7 steps to take that can help you build confidence and self-esteem as a parent.
Striving for perfection as a parent means you’re constantly falling short of your own expectations. That often comes with harsh self-criticism, overwhelm, and sometimes even hopelessness or helplessness. It’s that much harder to be the parent you want to be when you’re feeling very bad about yourself. In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor offers ideas for boosting your confidence as a parent.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hey parents! You're listening to the Project Parenthood podcast. I'm your host Dr. Nanika Coor, clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll introduce you to the same respectful parenting practices that I use to help parents repair and deepen connections with their children. You’ll get tips for cultivating more parental self-compassion, more cooperation from your kids, and more joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
In today’s episode, I’m talking about steps to take that can help you build confidence and self-esteem as a parent. Stick around till the end to hear about how you can use connection to pave the way for making requests and setting limits.
Parental confidence is about how well you feel like you can attune to and meet your child’s needs and how competent you perceive yourself to be at performing caregiving tasks.
It’s easy to feel self-critical as a parent with all of the societal pressure to get parenting “right.” And if you struggle with perfectionism, there may also be pressure coming from yourself! Striving to be perfect as a parent is always a losing game because there’s no such thing as a perfect parent—though your social media feed may say differently. You’re just a person. You’re going to make mistakes and fall short and feel off your game regularly as a parent—that’s just part of the gig. You don’t need to be perfect, your child just needs you to be good enough.
The more you behave as if there’s an emergency in your speech or your movements, the more you—and your child—will physiologically feel like there’s an emergency. An emergency implies a potential lack of safety—you’re less likely to feel confident if you don’t feel safe.
The more deliberate you can be with your breath, the less likely you are to end up in a fight-or-flight situation where you’re either yelling at your kids or stonewalling them. So give yourself time to respond intentionally rather than react automatically. Take a full inhale and exhale before setting that limit or checking in on your child who just fell down. During that intentional breath, remind yourself: “This is not an emergency.”
Let your child be in charge when you play with them. Put the blocks where they tell you to. Play the character that your child asks you to play. Follow your teen’s directions on how to play their video game. Really listen when they tell you their reasons for loving that game, if they offer that information. Don’t correct, make suggestions, or criticize. Just play with the goal of getting to know your child a little better than you knew them yesterday.
If you happen upon your child playing independently, you can even ask if you can watch them play for a while. Take 5 minutes just to watch and see what they get up to when they can choose what they want to do instead of being directed to do something. It’s moments like these that help you understand who your child is, which helps you pick up on their signals and get better at supporting them and meeting their needs.
You’ll get parenting advice from a ton of places, so it’s important to remember that you are the expert on your particular child. When something doesn’t feel right for your child, it likely isn’t. When you’ve made a particular parenting decision that a family member doesn’t agree with, don’t personalize it. It’s fine for you to hold different opinions. Them disagreeing or choosing a different parenting strategy doesn’t automatically mean that your strategies are wrong.
Know what to expect from your child’s age and stage of development. Do they have a medical or psychiatric diagnosis that impacts typical development? Does their diagnosis mean that they have particular strengths and challenges? Learn about all of their diagnoses so that you have realistic expectations of your child. If you know what behaviors your child has control over and those that they can’t control, you can look at them through a more compassionate lens. You can remind yourself that kids (and all people) do well if they can. If they’re not doing well it’s not because you’re a terrible parent or they are a bad kid—it’s that something is getting in their way.
Accept that you’re not always going to know what to do as a parent. You will sometimes be at a loss and not know what the right parenting decisions are. That’s part of being alive—you just can’t predict or solve every conundrum. Some things you’ll need to seek help for, and that makes sense! Evolutionarily we’re not meant to parent all alone without a network of experienced elders and peers to turn to for advice or reassurance in moments of parental challenge or crisis.
When you notice yourself becoming self-critical about your parenting, remind yourself that parenting is hard! Of course you’re struggling! Of course you feel overwhelmed! Of course you sometimes just want to run away from the whole situation even though you love your kids deeply! You’re not the only parent who feels those ways, and you’re doing the best you can with the internal and external resources that you have on any given day.
Make a habit of going back to your child after you’ve had an interaction where either of you walked away feeling badly and patching up that temporary breach in the relationship. Wait until both of you are calm and connected, then own your part of the situation, hear them out about their experience of the conflict, and work out a plan with them about how you’ll handle these conflicts in the future. Engaging in this kind of repair with your child gives both of you confidence that the relationship is solid and can handle some bumps and bruises because you’ll always come together again.
Experiencing negative thoughts and feelings about yourself can affect how “good enough” you’re able to be as a parent. Self-doubt and second-guessing parenting decisions you’ve made can compound the problem. Holding a lot of negative judgements about yourself can sometimes be the result of childhood abuse or neglect, or from being raised by parents who were highly critical, overprotective, or rejecting. You may have had many stressful life experiences in childhood, teen years, and adulthood that have led to a lot of negative core beliefs—which can lead to unhelpful parenting strategies.
If you find yourself becoming overly harsh, avoidant of your child’s big feelings, or emotionally distancing yourself from your children, engage your self-compassion and try to get back on track by taking care of yourself.
This could mean carving out time out for your hobbies, for exercise, to see friends, or to go to therapy. Talking with a professional can help you work through past experiences, and learn to regulate your emotions so you can help your child with theirs.
For this week’s parenting challenge, try connecting with your child before you correct them or request something of them.
When your child is angry, frustrated, worried, resistant, or speaking to you or behaving in ways you don’t like—take a deep breath before you respond. When you lack confidence as a parent, you can feel driven to fix or avoid your child’s big feelings and problems. But instead of offering rapid-fire solutions or trying to convince them to feel some other way about the problem, internally take a guess at what emotions might be underlying your child’s unpleasant words or behaviors. Imagine responding to those emotions and ignoring unwanted tones and tirades.
Then de-escalate these moments of conflict by using a calm and soothing demeanor, tone, gestures, and facial expressions. Convey support and empathy in the moments your child is having big feelings before you set a limit or make a request of them. “I can hear how mad you are about missing Sam’s birthday party because of our trip. When you’re yelling it’s hard for me to listen to you. I’m happy to listen if you can lower your voice, or do you want to take a break and we can talk about this later when you’re feeling calmer?”
Test it out and report back!
Increasing your knowledge of child development in general and your child in particular can help increase your confidence as a parent, and your child is more likely to allow you to know them when your relationship with them is strong. The ideas I’ve offered today are all helpful for increasing connection with your child.
Gaining confidence as a parent means that you’ll feel less stressed out. When you’re less stressed, your child is calmer and day to day life runs more smoothly. And when things are running smoothly—you feel more confident! Your child needs you to be good enough at recognizing and meeting their needs, and repairing with them when you’ve been unable to meet their needs for whatever reason. Most parents believe themselves to be a combination of skilled in some areas of parenting and very unskilled in others. Perfection is not in your parental job description! So give yourself some grace—parents do well if they can, too.
I hope that’s helpful! You can learn more about my work with parents at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com and on Instagram at BKPARENTS.
If you have more questions about increasing your confidence as a parent, or any other parenting questions or stories, leave me a message at (646) 926-3243 and be sure to let me know if it's okay to use your voice on the show. Or, send an email to parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to Project Parenthood on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next week!