Do your kids lie to you or hide things from you?
Do they blame others for their mistakes?
Do they look away or fall silent or seem to shrink when you come into the room?
Do your kids cry even before you yell at them?
Do you yell at them? Or hit them? Or make sarcastic remarks?

Too many children are afraid of their parents. Mom and Dad mean well. They’re just trying to get the day accomplished and it seems to them that the kids are getting in the way. So they lose their tempers. But the children are the real losers. If your children are afraid of you – if you see the kind of behavior listed above – then you’ve got to turn things around, and fast.

This turning around is something for you to do. It’s not true that you’d be a better parent if you only had better children. It’s not true that the way to have better children is to destroy them so you can build them into people who are nicer. What is true is that our children were created by us. The problems we see are problems we created.

Which means the problems we have with our kids are problems we can solve.

If you have a short temper, if you get stressed and overreact, if you want everything to be perfect and things are never perfect, then your children are your victims. This is a hard thing to realize. We love our kids and we’d never do anything to hurt them. We only want the best for them. But the demands we make, the blame we assign, and the punishments we mete out take their toll. If your children are afraid of you, you’ve got to begin to back off.

Children who believe the important adults in their lives are dangerous have only two outlets. They can become small and timid, afraid to shine, afraid to try. Or they can become even more dangerous than you are, to their siblings, to other kids they know and, eventually, to you.

If what you’re yearning for is the perfect family, then making your children afraid of you and afraid of your anger and your unhappiness is the wrong way to go. Make a change.

1. Give up your electronic devices. The constant pinging is like having an insistent puppy always demanding your attention. Give your children your attention. Put away your phone and your tablet while your children are home. See if you don’t feel calmer.
2. When something goes wrong, make your first reaction a smile. See setbacks as opportunities to work together with your child to solve things. Help your child get back on track in a way that is supportive and loving. When you quit assigning blame and quit being angry all the time, your children will become more responsible and happier.
3. When anger bubbles up, take a deep breath and strive for self-control. Don’t take things out on your kids. There is nothing, nothing, that matters so much over the long term as your relationship with your children. Whatever just happened is a momentary distraction. Don’t let it become more.
4. Speak in a quiet voice. There’s no need to yell. You don’t need to shout to be heard. If your children are used to you fighting to be heard, if your kids are used to being out of control until the moment you scream at them, it will take time for both of you to get back to a more normal interaction pattern. But it has to start with you. You’re the grown up.

When we realize the damage we’ve inflicted, to the point that our children are actually afraid of us, we’re embarrassed. We’re sad and ashamed. We want to hide. But none of that solves anything.

The way to repair the hurt we’ve inflicted is to become the parent we wanted to be all along.

© 2015, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Look for free downloads on Dr. Anderson’s website at www.patricianananderson.com.

A parent contacted me last week, asking for advice about her two-year-old’s behavior. The event that triggered her email was a family picnic with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law’s family. The sister-in-law’s three-year-old children were perfectly behaved and her own son was not. What, she asked me, was she doing wrong?

If you’ve ever been on either side of a situation like this, you know how your children’s behavior can make you feel terrific or can make you feel terrible. It’s easy to think when our kids perform perfectly in public, especially in comparison to other children, that it’s all because of our own wonderful parenting. And when our kids perform awfully, embarrassing us in front of the very people we’d like to impress, it’s easy to think that it’s all our fault.

What bothers us about our two-year-old children continues to bother us as our children get older. When our school-age child doesn’t read books above his grade level as his cousins do or our child doesn’t shine on the soccer field like the girl next-door or our teen doesn’t get so high an SAT score as someone else we know… it rankles. And one of the reasons it rankles is that the parents of those star children seem to rub it in. They act like winners and we feel like losers. But neither position is correct.

We live in a society where any activity can become competitive. If we let ourselves, we can feel superior or inferior in just about anything. And because many of us live through our children, wanting them to be everything we are not including everything we could have been but never achieved, and because we believe our children are “the best” and want them to be “the best” all the time, this competitive spirit infects our parenting. The impulse for social comparison becomes almost irresistible. We cannot think of anything our children do without immediately considering how they compare to other kids.

This is unfair, to ourselves and to our children. I invite you to stop.

You are invited to consider your children all by themselves, without making any comparison to anybody else. Instead of comparing your kids to their cousins or children you’ve heard of or children you’ve imagined, try comparing them to their own past selves. Notice the progress your kids are making in becoming more accomplished human beings. Notice where they are not making progress and consider how to help them. But “help them” means “help them to become more themselves” not “help them become more like some model child” or “help them be better than another child.”

And you are invited to be patient. Each child takes her own path and every child develops on an individual timeline. Getting anxious and antsy helps no one, not yourself and not your kid.

Admittedly, this is difficult when your mother-in-law is watching with that little frown between her eyebrows and her other grandchildren are showing your child up. But acting serene and unconcerned about your kid’s natural kid-ness is more reassuring to your critics than is acting like you think they’re right.

And if you are the one with the perfect children, cut your sister-in-law some slack. You know your kids aren’t always so angelic as they seem right now.

© 2012, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved.