How To Be Successful At Parenting
Have you wondered how to be good at parenting?
After all, that little magical land known as parenting is the destination, whether intended or not, of a great many relationships. And, a great many writers and other parents will then go on to tell that couple in a relationship that parenting is not some magical land. It’s sweat, tears, frustrations, aches, and on and on. And that juxtaposition where magical meets ugly-hard is the simplest way to understand parenting, particularly in those early years. It’s no different from anything else in life that you might endeavor that you wish to be a great experience – a relationship, career, travels, or anything else. There’s ugly and there’s beauty; hard and smooth.
For many would-be parents, the glorious land is not that time when the child is young, but when it is finally a teen and able to communicate more as an adult. Other to-be parents dream of their child’s actual adulthood when they can have a more equitable, adult-adult relationship. Still others have children who will care for them in old age.
Reverse-Engineering Parenting With the Erlandson Family
And it’s precisely there that I want to start in a sort of reverse-engineering of parenting, as a means to shed light on and offer guidance in those early, incredibly formative years of parenting. If you are even remotely familiar with my work, you’ve heard me discuss my own mother and father, and their parenting of their six children.
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So, the facts are these:
My mom died in 2021 at the age of 93. Dad died in 2020, at the beginning of Covid, at age 92.
In her final year of life, as she knew her own energy was winding down, Mom, for the third time in our lives, went to each of her now adult children, now in their 50s and 60s, to once again seek to “reclaim her rocks,” as I like to call it. As she and Dad had done when each of us was in our 20s, then again in the 10 years before her death, she came to us now and said, to paraphrase,
“I want my rocks back.
In your childhood and in your life, I’ve put rocks in that bag on your back with the pains I have caused you, the harm I’ve done, the ways I’ve hurt you, and the messages I’ve sent you. And, if those rocks don’t come out, you’ll be weighted down in your life. I won’t have that.
Anything – ANYTHING! – I’ve done, please tell me; talk to me; give me my rocks back.”
Furthermore,
Approximately 5 years before my father died, my sister, who had lived in Texas for decades for her work and had built a good life there, moved back to Minnesota to be near my aging parents and to help them. She, who had been the Administrative Assistant to the president of a very large corporation, effectively came home to apply her skills in service of my parents.
At the same time, I already had three other siblings there with their spouses.
One sibling a 30-year military veteran specializing in finance tended my parents’ finances.
One sibling was in surgery every day administering anesthesia, and faithfully covered all of my parents’ medical appointments, questions, and direction, along with another sibling who had been an oncology hospice social worker for decades, literally specializing in tending all - literally all - facets of the aging and dying.
Additionally, one in-law had a PhD in physical therapy and was on top of my parents’ upkeep in that vein.
Two other in-laws brought massive emotional support and logistical help.
In other words, my parents existed within a cocoon of adult kids tending to their every need, despite the fact that mom and dad were quite independent and lived by the mantra, among others, of “Don’t be a burden.” While my parents did give themselves permission to ask for help, they were okay with hearing ‘no’ and they never put their burdens onto their kids, particularly their emotional struggles.
Parenting Your Own Parents
But do you see the interplay between those two concepts? At the end of life, my parents had kids/in-laws moving across the country and moving mountains to serve them in whatever small ways they could, relative to the giant love those same kids felt they had always gotten from their parents. For the kids, it was a labor of love.
But do you see how that was largely created by the very ethos of my mother (and father) of owning their own shit, so has to have as little enduring negative impact on their kids (and, thus, their kids’ kids) as possible.
It’s that spirit of contrition and atonement, particularly when it came to emotional wounds, and that humble willingness to admit wrongs and own their failures that unblocked the love to flow freely from their children. My parents knew that pain blocks love. And, they knew they had the power to remove the pain, for they had caused it when we were children and teens, very often unwittingly.
As they always had, Mom knew in the end that it cost her nothing to take back the rocks, to own where she had caused pain. As long as she could get her own ego out of the way – the ego that every parent has that wants to believe “I’m a great parent and made no/few mistakes” and can’t bear to admit fault – she could bring perhaps the greatest gift to her children, which is the release of the rocks of pain and negative messaging.
Great Parenting Begins With Humility And Strength to Admit Failings
We see, right there in the end-of-life snapshot, where great parenting begins: in the humility and strength to admit her own brokenness and failings, rather than gratify her own ego needs.
Sven’s Family Background
Rewind the tape a very long way, back to 1967.
