How to Show Self-Compassion When You Mess Up as a Parent
This podcast will focus on self-compassion, especially in moments when we mess up as parents. We need to remember, being a great parent is not the same thing as being a perfect parent. When we show ourselves self-compassion, we don’t judge ourselves and we show our kids that it’s okay to make mistakes and move forward.
Special guest: Carla Naumburg
Think you are doing a crappy job as a parent? You are not alone. It’s pretty much a byproduct of our society, with its incessant demands coupled with the in-your-face competitiveness parents see on social media. We mess up constantly—but my next guest reminds us that great parenting is not the same thing as perfect parenting. Great parenting starts with true self-compassion, the kind that means you don’t judge yourself. With her relatable voice and her hands-on strategies, I would like to introduce you to my friend and colleague, Carla Naumburg.
Bio
Carla Naumburg, PhD, is a clinical social worker and mother. She’s the author of four non-fiction books, including her international bestseller, How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids (Workman, 2019), as well as You Are Not a Sh*tty Parent, and the forthcoming How to Stop Freaking Out, the (completely swear-free) middle-grade adaptation of How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids.
Carla’s writing has appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post &. The Huffington Post—and has PhD in clinical social work from Simmons College in Boston. Carla currently lives outside of Boston with her husband and two daughters.
Important Messages:
I don’t believe there’s such thing as a bad parent. And the do I believe there are parents who aren’t parenting the way they want to? Of course. Do I believe that there are parents who are parenting in ways that aren’t great for their kids? Yeah. We want to help parents. I think about parents who don’t have the information, support and resources to parent the way they want to.
Deficits: External deficits- like money, health insurance, access to good healthcare, access to therapists, or high quality education, could cause issues. Internal- physical health and strength, our mental health and strength are emotional stability. For parents, we all lack information, resources and support at times. But for some parents, the deficit is really significant and those are the parents struggling the most.
And- just because we have the information doesn’t mean that we are like somehow immune to having these issues.
When you apologize to your child- the are learning in the most real and relevant way possible that in a healthy relationship, sometimes people fall apart, sometimes people lose their tempers. Sometimes people say things they don’t mean or do things they don’t mean, and then you can apologize. Have to connect and move on. And I would much rather have my kids have that view of a healthy, resilient relationship then assuming that a good relationship is one where everybody behaves perfectly all the time.
When we’re showing others that we can be human and then reflect that humanness towards our children and then have them be human back to us, gracious back to us, that is such a good lesson in real relationships and real emotions.
Arrows: It’s an old story from the Buddhist tradition. Buddha talked about the first arrows of life, and this is the stuff that just happens to us, right? Somebody rear ends you, your kid gets a diagnosis of adhd, your refrigerator breaks, you get an unexpected bill you can’t afford, there’s a massive storm and a tree comes down on your house or I don’t know, a global freaking pandemic, right? Those are the first arrows of life. They are unavoidable, they’re painful, they’re unavoidable. There’s, we can’t, maybe sometimes we can soften the blow a little bit. Like, I don’t know if you have a generator hooked up to your house, maybe the storm isn’t so bad, but you can’t avoid the first arrows their life. But so often for those of us, after this first arrow comes, there’s another arrow that comes right after it, the second arrow. And this is the arrow of like shame and suffering and blame. And this is the arrow of our voice saying, oh, if I had only done X, this wouldn’t have happened. Mm-hmm. , if I had talked to the right specialist, if I had like been better prepared, if I had had my together more, these things wouldn’t have happened or they wouldn’t have happened so badly.
When things go wrong: So what is self-compassion? Self-compassion is noticing when you are suffering and then choosing to shift the way you perceive the moment or engage with the moment in response to your own suffering. So look in this swirl of chaos, right? You’ve got like this Tasmanian devil energy happening in your house. You can choose to continue to run around like a crazy little chicken parent with your head cut off and yelling at this kid and picking up your phone and reading the text and half answering it and stirring the pasta, which is already like too soft and gross. Or you can stop for a second, just like put a pin in it. And yes, the chaos may be still swirling, but you can take a moment in the eye of that storm and take a deep breath and say to yourself, whoa, this is a, this is a really hard moment. This really shows compassion and is so different than calling yourself a sh*tty parent.
Saying this is a rough moment makes it less personal- makes it less permanent.
Ask questions. Get curious. Get curious about how you are feeling. Get curious about what’s going on.
When you feel like you are failing—ordering pizza to make things easier—might be such a treat for the kids.
Connection is the antidote to isolation. And in really rough moments we parents tend to resort to, “I’m the only one who,” I’m the only one who fed my kids boxed mac and cheese for the first four years of their lives. I’m the only one who ordered a pizza. I’m the only one who yells at my kids whatever that is. You are not the only one.
