When you don’t stay calm when your kiddos start fighting, making messes, or having melt-downs it’s not your fault. ❤️❤️❤️
👉 You are fighting against what our society believes about parenting.
Society tends to believe our kid’s SHOULDN’T HAVE EMOTIONAL MELT-DOWNS OR OFF-TRACK BEHAVIOR.
So when our child has a melt-down, talks back, or ignores us (something that is most likely 100% developmentally 🧠appropriate for their age) our nervous system thinks we have a HUGE PROBLEM and kicks into fight or flight mode in an attempt to fix things.
When we understand that it makes sense why we so often lose it when our kids have off-track behavior.
But what if we understood nothing 👍 was broken?
That is exactly why our kiddos need us.
✔️ To learn how to regulate their emotions and their behavior. (If they came into the world already knowing all of this stuff they wouldn’t need parents.)
If we understood this we probably wouldn’t get so triggered because we’d understand that this was normal and know what to do next. 😘
But since we’re still all re-learning what our kid’s behavior and emotions mean — 🙌 let’s give ourselves lots of grace and space for “mistakes.”
It takes time to release the old stories we have about parenting.
The old stories where we believe we need to fix the kids’ behavior from the outside in (consequences and rewards), and where we should all only feel positive emotions.
→ Letting those beliefs go is not an easy task.
So here’s my advice. It’s the same advice I told myself as I was shifting from a corrective to connective parenting.
When you have a misstep with your parenting, go directly to forgiveness, patience, and empathy for yourself. 💙💙
💃 You’re doing your best!!
You’ll learn more, and make more progress with your parenting by being gentle, curious, and kind to yourself than you’ll ever learn by being harsh, judgmental, and upset with yourself.
The more you practice giving yourself compassion the easier it will be to give it to your children. 💗💗💗💗💗
