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Parenting is hard. Good parenting is harder.
My journey as a parent has been long and difficult, and I’ve learned an awful lot along the way.
So, I thought I would share the things that have made the biggest difference in my relationship with my children. Each has required a lot of work and a lot of energy, but now that they are firmly in place, they allow us all to live with some ease.
#Parenting #Writing #Books #Children #Family #Scotland #WritingCommunity #Reading
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Parenting is not about controlling children. It’s about controlling yourself.
I remind myself of this all the time. 99% of the work is internal. Managing my own reactivity, my tiredness, my triggers, my expectations. My children follow the emotional temperature I set, not the words I say. This is most of the effort that is required in parenting that works.
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I learn from people who know more than I do.
I read a lot. I ask questions. I change my mind. I don’t treat parenting like something I’m meant to instinctively understand. Good information makes me a better parent.
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I read about neurodevelopment really early on.
Not to optimise my children or turn their childhood into a project, but to understand what’s realistic for a nervous system at different ages. Most conflict in family life comes from expecting a child to do something their brain simply cannot do yet. Once I saw the developmental picture, so much dropped into place: the struggles, the gaps, the limits.
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I model what I want them to learn.
I can’t expect calm if I never show it. I can’t expect accountability if I never apologise. I can’t expect emotional maturity if I am always defensive. Kids learn more from what we do than what we say. We spend so much time analysing children’s behaviour when, in reality, the most effective place to intervene is in ourselves.
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I don’t argue with my children about their reality.
If they tell me how something felt to them, even if they say I said something I don’t remember saying, or that my tone was harsh when I thought it wasn’t, I try not to argue. They’re describing their perception, their experience. Mine is just a different one, not a more accurate one.
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I don’t moralise. I problem-solve.
I don’t frame my children’s behaviour as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, even in my own head. Adults forget how hard the things we expect of kids actually are. We struggle with the same impulses but when a child struggles, it’s ‘bad behaviour.’ Moralising turns ordinary human difficulty into shame, guilt, fear. If something’s going wrong, I stay neutral, look at what’s driving it, & we problem-solve together. The behaviour isn't a character flaw, it's information.
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