Prioritizing Your Child by Focusing on Yourself
When’s the last time you saw a parenting book that asked parents to defocus on their kids?
-Rabbi and family therapist Edwin H. Friedman
The greatest thing we can do for our kids is to learn to focus on ourselves. That opening line is meant to come across as contrary, even heretical. “Now it’s all about the kids” is what most of us recite as soon as we bring offspring into the world. And we keep receiving countless bits of counsel urging us to continue taking all focus off ourselves and placing it squarely on our kids. After all, what they need is our constant attention, affection, and sacrifice so they’ll think the right way, feel the right way, and behave the right way. Right?
Wrong. Such child-centered advice is simply a lie. Mothers have especially been sold this lie, and that’s why we see so many moms just give up pursuit of any sort of individuality or sexuality; their new primary identity is Mother. So the sweats replace the little black dress, and the Keds knock out the heels.
But it’s not just moms. Now dads like me are bombarded with messages to make up for our fathers’ relative absence by being supremely present, even it means neglecting ourselves, our marriages, and our careers. And before you know it, the stickers with our kids’ names get emblazoned all over our minivans, shouting to the whole world who really owns the van—and the rest of our lives.
That’s why the greatest thing we can do is focus on ourselves, because we’re the only ones we can control. We cannot control our kids, that’s for sure—that’s why we’re reading parenting books in the first place! Every parenting expert we’ve read before has just given us more tools (“techniques”) trying to help us do just that. But the more we’ve tried to control our kids (with new charts, new rewards, new punishments), the more out of control they’ve become.
That’s because nobody likes to be controlled. And it’s because our kids are not the ones out of control. We parents are out of our own control, placing ourselves in the backward position of needing our children to behave for our benefit because, after all, they now represent our whole world.
No wonder we end up screaming. Or shutting down. Or simply giving up and caving in.
ScreamFree Parenting is not just about lowering our voices. It’s about learning to calm all these emotional reactions, learning to focus on our own behavior more than on our kids’—for their benefit. This is because our biggest enemy as parents is not TV or the Internet, not bad influences at school, not even drugs or alcohol. Our biggest enemy as parents is our own emotional reactivity, because when we “lose it,” we’re actually losing our adulthood. And then we wonder why our kids have so little respect for us.
ScreamFree Parenting offers a revolutionary new option—by inviting parents to focus on themselves, grow themselves up, and calm themselves down. Following these ScreamFree principles leads parents of all ages (with kids of all ages) to create and enjoy the family relationships they’ve always craved.
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September 10th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
We raised our childeren by giving of our selves. We praised good behavior and tried to be
better parents than our own parents.
September 10th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
We tried to approve what our childern accomplished. They both have college degrees.
Now we have a grand son to inspire and encourage. What advice would you
give the grand son. Keep away or would you give your opinions only when ask??
September 10th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
i wasn’t a fabulous parent for my two older ones but they’re doing all right for themselves – they’re managing way better than i did, so i’m counting that as success.
my rules were simple: my needs come before your wants; your needs come before my wants; if needs collide, prioritize. don’t embarrass me in public or you’ll get it twice back. ask me once, the answer is
‘maybe’; ask me twice, the answer is ‘no’. it’s not my job to buy you treats – it’s your job to make me want to. if what you’re doing will get you hurt, you’ll get hurt.
made life ever so much simpler and easier.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Better to be safe than sorry…Err on the safe side and give opinions only when asked. However, it really depends on how open the parents are about parenting unsolicited advice. If a parent was the most loving, patient, kind, and a nearly perfect parent while raising his/her own children, then I think advice would be taken well and warmly welcomed.
As a side note, my mother made very huge mistakes raising/disciplining us. She is so painfully aware of this that when I became a parent and she a grandparent, she has never ever given unsolicited advice about how to raise or handle my children. I cannot tell you how wonderful that has been and is!!! I am so thankful for that because it would caused a lot of problems between us and our relationship as her being the grandparent and me being the mother to my children. Every once in awhile my father in law gives a little unsolicited advice or unwelcome opinion about our kids and it immediately ruffles my feathers…not good. A parent who was not a very good parent, shouldn’t offer any unsolicited advice as a grandparent. Now days there are countless parenting books that have great ideas for parenting.
A college degree doesn’t mean a person is successful on the inside or has strong moral character. We do want our kids to be academically successful and go to college, etc., but in the end, THE most important to us is that our children grow up becoming people of good character (having a personal relationship with God, which out of that, is being kind, loving, forgiving, patient, loyal, hardworking, etc.). We hope that they will own it for themselves.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
I read something very similar in a book called – Familes Where Grace is in Place