Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Great Mothers


Sometimes great mothers end up in my office.  I call them "Great Mothers."  Great mothers are the ones that can juggle their responsibilities to the children, the husband, the home and a job.  They don’t question their duties, but go about them effectively and with love.  They are comfortable making dinner, while feeding the baby, kissing their husband hello and checking their schedule for the next day.  You wouldn’t think that great mothers would end up talking to a therapist. 
It has to do with the development of the family.  Juggling everything for everybody works when the kids are small.  But we all need to learn to do things for ourselves.   The more you do for maturing children what they can do for themselves, the more you handicap them.   Adolescents need to learn how to take care of themselves.  This is a slow process that continues until the child is launched.  When problems occur during teen years, great mothers revert back to doing the things that worked before, namely fixing things.  Now, these efforts backfire.  What the child really needs is enough support to handle the problem themselves if they can.  The message the child gets is that they can't handle their own life, so parents will control them.  Parenting requires that the adult continually be changing as to how they raise their child.  This is a difficult shift for some mothers to make.  It requires that the parent watch their child fail, hurt, face disappointment and generally struggle through the chaos.  As parents, we hurt when our kids are hurting, so we want to spare them.  Further, adolescents are now much more capable of doing permanent damage to themselves or others.   Now matter what the age of the child, parents will want to protect them.  The basic job of parenting is to teach the child to take care of themselves.  This means that mom needs to change how she does things.  In order to change this pattern, mothers can start by finding one thing a week, that they are doing, that their child could do for themselves and give it up.  When the pattern is broken for the first time, parents tend to apply the process to other issues.  As they learn to adapt, great mothers again become great mothers.

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