Parenting is a life-long learning experience. It is a thrilling journey of growth for parents as well as their children. In the parenting expedition, there are lots of discoveries coupled with joy, happiness, frustration, disappointment and self-growth – it is not a bed of roses but a magnificent rainbow that requires both rain and sunshine. There are some mindsets that make parenting more fulfilling whereas others are like an iron ball working agains the parenting ideals you aspire to realise.
The mindsets that make parenting more fulfiling also play a big role in helping you experience more balance, joy and a deep sense of personal growth and fulfillment as you raise your children. You will also feel less frustration and stress that are rife in parenting across generations. Much as you cannot operate as an ideal parent always, reminding yourself to embody these mindsets and taking time to notice your parenting growth and recalibrating when you veer off will help you a lot in the long run.
Remember, if you do not actively control your parenting mindset and align it to the parent you aspire to be, you will fall short of the parent you know you are capable of becoming.
Below are 5 mindsets that make parenting fulfilling to both parents and children.
1. Empathy
This is the ability to feel and understand what another person is going through. It is an important human virtue that enables people to bond and form deep and trusting relationships. Empathy allows you to viscerally feel what your child or spouse is going through and hence makes them feel understood. This allows you to influence them with your advice when they ask for it.
Most often the most important thing your child and spouse need is your attention, validation and to be heard. Just that. Empathy allows you to meet this deep human yearning.
Parents who cultivate this higher human virtue are able to maintain harmonious relationships with their family members and close friends and are able to influence them with ease. The opposite of empathy is self centeredness and narcissism where the parent’s feelings, experiences and opinions are the only ones that matter.
Your own self-importance minimises the needs of your child or spouse to connect with you and makes them feel unseen, unheard and unloved.
Growth from empathy
When you embody empathy, you acquire other desirable traits as you grow with your spouse and children. Notably, you become more patient and understanding. This makes your spouse and children turn to you as their confidant. Empathy also helps you hold space for others.
To hold space is to be there for someone when they are going through difficult emotions, when they are happy or when they are in the process of building themselves up without judgement, rushing them to ‘get over it’ or criticising them. It is to witness your spouse or child going through a transformation and not interfere with it.
Holding space is something parents need to consciously cultivate in themselves. They believe it is their duty to help their children and make all transformation easy and smooth. This is a dangerous thing to do. Just as a moth dies if it is helped out of its struggle to get out of the cocoon, so do some aspects of a child’s growth stunt or die when you rush to help at the slightest discomfort.
Empathy is cultivated by being an active listener with the aim of understanding your child or spouse, asking questions to clarify what they are saying, withholding sharing your experiences when someone opens up to you for the sake of seeking attention and refraining from giving advice or solving their problems. This is a virtue that is finessed with time.
2. Humility
This is the virtue of accepting how your life as a parent is turning out. Humility is coming to the awareness that you have both strengths and weaknesses, you can be good and at the same time harbour the capacity to act in ways that are not good. To understand that you cannot be the best in everything and that things will often be the antithesis of what you expect.
As a parent, practice humility when you are tempted to hijack space while with other parents or friends. To hijack space is to talk incessantly about your child, spouse or yourself with complete disregard of others’ need to be heard. A more covert way of hijacking space is complaining and venting to others with the sole aim of getting sympathy and attention.
Another example is sharing your experiences as a child every time your child shares something he is going through. Your experiences override your child’s experiences leaving him unheard, unimportant and disconnected.
Humility is having enough self-awareness to be judicious when talking about yourself and interacting with others.
Practice being aware of how your words not only make you feel but also how they make other people feel. You can make this observation by listening to the feedback you get and also by observing the non-verbal cues from others as you speak. Humility is a higher virtue than pride and victimhood because it requires you to look inside and accept that you are ok being the parent you are without the inexorable urge to share your story with others to either gain sympathy or approval.
Growth from humility
Humility, when embodied and taken as a way of life, helps you have self-compassion. You are able to extend grace and forgiveness to yourself when you slip on your journey or act in a way that hurts your spouse, children or friends. Humility also bears the fruit of self-acceptance. Being humble makes it easy to admit that you do not know everything to do with parenting and still give your best efforts. Self-control is also a fruit that grows from being humble. You become judicious on what and how to share your triumphs and challenges with others without dumping your emotions on them or hijacking space.
