Changing family patterns of relationships is a long haul task. Moving away from the ways our parents taught us their values, intentional or not, takes thoughtfulness, practice, and humility.

​We tend to flounder without an organizing sense of who we want to be as parents and what we want to instill in our children. This may leave us with the feeling that we’re not doing a good job, because we’re kinda piecing parenthood together as we go and it’s not feeling rooted or grounded. 

Changing family patterns is the kind of work we do for a lifetime.

It’s many small meaningful acts, rooted in care, repeated again and again. But it doesn’t have to be a huge lift, it doesn’t have to empty you to fill your kids up.

That brings us to our first fallacy:

1. If it’s hard I suck at it.

Yes, parenting is hard. Especially the way it’s set up with one (or maybe two) adults trying to work for wages to keep the whole family afloat, as well as meeting a whole suite of needs for their children on a long developmental path.

This is the work of a village, and humans evolved under the conditions of having many adults available to help raise children born into the community. It’s hard because you’re missing the support network, not because you are not good at being a parent.

2. I want to do better than my parents did, so I’ll do the opposite of what they did.

This one is tricky. It’s rare that I’ve heard someone say that worked for them. Most often this “opposite” comes with another, related, set of problems. It contributes to the polarizing idea that there are only two ways and you must choose one of them. From authoritarianism, where parents exert strict control over their children and expect compliance, the swing goes to permissiveness in which parents try not to control and enforce, but often find themselves lacking boundaries and routines.

When we buy into the polarity of one right answer and one wrong answer we pit the two extreme ends of a spectrum against each other and skip over everything in between. And honestly, if we just do the opposite, we often just end up with different problems. There are no fewer of them and they are no less problematic.

The key is to find something in the middle that is obscured by black and white thinking. What lies in the middle is healthy boundaries, clear communication, and cooperation. When you find yourself in a double bind (you have two terrible options and it’s difficult to choose between them) it’s often helpful to look for the third thing, the middle ground, the option no one is seeing.

3. I have no idea what I’m doing

I think you do know what you’re doing. You are following your gut because you don’t want your kids to feel the way you did. You want something better for them. And you’re willing to work for it.

At this moment, though, your actions may be motivated by getting away from what you don’t want. You may still not feel rooted in what you DO want. That’s different from not knowing what you’re doing.

4. I have to toughen up my child for the “real” world.

This is often used as a reason not to be kind, empathetic, and meet the child where they are. It’s used an excuse to not have to consider the impact of parental actions on children.

It’s often used in conjunction with a “what if they still do that when they’re 25?” They won’t. Kids don’t go off to their first apartment or to college still wanting to sleep in your bed, or believing in Santa Claus. They grow out of things. That’s what development means.

And early in development they need a lot of guidance about how to use their bodies, growing knowledge and capability, and their creativity to build their lives.

So, what happens if we let these perspectives go? Or at least update them a bit? We get to a place where difficulty with our kids doesn’t make us bad parents.

I know it’s often said that parenting is so hard because kids don’t come with a manual. But they used to.

For most of human history we lived in tribal groups of around 100 people that worked together to take care of one another. They gathered and cooked food together, shared the tasks of maintaining structures, and raised their children collectively.

In this way, parenting was a shared activity of most, if not all, members of the community. Children played in multi-aged groups and took care of younger kids. Adults were nearby if anything was needed, but most of their day the children spent time together.

Adults in those tribal communities had two things working in their favor that we don’t always have anymore. One is, that they had lots of previous experience with children because they were part of those multi-aged groups when they were younger. Folks of different ages were not separated into cohorts the way they are today.
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Second, they had other adults to turn to if they needed help. The how-to-care-for-a-kid-manual existed in the many available people in the group who had parented before them. No one was left to deal with situations in isolation. Help was available.

This is the resource that’s missing these days. And it used to be contained inside of multi-age communities that we don’t really have anymore. There is a continuity of care missing from our family units. And in that continuity was the lived knowledge and experience of the community.

This is why we feel like we’re parenting alone and doing it by the seat of our (exhausted) pants!

Since we’re unlikely to restore the multi-age familial unit in a big way anytime soon (it would require so much more repair than just moving us all in together again), I think we start by looking to systems we do have access to in order to find someone who has navigated this territory before. I hope you already have that in your life; other mamas who are parenting kids a little older than yours, or a wise grandmother, or a friendly neighbor. I wish that for you, and I wish I’d had that when I was a young parent.

We may not have the ideal community, but I do think we are often still more connected than we think. We don’t have to have the whole thing to have elements of it. Maybe it’s worth considering the imperfect ways that these resources do exist?

What about the friends you call, the other mom’s you talk to, or even the other exhausted moms you pass in the grocery store that give soothing and knowing looks at your screaming toddler or your sleeping baby?
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We need solidarity. Give it. Receive it when you get it. Let it in.

And if that still isn’t cutting it, you can find a professional mentor. Think of it as a rent-a-grandmother. I have thought a great deal about parenting in the 35+ years since I had my first baby. I’ve raised my kids, all wildly different human beings who have taught me the value of care, of being seen, and of the impact that seemingly small things can have on us all.

I am a resource for working through the kind of parent you want to be and how to pull it off. I have a lot of skills from all of the repair I’ve done with my children over large and small things. I’ve learned (and still am learning) what it takes to have relationships with my children based on love, support, and shared humanity. I’ve learned how to listen deeply, have good boundaries, and love wholly.

Please do reach out if you’re feeling lonely, isolated, and overwhelmed. Whether you hire me or not, knowing that you’re not alone is often a large piece of the puzzle. I care how your parenting is going. I care how under-resourced you are. Parenting doesn’t have to be this big of a struggle.

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?