Build Confidence by Avoiding these Parenting Traps: Tips From a Parent Coach
Parent coaching can provide support by helping parents identify and avoid these common traps, offering effective strategies tailored to their family's unique needs. Parenting traps are common pitfalls or mistakes that parents can fall into. Parenting traps usually fall under two main categories:
1) Because it seems to make sense!
2) Because the parent feels helpless and is grasping to find something that will work.
Parenting traps can make parenting more challenging. The traps can have effects that run counter to what a parent wants to happen. Here are a few examples to help explain parenting traps.
Examples of Parenting Traps From a Parent Coach
Explaining
It’s easy to want to convince children to behave better by talking to them and using logic. While some kids might respond well to a simple rationale from their parents, most kids who struggle with self-control need a different approach.
Do any of these strategies sound familiar?
Explaining, moralizing, lecturing, pleading, cajoling, criticizing, overtalking, being right, being logical.
Most of us can relate to resorting to talking a lot just to sell a point to our children. It’s easy to fall into logic. This category of tempting parenting behaviors is likely to backfire. When we lecture our kids, they typically feel criticized and may even experience the sermon as an attack on their character. When kids feel misunderstood in this way, the emotional tone of the parent-child relationship is compromised. Kids usually know what’s right and wrong, but there may be factors at play that make it hard for them to follow their own moral compass. It is usually more effective to understand what is maintaining the problem behavior and target those factors, rather than to try to talk our kids into doing better.
Repeating
This is a really common trap! Many parents find that they have to say something ten times before their child finally listens. By the time that the parent gets to saying it ten times, they have usually raised their voice and maybe also issued a threat that the child will lose a privilege if they don’t comply.
Punishing
The topic of punishment is complex. Predictable and reasonable punishment, when used sparingly, can be highly effective. Most parents, however, find themselves choosing punishments on the fly. Punishments that are chosen at the moment tend to be overly harsh. In these cases, parents might have a hard time following through. Or, the punishment is applied and the family suffers. An overly harsh or unexpected punishment is likely to leave the child or teen overwhelmed. Another negative side-effect of punishment is that kids end up feeling resentful. Then, the problem behavior is likely to worsen.
Psychoanalyzing
Psychoanalyzing is a way that parents try to make sense of their kids' behavior. There is nothing wrong with stepping back and trying to understand a child’s behavior. In fact, we should try to understand what’s going on for our kids! All too often, though, the armchair analysis of the “roots” of the child’s behavior does not lead to productive solutions. Instead, the narrative can distract from where attention needs to be focused in order to best support the child.
Over-engaging
Over-engaging refers to the tendency to take a child’s bait. A kiddo might hurl an insult or threat. With the trap of over-engaging, the parent responds with a big reaction. The child is then reinforced for the negative statement because boy did it get their parent’s attention! Or, the child was successful in derailing the issue at hand by saying something that’s hard for their parents to ignore. “I hate you” and “You don’t love me” tend to hook parents and reduce a parent’s effectiveness.
How Parent Coaching at Child and Teen Solutions Can Help To Avoid Parenting Traps
You might ask, “So what am I supposed to do instead?” If the solution were that simple, you would have figured it out. With parent coaching, a skilled parent coach assists parents in building a customized toolkit to address specific concerns.
Instead of falling into the trap of Explaining, parents can teach their children self-control by changing how the environment responds to misbehavior. Instead of Repeating oneself over and over, parents can modify their approach to help their child learn to take them seriously the first time. Rather than Punishment, parents can discover ways to increase the chances that their child will comply without having to resort to threats. Parents can also learn what mild, effective punishment can look like. Instead of Psychoanalyzing, parents can learn new ways to view how their child’s problem behavior might be functioning. An understanding of how a behavior functions is a powerful way to guide the treatment. The therapist can also offer insights into the environmental context and family system in ways that support productive change. For the trap of Over-Engaging, parents can try a new lens for understanding how their child’s verbalizations might be functioning, and learn effective alternatives to engaging.
If you are interested in learning more about parenting coaching at Child and Teen Solutions, reach out to us through our contact page.
Build Confidence as a Parent With The Support of Parent Coaching in Seattle, WA
If you find yourself lacking the confidence you need as a parent, find support with parent coaching in Seattle, WA. With the help of a skilled parent coach at Child and Teen Solutions, we can help you build the confidence you need to help you manage your child’s behavior and emotions. Follow these three simple steps to get started:
1. Contact us and we will get back to you to gather information and answer any questions you may have about parent coaching.
2. Our Client Care Coordinator will walk you through the steps for scheduling and preparing for your first appointment with a skilled parent coach.
3. Start gaining the confidence you need as a parent!
Additional Mental Health Services Provided by Child and Teen Solutions
CATS offers comprehensive support tailored to meet the unique needs of every family member. We provide a range of services, including parent coaching, to help you gain the confidence you need as a parent to help with your child’s emotions and behaviors. Our specialized services for young individuals support them in areas such as self-regulation, ADHD, autism/PDA, emotional management, defiance, and anxiety. Additionally, for families with young children, we offer Theraplay, creating a shared experience for parents and children in therapy sessions. If your child or teen would benefit from working one-on-one with a therapist, please explore our child and teen service pages. In some instances, the same therapist providing parent coaching may transition to work directly with your child, or it may be beneficial to assign another CATS specialist to support them individually. For families seeking more insight into a child or teen’s development and learning profile, we also offer neurodevelopmental evaluations. We welcome and affirm all family structures and identities, including LGBTQ+ individuals, in every aspect of our care. Check out our blog for more articles like this!
