Parenting is hard. Newborns do not come with an instructional manual. What works for one child doesn’t necessarily work for all children. What worked for your parents, doesn’t necessarily work for your children. Over the past 15 years, I’ve worked with numerous families from various socioeconomic backgrounds and here are some of the common themes I’ve encountered that contribute to negative family dynamics:

• too much pressure from parents on themselves and children to ‘get it right’
• not enough guidance from parents
• too much communication (teenagers do need some level of privacy)
• too little communication
• parents forcing their dreams/goals onto their children
• parents assuming they know the best path to success for their children without getting input from their children

As stated earlier, parenting is hard. So what’s a parent to do?

Perhaps level setting expectations is a good place to start. I’ve been asked numerous times, “What is the goal of parenting?” Not everyone may agree, but I believe the goal is to teach children how to make healthy choices for themselves so when they leave the nest, they’ll be better prepared to make difficult choices.  This includes teaching them emotional regulation or emotional intelligence. If you do this along with providing the necessities of food, shelter and letting them know they are loved (words and actions), you’re already parenting well. 

What I’ve seen is when parents focus on the above and stop worrying about things like what college a child is going to attend or what type of career they will have, things within the home relax and things tend to work themselves out. One family I worked with, the mother had three children and was insistent that all three attend college. This was a great option for two of the three children, but the third child just wasn’t into it. He wanted to be a mechanic/welder. In working individually with the parent, the first thing we addressed was her idea that being a welder wasn’t prestigious enough for her son. She didn’t realize how her biases got in the way of helping her child achieve his goals. Once she accepted this idea instead of trying to change it, the relationship between the parent and child improved and he started doing better in school.

Parenting is hard yet we tend to make it more complicated instead of learning to focus on what we can control. Try letting -it might just help.