When this happens, I revert to doing things that were modeled for me growing up, aka I yell. When my children don't listen, I feel like I have no control, and it turns out that this is a hard pill for my type-A personality to swallow. This typically ends with one or both of us overpowering our kids, them crying, and us feeling guilty.Īs I dug a little further into my feelings, I realized that my trigger of “not listening” stemmed from a deeper seed - that of control (or lack thereof in this case). And when our children resist our yelling? We yell louder. "How do we react when we are triggered?" It turns out that my husband and I react to feeling not listened to in a similar way as well - we yell."What are our parenting triggers?" It turns out that my husband and I share the same trigger - yep, you might be able to guess it - it's "not listening." This completely knocks us "off our center" as the instructor called it, leaving us triggered and reacting instead of responding.At first, this idea left my husband and me scratching our heads, but by the time we'd completed the first handout/exercise, we were beginning to understand what the instructor was saying, namely, that this parenting thing has as much to do with us, the adults in the room, as it does our kids. We got the kids to bed, crawled into bed ourselves with our laptop, and five minutes later we were watching the first class together.Ībout ten minutes into the 75-minute class, the instructor shared the idea that "parenting makes our own lives a-parent". I remember thinking, What the heck, things can't get much worse, and so my husband and I signed up for the class that night. Just reading the words had me feeling just a tiny bit hopeful because, when I looked down at the toolbelt I was supposed to be wearing, I wasn't seeing much. I read a little further and the phrase " tools you can start to use day one " in the course description caught my attention. Good, I thought, S o when I fail this thing, I can get my money back. I clicked through to read about it and saw that the class had a 100% money-back guarantee. Tired of feeling like I was living inside a boxing match, I was motivated to find a solution, and this is when a friend of mine recommended a positive parenting course that she'd just taken. I felt broken, or like maybe our kids were broken? I wasn't sure, but I knew something had to change. It was exhausting and it wasn't helping my kids learn to listen. I was tired of yelling because, frankly, yelling didn't feel good. This shopping incident was not an isolated incident but more of an example of the THEY DO NOT LISTEN TO ME feeling I'd been dealing with for what felt like all day every day. But more than anything, I felt like a failure and I could not stop crying. When my husband came home that night, I crumbled. Was this a game of parenting Jumanji? I left the store without buying a thing, with a fire burning inside me so bright I felt like I might explode. Now feeling both ignored and overwhelmed, I yelled, "Just STOP!" in a voice so loud and full of rage I nearly scared myself.īy the time I was able to get my son away from the food tray, both he and my 5-month-old were crying and my middle child was throwing items from the snack aisle into our cart. My son persisted to shovel the snacks into his mouth. I heard myself say again, “No more cheese puffs. It was like he grew additional arms as he started shuffling cheese puffs into his mouth. Once at the food station, I told him that he could take just one sample, and then we were all done. Picking up my pace to catch him, I nearly took out a display with my cart. My oldest son saw the sample station and darted off. It took all of about three minutes for things to head south. Wearing our youngest, with my middle child in the cart and our eldest holding onto the side of the cart, we walked in and I was feeling good. The complete lack of listening that existed in our family was brought into 20/20 focus for me the morning I decided to tackle the grocery store with all three kids in tow instead of waiting for the weekend. Was it too much to expect them to listen without our needing to yell or to repeat ourselves what always felt like five times? We were feeling extra exhausted, fed-up and like we were in a near-constant battle with a trio of tiny humans that we loved so much. Can't they see me? Can't they hear me?!Īfter years of this, my husband and I arrived at one simple conclusion - our children do not listen. Like a broken record, my requests would echo as I stood by, silently praying that this time they would cooperate without me needing to yell. With three children under age five and 1,440 minutes in a day, I felt like I spent most of those minutes either yelling, lecturing, or bargaining with my children.
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