Some advice on getting through some of the more cringeworthy moments as a parent.
Being a parent can be downright embarrassing at times.
Your toddler has a meltdown in the middle of the grocery store.
You get called to the principal’s office because of something your child said or did at school.
Your teenager says something obnoxious or edgy at a family reunion.
You get the picture….
The question, of course, is how to respond to these all-too-common scenarios.
How can you manage your own feelings of embarrassment so that you are able to respond in a way that is helpful (as opposed to harmful) to your child?
Start out by acknowledging that this is hard — because it is.
There’s no doubt about it: it can be challenging to handle the more cringeworthy-moments of parenting: those moments when your child says or does something that is downright embarrassing to you. Say, the classic candy aisle meltdown…. Basically, you’re being called upon to be “your best parenting self” at the very moment when you feel least equipped to do so: when your brain is being flooded with emotion and you feel like every single person in the grocery store is judging you and waiting to see what you will do next. You can almost imagine your fellow shoppers reaching for the popcorn and placing bets with one another about how well (or how terribly) you are going to handle this:
“I bet he’s going to give in to the candy request!”
“I bet she’s going to start yelling at the kid!”
Trust me, it doesn’t feel great!
Parenting is challenging at the best of times — and knowing that you’re parenting in public only serves to make it 100 times harder! And these days, it can feel like you’re just one smartphone click away from becoming the Internet’s next bad parenting meme. So, there’s that, too….
Recognize how much power you have in this moment.
Sure, you might feel completely powerless — like your shrieking toddler is the one who holds all the cards — but actually the opposite is true. You have a huge amount of power in this moment. You have the power to choose how to respond — a decision that will play a major role in determining what will happen next. Will your actions help to calm your child or will they escalate the conflict, pulling you and your child into a messy and very public tug-of-war, a situation where you’re likely to say or do something you might regret?
You’ve reached a turning point, in other words. And it all starts with you gaining control of your own thoughts and feelings so that you can make a conscious decision about how to respond to your child.
Hit the pause button on your own emotions.
A critical first step is in managing your emotions is actually allowing yourself to acknowledge whatever it is you’re feeling — and odds are you’re feeling a lot of different things all at once. In addition to feeling embarrassed (“Everyone is staring at me and thinking I’m the world’s worst parent!”), you might also be feeling angry at or frustrated with your child (“Why can’t you just behave? Why does everything have to be a battle with you?”) Add to that a layer of guilt (“Good parents don’t ever feel angry with their kids! Why am I such a terrible parent?”) and you can see that you’ve got a cocktail of emotions swimming around in your brain.
Parenting is ultimately about empathy: recognizing that it’s hard to be the parent and it’s hard to be the kid.
Hitting the pause button on all those emotions gives you the opportunity to figure out how you want to respond to your child. You want to be able to do your best thinking—something that’s impossible while your mind is being flooded with emotion and all kinds of just plain unhelpful thoughts. And, according to Leena Augimeri (Director - Scientific and Program Development with the Child Development Institute in Toronto and co-founder of the Stop Now and Plan (or SNAP) program) hitting the pause button on your own emotions begins with answering yourself this all-important question: “What is the first thing that you need to do to gain better self-control?”
Augimeri recommends taking a deep breath or counting to ten or doing whatever else you can do in that moment to calm yourself. Then, at that point, you can start challenging the unhelpful thoughts that only serve to make parenting harder — thoughts like, “He’s doing this on purpose to make me really angry!” or “He’s doing this to embarrass me!” — thoughts that may not even be the least bit true at all. Odds are, your child isn’t doing this to make your life harder: he’s actually just really frustrated himself. Recognizing that simple yet all-important fact allows you to pivot from embarrassment to empathy.
Switch into detective mode.
Sometimes we parents are required to play detective. We have to decode the messages that our kids are sending us. Then, once we’ve managed to figure out what it is that a particular child is trying to tell us in a particular moment, we’re in a much stronger position to be able to try to meet the underlying need. Maybe a child who just had a very public meltdown needs you to help solve a problem. Maybe she would benefit from some hands-on help. Or maybe she just needs to have you recognize and validate what she’s feeling: a simple acknowledgement that “This is really hard.” As psychologists like to remind us, “Behaviour is communication.” Sometimes the messages that that our kids communicate to us through their actions and their emotions are far more powerful than what they’re actually able to put into words.
Keep your expectations of your child age-appropriate and realistic.
According to a 2016 study conducted by ZERO TO THREE (a major US child development research organization), there’s a significant gap between what parents think kids are capable of at a given age and what those kids are actually capable of at that age. The researchers discovered, for example, that nearly half of parents of two-year-olds expect their toddlers to be able to refrain from having a temper tantrum when they’re frustrated when, in fact, that kind of self-control only starts to develop when children reach the age of three-and-a-half or four. In other words, it’s normal for toddlers to have difficulty managing their emotions, and failing to understand that simple-yet-all-important fact makes parenting so much harder.
Having a basic understanding of child development makes it easier for you to parent in a way that you can feel good about and that brings out the best (as opposed to the worst) in your child. Understanding child development also makes it easier for you to tune out the voices of other people. Instead of worrying about what other people are thinking as they observe your child’s meltdown in the candy aisle (“What a bad parent!” “What a bad kid!”), you can focus instead on meeting your child’s needs in this moment and learning from this experience (“Note to self: Let’s skip the candy aisle next time!”). And, most important of all, you can choose to parent in a way that will build upon the all-important bond between you and your child.
Be self-aware enough to recognize when you’re the one causing the embarrassment.
The embarrassment thing works both ways, after all. Sometimes we parents are the ones who are embarrassing our kids!
It’s important to be self-aware enough to allow yourself to recognize when this is happening. Maybe you shared something cute or funny that our child said or did and your child is embarrassed that you passed that information along (“Hey, that was a secret. I didn’t want you to tell Grandma or to post it on your Facebook page!”)
If you’ve goofed, be willing to acknowledge that you’ve made a mistake. We parents are human. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to say or do things that our kids aren’t thrilled about. And when this happens (not if this happens – when this happens), we have an opportunity to apologize and make amends.
Key to making an effective apology is acknowledging the impact of your actions and promising to do better next time: “You’re right. I shouldn’t have shared that on my Facebook page without checking with you first. I can see now how that would have embarrassed you. I’m sorry. I’ll take the post down and I’ll make a point of checking with you before I post anything similar from now on.”
Finally, take solace in the fact that you’re in good company when it comes to accidentally embarrassing your kids, but, at the same time, don’t allow that to become an excuse for behaving badly. Sure, parental oversharing (or “sharenting”) seems to be happening more and more these days, but that doesn’t have to mean that we should make embarrassing our kids the new normal. We can make a conscious decision to do things differently: to do our best to defy all those stereotypes about that totally embarrassing mom or dad; and to try to embarrass our kids a little less. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a worthy parenting resolution to carry with us into a brand new year.
This blog post is based upon my most recent parenting column for CBC Radio.
Ann Douglas is the author of numerous books about pregnancy and parenting including, most recently, Happy Parents, Happy Kids and Parenting Through the Storm. She is also the weekend parenting columnist for CBC Radio.