Parenting With Patience: Turn frustration into connection with 3 easy steps

INTRODUCTION

Our anger and annoyance are more detrimental to us than the things themselves that anger or annoy us. -Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor

I recall one of my less-than-stellar parenting moments that I wrote about in Discipline Without Distress; to this day, all my children also remember it. I had a really bad day. I was under stress. I needed to get a handout ready for a class, and my printer wasn’t working. I had four children under eight years of age. I was furiously trying to get the printer working when the two younger children started fighting. I yelled. I fumed. I threatened to put them in their rooms and take away TV for a week. Completely frustrated, I took a hammer to the printer. The children were in tears. I was in tears, and the printer wasn’t in great shape either. I felt embarrassed for demonstrating a very poor expression of anger in front of the children, and I regretted taking away TV for a week. I knew when I calmed down that the TV punishment would never be enforced. The printer and handout problems eventually were solved, but the relationship between the children and I was not repaired as quickly. Now that my kids are older, we laugh about that incident, which was not one of my prouder parenting moments. Luckily, children’s memories don’t start much before four years of age, which is Mother Nature’s way of forgiving parents during those really tough years of parenting small children. On the flip side, we still have to be careful how we handle stress because children’s brains record what they see, feel, and experience.

Living with other people is joyful, satisfying, and hard work. Because we don’t always agree and we have needs that may conflict with the needs of our partners and children, strong emotions arise. We feel anger and frustration. It’s a normal part of life and relationships. Anger is one of the hardest things to deal with in the family because of the perception that families must always be loving. But anger can be very productive.

As a wife for 25 years and mom of five children, three of who are now adults, I found myself getting angry quite a lot in their early years. Sleepless nights, messes, spills, destroyed items, children who don’t listen, feeling unappreciated, and a rushed schedule can bring out the worst in normally nice people. As children grow, there are fewer and fewer issues to yell about, so parenting school-agers and teens becomes easier. However, parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth. Parenting requires constantly caring for another person, and staying patient under time pressures is a goal that many parents find difficult to achieve.

As a professional educator who teaches parenting and child development, I resolved to never punish my children and managed to do that for the most part. However, many times I yelled and went off on angry tirades. I threw things and broke a few others. I swore a lot. Thank goodness that no one is perfect.

I teach parents not to use physical punishment and many of us are not doing that any more, yet we resort to yelling and swearing which might be considered a form of emotional punishment. A New York Times article even went so far as to say that yelling is the new spanking. (Stout, 2009) A 2003 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that parental yelling is quite prolific: of the 991 families interviewed, 90% of them admitted that they shouted, screamed, or yelled at their children at least once in the previous year. (Sutherland-Smith, 2013)

Although sporadic yelling probably doesn’t cause children irreparable harm, we don’t like it when we behave that way and we really hate it when our children copy us.

We wake up each morning and hope for more patience. At night, we feel tremendous guilt when kissing our sleeping angels goodnight and remembering their scared little faces when we yelled at them during the day. We wonder what happened between the morning and the evening.

As children grow, two things happen; they become much more verbal and able to understand our words and hence listen more, and they become much more physically capable of navigating their own needs and lives. Those two factors make parenting much easier and the opportunities for yelling greatly decrease as children age. Patience comes easier.

You are probably reading this book because you don’t want to wait until your children are school-aged to have more peace in your home and wish to cut down on the yelling now. Good for you! I hope this short manual helps. The three steps you’ll learn have helped many thousands of parents that I’ve taught in groups and classes.

Start small. Practice just Step 1 for a month and see how much calmer things are. Then try Step 1 and Step 2 in tandem. Then do all three steps. You will be well on your way to more conscious and non-punitive parenting.

Keep in mind that there is no one correct way to parent. There are many, many good ways to parent and a few not-so-good ways. The reason for so much published information about parenting is that no family is the same. A family combines different personalities, values, attitudes, beliefs, temperaments, genders, ages, learning styles, and intelligences; each member has a unique relationship with every other member. With so many variables, it’s no wonder there is such a plethora of varying parenting advice. Innumerable dynamics elicit innumerable approaches.

