The 3 Pillars to Connected Parenting
They’re easy to miss.
Parenting is a process that requires us to evolve, learn, reflect, change and grow. On the surface, parenting is the task of raising a child through different developmental phases. You can find countless resources on how to do this, with many different parenting styles touted as “the best.” But to parent well, in my humble opinion, requires three critical pillars that often get missed.
We’re a solution-driven culture, taught to believe that the answer to our problems can be found outside of us. Consider how many times a day you ask Google for guidance or grab your favorite parenting book so you know exactly what to do next time a challenge strikes. We’re rarely given tools to better understand ourselves and how the interaction between parent and child is a dance. You both have a part in whatever the challenge may be. Yes, behavior plans and understanding what to say and how to help your child work through various challenges are essential, but we have to look beyond the behavior or the challenge.
Recently, I talked to one of my favorite people in the parenting space, Joe Newman, author of “Raising Lions,” about tackling challenging behaviors. He explained that when we isolate a problematic behavior and only focus on it, we miss other critical pieces to the puzzle. Families, schools, teachers, and friends are all part of what I consider a developmental web with your child in the center. This web and how your child interacts with it will inevitably shape who they become and how they behave. If we isolate parenting challenges with a fix-it mentality, we abandon the rest of the web and pieces of the puzzle.
As a parent, I discovered three critical pillars that every parent needs. These apply to all ages because parenting, like life, is not static. We need to remain flexible and open throughout the different phases and stages. Consider these three pillars when you find yourself stuck, overwhelmed, or feeling like there is no solution in sight.
A process to help you reparent yourself
Reparenting can be challenging to understand, as some interpret it as blaming our parents for everything that’s gone wrong in our lives. Reparenting doesn’t mean this. It’s when an adult works to meet their own emotional or physical needs that went unmet in childhood. Even if you had a wonderful childhood, which I did, you will still need a way to reparent yourself because each generation knows more. Overtime we evolve and have more access to new research and information. I hope my kids parent their children differently and have more understanding than I do. This is what it means to evolve. My mom and I have extensively discussed this, and she entirely agrees. Parents are humans that do their best with what they know at that time. The same is true for me and you. Once you can get over the blaming hurdle, you’ll need a way to access the parts of yourself that could be getting in the way of how you parent.
For example, I was working with a mother who experienced some neglect as a child. She wasn’t abandoned, and she wouldn’t describe it as severe neglect, but she can recall moments when she didn’t feel seen. As a result, when she became a parent, she was determined to ensure her daughter never felt this way. This is fair and reasonable. The problem was that she smothered her daughter with attention, became overprotective, and constantly praised her. As a result, her daughter was robbed of opportunities to build resilience. She struggled with the slightest challenge, and her mother began to burn out because she had to do everything for her. Whenever she tried to take a step back, watching her daughter struggle hit too close to home, and she only saw it as the same neglect she experienced.
I worked with this mother and taught her my four-step method, PARR (pause, acknowledge, respond, reflect). PARR is a tool I created for myself and then shared with others to pause and recognize triggers. Reflecting is a critical part of this process, along with self-compassion. Over time, this mother began to see her own unmet needs as a child were hindering her daughter’s development.
I offered this mother this advice: How amazing would it feel for your daughter to look back one day and say, “Every time I felt frustrated or sad, my mom was strong, and her faith in me was unwavering. She was simply there for me, knowing I have what it takes to get through it.”
If we don’t take the time to understand what comes up for us emotionally, our parenting decisions will be impacted, and not always positively. Give yourself a process to reparent yourself, and know that we are all — not just children — growing, learning and evolving.
An environment conducive to connection
I was listening to a psychic/medium describe her process for connecting with spirits on the other side, and she said you have to create an environment conducive to connection. I sat straight up and realized this is true for parents, too. The environment we create for our kids to flourish, develop, and thrive is critical. Considering the web analogy I explained earlier, we want the web to be healthy, strong, and full of meaningful connections, love, and support. So, how do we create an environment that’s conducive to connection? We have to practice presence, intentionality, and simplicity.
My son recently came home from college, and we were eating dinner together. I looked up, and all of us were on our phones. I was stunned and wondered, how did we get here? We had countless boundaries around electronics when our kids were younger, and now that they’re older, we all succumbed to the temptation to numbly scroll through our phones. I announced right then that the rules haven’t changed, our phones are to be put away at dinner. What happened after was amazing. We had conversations, interesting questions were asked, we laughed a lot, and we simply appreciated being together.