I was born into a very loving, loud, boisterous family. Four brothers and one sister, who by her own reckoning was definitely one of the boys. I recall, even from my very oldest memories, my mother being quieter, and kind but strong and firm. Dad, over the years, was never unkind but laughed, and taught us things like how to fix our own bikes, use the table saw, and to trim or fell trees.
I chalk most of their parenting deliberateness up to the fact that they were just kissing their 40th birthdays when they had me, the youngest. I can’t speak to what they were like as 28-year-old parents when my eldest sib was born. But I loved that I got parents who were almost never in a hurry, except on Sunday mornings when trying to get six kids to church on time. They were deliberate, methodical, and yet left room for relaxed improvisation. And, in an unpopular thing to bring up nowadays, I was spanked, now and then. Though, decades later, my mother would confess, “Sven, by the time you were four, I couldn’t handle you.”
Longing for More Attention
I was the last of six, but was also a physically large child and, whether it grew out of some innate spirit or the very fact that she couldn’t control me, I had a large personality. Also, whether because of that sort of pulling back implied in the inability to handle/control me or not, the other thing I can see so clearly in my childhood was the longing for more attention.
I was told every day of my life by both parents that I was loved; was hugged every day; and was bathed in supportive words. But, I also lived in a home with five other kids needing attention. Mom and Dad had their own attention needs, too, particularly Dad. So, there was just a lot of competition for the attention, if not the love.
Counter-messaging between Mom and Dad
Perhaps most significantly, what I recall being modeled for us was a willingness, particularly in my mom who was the full-time parent until I was in junior high, to listen. I always felt heard with Mom. Therefore, there was always an immediate off-loading of burdens, pains, hurts, and anxieties as they naturally arose in my childhood. Dad was so self-effacing in his own way that the only harm he ever really caused was he was another mouth to be fed when it came to needing attention, usually acquired by incessant talking or telling the same stories, over and again.
Thus, the modeling was this stark counter-messaging between mom and dad: feeling heard by mom, feeling so very unheard by dad. The latter enabled me, in adulthood, to greatly understand and appreciate the power of the former. Except for that one thing, dad was great – a strong farm kid who tried to sneak into WWII at age 17, wrestled at the University of Minnesota in the 1940s, and went on to be a gentle, talkative Lutheran pastor, who came to all of my orchestra concerts, theater productions, and choir concerts, as well as a few sporting events in my younger years.
Appreciation for Having the Room to Be Me
What’s my point?
My childhood was not without flaws, but I was given attention, felt heard, wished I had gotten more attention, and felt terrifically unheard. And, at this stage of the game, as a 56-year-old Gen-Xer, I begrudge them nothing. In fact, I feel so profoundly blessed to have gotten the exact parents I got. I needed to experience viscerally the frustration of not feeling heard, as well as being taught by my mom when I was 13 to journal out of me all of my thoughts, pains, frustrations, anger, and the like.
I love the room they gave me to be this loud, odd duck, wildly free spirit, who quit college three times, got thrown out of Lutheran ministry three times, was always the (obnoxiously) loudest in the family, and went and lived on the streets with the homeless for 2.5 years well into middle age as my own kids were in their late teens/early-20s.
Can You Be a Good Parent if You've Had a Bad Experience as a Child?
Yes, if you can let go of ego and heal your own shit. I absolutely believe that what corrupts the parenting process more than anything is frail egos and unhealed childhood trauma.
I failed my own children and missed out on years of their lives because I didn’t have the strength to stand up to their mother and her own ego needs that proclaimed when we were first dating, “I want to have children so that I’ll have someone who’ll love me forever.”
I was young and didn’t know who I, myself, really was. I had not healed my own shit from my past, and had not found my own centering internal voice. I was still in the process of burning through all of the not-mes, in quest of authenticity. And so, my own children grew up receiving messages of feeling unimportant and unloved, at times.
This was stuff that required times of reckoning in their 20s and will continue to be plumbed in their 30s and beyond. The last ten years have been lovely, as they’ve more and more opened up and released to me the ways I’ve hurt and disappointed them, as I’ve strived to be the more consistent parent I wasn’t.
What Parenting Lessons Did You Learn?
Go to f*king therapy!
Do it now, before the kids.
Go into your shit from your childhood. No matter how terrific your childhood was, your parents made mistakes. EVERY PARENT MAKES MISTAKES, and those mistakes cause damage, often long-lasting.
>> See Why and How to Heal Your Inner Child
And you can tough-guy/tough-gal your way through it, at least for a few decades, but it will – I repeat, WILL – either directly impact or insidiously, negatively influence your own children. It always does.
