We Know What Helps Your Kids, But It's A Hard Sell

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”

-Carl Jung

The way we first learn to interpret the world and other people has a profound and lasting impact on the way we later navigate our lives and relationships. These early experiences shape our concepts for everything—our sense of self, other, what is right and what is wrong, how people should and will behave, how to get our needs met, how to handle our emotions, personal challenges, and how we conceptualize concepts of success, safety, and worth. Thus, ones early experiences, and more importantly ones understanding (or lack thereof) of those experiences, has a massive impact on their approach to and experience of parenting. And it can go either way.

When your child is suffering, acting in and acting out, it is entirely counterintuitive to stop and shift your focus from immediate tending to the current conflict. It may even seem “out there” or dangerously off base. Parents want nothing more than to keep their kids safe and help them to be successful. Any significant shift from focusing on their children, especially in times of immense struggle, can feel unsettling or even negligent. Though natural, such a singular focus is not rooted in what we know about relational behaviors and interventions that work. Many developmental psychologists are suggesting that parents can best help their children by getting better educated—educated about the specific struggles their children are facing, and about how attachments have been formed throughout the family and generations, the dynamic of the bonds, where they may have been disrupted, and how these patterns contort or repeat in various sneaky forms, until something disruptive enough happens that on our knees we seek this different, life-changing, information.

Though it is not the only factor, your attachment bond with your child has everything to do with how well, or if, you can resolve conflicts, communicate, connect and relate. This is not to be confused with blame—you are not to blame for your child’s struggles. Yet, how you interact with their, and your own, feelings, thoughts, needs, and beliefs, has a tremendous impact on the interactions you have with your child as well as how they feel in relation to you and any challenges you are facing. If your child is struggling with more severe behaviors and mental health issues, it can be all the more counter-intuitive to stop to learn about how your attachment style, communication style, and emotional/relational patterns translate and interact with his/hers. Yet, in such trying circumstances this will be you primary tool for having the sort of positive impact you wish to have. As Daniel Siegel says, an adult parents’ understanding of their own history, and how that has impacted them and formed their perspectives and behaviors, is the single most influential factor in determining the attachment styles of their children. And how we are, or are not connected, has everything to do with how we act, speak, think, and feel about ourselves and one another.

So what can you do to really help your children? Engage in your process of own personal growth and exploration—shift the question set from being about them, to a question set more focused on yourself. Ask, Who am I? How did I get here? Where did my beliefs and expectations get formed? How do I handle emotion? Pain? Fear? How do I define a good relationship? My worth? Success? Failure? And how might this impact my children…?