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To be listened to makes us feel seen, understood, and valued.
To be ignored or have our listening go unanswered makes us feel hurt, afraid, and sometimes enraged.
And, when our kids don’t listen to us, it can trigger a cascade of feelings and worries that reach both backward into the past and forward toward the future.
Let’s take a closer look at listening, and at what happens to us and to our kids when listening falls apart.
Read moreMost of us have the experience of feeling very angry at our kids at least occasionally. And, more than any other feeling we experience—in parenting or in other aspects of our lives—anger seems to evoke the most shame in us.
Here are a few thoughts about this particularly intense feeling, and how you might begin (or continue) to work with it, especially now.
Read moreI often think about something a very thoughtful dad of two said to me during a coaching session last year. We were talking about his transition home after long days at work, and how hard he tried to come into the house with an open heart and mind.
Things had been very challenging with his 5-year-old son, and he worried about what he might encounter when he opened the door. He worried too about how triggering his son’s behavior often felt.
He tried to shed his day on the commute home, and plug back into family life with energy. But, he said, as soon as he stepped through the door, he felt as if he were “back in the lion’s den again, ready for war.”
Read moreWe were traveling last weekend, visiting my parents in Florida to celebrate my dad’s 90th birthday. It was lovely, but possibly slightly boring for a 5-year-old. So, the day after the party we hit the mall to find some play spaces for him to move his body a bit. (That’s how they do it in Florida!)
The mall had a High Jump—one of those contraptions where they hook you up to a harness and some bungee cords and you can jump super high on a trampoline. Naturally, our kid was like a moth to a flame.
My son had to wait for a couple of other kids before it was his turn, sitting in a little chair inside the ring containing the High Jump. At one point, excited by all the jumping, he stood up. The ride operator immediately barked, “sit down!” He did, chastened.
Read moreOne of the biggest challenges we face as parents is knowing how to respond when our children have a big feeling—when they get angry, very sad, frustrated, or even super excited.
This work begins for us when our babies are tiny, when they sometimes cry for prolonged periods for seemingly no reason.
And it continues as our children grow into older babies, toddlers, and beyond.
How we meet our child’s big feelings will teach them how to meet their own feelings, and, I’d argue, how to understand themselves as they grow.
Read moreIn a recent post about limit setting, I argued that, for our passionate little movers, limits are like the railings on a beautiful yet precarious dance floor. We need them to provide safety and security as our kids explore the world and their place in it.
In this post I want to explore in greater detail how limit setting can look, through the lens of a beautiful path for living and relating to others called The Four-Fold Way®.
Read more
Fog in the Grand Canyon
I recently got a question from a young couple about to embark on their marriage and parenting journey. The question was about setting limits for children, and whether and how to do it. One of them grew up with many firm limits, while the other was raised to find his own way and make his own choices for the most part. Both felt very strongly that the way they were raised was the best way.
Which one of them was right? they asked.
Read moreLearning a little bit more about why tantrums happen, as well as what we can do to weather them in a way that supports both our child and our own needs, can help us get through these long moments with more of our sanity intact.
Read moreHer are some simple, respectful parenting tools that I recommend when you find yourself behaving like the parent you don’t want to be—either by accident or because you can’t seem to stop yourself.
Read moreFertile Ground Parenting
Caroline Griswold
415.484.8889
caroline@fertilegroundparenting.com
