“If you don’t know how to take care of yourself and the violence you bring inside, you will not be able to take care of others. You need to have love and patience to be able to really listen to a partner or child. If you are irritated you cannot listen to. You have to know how to breathe with awareness, welcome your irritation and transform it.” Thich Nhat Hanh.
Being the parent is the most rewarding and difficult activity that can be taken.
A effective parenting It requires to keep calm during the emotional explosions of a child, try to understand and recognize them within his context of life and his experiences. It also requires implementing strategies that allow you to reduce dysfunctional behaviors and the occurrence of difficult and stressful relational dynamics for everyone.
A Reflexiv parentingA allows you to recognize the different states of the mind, in which sometimes emotions can dominate and other times rational thinking and helps respond more balanced and functionally responding.
Effective parenting moves around the possibility of balanced the emotional experience and logical thought, and it is through this synthesis that the possibility of making wiser decisions (Linehan, 1993) is concretized.
When people take care of each other and spend a lot of time together the conflicts are inevitable. Creating an emotional bond and repairing the breaks of the bond when they take place, helps both children and parents, to mature as people and make the relationship even more solid and profound.
A discussion may seem a breakdown of the relationship, but every discussion is an opportunity to approach the other and help the relationship to grow.
Scientific research
Search on attachment has always focused on the sensitivity of mothers and their ability to tune in to the requests and needs of their children.
In an interesting research, Z. Biringen and colleagues have analyzed a substantial number of movies of interactions between mothers and children. They discovered that the mothers were able to remain in complete harmony with their children for about a third of the time spent in the relational exchange. For another third the mothers managed to repair the lack of tuning thanks to the solicitations and explicit protests of the children. Finally, for a third they could not tune in.
The team of researchers, concluded that to make the link between mothers and children more solidly solid to largely on the mother’s ability to direct his behavior thanks to his son’s reactions.
There Relational repairthus increasing the trust of the son in his mother and in himself, feeling active in the relationship and also being able to experiment in self -consolation skills when relational resources are not available.
Breakage and repairs in the parents-child report
The breaks and repairs are not only important in the first years of life, but they are also afterwards. In fact, in adolescence, in fact, a parents-child relationship is crucial characterized by a safe attachment and a good ability to repair the breaks of the bond. To communicate openly, not judgmental and not hostile and be able to support the natural push to autonomy and identification.
Even in this phase of life, the creation of a positive relationship, based on themutual listeningon the ability of empathy of acceptance and emotional validation.
“The emotional centrifuge in which often a parent can find himself can lead to asking a child: what do you want from me? Children do not come with an instruction manual and this is what makes the parents in part. Very very true, but there is another way of seeing the situation. Our children are themselves the instruction manual in the sense that since they are born they do everything to tell us what they need.” (Circle of Security, Cooper, Hoffman and Powell- 2009).
Grasp the needs of the children
The task of a parent is to learn to wonder what need is to express a child with that certain behavior and tune in to this.
It is important to be together ‘to a child who is trying emotions and help him organize them.
Depending on the way a parent reacts to the emotion of a child, the latter will learn his way to manage emotions: If you communicate or hide them, whether to face or avoid them.
Children learn to face, accept, communicate emotions based on the possibility of a parent to be with them in the face of all the different emotional experiences they can experience.
A solid parent-child relationship is a compromise between different types of quality: being flexible but still, being reassuring without being overprotective, being restrictive but also able to leave free.
Parenting support interventions
There are different types of interventions aimed at parents to support and accompany them in their difficult task and to help them manage specific or problematic educational situations independently.
The Parent training It was born more than forty years ago as a model of intervention in cases of child behavior disorders (Gordon, 1970), with the aim of providing parents with information about education and transmitting the skills necessary to adequately manage specific educational situations, improve interactions with children to encourage positive behaviors.
The classic parent training intervention is based on the use of common life situations, on the observation of the child in his natural environment. With the aim of helping parents to recognize the mutual relationships between children’s behaviors, especially the most dysfunctional ones and the circumstances that influence them, including adult behavior.
Parents learn to be aware of their educational style, their emotional experience and everything that guides them in behavior with their children.
From one perspective aimed at providing mostly educational advice has gradually passed to Parenting more type Cognitive-behavioral With a perspective aimed at promoting a better assimilation of educational methods, a greater understanding of the relationship styles learned and induce a real change in the interactions and therefore in the parents-child relationship.
The structure of the parent training
Parenting interventions can adapt to multiple needs.
- Provide prevention interventions;
- Constitute themselves as preparatory interventions for psychotherapy;
Small homogeneous working groups can be structured by age group of children or homogeneous for the difficulties of the son (children with autism, ADHD, provocative oppositional disorder, eating disorders, anxiety disorders). They have a default duration, in general, do not exceed 8-10 meeting and have a weekly frequency.
In summary, below, the main objectives in the work of parent training:
- Provide detailed information concerning the socio-affective and psychological development of the child;
- Increase the level of awareness about their educational methods and relational methods learned;
- Enhance the communication and resolution of conflicts;
- Enhance the emotional regulation and co-regulation capacity;
- Transmit educational methods that facilitate the development of the educational task.
Practical advice
“Be older, stronger, wiser, more affectionate.”
“When possible, support the child’s need.”
“When necessary, impose yourself.”
The work on parenting pursues in parallel on two levels of awareness:
- Interactive dysfunctionality and communication errors are focused on a behavioral level, encouraging a sensitive and careful discipline;
- On the level of the representations, the goal is to increase awareness on parental mental models, consisting of beliefs, emotions and sensations related to their history of attachment and care received, which in an implicit way regulated the behavior in acquiring the parental function.
Reaching a level of awareness allows you to move from reactive communication to a communication based on mutual understanding and a sense of connection.
Bibliography
- Cinotti (2020). Mindful Parenting. To build a conscious relationship with our children.
- Cooper, Hoffman, Powell (2009). Circle of Security Parenting.
- Lebowitz, Omer (2020). Parent Training for anxiety disorders of children and adolescents.
- Menghini (2019). Parent training beyond diagnosis.
- Puliatti (2021). Parent training.
- T.naht Hahn (2013). Our weapon is peace. The courage to build a world.
