Parenting is very tricky. If you are anything like me, you are stuck in the battle of being a good-enough parent, and being a horrible parent. With so many ways a parent can emotionally and physically hurt their child, it’s no wonder a vast majority of parents are experiencing this battle and finding themselves curled in a dark corner crying about the shame they feel after screaming at their children.
Parenting is already tricky without a Pandemic
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With the COVID-19 lockdown, we parents are locked in a house for an uncertain amount of time with increased anxiety of the uncertain future, the increased stress of teaching our children while working our 9-5 from home, and the increased frustration of not getting a break!
COVID-19 has challenged our reality. Imagine taking what you know to be a banana, yogurt, kale, and strawberries, putting it into a blender and turning it on. The outcome is poured into your cup and now what you know as banana, strawberry, kale, and yogurt is now a smoothie. This COVID-19 took what we thought we knew in our life, mixed it up and served it back to us and called it “life”. For those who thought they were getting a handle on parenting, may suddenly feel like they were thrown off-course with this lock-down.
But, the interesting thing about humans, is that we are ever-adapting to change and turmoil. We too can adjust to these uncertain times and still provide a supportive and nurturing environment to our children. Here are 5 tips you can do to help you parent during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Five Tips on parenting during the COVID-19 Lockdown
Tip #1: Self-awareness
When it comes to parenting, it is important to always be aware of your own emotions and bodily sensations, before speaking with your child. If you are hurt, angry, anxious, or frustrated your words and behaviors will be filtered through these emotions. Your message will get lost in your emotion, and as a result, you risk emotionally hurting yourself and your child.
How to become a self-aware parent: start with a deep breath. Then, scan your body for any discomforting sensations such as a tightness in your chest, shortness of breath or shallow breathing, any tension in her head, or even feeling flushed. Identify where you feel this sensation in your body and just notice it. Don’t try to rationalize it or understand it. Just notice it. To help you “notice” your sensations, try to answer these questions:
- What color would I imagine this sensation
- What shape would I imagine this sensation
- How big would I imagine this sensation
- What texture would I imagine this sensation has
- What word, phrase or image closely resembles this sensation
- What do you imagine would help ease this sensation
Tip #2: Self-soothe
Once you are able to identify the emotion and sensation within you, another great parenting tip is self-soothing. As long as you experience this uncomfortable sensation, any words or actions will reflect your emotions. It is important as parents that we try to not pass our own issues and discomforts onto our kids. This is how generational traumas are created, and the knowledge of this cycle is how they are broken. Self-soothing is exactly what it sounds like, it is us soothing our own selves back to a state of calm. Just how we would soothe a baby when s/he is crying, we do the same with ourselves.
How to self-soothe: AFTER you become self-aware of your bodily sensations, imagine what you would need to ease this sensation and try to mimic this. For example, the texture that pops into my mind when I become stress feels like a thin hard film over my solar plexus or diaphragm area. The image that comes to my mind is the thin hard layer of a Crème Brulee. So, to ease this sensation I imagine crumbling this thin layer but taking a deep breath and imagine my rising diaphragm pushing through the layer and crumbling the thin layer [sensation]. If this didn’t work, try another image that best resembles the sensation you feel. If the image feels right, try another way to ease the sensation. Here are some ideas on how to self-soothe during a lockdown:
- Deep Breathing or Meditating
- Exercising or going for a run or walk (Please practice social distancing)
- Eating a nutritious snack
- Journaling
- Arts & Crafts
- Observe nature from your backyard
- Cleaning
- Taking a warm, soothing bath
- Laugh (laughing yoga is really a thing)
- And for those who have the urge to scream: Deep breath but do a low, slow, long hum when you exhale
Tip #3: Structure your child’s day
Children enjoy freedom, but they feel most secured within predictable and structured environments. Parenting tip #3 is all about creating a predictable environment for your child. If you think about yourself at work, if your boss frequently changed the rules and expectations without warning, then how confident are you that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing? Take a moment to imagine this scenario: Yesterday your boss told you that every morning you are expected to complete the stack of paperwork. But today, as you are completing the task, your boss becomes upset and tells you to leave the paperwork and focus only on helping your colleagues finish a project. You do this, but by the following day, you are reprimanded for not completing the paperwork, the day before. How do you feel? How confident are you that the next day you will do exactly what your boss expects of you? How confident do you feel in completing your tasks in comparison to your other colleagues? I can imagine you feel less confident and this could eventually affect your self-esteem. Children are the same way, but this time, we [parents] are the boss.