It’s easy to fall into routines where we check out. I’m the first to fall into this trap. Let’s face it: We all live busy lives, and a quiet moment to check out is usually welcomed. But, if left unchecked, our environment slowly changes, as mine did around the dinner table. The subtle changes, over time, create deficits in our ability to connect with others.
I was working with a parent who explained that her job in sales requires her to always keep her phone nearby. Her children started to get bothered because every time they needed their mom’s attention, a text or a phone call interrupted. She would snap at them, telling them the phone was part of her job and she had no choice but to answer.
As a solution, we created an intentional schedule where time with her kids meant exactly that: She wasn’t interrupted by notifications on her phone. She asked me, “Do you think I should put my phone away? This way, I’m not even distracted.” I said, “Sure, if that’s what you need. But, I want to offer a reframe: What if you kept your phone out, and every time you heard a notification, you consciously chose to keep connecting with your kids and let the call go? Your children will realize you’re in charge of your time and how you want to use it. And in that moment, nothing is more important than them. This is significantly more powerful than your children watching you lock your phone away because you won’t be able to help yourself if it’s around.”
I am not saying we can never be on our phones or busy with something else. I’m saying to be intentional with your time. If it’s family time, stay present and connected to your children.
A conducive environment for connection will require simplicity. Think of the busyness we all subscribe to. Our kids’ schedules are starting to rival those of major CEOs. I love the feeling of a wide-open day on my schedule. When my kids were younger, we always did pajama days, and they loved it. We baked, played, watched movies, and stayed in our pajamas all day. The simplicity brought a sense of steadiness to our days.
Check in with yourself each week and ask yourself, “Where am I feeling overwhelmed? Is there anything that can change? Am I taking on tasks that I need to say no to? How am I prioritizing my time?” Breathwork can be an incredible tool when practicing simplicity. Five deep breaths can remind me that life is never as complicated as I perceive it to be. It grounds me in a moment of chaos and anchors me when things go awry.
The ability to process complex emotions
If I were to speak to an auditorium full of parents and say, “Raise your hand if you want your kids to be unhappy,” I’m certain no one would put their hand up. Emotions like sadness (aka unhappiness), anger, despair, etc., are hard for our kids and us. You may have grown up in a generation where no one acknowledged hard emotions. When you experienced a challenging emotion, like sadness, you were immediately urged to stop — don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry about. Sometimes, you may have hidden these emotions because they came with punishments or harsh words. The takeaway was that feeling an emotion like sadness was wrong and doing everything you could to avoid, deny, suppress, and move on from the feeling was needed.
When we see our kids display these tough feelings, we’re often triggered, especially fathers. For a long time, it was socially unacceptable for a boy to cry or act weak. We now have generations of men who denied these emotions or feelings because they were shamed. As a result, when our children are unhappy, we go into fix-it mode because this is what we learned to do. We don’t want to deny their emotions, but we also don’t know what to do about it. So we either clear the way and try to create a path with little to no challenges for them, or we try to fix it and stop it when the feelings take over. In either case, even though we do not mean to, we send the same message: These feelings and emotions are bad; run the other way.
How can we remedy this? It starts with our own ability to process our feelings and emotions. This requires self-compassion, acknowledgment of the emotions or triggers, and tools to sit with the feeling rather than run. The more we can do this, the better equipped we’ll be to help our children. When we deny kids’ feelings like sadness, anger, and unhappiness, and we aim to always ensure they are happy, we rob them of the richness of life. We are meant to experience all of these emotions so that when we experience joy, it feels so good. Imagine not running away from pain and allowing it to teach you. I don’t think I’m alone in saying this, but some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned have been the result of going through something hard. Allow your kids and yourself the spectrum of all emotions, and watch how they grow to depths you can’t even imagine.
It is natural for a parent not to want to see their child struggle. Believe me, I’m right there with you. If you are the parent of younger children, brace yourself because it only gets harder as they get older. Watching your child get left out of a group, sitting with them the first time someone calls them a terrible name, or walking with them when they experience their first betrayal, will trigger all kinds of emotions in you. But use these moments to help yourself and your child. These moments help us grow and gain perspective. They deepen our lived experience, and we can move through life with more confidence and resilience.
When we process our emotions rather than run away, we teach our kids to do the same. We learn not to cower in fear and to trust ourselves in moments of adversity. This is and always will be a team effort between you and your child.
Putting it all together
We can all agree that we love our kids and want to do right by them. Regardless of your child’s age, these three pillars will be your roadmap to grow as a parent and cultivate an environment where connection is at the forefront. You’ll build trust and awareness around hard emotions and what can be discovered on the other side. Remain flexible and agile so you can shift and dance through this process rather than cling to fear and control. Parenting is the ultimate journey in surrendering and letting go.