3:28:0 
2025-01-06 
617
((Mindfulness: letting an emotion take over and pass without acting on it)).
- Benedict Carey
((Mindfulness: not punching someone in the mouth)).
- An 11-year-old, quoted by Sharon Salzberg.
Your child will inevitably act like a child, which means she is a person who is still learning, a person whose priorities are different from yours, a person who cannot always control her feelings and actions. Her childish behavior will certainly provoke you at times. The problem comes when we act like children, too.
Someone has to act like adults if we want a child to learn how to act! If we can instead stay mindful—that is, notice our emotions and let them pass without acting on them—we will set an example for children in emotional regulation, and they will learn from watching us.
There is a reason why airlines ask us to put on our own oxygen masks first. Children don’t have access to these masks, and they can’t be relied upon to use them correctly. If we do pass out, children can’t save us or themselves. So even if we’re willing to sacrifice ourselves to save our children, we have to put on our own masks first.
Similarly, a child can’t control his tantrums. He has no way of avoiding the mines of jealousy that drive him to hit his little sister. He needs our help to deal with his fear of not being loved, just because he’s not good enough for some reason. He knows that if he were good enough, he wouldn’t want to hit his sister or steal that piece of candy, and he wouldn’t throw himself on the floor and scream. But he can’t help himself no matter how hard he tries. (It’s like when we rush out and eat that extra piece of cake.)
So, just like with an oxygen mask, your job is to help your child deal with his emotions so that they can help him with his behavior. Unfortunately, when you are stressed, exhausted, and drained, you are no more able to support your child constructively than if you fainted on a plane.
That’s why your first responsibility as a parent is to be mindful of your inner state. Mindfulness is the opposite of “losing your temper.” Don’t get me wrong—mindfulness doesn’t mean not feeling angry. Being mindful means being aware of what you’re feeling, but not acting on it. Anger is part of every relationship, and acting on it without mindfulness, in word or deed, is what compromises your parenting style.
Emotions are as useful as warning lights on your dashboard. If you see a red light flashing in your car, you wouldn’t cover it up or cut the wire that caused it to flash, right? You would listen to the information and act on it by, say, taking your car to the mechanic to get the oil changed. The challenge with human emotions is that we often don’t know what to do when we feel them. We are programmed to respond to all “negative” emotions (the flashing red lights inside you that come on throughout your day) in one of three ways: fight, flight, or freeze.
These strategies work in most emergencies. But parenting—despite our fears—is not always an emergency. The best response to upsetting emotions in parenting and in life is usually to think, not act. In other words, don’t act when you feel your trigger being pulled.
You’ll find yourself flooded with fight-or-flight hormones at times, but if you can train yourself to recognize when you’re losing your temper, you have the option to bring yourself back to a state of balance. That safe place inside of us will ensure that our actions are wise and loving.
But what happens when we simply can’t get there? When a child does something that drives us crazy, and all our efforts to stay calm don’t work?
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