Emma Stone hits the court, with an ace of a double
‘We all get mad, we all yell.’ Experts urge resetting after battle with kids
It was one of the first few weeks of school last year, and I couldn’t believe my daughter had already lost her sweatshirt.
As we stood at the front door of our home, I found myself informing my usually conscientious child, at high volume, that I wouldn’t allow her to take sweatshirts to school anymore because clearly this one incident meant she wasn’t capable of keeping track of her belongings.
Then I thought: Hold on, what in the world am I doing?
I was imposing a ridiculous punishment and helping my daughter see herself as untrustworthy, and that wasn’t the kind of parent I wanted to be.
But while we’ve got many chances to mess up, we have just as many opportunities to start over — a theme that’s especially resonant this week as Jews around the world celebrated the Jewish new year on Rosh Hashanah.
The High Holidays are a time to take stock of our deeds, reflect on our lives and hit reset. But as parents, we first have to accept that we probably will continue to make mistakes.
“We’re all in this same human condition,” said parenting expert Joanna Faber. “We all get mad sometimes, we all yell sometimes, we all lose things, we all get grumpy. And then we get better.”
All the same, it can be tough to figure out how to turn around a parent-child interaction gone sour.
“If your four-year-old shoved his two-year-old sister to the floor and screamed, and you screamed at him and dragged him to his room and the whole thing just ended horribly, how do you come back from that?” asked Faber, whose mother is parenting expert Adele Faber “My mom has a phrase for it: ‘Erase and start again!’ ”
Unlike in the traditional High Holiday prayer service, no breastbeating need be involved. “I’m not heavy on apologizing to a child because you got angry and you screamed,” Joanna Faber said.
Instead, Faber suggested two major steps as parents pivot from explosive confrontation to constructive conversation: Acknowledge your feelings and talk about the future rather than express excessive remorse.
“You can say, ‘Boy, I was really angry and I yelled at you, and you did not like being yelled at and you were really upset, and that was no fun for anybody.’”
As for talking about the future, make a practical action plan with your child. It’s more helpful than repeated scolding or lecturing. The focus for the child, Faber said, should be: “What should
I do to fix the mistake? How should I make amends? What should I do next time?”
You may not remember to make an action plan when your six-year-old spills milk all over your brand-new leather bag or your teenager takes the car without permission. You may end up yelling loud enough to wake the neighbours and grounding your child for the foreseeable future.
But the idea that we can rewind and begin again means we don’t have to feel locked into an unwanted power struggle.
Once you’ve calmed down, said Faber, “you can say, ‘I don’t think punishment is a good idea. I don’t think it’s going to work.’ ”
For very young kids, bringing a sense of play into it can be more helpful than logic, she said. Try rounding up all the dirty tissues before the tissue monster gets them, rather than constantly nudging your daughter to throw out her used Kleenex.
I’m drawn to the notion of starting over because it makes room for the reality that parents are fallible.
That time my daughter lost her sweatshirt, I managed to interrupt my own rant, telling her: “You know, sometimes I lose things, too.”
The atmosphere shifted, as it sometimes does, and I suddenly had my children’s attention.
My second-grader lifted her head to look at me and I told her I knew that most of the time she did bring her things home.
I reminded her that tying her sweatshirt to her backpack would make it easier to remember it.
I went from feeling like I hoped no one could overhear the way I was speaking, to feeling like I had just transformed defeat into victory.
“Changing course is what it’s all about,” Faber told me.
“Your first instinct sometimes is to lash out, and then, as you see you’re heading for the rocky waters there, a little light goes on in the back of your head and says: ‘Change course! Change course!’ ”
There’s something redemptive about knowing that even though we parents are likely to find ourselves heading for rocky waters again and again, we retain the power to swerve away — on Rosh Hashanah or any other time of the year.