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Six Parenting Truces for Divorced Families

six parenting truces for divorced families

By Ron Huxley, LMFT

The most difficult problem I have when working with children, in my private practice, is the parents. When parents cannot agree on how to raise a child, and specifically, how to discipline, it is almost impossible to reach a solution. By the time parents reach me, the problem has been going on for such a long time that neither parent will budge from there position. It is only when one of the parents will give up some of the battle ground that I can help the parents help the child.

This is even truer in divorced or separated families. In these situations, the parents are more interested in returning cannon fire at the “other parent” for past wrongs then they are interested in co-parenting their children although
that is what they claim motivates their actions. They will fight with their child’s name as their battle cry, making their warring appear righteous and their violence just, and sacrificing the needs of their children for stable, cooperative parents.

But, I have few battle tactics myself. In those moments when parents cannot agree, I offer parents some difficult truces:

The first truce is called “Squatters Rights.” The first parent on the scene gets to do the discipline, no interference allowed. This works well for parents that cannot reach a compromise or with children who are masters at the “divide and conquer” routine. In this routine, the child, who may or may not have been the original transgressor, walks away from the crime, leaving warring parents in his or her wake. Why? Because the child has learned the art, dark and ugly as it is, of how to manipulate parents into a confrontation with one another to get out of trouble. Only parents who have recognized this routine with their children can use this truce effectively.

The second truce is called “Tag Team Discipline.” The other parent can only take over the discipline when the first parent signals for help. Just like tag team wrestling, a tag or signal must be made before the other parent can enter the ring. At that point it is the other parents turn to discipline and no interference is allowed from the first parent who left the ring. Unless a second tag is made. This truce will only work when parents recognize a need to cooperate more but can’t break out of old warring patterns with each other.

The third truce is called “Two Heads are Better Than One.” In this situation, no decision is made unless both parents have consulted one another and agree completely on the decision. If they do not agree, no decision is made. This will put an immediate stop to children whom play one parent against the other. It will work only for parents who are motivated to working cooperatively together but are having difficulty knowing how to get started.

The fourth truce is called “Getting Off the See-Saw.” You have seen a see-saw at a child’s play ground. It has a long board, usually with two seats at either end, resting of a bar or barrel so that the board can rock up and down. Parents who war with one another are like two children playing on a see-saw. Push down on one side of the see-saw and the other side goes up. Push back on the other side and the first side goes up. Parents who disagree are engaging in a rocking motion that is self-perpetuating. It becomes very difficult to stop playing on the see-saw, especially after years of practice. This truce is only for parents who sincerely want to stop the see-saw rhythm in their relationship but cannot get the other person to stop pushing on the see-saw. It requires that the parent, who wants to get off, to moving toward the middle of the see-saw and away from their extreme position. If your husband is too lax with the kids, act more permissive and he will be more authoritarian. If he is too harsh, set some firm limits and he may become softer. The other parent can’t help put push on their end, even if it is not the one they originally choose. Eventually they will be forced to step off and stand on equal ground.

The fifth truce is called the “Ben Franklin’s Problem Solving Method.” It has been said that whenever Ben Franklin, an American Patriarch and successful business man, could not make a decision, he would take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. He would then put all the reasons for the decision on one side of the line and all the reasons against it on the other. The side with the most reasons would win. The success of this method is its reliance on logic and facts versus emotions – a dangerous area for warring parents. It will only work for parents who have had some experience cooperating with one another but get stuck on a particularly emotional issues.

The six truce is called the “Coin Toss.” Sometimes parents, even cooperative ones, cannot reach an agreement. Usually the best choice here is to decide to not make a choice. But when that isn’t possible I suggest that parents simply toss a coin. One parent calls it in the air and which ever side it lands on that parent gets the final say. Of course, I am usually joking with the parents when I suggest this truce, but if they want to use it, each parent has 50 percent chance of winning. I know for a fact that this is a higher percentage than most parents get in decision-making with each other. Humor is an important skill in parental negotiations. When parents take parenting too seriously, they lose perspective on what they are trying to accomplish and war erupts. Families today experience more stress than families of the past. This is why humor and a flexible attitude is crucial to cooperation. This truce will only work for parents whom generally cooperate with one another but get stuck from time to time.

These six truces cover the full range of situations where parents can disagree about parenting. If they do not work, find a family therapist to help the negotiations. Otherwise, war will continue. As with real wars, innocent children are often victims of even the most righteous causes.

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Parenting is a game…

Sometimes parenting just seems like a game…that you never win.

The child team has more energy, more time, and more players. To help parents improve the odds, we’ve come up with some new “game plans” that might even the score.

Here are three parenting tools that look like games but can really build cooperation and respect:

Follow the Leader is a parenting tool that can be used in two ways:

As a game; and as a “redirection” tool. When using this tool as a game, parents can invite their children to play “follow the leader.“ This game is fun on family trips or vacations. Families with more than one child can have each child take turns leading the family hike or singing a song. The leader has the power to choose which forest path to take or which song to sing. Each child (and parent) gets the opportunity to be the leader, thereby encouraging equality and fairness. When used as a “redirection” tool controlling children can be direct their need to take charge of a particular task, such as getting the family together for dinner or organizing a wood gathering party for the campfire. This is a great game to replace power-struggling.

