How to manage children?

Q: I love my kids very much, they are in x and xi class, these days I am very much upset with children, children are always fighting with me, every conversation is converting into an argument and end up with a fight, not talking to them, it is effecting my professional work and entering into a feeling of useless and depressed, please let me know, how to manage my children, how to teach them, how to behave with the parents.

Ans: I can understand the stress that prevails when teenage children challenge us and our way of functioning, breaking all the rules set in the house with a pretext to create harmony in life. We feel dejected and disturbed. We feel we are loosing the battle. Keep on questioning self, where I did wrong, what went wrong, is anybody guiding my children against us? Like many self-defeating thoughts usurp in our minds and make us think downward, this may lead us to despair.

To overcome from this? First of all one must understand these fights are not due to the children’s behaviour but our own thinking patters, your mental models were created in your childhood days due to the environment and the parenting we experienced. The unresolved issues can directly influence our present situation and make us behave the way in which we behave. We think it is the right way to behaviours. We really don’t know that the influence of the past exists behind our every action. As per Dr Daniel Siegel, when unresolved issues are writing our life story, we are not our autobiographers; we are merely recorders of how the past continues, often without our awareness, to intrude upon our present experience and shape our future directions.

So we are no longer making thoughtful choices about how we want to parent our children, but rather are reacting on the bases of experiences in our past. It’s as if we forfeit our ability to choose our directions and put ourselves on automatic points without knowing where the pilot is taking us.

So we need to challenge our behaviours and check where this response has come; why am I behaving like this? It will open up new ways and help you give your children better direction, and harmony prevails.

We often try to control our children’s feelings and behaviour when our own internal experience triggers your upset feelings about behaviour. Try to work on yourself and raise a few questions.

For example, how did your parents do the parenting, what are the conditions, and what were your reactions to the parent’s rules? This activity of revisiting your childhood can decrease a lot of anxiety, and it develops empathy and love towards your children. If it is not working, please take an appointment with us.