008 - Asking for help = failing?

Parenting the Intensity · Aug 22, 2023

Transcript

Do you feel like getting outside help with your parenting is admitting you are not enough or not able to do your job as a parent? That's what we're talking about today. Welcome to Parenting the Intensity, where we'll talk all about how we can drop the general parenting advice that doesn't work with our emotionally intense kids anyway, and let go of the unrealistic expectations society puts on us as parents. Together, we'll find solutions and ideas that work for you and your kids. Chances are, deep down, you know what they need. But you need a little encouragement to keep going on harder days and permission to do things differently and help you fully trust that you already are a wonderful parent to your exceptional but challenging kids. So do you feel that getting outside help means you are just giving up or giving your job basically to someone else? And like you're not doing your job.

You're not able to do it. You're a bad parent, basically. I certainly did. And sometimes I still do. And I have a master in social work and I've been a social worker for a few years. Many years. I do give outside help to people and I do still believe it's a good idea. But I still feel like I should be able to do it myself. Maybe even more because I'm trained and I have experience. But we can all still feel that way because we're told. And honestly, I think I was feeling that way before I was trained as a social worker. And it's not easy to admit that we can be or do everything our kids need. It brings a lot of feeling of guilt. Especially if we're overachievers in our professional or personal life, we tend to do the same as parents and we want to do everything well and everything good. And the society is adding a lot of pressure to that. We should be super moms. And let's be honest, that pressure is often more on moms than on dads. It's starting to be more and more on dads too. But it's historically more on moms and that we should know everything. We should be able to do everything ourselves. And so when we can't do everything yourself, we feel like we're failing, like big time. And there are so many like social media ads to dad, but it's always been true. We're comparing ourselves to other parents and we feel like they have it all together. So we should have it all together too if we don't, we're bad parents and our kids deserve better than us, right? But no, not at all. We are social creature, like humans are social creature and we need each other and we need support and getting help is often necessary if we want to get through it.

It's that simple. I thought a lot about self-care and self-regulation and yes, you can do part of it with your kids. I have a free self-care guide if you want to check the show notes that can help you find ways to do self-care with your kids, but you also need to do self-care without your kids and for that you need help. You need some other people to take care of your kids and if they go to daycare or school, fine. But if you have emotionally intense kids that act out, you might get called every day from school and then even if you try to get some self-care in those pockets, you might get disturbed in your self-care. You might get called by the school to go get your kids because something happened and I'm not talking about the broken leg, just a tantrum that the school cannot deal with or they're just complaining with you, which is another story because school is as overwhelmed as families are. But yeah, it's hard and so you need the help to get through it. And help can come from very different places. One of the very helpful places sharing with other parents who get it, who have similar experience than you have because they don't judge because they know what you're going through. So that's very, very helpful. It can also be family members or friends as long as they get it too because your help needs to get it. I'm going to address that a bit more later. And it also can be professionals. But then again, it's not because someone is a professional that is supposed to be helpful that definitely that person will be helpful. Some are wonderful and some aren't or they're just not the right fit for you and your family. And so you can definitely keep the right to say no to some professional help without feeling like you're a bad parent even more because that's a big thing. When you finally decide to go ask for help and you're confronted with someone who is not helpful professionally, that can be very hard and then it's even harder next time to ask for help. But I just want to say it's possible to find the right person, the right fit, the right professionals to support you. No matter where they are, who they are, as long as you feel supported in the right way and something that is helpful for you, it's the right person. Don't really matter what their profession is and what their experience is as long as they understand.

And that's the part, that's the thing. That's important. Support is not always positive. We need support that is positive because if support, like if there's people in our life that are there to help, quote unquote, but the help is not helpful, it's not support. It's not supportive. For some support to be really helpful, we need to feel 100% accepted and like we belong and that we're not judged. That makes a huge difference as a parent in how, and like it's really important to find that tribe, to find those people because it's only in those places that we will be able to be vulnerable and it's important to be vulnerable to be able to ask for what we really need. If we don't feel comfortable and secure, we won't ask for what we need. It's the same for us as it is for our kids. We cannot ask for what we need if we don't feel like the person in front of us will be able to answer that in a meaningful way, but even more in a non-judgmental way. But when it's the right people around us, not the right people for our kids, don't fit our kids' needs and make things worse. Like when they leave, our kids will lose it. Or when we're around them, we feel like we need to tiptoe and control our kids more than usual because they don't really understand or support what's going on. And those are more like, even if they can help, they might not be very helpful. And sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's the only person that can really help. So we need to still help like use them.

And it's really that at that point. If we can give ourselves permission to stay away from negative support, then do. No matter who that is, even if it's close family. And that's hard. And I plan on doing something specific on that, but it's not because it's family or close friends that you need them around your kids right now. If you yourself are overwhelmed and have trouble supporting your kids because you don't know what's going on, that you're doubting yourself and your ability to parent them. You don't need a little someone over your shoulder correcting your kids in a way that make things worse or commenting on what you're doing and making you doubt even more the choices you're making. That's something I'm addressing in my Parent Your Emotionally Intensified More Easily Free course that you can find on the show notes. Clarifying what we want to do is helpful to like talk to those people because if they're close, sometimes we cannot just shy away and leave. We need to talk with them.

We need to explain. And hopefully they will add a little opening to the explanation, but sometimes they don't. Then, yeah, if you can leave and be less in contact with those people, at least now, it doesn't mean it's going to be forever. It means right now you cannot lose that emotional energy with those negative people around you. So if you can take some distance, give yourself permission to do it. And on the other end, the people that are very supportive, they will like first and foremost give you positive feedback, reinforcement, encouragement, even if you don't see them often. Some of those people might be online. They might be friends you never met in person. It might be a very like not close relative that you don't see often, but they believe in you. They believe in your capacity of being a parent of your kids and they get it and they see that you're doing it, you can for your kids and they're encouraging you. And that has a huge impact on how we feel about ourselves and how we feel in our parenting and that way we can support our child much better. So gathering those people around you as close as possible and seeing them more often or chatting with them more often or listening to them more often is very helpful because they're sending you the right message that you are a good parent, even if you don't feel like one today and even more so if you don't feel like one today, you need that message from those people around you because it's so, so helpful. And sometimes it's just it needs to be the right person to say it and times to you to maybe believe it a little bit. So today I'm telling you, you are a wonderful parent to your intensely a wonderful kid. I would like to know if there's one thing that you do as a parent that you're proud of, especially if you're feeling not so good today. Let me know if there's one thing that makes you feel like you're doing the right thing and let's focus on that. Even if you don't tell me, just yourself, tell it to yourself and let's focus on that. And then let's look at people around you and who you need to maybe take some distance from, maybe just temporarily and who you need to get closer to you to feel supported because you're doing something that's hard, you're going through something hard. What you're doing is not easy and your kids need you to be supported because if you're not supported, you cannot support them the way they need to. See you next time. See you next time. I'm so glad you joined me today and took that time out of your intense life to focus on finding a new way to parent that works for you and your kids. To get the episodes as soon as they drop, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and please left a rating and review so other parents can find it too. Also check out all the free resources on my website at familymoments.ca so you can take action on what's the most important for you right now. And take a deep breath, keep going, we're all in this together.