Spending hours of your time and energy trying to teach, show, explain and train your child is a sure sign that your parenting is becoming ineffective.
Like getting your childto learn socially acceptable behaviours like manners, how to eat, speak, cooperate and to be respectful of others and more...
In other words to respond to your expectations and desires as a parent.
And when you fail to get the response you require you will, more often than not, use certain discipline strategies and methods, that your teaching, showing, explaining and training efforts have failed to achieve.
These are the current and ‘normal’ discipline methods that most parenting experts encourage and can also include the learning of new parenting skills.
Normal methods like; praise, rewards, consequences, boundaries, exclusion, isolation, confiscation and more.
Usually with little permanent or satisfying effect.
And this isn't age-specific at all and can still be going on when your child becomes a teenager.
Ineffective parenting and Stress
Ineffective parenting is when you fail to produce certain desired behaviours in your child andwhere both parent and child can feel intolerable stress in the process.
And it’s this aspect of parenting that can endanger a child’s wellbeing and mental health in later life not to mention your own.
Stress, in the context of parenting I would express as, the by-product of ineffective parenting and is not a good thing, it really, really isn’t.
Stress
Did you know that stress, particularly in the early years, sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviours in children?
Parents are unaware that the origins of antisocial behaviour, including defiance, lack of cooperation, indifference, disrespect and disconnection are stress-related and that the cause of this stress is ineffective and inappropriate parenting.
Hard to grasp for some perhaps, but vital to 'get' for us all.
This is why parenting has become so ‘stressful’, exhausting and overwhelming for many parents.
A bit like fighting fire with water not realising that the water is pure fuel.The water, we think, is our explaining and shaping of our child's behaviour to keep them in line, under control not realising these ways of being are fueling the behaviour making it even worse.
It can become a not so merry, merry-go-round.
What happens when a child is stressed?
Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to help cope with the child’s innate sense that all is not well.
It’s an automatic fight/flight/freeze reaction which is triggered by fear and overwhelm in the child. Fear from not feeling or sensing a sense of belonging and attachment and overwhelm from inappropriate overstimulation.
Overstimulation like expecting a child to be able to understand something when their brain developmentally is not ready to respond as a parent expects and wishes.
It’s often a question of too much too soon…
For instance, a child younger than 7yrs will find concepts like distance and time hard to fathom in real terms, though they will exhibit every indication that they do, because of their need and drive to be connected. They literally lack the brain growth and development to process such complex concepts.
Parents often find it very hard to hurry a child along.
Inappropriate expectations
Trying to meet the expectation in a parent's voice that they must understand even though they are unable is likely to move a child beyond thinking to emotion and stress.
Stress chemicals in the brain and body like Adrenaline, Cortisol, Corticotrophin Releasing factor (CRF) are released when a child feels stress from fear or overwhelm.
When stress chemicals, like cortisol and CRF have been injected into animals they exhibit depression, anxiety, an increase in heart rate, disrupted digestion, decreased appetite, disruption of sleep, suppression of exploratory activity, startle responses and freezing and fighting behaviour.
Can you imagine what stress must do to a child?
See your child's unwanted behaviour as a symptom, not a problem
When a child is acting out, is defiant or uncooperative you can be sure that there is something else going on besides the unwanted behaviour you're trying to be effective over.
The child’s perceived antisocial behaviour is nature’s way, by design, to provoke the parent to make the child feel safe again and so to become stress-free.
Focusing on trying to ‘fix’ the negative or unwanted behaviour you see in your child with conventional methods and tactics only inhibits your child’s ability to cope with and regulate their stress going forward.
Leaving children in high levels of stress for long periods and repeatedly, can programme the brain’s alarm systems to become hypersensitive (HPA axis)
When a child is overburdened (neurobiological inability to process) with inappropriate expectations of them by the parent, their thinking is hijacked by emotion.
The brain's frontal lobes aren’t able to calm the fight/flight/freeze responses in the child.
“Unfortunately, in the traumatised person, the cortex is unable to allay the fear response. Meaning... we cannot reason away the fear and are left either to act it out on others with extreme emotion ( e.g.tantrums, defiance and anger (GMO)), suffer silently from overwhelming feelings [e.g PTSD, phobias, obsessions, ruminations],or blank out from the distressing fear-response signals.(disconnection, isolation, becoming a loner, reluctance to engage( GMO) )” ( Levine/Kline 2007:11)
So, what can you do?How can you start to parent more effectively?
Becoming an effective parent
It's not your fault...
Understand that the difficulties you may be experiencing are not your fault. Parents often blame themselves and beat themselves up for not being a good enough parent.
I haven’t met a parent yet who doesn't love their child and wish the best for their child and yet still struggle.
Stop blindly following the crowd
Know that most parents are under the spell of ‘convention’ and ‘consensus’.
Parents are influenced and informed by beliefs and assumptions that go to create how they think they should behave and how their child should behave.
And when there is a problem, they tend to implement the conventional strategies I have mentioned above. Strategieswhich in themselves go a long way to creating the problem behaviour parents are trying to fix, and produce the stress.
No child is born bad
Remember that no child is born bad. A child is born exquisitely social by nature...which may be difficult to see through the lens of the conventional view.
The number one overriding belief and assumptionis that children need to be socialised, trained and taught how to be human.
This is simply untrue and a belief that has been generated and installed in the collectiveconsciousness over many, many centuries of superstition and doctrine.
Even in business, we learn never to assume, yet parents assume so much, so strong are the messages out there that inform how we are supposed to parent.
Origins of mental ill-health
We hear so much about mental ill-health and thankfully, much is being done to promote mental health awareness in schools and the workplace.
But what about the home?
Where does mental ill-health come from?
We hear little about the origins of mental ill-health.
Stress robs us of experiencing that innate joy we find in so many supposedly uncivilised cultures around the world.
It makes you wonder, just how civilised are we really?
For the last 32 years, I have been exploring the ineffectiveness of parenting and the resultant stress it manifests in all stages of development right through to adulthood.
If I was asked what the origins of mental ill-health were, I would answer unequivocally,ineffective parenting practices and ways of being with our children. Ways that can stress our children so much that can it can leave them vulnerable to suffering from anxiety, depression and even rage in later life. In others words, mental ill-health.
Food for thought, surely...
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If you'd like some insights and advice into reducing your child’s stress so you can live in more harmony with your child and they with themselves, why not book a free 15- minute Effective Parenting Insights chat with me.
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