Culture trumps strategy, even in parenting

In the social arc of parenting paradigms we are in a place where most of our parents were told by parenting experts to focus on the behavior of their children. The basic idea is that behaviors that were unwanted were squashed. If there was a behavior that our parents didn’t like, made them feel uncomfortable or bad, or was inconvenient, it was punished. (I also think there’s an argument to be made that this perspective is making a resurgence in the collective conversations around parenting).

While parents are focusing on behavior, from the child’s perspective this is a time of developing their sense of SELF. This results in conflating “bad” behavior with a “bad” child.

Additionally, parents were (and often still are) judged as good or bad parents based on whether their children are compliant, easy to direct, and obedient.

The advice our parents got from parenting “experts” of their day was that they shouldn’t coddle us, we would become soft. They were told to let us cry when it was time to go to sleep because eventually we’d learn how to put ourselves to sleep. They were told that if they withheld their affection we would be left wanting it, and it would make us more compliant, and therefore “better” children.

The problem is that children crying themselves to sleep doesn’t teach them to self-soothe, it teaches them to avoid rest until they’re so exhausted they crash. Babies don’t have brains that can self-soothe yet. It’s not possible. What we know now is that babies develop the ability to work with their own nervous systems through receiving regulation through caregivers (and not necessarily just their mother).

Is it any wonder that so many of us grew up feeling like failures? Feeling like we’re not good enough, like we don’t deserve any better? We grew up feeling unseen, unloved, alone. Our parents were not meeting us where we were in our development. This isn’t necessarily their fault, even if the effects were painful. They were given terrible advice and they didn’t have a lot of resources to figure something else out.

But let’s stick with what happens when a child is raised to be compliant.
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The behavioral lens of parenting leaves parents looking for obedience in children to determine their “goodness” that gets extended from how they are behaving to “who they are”. ​

In addition, children were seen as little adults, and the expectations of children were often beyond what was developmentally appropriate (like the ability to anticipate outcomes, or to control impulses).

It makes sense that we didn’t feel seen, understood, or loved (all to varying degrees based on our individual parents). At the precipice of parenthood or in the beginning of raising our own littles, we might find that we really want to do thing differently. We really want our children to thrive, and now we know more about child and brain development and we can do things differently.

Our nervous systems were built around behaviorism. What we did was conflated with who we were. We were judged against expectations we could not meet and the probability of failure was always high. We were punished when we couldn’t perform. What have we been left with in the wake of these problems?

We’ve been left with generations with low self-esteem and a lack of skills around disappointment, failure, and compassion, both for ourselves and others.

This parenting lens has far reaching implications. How we are parented and how we are perceived as children grows into a sense of who we are and can be as adults. Our beliefs about ourselves are anchored in our early experiences, and as we grow it colors how we see and participate in our communities.

I don’t want to make parenting seem like something we have to be perfect at, but I am trying to argue for getting clear on what we are trying to accomplish in parenting. I want to suggest that it is an important place to put our attention for lineage healing, for community well-being, and for our futures.

Our families are a place of possibility.

So, what if you’re a new-ish parent, and you can see the harms from the past, and you are committed to parenting differently? You know what you don’t want, but you can’t yet see what you do want. Maybe you have visions, parts of the whole, but because your nervous system was grown on behaviorism, you don’t always have what you need to be the one who soothes, the one who stays, the one who softens.

This was where I found myself as a parent when my kids were little. I believed in them as their own little people, that my job was to help them grow and develop into people who could form good relationships with others. I wanted them to believe in themselves, know their strengths and limits, and to have a caring community around them.

I knew what I hoped for my children, but I didn’t know how to get them there.

It eventually dawned on me that the reason I was struggling with the implementation, was that I was still missing an ability to self-soothe (among other relational skills). When they got upset, I got upset. Which meant that my kids’ emotions were running the show and often we were all crying. I was constantly chasing our feelings and trying to fix them.

And what ended up helping the most was having a new paradigm.
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I didn’t just switch to a different paradigm of child development or expert advice (though I did still gather research), but I changed my focus from managing everyone’s behavior to centering our relationships. I began to look at our family as an ecosystem. Perceiving that each of us is a valuable individual within that ecosystem with autonomy, yet acknowledging that we are interconnected, and we impact each other.

I had to learn the skills of presence, listening, and self-soothing. I had to learn to co-regulate, to be the one who was steady. I worked with my Inner Mother who was able to care for me as I was caring for my kids. I prioritized my own healing so that I could be the parent I wanted to be.

My youngest is 18 now, and when I look back on this ecosystem orientation of parenting I see the benefits. We know how to stay through difficult discussions. We know we are held by the others in the ecosystem. We have all practiced dealing with our own disappointment, staying through hard times, and what it means to do relational repair. It’s not easy, and it hasn’t made us a “perfect family” by any means, but it does mean we have a foundation of care.

It also opts us out of the conversation about whether any of us are “good” or “bad.” We are as we are, and it is known that we have an inherent belonging, we are part of our family ecosystem. This allows each of us to express our own will, to receive feedback from how it impacts the ecosystem, and for all of us to adjust (or not) as necessary.
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What would it be like to set down the precepts of behaviorism, that focus on what people do rather than who they are, and to consider looking through the lens of ecosystem? What would we see in our family if we weren’t measuring their compliance to our preferences? Who would be standing in front of us, and what would they actually be capable of? What would we be capable of bringing to our family if we redirected all the energy we put into getting their compliance?