Parent Traps: Understanding & Overcoming The Pitfalls That All Parents Face

By Donna G. Corwin

From Donna G. Corwin, the bestselling co-author of Time Out for Toddlers, Parent Traps is an insightful book that helps parents explore experiences from their own childhoods to help them better understand their own parenting styles. With helpful solutions and psychological tools, Parent Traps can help you navigate the dilemmas that all parents face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781429925792

Donna G. Corwin

Donna G. Corwin is the author of PARENT TRAPS.

Book preview

Introduction

All parents get into traps. They think they should act a certain way, parent a certain way, and have a certain type of child. These negative traps are what often prevent you from being the parent you want to be. You are stuck in a cycle of unresolved anger and diminished expectations.

You may fall into these traps if you believe that there is a right and wrong way to parent. If your child won’t listen to you once in a while, you are not a terrible parent. If you raise your voice, you are not a terrible parent. If your child is having trouble in school, you are not a terrible parent. Children do not come out of good and bad molds. They are as complex and different as you and I.

People like to cite the fact that Albert Einstein got poor grades in school. Some even suspected he had attention deficit disorder. Because he was such a poor student, his teachers said he would be useless. Needless to say, he found work. This anecdote gives reassurance to us all—you can still be a genius while not being at the top of your class.

In order to be a truly effective parent, we need to know who we are as people, how we were parented, and how our learning styles are different from our child’s. We need to learn how to communicate with our spouse (or ex-spouse) and our child, and what to do with our anger. These issues and many more are explored in this breakthrough book for and about parents and parenting.

Reading about what to do to be a good parent is not enough if you don’t have the psychological tools to follow through. It’s necessary to work out your own internal struggles so you can help your child flourish.

An angry, verbally abusive parent cannot parent well. Usually these parents insist that they will never repeat their parents’ mistakes, that they will be much better parents. Yet, they fall into the same traps their own parents did.

Negative parenting patterns tend to be repeated over and over again. Statistics confirm that we are a product of our upbringing, as we tend to emulate our parents and model both their good and bad behaviors.

With awareness, psychological skills, and parenting tools you can break negative patterns that affect the way you interact with your child. There are no miracle solutions—only methods that can start you on the road to exploring where your struggles began, and provide you with ways to end many of them.

For instance, if your child has a musical learning style and you have a linguistic (verbal) one, you may be pushing him in an area in which he is uncomfortable and not doing well. You may be expecting his school performance to match your own, when in fact he needs to learn differently from you. You may be fighting over issues your child can’t really explain or change. This book helps you identify individual learning styles and discusses each one in depth.

Recognizing the unique needs and differences in children and adults, and then respecting those needs, is a large task. It may mean changing the way you parent, the way you think, and the way you run your life. But if you and your child are constantly at odds, if there are tension, anger, impatience, and unresolved feelings, then it is worth the effort to make changes. Even small steps like giving positive strokes every day to your child, your spouse, and yourself can make a difference in the family dynamic.

What makes Parent Traps different from most other parenting books is that what I advocate for child behavior translates to the parents’ behavior as well. You have to parent yourself well so you can turn around and parent your child well. You need to repair and rebuild the hurts and angers of your past, so you can parent in a healthy way. Many books have been written about getting in touch with your inner child. And in many ways this is necessary. But the narcissistic view of focusing solely on one’s needs fails to take into account the needs of others with whom you interact.

When raising a child, you can’t set aside the child’s problems and desires because you are feeling needy. Parent Traps will teach you how to strike a balance between your needs and your child’s, so resentment does not build up on either side.

You can’t isolate yourself when you have a child and/or are in a family. If you are a single parent, the task is even larger because there is the pressure to be both mother and father, and the responsibilities for child care, finances, and everything else fall mainly on your shoulders. Parent Traps helps you deal in a realistic way with these challenges and demystifies the stigma attached to divorce and single parenting.

You need to break free of parent traps by letting go of preconceived notions about parenting. Your biggest responsibility as a parent is to try to be an effective human being——caring, respectful, giving, responsible, fair. Your child deserves the best of you and should be given an opportunity to understand the worst of you. Never be afraid to say you are sorry, to teach respect, and to ask for kindness. Most important, when breaking free of a trap, expect to make mistakes and stumble.

My book will help free you of traps from your own childhood that affect your adulthood. It is most painful to recognize those things in your child that you see but don’t like in yourself. For instance, you may have been a difficult child. Perhaps you also have a difficult child. You may have hated it when your mother yelled at you, yet you find yourself yelling exactly the same way at your child. You’re caught in a parent trap. It’s not easy to get out of this trap because your child is evoking the same frustrations that you evoked in your mother. You feel powerless. But you’re not. Parent Traps not only gives you tools; it also enlightens you to your past patterns. Enlightenment is perhaps the most effective way to help a parent, because you become more empowered to deal with your child when you understand your own internal buttons. You have options. There is no bigger or more painful trap than our children mirroring our negative sides. Parent Traps will turn you around and help you look at the positive aspects that your child reflects of you.

In many ways, this book is about self-love and understanding. It is about parenting and parents. It is about talking with other parents and finding their personal solutions. Most important, it is about freeing yourself from the traps that prevent you from truly being the loving parent that you are.

1

The Ties That Bind

e9781429925792_i0002.jpg Parent traps are the negative feelings and experiences, often buried in our subconscious, that are reawakened in us by our own children. They are all of the pain and unanswered questions from our own childhoods. Parent traps are often the replay of experiences that we have never psychologically and emotionally worked out and extricated from the negative patterns of adult behavior.

Parent traps are often unseen until you have a child. When you are a single adult, you often use childhood traps to protect yourself from deep emotional feelings. Traps can become a shield against unwanted involvement. When you have a child, you may fall into a pattern of conditioned behavior from your own childhood. These behaviors become magnified when you are a parent because of the intimacy created with our children. Once the shield comes down, you allow for a new kind of intimacy, which sets the stage for a new role. With your child, you create an extension of yourself—a physical, mental, and emotional extension. This small life becomes your mirror. Most of us begin the parenting process with positive and loving intentions. But it is very difficult to prevent your early pain from intruding into your life with your child.

The early development of a child is a complex interactive process that shapes your child by her environment and your personal interaction. The way you respond to your child is in part determined by how you were responded to. Were you held? Cuddled? Allowed to cry? Abused? Yelled at? Spanked? Left alone? Unless you completely understand and come to terms with early pain, you will repeat past emotional patterns. As your child grows and you have to deal with other issues of childhood, you will continue to get trapped in parental misgivings—factors about values, physical attractiveness, intelligence, and athletic prowess. All these can be the catalysts for parent traps.

Awareness is the main step to avoiding a parent trap. You cannot change the past, but you can alter the future. You can bring up early pain, recall your feelings, and talk them out. By reliving past memories, you are able not only to remember what it felt like but also to think about your actions before you burden your child with any past negative pain.

Because the most emotional parent traps are the ones that we carry over from our own parents and grandparents, the generational and genetic bond is strong. What we were conditioned to believe usually continues from one generation to the next. Although some of the parenting ideas from the past can be helpful and well-intentioned, others are old-fashioned and not applicable to raising a child in today’s