How to repair after a tough day
with your kids BY ALITA BLANCHARD, PARENT COACH
Like many parents, you may be coping with your own emotional pains, pandemic stress, anxiety, as well as a lack of support and village. You will inevitably crack some days and explode at your sweet child. Here is how to repair the disconnection on those tough days.
The ongoing global pandemic is well and truly taking its toll. Many parents are in varying levels of stress and nervous systems are in an almost constant state of fight, flight or freeze. All of this, on top of the everyday emotional experience of raising children, may have you in cycles of anger, sadness and disconnection. Every parent will “lose it” at their kids at some point – yell, scream, push, rage, ignore, threaten and punish.
It would make absolute sense if you are at the end of your tether – impatient, overwhelmed, exhausted and, as such, your capacity to remain calm and connected is harder than ever.
What our children need For children to thrive, they need to rest in the safety of a loving and connected relationship with their primary caregiver and feel the
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ON T H E C OA S T – FA M ILIES
4S’s of attachment – safe, seen, soothed and secure. When you’ve had a tough day with your child, it can be easy to feel a lot of guilt and shame about how you have reacted to their often challenging behaviours. The key to ensuring an ongoing secure and attuned connection on those tough days is to reconnect and repair the rupture. This is so critical and it is what many parents missed out on as children. I have many mothers I work with that say “my parents never said sorry to me”. When you learn and practice this process of repair, you are not only modelling to your child how to do a true, healthy, connected apology (instead of some
