018 - When you feel like giving up...
Parenting the Intensity ·
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Transcript
Welcome! Today on the podcast, we're talking about giving up. Can we give up when it's about our children? We'll talk about that 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 you 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. We cannot really give up when we have children that are, when we have challenging moments, really really hard moments. Sometimes we really feel like we want to give up.
It often, like it happened really often, sometimes more than once a day. It can be very hard, and we know that we cannot do it. Like it's not something that we can do as parents. Give up. We cannot leave our children. It's not perfectly true, but I'll get back to it. Most of the time, it's not anyway. And feeling like we want to give up is just normal. Like we are going through really challenging stuff, with our kids really challenging, and wanting to give up, wanting to just leave everything behind, doesn't mean we love our kids less. Doesn't mean we're not good parents. Instead, it's the opposite. Like we are working hard, we are trying hard, and that makes us wonderful parents. And we care. We care that they're not going well. We care that they're not thriving. We care that they are not happy. They're not feeling good, and that's why it's so hard for us, and makes us want to give up. And sometimes it's just weird when people tell us that, oh, you're so strong, and it's because we don't have the choice. We're not strong by choice. We're not choosing what we're going through. We're not choosing to stay there. It's not a choice. We just have to go through it. But from the outside, I don't know if you tried, but like start listing everything you're going through right now with your child.
And when you look at it on paper, it's a lot. Like there's a lot to deal with. It's a lot of challenges, and it's normal to struggle. And it's also normal that when people look at it from the outside, they don't understand how we're going through it, because it's hard. And the more you have, the more kids you have, the more different challenges you might have, and the bigger the mountain. But that doesn't mean with one child, it's not hard at all. So we kind of feel like people don't get it when they're telling us that we are strong and we are good to do it, which is weird because it could feel also that is like it can be flattering, but most of the time, from what I've lived through and heard from other parents, it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel that way because it's not a choice. We don't feel like we have the choice to give up and do anything else. We're just going through what we have to go through and we are not making the choice. And if it's not a choice, are we strong? But in fact, it might be more resilience than strength, but we are strong. Like it's not true that you cannot give up. It's not true that we cannot decide to just stop, because stopping doesn't necessarily mean leaving our children. It can just mean not trying. It can mean just letting things happen. And that will, we will all be there at some point. And that's normal too, because we don't always have the energy to fight and to work hard and to learn new things and to apply those things. It's very hard and it takes a lot of mental, emotional energy and physical energy to do that. So we will at times give up temporarily, I would say. But in general, we don't and we go through it and we just do the thing. So it's more resilience than strength. So it's more like we are letting the wind, like make us like move in the wind, if you will.
And we're not breaking in the wind. We're just going through and we're just continuing. And that's also what makes us sometimes, I'm going to go a bit on a tangent, but sometimes it makes us feel like we're not really living our life. We're just like putting our head down and going through it without really making any choices and taking decisions, just doing the things, which is normal and fine. But sometimes it just gets a bit discouraging too. So it's important to get back some control on our life and not just keep going without really making decisions or going back to our values. And I talk about that in other places, because it can take all this pace in our life. So it's also important to focus on making decisions and not just letting things happen to us. And as I touch a little bit, it's also okay to need a break and to break sometimes, and because it's very hard and it's normal and we need to realize that we're going through something that is hard and we can break sometimes. And as I said, break doesn't necessarily mean living our kids by eyeing forever. It can mean a lot of things. It can just mean we're not cooking dinner for a month. We're just ordering takeout. And yes, it's crap, but it's the way to go through life. Or we're giving up on screen time. I'm going to talk about that in another episodes. Or we're giving up on extracurricular activity and we're not doing any, or we're not reading anything about our like parenting our children or anything, because we cannot just take anything more on. It can mean a lot of things. And it's not nothing that is a problem per se. Of course, we want to best for our children. Of course, we want to do as much as we can, but sometimes we cannot do it.
We cannot do more, learn more, apply more. So we kind of break temporarily. And some parents will completely give up. Yes, sometimes it will happen. Like I've seen some parents just leave most often than not. It's one parent that will do that. The couple will explode in some way and one parents will leave and we never see them anywhere. This is kind of giving up. Yeah. And does that make them bad parents socially? Yeah, we will probably say that. But honestly, it's mostly a way to protect themselves. It's not necessarily because they are bad in per se. No, parents are really bad. It's just they were not able to go through. They didn't add the resource. They didn't add the emotional regulation. There's lots of reasons. So it would be easy to judge, especially when we are going through something like that. But it's not necessarily a bad parent. It's really rarely bad parents. Don't even like, not even sure that really exists as is. It's a debate. It's up for debate. But there's really little instance where a parent is really bad and a parent that would have other resource, other support system, other tools. The same parents would be a great parent per the society standards. It's really more of a question of we are seen and we are equipped to go through those things. So that being said, I of course don't encourage you to just leave. I'm never going to say that. But you can leave for a weekend. You can leave for a week. You can take a break. That is okay. And that doesn't make us a worse parent if we leave for a little bit of time to regroup, take some rest and come back stronger or more resilient. So yeah, I encourage you to maybe look at all the things you're doing and realize how, oh, it's a lot or not at all because it's encouraging for you. But yeah, like take on, take in all of what you're already doing because we so often don't see it and see how strong and resilient you already are for your child. 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 leave everything in 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 a look at what's the most important for you right now. And take a deep breath, keep going, we're all in this together.