“He’s always grabbing for power,”
“She wants to control everything,”
“I have to show them who’s boss!”
I hear statements like this from parents a lot. Our cultural environment doesn’t help; with its unrealistic expectations and tendency to judge how well a parent parents, by how well a child behaves.
Parents are told clearly and often that they should absolutely be controlling their child’s behavior. This framework is simply unhelpful, for both parents and children.
I offer you three different ways to think about power, and parenting:
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Know that there’s more than one kind of power. I learned in a teacher training about two types of power: power-to and power-over. Our goal as teachers (and parents) is to promote the former and diminish the latter (unless safety is a concern). It’s worth noting that children whose power-to gets regularly thwarted, will seek to gain power-over with their peers (and siblings) whenever possible. The more respectful we can be as big people, even when we do need to take charge with little people, the better.
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Remember that you have plenty of it. One of the feelings that triggers me most often is one of feeling powerless. It’s no fun, and it leads me to a panicky, freaked-out zone where I’m totally ineffective as a parent. When I start thinking with my “emotional brain,” I need to do something to jog my memory so that I realize I still totally have power. I can always choose to slow down, take a breath (or two) and regain some calm, even in the midst of a storm.
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Tell yourself a new story. Just today I was triggered and feeling powerless (with a layer of anger on top) about my child’s behavior. Ironically, I desperately wanted him to change his attitude and story about something that had not “gone his way,” but then I was escalating because I couldn’t do that exact same thing! When I changed my internal story from, “My kid is terrible, driving me crazy, and I don’t deserve this,” to, “This has been a rough day and no one is able to self- regulate but this too shall pass,” it all just felt better.