Creating a schedule that is easy for your children to follow will improve their confidence and self-esteem. They will feel more confident that they are making choices in alignment with your expectations. It will also reduce your own emotional discomforts and improve your confidence that you got this parenting thing down.
How to create a schedule: There really isn’t any right or wrong way to create a schedule but here are some things to consider
- Make it visually attractive for your child.
- Include time for play or doing virtual playdates
- Create a space in your house for playing, and another space in your house for online learning
- Predict a problem that your child may face and give options for your child to try before coming to you.
- Include your child in creating the schedule, so that they feel encouraged to abide by the schedule
Tip #4: Choose your battles with your children
During this lockdown, I realized that not every broken rule requires a battle. Parenting tip #4 focuses on arguing with your child. During these uncertain times, everything that we know to be normal has been blended up and served to us as “life”. To adapt, flexibility is warranted. This is the same with household rules. There is a rule where my kids don’t play in the house. But with outside being a “threat”, I cannot expect them to honor this rule. Flexibility is warranted in this situation. Another example is hearing my kids play loudly in the house and leaving their toys around. Normally, I would discourage this behavior and implement a punishment; but, I have to stop and think, “Is this a battle worth fighting right now, or can I practice flexibility?” I’m reminded of my elder’s words, “if they aren’t killing or hurting themselves or anyone, then leave them be; it’s not worth a fight”.
How to be flexible: Compromising with your children is a great way to be flexible. Here are some examples of being flexible:
- If your child wants to play inside, create a space for him/her to do so safely.
- If your child is always in the pantry eating all the COVID-19 snacks, buy snacks specifically for him/ her, create snack bags and let your child know these snacks are for him/her whenever they need it (put up any excess snacks for another time).
- If you are working and your child wants your attention, try to use your 15 min and lunch breaks with them –eat lunch with your child, cuddle up together for a quick nap.
Tip #5: Be easy on yourself.
This is a parenting tip that I find, to be, the most difficult and most important to do. It requires me to forgive myself for the mistakes I made as a parent. It seems easier to forgive others than ourselves, and if you are like me, then that means you can be really critical and verbally abusive to yourself. When I subject myself to my own verbal abuse, I teach my children to also verbally abuse themselves. This act, subconsciously teaches them that their “true self” isn’t worthy or good enough. As a parent, I would never want my children to learn this lesson especially from me. But this is the unspoken message we relay to our children when we become verbally abusive to ourselves. We also express this same message when we yell and belittle our children out of our own emotional discomfort. This parenting tip also has the dual advantage of strengthening your child’s emotional intelligence.
How to be easy on yourself: To overcome this, you have to experience compassion and empathy TOWARDS yourself, first. You have to identify your fear and practice self-soothing, then you are ready to apologize to your child.
So many times as adults we reflect on past memories in our childhood, and think “why did mommy/ daddy do that to me?”, “Why did they say those hurtful words to me”, “I must be bad because I was always yelled at and in trouble”. These thoughts are usually left unanswered and we grow up with a hurt inner child. As parents, we are now in a position where we can do the same pain to our children. We can stop this cycle by teaching our children how to forgive, how to apologize, and that their emotions are important too. Remember: You are your child’s first and most important teacher, and your method of teaching is your behavior. The most effective ways to forgive ourselves and teach our children how to forgive themselves are:
- Apologizing to our children when we hurt their feelings.
- Sharing our own point of view of the situation, and allowing them to do the same
- Share our fears of what would happen if we didn’t behave the way we did
- Using I-statements when we speak; limit the amount of “you” in our statements
- Let them know we made a mistake, and how we will change
- Hug and embrace our child and allow them to cry or scream without telling them to stop or judging the behavior.
Parenting is already challenging, coupled with the uncertainties of The COVID-19 Lockdown, parenting can be downright complicated and frustrating. I have presented five tips that helped me to re-ground myself as a parent and hopefully, these five tips can help you too.
Remember there isn’t a right or wrong way to parent, it’s a huge learning curve that we are constantly adapting to, and that is perfectly fine.
Written by: Robyn Smith-McLeish, MSW, LCSW
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