Freeze Play is a parenting tool variation of the old stand-by: Time-Out

Time-out is usually conducted by isolating or excluding a child from the rest of the family or classroom. In this traditional form children are sent to their room, a chair in the kitchen, outside the classroom door, or left facing a wall. Time-Out has a number of disadvantages, the primary one being that it involves the use of punishment that may seem harsh to some parents and children. Some children may become out-of-control or physically destructive when put in isolation or exclusion time-out. Fortunately, parents can use a different form of time-out, that behaviorists call “nonexclusionary time-out.“

Nonexclusionary time-out, like isolation and exclusionary time-out, eliminates reinforces (interaction with others). It accomplishes this by freezing the moment of interaction with the child for a very brief, but poignant amount of time. For example, if a child starts whining when told they must wait for dinner to eat, the parent can firmly but evenly, say, “freeze!” The parent then avoids eye contact (i.e., attention during the discipline) for a few seconds and the child is prohibited from communicating during this time. Afterwards the parent can nonchalantly carry on the task at hand or use Time-In or educational parenting tool. Be careful not to place too much emphasis on talking about the misbehavior afterwards as it might inadvertently reinforce the child to misbehave again for the attention it gains.

It might be necessary for the parent to tell the child what is going to happen during “freeze play” and the expectation that there will be no communication/eye contact during that time, so that the child knows why the parent is “acting this way.“ In addition, the old rule of thumb for time-out, one minute for every year of life, can be used in Freeze Play by substituting seconds for minutes (e.g., one frozen second for every year of life.)

Huddling is a parenting tool shorten version of a family meeting without all the fuss or preparation time.

Huddling is a quick, informal, type of family meeting that any number of family members can have together and can occur at any time or place. Football players do this before every play to make sure the team knows what the plan is and to make clear everyone’s job. Family members can stop whatever they are doing to have a quick, little meeting about a specific problem or task. Parents can play the captain by telling the family to “huddle together.” Put arms around one another for support or just gather together in a circle, face in. Talk about the problem or task and assign jobs or ask for quick input. Decide on a plan of action and say “let’ go!“ Parents can use this tool at the zoo to decide what they are going to go see first, at the restaurant to decide what everyone wants to eat, and at home to decide what toys need to be gathered up before going to the park. While these “game plans” don’t guarantee a winning season, they can coach parents on new ways to improve their performance and their satisfaction in parenting.

OK, let’s play!

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What is shame and how to heal?

By guest blogger: Stephanie Patterson, LMFT

 

According to researcher Brene Brown,

shame is defined as “the intensely painful experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.”

Shame has a strong visceral reaction. One person describes it as “that feeling in the pit of your stomach that is dark and hurts like hell. You can’t talk about it and you can’t articulate how bad it feels because then everyone would know your ‘dirty little secret.’” And yet we all experience it from time to time when one of our vulnerable spots gets triggered. For example, motherhood and body image can bring a feeling of shame to women; men commonly feel ashamed of being weak.

Shame is different from guilt.

Shame is believing one is bad, while guilt is believing one did something bad

This is an important distinction.

Parents often try to shame their children into obedience, mistakenly thinking shame is a great motivator. This could not be farther from the truth. Shame disconnects us from others.  It immobilizes us. It makes us feel weak.  We want to shrivel up into a little ball and disappear. When we call children names, when we say “You’re always…(anything negative)”, or if we say, “Don’t be a…. (wimp, cry baby, drama queen, etc.),” we are shaming our kids. When we tell children, teens, or grown up children that they ARE something, they usually believe it.  Then they wear that label and inwardly feel it is true about them. Make sure you are not telling them they are something bad. That is shaming.

On the other hand, feeling bad about doing something wrong can be a great motivator for change. The difference is that when you do something wrong, you yourself are not something wrong.

There is a fine but significant distinction.

In Brene Brown’s book I Thought it was Just Me (But it Isn’t), she shares her insights from years of studying shame and how to overcome it.

Here are her steps in a nutshell:

  1. Notice when one of your shame triggers is hit. Get to know what your body feels like and the thoughts that tend to run through your head when you feel shame.
  2. Reach out to someone you feel comfortable with. This person should be reliably supportive on the topic that you are feeling shame about. For example, I may go to my sister on topics of womanhood or dealing with family, but I may avoid topics of raising children if she sometimes makes unfavorable comparisons.
  3. The last step is the hardest: speaking shame. After you receive a healthy dose of empathy from your support person, you can then talk with the person who hurt your feelings. You can tell them what they said and how deeply it hurt you. When you are able to speak your truth about your shame, you disarm it.

We cannot always know which of our comments will hit someone’s shame target right on, but we can be fairly certain that when we respond to others with empathy, shame cannot exist. Empathy means listening to others, hearing the emotional undertone of their messages, and commenting on how the experience might feel to them. Empathy connects and heals. Shame severs and hurts.

