The Parent Survival Guide

From Chaos to Harmony in Ten Weeks or Less

Theresa Kellam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781138139480
• eBook ISBN: 9781135858070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

When parents turn to the parenting/self-help section of their local bookstore, they are looking for both practical guidance and a childrearing philosophy that resonates with them - an approach they can relate to and be comfortable implementing in their own household. In The Parent Survival Guide: From Chaos to Harmony in Ten Weeks or Less, Theresa Kellam presents a way to strengthen the relationship with the child that simultaneously promotes the parent's own emotional healing and wellness. Grounded in a research-supported therapeutic technique that uses structured play time as the catalyst for interpersonal connection and growth, Kellam's model is subtle in its simplicity. Through a series of guided exercises, Kellam gives parents the skills they need to begin to set aside special playtimes with their children, during which the most important part of the process is simply "being there" in a way that promotes healing, growth, and communication. The beauty of this approach is that in only 30 minutes, once a week, the results can be seen in only a few weeks. Features of the book include:

• "Parent Survival Tip" at the start of each chapter
• Original cartoon illustrations bring text to life
• Short but insightful workseet questions bring focus to the program

The Parent Survival Guide is structured over a series of 10 chapters, which can be read in conjunction with the 10-sessions of the CPRT workshops for those parents enrolled in a formal filial training program. But the material in the book is designed to be read and implemented by anyone. The author is not only a licensed psychologist and filial therapist, but she has also gone through the program with her own son and continues to rely on its principles within her family.

1
MAKING A LOVING CONNECTION

Survival Tip 1

Focus on What Your Child Needs, Instead of Who You Want Your Child to Be

You may be tempted to skip this chapter because you already have a loving connection with your child. This chapter, though, is the foundation of all the other work you will be doing. It explains the framework you will need to be able to express love to your child in any situation, even when you are frustrated and angry and need to set limits. Although you love your child when you need to set a limit, you might be communicating your desire to be “right” or respected rather than how much you love your child. That’s because the more difficult relationships are, the more stubborn and inflexible we tend to become. It’s just a normal human reaction. We naturally want to protect ourselves from the pain that the difficulties cause. We start to see the person we are having a difficult time with as separate from us, on the opposing side, a “problem” we must overcome. When this happens, we risk losing sight of the person and start to view our relationship with him or her as something we want control over.

When my son, Dylan, was having serious behavioral problems, it didn’t feel as though he and I were on the same side. Every day was a struggle, a battle of wills in which we both felt defeated by the end of the day. I simply didn’t know what to do or how to help him. When I began filial therapy training, Dylan was 8 years old and his symptoms were the most severe. He had dyslexia but had not been diagnosed yet, in part because he did not feel safe enough to let us know about the trouble he was having.

He was often disciplined for screaming at, hitting, and pushing his parents and his sister. He was angry much of the time at home and often would not cooperate with simple requests. He refused to do chores, yelled at his parents, and had angry outbursts. During one of these outbursts he broke his closet door; in another, he punched a hole in the wall of his room. He argued frequently with his parents and could not seem to get along with his little sister. He did not respect others’ boundaries, often intentionally getting in their personal space to annoy them or push or hit them. During the past year, Dylan had also become more and more hyperactive and unsociable to the point of being unable to make lasting friendships at school. He was not often invited over to children’s houses to play and complained of not having any friends. He was so hyperactive and so difficult to socialize with that other children did not want to play with him. He was very critical of other children, complaining about them with vague descriptions—for example, saying he didn’t want to play with a particular child because he was “stupid” or another because he was “not any fun.” He came home from school many days crying, saying he hated school.

Dylan also seemed to be depressed. He was very sensitive about mistakes he made and often would not try something for fear he could not do it. He had a low frustration tolerance and would give up easily when trying to do something, often throwing things in anger and yelling or crying. At bedtime, he would complain that he never got to see his mom and dad, was often afraid to go to sleep, and had occasional nightmares. Dylan also had difficulty taking responsibility for his mistakes, often blaming others for them. He berated himself, complaining that he was “stupid” at times and at other times claiming to have super powers. He also seemed to be obsessed with aliens, often drawing, playing, or talking about them. There was a noticeable decrease in Dylan’s frustration tolerance, scholastic abilities, self-esteem, and self-confidence. His drawings were regressed at times and reflected chaos and pain.

