In last week’s episode, I talked about how to forgive yourself when you yell, shame, hurt, or otherwise show up in a way you don’t love as a parent. Today, we’re talking about what comes next - saying “I’m sorry” and having a repair conversation with your child.
You’ll Learn:
It’s normal to lose it with your kid. What’s important is how you choose to handle it afterward.
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You know what this looks like…
Your kid keeps complaining about what you’re serving for dinner.
Or they keep asking for something over and over, even though you already said no.
Or they start hitting their sibling while you’re trying to make an appointment on your phone.
You lose your compassion and patience and get angry, overwhelmed, irritated, or frustrated. You get dysregulated, short-tempered, and disrespectful toward your child.
Children are very self centered. That's their natural way of viewing the world. They're pretty sure the world revolves around them.
So when they notice that you’re mad, they will automatically think that they are the reason. And further, they’ll think that something is wrong with who they are. They don’t know how to separate their core self from their behavior yet. They internalize our anger, and it's very easy for them to go into shame.
This means that when you yell or get upset, you have to go back and give your child some understanding of why you behaved the way you did. We call this repair.
You explain to them that you were in a big feeling cycle, and you didn’t use your tools of taking a pause or deep breathing or moving your body or whatever you typically use to calm yourself.
The conversation is about repairing your relationship with your child, as well as their self-esteem and internal self-talk (basically your kid’s relationship with themself).
Here are some signs that your child might need a repair conversation with you. You might notice that they:
When you act out your big feelings on your kid, it activates their stress response. They go into fight, flight, freeze, faint, or fawn.
Anytime you notice that you’ve created a rupture, go make a repair.
If you’re at the beginning of your Calm Mama journey, you’ll probably have to do this a lot. You haven’t developed the skills yet, and that’s okay. You are still learning.
Another thing to note is that the repair conversation should happen separately from parenting, limit setting, or correction. You might feel tempted to say something to your kid like, “I’m sorry I yelled, but I wouldn’t yell at you if you would just put your pajamas on.” Discussion about your child’s behavior is a whole different conversation.
You are responsible for how you respond to misbehavior. Repair is the time for you to fix your mistake and reconnect.
Repair is the act of returning to a moment of disconnection, taking responsibility for your behavior, and acknowledging its impact on your child. You caused a problem with your...