The one thing that unites all family members and differentiates family relationships from those we share with others—neighbours, friends, employers, employees, and colleagues—is that family relationships are love-based relationships and we must treat our family members with care. However, that doesn’t mean we feel unconditional loyalty for family members. And just because a person is a family member doesn’t mean that we can abuse them or take liberties that we would not take with people outside the family.

You Are a Fabulous Parent!

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children. -Bill Watterson, Cartoonist

If you are reading this book, you are a wonderful parent. Please rest assured that your occasional lapses of anger will not wreck your child or destroy his brain development or mess him up for life! If you are a kind, patient parent for about 70% of the time, you are doing well and your child will be absolutely fine. You are human and so are your children; parents all lose it at times. Cut yourself some slack and let go of the guilt.

Stress affects all of our lives, including kids. The three types of stress include positive, tolerable, and toxic stress. In all cases, stress produces cortisol and adrenalin in the body. Stress is felt in the brain and in body responses. (Harvard University, 2014)

Children experience positive stress when preparing for sleep-away camp, looking forward to a birthday party, or studying for an exam. Parents experience positive stress when preparing for a presentation, planning a holiday, or trying a new sport. Positive stress is temporary, builds resiliency, and allows us to feel good about our accomplishments.

Tolerable stress describes a negative, temporary event in a child or parent’s life: divorce, a hurricane, a move, or a death of a beloved relative. What makes this type of stress tolerable is that the stressful effects are buffered by at least one caring, loving adult who supports and helps a person through the trauma. The stress eventually subsides and the person withstands the stressful effects.

Toxic stress includes ongoing, prolonged, inescapable, negative events that are not buffered by caring people in our lives. Stress caused by a death in the family, neglect, abuse, addictions, or parents with ongoing mental health problems becomes toxic when a child or parent has no one to talk to or provide support, comfort and care.

The science behind anger and brain development shows that toxic stress affects a child’s brain architecture: namely, the ongoing release of cortisol and adrenalin negatively affects neurons. Temporary release of cortisol and adrenalin, as in cases of positive stress, provides motivation and energy. Ongoing release with no cessation, as in cases of toxic stress, can be damaging. It’s like a car driving on the highway, in which acceleration is the cortisol and adrenalin. The temporary acceleration used to pass another vehicle is good. Ongoing acceleration is not good and can damage the motor if used too long. The same is true in parenting. For example, if you yelled at your child every day for five hours and she had no one else to turn to, her brain development could be affected by that stress. Children are fine with positive and tolerable stress, which is occasional and not ongoing, and when still buffered by caring adults. Children show amazing resiliency to normal parenting anger. So if you lose it once in a while but are generally a kind and patient parent—which most parents are—you will not inflict long-term brain damage. You are a great parent!

What Every Person Needs to Know About Anger

Let’s explore a few facts about anger:

Anger is a normal, healthy, productive emotion that everyone feels. Anger is a part of the human experience.

Anger can be neutralized by appropriate or inappropriate expression. The more you express your anger, the more it loses its grip on you.

The ultimate goal of anger is to solve a problem. Anger alerts us to change! This is a good thing.

Change can be as simple as letting go of the issue and realizing it’s not a big deal.

Or perhaps it is a big deal and you need to make major resolutions and commitment to solving the problem. If you sleep on the issue and are still angry the next day, chances are you can’t let it go and need to resolve it.

We can choose to not give our anger the energy or gas it needs to continue. We choose when to stop anger. We can feel it, express it, and then change what caused it.

We usually vent anger on those closest to us. Let’s face it—our families are safe outlets. They love us no matter what. Unfortunately, they get to experience our anger more than outsiders because we can relax and be our true selves with people we love and trust. Familiarity with family and the safety of home make it easier to be angry there rather than with a peer group, friends, or at work. As my daughter says, Home is where you go when you can stop being artificially nice to people.

