How did I get here?
By the Grace of God.
Earlier I wrote about how this blog came to be.
But, what about peaceful parenting?
How did I come to discover peaceful parenting?
By the grace of God.
Before I had children, I thought I would not spank.
I knew that there were other tools out there to address challenging behaviors.
I was a relatively calm, patient person.
My husband and I were relatively easy-going children per our parents’ reports,
so we thought we’d have relatively easy-going children who would ‘behave.’
However…
along with all the other things I didn’t expect
(emergency C-section,
difficulty with breastfeeding,
a baby who didn’t sleep well,
a toddler who was a super-picky eater),
I didn’t expect to have a ‘strong-willed’ child who ‘pushed my buttons’ at every turn.
I had such a hard time getting my son to behave and listen.
As he got older, I remember thinking he needed to learn to take responsibility for his actions and to understand his role when things didn’t go right.
My husband and I resorted to punishments,
and we were constantly having to shift our rewards for him because we couldn’t figure out his ‘currency.’
We couldn’t motivate him.
He was so strong-willed,
and the parent I had become broke my heart.
I didn’t want to be punishing him all the time,
but I was at a loss for how to parent him.
One day I was at my parents’ house,
and on a bookshelf I saw the book ‘How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, and How to Listen So Kids Will Talk’ by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
I asked my mom if I could borrow it.
She said that she didn’t even know she had it,
and I could have it.
She didn’t even know she had it.
She didn’t remember getting it or reading it.
Yet it was on her shelf.
It was a God thing.
The Grace of God.
Hindsight sees this book crossing my path as a miracle.
It started me down the peaceful parenting path.
This transformative peaceful parenting path.
Thanks be to God!
Upon reading the book, I remember thinking, "this is well and good for some kids, like my youngest, but there is no way it would work with my strong-willed oldest."
I thought this strong-willed boy needed consequences and rewards to help him do the right thing.
But, I was desperate to try something other than what I was doing because what I was doing the previous 9 years wasn't working and left me feeling terrible.
So, I tried some of the techniques, like active listening.
The results from just that change were good enough that I started looking into parenting this way more and more.
It was bumpy and hard and ugly initially.
My strong-willed boy had a huge backlog of feelings he needed to offload,
and once I was a safe place to offload them,
we had some very…
very…
long evenings
where my active listening skills were put to the test and my empathy was tapped out.
I remember thinking,
“I cannot do this every night.
What if this happens all the time?!"
I remained present, though,
and, by the Grace of God, I didn't lose it.
It felt like a gamble.
It took a lot of faith.
(And I hadn’t worked on my relationship with God enough at that point to even have the faith it took, so the fact that I had the faith was another grace-filled-moment-thing)
Over time, more peaceful parenting concepts started to click with me…
I began to look to the underlying cause/issue/feeling instead of reacting to the behavior.
I began understanding the need to connect before all things –
before correcting,
before transitioning,
before requesting.
I began to understand how my own actions were actually disrespectful –
when I would interrupt my son’s important work (play) in order to have him do something I deemed more important,
when I would bark orders,
or give exasperated sighs,
when I would try to get him to see my side without trying to view things from his point of view,
how I minimized his feelings by not letting him have them…
Once I started employing peaceful parenting concepts to our daily lives,
my relationship with this strong-willed boy transformed.
We became closer.
My boy became more respectful and cooperative.
He was no longer 'defiant' and no longer 'pushed my buttons.'
Over time, my heart caught up with my head;
I no longer felt that urge to react to or punish behavior.
Instead, the behavior became like a yellow warning flag to alert me that something was up.
The behavior was my boy's subconscious telling me something needed some attention.
The behavior was communication - my boy letting me know that he was feeling disconnected and off.
And I realized that it was my job to help him, not to punish him.
By viewing his behavior as communication I was able to get to the heart of the matter instead of reacting to the behavior.
By seeing my role as “how do I help him?” instead of “how do I get him to do/not do something?”, I was able to connect with him at the heart level.
I’m so grateful that God gave me the Grace and courage to change the way I parented.
I would have missed out on so much if my son and I had continued with our power struggles.
Was the transition easy?
No way.
Did his behavior instantly improve?
Nope.
Was it worth the long nights of rage and loooooong talks?
Absolutely.
And it all happened by the Grace of God.
May Christ’s Peace be with you.
💕🙏💕