Why are you so triggered by your child's emotions?
As I embark upon the final stages of pregnancy, I have been exploring how it feels like another opportunity to reflect upon myself as a parent. What mistakes have I made on the journey so far? What have I learned? What do I want to do differently this time around? What feels important to me in the way I raise and respond to my kids? And what is so difficult about being the kind of parent I want to be? These are big questions that many parents sometimes ponder, and the answers aren’t always easy!
Regardless of whether you have one or more children or are on the cusp of becoming a parent for the first time, parenting is an enormous gift for those of us that choose it. But it’s also extremely hard work. Children change us. They change our lives. it is an immense privilege to have so much power over a human life. And at the same time, it is one of the most challenging things many of us will ever experience. With the power to shape another life comes enormous responsibility….and exhaustion, self-sacrifice, and the unrelenting nature of having to continuously meet the needs of another human being as well as our own. Most parents care deeply about their children’s welfare, and when we care about something, we tend to put pressure on ourselves to do it well. And yet raising children is not as simple as knowing if we work hard, we will get the outcome we want! Children don’t always respond the way we want or expect them to. They are complex and ever-evolving. And sometimes no matter how hard we try, we struggle to feel like we are truly succeeding at parenting the way we want to.
Part of this is simply that we are all human, imperfect, and unable to meet the idealised and often unrealistic expectations we may hold for ourselves or for our child; but perhaps part of it is that being a parent triggers old wounds. Unconscious remnants of how we ourselves were parented. Thoughts, beliefs, internalised messages, emotions, and memories from a time we may not even consciously recall. And these things drive our actions far more than we may care to acknowledge. Despite our best intentions, we hear ourselves saying things we later regret. We don’t always hold the boundaries we plan to. We inadvertently lose our tempers, criticise, or shame our children. And sometimes we hurt them the way we ourselves were hurt. And in these moments, it’s often easier to blame them or see them as the problem. But if we really reflect, it’s not really about them and their behaviour at all. It’s about us, and the work we haven’t yet done to process and explore our own early experiences and the impact of these upon us.
This is not about bashing our own parents. After all, they were likely also doing the best they could with the knowledge, skills, and resources they had at the time. And these things were influenced by how they themselves were parented. The uncomfortable truth is simply that becoming a parent is like holding up a mirror to see parts of yourself that are difficult to acknowledge, or perhaps even parts of yourself that you didn’t even know existed!
Inside of all of us is that part that is vulnerable, that part that feels painful emotions like hurt, anxiety, loneliness, shame, and fear. And often the way our parents responded to us as a child influences how we ourselves respond when that vulnerable part of our child is right in front of us. Particularly if some of those emotions are so difficult for the child to experience or understand that they shift into anger instead. What a parent often sees as defiance, refusal to cooperate, being disrespectful, or “naughty” is actually their child’s signal they are stressed, overwhelmed, or unable to cope. But do we (and did our parents!) always recognise this? Similarly, when we react with anger, are we always in-tune and aware of our own more vulnerable emotions that often lurk underneath?
For most of us, it is distressing to see our child distressed. And despite our best intentions, the more they escalate, the more we do too. We’re often so desperate for them to calm down, or stop crying, or yelling, or to just co-operate and do what we want them to do, that we panic! Without even realising it, we’re no longer in control. Instead, we’re reacting from our own emotions. And these emotions are often driven by the unconscious internalised messages we picked up a long time ago.
So, if you find yourself struggling to hold the boundaries you try to set, or if you hear yourself snapping at your child when they say or do something that triggers you, or if you find yourself becoming frustrated with them not doing what you expect of them, it may help to ask: Why? Why does this bother me so much? Why does this hurt? Why does this feel so threatening or overwhelming to me? Why is this so hard for me to navigate?
And as you’re asking these questions, it’s important to let go of defensiveness and instead non-judgementally reflect on the deeper-seated emotions or experiences that are about more than just how your child is behaving in that moment.
Because sometimes, children have as much to teach us as we do them. And sometimes, doing this inner self-reflection allows us to see that in order to change the patterns of our child’s behaviour, we first need to recognise and change our own.