Others can’t make us angry. They do things and we react. We own our anger. Rather than say, She made me so angry, we need to say, I felt angry when she... We take responsibility for feeling and expressing our anger. Anger is all about us and how we react to things. We all have certain buttons that can be pressed, and we need to analyze what it is that makes those buttons hot.

Anger is often a secondary emotion caused by an unacknowledged first emotion, such as frustration, fear, jealousy, stress, hunger, embarrassment, loss, grief, and sadness. Fatigue, feeling unappreciated, and lack of me time are three big ones for parents.

Anger is hard on the body. It causes the release of stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenalin, which are beneficial for us in the short term, but endanger our health when sustained long term.

Anger usually indicates we feel hurt in some way. Reducing our triggers helps to reduce the amount of anger we have to deal with.

Our homes are living classrooms for learning how to handle anger. As children, we may have been taught how to handle our anger either directly, such as being told to Use your words! or indirectly, by watching our parents, TV characters, or even the audience at a hockey game! When you were a child, how did your parents express anger? My parents yelled and swore a lot. I tend to yell a lot and my children do, too.

Children need to witness healthy expression of anger. They need to see adults use anger productively to make change.

Unresolved anger will resurface at a later time. Anger management does not mean suppressing anger. It means recognizing it, feeling it, expressing it, and then using it productively to solve the problem.

Anger and aggression are not the same. Anger can be expressed assertively using I-statements rather than You-statements. It can also be expressed in many other ways.

Respectful anger does not hurt healthy relationships or people. We choose if and how we vent anger. An expression of anger shows that we care enough about the other person to discuss the issue and have enough confidence in the relationship to reveal our true selves.

Anger does not reflect badly on the character or personality of others. Being angry does not mean being angry forever. Feelings are fleeting. Like cravings, anger builds, crests, and then subsides. It is only temporary.

Feeling angry does not always happen when we think it should or when we think we have the right to be. It is as natural as our feet. We don’t question why our feet are part of our bodies, so why do we question if we should feel angry about something?

Anger seems inappropriate only when we don’t understand it.

How we express our anger can trigger or escalate other’s anger. We have to be very conscious about that when we express anger.

When dealing with anger in children, we can’t deny our own angry feelings, because then our child’s outbursts will trigger ours and we will react with anger. We, as the adult in the situation, need to stay calm and find healthy ways to neutralize our anger in order to help our children with their anger. As adults, we have had more experience with anger and have more self-control techniques built up over time than children do.

Punishment for expressing feelings, such as anger, can be very disastrous for children and result in the repression of feelings. Repression of feelings can have serious health risks: high blood pressure, depression, stress, worry, addictions, eating disorders, cutting, heart attack, stroke, and many other illnesses.

Children need to learn to feel, express, and resolve their anger as a genuine life skill. Learning to handle anger productively takes at least the first twelve years of childhood and much repetition.

Most young children express anger with physical aggression that becomes more frequent by age two, peaks at age three, and then tapers off around four when children become more verbal.

The most important point is that anger should not be expressed in any way that hurts ourselves, hurts other people, or hurts our treasured belongings.

Anger begins in the brain

Anger starts as a perceived hurt or injustice. We misinterpret information or make assumptions.

It can be stopped at this point by asking, Do I know everything? Is there something that I am missing? Should I ask more questions? Seek first to understand! Often, additional information reduces anger because we better understand the intent of the other person.

It’s very, very difficult to listen to another person’s point of view when we are angry. But it’s very important to do so, because often we make assumptions before we have all the information.

If your assumptions are incorrect, calm down and be glad that you didn’t act out by hurting someone or something. If your assumptions are correct, express your anger without hurting anyone or anything, by asserting yourself with an I-statement, and move on to problem-solving for now or next time.

Anger continues in the body

Anger can cause an accelerated heart rate, heated and flushed cheeks, a burning