🤫 Parenting experts dirty secret 🤫

The dirty secret of parenting experts? Their children aren’t perfect. They aren’t emotionally mature, perfectly behaved little angels that never lie, snatch, fight or ignore their parents. They are children. And good parenting experts wouldn’t expect their children to be those things, because they know they are developing and learning and that most behaviour is developmentally appropriate.

Every week, I deliver parenting advice to your inbox- are my kids perfect? Absolutely not. Incidentally, when I use the word perfect- my daughter immediately corrects me and says “there is no such thing as perfect”, and she is right.

As an example of this, another parent recently accused my daughter of some mean behaviour towards their child. I was shocked, because it was so unexpected, and her school had told me she is very kind and there were no problems in her relationships. How do you react when this happens?

You model the behaviour you are trying to teach your children

1. Validate feelings. Instead of becoming defensive, I listened to the parents and what they told me their child felt. Although our instinct is to be defensive, we can’t preach about validating feelings, and then dismiss those that make us uncomfortable.

2. Recognise bad behaviours, not bad children. When we label children as bullies it implies this is a permanent feature of them, and not a behaviour that can change and improve. We also remove the need to find the source of the negative behaviour.

3. Take accountability. Apologies that are not really apologies (“sorry, if you felt like that…”) are so common, because of defensiveness, a failure to validate others feelings, being uncomfortable with difficult emotions, and not being accountable for our actions. None of these are outcomes we want for our children, so we have to model the better responses.

4. Don’t talk down other children. How you respond when your child tells you another child has said something mean to them, is as important as if it is your child that has said something mean. While it might be tempting to call the child a bully, we simply teach our children to label other children and not deal with the situation.

5. Consult the experts. Many people work tirelessly to provide parents with information to empower their parenting, use those resources. I used the Anti-Bullying Alliance resources to teach my daughter bullying behaviours and how to be a good friend https://anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/ 

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