Two Things Working Against Us In Our Parenting?

The brain is just so incredibly complex. There’s so much going on simultaneously in our brains in so many different locations. Many of the neural pathways you create help you avoid danger and help you go after what you want and enjoy in life. However, there are some neural pathways that are doing the opposite of that. Some parts of your brain are making you suffer needlessly, preventing you from achieving your goals, preventing you from parenting more peacefully, preventing you from achieving your health goals, or causing problems in your relationships, or even preventing you from making more money. Some neural pathways are doing that because your brain thinks that it’s helping you and saving you from what it perceives as danger. We don’t have to just let the brain wire itself unconsciously.

The two things that are working against us in our parenting are, our habits and our thoughts.

Habit Brain

Thoughts pop up, random thoughts get served up, the thoughts get noticed, and feelings are created from the thoughts. Then actions are created from the feelings. Then the result is I have a habit of screaming at my kid. I have a habit of being late to work. I have a habit of not going out to the gym. Do you have this unconscious wiring of the brain that ends up with the brain that yells, punishes or threatens your kids?

It is possible to rewire the neural pathways in the brain for example, to not yell at your children when something goes wrong. The good news is that we can purposely wire our brains to serve us better, and it’s not even hard to do.

Thoughts

You do not have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop allowing your thoughts to control you. You have to become the manager of your brain. You cannot leave your brain unsupervised. Surprisingly, we have over 50,000 thoughts per day. According to the research of Dr. Fred Luskin of Stanford University, “A human being has approximately 60,000 thoughts per day-90% of these are repetitive!” Our goal is not to control our thoughts, but our goal is to stop allowing our thoughts to control us and supervise our brain by noticing our thoughts, especially the thoughts that are just randomly rolling around in the back of your head. Stop letting these thoughts control you. They’re just random thoughts. If a thought comes to mind that is not serving you, just let it pass through your mind. Don’t allow it to linger. Don’t allow it to marinate or hang out in your brain. Recognize it and acknowledge it and see it for what it is. Oh, that’s just a thought and then let it go. Move right onto a new, different thought. The new thought doesn’t necessarily have to be the opposite or contradicting. It just needs to be a less painful thought.

Sometimes the harder we try to negate our thoughts, the harder they fight to hang on in our brain, and the more attention they get. So you just want to move on to a new thought. It can be any thought that changes the subject and the conversation you’re having with yourself inside your brain.

The goal is to stop allowing random thoughts to take up airtime. So just let them go. Delete them, dump them in the trash can. Sometimes thoughts can be convincing, either because they’re in your habit brain, or if you’re trying to evoke change, your brain thinks it’s going to die. So it tries to convince you that you’re better off holding on to the original thought that’s not serving you. Your brain wants you to believe stuff because it’s a habit. It likes to do the habits because it conserves energy. Your brain’s number one job is to keep you alive. One of the ways that it does that is it conserves as much energy throughout the day and night that it can in case you are faced with danger, it has all the stored energy to save your life. Your brain is just putting everything on habit and just repeating, including the thoughts that are not serving you.

If you have a thought about your child like he’s lazy and the brain doesn’t have the ability to discriminate. Your brain doesn’t have the ability to say hey, is that a good thought? Is that a good idea? Should we think that? No. It just thinks oh, let’s just keep thinking he’s lazy because that’s part of the habit, and that conserves energy.

Again, there’s over 50,000 thoughts a day that our brain has. They’re not facts. They’re not family values. They’re not laws. They’re not right. Their thoughts. Hold on to the ones that are good. The ones that are bad, consider changing them to developmentally appropriate expectations for your children. The ugly thoughts, just drop them and get rid of them. If you can’t drop them or get rid of them, at least communicate them to the other party.

Michelle Tovar

Michelle has been a certified Parenting Coach and a Montessori educator for over 20 years. As the proud owner of Practical Life Parenting, she helps overwhelmed parents exhausted from the power struggles gain cooperation from their children using effective communication. She guides parenting partners to strengthen relationships and bring peace and joy to their homes.

Michelle loves to travel and participate in adventurous activities with her 3 boys and husband. She lives outside of Tampa, Florida, where you will find her on the sidelines cheering on her boys every weekend.

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