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| Image: Pexels/Sofatutor |
Parenting can be hard.
Most of us muddle through as best we can.
But how do you know whether parenting decisions are truly in your child’s best interests — or if they merely satisfy your own needs?
Decisions that might seem tailored toward your child’s best interests sometimes create unanticipated consequences. This happens when decisions are driven by anxiety, uncertainty, or a desire to protect your child from failure. And parenting can be even more complicated when your child is gifted or twice-exceptional.
Fortunately, there are tools available for understanding more about these common practices (see more below).
What parenting interventions work best
Children thrive when there is love, warmth, open communication, emotional attunement, and clear boundaries, as part of an “authoritative” (not to be confused with authoritarian) parenting approach. The absence of physical punishment, shaming, or other harsh forms of discipline is also essential.
And considering your family’s or your own needs in addition to those of your child is also necessary at times, as with the following:
Clear and necessary choices related to safety or finances or basic respect for others (such as limiting extra curriculars due to financial limitations).
Expectations that benefit the child and the family (such as insisting on regular chores).
Setting boundaries and limits on what you can handle or what your entire family needs (such as limiting the the noise decibels in your home).
Acting on what works for both you and your child is a win-win situation. It only becomes problematic when the child’s needs are misunderstood and if your involvement thwarts their development.
When parenting decisions inadvertently make things worse
There are times when worries, high expectations, personal struggles, or even patterns from your own childhood overshadow parenting decisions.
I have heard a variety of parenting struggles in my psychotherapy practice:
Parents who are willing to sacrifice everything to support and protect their child, yet who are often unaware of how much their own needs or worries affect their decisions.
Parents who are reluctant to let their child experience “natural consequences,” attempting to insulate them from any risk of failure.
Parents who struggle with anger and grief when their child’s behavior, temperament, or interests conflict with what they had expected.
Parents who “lose it,” and lash out in a rage when their child’s self-defeating or stubborn behaviors persist.
Parents who feel compelled to repeat the child raising practices from their past and are afraid to develop their own parenting compass.
Parents who view their child as a close confidante, where closeness masks an unhealthy reliance on the child for emotional support.
These parents clearly love their children and want the best for them. But attempts to shield them from failure — or relying on them to fulfill their dreams or provide emotional support — can backfire and contribute to unexpected negative outcomes.
The autonomy factor
Sometimes, you must intervene to keep your child safe and offer developmentally appropriate support: removing them from a physically unsafe or emotionally abusive situation, approaching their teacher to understand why they failed math, declining a playdate invitation if a neighbor’s child repeatedly teases and taunts your child.
Protecting your child and keeping them safe is essential. But most of the time, parenting decisions are not so clear-cut.
Attempts to rescue children from challenging situations — when they are developmentally, emotionally, and socially capable of handling them — deprives them of opportunities to flex their autonomy muscles and build resilience and confidence.
Children are born with an inherent developmental drive toward autonomy and self-sufficiency. Ushering a child along this path, though, creates challenges for all involved. Children careen from needing comfort, protection, and guidance… to a fierce drive for independence. And these competing needs can change within seconds.
When my three-year-old tussled with a stuck toy and wailed, “I want to do it all by myself, but I need your help!” his reaction epitomized the developmentally universal desire for both autonomy and support.
Key questions to ask yourself
How can we ensure that our decisions best serve our child’s needs, support their safety and wellbeing, but also encourage their autonomy?
Self-awareness, clarity about goals and values, and attunement to your child’s unique needs are all critical components of effective parenting.
The following are questions for self-reflection to consider as you navigate parenting decisions (along with some examples of child-raising dilemmas).
1. Do my decisions arise from my personal wishes, expectations, and goals for my child? Or am I overlooking what they might truly need based on their developmental age, abilities, temperament, and interests?
Both Mara and Tim* (whose names are changed to preserve confidentiality) wished their parents had encouraged them to excel in school. In hopes of averting a similar fate for their son, they demanded a high level of achievement — insisting that he take the maximum number of AP classes and participate in afterschool sports. But he felt pressured and angry, started to withdraw and rebel, and ended up failing two of his classes.
