Did you have a good cry today? Did your child? Perhaps they ended up having a meltdown because they wanted pizza for dinner and you made pasta. Or perhaps they wanted to wear their red socks, and they were in the wash.

Your child might of had a tantrum before bed because they didn’t want to clean their teeth. Eventually they snuggled up in bed, and fell asleep, leaving you feeling stressed, and exhausted.

How was your day? Did you have moments of joyful connection with your child? Did you have moments when you felt frustrated, or said things you regretted? Chances are what you need is to have a good cry.

Our children naturally seek to release stress and tension through crying and tantrums, and they naturally expect us to be their listeners. It’s not always easy, and part of the problem is we are the ones to have to hold it together. At the end of the day we probably need to have a good cry too.

Yesterday I spent the whole day with family and friends, I was talking and laughing, and having wonderful conversations. And yet at the end of that lovely day, I was feeling sad, upset feelings were rising to the surface, and I was struggling to feel connected to my daughter. I knew I needed to have a different kind of conversation. One in which I could find my tears. So I called my listening partner. I barely spoke to her, I just simply cried for a few minutes, and afterwards I felt completely transformed, ready to engage with my daughter again, and no longer weighed down by heavy feelings.

For those of you new to my blog and Hand in Hand Parenting, a listening partnership is where two parents make an agreement with each other to spend time talking and listening together about how parenting is going. When you follow specific listening guidelines you can create a safe space so each person can find the feelings that don’t come up in normal conversation. You can have a good cry.

Your toddler or young child may naturally seek moments every day to release stress and tension that builds up in our busy lives. We often think of their meltdowns as the problem, but what is actually the problem is not that our child is crying but that we are not. Imagine how different parenting could be if you got to have a good cry every day just like your child!

To find out more about listening partnerships you can read more about them in my introductory post here, or in my book Tears Heal: How to listen to our children

Last week I was spending time in the UK with friends and family. In effect I was solo parenting as my husband was still working back in Switzerland. Except I wasn’t. I spent almost every waking minute in the company of other adults, and often children. There were people to play with my daughter while I took a shower, or brush her hair while I got dressed. There were other children to play with so that I could sit and have a chat without interruption.

Living abroad means our holidays are often spent like this, catching up with friends and family. And unlike day to day life it really is like having a village; having people to share cooking and childcare.

As I travelled from one house to another I reflected on how easy it was to parent with other people around. And how happy I felt to be spending concentrated time with my daughter, along with the support of others.

Since my daughter recently started Kindergarten I’ve enjoyed my free time so that I can be completely alone, and blog and write. But during this week with other people I felt a much deeper happiness that seemed to come from being constantly connected to my daughter and with other people. My drive to be ambitious and finish another blog post or the chapter of my next book faded into the background, as play and laughter and togetherness were all that mattered.

The way we live in modern times our sense of tribe may be temporary. We have a lovely girls night out and then return to our nuclear family, or we have holidays with extended family and then go back to parenting alone.

There are lots of childcare options for when we need a break, or time to ourselves and some of those may even be free. But as I heard one mum say, we don’t just need someone to take over the parenting responsibilities for us, we also need people to support us to be the parents.

What this week taught me is that I love being a parent. I want to be with my daughter as much as I can, and often what I’m missing is not extra time for myself but emotional and practical support to make my job easier.

With Hand in Hand Parenting, we can’t cook your dinner and put your kids to bed,  but we can offer you emotional support. Listening time can refill your cup when you feel like you need to run away from your family! I can remember in the early stages of parenting where I’d feel like I needed a long break. Then I’d have ten minutes of listening time, and feel completely renewed and ready to enjoy parenting again.

The foundation of Hand in Hand Parenting is listening to each other and building a village that supports parents just as much as children. As more and more parents discover this transformative way of parenting, we can rebuild the sense of having a village around us.

For more information about listening time check out my blog post here, or my book Tears Heal: How to listen to our children. Or join the Hand In Hand Parent support group on facebook to find a listening partner and build your village today! 

 

A few weeks ago I had some devastating news; my sister was diagnosed with Leukemia. I rushed off to the UK to visit her, and came back to my slightly angry and disconnected daughter. Over the next two weeks, I did my best to try to reconnect in between the morning separation of Kindergarten. I was feeling sad about my sister a lot of the time and I wasn’t exactly at my most playful and energised despite lots of listening time.

