Stay Strong- Parenting Advice
I’ve recently been concerned about my little guy’s behavior. He has been overly emotional, aggressive, and angry lately. Now, my mind is racing about what I did wrong. Is it from all the medications he had to be on while going through cancer treatments? Could it be the trauma from it all? What can I do to help him? What can I change to be better for him?
As a parent, you naturally worry about your child’s future. It’s part of being a parent, and it makes sense. A healthy dose of worry motivates you to set limits and keeps your child safe and on the right track.
Nevertheless, too many of our worries might be excessive. Especially when we worry about what our child’s behavior today will mean for his future five, ten, or fifteen years from now.
If your child is overly emotional, disrespectful, jealous or angry, then you probably have similar thoughts about how your child will fare in adulthood. In your mind, you see today’s problems as a preview of things to come. And you worry that your child will struggle as an adult.
In psychology, futurizing, is one of the most negative and potentially destructive things we can do as parents. Yikes, I didn’t know I was potentially hurting my child. Futurizing is having an unrealistically negative view of what the future holds for your child. It’s a tendency to expect the very worst outcome.
Futurizing is what psychologists call a thinking error, and it is very common. A thinking error is a faulty pattern of thinking where what you think doesn’t match reality. Your thoughts are distorted. With thinking errors, the distortion is virtually always negative. In other words, your faulty thinking makes things out to be worse than they really are. When we make things out to be worse than they really are, we start to cause more problems.
It is important to recognize that negative feelings can never be completely avoided, unfortunately experiencing some negativity is part of life, so the key is to help our kids develop skills to overcome it.
One thing I’ve been trying to engrave in my son’s head is to not sweat the small stuff. That I love him no matter what. Parenting is tough and it can be overwhelming at times, but I keep trying to be better and I hope that it makes a difference in my kids' lives.
Till next time friends,
Susy
“When you can’t control what is happening, challenge yourself to control the way you respond. That’s where your power is.”
Unknown.