I recently had a chance to interview Shantelle Bisson, author of Raising Your Kids Without Losing Your Cool.
- Why is parenting so full of emotionally-charged situations?
Wow. I wish I had the perfect answer for this question. Personally I believe that parenting is so full of emotionally-charged situations because you have two people, you and your kid, or in the case of a family meltdown, you will need to add a partner, and another kid, or kids. All with different personalities. All with their own ideas of how they want things to go, or how they would handle a situation. Put all this into a house, especially right now during a pandemic with lots of shutdowns, and cancellations of activities taking place outside the four walls of your family home and man oh man is that not a recipe for adding fuel to the fire of personality differences.
The minute you have different personalities in one room, day in, day out, for YEARS you're bound to end up with upset and flared tempers from time to time, or sometimes OFTEN. I have to say, that of my three girls there was one that I can count on both hands that I had any sort of emotionally charged encounters with, another who I had way too many to count, and then my third who we've barely locked horns her entire life. I truly think it is a simple as this. We don't get along with all the people all the time, and we accept this out in the world with our co-workers, in the dating world, and with friends, but for some strange reason when we become parents we expect that the parent/child relationship will go smoothly.
I believe it is the unrealistic expectation that because we love one another so much, and because you are their parent, that it can and should go well because of these givens, that only adds unnecessary extra pressure to the relationship. Just because we are family it doesn't mean that our personalities are going to mesh. I think it is so important for parents to take it easier on themselves when they feel like one of their kids might just rub them the wrong way. That they don't naturally get along as well with one like they might with another one of their kids. It doesn't mean you love your child any less, often times I noticed in our own household that my husband and I tended to lock horns with the daughter who was the most like us. So often it was like having a fight with yourself whenever we would get into a argument with that daughter who was so much like us!
We can get so wrapped up in feeling guilty, that we forget to just relax, and understand that there is no perfect in parenting, and once we release some of the expectations from not only our kids but ourselves, a lot of these emotionally-charged situations will melt away.
- With the recent election, politics are a particularly hot-button issue. How can parents help their kids be informed and confident in their opinions in an age-appropriate way?
This is a hot potato topic for sure! We have three daughters, all with varying political ideals and leanings. The way we helped our kids be informed and confident in their opinions was to allow them to lead the conversation of hot-button issues like politics, religion, and sex. It is so important as parents to take the back seat on some topics, allowing our kids to share with us their ideas, their questions and their concerns. They ask we answer, rather than the temptation to tell them the way they should think and feel about these issues and then put our political views on them.
You see the beautiful thing about having children is to witness the evolution of our society through them. In my opinion your job as a parent is not to recreate you, or relive your youth (but maybe better), your job as a parent is to allow them to experience the world through their own lens. To learn from their teachers, their peers, and you. To form their own beliefs and ideals based on their journey through the world, and resist the temptation to make them a carbon copy of you. Parenting is a role that requires that we leave our egos at the door, and that we constantly remind ourselves that our kids are not US. They are their own people, here to have their own experiences.
It is our job to safely guide our children through their lives, not put blinders on them and shield them from real life. So how do you do this while protecting them and respecting where they are at age wise. Well the way we handled hot-button issues with our girls was to draw a comparison to their real lives; meaning if they had a friend who they felt was behaving rudely, we would use that experience that they lived and tie it back to a current issue. For example with all the name calling that is taking place in politics right now, if my girls were still little I would use it as a teaching opportunity to remind them that no matter if somebody calls you a name first, the better way to respond is by not name calling back. For me this was always a tried and trued way to teach them about current news happenings in their lives that they were curious about, by bringing it back to a real life experience that they had lived either at school with a friend, teacher, or bully. This allows you to keep the conversation age appropriate without stressing yourself out.
- For many families, the holidays this year are going to be full of uncertainty and changed traditions. How can parents prepare their kids for that?
I think the best way for parents to prepare their kids for a very different holiday season, that will most definitely be a departure from the "norm" is to remind our kids that life is a living breathing thing. That is always changing, and that we're never guaranteed that tomorrow will be the same as the day before. We need to raise them with the understanding that every day is a gift, even if the day isn't going as planned, especially if it's not going as planned, or how they wished it would go. We need to instill in them at a very young age that it is a tremendous blessing to have one another, and to have our health. R
ight now we live in precarious times, and I believe wholeheartedly that we need to help them focus on gratitude, and we need to (even if behind closed doors we're freaking out in front of our kids) assure them that it won't be like this forever, that next year we'll hopefully be able to go back to celebrating the way we used to, and maybe not. And that's okay because we're focusing on all these other things to be grateful for. I also encourage parents to create new traditions, such as making food hampers, or present hampers for families in great need, and then delivering them to an organization that can distribute them to vulnerable families. This pandemic is a great opportunity to teach your child about giving back. About celebrating all that they do have, while helping them to take the focus off all that they don't have. Because let's be honest, there will always be people who have so much more than we do, and even more that have much less.
If we can work hard every single day to keep our eye on the positive, even when it feels like there is none, and coach our children to do the same, we will find new ways to celebrate old traditions, that hey, we may end up liking even more. And maybe if you start new family traditions that focus more on gratitude and giving, even if things don't go back to the way they used to be but holiday season 2021 you will have started new and beautiful traditions to replace the old until we can get back to them.
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