Mindful Parenting: Responding, Not Reacting

Through mindful parenting, you become more aware of your feelings and thoughts, more sensitive to your children's needs, and better at regulating your emotions. You learn to criticize yourself and your child less, take a step back from intense situations, avoid impulsive reactions, and ultimately, deeply improve your relationship with your child.

How to Practice Mindful Parenting

Think of a situation where you felt angry or annoyed with your child, and automatically reacted—just as most of us do when difficult thoughts, feelings, or judgments arise. In stressful situations where our emotions are easily triggered, it is hard to be the best version of ourselves. And you can be sure your child will find those triggers! To choose to change your behavior, you must first become familiar with your 'danger zones' and emotional triggers.

Danger zones are specific times during the day when we are most vulnerable and emotionally less accessible. We might feel stressed, tired, overwhelmed, helpless, or anxious about work or our relationship. Emotional triggers, on the other hand, are feelings or judgments from our own childhood that surface when our child acts a certain way:

• Your child acts in a way that conflicts with your beliefs. For example, throwing food around in a restaurant or grabbing every toy in a store, making you feel embarrassed or humiliated.

• Your child's behavior triggers a childhood memory or reaction. For example, your child is not performing at the academic level you think they should, and you feel defeated as a parent because when you got a bad grade, your parents told you it wasn't good enough.

• Your child's behavior evokes a traumatic situation or event. For example, if you broke your arm on a climbing frame as a child, you might feel terrified every time your child goes to the playground.

• Your child's behavior activates lenses of fear and desire. For example, if one of your children wakes the other up at night, everyone is crying and no one is sleeping, and you fear you will never get any adult time again or that you have completely lost your old self now that you are a parent.

To feel some sense of control over your emotions, you must first recognize and anticipate what kinds of situations trigger these danger zones and emotional responses.

Three Key Factors for Mindful Parenting

1. Become Aware of Your Own Feelings During Conflict

Think of your most recent argument or a frustrating situation with your child. What feelings were triggered? Were you angry, embarrassed, or humiliated? Try to experience your emotion or trigger as a wave that comes and goes. Do not try to block or stop the emotion. Do not push it away, judge it, or reject it. At the same time, do not try to hold onto it, obsess over it, or make it bigger than it is. You are not your emotion, and you do not have to act on it. Just be there, fully aware of it. Remind yourself that you don't need to blame yourself or your child for what is happening.

Next, try to see the conflict through your child's eyes. If you struggle to see the good in your child during a tantrum or argument, recall a time when you connected deeply and responded with affection. Try to remember that version of your child when you feel triggered. Make an effort throughout the day to notice when you start to feel anxious or uncomfortable—this is often a sign of being triggered. Once you identify your triggers, you can take the next step.

2. Learn to Pause Before Reacting in Anger

The most challenging and important part of mindfulness is finding that calm space in the heat of the moment. We practice finding this space by shifting our attention to our body and breath, as emotions always manifest physically. When we slow down and focus on our body and breath, a psychological shift occurs that reduces reflexive reactions and enhances our prefrontal cortex's abilities. This leads to a calmer mind, giving you the space to sit with the emotion. When we successfully pause, we can experience emotions as physical sensations without letting the trigger ignite them. In this space, we can remind ourselves to breathe, bring our thoughts back to the present moment, and choose a thoughtful response rather than a reactive outburst.

3. Listen Carefully to Your Child's Perspective, Even If You Disagree

Your child will act like a child! This means they won't always manage to regulate their feelings. Children (and indeed, most adults) are still learning how to regulate emotions, and they have different priorities than you do. Their behavior will push your buttons from time to time, and that is okay. The real issue arises when adults start acting like children too. If, instead, we maintain our mindfulness—noticing our emotions and waiting for them to pass before acting on them—we model emotional regulation, and our children will learn by watching us.

Learning to pause before responding takes practice, and our ability to manage our emotions fluctuates depending on daily life. This is why self-care is vital. We cannot run ourselves ragged every day without ever taking time to recharge. Many parents feel guilty about attending to their own needs, but this is not selfish; it is necessary. Make yourself a priority, because the better you feel, the better you can handle moments of frustration. It is essential to learn how to help yourself and meet your emotional needs. Examples of self-care can range from taking a 'timeout' in the bathroom when overwhelmed (as I did last night), taking a few minutes for deep breathing, or turning on the TV so both you and your child can take a break, to journaling, taking a shower, going for a walk, or talking with your partner or a friend. And sometimes, we won't catch ourselves in time and will react in ways we regret. In those moments, we apologize to our children after yelling, because we are still learning, and parents make mistakes too.