The other day my partner and I were on a long drive with our daughter. We were trying to keep her happy in the car. She asked for a snack and demanded I give her the whole bag of crackers. My initial response was, “no, I don’t want a mess all over the car.” My partner suggested just giving her the bag in order to avoid a melt down. I relented and gave her the bag and it was fine – no huge mess in the car. It brought up a pretty big issue for me, though. Not so much my partner disagreeing with a limit that I tried to set, though that is annoying, but how our current parenting approach requires a lot of change on my part. My initial thoughts and responses to my daughter are usually not in line with how I want to be responding to her, which is my fundamental parenting challenge. So, for the past three years, and I imagine for most of the rest of my life, I I’ve been working on overcoming my automatic behavior and making much more thoughtful decisions about how I interact with my child. Often, that feels really daunting.
I thought I was well prepared to become a parent. I have many friends that had babies before me. I babysat for family and friends throughout my adolescence. I just thought I knew what I was getting into. What I completely underestimated was how different child-rearing is when it is my own child. Suddenly all those worries my friends had as new parents made sense. All their over-indulgent or over-attentive parenting practices now seemed logical. All the over thinking of every decision now resonated with my experience. Before I had a child I could be cavalier and judgmental about parenting philosophies. Now that I have my own child I find myself wanting to be very intentional about how I parent. This intentionality, however, has created a need for personal growth and transformation that I hadn’t expected. Managing myself has become my main parenting challenge.
Parenting for me revolves around the daily work of challenging my automatic thoughts and emotions. Often I feel frustrated by my daughter’s behavior. I remember feeling this way even when she was a baby. I would try to get her to go with my plans and she would try everything in her arsenal to get me to meet her needs. I would ‘give in’ and pick her up or feed her. This made her feel better, but I would feel frustrated and annoyed. That moment of annoyance in the face of a content baby is where my personal work lies. In these moments I feel really out of control of the situation and my emotions. I also feel ashamed of myself for not being able to better pull myself together. It’s very reasonable that a baby can’t regulate her emotions, but a 30 something year old woman should be able to put things in perspective, right?
That moment of feeling frustrated by my daughter’s natural behavior is what I don’t like about myself. It’s the part of me I wish I could change. It’s the part of parenting that really doesn’t make sense to me. Why am I wired to be frustrated by my offspring’s developmentally appropriate behavior. Life would be so much easier if my thoughts and expectations lined up with my child’s needs, but they don’t. The only reason I can think of is that we, as a culture, have suppressed our biological response system in favor of culturally normative parenting approaches. This means that our environmental influences have over-ridden our innate response system. We all still have the instincts to care for our babies. We also have developed different parenting approaches not based on instinct. I think this leaves a lot of us new parents trying to figure out how we want to parent our babies and struggling when our intentions and automatic responses don’t match up.
I thought caring for a baby would present the biggest parenting challenge, but I find that trying to deal with my own inner-experience is what really puts me over the edge. I feel like every day I fight against my automatic reactions in favor of the parenting approach I want to follow. For example, being flexible instead of rigid or allowing freedom instead of controlling. This is exhausting, but it feels like the only option. I don’t want to be the parent that seems to emerge in times of frustration – the one that yells, the one that grabs an arm a little too tightly, or the one that arbitrarily says “no” just because I want to be in control. That is not how I want to treat my daughter. So, I am left working on managing myself in order to care for my child in the way I believe I should. I’m left on the long slow journey that many have done before and I’m sure many of you are on along with me right now.