The goal of peaceful parenting isn’t to make our child less challenging (although it really helps!) The goal is to help us respond better when things are hard.”- Sarah Rosensweet
My client, Lauren, is new to peaceful parenting. She sent me an email this week after a hard evening.
Lauren’s 7 year old, Sophie, didn’t want her 2 year old brother, Ethan, to play with her doll stroller. Fair enough. We don’t ever want to force sharing as forced sharing greatly increases sibling rivalry. So Lauren bought Ethan a new doll stroller. Sophie was very unhappy that her brother got a new stroller and had a giant meltdown with crying, screaming and trying to pull the stroller away from Ethan. Then Ethan was trying to hit his sister. Lauren and her husband, Steve, stayed calm through this whole thing! Amazing!!! So hard to do and so well done. She was exhausted at the end of it and wrote, “We definitely earned our Respectful Voice Chart stickers last night! It’s just so hard.”
I wrote back to Lauren and Steve, “Well done for staying calm! That sounds incredibly tough. Sophie is an intense kid. The point of peaceful parenting is not necessarily that we don’t have days like this. (Although things will get easier once you’ve had some more time and practice.) There will ALWAYS be tough times when you have intense kids. The point is that when those tough times happen, you can stay calm and show up for your kids when they are having a really hard time instead of getting upset yourself and either losing it on them or shutting them down. At least the goal is that you can stay calm most of the time. You don’t have to be perfect.
Those of us that have to be intentional about parenting usually have to do so because we have intense kids. Kids who are a little bit “more” or “extra.” More spirited, more strong-willed, more sensitive or more anxious. Or a combination of these things!
Peaceful parenting DOES help children learn to regulate their emotions and want to work with us. And it definitely makes life with these more challenging kids easier.
But the thing is— our kids will always be “more.” There will always be hard days and challenges.
What makes it all work out okay- and even great- is when we can show up with calm and compassion for our intense kids. We can deal with the situations without damaging them or our relationship with a tantrum of our own. That’s the gift of peaceful parenting.
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Sarah Rosensweet is a certified peaceful parenting coach, speaker, and educator. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three big kids (ages 15, 18, and 21). Peaceful parenting is a non-punitive, connection-based approach that uses firm limits with lots of empathy. Sarah works one-on-one virtually with parents all over the world to help them go from frustrated and overwhelmed to, “We’ve got this!”
Read more at: www.sarahrosensweet.com
![As parents, we all face challenges, but what happens when traditional parenting approaches don’t work?
That’s why my client during this call, Samantha, is actively transitioning to a Peaceful Parenting approach.
We’re talking through how those challenges can feel even more intense when your child is more sensitive and needs additional attention and understanding.
Join us to discover major tips for a more peaceful parenting journey.
Go to https://link.chtbl.com/Z_YOP4jb to listen to this episode now, and share it with a friend you know needs to hear it too.
[ID: Photo of child and parent arguing on a blue background. Audiogram reads, “Yeah. The fact that he brought it up again tells me that he’s got some shame around it and feeling bad about it. So we don’t need to bring it up in a corrective way. I’m going to exaggerate for the purposes here, but, you know, yesterday when you bit me, biting is not okay. We don’t bite in our house. We don’t want to do any of that. He already knows that, right? There’s no information gap where he thinks biting is okay. So the healing that has to happen is around he needs to feel like, back to the beginning when we started talking, he needs to feel like you still think he’s a good person and that’s why he brought it up, because he feels bad about it. So you can say to him and he says, oh, what did he say again? Remember yesterday when I bit you? Yeah. And he said, I’m a bad boy. So you can say there’s no such thing as bad boys. Mhmm, that is, yeah. They’re only boys who sometimes are having a hard time.”]
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we often demand too much of our children. I dreamed that they were champions, good and smart. maybe a little too much. Maybe I was demanding more than what we ourselves were when we were little. Too many claims are not fair and create anxiety in the kids.
Dr. Floriana de Michele