How Parenting Became Easier

The hardest thing for me as a parent is to see my kids suffer. To see them fail, or struggle, or reduced to tears. It doesn’t happen often, but in the past I always waded in to try and fix things and ‘cheer them up.’
What a dope.
I kept ending up involved in my daughter’s teenage melodramas, offering all kinds of thoughtful, mature, wise, far-sighted advice that was completely useless. What’s worse, my ‘cheering up’ completely diminished and nullified her feelings. I may have told her, “You have other friends besides Ashley,” with the best intentions, but the message she got was, “You shouldn’t feel bad, you should be happy.” In other words, my daughter was being told that what she was feeling was wrong, or at least misguided.
(By the way, I didn’t figure this out all on my own. A therapist helped me to understand it.)
The ugly truth is, I probably didn’t trust my kids to handle themselves.
The even uglier truth is that the person I really don’t trust to handle things is moi.
Rather than acknowledge what she was feeling, even with something as simple as, “I can see you are very upset. I can see you’re hurting. You obviously liked Ashley a lot,” I would try and get her to see the big picture.
She didn’t want the big picture. She was stuck on what happened today.
I just needed to listen.
Just allowing her to feel what she was feeling. Because the only way past the feelings is to let someone feel them.
Understanding this changed everything. Life got much simpler. Parenting became much easier.
Before, when there was an upset or ‘trauma’, I’d spend hours spewing thousands of words of fatherly advice about ‘the big picture.’ I had this belief that if I acknowledged her feelings I was validating them and even adding to them and making them stronger. If she sobbed, “I’ll never love anyone as much as him, ever again,” I would of course argue the point, I mean really, how ridiculous. I felt duty bound to immediately point out the stupidity of such a statement.
Of course what you resist will persist, and it just made it worse, until I was shut out with, “You don’t understand.” Or she just went quiet, stuck in her head with, “I guess what I’m feeling is wrong. I’m an idiot.”
When I learned that I could acknowledge and not necessarily be agreeing that she would never, ever, ever be happy again, it was miraculous.
I learned to say, “It’s sad.”
Or “It feels so unfair that you didn’t win the dance competition because the other girl fell.”
Or even, “I’m sad that the other girl fell and now you won’t be going to the championships in Ireland.” I mean, I could admit I was sad too!
Or best of all, “I know, honey. I love you.”
Well, as I say, it was miraculous.
Instead of a fight she kept talking, pouring it out.
Sometimes I made the mistake of adding to the drama, “Yes, life’s not fair.”
But mostly I just listened and repeated what she said and asked questions.
And before my eyes she not only got it all out, but she quickly got to where I would have wanted her to go, “Well, he wasn’t very nice to me anyway.” And, “Actually Ashley was mean like this to Amy and Amanda and Ainsley. She’s mean to everyone.”
She solved it all herself!
I was afraid that if I agreed that it was terribly sad or horrible or whatever it would only deepen her despair and she’d get stuck. In fact the opposite happened.
She figured it out. Without any help from her wise and sagely old man.
Who knew!?
Well, at the time, I didn’t. Now I do.