Food, shelter, and clothing are not enough. The emotional needs of your kids need to be tended to, as much as anything else, by both parents, which requires both parents to get their own pains and problems out of the way, which means some form of therapy or serious self-help.
THIS is how you prevent yourself from making the same mistakes your parents made and it reduces the pain you inflict on your children.
And, just for the record, just doing the opposite of what your parents did really is no different from doing the same as what your parents did. Read that again.
Insofar as you’re still taking your cues from your parents (and not doing actual research into good parenting), doing their opposite or doing the same parenting is really not different.
For example, I’ve had clients who grew up in homes where there was extreme touch and uber focus on the kids, to the point where by the time the kids reached middle school they felt suffocated by the over-weaning parents. The parents were so trying to just do the opposite of the bone-dry, unemotional, non-affectionate they were themselves raised in that they created toxicity of a completely different flavor. Resultingly, somewhere inside them, their kids innately sensed that the excessive attention was more about the parent’s needs than those of the kid, almost like the parent was trying to prove him- or herself.
So, again, the “just do the opposite” strategy is not an example of deliberate parenting.
How Can Parents With Anxiety or Depression Be Good Parents?
As mentioned, I made some major mistakes with my own children. I hurt them. And I was definitely dealing with my own depression, largely influenced by my own past.
I was unable to find a therapist who could really take me down into all of it and heal it. So, I had to do it on my own, which is why it took longer for me. But the real work was about getting my own shit out of the way so that I could be fully present to my children.
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What Are Signs That You Need to Take a Break to Regroup or Refocus Yourself?
And this is the biggest indicator that you need to regroup, refocus, and get help in parenting or, really, in anything.
It’s when my own feelings inside have become so swollen and overwhelming that I’m not fully present to this person I claim to love, or where my own inner emotional charges are spilling out onto my children. Those charges can include feeling overwhelmed, fatigued, angry, sad, fearful, alone, invaded, depressed, and more.
It is for this reason that, especially when it comes to parenting, deliberate self-work, be it daily or weekly, is so critical not just to success, but to sanity. The more you willfully flush out all of the powerful or overwhelming thoughts, fears, and feelings, the more you are able to be truly present to your children.
There has to be active engagement, regularly, with the shit going on inside you, NOT just from today or this week, but from your past. It is that past stuff that is using up most of the memory in your hard drive, so to speak, thus depressing the system’s capacity to execute even basic functions in the day-to-day work of parenting.
What Are the Biggest Parenting Concerns You Should Pay Attention To?
Emotional fluctuations in your children, in yourself, and in your parenting partner, if you have one.
It is when a person becomes pregnant with emotion that they become unable to handle the tasks at hand and often do the most damage.
If you feel your own shit rising up in you, not just in a day but let’s say over the course of a year, there are big problems ahead, many of which you are about to create. Get professional help, now!
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If you see deviations or fluctuations in your child’s emotional responses, engagement in life, or seemingly inexplicable physical problems, something is going on inside that child. And if you lack the ability to extract or suss out the emotional stuff affecting your child (and don’t feel bad if you can’t, not every parent can), get professional help for that child, now!
If you see swelling of your partner’s emotions, such that they’re taking it out on or checking out from the kids or you, encourage them to get help now, or even talk it out with you (up to a point, after which they will need pro help) or start their own journaling and self-care.
If you begin to see a degeneration in the marriage, if there is one, this too is an indicator of crud going on inside one or both partners. The decay of that fundamental parent relationship will adversely affect those children, both in the present and down the road. Get help now, not just as a couple but individually for each person. Or mix professional help with hardcore self-help work.
That inability to be present to the child, to the spouse, and to one’s self are the very things that are indicators of existing problems and future problems. It is for this reason that building a life and raising children requires such discipline of self, deliberateness, and teamwork, where possible. Willy-nilly/just-wing-it parenting creates a lot of pain for children, which invariably protracts into adulthood.
What About Parental Transitions?
One of the most pivotal moments in a child’s life is preceded by one of the most pivotal moments in the parent’s life. It’s when the parent begins the deliberate process of taking half a step out of the child’s life. It begins with just that, a measured stepping back. For some parents, this happens when the child is 3; for some 13; for some 23; for some never. It is the moment when the parent begins to transfer power back to the child.
From Navigating the Basics to Becoming Your Authentic Self
I like to think of it this way.
