☔️The #1 Most Critical Parenting (and Life) Skill
in my opinion, as I deal with my little monkeys...
Kids—at least my kids, but I’m pretty sure it’s all kids—are not only like little monkeys, they’re also like little explosions going off all the time, wrecking your house, your schedule, your plans, your time, your money…and so on. (Thankfully, they’re cute and joyful little explosions, but still.)
They are also, of course, little sponges—not for cleaning up the wreckage they cause, unfortunately, but for soaking up every drop of your moods (while you deal with the wreckage) to receive into their permanent psychological development.
OY.
So, I think the #1 most essential, critical, monumentally important parenting skill—and life skill in general—is self-soothing.
It’s the ability to directly soothe and regulate one’s own nervous system, especially in the midst of intense moments and dysregulation.
For me, it’s knowing how to help myself calm down and how to soothe my own inner child.
I’m still working on it (probably most people are still working on it)—but the more I practice self-soothing to calm down my own nervous system, the better I can help calm down their nervous systems, and the smarter and more effectively I can parent.
I’m a very word-oriented person (inside my head at least), so talking soothingly to my inner child is very helpful for me. On any given difficult day with the kids, my self-talk needs to sound like a recurring refrain of self-soothing: “It’s okay, we’re okay, that’s not a big deal, I’ll get to that when I get to that, we’re going to be okay, this is not a crisis, take a breath…”
This is also a main reason for my “Serenity Splash” poems and my songs—they help me calm down, both in the writing and the reciting of them. I use them as regulation aids the way other people use sensory fidget toys! (They really are like mental fidgets for me.)
I aim to keep exploring for new ways to soothe myself in times of stress, and to keep practicing what strategies work for me, until self-soothing becomes a habit.
What are your go-to self-soothing strategies?
