Does your child do something that makes you overreact? How about your partner? Or your own parent? Do you know why you react that way? Soho Parenting helps one couple find a solution to their “blind spot.”
Shine The Light on Your Parenting Blind Spot
by Jean Kunhardt and Lisa Spiegel of Soho Parenting
Everyone has blind spots. They are unconscious conflicts from the past that creep up on us unexpectedly and influence reactions we have and decisions we make in the present. They are a normal part of the human experience; pockets of feeling or behavior that are hard to explain or understand, and which seem to control us.
In the course of parenting, we all hit up against these blind spots. Something in our child’s behavior or stage of development triggers an overly intense reaction. We may know that we are “over-reacting” but do not know why. Left to our own devises these areas can become repetitive patterns of negativity in our relationship with our child. At Soho Parenting we help parents learn to identify their own blind spots so that they can untangle the past from the present.
____________
Jeff sits in my office looking sheepish as his wife Tina, frustrated and angry, talks about why they have come for some help. She complains that Jeff continually undermines her attempts to control the wild and often disrespectful behavior of their four-year old son Gabe.
“It’s like having 2 children,” she says in exasperation, “I cannot stand to be the only parent. He just cannot say no to him.”
“I’ve tried to be stricter”, says Jeff, “but I hate it when he gets so upset.”
In trying to understand more about why saying no is so hard for Jeff, I ask him to talk about his own upbringing and early experiences of discipline. Jeff looks uncomfortable and then starts to talk haltingly about his own strict and overly harsh father. He describes him as cold and quick to anger, with little patience for childish behavior.
“My father was always flying off the handle. He wanted us to be like perfect little adults. If I didn’t hang up my towel after a bath he’d freak.”
Jeff has sworn that he will not repeat this treatment with his own son and in these first four years he has been very successful in being a warm, affectionate and available father to Gabe.
So where is the parenting blind spot?
Jeff has not been able to see that his old hurt from childhood has been keeping him from entering into an arena of parenthood that is critically important for a growing child’s health and development. Discipline. Not the harsh and punitive kind, not the arbitrary and scary kind, but the kind of discipline that teaches you how to be respectful and gives the feeling of safety that comes with knowing that your parent is the adult and will keep you from getting out of control. It was easy for Tina –and anyone else for that matter– to see that Jeff was not providing the stabilizing function of a strong but loving parent. But for Jeff, who was unconsciously avoiding setting limits for fear that he would “become his father”, couldn’t act on his son’s need for boundaries.
Jeff really understood and felt this connection in the session. He knows now that he needs to actively counteract his worry about “becoming his father” and step up to the challenge of being Gabe’s father. He was thankful for the concrete advice about discipline; having a real game plan was reassuring. TIna felt validated and more hopeful about being allies instead of adversaries. A blind spot uncovered and a path made clearer!
For all parents, raising children confronts us with our inevitable vulnerabilities. If we use these discoveries as an opportunity for growth, we can take more control of our behavior, and be more the parents we want to be.
____________
Jean Kunhardt, a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, has graduate degrees in Early Childhood and Special Education from Bank Street College. In addition to leading parenting groups, she specializes in children’s sleep as well as working with couples and adults using a mind-body approach to psychotherapy. She and her sister, Sandra K. Baslie, are the granddaughters of Dorothy Kunhardt, creator of the beloved children’s book, Pat the Bunny. She is the proud mother of high school and college-aged children.
Lisa Spiegel has a Master’s in degree in developmental psychology from Columbia University and is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor. From her two decades of work with adults and children, she has developed an approach that draws on an eclectic range of disciplines, including psychotherapy, hypnosis, meditation, yoga, and EMDR. She also specializes in children’s sleep issues, as well as marriage counseling. She enjoys spending time with her high school and college age daughters.
For more than two decades Soho Parenting has offered realistic, insightful and practical guidance to strengthen parents and help create close and communicative families.