When the child is born, it’s as if they have been implanted with a computer chip on which is written everything about who that child is, will become, won’t become, what the child will like, hate, want, aspire to, and more. Now, in the beginning, the child needs help navigating the basics of life. To some degree, the wires that connect the child to his/her own inner chip deep in their soul needed to be wired into the parent’s chip. The values of the parent do get wired into. For example, “Be nice to old people,” “Look both ways before crossing,” “Work hard but enjoy play,” etc.
But, in order for that child to ever become their authentic self – ie to become what was written on that chip – they have to begin the process of de-wiring from the parent’s chip. This is taking half a step backward. Some parents do this when the child naturally wants to do this, roughly around puberty. Some parents start much earlier, and some only defiantly do it when the young adult really doesn’t want to be around the parent anymore, if for no other reason than the parent clings too hard.
It can be a very painful moment for the parent. It can be hard to let go of the controls, hard to risk the child embarrassing you, hard to not be able to prove your worth through your kids, or hard to watch your kids struggle and even fail, at times. But all of this is necessary in the process of that child growing into an authentic person. Transitions are always the hardest. These parenting transitions are no different.
And, they can be as painful or more for the child, teen, young adult, or grown-ass human, made worse when the parent fights the process or seeks to retain control, when the parent makes it more about their own agenda than setting the child free to begin to learn to trust their own wings.
The Importance of Deliberate Parental Self-Work
Again, the necessary precursor to effectively navigating transitions is the parent engaging in deliberate self-work, addressing his/her own inner feelings and fears. Yet again, what is going on inside the parent will govern the day and the whole transition…until the young adult, or so, becomes so powerful that they command the driver’s seat of the relationship.
Unfortunately, there are some parent-child relationships where the child is grown and is now having to go through the oft-painful process of teaching the parent how they wish to be parented or what the new relationship is going to look like. Rather than the parent pre-emptively leading the process into full adulthood for the child, the adult-child has to strip the reins from the parent, often with fierce penalties to the parent for obstructing the natural evolution into adulthood.
I’ve seen this process extend into the 40s, 50s, and 60s of clients who still have a dominating, petty, or controlling parent. The natural transition into adulthood, in some ways, never happened for my client, despite a successful career and family of his/her own. The now-adult is still not possessed of his own inner guidance system. Rather, there is still an external power source (mom, dad, or whoever raised them) driving the equation of his/her life. And, that shit will destroy marriages, careers, and the next generation.
How Can You Support Your Children As They Evolve?
The short answer to being a parent who supports your children through life, you continue to take half-steps out of their lives, while surrounding them with love, listening, and positive encouragement.
Children need boundaries, chores, expectations, and repercussions, as much for their own growth as for learning how life works. But they are going to fall down, screw up, evolve, take 20 steps back at times, and go sideways in all manner of possibilities. If you lack flexibility and a willingness to encourage, those strange movements will drive you bonkers, which will in turn roll downhill onto the child, thus compounding that child or teen’s confusion, inner struggles, and frustrations.
The best way you can support your child is to both manage and extract all that is going on inside you that is causing you to be inflexible, controlling, negative, ego-driven, and consumed by your own crap.
I’m a big believer in most human interactions in replacing the over-worked term “love” with “positive attention.” I’m as big a fan of love as anyone, but that is not always the most directive term when it comes to choosing a course of action. But, positive attention is. And, it’s never more true than with children.
Are you giving each of your children alone time, focused on them, with encouragement? If not, start!
Is your spouse doing so, if not, help to make that happen. When my girlfriend and I started dating, my kids were in their 20s and living in different cities. She had one daughter living away, but she had a 14-year-old living at home. Slowly, I sought to build trust with her daughter. But, far more importantly, I insisted that my gf every week took an evening for just her daughter and her. It ended up becoming the Wednesday night ritual that they would go out for sushi and then go, on my random recommendation, to the basement of one of the local Catholic churches to play Bingo with the old ladies. Neither had ever much played Bingo, at all, but they LOVED it. It was their thing. Their relationship not only weathered the transition of us now living together but greatly improved to pave the way for her daughter’s transition into adulthood. My gf was also very deliberate about flying to visit her other daughter, just the two of them.
Children of all ages need time alone with each parent. They need to feel special. They need to feel rooted. They need to have an avenue for expression of self wherein they are accepted and loved by the two most powerful people in their lives. Acceptance, approval, affection, attention, acknowledgment of mistakes, and apologies are sooooo very crucial to the healthy development of young people, but never more so than in the intimate relationship between individual parent and individual child.