Connecting to common humanity, which comes out of the work of Dr. Kristin Neff.
Past thinking and that future thinking is like super unhelpful. Cause we can’t change the past and we don’t actually know what’s going to happen in the future.
If you have one friend, loved one, therapist, who shows u p for you—that’s good. Most people don’t have a “compassion team.”
Other voices to drown out the “you suck” voice.
I don’t think every moment has to be a learning reconnecting moment. But when those big moments happen (1) the first thing that I do is, is take a little time to get calm. (2) Distinction between behavior and feelings. No emotion is wrong. Apologize for the behavior. (3) Make a plan for the evening. You may be able to show up now. Or you may have to call it quits for the evening in terms of that puzzle or that homework assignment. We don’t always have the energy to continue. (4) Don’t say you’ll never do that again. (5) You can say ‘I’m having a bad day.’ Not “I’m a bad person.”
You can apologize to your kid– then you can say things like, “I’m having a bad day” instead of, “I’m sorry I’m a bad mom, I’m sorry I’m a bad person.” I’m thinking about what’s the language I want my kids to use when they screw up. And I would love for them to say, ‘I had a bad moment.’ I’m having a bad day. Not, I’m a waste of a person.
You can then address their behavior. Make a plan for how things to go differently for next time.
Top Tip: It’s all about the self-talk. So many of us move through our day thinking that we are horrible parents. We’re screwing this up, we’re useless, and we’re the only ones who can’t get parenting. Right. And that’s like trying to do your job when you have, you know, a boss or a supervisor following you around all day, telling you how much you suck. It’s impossible.
Shift your self talk into ways that are much kinder, more forgiving, more understanding. That’s more like having a boss walking around all day saying, ‘Hey buddy, this is a hard thing you’re doing and just because it’s hard, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. So hang in there.’ We still have rough moments, but they just feel so much easier to handle.
Like a new language—sometimes resort back to your old ways.
Notable Quotables:
“There’s no such thing as a perfect parent. There’s no parent that gets it right all the time.”
“My wish for every parent is that we could move away from this intense judgment. That the minute we’re less than perfect, which for so many of us is all the time because that’s human nature. I would love us to get to a place of compassion in those hard moments that we all have.”
“Instead of like continuing to jump around and be at the mercy of your own kind of crazy thoughts bouncing around out of control and at the mercy of kind of everything that’s happening, choose to just stop for a minute, take a breath and say, ‘this is a rough moment.’
“Saying this is a rough moment is actually dramatically different from saying ‘I’m a sh*tty parent.’
“I want parents to remember that those nights when we let them eat pizza in front of the tv, we may see as a failure and they may see as such a treat. Those pizza moments are sometimes a total win.”
“Connection is the antidote to isolation. And in really rough moments we parents tend to resort to, ‘I’m the only one who,’ that is, ‘I’m the only one who fed my kids boxed mac and cheese for the first four years of their lives.’ ‘I’m the only one who ordered a pizza.’ ‘I’m the only one who yells at my kids.’ You are not the only one. Remember that you’re not alone and remind yourself that no matter how crazy it gets, no matter how chaotic, overwhelming or out of control, there are other parents who have been and are dealing with these issues.”
“You can apologize to your kid– then say things like, ‘I’m having a bad day’ instead of, ‘I’m sorry I’m a bad mom,’ ‘I’m sorry I’m a bad person.’ I’m thinking about what’s the language I want my kids to use when they screw up. And I would love for them to say, ‘I had a bad moment.’ ‘I’m having a bad day.’ Not, ‘I’m a waste of a person.’
So many of us move through our day thinking that we are horrible parents. ‘We’re screwing this up, we’re useless, and we’re the only ones who can’t get parenting.’ That’s like trying to do your job when you have a boss or a supervisor following you around all day, telling you how much you suck. It’s impossible.
Shift your self talk into ways that are much kinder, more forgiving, more understanding. That’s more like having a boss walking around all day saying, ‘Hey buddy, this is a hard thing you’re doing and just because it’s hard, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. So hang in there.’ We still have rough moments, but they just feel so much easier to handle.
Learning self-compassion is like learning to speak a new language. None of us grew up speaking the language of self-compassion because our parents didn’t grow up speaking it. It just wasn’t a thing in western culture for so long. And so now we’re learning to speak it. And when you start to speak a new language, you forget the words sometimes and you revert to your old language sometimes. And then you grab your study guide or you grab your notes that you’ve written for yourself or you go back to the really basic words. You may always speak self-compassion with an accent, right? It might always feel a little weird, but speaking with an accent is so much better than being fluent in the sh*tty language you were speaking before.”
There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, says @CarlaGeorge22 on the latest episode of #talktokids podcast. Listen in for real strategies for self-compassion as a parent! Click To Tweet
