Changing Ourselves to Raise Our Children by Steve Disselhorst
Raising a child is a never-ending lesson in understanding our children and understanding ourselves. Every day, I awake to the sound of my children in various states of being. Some days they are happy and running around without a care in the world. Other days, they awake frightened, irritated, and needing to be consoled. Once I gain my bearings, I try to figure out how I feel and what is going on inside me.
Some days, we are both happy and able to meet each other quickly. Other days, we are on very different wavelengths, and I need to push myself out of my mood to fit their mood. As a parent, it’s my job to recognize my feeling and move into being ready and available to meet my kids’ needs. When I feel well and understand my mood, it’s relatively easy to shift to meet their needs. Other days, my feelings are harder to understand, and it’s more challenging to change into meeting their needs.
My son is almost five years old, and he is very expressive on both ends of the spectrum of happiness and sadness. At times, he gets upset, starts to cry or act out, and he behaves erratically. When I try to console him, he says, “leave me alone.” When I step away to give him space to sit with his emotions, he becomes upset and yells, “don’t leave.” This game of “leave me alone” and “don’t leave” can go back and forth without any resolution. It’s a confusing game of figuring out what he truly needs and what I need to stay sane. Depending on how I react to these shifting moods, it can make him feel better or worse.
In the past, I tried to control these outbursts with time-outs or punishments. With my son’s outbursts, I found myself struggling to get him to calm down, and in fact, punishments or time-outs seemed to make matters worse with him. I felt confused, frustrated, and out of options.
As a child, I received plenty of punishments for misbehaving, and I turned out ok. During my childhood, there was a lot of what I’ll call cause and effect disciplines. If you don’t eat your dinner, you can’t watch TV. Or if you hit your brother, you will have to go to your room. It was a negative reinforcement. It worked well at getting me to do what my parents wanted. As a parent, I have often employed the same cause and effect punishments with my children.
During my childhood in the ’70s, time-outs weren’t an accepted part of parenting skills, so I didn’t experience them firsthand. This parenting tool was something I learned when I became a parent and was pretty useful with my older daughter. When she had outbursts, I’d send her to her room. She responded mostly well to “time-outs” and calmed down.
Both of my kids are adopted, so when my daughter was about six years old, I hired a therapist specializing in adoption to help provide additional support. She sent me an article that condemned “time-outs” and instead advocated “time-ins.” Time-ins are when the parents stay with the child when they are experiencing “big emotions.” I questioned my parenting skills but didn’t make any changes. I knew many other great parents that used both punishments and times outs.
A few weeks ago, when my son was experiencing one of his “leave me alone” and “don’t leave” episodes, I employed my old parenting methods with no avail.
We were on a Pandemic mini-vacation in LA, and we were lying at the swimming pool when he started to get irritable and act out. He had been having a great time with his sister in the water. Then he came out and started to fuss and threw things on the ground. I couldn’t get him to calm down, so I told him that I would take him away from the swimming pool to give him a time-out. He became more upset. Subsequently, I became angrier. I felt embarrassed in front of other parents and wanted him to stop. I took him away to a cabana and asked him to sit in the other chair as I prepared to walk away. He was frantic. He was crying and doing the “leave me alone” and “don’t leave.” I felt my heart rate go up and wanted to control and stop his behavior.
As I was walking away for his “time-out,” I was overcome with a different feeling and decided to try to be with him in his feelings instead of changing them. I decided to witness his emotions and set my feelings and reactions aside. It felt uncomfortable and strange for me to do nothing except being with him. Instead of figuring it out and fixing it, I observed and opened my heart to a place of compassion and understanding.
We sat across from each other in different chairs. I listened and held out a hand. My son started to shift, and instead of becoming more irritable, he began to quiet himself down. I asked him if I could hug him, and he declined. He was still upset, but I could feel his demeanor change. I continued to ask if I could hug him, and he finally relented. Once we embraced, I felt myself calm down, and I felt his anger and irritation dissipate. I held him for a couple of minutes, taking deep breaths with his chest against mine. Then I asked him what was going on, and he said he was scared. After he uttered those words, I didn’t try to fix or change his behavior; this tense situation turned into happiness and joy.
I felt delighted with myself and how I handled the situation. While I was in the midst of it all happening, I wasn’t consciously aware of what I was doing differently. After my son returned to swim with his sister, I reflected on the difference in myself and realized that I had changed. I made some mental notes to myself to remember how I acted differently and the positive outcome. I wanted to practice what I had learned again to gain mastery.
A couple of days later, we went to Santa Monica beach and met another family with children of similar ages. We had a socially distanced beach date with this family. Everyone was getting along really well. I started to swim in the ocean and play in the waves. I noticed my son begin to act differently. He was no longer playing with the other boy and instead was fidgeting with his goggles. I came out of the ocean and approached him. He told me his goggles were too tight. I helped him adjust them and put them back on his head. Then he said they were also loose. In my opinion, they fit perfectly. He asked me to get him another pair of goggles in our beach bag. I complied, and when I returned with the other goggles, I thought that would solve his discomfort. He became obsessed with the goggles and started to say, “they are too small and then too big.”
I began to get frustrated. I kept providing solutions, and my son wasn’t satisfied with those solutions, and he became more agitated. I noticed myself falling into my old pattern of trying to “fix” things. I paused and said to myself, “it’s not about the goggles; something else is happening here.” I stopped trying to solve and instead stayed by his side. I didn’t say much and instead offered silence. He slowly started to become calm and turned away from this fixation on the goggles. I asked if he wanted a hug, and he said yes. While I was hugging him, I asked him, “What’s wrong? He said he was scared”. Then I asked, “What are you afraid of?” He said, “He was scared that I was going into the ocean, and I wouldn’t come back.”
I felt sad about his fear, yet it entirely made sense. The ocean is a scary place for a five-year-old boy. While I was enjoying the crashing waves, he was becoming increasingly afraid. I realized that I couldn’t return to swimming in the ocean because he was scared. I was disappointed to stop swimming, but I realized that his emotions were more important than my needs in those moments.
Parenting is a never-ending journey of self-exploration. When I think that I am mastering it, my children show me that I have a lot of learning. When I find myself using punishment, time-outs, and losing control, it’s time for me to look deep inside myself and figure out my own emotions. It’s not about finding solutions or fixing behaviors but instead witnessing emotions, being present, and helping them in their own journeys. In the end, I am always learning, growing, and changing my behaviors and actions to raise our children.