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Family Vacation Tip: Take a time cushion and avoid time outs!

If you think it will take seven days for a vacation, plan for eight or nine. If you think it will take four hours to drive to your vacation spot, prepare for five or six. Taking a time cushion will allow you to rest and not be upset because you are late or lost. If you are a single parent, you have the job of two parents to do when on vacation. Be kind to yourself and over prepare. That extra sweater just may come in handy if someone gets theirs wet and need a new one. Those extra snacks may keep the wild things calm when you are trying to find the right turn off on the highway in the middle of the night after being hours on the road. Time cushions allow you to handle the stressors that occur when taking a nontraditional family vacation.

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It’s not too late to sign up for the “Healing the Hurt
Child” seminar this coming Monday, October 31 at GraceSLO Church in San Luis Obispo. Perfect for any foster and adoptive parents or professionals working with traumatized children.

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Parenting Success In Small Steps

By Ron Huxley, LMFT

The key to building the family of your dreams is to measure your success in tiny steps. Stop looking for the big changes and focus on the small. Eventually you will get to the big ones but only one tiny step at a time.

Parents have a shortage of time. The quickest way end a parents dream strategy is feeling “overwhelmed.” Map out your day with your family in terms if hours and minutes. Build in time cushions so that you can get everything done. Eliminate anything that is not absolutely essential to the type of relationships you want and deserve to have.

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Frustrated with fighting with your child?

Yelling, nagging and threatening no working for you?

Can’t figure out why your child is always misbehaving?

Let us help with this special report on the “4 Goals of Children’s Misbehavior” and redirect that negative energy into positive relationships. It can be done. No matter how small or how big the behavior, this report will help parents find more peace and respect in their family! 

Click here to get it now!

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Dream Parenting is about speaking into the lives of our children and awakening them to the reality of who they are designed to be. Not all children what us to speak to them. They feel they know best. How do they come up with that idea? Do they see us as poor models about how to live life? Do our actions not inspire them to be designed like their designers? Design is the starting place. Destiny is the goal. They carry our DNA but we have to imprint and inspire them to be all they are designed to be, so they can live out their destiny. Our dream family is not just a product of our imaginations alone. It is birthed in the union with those we have birthed. 

Our children turn away from our moral codes when we react more to fear than to promises about our future. Fear is always a reaction. Promise is a response! Think about it for a few minutes. As parents, too many of our past disappointments are speaking into our present/presence and we do not display a design our children want to emulate. Dreams are not born out of fear. Dreams are produced by a strong faith in the knowledge of who we are. Not what we do and not based on what our children do. 

I hope this is not confusing you. You can’t build a dream family by managing behavior. That’s the bottom line. You have to build it by reminding yourself and your children about who you are designed to be. If you don’t yet understand that, then this is the first step in your new family blueprint. 

I think I should create a handout to go with this…Be on the lookout for one. in the meantime, join our MORE list and get past Dream Parenting Handouts and more: Click here now.

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How do violence and trauma affect a child’s brain? 

Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEEVKDW5NDc?

A research-based discussion by Ron Huxley, LMFT

It is interesting how society views traumatic experiences. We tend to “sweep it under the rug” and pretend it doesn’t affect us or tell ourselves to “move on.” So many people come into my office who have a long list of traumatic experiences but can’t identify one reason why they are having problems in their work and family relationships today.

If we as adults do not recognize the effects of exposure to violence and traumatic abuse and neglect, we won’t recognize it in our children either. There is a belief that children are resilient and they won’t remember the early incidents of violence in their lives but that is simply not sound science or everyday reality.

Watch the video above to see what modern-day researchers are saying about a child’s exposure to violence and trauma. I will make a few more comments that highlight areas for parenting the traumatized child. 

The child’s brain develops from the bottom up and the inside out. Fear disrupts and shuts down the thinking areas of the brain that shows up in night terrors, severe tantrums and difficulty in attachment and bonding. At times, it seems that children have no conscience or remorse. These are survival strategies!

Children exposed to violence and trauma have a higher rate of mental health issues and chaotic relationships later in life. It is a “lifetime legacy” with unhealthy coping behaviors and individuals end up doing the very thing that was done to them no matter how much they vow to never be or do that to another human being.

Healing for traumatized children needs to re-experience stressful situations by using calmer, more rational strategies. Being able to talk about feelings instead of acting them out is crucial to children. Children need “healthy adults to connect to…”

Traumatized children who become parenting themselves have to re-learn how to create an environment that is safe and healthy. The “most important thing a parent needs to understand is that a child’s brain will become what it is exposed to…The brain is a mirror of a child’s experience.”

It seems simplistic but if you want your child to be kind, they have to be treated kindly. If you want your children to feel safe, they need to experience safety. If you want your child to be respectful, you have to treat them respectfully.

What are your reactions to this video? How have you overcome your traumatized childhood and become a safe, healthy parent?

Video source: (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEEVKDW5NDc)