“But the work is to try to get parents to take ownership of themselves in the face of having, seemingly having to save their child. And maybe let me rephrase this. So when my daughter was struggling, she was the one that was struggling, not me. I was fine. My work was going fine. My relationship with my husband was going fine. There was food on the table. She was the one that was struggling.”
Podcast Transcript
00:01
Hi, I’m Lauren Edmunds, and this is the Lauren Edmunds podcast. I’m talking all things education and parenting for children in the primary school years, but specifically for remedial and special needs children. I hope to give you my insights that I’ve gained over the last 12 years of in-field research, owning a special needs school in Johannesburg, as well as the academic research I’ve been doing for decades. I hope you enjoy it.
00:27
I want to talk a little bit today about the relationship between a parent and a child who is struggling. And I’m going to speak about it from my specific point of view as a parent with a child who is struggling as well as the owner of the school with many students who are struggling who have parents. I want to bring in much of my thinking.
00:55
to try to help you to reflect on yourself. And there was a conference I went to recently and the saying came up again. It said, when parents aren’t coping, they medicate their children. And I think that is happening more and more and more. And as much as the work that I do is to try and prevent that from happening, the prevention is me trying to help the parents to cope better.
01:27
And it starts at very basic things like, how do you get homework done? Or even letting parents off the hook when it comes to homework and saying, don’t worry about the homework because it puts so much pressure on the family unit that it’s not worth the paper it’s written on basically.
01:43
But the work is to try to get parents to take ownership of themselves in the face of having, seemingly having to save their child. And maybe let me rephrase this. So when my daughter was struggling, she was the one that was struggling, not me. I was fine. My work was going fine. My relationship with my husband was going fine. There was food on the table. She was the one that was struggling.
02:13
And then I came across a book by Wayne Dyer called What Do You Really Want For Your Children? And that shifted so much for me. Because she was a child, she had no authority, autonomy, agency to do anything to help herself even though she was struggling. In fact, she just thought herself to be more and more stupid with all the things that she couldn’t do. So she didn’t have the capacity to go, wait a second, hold on a moment.
02:43
What I’m going through now is causing me to struggle. How do I change what I’m going through? But I had that capacity as the adult in the parent-child relationship. And when I read the book, What Do You Really Want For Your Children? Every single word in there was not what your child should be doing differently at all. There wasn’t a word of that. It was all about what you should be doing as a parent. If you really want your child to be
03:11
happy and healthy and have good relationships and be strong in the world. And I began to read the book quite seriously, underlining everything I could find that was important. And I used it as a checklist to see, am I like this? Am I not like this? What could I change? And it was a big book with lots of things. So I decided to change one thing every week or two. And I would really focus on how I was currently doing it, what I could do.
03:40
slightly change in maybe my words or slightly change in my routine that after a week or two would slowly become automatic and then would just become the way we do things around here. And that always reminded me of the story, kind of a fable story where the daughter is watching the mom cook the roast turkey. I think it’s an American story about Thanksgiving.
04:05
And the mom cuts off the ends of the turkey before she puts it in the tray in the oven. And the daughter goes, mom, why are you doing that? And the mom goes, well, because my mom did it. And of course they go and ask her mom, because her mom did it. And the final answer is, well, because when I was making turkey back in the day, my oven wasn’t big enough. And I love that story because it really resonates and it really makes us focus on why are we doing the things that we’re doing? And we have an opportunity to change it, not add on.
04:34
I think today’s society, or at least from a parenting point of view, we feel like we need to constantly add things on. Go to another appointment, see another doctor, add another piece of homework, do extra reading. It’s just sort of this compounding effect when actually what it should be is sitting back and going, oh, when I say this to my child when they come home after school, maybe I could say something different. Instead of saying, how was your day? And they say, fine. Perhaps I could say…
05:03
The lunch I gave you today, what part did you eat first? Perhaps I could do that. And with each change that we make, we get to see how it changes the whole microcosm, the connection, the family units, and then the child as an outcome. I’m talking about this specifically today because I’m reading again, Richard Raw’s book, Breathing Under Water, where he talks about spirituality and the 12 steps of AA.
