Tarnow Articles

Competent Parents are Made not born 

You've taken on the most important job of your life, and it's a job that requires skill, knowledge and expertise that you can really only acquire after years of experience and study. Unfortunately, you were hired without any of those. Maybe it's time to panic... Or maybe it isn't. Raising children is the most impossible job in the world, but everyone starts out with almost no experience. If your child has self-management difficulties, congratulations... your job just got ten times harder. A child with self-management difficulties can make even the most effective adult feel completely incompetent.

Many parents expect that they should miraculously "just know" how to deal with their child, no matter how complicated the child's difficulties. They believe this to be true despite the fact that the only parenting training they received was being parented themselves.

It would be nice if children with self-management difficulties were always born to parents with exemplary self-management skills that these parents could simply impart. But, of course, it doesn't work that way. Instead, parents often share important biological vulnerabilities with their children, and biology contributes heavily to self-management difficulties. So, for example, an ADD child is more likely to have an ADD parent. Both are likely to have difficulty with self-management skills.

Therefore, first and foremost, give yourself a break. You were not born knowing what to do and you might well have a more difficult time yourself than the average parent, both because you have a challenging child and because you may well have biological vulnerabilities that make it harder for you to be a parent. All of this doesn't get you off the hook, of course. You know that you want, with all your heart, to be a wonderful parent to your wonderful, if impossible, child, and we know that, no matter what, your child needs you to try.

Here's the good news. You don't have to be a perfect parent to have a happy and healthy child. You just have to be good enough. You can make mistakes and you can have bad days. Don't hope for perfection from yourself. Just hope for the stamina to try again when what you tried the first time didn't work. Success will require many tries and even the most successful strategies will need to be revised. Don't give up! You can learn to do better.

Changing the way you parent is just like changing other behaviors. Think of attempts you might have made to become more organized, lose weight, eat better, quit smoking, or choose better relationship partners. Anything that we try to change requires time, energy, commitment, patience, and the ability to tolerate many failures or false starts. Be kind to yourself. Don't make negative self-statements such as "I'll never get this," "why am I the 'only' parent who can't get my child under control?" "I can't," or "this is hopeless." Instead, expect that the road to improving your parenting will be a journey, with both peaks of success and valleys of ineffectiveness. Keep trying to head in the right direction. Start today.

Make a good plan, try it, stick with it, evaluate its effectiveness, and then revise it based on the information you gathered when the plan falls short. To make a realistic plan that has some chance of success, realistically assess your child's ability. This will require you to appreciate your child's uniqueness - including both the positive and negative aspects of his or her style. Ask yourself, "Ultimately, in what ways do I want this child to be competent by the time he or she is an adult?" Start small, and add new goals when the initial goals are met.

Remember The Acronym P.I.P.E.:

• Plan - Gather information and make a plan for change.
• Implement - Like the people from Nike say, "Just do it!"
• Persist - Stick with it long enough to see how it works.
• Evaluate - How did it go, and what got in the way?

You can be a wonderful parent to your wonderful child and you can help them succeed, despite your limitations.