Love over fear, how I found my 'instinct' and dialled down parental overwhelm
I wish I was the natural and instinctive mum I pictured I would before I was a mum.
I have had to work hard to filter the information overload, and dial down fear based parenting to find my groove. As a girl I always wanted to be a mum more than anything else. I had very strong visions of the mum I’d be: kind and loving, fresh cookies on the table after school every day. Instinctively fun, loving, and gentle.
I thought instinct was looking at your baby and knowing that a certain cry meant food and another meant cuddles. How hard could it be?
We tell new parents to ‘trust their instinct’ I find when I teach my classes at hospital parents look at me with confusion about what that is. When there is so much pressure and so much noise around how to get this job done right it can feel absolutely daunting that we should have ‘instincts’ about what our baby needs.
I think as our kids grow, finding the instinct about what they need can get harder. It’s one thing to know the kind of parent you want to be, and quite another to show up as that person day after day in the depths of tricky behaviours, public meltdowns, sibling chaos and fussy eating. These things start to muddy the waters.
When kids break a rule, hurt someone, lie or steal, or truly struggle with school or friendships we can find ourselves really susceptible to taking our hands off the wheel. These moments are really, hard to navigate and often it feels impossible to know what they need from us. Parenting from instinct can just feel impossible to reach in these moments and we reach for whatever we can find and we often find control, or fear, or anything to stop the noise.
Around the time I was juggling a two-year-old that would push and snatch, and meltdown about 77 times an hour and a newborn with reflux who never slept is when I felt myself step away from my instinct as a mum.
It was a gradual slip where information about what my son needed in order to grow into the person I wanted him to become started to cloud my judgement. It came from the internet, friends and ideas from family, but it also came from within. It was this voice whispering in my ear things like ‘I needed to teach him a lesson or he wouldn’t develop right…’ it was fear overriding love.
In hindsight these messages got between us. Instead of me being on my sons team helping him as he learned and grew, I found myself in a constant battle with him, pulling my hair out as he ruined ‘yet another playdate’.
I cringe when I remember a time when my two-year-old was crying at my feet because I had just disciplined him for hitting, and I was telling my mum that I had read online it was better not to give this ‘attention’ and once he stopped crying, I would comfort him…. My mum who was always on my team and from a different ‘era’ of parenting nodded in agreement, letting me know I was doing a good job.
My son howled at my feet. I stood my ground.
You see I had read that giving him a hug would reinforce his bad behaviour.
Fear over love.
What I didn’t realise was that there was whole bunch of covert messages that would getting in my own way and mucking me around in my parenting. These are old messages around what a good parent looks like, and what a good child looks like. They get reinforced by social norms and they are hard to spot in the moment. But not impossible.
There is a way to spot them though: It didn’t ‘feel’ good.
It felt wrong.
It felt heavy.
It felt hard.
And most of all, it simply didn’t work.
My son cried harder, behaviour worsened, and we were not getting anywhere.
In hindsight, that was my instinct. That It felt wrong.
Through a process of enough about learning about child development through legends like Maggie Dent and Steve Biddulph to know what’s normal. And through the process of learning about attachment needs and more importantly why we struggle with these though doing Circle of Security Parenting, I was gradually able to dial down the noise around parenting and find my ‘instinct.’
It took a lot of practice, and a lot of self-forgiveness. Thank goodness my kids are patient teachers, but eventually I found that coming in with connection, and then that limit if it’s needed not only worked better but it felt better.
I remember the first time I found my instinct and compassion alongside a limit for my eldest son. He didn’t want to go to sleep. I needed him to go to sleep. I wanted to threaten and ignore and punish and I suddenly felt how that was not my instinct because it felt wrong. I could feel the fear and worry and doubt rising in my body. It was fear over love.
I sat on his bed, gave a big sigh and stopped fighting his feelings and said only two things:
- I get it, you don’t want to go to bed. It’s hard to go to bed… I find it hard sometimes too. And
- I can’t want to see you in the morning.
To my absolute shock my son literally rolled over and went to sleep. I sat there blown away…… um…. Could it really be this easy?
Here is how I describe the way that feels in the moment, even moments where I set a boundary and EVEN when my child is unhappy about that limit:
It feels authentic, it feels strong and kind, it feels real and gritty but loving.
It feels good.
More than anything else I swear every time I have done a boundary like the one that night with my son with my four boys, I swear you can see the faintest smile in their eyes. I feel like it says, “thanks mum for being at the wheel”.
Like they do actually want the help to get into the car, the bath, or bed and they do want help to not hit or snatch, and when we help them in a way that is both firm and kind, it’s a really powerful message of love.
Recently my eldest who is 15 and I were negotiating about a pickup time from a party.
He wanted 11pm and I wanted 10.
He wanted to walk home, I wanted to pick him up and look him in the eyes….
He negotiated and I held my ground.
Firm, but also kind.
Not scared, just staying with him. Allowing him to find it completely annoying that I plan to collect him, but also making sure he knows the limit stays.
We eventually agreed and I swear to you, even though he will deny it, I saw the faintest of smiles…. ‘Thanks, mum, for being at the wheel.’
