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His Words,
Training Up
The below is the transcript from an awesome post titled "Okay, Which One Of You Took My Sanity" from The Urban Servant blog. This really spoke to me about my response to my child's behavior (my blog is my journal, so I like to keep good records of things God has used to teach me. I forget easily).My favorite quote - "my own heart has turned toward my children and I can walk with them through the valleys of their challenges fully aware that I don't need to limit our relationship based on their failure to meet my expectations".
“Isn't that a fun name for a book? Okay Which One
Of You Took My Sanity? truly is the title of Matthew Hoffman and
Claudia Fletcher's new book on parenting and I invested the weekend picking up
their best ideas on living with and loving our adopted kiddos with special
needs. It isn't a book I would have enjoyed ten years ago
when consistency - consistency- consistency was my mantra and the clearest
idea in my head was that our kids were 'special needs' because of their race.
(A thought that makes me laugh hysterically now - since they absolutely
were and still are challenged not primarily by skin color but by IQ, FASD's and
ADHDs - but that is another post to be written.)
The last year has been about failure and recovery
in my parenting methods. Somewhere in the desert of Colorado I found
myself in the place where I was willing to admit that many of my kids have
behavioral and mental challenges which really are not going to be modified
through consistency. Not that I gave up on them - it just dawned on
me that I was spending huge amounts of energy trying to change my kids and
was at risk of loosing them because of it - I was simply ruining my
relationships with them because they wouldn't/couldn't change. Which
stunned me. Shoot. I was a child of the 80's where we learned
that it doesn't work to make other people change in order to please us we must
first change ourselves. Something I got a little hazy on when I became a
parent. Something that is still true today.
It's been a long and weary journey back from that
place of acknowledging my failure. There are not many authors out there
who are sharing the message that our relationships should not be based on the
success of behavior modification and a punishment/reward system. I'm all
for consistency - my kids with FASD's thrive under it - but I need to be super
careful I am not taking the same punitive system we use for housework into my
relationships with the kids. Which sounds horrible to write here
but I was doing it far more than I want to admit.
Some of it was subtle - just an emotional
distancing.
Some of it was not subtle - letting them know that
they had disappointed me and now there was a cost. Remember the Soup Nazi's
famous phrase "No Soup For YOU!" I had the same heart
attitude as that character and it wasn't pretty. Nope. It was all
about setting up some weird sort of conditional-love based on behaviors and me
as the controller of the standards. It was wrong and I am sorry that I
manipulated my kids in that way.
The good news is that out of my failure I
am finding success - in perfect God-type timing my own heart has
turned toward my children and I can walk with them through the valleys of
their challenges fully aware that I don't need to limit our relationship based
on their failure to meet my expectations. The world will tell them often
enough of their failures - I need to find and nurture all of the good, strong,
positive things that are within them and be sure that I am seeing and reacting
to those things. Which isn't to say that I need to let them walk on me or
become out of control behaviorally. That's the consistency part that is
important - but I am learning to really see that there is a difference
between their exterior behaviors and interior hearts. Especially for
those with FASD's and anxiety issues what I see (and react to) on the outside
is not necessarily what is going on on the inside. It's my job to know
their hearts - and not crush them - regardless of if they make me 'happy' with
their behaviors.
I'm going to ask for a Soup
Nazi tshirt for Christmas - I want to be reminded that I don't want to go back
to that character of a person. I want to make a joke of the control
freak in me - the part that thinks I should change the people around
me so that I can have the life I dream of - I want to laugh
with my children about how sill I am and feel their forgiveness. I
want to be the anti-Soup Nazi.”
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