Mara and Tim had reasonable expectations about their son’s potential. However, they ignored some of his emotional needs or his capacity to take on activities that may have been too challenging. Their attempt to prevent a repetition of their childhood experiences backfired.
2. When should I let my child struggle and accept natural consequences? Can I recognize when my involvement or interventions are necessary or when they might interfere with their burgeoning independence, confidence, and resilience?
Kevin’s* parents were frustrated when he refused to complete his homework. They sat with him, readily answered his questions (rather than insisting that he research information on his own), and even helped rewrite some of his papers.
Kevin’s parents were unaware that their “help” was contributing to his resistance. As a result, Kevin learned to doubt his abilities and was reluctant to attempt difficult or challenging schoolwork.
3. Will my expectations contribute to my child’s safety as well as their autonomy and confidence? Or instead, will these expectations convey doubts about my child’s capabilities and create an unhealthy dependency on us?
Heather and Jesse* were sad and anxious when their daughter left for college and insisted that she call them every day so they knew she was safe. Rather than feeling comforted by her parents’ need for connection, their daughter internalized her parents’ anxiety and worried that perhaps she could not handle college life so far from home.
Heather and Jesse understandably anticipated missing their daughter. But their insistence on daily check-ins was prompted by their own fears and grief about her leaving home. Unable to offer a confident send-off with perhaps more reasonable expectations, they inadvertently conveyed doubt about whether they trusted her readiness for college.
4. How do I separate my own childhood experiences and fears from what are reasonable expectations based on my child’s age, developmental level, and social/emotional needs? Can I distinguish my anxiety from what is safe and developmentally appropriate?
Marjorie* was sexually assaulted at a party when she was 17. Now that her daughter, Kayla*, was in high school, Marjorie would not let her participate in relatively safe social activities. She was terrified that the same fate would befall her daughter.
Marjorie’s goal of protecting Kayla set up an unhealthy dynamic. Rather than prepare her daughter with tools for managing challenging social situations, she conveyed fear and distrust, setting her daughter up for anxiety… along with rebellion (as Kayla learned to hide her social activities from her mother).
5. Am I relying excessively on my child to fulfill my needs or provide emotional support?
Tara’s* parents divorced when she was 14. Tara felt sympathy for her mother and tried to cheer her up by spending most of her free time at home rather than with friends. Tara secretly worried that her mother would crumble without her emotional support.
Tara’s mother assumed that her daughter was happy and wanted to spend her time at home. She never realized that Tara felt obligated to support her mother’s wellbeing, which inadvertently thwarted her social and emotional development.
What went awry for these families?
The above examples may seem familiar. And most of us (myself included) have fallen into some of these parenting traps at times: Conveying mixed messages about rules, “rescuing” them from natural consequences, or yelling at them after a hard day.
Occasional lapses rarely cause harm. It’s only problematic when these actions become entrenched patterns or are clearly misaligned with what our child needs.
When to intervene and when to hold back
One of parenting’s greatest challenges involves learning whether to intervene or not. This might require restraint on our part, containing our own anxiety and expectations, allowing our child to fail, and recognizing when our involvement relieves our worries and unhappiness but instead interferes with their capacity to learn new skills and face difficult challenges.
But we can enlist one of our most powerful parenting tools: the capacity for self-reflection.
The next time you are feeling torn about parenting decisions, ask yourself the following additional questions:
Is this what my child needs at this given moment in time?
Is this essential for their long-term development?
Are my decisions based on my personal longings, unmet needs, or reliance on them to offset my own unhappiness or anxiety?
Are my expectations based on my child’s abilities, temperament, and developmental level?
Are my reactions driven by my own uncertainty, anxiety, or influences from others?
The more we feel grounded in our parenting values and goals, can rein in our anxiety and worries, consider our child’s unique strengths and challenges, and seek out guidance and support from trusted loved ones or mental health professionals (and not from our child), the more we help our child transition into the confident, independent, and kind young adult we hope they will become.
*All names and some minor details were changed to protect confidentiality.
A similar version of this article was recently published on Medium.
