The word I use to keep myself on the most optimal therapeutic parenting tract is: BALANCE. After reading, listening, talking, listening, attending countless workshops for the last 12+ years, I have to say that at the crux of all therapeutic parenting theories (whether you call them old school or new age) is balance. Our kids need high nurture; high structure – both in MEGA doses. And I believe that if you look at any of those “experts” offering therapeutic parenting advise to us that high structure/high nurture is espoused in their approach, but called a variety of things.
Ok – easy said. Problem is that we can never keep nurture/structure in perfect balance – but we can try every day to get closer. I can only speak for myself on this one, but I find myself always a little heavy on one over the other. Sometimes this is due to my own upbringing and background; sometimes it’s due to my feeling sorry for my daughter; sometimes it’s due to being tired myself and taking the easy way out. Therapeutic parenting is the most exhausting work any of us will do. But if your child is like mine, an emotional barometer – you won’t be able to get too far out of balance before things start to spiral out of control.
If I’m too structured, too much in control, to the point of becoming punitive, it trips my daughter’s trauma triggers. I’m angry and she’s angry & scared. I need to check myself on that one – decide what’s important (my daughter or what I want her to do – my daughter, of course). If I’m too nurturing though, it can be just as harmful. First off, our children often get just as scared by a situation that is nurturing to the point that the structure becomes lax. They are scared of their own angers and rages.
They are scared that we’re not strong enough to take their big negative emotions. They feel internally out of control – so if we don’t impose structure, they wonder if we are strong enough to keep our households from spinning into chaos. I’m coaching a mom right now who is living in the chaos of her son’s out-of-control behaviors. She’s scared of his behaviors (and you can bet he is as well). If she gives him parameters/limits, he rages. Yet she has to imposed these limits because otherwise he become verbally abusive, makes impossible demands and then rages. Either way, he rages. And his behaviors continue to escalate because he craves the structure and is terrified of allowing the nurture.
The other things about structure (which I guess you could call control) is that it is necessary for our children to experience so they can then learn self-regulation; self-control. They can’t learn this without first feeling safe (which requires the high nurturing). But if the structure isn’t also high, as the child moves on to a more toddler-level of emotional development, they cannot learn self-control and delayed gratification. My daughter exhibits much of this in her ODD behaviors.
Recently she’s not been feeling well (discovered yesterday a sinus infection). She’s 14 y.o. and I thought was in better touch with her body to be able to tell me this –sigh. Anyway, opposition has increased. Going to total nurture of her while she’s feeling sick worked, but only for the first few minutes. Then she was overly demanding, and angry with me for tending to her needs – fearful of her internal feeling of weakness when allowing me to nurture her.
My assessment – three possible things were going on in her brain – first she knew she should be controlling her behaviors better (but felt sick and wasn’t able to express that), second she felt shame, and third her physical weakness illicits fear.
Shame is an interesting byproduct of our children’s angers and behaviors. If we’re punitive, we can contribute to the shame. But if we’re not structured enough, we can contribute to it as well. Our children have a highly tuned emotional barometer. They know if we’re overdoing praise. They have an overly skewed negative view of themselves – so too much positive talk about them makes them suspicious that the person giving them this praise is either — a. naïve/stupid (and therefore not safe) or b. giving the praise with ulterior motives – wants something in return. Neither helps attachment.
Knowing that my daughter needs a near-perfect balance of high structure/high nurture and knowing that I cannot (no one can, to my knowledge) maintain a PERFECT balance of these things, I listen for clues about which side I’m erring on.