Giving New Meaning to Parenting

Do you ever feel powerless?  What can you do to change that?

Sometimes it means saying no.  Sometimes it means walking away.  Sometimes it means not engaging in a conflict.  Sometimes it means recognizing when you are getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop and deciding you are tired of that as well.

I had a fight with a relative that was started by them and I decided not to engage.  In fact, when they started yelling at me, I hung up the phone.  Why? Because it takes two to argue, and this was not my problem or issue.  And when I decided that they were not interested in listening to me at all, allowing them to scream at me was pointless and silly.  I exercised my power to say no, rather than continue in engaging in the pointless venting they felt they needed to do.  And by taking my power back, by drawing a line for me, I felt better.

It took me a long time to figure out that other people don’t make us feel a certain way-we decide how we want to feel or react to a situation, conversation or incident.  We say “this person makes me angry” or “this person makes me happy” but really, we are saying, is “when I talk to this person, I feel frustrated and annoyed and I have a tendency to get angry” or “this person is funny and always makes me laugh, I like them and they bring joy and happiness with them, and I love to have them around.”  We make a choice; sometimes conscious and sometimes unconsciously to act and react to other people and their moods.

If you look at every situation, especially some of the more stressful ones as an opportunity to make a choice, you have more control in your life.  You can decide to harness the power of choice to do things like hang up the phone, even if it seems rude.  You can reach out to someone and try to make amends.  You always have options and choices-you just have to decide to exercise them. 

The worst prison we have is inside our own heads, and when we decide “I can’t do that” it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even with my children, I try to teach them this lesson, along with the lesson of not becoming an emotional bully of others.  My youngest is the more dramatic of my two kids, and knows when to turn on the charm or the pout to try to get his way.  Our response can’t be to feed into those tantrums, but instead to show them they have little or no effect on anything other than our opinion of him as being a bit overly dramatic.  It’s his reputation and perception he’s harming, and he doesn’t have to make us feel guilty or mean or anything else. 

We have to teach him he needs to be able to control his own emotions, which is not always easy for kids, and that lesson takes a long time to learn.  But it’s one they do need to learn, and best at home rather than out in the world where people may be less understanding.

by Whitney Hoffman

Photo graciously provided by KM Photography, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved