If you have ever been in a store with a screaming child, you can relate to the feeling that you’ll do anything to quiet your child so you can complete the errand you sought out to do. Even if that means letting them play with your phone, buying them that stuffed animal they wanted to hold in the shopping cart, or meeting any other non-verbal demands they may make about the world around them.
Parenting is full of moments when you have to make decisions in the best interest of yourself, your child, and the world around you. While super challenging in the moment, choosing the hard thing often leads to the best long-term outcomes. This starts with the screaming child in the grocery store and continues far into raising kids in the teen years when you might have to make decisions about situations like your child’s curfew.
In this post, we help you understand how the decisions you make in the moment lead to long-term patterns for your children, why you might make those decisions to quickly fix the situation, and what you can do instead that might lead to the best results for everyone involved.
Recognize the long-term outcomes
Making hard decisions about parenting means setting limits and boundaries that lead to the long-term outcomes you want for your child and family overall. How you do anything is how you do everything and making hard decisions sets you and your child up for good long-term patterns. Difficult decisions, like not buying the stuffed animal your child seems instantly attached to or not letting your teenage daughter attend a concert in a dangerous downtown area with her friends, sends the message that you are invested in making decisions that support your child’s long-term well being.
When you find yourself defaulting to a quick fix to keep your child happy, ask yourself what patterns you are creating or messages you are sending if you continue to do this into the future. Recognize how you are trying to keep the peace in the moment instead of solving for the root cause of the issue, such as your child’s discomfort being strapped into a shopping cart for too long or your teen’s desire for freedom and independence.
Understand the why
As a new parent, you are managing unexpected emotions and situations regularly in the postpartum phase and beyond. If you regularly choose a short-term fix to challenges, it may be because you are tired, emotionally depleted, and/or overextended as you take on this expanded role in your life. This even applies to parents of older kids who are now spending an inordinate amount of time running them around to commitments that often extend late into the evening. It’s hard to see the long-term impact of your actions when you haven’t slept well for weeks or made time for eating healthy and exercising. You’ve likely deprioritized your needs and self-care routines in service to your new baby or busy teen. You may even be so preoccupied thinking about your mental to-do list of cleaning, laundry, responding to emails, and more, that it feels impossible to see the big picture impact of everyday choices.
It’s important to have compassion for yourself when you notice how desperately you want to fix something in the moment and hold space for the long-term solution. Set aside even 10 minutes a day for reflection, grounding, and connecting with self in order to recognize both short-term needs and long-term goals as a parent. When you have the opportunity to connect with your ideal, or your intentional, vision of parenting, it will be easier to make wiser decisions in moments where you are tempted to do the easiest next thing. Ask your partner for support and accountability during this time by requesting that they also recognize and call out moments of short-term gratification or ease at the expense of creating healthy long-term expectations and patterns.
Individual therapy can be helpful in providing additional support to parents who need to carve out time for self-reflection. Working with a therapist can help you recognize and honor the personal growth that happens through parenting. At Center for Shared Insight in Denver, Colorado, we can provide that space, along with the direction you need to understand why you make certain parenting choices and how you can start to repattern your behaviors with the long-term in mind. Contact us to learn more about our services.
