I have been seeking solace recently in parenting blogs/books because my eldest son is presenting challenging behaviours, which I am finding quite triggering and upsetting.
I know I am capable of reacting very calmly but recently I have been struggling to keep the anger inside. He is testing me and testing boundaries, it is a phase, I get it, but I am seeking help to find out what I can do to ease us out of this or at the very least what I can do to not make it any worse.
One technique mentioned in Calm Parents, Happy Kids is to balance the moments of negativity in the challenging behaviours with praise for all the positive things your child does - avoiding a spiral of negativity.
His behaviour has been challenging, but he is also a very sweet child, so I have easily been able to find things I can compliment him on. In this way, the idea is that with the good feeling he gets from these things being noticed and talked about, it may encourage him to behave better and do more of the nice things.
Here are some examples of what I have said, and what I left inside my head….
“It was really lovely earlier when you were playing with your brother, building blocks together.” instead of hitting him in the face with a brick…
“Thank you for being patient with me earlier, when I put your brother down for his nap.” instead of shouting and singing downstairs ensuring that your brother cannot sleep even if he tries…
“Aren’t you getting on well with the boy at playgroup? It’s lovely how you play nicely together.” Thank you for sitting nicely with him and his nan and not spitting in her face like you did the lady on the bus.
The logic behind this seems familiar to me. Gratitude journals have long been accepted as a helpful way to reframe a negative mindset and encourage a positive mental attitude.
“Practising gratitude is not some fluffy new-age bull-shit. It’s not a dusty quote hanging in the changing room of a regional boutique. It is now one of the most widely recognised methods for improving your overall well-being.”
Angela Scanlon, Joyrider (2022)
In the same way a gratitude journal can help reframe your perception to see the positivity in life, celebrating positive behaviours should outshine the negative ones not only encouraging him to behave better but also to encourage me to not see him as a problem child and thus treating him as such.
But acknowledging positivity doesn’t have to stop with him.
It occurred to me that I respond well to positive comments, and yet if you ask me about my parenting ability I would probably be self-deprecating. When writing these essays for Distracted, I know I can come across quite negatively, but to me that is how it feels sometimes, and I want to be authentic. Importantly, though it isn’t how I want to feel and in the spirit of self-fulfilling prophecies and positive mental attitudes, perhaps coming from a place of gratitude isn’t such a bad place to start.
At school, I was very conscious that I needed positive praise to do well. I noticed this change when I moved from my primary to my secondary school. In my primary school I was “the clever one”, everything I did or said was met with gushes of positivity. It gave me worth, I felt I had value. When I moved to my secondary school it was a grammar school and whilst that did in some way confirm that I was again, “the clever one” I was actually just one of many clever ones and it was much harder to win the same level of praise and approval as I had before. This took a while to get used to.
One class I took was AS level Psychology, and in one of the lessons, the teacher admitted that normally when the teachers would receive a new class, they had a list which gave them an idea of where each student sat in terms of ability. I thought this was a little strange seeing as Psychology was a new subject for everyone in the class, but somehow they had ranked us on our intelligence on a subject before we had even started studying it. I think the idea was it would help teachers see if there were any unusual occurrences. If you were expected to do well and you didn’t perhaps they would notice and ask if there was something wrong at home, or if you did really well and you weren’t expected to, you could be plagiarising your work, for example. The Psychology teacher told us he resisted looking at the list as he knew from his work that it created a bias. He would treat the “clever” ones differently on that basis, even subconsciously and that positivity from those interactions would then lead to them doing better.
I had noticed that I didn’t get anywhere near as much positive attention in Psychology as I did say in Maths, where I probably seemed like a teacher’s pet and it bothered me actually, that it seemed I needed this constant reassurance that I was doing well in order to do well and enjoy the class. In University it wasn’t dissimilar, in the second year I had a teacher who seemed to dislike absolutely everything I did, which made me really question my self worth and my performance reflected that.
Positive feedback releases the chemical dopamine into the brain making you feel good. I have been able to use this reward system in the past to encourage myself to be more productive. I have written to do lists with basic things at the top, which I can tick off straight away and work with the momentum of doing a good job. (I almost always do the easiest jobs first!) Now in parenting, there is no positive feedback loop. There is no one saying well-done, no reward stickers or grade A’s, and perhaps there isn’t a whole lot of dopamine, but that is what I need.
I think this is very much why parenting a very tiny baby can feel so demoralising. They can’t talk, they don’t even acknowledge you exist and yet you are responding to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is when they learn to laugh and express a mild form of gratitude that the days become easier and brighter.
As well as making my son feel more positive in order to want to behave better, I need to congratulate myself (and my partner) on the small wins, enabling us to move forward and do better. Negativity can breed negativity in that we dwell and blame ourselves for the things that haven’t gone right and this isn’t helpful or productive. Yes, we can acknowledge that things went badly, maybe I reacted to a behaviour angrily, but making myself feel bad about isn’t going to help anyone, we need to move on and we need to move on positively.
In celebrating the small wins, we can foster a positive mindset which will in turn help us to get through those harder days, knowing that we are in fact doing a good job. In the heat of the moment it is hard not to see challenging behaviour as a reflection of your own parenting and potentially react negatively, which can further encourage negative behaviours.
I have started with a gratitude journal of sorts to celebrate the little wins in parenting (and life) and alongside complimenting my son on his nicer moments, I am hoping at least we can get through this phase with smiles on our faces.
I am not naturally a positive, glass half full kind of person, I know I veer towards pessimism but I know a positive outlook here will be beneficial and so I am going to try harder to pat myself on the back every now and then, because he is a good kid and we are doing a good job .
If this piece resonated with you, I would love to hear your stories. Please join me in the comments.