Parenting Counseling
Parenting counseling, what does that mean? I am a parent, a late life parent, which has its own
built in wisdom and deficiencies when the kids are almost 11 and just turned 5.
I find myself routinely looking back to my own childhood and remembering behaviors that I
demonstrated, and my parents response to those behaviors, to evaluate how strong my response
should be to the behaviors of my kids, when I am alarmed about something they say or do, and
that, according to Marcy Axness, Ph.
D.
, is what parenting counseling is about, us making sense of
our childhood experience so that we can guide our children.
However we know today that attachment plays a huge part in the brain development of our
children, and a secure attachment can be attended to, guided, enhanced so that our children enjoy
secure relationships as adults.
So I want to study up on what makes attachment happen in relationship with children.
My reading of Allen Schore s work says that attachment is visual and is communicated when the
children are young through the eyes and voice and touch, when I smile they smile and vice versa,
and that their may be as many as 20 contacts like that per minute when an infant needs them.
The infant will also signal when they are over stimulated by breaking off eye contact.
So how do we sustain healthy attachment through the inevitable behavioral issues which will
occur with our kids as they grow up, how do I deliver consequences for deliberate transgressions
from an emotional place that teaches but does not abuse.
Of course, it takes thousands of those small, quick, loving contacts to ensure a secure attachment,
but only one perception of serious threat to change a child s brain forever, so how do I parent
from a place of emotional regulation?
Perhaps the most important thing that I have learned about attachment is the role of the father in
regulating aggression.
Dad s, in their play with children, are supposed to help them understand the limits of arousal, how
to go up and down the arousal ladder so that no one gets hurt, especially with the boys who have
a greater aggressive endowment, and everyone has fun, so the key for me in terms of parenting is
to learn how to regulate my own arousal, so I am communicating to my children that their
consequences are serious but they are not perceiving that they are going to die soon.
It is their perception that changes their brain.
I have used many tools to practice appropriate internal self-regulation.
The cheapest and quickest
is deep breathing, a breath in for three counts, hold for three, and then exhale for a count of three,
repeated three times.
[Moins]