Does this require time? Yes.
Does this require effort and deliberateness? Yes.
But welcome to the NFL! This is what it means to play in the big leagues, and there ain’t no big leagues like parenting. The stakes are never greater. The potential negative outcomes are never more long-lasting.
But also, the result of focused effort is that you’re changing the world, one child at a time.
What If Your Spouse Has Parenting Issues? What If You Separate? How Can You Raise a Child Without Burdening Him/Her With Emotional Baggage?
Half of marriages end in divorce. So, it’s reasonable to assume that if you have kids in that marriage, you might run into having to co-parent with an ex. Talk about a sticky wicket.
The biggest issues in co-parenting with an ex? The exact same as I’ve been saying throughout this article: Ego and past shit. If one or both parents aren’t actively working on flushing out their own emotions and negative programming from their own past, the kids are in for a shitty ride. Fact.
Y’know what, let me make it clear, based on my own parenting mistakes and experiences. DON’T DISPARAGE THE OTHER PARENT! JUST DON’T. Just shut the f**k up. Wanna know why? Because IT HURTS A CHILD to hear their parent (either parent, or both parents) disparaged. It hurts a child, even a teen, so badly. So, you may think you’re soooooo justified in whatever vomits out of your mouth, but the person you’re hurting most is that child, not your ex. You may be hurting your ex, too, but you’re hurting the children more. Do you feel good about that?
When my first wife and I were divorcing, the therapist gave us research to read on this topic. I read it all. One of the main points was not to speak ill of the other parent to or around the children. So, I strived to do exactly that – keep my mouth shut. I wrote out all of my anger and sadness, both my own and those I felt for my children. I held out for the day I would be able to share it all with my adult kids, even if that wasn’t until they were 35. But I got it out of my system, daily. I was determined to not let my antipathy toward their mother become a cloud over and inside my kids. Now, I have no doubt I failed in that endeavor, at times, but I strived to just shut my piehole on that one subject.
Unfortunately, their mother did not. As a result, the effect was poison being poured into the ears of my children, not to mention her family and even mine. The price of her doing that was extremely high. I lost over a decade of my children’s lives. It was horrible, not just for me, but for them. They had every right to have a relationship with their father and needed it.
But, in the end, the fault was my own. And, on this notion of parenting with an ex, I teach this to my clients. When they are dealing with an ex who is actively engaged in undermining their relationship with their own children, or engaged in openly disparaging them to the kids, they have a few options:
Be silent and do nothing but keep trying to love the kids. This was the approach I took, and the price was high, in terms of years and connection lost.
Go nuclear. Real ‘War of the Roses’ shit. Engage in the same destruction of the ex’s relationship with the kids as they’re doing to you. Or,
Don’t disparage the other parent, but as necessary stand up for yourself in dispelling lies or mischaracterizations. I wish I had done more of that. And I would not have needed to disparage their mother to do so. I would have only needed to present a brief counter-argument, as necessary, without dragging the children into the full-blown swamp of heaviness. See, if the child is not getting a counter-message to whatever is being leveled against a parent, they will believe what they are being told, especially if it’s backed up by other family members, who may be in on the slander. If you can defend your position without willfully hurting the other parent, your relationship with the children needs you to do so.
I’ll be honest, I hate that this even has to be part of the divorce discussion, but it is. The hateful poisoning of children or using them to get adult needs met is too common and too painful.
So, How DO You Co-Parent With an Ex?
Respectfully. You co-parent respectfully.
Unfortunately, within the boundaries of the laws in your state or country, there is often not a lot you can do to control how the other parent raises your shared children on their own time. You don’t get to control how they parent. And if you’re convinced you know what’s best and the other parent doesn’t, this can be excruciatingly hard for some parents. So, that respectfulness may not be reciprocated.
If the other parent is outright abusive, then obviously that needs to be continually reported to the law. Short of that, if the other parent is negative, controlling, or in some way not parenting in a way you approve of, you have to provide significant counter-messaging to the child about their worth. And, you’d be wise to get that child/teen into therapy, so that there can be active work in flushing the pains out of that child.
Ultimately, both need to strive to at least somewhat get on the same page in your co-parenting. To some degree, you do have to learn to work together. My ex-wife and I did not always see eye-to-eye, but we both tacitly acknowledged that I was better at the macro and she at the micro. She was great on the day-to-day meals, school, toothbrushing, do-your-chores stuff. And I was better at charting the values, bigger parenting decisions, and deeper needs of the children, and so forth. So, in a way, despite the animus between us, there was some acceptance of each other’s ways. There just has to be that in the parenting, again assuming there is no abuse.