At school Dylan was in trouble frequently for disrupting the class. He was described as the “class clown” by his teachers. He did not stay in his seat or follow directions and did not usually complete assignments he was supposed to at school. He had trouble paying attention. He had to be reminded several times to stay on task, often staring off into space or becoming interested in something other than the assignment he was supposed to be working on. He also had great difficulty completing homework assignments and was very sensitive about receiving any constructive criticism or instruction from others. He struggled for hours on assignments that should have taken minutes. At times he seemed unable or unwilling to read because of his angry, defiant behavior. The professionals at his school did not believe he had a learning disability and discouraged testing him for one. I also wondered if something had happened to him that we didn’t know about, but when I questioned him, he assured me that no one had abused him in anyway.¹

Keeping a Loving Connection

When you struggle in your relationship with your child, you can become so overwhelmed that you cut yourself off from the love and compassion you feel for your child in an attempt to get control over the situation. When your child is acting inappropriately, you may think it’s your fault because you weren’t hard enough or strict enough. You may begin to have more faith in the harsh, punitive measures that society sanctions than you do in more loving, compassionate approaches. You start to believe that the answer to the problem is to change your child into the person you think he or she should be. You do the same thing to yourself, too. You become harder on yourself for not being the parent you think you should be. On top of having to deal with your child’s problems, you have to deal with the guilt of feeling it’s all your fault. Under the pressure of responsibility that you naturally feel to make your child into a well-rounded, competent, responsible human being, you may find that you get caught up in the cycle of criticizing yourself or your child constantly, trying to make yourself and your child into the people you think you should be. This is how the loving connection we want to nurture and are striving for gets lost.

A Loving Connection: Guidance Instead of Control

To make a loving connection requires us to be vulnerable, to open our heart to another person. How is it possible to make a loving connection any other way? In trying to control someone and make them into the person we wish, we close our hearts to who that person actually is. It is impossible, therefore, to make a loving connection if you are trying to control someone, especially if you are trying to control him or her in a harsh way. Loving behavior and loving actions can guide and protect children, but they don’t control them. If you think you aren’t trying to control your child, keep reading because sometimes it’s really hard for a parent to recognize this problem in his or her approach to a child.

We often make the mistake of thinking the love we feel for someone is the same as making a loving connection. The love you feel for your child is probably the most powerful feeling of love you have ever had. Feeling love, though, and making a loving connection are not the same thing. To make a loving connection requires us to “be with” the people we love in the feelings they are experiencing and try to see the world through their eyes. To love someone is to focus on what that person needs. Unfortunately, when we love someone, we have a tendency to do just the opposite, to try to get them to feel the way we want them to and see the world the way we do. We focus on who we want them to be, instead of what they need. For example, we want our children to be happy, not sad or angry or scared. We don’t want to experience with our children the difficult feelings they have, because it’s just too painful. If we can’t handle connecting with our children emotionally, in a loving way, our children find other ways to connect emotionally with us, and they’re not always pleasant ways.

To Survive We Must Have an Emotional Connection

You can interpret your child’s behavior as attempts to connect emotionally with you. If children don’t feel safe enough or brave enough to make a loving connection, they will make any emotional connection they can. You may not realize it, but having an emotional connection with someone is so important that our survival may depend on it. In the 1940s, René Spitz, a child psychiatrist, shocked the medical community by showing heartwrenching film footage of babies in institutions grieving the loss of their mothers who had been sent to jail. Spitz explained that although the babies had all of their physical needs met, some died because their emotional needs had not been met. At the time of the filming, it was thought that babies in institutions would cry more if they were held or cuddled. Even though the babies had clean places to live and all of the food and medical attention they needed, they died because they were not able to make an emotional connection with another human being.

Children Will Connect Any Way They Can

By about 18 months, if children don’t feel safe enough or brave enough to be vulnerable, they can push our buttons to hook us emotionally. Around that time, children begin to say “No” and rebel, which often makes parents angry. The most powerful emotional connection we can make, other than love, is anger. Think about it. Have you ever been so angry at someone that you couldn’t stop thinking about him or her, couldn’t get your work done, couldn’t sleep? That’s a powerful emotional connection. Anger gives us a way to emotionally connect while still allowing us to keep our guard up and protect ourselves. Children aren’t the only ones who use anger to connect emotionally—we all do. Many couples I work with begin therapy because they’ve either forgotten or probably never learned how to connect any other way.

Another way children connect with their parents is by pushing their rescue button. It is very difficult for most of us to distinguish a loving connection from rescuing. Sometimes children whine when they are trying to connect by pushing your rescue button, and if you have a particularly sensitive need to rescue, you might have a child who whines a lot. When children connect this way it sounds like this: “Mommyyyyyy, I can’t find it” or “Daddyyyyyy, I can’t do it. It’s too hard. I’m too sick.” If they cry when they say it, it might work even better. Don’t misunderstand. Children may not know why they become helpless when you’re around. It’s not always a conscious decision. It can become an unconscious habit to interact this way if every time you do, you are reassured by someone always coming to your rescue. Again, children aren’t the only ones who interact this way. We all do, at least occasionally.