Humility also helps you to keep envy and jealousy at bay. It helps you become grounded in gratitude for what you have which minimises envy and jealousy. It helps you to be ok with the fact that we are not all equal as parents and that it is ok to be on different stages even with our peers.
To cultivate humility, practice gratitude, regular self-validation and mindfulness
3. Open-mindedness
Not everyone sees the world as you do. This is particularly true as you get older and become more experienced and assertive. Growing with your child can be deceitful and can lead you to think you know your child in and out. Sometimes your child will behave differently in certain situations which can surprise you. Only being open-minded will spare you the trait of defensiveness for the mistakes of your child. This makes it easy to work with others to correct or help your child attain his aspirations.
Open-mindedness also helps you make better decisions. This is because you check in with all the parties involved in raising your child instead of jumping into final decisions by yourself. This creates harmony and understanding within the family and other key relationships.
Open-mindedness is having the awareness that people have different beliefs, viewpoints and perspectives from yours and being willing to hear them out without being defensive, critical or judgemental.
Growth form open-mindedness
Being open-minded helps you experience fulfilling relationships with others because you are more accommodating and willing to consider other people’s points of view even if you do not necessarily agree with them. With open-mindedness, you are more likely to learn a lot more than if you remain cocooned in your own world. Remember, a person who is judged and criticised without standing up for himself learns to judge and criticise others to feel good about himself.
To cultivate open-mindedness, determine and embody your values, beliefs and who you are as as a parent. Determine whose influence you value most, regularly discuss issues you face with them and be open to their feedback. This can be your spouse or a marriage mentor.
Also, be open to the views of your teenage and young adult children who see the world in a completely different perspective. Strive to make them feel heard even if you do not agree with their views.
4. Unshakable self-trust
All great parents have unshakable trust in themselves. They trust that whatever they set out to do for their children is with the utmost good interest of the child at heart. That they are capable of bringing up their child in a way they aspire to despite the challenges. They deeply believe in their parenting capabilities based on their parenting resources no matter their shortcomings or challenges that arise as they raise their child.
Parents who have unshakable self-trust do not go about looking for some societal set standards to follow or comply with. Instead, they trust their own internal locus of control. They act in complete faith that the outcome will be favourable to themselves and their families. Self-trust helps parents to shield themselves against the opinions of other people.
No matter how much people tell a parent who trusts in himself that he cannot make it, it only serves as fuel to push him/her closer to being the best parent he/she can be.
Growth from self-trust
When you embody self-trust and harmoniously working with your spouse, you radiate authenticity. This is because you rarely rely on others, be it your parents or religious organisation to be the guide or influence on your parenting. When you are authentic, you inspire others to be authentic too. Self-trust also helps you become more decisive. This spares you from the debilitating effects of indecisiveness and perpetually feeling stuck. Another benefit of being decisive is increased self-confidence
To cultivate self-trust, learn to make decisions and follow through without fearing what other people might say or do.
5. Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a conscious decision to let go of resentment, anger and vengeance towards a person or group who has harmed you irrespective of whether they need forgiveness or not. It is about releasing internal feelings of anger, resentment and vengeance. Parents quickly learn that forgiveness is an indispensable trait. Fulfilled and happy parents understand that forgiveness is about their inner peace. They understand that holding grudges, no matter how badly hurt they are, is poisonous for them.
First, they learn to forgive themselves, (self-compassion) then having the understanding that they are imperfect, they extend this forgiveness to their spouses and all the people involved in raising their children. They understand that inner peace is more beneficial than the pain of holding grudges and resentments.
Forgiveness on the part of a parent means being able to separate the mistake from the child, spouse or any other person. This allows you to see the child as a person worth loving and being accepted instead of being lost in the momentary anger. By all means, refrain from identifying your child with his behaviour as this deeply confuses the child about his own identity.
Growth from forgiveness
When you embody forgiveness, you experience harmonious relationships with loved ones and friends. With practice, forgiveness helps you learn how to set boundaries and avoid being hurt in the future. The truth is you cannot always be forgiving and letting others off the hook. Setting boundaries will help you define what you tolerate and what is off-limits.
Forgiveness also makes it easier to let go or seek help. When you forgive, you can also realise that the relationship was not worth keeping especially with friends or acquaintances. However, if your spouse keeps on hurting you or the children despite setting boundaries, it is wiser to seek help from a therapist – most importantly for you and the children.
To cultivate forgiveness, regularly carve time to evaluate your relationships and learn to communicate in an assertive and respectful way with others whenever they hurt you.
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