The most common thing for parents I meet with to be stressed and shamed about is their yelling.
They report being mightily confused and confronted by how they can calmly manage a team of staff at work only to elevate into a shrieking hot mess around that particular child of theirs who for the life of them can’t follow a simple instruction. It feels out of control. It feels so far from how they intend to parent. They often leave for work embarrassed at what the neighbours would have heard *again* that morning.
If you can relate then I invite you to consider this:
Our years of success in settings like school, uni and work have come from building our capacity in ‘efficiency thinking’. To-Do lists and always thinking a couple of steps ahead to prioritise a series of tasks so that our end-goal can be met in the most efficient way possible.
While also useful towards running a household, an over-reliance quickly burns out our clutch because our children don’t think that way. They can’t yet. The part of their brain (prefrontal cortex) that governs executive function isn’t mapped in. It is purposely designed by nature that way so that as kids they can curiously move through the world open to every possibility ripe for soaking up learning from wherever they spontaneously find it.
When our attachment to efficiency-thinking meets with their openness-to-distraction we hit unrealistic expectation-ville and the yelling starts.
What this year can you do to slow down the frenetic pace of life you’ve been asking yourself and your family to operate at?
*Interesting fact: over 25% of parents that link in with Love Parenting work as Engineers. It is both uncanny and makes a world of sense given what I’ve described above.