“As an investment in easy parenting, trusting in a child’s desire to be good for us is one of the best. – Gordon Neufeld
This reminds me so much of one of my favourite peaceful parenting mindset shifts: They’re doing the best they can.
Children want to be good. We are hard-wired to seek out connection with a caregiver. That is how we kept ourselves safe from the tigers! Harmony and connection with each other is our natural state. If children aren’t being good, it’s because they can’t manage to be good in that moment.
It’s true that children misbehave all the time, even though they want to be good:
They are curious: “What happens if I pour this soap in the sink?”
They live in the moment: “Jumping on the couch is so much fun!”
They have big feelings: “I hate sharing with my sister!”
They have poor impulse control: “I know the rule but I can’t help hitting.”
So frustrating! But if we can remember in those difficult moments, “They’re doing the best they can,” everything changes. We can respond with the patience and compassion we need to solve whatever problem is at hand and make parenting so much easier.
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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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