Member-only story
Don’t Make It Worse
Beginning a new year as I mean to go on
When our daughter was small, my husband and I attended parenting classes at her hippie-adjacent preschool. Both of us grew up in high-control religious communities and most of what we knew about parenting was what we wanted to avoid: guilt, shame, fear, punishment, repression, children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard, stop-crying-right-now, you-need-to-learn-to-behave, don’t-make-God-sad, because-I-said-so, etcetera.
The preschool ran a parenting course that used materials from experts in the attachment parenting field: Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, Dr. Laura Markham, Patty Wipfler from Hand in Hand Parenting. We learned a great deal about parenting through deep connection and emotional understanding. We learned, too, about healing from our own childhood hurts so we could be better parents and partners.
At the time our daughter was only two, so the class spent a session or two in discussion about how to deal with tantrums. My own experience as a child who felt all things intensely was that those feelings were embarrassing. Inappropriate. Weeds that needed to be pulled; uprisings that needed to be quelled. To rage, to weep — these were things I could only do safely within the privacy of my room or the pages of my journal.
