One of my favorite topics, which I've talked about before is trusting yourself as a parent.
I recognize that one of the greatest gifts I wanted to offer my daughter was an environment where she learned to trust herself. But that made it really hard when I wanted her to trust only my knowing. And I have a lot of knowing and yet that comes from my experience. I have a lot of experience that I wanted to share with my daughter. And yet when I made that as if it were the only experience or the only truth, it made it really hard for her to have a different experience and therefore trust herself.
I recognized that it was especially hard for me to trust myself in the parenting world because I had a bit of a disturbing childhood. I had all these ideas about how I wanted to be different and how I wanted to give my daughter something that I didn't get. This made it really hard to trust myself because I knew a lot of the things that I was doing, which I had read I was supposed to do on both sides — on the conscious parenting side and the traditional side— didn’t feel right for me in my relationship with my daughter. Yet, I was really scared to trust myself because then I had to come up against my desire to fit in and my desire to do the right thing.
It was challenging to step back a little bit from the culture, not out of the culture, because I'm in the culture and I'm immersed in the culture, so is my daughter. But to actually shut my ears a bit to all the advice and all the things that I was supposed to do. I flipped over to conscious parenting because I didn't want to do what my mom did. And yet those methods didn’t feel totally right either with my child. So I had to find my way. And that required, and still requires, trusting myself.
So when we say, "trust yourself," it's like, well, who am I trusting? Because a lot of who I was or am still as a parent is my conditioning and my template, everything that I learned growing up, everything that I had, my relationship with my parents, everything that I believe. A lot of that was what I was parenting out of instead of sitting and listening and actually trusting my experience in the present.
That's what I'd love to share. It's like, what was my experience with my daughter when I overpowered her, or I was powerful, or I was trying to enforce things, or push or pull, or force her to do what I wanted her to do? Well, my experience wasn’t great. I didn’t feel good inside. She didn’t feel good inside. So I thought, well, maybe there's another way. If I trust myself, I know my daughter. You know your children better than any expert. You're with them 24/7. So I knew my daughter. I knew when she was cooperative, I knew how that worked with us. So it was like, well, what if I trust myself, even though all the experts say you need to come down hard or you need to set a boundary, you need to do this.
I began to question it all. It's like, how would anybody, when they say all children need something, know what my child needs? Now, of course, there's an overview, but I have a relationship with my daughter. She's unique, she's different, she has her own needs. So do your children. You'll know this, especially if you have more than one child, how different they are, how one may move towards something, the other toward another. One may be cooperative if you treat them in a certain way, the other one may not.
So this week, play with this. Take some time, play with what you know about yourself and your children, and see if you can shake it up a little bit. Instead of trusting all the experts and all the advice, listen to it and see what you think, but don’t just take it as a given truth. See what it's like to trust yourself. Because the more you do this, in my experience, the more I was open to creating that environment for my daughter to trust herself. I'm telling you, she's 24 now, and it's important that she trusts her instincts, her knowing, what works for her, instead of putting her power outside into me or the culture.
Now, she still comes to me. She did the other day to ask my advice on something and what I would do. But even in that, I don’t ever really give her the answer. I tell her what I would do, and then I support her in knowing that I believe she knows what to do. I may state some facts and go through that with her. But I never take the role of, I know what’s better for you.