he can control his own life, that he can chart his own course… How would you like it if I came into your office every five minutes and gave you an order? You probably wouldn’t like it very much, and children are no different. Although they can handle a reasonable amount of commands each day, if you’re overdoing it just a little bit, resentment, anger and frustration is going to build up and the child is going to begin to become defiant, resistant and have tantrums. This often causes parents to re-double their efforts, being even more bossy and micromanaging and a vicious cycle ensues, often resulting in a full-blown rebellion of defiant behavior, aggression, anger, tantrums and disrespect.
That is usually when parents find my website and call me!
Fortunately since I’ve resolved this precise issue with over 200 children, the solution is usually near at hand. The first step is to recognize that you are not a bad parent, you are a great parent with great intentions. You just need a little parenting tune-up to learn a few skills, and to stop overdoing things. What we do is work out a plan for how to reduce commands, bossiness and micromanaging between 20 and 50 percent across-the-board. We cut out the little ones, all those little requests and do’s and dont’s: Pick up this and stop shouting and wash your hands again and no standing on the chair and no jumping on the furniture and don’t talk that way, and all the little commands that we can safely overlook. We reserve our commands for important issues such as safety and danger that are truly non-negotiable. This will leave the child feeling much less bossed, resentful and frustrated and much more willing to comply readily with the fewer remaining commands that you do issue! After a few weeks, the problem will be greatly reduced. It works like a charm I’ve seen it many times.
Am I a bad parent Common Mistake number two: too much scolding, reprimanding or criticism.
Again you are probably such a loving and dedicated parent, that you simply want your child to do the right thing, and grow up to be wise, respectful and well adjusted. You just see the many mistakes that all children make and you feel the need to scold, rebuke, reprimand, and criticize. Sometimes the mistakes can be very inconvenient, messy, nerve-racking or even alarming. How are they going to learn if you don’t scold, reprimand and correct them? The problem is that scolding and criticism generates an extremely powerful shame response in a child’s emotional make up. Children wither and tremble under parental disapproval. The shame of a rebuke if experienced chronically is devastating to their self-esteem and their sense of well-being, and on top of that it doesn’t work! The shame of scolding is so upsetting that the kids usually just block it all out and forget whatever lesson you’re trying to teach them, and they end up repeating the mistakes anyway. Not to mention being shamed makes kids miserable, and lack of happiness is always the greatest fuel for more misbehavior and defiance. Often the problem is that parents do what’s called catastrophizing:
they think, “My child is making a lot of mistakes lately. If I don’t correct him, it’s going to get worse and worse and then he’s going to be truly incorrigible and he will be a huge embarrassment and a disaster! It will reflect on me and I will have failed as a parent!”
However in my experience, that great fear is almost always totally unfounded! The truth is, most mistakes that children’s make are totally within the range of normalcy and can be completely overlooked and forgiven. We must understand that children must make volumes and volumes of mistakes in order to learn, it’s a healthy part of growing up. Most of the time the child learns from his own mistakes without you having to point it out or scold him. He himself can see that what he did is not ideal, and over time most of these mistakes will correct themselves on their own. In addition, when your child sees that you forgive him for his mistakes and don’t overreact, get angry, scold or criticize, it makes the child feel so loved and accepted and that increased happiness leads to much improved behavior. He or she learns to see himself in the same wonderful way that you do! Not to mention a loving and warm parent child relationship will ensue, which of course has endless emotional benefits…So therefore the solution is to resist the temptation to criticize and scold as almost always it does more harm than good. Bite your tongue and accept your child’s mischievous escapades with a smile enjoy it, it won’t last forever. 10 years from now you are going to wish she was a little kid again! Simply tolerate the mischief with patience and in a few minutes it will all fizzle out and you will be left with your angelic child just as he was before, but in a much healthier emotional state.
Am I a bad parent mistake number three: expressing the idea that things are not OK with your child or family, that things need to be improved and fixed and that there are things to worry about!
Adults can handle constructive criticism. We make New Year’s resolutions, we have a list of areas in which we need to improve and plans for character traits we need to work on. Such habits are particularly necessarily in running a business and making a living. You have to have running constructive criticism in order to discover mistakes so you can fix them improve and be successful. Now since you’re probably such a loving, great and dedicated parent, you feel that such a practice will be helpful and constructive for your children. You have the best intentions, but unfortunately it is a mistake.
Children are in the early stages of development and that whole attitude of constructive criticism is unhealthy for them.
In order to create a firm emotional foundation of self-esteem and self-confidence, children need to think “I am doing just fine the way I am. Everything about me is OK just the way it is. There’s nothing I need to improve, nothing I need to work on, and nothing at all I need to worry about. Everything in my life and my family and my performance is safe, happy and rosy. My parents really approve of me always and think that I am doing just great the way I am. The only important thing for me is to work on just being happy.” A steady feeling of happiness is the most important, under-appreciated and overlooked element that children absolutely must have all day, every day in order to grow up to be healthy.
They need to feel that this world is a safe, fun, rosy place and that everything about them and their family is fine and dandy.
But if we don’t give them that, and we adopt an attitude of constructive criticism, the child will be very anxious, worried, upset and ashamed and a dark cloud of gloom will plague him always. He will learn to be very self-critical and perfectionistic and will grow up with poor self-esteem. In addition he will likely be provoked to be defiant, uncooperative and impulsive, and may exhibit a whole host of other behavioral and emotional disorders. Therefore you must always pave the road to achievement and improvement with patient acceptance and celebration of simply where he is right now.
