Today’s Gift on the Joy. Peace. Love. @ Home advent calendar for parents
1 hour Relationship Repair Coaching + daily SMS follow through for 1 week
with Denise Dampierre
How to receive this gift? Take the fun quiz on the Parent Advent Calendar today and you could be the lucky one to win the draw.
Today’s gift helps you live a life without regrets and to repair a relationship. You receive 1 hour of coaching to create a reconciliation action plan and daily SMS follow through for a week to provide encouragement and tweak your plan as needed.
Let’s gain insights from wizened folk.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and much more
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Clayton Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School. In speaking about parent-child relationships
The time to plant a tree is before you need the shade.
Lovely Ladies
What will you do TODAY so that TOMORROW your relationships remain vibrant and strong?
A Mom’s Story
Here is a glimpse of a coaching conversation with a mother of four children:
Mom: “I don’t want to deal with past mistakes I may have made with my kids. I’m human.
Apologize? No!
Here is how I treat my past blunders. It’s like I sweep them under the rug and place them behind me so that I don’t see them.”
We both laughed as we imagined the scene and what the kids’ saw: a smiling mother with a VERY BUMPY rug behind her! L.O.L.
As we shared, she admitted that the debris really lay between herself and the children, like a hurdle to climb to gain intimacy.
Mom: “A small hurdle is not a problem.”
Coach: “What’s your goal with the children? Big intimacy or small problems?”
Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word
“But I am Right!”
Parents may wonder, “Why apologize when I am right?!”
It takes two people to have a conflict. Very rarely is one party 100% in the right and the other completely at fault.
Regarding the underlying issue between you and your child, you are probably right. The room does need to get cleaned. Curfew is to be respected. The way one speaks to elders matters.
AND process matters too. Might there have been an over-reaction? Were you closed to feedback and your child wanted to share his point of view? Did viable distractions limit your ability to focus on your loved one?
In the coaching I help parents realize where they may have added fuel to a slight tension flicker…which resulted in a full-blown flame.
Don’t be sorry for asking your child to clean his room. That is your parenting prerogative.
You can be sorry for screaming at him when he did not respond after you asked him numerous times. “And, darling, can we work out together a way that I won’t be tempted to raise my voice because you would respond more quickly?”
“Will apologizing make we look weak?”
On the contrary. A sincere apology for YOUR part of the conflict makes you authentic, one of the qualities teenagers appreciate in adults.
Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD reminds parents that respect is assimilated through language and modeling, not through the act of traditional “teaching.” Even young children understand when adults are not walking their talk. By adolescence, those mixed messages can cause deeper and deeper divides between teens and adults.
(Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD, is the author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers: Reclaiming the Power of Citizenship for a New Generation. A developmental psychologist and researcher, she works at the intersection of positive youth development and education.)
We reconcile to choose to love. To reconnect.
Nelson Mandela is reputed to say,
“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”
Reconciling does not mean pretending that the incorrect behavior suddenly becomes acceptable. The mis-action remains wrong.
Repairing the relationship means choosing to love even when you have been hurt and to let go of the resentment so that you can keep thriving.
Reconnecting places the priority on the relationship rather than on the back-talk, perpetual tardiness, or any other of our children’s challenging behaviors.
Wonder!
It often happens (but not always) that when one person recognizes their part in a conflict, the other party admits their misdead too. Phew !
Note: This coaching will be with Denise Dampierre, a trained Positive Discipline educator and certified in Appreciative Inquiry. If your situation requires medical or psychological expertise, Denise can you recommend you to a specialist.
