13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do summary

Chapter 1: Introduction and Avoiding a Victim Mentality

13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do By Amy Morin What's in it for me? Fortify your own mental strength to raise kids who'll be ready to take on all of life's challenges. Frederick Douglass once said, it's easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. So while they're under your roof, how can you ensure that you're teaching your kids the right skills and values?

What do your children need most in order to become self -reliant, responsible, happy adults? All parents want their children to have the best possible future. But you might be surprised to learn that positive emotional and behavioral development is just as integral to success as, say, academic achievement, though there's no shortage of how-to parenting books. Amy Morin argues that it's just as important to know what unhealthy habits not to teach children.

As a foster mother and family therapy expert, she's discovered through experience that parents need to work on their own behaviors in order to raise mentally strong children. This summary draws deeply on both research and Morin's own clients to show how common parenting practices can actually be detrimental to your child's growth and what you can do instead. Chapter 1. Mentally strong parents promote responsibility and perseverance over a victim mentality.

Everywhere you look, there's advice about helping your child stay physically fit. But what about other important kinds of fitness? Like mental or emotional well-being, there's little in life that benefits a person as much as learning to be mentally strong, a mentally strong child is more likely to turn setbacks into opportunities and face hardship without feeling sorry for himself. So what's the best way to raise a mentally strong child by practicing good, healthy habits yourself which makes you capable of passing them on to your child?

For example, it's natural to want to defend your child when they've been wronged. The age of social media has led many parents to encourage feelings of victimhood in response to every slight. Mentally strong parents refuse to do this. You want your child to be empowered to handle life's challenges rather than always seeing himself as the victim of circumstance.

Take the example of Cody, a 14-year-old who was prescribed ADHD medication. His teachers reported that he was calmer and more attentive as a result, but his grades didn't improve. His parents' response: to demand that he be assigned less work than his peers. Cody's workload wasn't the problem, however.

He had developed what researchers call learned helplessness. He believed that his ADHD made him fundamentally incapable, and his parents had reinforced this idea. Once they started treating him like he was equipped to handle his responsibilities, he began to put in effort, and his grades soon turned around. Mentally strong parents don't let their children avoid responsibility, either, instead of letting your child blame others for his problems, hold him accountable, and let him face the consequences of his actions.

If you don't, how is he supposed to learn to cope with the inevitable injustices he'll face in life? You can also help your child at home. Assign him household responsibilities, for one research shows that kids who have to do chores from an early age become more successful, empathetic, and self-reliant adults. Let him handle problems by himself, too.

According to sociologist Stephen Horwitz, children need to practice resolving conflict on their own during unstructured playtime. If they always rely on adults to intervene, they're more likely to blame others. Finally, teach your child to choose true thoughts over negative ones. Morin calls these BLUE thoughts.

They are thoughts where you blame everyone else, look for the bad news, and fall prey to unhappy guessing. You also become exaggeratedly negative. True thoughts, on the other hand, involve accepting responsibility, pointing out the good, taking action, and looking for exceptions.

Chapter 2: Dealing with Guilt and Fear

Don't parent with a strategy of avoidance. Instead, teach your kids healthy ways to deal with guilt and fear. If you've ever worried that you're not a good enough parent, you're not alone. A whopping 94% of mothers surveyed by BabyCenter report feelings of mommy guilt.

But for both mothers and fathers, too much anxiety about being a bad parent can lead to a big mistake, making parenting decisions with guilt as your guide. Guilt can encourage parents to give in to their child's demands, for example, which allows them to avoid feeling guilty in the moment. Take Joe's case, his son Micah was a 100 pounds overweight when his pediatrician threatened to call child protective services. While Joe felt guilty about enabling Micah's unhealthy eating habits, he had a harder time coping with the more immediate guilt he felt when Micah begged and cried after being denied junk food.

So how should parents manage their guilt? Well, that depends on whether or not it's warranted. If it is, that's probably a sign that you should change your behavior. Joe learned to tolerate the short-term guilt that came with setting limits on Micah's diet, knowing that the long-term remorse he'd feel if he let Micah's health deteriorate would be much worse.

But if guilt isn't warranted, don't catastrophize. Just because you can't afford to buy your child the latest cool pair of sneakers doesn't mean he'll become a social misfit. And remember to forgive yourself, you're a role model for your child. You don't want him to learn self -condemnation from you.

Unfortunately, many parents try to combat guilt and worry by parenting out of fear. Take April, one of the author's clients, whose brother had drowned as a child. When she had kids of her own, she kept them away from water at all costs which meant they never learned how to swim. One day, at a friend's house, April's seven-year-old wandered away and ended up in the neighbor's pool.

The neighbor rescued him, but April was traumatized all over again. Eventually, she realized that to truly ensure her children's safety, she needed to teach them how to swim. As your child gets older and enters her teens, encourage her to step outside of her comfort zone. Don't coddle her, let her learn self-reliance.

Research has found that overprotective parenting has resulted in an increase in boomerang kids twenty-somethings who move back in with their parents because they aren't equipped for the transition to adulthood. The lesson here is that your energy is better spent teaching your kids the skills they need to flourish rather than trying to protect them from the outside world.