How Can Moms Support Dads While Caring For a Child? How Can Dads Support Moms?
I had a military guy reach out to me, this week. Young guy, with three kids. He said,
“Sven, whenever I was not deployed, I was always the one who got up in the night to give my baby a bottle or to comfort a kid after a nightmare. I worked my ass off, during the day. But she was the one doing all the parenting during the day, so getting up at night was the least I could do.
And y’know, even though I was tired as f**k, those night times of being alone with my baby or kid, there in the quiet of the night, bonded me to my kids more than almost anything. I never felt so close to them.”
We support the ones we love by busting ass for them. That’s how we support them. It’s never more true than in parenting.
An old girlfriend of mine reached out to me for counseling, recently. She was really struggling with the fact that her boyfriend of 7 years has a mentally ill twenty-something, who is wreaking havoc on their lives and finances. I asked her, amid her anguish, “You don’t have to do it, but what do you WANT to do?”
Her response was, “Sometimes, I want to punch his kid in the face. But I don’t. I want to keep loving my bf. He’s just a really great man who is so good to me and my adult kids. I do genuinely want to be there for him and for his really difficult kid. But damn, it is soooooo hard. And I resent him, at times, for it, too, not just the kid.”
“So,” I queried, “what do you need to do to execute what you want to do?”
“I guess I gotta just keep flushing out my feelings and crud like you always say.”
“True,” I said, “but you also have every right to stand up for yourself when things have gone too far or when you feel taken advantage of.”
There has to be an arrangement that gets reached in any parenting relationship, a division of labor, if you will, where responsibilities are fairly assigned/chosen, and where each parent feels they are not shouldering an undue portion of the parenting responsibilities and life responsibilities. Why? Because if you do not sort that sh*t out in advance, it will undermine the health of the parent’s relationship with each other, as well as the parenting itself.
But, simultaneously, there have to be allowances made for changing circumstances.
Flexibility is key, even inside a generally clear division of labor. And, again, it is not a wise idea for there to be long-term imbalanced responsibilities.
Short term, there are going to be times when I carry you or you carry me in parenting. But that is not an effective long-term strategy. An old, or new, balance must be struck, wherein both partners feel heard and honored.
What is Parenting Counseling?
Parenting counseling is done differently by different therapists.
That said, I am a firm believer that problems in parenting are seldom problems in parenting. That’s the battleground of a bigger war, or two. The bigger war(s) is the one going on inside each parent – the war of the parent with him-/herself and the past. It’s almost invariably that stuff that is doing the damage in the parenting and in the parents’ relationship with each other.
Address What’s Getting in the Way of Your Parenting
So, again recognizing that different counselors do things differently, I take parents individually and just do a deep dive into the real stuff that is going on inside them – unearthing and naming real feelings, finding origins of those feelings, unpacking sequences of events, identifying messages from the past that are also down there in the soul doing damage.
Is this work that a person can do on their own and not pay a therapist? Absolutely.
In fact, so many of my resources, many of them free, are designed to help you do precisely this on your own. You can heal yourself with the right tools. And, as stated above, nothing will more positively impact your parenting and simultaneously reduce the likelihood of you perpetuating generational trauma than you flushing out all of your feelings, pains, frustrations, and disappointments; AND going into your childhood to find and excise the core beliefs you were taught to believe about yourself.
>> See The Soul Disciplines and Keeping Your Spirit on Track
But some people prefer to work with a therapist. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stuck, depressed, or anxiety-ridden in your parenting, seek counseling.
Read Parenting Books
Also, whether you have kids or are considering doing so, start reading parenting books. There are so many good ones out there. I’m a fan of ‘Scream-free Parenting,’ by Hal Runkel.
There are lots of good ones. Start reading them. Start being deliberate about the formation of your own parenting strategy.
Be flexible but firm in your parenting. Your children need your strength, your compassion, your kindness, your play, your rules, and they need you to be the adult in the room. Please do your own self-work, so that you’re not using them to get your own emotional needs met.
>> See 9 Badass Questions About Emotional Incest
Successful Parenting Means Just Loving Them
Be willing to accept that you’ve made mistakes and will make many more. Apologize. Take the rocks back. Give your kid your good listening abilities, so they have a person to flush out their pains with. Heal your own past.
And, in the words of my mother, “Just love ‘em.”
You’re going to do great!
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement, After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.Com