05:32
And I’ve gotten again to the part where he talks about co-dependency. And he says that the founder of AA, Bull W, he created a whole program around the co-dependence that are around alcoholics. And the work that I’ve done with trauma, I see this a lot where the enablers are often the people in our environments that love us the most, they don’t want us to be hurt. And so they give us
06:00
more of what we want so that we are happy. And in fact, it’s the very thing that’s killing us. And I’ve spoken to many traumatologists who talk about a person who has gotten clean from drugs for instance, and they go home for a weekend. And because they’re doing well, they say to the mom, oh, won’t you just give me 20 Rand? I just wanna pop down to the shops and get a Coke. And the mom believes, of course, no problem, because you’re clean and you saying you’re gonna go get Coke, Coca-Cola from the…
06:29
from the local supermarket and they don’t come home that evening because they’ve landed up in the middle of wherever they’ve landed up on the streets and they’ve been shooting up heroin again. And those are really sad moments, especially in that big sort of outward way that we can see of drugs and alcohol. But what about the other little things? And I see this in moms a lot. Children who have diagnoses that make them different.
07:00
and in making them different, force the household to be different than everybody else or to be different than what you expected your household to be or different from your childhood house or maybe not so different from your own childhood. But we get these diagnoses of our children or we experience the failure that our children experience or experience them failing. And we get so hooked into it because we need to be, we need to be part of the healing process that we become…
07:28
codependent in their difficulty and when those people, those children, start to heal and move out of the difficulty, the parent is often the one keeping the child back. And there’s a line in here that that’s the paragraph that made me want to talk about this and I’ve underlined it and it says, codependency is the disease of those who support and contribute to others disease by what we call enabling behavior.
07:57
Sometimes the enabler is sicker than the alcoholic and does not know what to do when the alcoholic enters recovery. Having a child with a learning difficulty and having to go through the mourning process of giving up the original hope that you had for your child and that is a very real process you go through, when you get to the end and you find acceptance, the danger there, it’s a beautiful place to be, a place of acceptance, but the danger there is that you accept with our challenge.
08:28
And when your child shows signs of improving or starting to do things you never thought they would do, you now need to move out of acceptance and you need to move into the new normal with the child. Otherwise you become the person that holds them back. There’s another lineup underlined here. Codependents end up being just as unhealthy as the addict while thinking of themselves as strong, generous and loving. And I read that not to…
08:58
to tell any parent that they’re not strong, generous and loving? Because they probably are. But are you also codependent? Is part of your identity hooked up with the solutions you’ve put in place for your child? Or the mindset you’ve had to take on in order to help your child and be a support for them? Has that turned into your need? And do we then…
09:26
keep our children back because of that, or can we evolve? And I find the most useful approach to take is that question, what do you really want for your child? And then to sit back and observe your child for who they are, where they are, what they’re doing, and then reflect back to you to say, how can I make room for that? I like the idea that children don’t belong to us, that they are given to us to take care of and to raise.
09:55
And I like that because it makes us sit back and go, that child is their own person. And as a parent, what do I need to give them? What do I need to be in my own self? So that they can have the thing they need to have in order to be their beautiful own person and not the person that fills my life up or gives my life meaning. I absolutely love my children. I…
10:25
I’m entwined with them. I think they are amazing. And they have absolutely their own lives, their own thoughts, their own behaviors. And I have mine myself and I’ve worked hard with this. And every time they get to another age, they’re 21 now, I’ve got to work hard again. Where are they going to? What do I need to let go of? The other day, my daughter, one daughter came into my room and said, Mom, can you stop following me on Instagram, please? And she made her point.
10:55
And I looked at her and I thought, the point is valid. She’s 21. And if this is what she wants from me, I’m okay with that. And I had tears ran down my cheek and she said, oh, no, I’ve hurt you. I said, no, no, no, I’m okay with being sad that you want me a little bit out of your life now. But it’s quiet, it’s perfectly, perfectly situated. It’s exactly what needs to happen right now. And by being able to be emotional,
11:24
I was able to let go a part of me in my parenting role and allow her to release a little bit more. This is an ebb and flow constantly between parent and child. It’s made even harder when a child either has a mental illness or a physical disability or any kind of diagnosis or even an undiagnosed challenge. How do we as parents not get so hooked into the role we have to play with our children that we can’t let our children go?
11:54
when they need to go. Can we open our hand and let them go and play? Let them go into life. And can we sit back and go, huh, look at how wonderful they are, rather than pulling them close to say, look at how wonderful they are next to us. I think that’s a powerful thing. And it takes a lot of work and it take constant work and we need to catch ourselves, catch ourselves trying to ask our children
12:23
to do the things, the work that we should be doing on ourselves. I hope that has been enlightening in some way and helpful for you because that way of thinking has really been helpful for me as a parent through the years.