Am I a bad parent mistake number four: Academic Pressure
Loving well-intentioned parents of course all want their children to be intelligent, educated knowledgeable, sophisticated and successful in career, business and life. Therefore very often in your zeal to accomplish that, you may tend to push your children a little too hard academically and put a little too much pressure on them. However unfortunately, ironically, paradoxically and amazingly, any academic pressure whatsoever completely derails, frustrates and prevents the very academic success that it purports to promote! Let me give you an example, very often parents call me up and complain “My child won’t read! No matter how hard I try and get him to learn how to read or to spend time reading and to grow in reading comprehension, he simply refuses. All he wants to do is use screens. I want so desperately for my child to avail himself of the knowledge gained from the written word. I’m so terrified that my child is going to be unsuccessful academically, but no matter how much I try, it doesn’t work!
So the answer as I have seen many times over is, to totally cut out all the pressure to read.
Being pressured or forced to do something is extremely unpleasant, and the experience of those feelings creates what is called a negative association to the reading process itself. The child associates books with that horrible feeling of being pressured and is conditioned to think, “I never want to read, ever!” Instead, the way you get a child to read is by starting at the youngest age buying hundreds and hundreds of beautiful picture books, leaving them out in your living room and offering to read the books to him at frequent intervals. Most, if not all children absolutely love when their parents read them stories. They feel so serenaded, doted upon and loved when we read to them. The trick is never, never ask them to read on their own. It makes the whole experience unpleasant and places too much unfair pressure on the child. You just be firmly determined in your mind to read endless books to your child for years without any expectations. He or she will be looking at the pictures of your shoulder and will begin to read the words on his own. If he asks you to read the same book 100 times as almost all children do, patiently fulfill his wishes. In this way, he will think, “I love reading! I want to read by myself!” After a few years he will have his favorite books practically memorized and then usually at the round the age of five or six years he will start picking up all of these familiar books completely on his own and start reading by himself. It will be like a dam bursting he will read and read and read for hours every day for the rest of his life.
The reason for this is because all the reading you did for him was intensely pleasurable in terms of love and attention, and that pleasure created a very powerful positive association to the reading process.
When you serenade a child through storytelling the child thinks, “I love so much reading books with mommy. It feels so good to spend time with mommy reading stories. I love hearing all these wonderful stories. I love books. I love the idea of how a simple pack of papers comes alive into an amazing world of fantasy, excitement and adventure. It makes me so happy to have my parents read to me that it makes me want to spend the rest of my life getting similar pleasures out of books. I can’t wait until I know how to read books all by myself. I can’t wait to show my parents how I can read!” Not only have I seen this technique work with many children in my practice, but it worked like a charm with all four of my boys. They were all reading on a college level voraciously by the age of eight. In addition you must set an example for your children which means you have to be a big reader as well. Turn off the TV, fill your house with endless bookshelves and spent hours upon hours reading and reading, and your children will follow your example. As I sit in my living room right now I see no less than nine packed floor to ceiling bookcases.
As children get older and schoolwork increases pressure, threats, punishments and even rewards do much more harm than good.
Also extra homework extra tutoring etc. is also unhelpful. The reason is because all of this makes learning unpleasant and the child will think, “I hate learning and school work. I don’t ever want to do it again. I never want to open a book.” His whole education will be a big battle. Instead the secret is to make a learning and study pleasant, fun, enjoyable and pressure-free, even if it means sacrificing grades and objective performance in the short run, and then the child will think, “I love learning, I love science and history and math and reading.” You must allow the child to follow his bliss and find his own enjoyment in academics.
Am I a bad parent mistake number 5: Making your child’s success too personal and a complete verdict on your own self-image!
Doing so makes you so worried over your child’s performance outcome that you can’t think straight and manage things properly. In addition, it is not appropriate morally because in that way your motivation is mostly to benefit yourself and your own self image, and that is an unfair distortion which can have disastrous consequences. The healthy attitude is to focus on giving and fulfilling the child’s needs exclusively. A trick to achieve this is to treat the child like he’s your nephew or niece! Of course you have his best interest in mind and you want to help him grow up to be healthy, but you’re not so worried about the outcome of your nephew because it doesn’t reflect so much on you. Therefore you can think more clearly, be more impartial and focus on doing a good job without overcompensating because of emotional fears, does that make sense?
The great news is that since you are such a loving, wonderful parent and there’s nothing you won’t do for your child, once you are armed with all this great new knowledge, skills and techniques, it is very easy to use your passion and drive to help your children by getting good advice and implementing it properly. I’m sure you have wonderful results!
There’s one more amazing point You need to know!
The true level and value of your parenting skills is not judged based on how much knowledge and abilities you have at the current moment. Instead the key indicator is your willingness to learn new skills and improve your parenting abilities. In other words, it’s not important how much you know right now, it’s important how much you are willing to know, how much you are willing to learn. it’s not important the level you’re on right now, it’s important which direction you’re going in. Are you constantly seeking to learn new parenting skills, are you constantly seeking to grow? Are you open-minded and willing to take tips, pointers and strategies? That is a good parent. But if you’re a very skilled parent but you think you know everything already and you’re not willing to hear new ideas, to grow and improve, then you are on the wrong path. Yet a relatively uninformed parent who is willing to accept new ideas and to grow and to learn is already truly a great parent.
So you can be encouraged that even if you made many mistakes up until now, and you feel you’re lacking in parenting skills, as long as you are psyched and determined to learn and improve, you’re in a great spot!
Feel free to peruse my informative blog, my videos or the specialties on my website. If you’re determined to be a better parent, and feel I might be the right therapist to help you, you may send me an email, or call my directly for a complementary 15-minute consultation at 646-681-1707. I look forward to speaking with you!
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