Do You Want to Lose the Stress and Calm the Chaos?
The surprising secret to fixing your family is to start with yourself.
Posted November 20, 2021 Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster
Key points
- Parents can focus on their traumas and coping skills to move past chaos toward a calm, connected family.
- Children don't need parents to be perfect. When parents own their imperfections, it helps children accept their own and gain confidence.
- Parents can build a closer connection with their children slowly, one step at a time. It takes time, trust, and commitment.
In my work with families, I often meet parents who are at their wits’ ends. Their home life is chaotic and stressful. There’s a lot of shouting and crying and door-slamming. They’d rather be at work or out shopping than at home with the kids. Not infrequently, one or more of the kids has a difficult temperament and/or some kind of special need.
The Solution Starts With You
No matter how much it seems that the problem is your child—no matter how challenging your child’s temperament, behavior, or exceptionality—helping them become emotionally mature starts with being emotionally competent yourself. So, if you find yourself with a home life where there’s more frustration, anger, and irritability than calm, loving connection, you might find it useful to take inventory of your own coping mechanisms. That’s the focus of Nicole Schwarz’s warm, generous, and insightful new book. It Starts with You: How Imperfect Parents Can Find Calm and Connection with Their Kids.
Your Kids Need You to Be Present (Not Perfect)
Schwarz is a marriage and family therapist who talks about the importance of a “grace-filled mindset,” a “perspective that prioritizes relationships over rules.” She recommends starting by forgiving yourself when you lose your temper with your child or punish them unfairly. It’s not okay to do these things, but you won’t make anything better by feeling ashamed or guilty about it. Instead, she says, use your bad parenting moments to realize that you have wounds, traumas, and habits to overcome. She shows how to move past shame and guilt to get to grace and generosity, first with yourself and then with your kids.
The language and tone of It Starts with You is simple, clear, and positive, and Schwarz uses situations from her own family life to illustrate her recommendations. For example, when talking about learning to embrace imperfection, she writes about “reminding myself that my kids do not need me to be perfect. They need me to be present.”
Although the writing style is positive and parent-friendly, It Starts with You is solidly based on current child and adolescent development research. Schwarz emphasizes the importance of a parent’s self-knowledge, self-regulation, and coping skills, as necessary building blocks to forming a solid and reliable relationship with their child, which is the foundation of the child’s acquiring the confidence and coping skills they need to thrive. She shows the importance of patience and positive communication skills, along with an acceptance that a calm, confident connection happens gradually, one step at a time, and not all at once.
Welcome Your Mess-Ups As Learning Opportunities
Kids who have trouble managing their emotions and behavior are comforted when their parents acknowledge their shortcomings. Embracing your imperfections as a parent—the times when you’re irritable or impatient or angrily punitive—can help your child realize they don’t have to be perfect to be loved. You can work together to welcome mess-ups--both yours and theirs--as learning opportunities, forging a bond as you create a calmer home and family. Schwarz calls this “grace-based parenting” and describes how it leads to a place of trust, where it’s safe to be honest, apologize, and make mistakes.
It isn’t easy to own your part in the drama of a chaotic household, but it is worth working toward doing that. In It Starts with You, Nicole Schwarz shows you how to get started.