As adults, we often turn to therapies that allow us to release our emotions by talking them through. For children, this is not a natural way of releasing their feelings. They lack the language or the understanding to express their emotion in words. Play, however, is fully functional in children from a very young age and courses through them, simply bursting to find its way out.
Parenting can be an island paradise with the potential to nourish and feed us with all its amazingness or we can resent its reality. Parenting complex and challenging kids leaves us with plenty to resent. More so than the average parent, we are beset with tantrums, school issues, behavioural challenges and our child’s ongoing health issues. Resentment feels like the more sane response than that annoying sentiment…gratitude?!
Parental guilt seems to be an inevitable and unenviable burden we carry as parents whether we want to or not...It's exhausting worrying so much of the time about another human being, and inevitably it leads to stress, which can lead to more regrettable behaviour all over again. So what should we do with all this parental guilt and shame?
I’m not that easily shocked working as I do with parents of turbulent teens. Still, I was kind of shocked when I heard the story of Penny*, the hockey stick and the phone...
“Good” children work hard to keep their parents’ love and affection. They learn early on that “bad” behaviours such as shouting too loud, demanding their needs are met or refusing to comply with directions all earn them their parents’ disapproval. This can be a frightening feeling for a child given we are reliant on our parents to survive when we are young. So a “good” child takes all the parts of themselves that their parent disapproves of and they hide it.
Any of us living with teens would be quick to tell you that the mood swings, the dramatic statements and the sometimes worrying behaviours seem a little off the scale compared to how we behaved when we were young. Is this normal? The fact is, when living with teens you’re bound to hit a bit of turbulence. They’re attracted to risk. They’re distracted from school. They’re prone to latching on to risky peer groups and they push back against the help and guidance we are wanting to give them.