I was due to go to a Hand in Hand Parenting retreat for instructors in Hungary. This is where instructors from all over Europe, the middle East and Africa come together to do listening time together and talk about the work we are doing with parents in our region. I wasn’t looking forward to being separated from my daughter again, but I knew deep down that it was important for my own wellbeing to go there.

At the retreat I got to cry, a lot, and be completely supported with love and attention. In between our group listening time sessions I got to talk and laugh with some of the people I feel closest to the world, as well as many wonderful instructors and trainees that I was just meeting for the first time.

When I arrived back home after the retreat I noticed that reconnecting with my daughter felt completely effortless. I was immediately much more playful with her. Doing special time together felt like pure joy. The thoughts I often have like, ‘’When is this going to end?’’ and ‘I wish I had some time to myself!’’ were much more muted.

My daughter sensed that I was more more emotionally available, and in the evening she started ‘acting up’ in a happy playful way. When I cleaned her teeth, she grabbed her plastic cup, and ran away spitting into it, instead of into the sink. It was much easier for me to respond completely playfully to this ‘misbehaviour,’ to help her get back on track, rather than becoming serious.

I’ve been on a few Hand in Hand Parenting retreats, and I always come back feeling amazing. It often feels to me that this heightened ability to connect is how we should all naturally feel as parents.

Except we don’t. Parenting is challenging and exhausting. We may have fleeting moments of joy with our children that all too often get buried beneath the stress of our to-do list. When we have present day difficulties, we feel our past hurts even stronger.

When we practise Hand in Hand Parenting we are trying to give our children what we didn’t receive as children. We want to give them unconditional attention, and listen to their feelings. It’s not easy giving what we never received ourselves.

But having real in-person listening time allows us to catch up on the listening we didn’t receive when we were young. I really like yoga and meditation, and lots of other nurturing activities, but I also think that listening time is so essential, because it gives us exactly what we are trying to give our children; a safe space to laugh and cry, and the deep sense of connection they need to thrive.

I know that the good feeling of the retreat is going to wear off, but I’m determined to hold onto it for as long as I can. I also I know I need extra support to be able to keep giving to my daughter while being there for my sister too.

In times of personal crisis, it’s great to have as much listening time as we can. We don’t have to get lost in our grief, we can use the warm attention of a listener to help guide us safely through our feelings. We can rise above our grief, and exhaustion, so it doesn’t colour our relationship with our children.

Life can bring many events that threaten the deep sense of connection between us and our children. The first step to reconnecting with them is to reconnect with ourselves. We need to take time away from our children to grieve for our own hurts, so that we can grow as parents.

If we don’t have the kind of support that we need to be the parents we want to be, then we can find it, although this may seem challenging at first. When we needed support as children we instinctively tried to signal to our parents through off-track behaviour, or tears and tantrums. But we were rarely met with the warm attention we needed. We may have been ‘shhhed,’ told to stop, shouted at, or distracted from our pain. Nobody understood that our behaviour was really like a secret code for how we were feeling.

This happened so many times that most of us gave up reaching out. It can make it hard to do so as adults.

The sense of wellbeing I’ve got from this retreat makes me think what would be possible, if all of us really made it our intention to reach out to each other, to rebuild a tribe of parents, with togetherness and support. It could start as simply as sharing some Hand in Hand articles or books with a friend, or asking someone you know if they’d like to try listening time. If we all work together, we can help each other to be the parents we want to be.

If you can get yourself to an in-person class, do it! Part of the reason we struggle to be there to give our children the connection and attention they need is because we aren’t getting this for ourselves. We can connect with each other on facebook or skype but there is nothing better than real-life human connections for helping us to be there and present for our children.

If you’re in Switzerland I’ll be launching my book Tears Heal
in Basel. Come along to the launch party, invite a friend, and find out about my local workshops beginning in November.

If you want to reach out for support right now, you can join the Hand in Hand Parents support group on yahoo, or facebook, where you can find listening partners, and ask parenting questions, so you never ever have to feel like you are doing this alone. And you could even train to be a Hand in Hand Parenting instructor, so you can have this wonderful support for yourself and go onto support others.