Project Parenthood

How to take responsibility for your parent-child relationship

Episode Summary

You believe that because your child won’t change, the situation is hopeless—and you’re helpless to do anything about it.

Episode Notes

When you are feeling frustrated, disappointed, or even perhaps dismayed by the relationship between you and your child, it’s common to see them and their behavior as the cause of your distress. Today I’m talking about improving your parent-child relationship by turning the spotlight on yourself. 

Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.

Other episodes to check out:

• Should you punish your ADHD child?
• Why threats, punishments, and adult-imposed consequences backfire
• 10 ways to help your child cooperate without using punishments
• Connecting to your child with non-violent communication
• Connecting to your child with Parent Effectiveness Training
• Connecting to your child with Collaborative and Proactive Solutions
• Connecting to your child with the Five Secrets of Effective Communication

Have a parenting question? Email Dr. Coor at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a voicemail at 646-926-3243.

Find Project Parenthood on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to the Quick and Dirty Tips newsletter for more tips and advice.

Project Parenthood is a part of Quick and Dirty Tips.

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https://brooklynparenttherapy.com/

Episode Transcription

When you are feeling frustrated, disappointed, or even perhaps dismayed by the relationship between you and your child, it’s common to see them and their behavior as the cause of your distress. If they would only straighten up and fly right, everything would be peaceful! Why don’t they just do what you ask when you ask? Why do they say such disrespectful things? Why are they so resistant? Why do they continually do the exact thing you’ve asked them over and over not to do? Well, today I’m talking about improving your parent-child relationship by turning the spotlight on yourself. 

Welcome back to Project Parenthood! I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor—clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll help you repair and deepen your parent-child connection, increase self-compassion and cooperation from your kids, and cultivate joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them. 

It feels so hard when you’re in what feels like constant conflict with your child. It stings when kids use hurtful words. It’s exhausting disentangling yourself from power struggle after power struggle. It’s disappointing and it might even be very painful not to have the kind of parent-child relationship you hoped to have. Those feelings are so valid. And under the weight of all those unpleasant thoughts and feelings, you can start blaming your child for the problems in your parent-child relationship. You might even start to believe that because your child won’t change, the situation is hopeless—and you’re helpless to do anything about it. 

This can feel especially true if you have historically used imposed consequences—otherwise known as punishments—and you might be feeling distant or even adversarial in relation to your child. They misbehave, you punish them, they get angry with you and act out, you get angry with them and punish them—and around and around it goes. You might feel like you’re trying so hard to “discipline” them and it all feels futile since nothing ever really gets better. If you’re a regular Project Parenthood listener, you know that I don’t advocate for the use of punishment or imposed consequences. You can learn more about the pitfalls of punishment on the episodes Should you punish your ADHD child?; Why Threats, Punishment, and Adult-imposed Consequences Backfire, and 10 Ways to Help Your Child Cooperate Without Using Punishments. I’ll drop links to them in the show notes. 

The problem is when you view the relational problems between you and your kid as “all their fault”—you’re putting the responsibility for your well-being and happiness on them. That’s a developmentally inappropriate expectation to have of your child or any child. It’s not a child’s job to make sure their adults are happy. And in actuality, you don’t need your child’s help or buy-in or cooperation to start making things better. Because it’s when you’re ready to take 100% responsibility for your own role in your parent-child relationship that you’re most likely to see positive change in your interactions with them. 

Examine your thoughts and feelings

Instead of focusing on what your child “should” be doing differently, put the focus on yourself and the thoughts and feelings you’re bringing into interactions with them. 

An important principle of respectful parenting is to view challenging behavior as the tip of an iceberg—the thing you can see on the outside. What’s invisibly lying beneath the surface are the underlying thoughts, feelings, and needs that have led to your kid’s challenging behavior. But guess what? Looking beneath the surface of behavior isn’t just for kids anymore! It’s so important to understand what’s going on with you beneath the surface. What are your triggers? What gets you going when things are escalating with your child? The better you understand yourself, the better you’ll begin to understand your child.

Oftentimes when you feel triggered by a conflict with your child, it’s based on split-second thoughts and judgments you’re making about your child, yourself, or the situation that result in you having unpleasant emotions. In cognitive behavior therapy, thoughts like these are called “cognitive distortions”—of which there are ten. Let’s go over them. 