When children connect emotionally by trying to hurt our feelings, what they’re really trying to tell us is: “I have been hurt and I want you to know what it feels like.” You may be the person who has hurt them or you may not. The important thing to remember is that the person who tries to hurt is hurting, whether that person is an adult or a child. Whenever someone is pushing your buttons, either you or they are afraid of not being lovable. When children are acting in irritating ways to get our attention, the message is the same: “I am afraid to tell you how much I need to be loved, because I feel powerless to make myself into the person I think you want me to be.” As parents, if we can begin to translate our children’s difficult-to-handle behaviors in this way, we will learn to understand what our children need from us. If you are feeling resistant to this idea or overwhelmed by it, it’s probably because you have learned to think of rescuing children and giving them what they think they want as giving children what they need—but it is actually just the opposite.

Making Things Better May Not Be Loving

I’ll give you an example from my own life. When Dylan was 8 and we found out he had dyslexia, we transferred him to a school with a program for dyslexic children at the beginning of the fourth grade. His first day at school, the students found out he couldn’t read very well. Just imagine how the kids treated him and what that was like for him.

My son had had a really rough day and came home to tell me about it. He said, “Mom, I don’t have any friends. Nobody likes me.” My response was, “Oh sure you do, you have me and Daddy (not at all what he was talking about); you have your sister and your friends in the old neighborhood. They still like you” (also totally unrelated to what he was talking about). I thought I was trying to make my son feel better, but what I was really saying was, “Please don’t tell me when you’re hurt. I can’t handle it. It hurts too badly. Pretend like everything is okay. Think about how I need you to feel.” I would never want to give my son that message, but that was the message I was giving him by trying to make everything all right, by trying to rescue him. I just wanted to fix things.²

It’s very difficult to understand that loving your child is not the same thing as making your child happy. I could have taken it even further with Dylan, suggesting we go do something fun or buy a toy he wanted (attempting to take away his pain), but that is not what he needed. What Dylan needed was to learn how to cope with having a rough day, with feeling lonely and unpopular. We all feel that way at times. No matter how wonderful our childhood was, that feeling is just part of being human. When I tried to fix it or make it go away, I was robbing Dylan of the opportunity to learn how to cope with that feeling.

Some parents go to the opposite extreme, thinking that if they are sensitive, they will make their children weak. Another parent may have tried to fix the problem with a harsh antidote, by criticizing the child for not doing something right at school or suggesting ways he should try to interact with others in the future. This implies that the cruelty of others is the child’s fault, when in reality, there is nothing the child could have done to make the children stop bullying him that day. To go to either extreme—rescuing or fixing—leaves the child alone with his or her feelings, unsure of how to cope with them, which is exactly the opposite of what is needed.

Being With Your Children So They Won’t Feel Alone

What Dylan needed was for me to be with him in the feeling, so that he didn’t have to face it alone. Through communicating empathy and understanding, I can connect with Dylan right where he is and let him know that I can handle or cope with the pain and support him as he finds his way through it. What I needed to say was, “Sounds like you had a rough day, honey.” If he knows I understand how he feels and can handle it, he doesn’t have to spend his energy worrying about what I want from him. This is so important, because no matter how hard we try, we can’t protect our children from painful feelings; in fact, if we try, we are interfering with their ability to learn how to cope with pain. If a child depends on us to do his coping for him, he will never learn how to cope. To understand that we can cope with whatever emotional pain comes to us is to learn to trust and have faith in our lives and ultimately to trust and have faith in a power beyond us.

The Simple Mechanics of a Loving Connection

As stated earlier, to make a loving connection requires us to give up our need to control the person we love, to be vulnerable. Making a loving connection requires us to “be with” that person rather than “do” something for or to him or her. The key to being with your child in the experience he or she is struggling with is to simply empathize and communicate that empathy.

To empathize with your child you must first recognize the emotion your child is experiencing. Sometimes it’s hard to understand what someone is feeling because there are so many possibilities to consider. However, categorizing emotions into four basic, easy-to-remember feelings—happy, sad, angry, and scared—will help y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Garry Landreth
• Introduction: This Program is Different
• Chapter 1. Making a Loving Connection
• Chapter 2. The Wonder of Play: Speaking Your Child’s Language
• Chapter 3. A Window to Your Child’s Inner World
• Chapter 4. Promoting Your Child’s Emotional Maturity
• Chapter 5. Your Child’s Place in Your Heart
• Chapter 6. Gaining Your Child’s Respect
• Chapter 7. Connecting with Your Child
• Chapter 8. Nurturing Your Child’s Inner Wisdom
• Chapter 9. Facilitating Your Child’s Healing
• Chapter 10. You Did It!
• Notes