• All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black-and-white. Your child complains about the ice cream flavor choices at the zoo, and you see the zoo trip as “ruined” by their ungratefulness. It’s either a perfect outing—or it’s a total failure. 
• Discounting the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting that they don’t count. Someone says something kind to you about something you’ve done and you attribute that to them just being nice, or feeling sorry for you or you dismiss your success to good luck or it having been an easy task anyone could have accomplished. 
• Emotional reasoning: You assume your feelings are the truth. You feel like a bad parent, so you assume you are a bad parent. Or you feel anxious, so you conclude that something bad is certain to happen. 
• Jumping to conclusions: You interpret things negatively in the absence of any fact to support your conclusion. Like mind reading—with no definite evidence, you conclude that others are reacting negatively to you. Or fortune telling—where you arbitrarily predict that things will turn out badly. 
• Labeling: You generalize by taking one characteristic of yourself, your child, or others and applying it to the whole person. You might say “I’m a loser” instead of “I made a mistake.” Or, “My child is a jerk” instead of “My child is really struggling today.”
• Magnification/Minimization: You exaggerate certain aspects of yourself, other people, or situations and downplay other aspects. Like catastrophizing or dismissing or denying things. 
• Mental Filter: You dwell on the negatives and discount the positives. Like—the whole day at the zoo with your child was fun and connected, but the tantrum they had at the end of it is the only thing you can focus on for the next several days.
• Overgeneralization: You see one negative event as proof of a never-ending pattern of defeat. You might use the words “always” and “never” in your thoughts a lot. Like—“My child never says anything kind to me! They’re always disrespectful!”
• “Should” Statements: You tell yourself that things should be the way you want, hope, or expect them to be. You might think, “I shouldn’t feel sad like this,” or “My child shouldn’t speak like that to me.”

Empower yourself through self-reflection

If you want to take responsibility for your part in parent-child conflicts, you need to make efforts to identify the cognitive distortions getting in the way of connecting with your child.. What evidence do you have for the conclusions you’ve come to? Understanding how you might be automatically and unconsciously distorting reality means you can start challenging those thoughts and begin replacing them with more realistic and helpful ways of thinking. 

But it’s also important to make intentional efforts to see things from your child’s perspective. Given the behavior you’re seeing and the words they’re saying, what emotions do you imagine they must be experiencing? What thoughts might they be having? What impact are your words and behaviors in this moment impacting them? Trying your best to understand their motivation and how they might be experiencing the conflict between you is helpful even when you don’t agree with it. 

Be honest in a kind way

Once you’ve identified how you’re feeling and you’ve made some educated guesses about or listened to how your child might be feeling, you’re ready to start communicating openly and honestly with your child in a way that conveys warmth, caring, and respect. It’s not wrong to be angry or frustrated, but how are you letting your child know about it? Is your tone sarcastic, critical, condescending, patronizing, competitive, or defensive? If so, this will necessarily have an impact on what happens next. 

If you’re looking for ideas about how to communicate your feelings to your child in clear, direct, and respectful ways—even when it’s difficult—check out the 4-episode series I did in August 2023. Each episode is all about increasing connection through respectful communication with your kids. Look for links to those episodes in the show notes.

It may be frustrating that you are the one who needs to do the changing when your child’s behavior is so challenging. But ultimately, if you want your child to hear you out and understand where you’re coming from, you need to do so for them. This means asking about and listening to your child’s perspective without getting defensive, arguing, or making verbal attacks—even when what they say is hard to hear. 

It can be tough to admit that you’ve hurt them or made a mistake or fallen short in their eyes somehow—but it’s also a crucial element of connected relationship repair. It’s a part of taking 100% responsibility for the part you’ve played—consciously or unconsciously—in the conflict between you. But when you’re an active listener and validate your child’s perspective and emotions you’re not only filling their emotional “cup,” you’re also modeling how to really listen! Validating how your child feels—from their point of view—can reduce tension between you even in the heat of the moment. But that means entirely letting go of the need to be right and the need for retaliation. Defending your point or trying to get revenge will never reduce conflict, only increase it. 

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Trying to change your child will ultimately keep you stuck in a negative cycle with them. You can’t change your child’s thoughts, feelings, and actions—and the more you try the more they will fight and resist you—but you can learn to change your own.

You have the power to completely transform your relationship with your child—without their help! If you want interactions with your child to get better and feel more satisfying then put the focus on yourself. Assume full personal responsibility for solving the problems in the relationship, commit to keeping your child’s emotional “cup” filled, and you’ll be that much closer to a more connected parent-child relationship. 

That’s all for today’s episode of Project Parenthood—thanks for listening, and I hope you found this helpful! Be sure to join me live on Instagram @bkparents on Monday, October 16 at 12:45pm when you can “Ask Me Anything”! You can get your questions answered in real time! 

If you have a question for me about parent-child relationships, respectful parenting tips and/or parental mental health that you’d like me to cover in a future episode, shoot me an email at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com, leave a message at 646-926-3243 or leave a message on Instagram @bkparents. And you can learn about my private practice working with parents living in New York State at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com. 

Catch you next week!