Parenting - The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy is Repairing

Repairing - The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy

Becky Kennedy | TED

This doesn’t just apply to parent-child relationships - it is applicable to any meaningful relationships.

There will be hard days in life. We feel uneasy and that might lead to unexpected bursts of anger on friends and family members. We snap. We say things that we don’t mean but still end up hurting the other person or people. After that, our own self-loathing sessions begin. We start asking ourselves what is wrong with us? There is no such thing as a perfect parent. Mistakes and struggles come with the job. After something like that happens, what do we do? All parents yell. No one knows what to do next.

There is nothing in our inter-personal relationships that can have as much impact as repair. What is one relationship strategy that we should focus on? “Get good at repair”.

What is repair? It is going back to a moment of disconnection, taking responsibility for our behavior, and acknowledging the impact it had on the other person.

How is it different from an apology? Apology often looks to shut a conversation down.

Repair assumes that there’s been a rupture. There is so much baked-in realism and hope and possibility. For repair, you have to mess up or fall short of someone else’s expectations. Rupture is the step before repair.

What will happen if we don’t repair? It it really important to understand and helps us make a decision about what to do next. When we mess up, the other person could get lonely, overwhelmed and in a state of distress. They need a way to get back to feeling safe and secure. If we don’t repair, they have to rely on other coping mechanisms they have at their disposal - self blame. It sounds like this: “Something is wrong with me”, “I am unlovable”, “I make bad things happen”. It is adaptive for children to internalize badness and fault. Because at least then, they can hold on to the idea that their parents and the world around them is safe and good.

While self-blame works for us in childhood, it works against us in adulthood. The core fears of so many adults are the same. “Something is wrong with me”, “I am unlovable”, “I make bad things happen”. But these are childhood stories that we wrote when we were left alone following distressing events that were left unrepaired. Adults with self-blame are vulnerable to depression, anxiety, deep feelings of worthlessness. We don’t want that for our kids or anyone around us.

We can do better. We don’t have to be perfect.

When we repair, we go further than removing a child’s story of self-blame. We get to add in all the elements that were missing in the first place. Safety, connection, coherence, love, goodness.

Yes, this chapter has an event in which I yelled but I can ensure that this chapter has a different ending, a diffent title, theme and lesson learned. It is as if we are saying to the other person, “I will not let this chapter in our life end in self-blame”.

Memory is original events combined with every other time you’ve remembered that event. This is why theraphy is helpful. When we remember painful experiences from our past within a safer and more connected relationship, the event remains, but our story of the event changes, and then we change.

With repair, we effectively change the past.

So how do we learn how to repair?

Step 1. Repair with yourself. You cannot offer compassion, or groundedness or understanding to someone else before you access those qualities within yourself. Self-repair means separating your identity from your behavior. Telling us two things that are true. I am not proud of my recent behavior. My recent behavior does not define me. Even as I struggle on the outside, I remain good inside. We can start to see that we are a good parent having a bad time - identity vs behavior.

This doesn’t let us off the hook. It is precisely what leaves us on the hook for change. After we replace our spiral with groundedness, we can actually use our energy toward thinking about what we want to do differently the next time. And we can use our energy to go repair with the person we yelled at.

Step 2. Repair with the other person. There is no formula for this. Think about these three elements. Name what happened, take responsibility, state what you would do differently the next time. Replace the other person’s story of self-blame with a story of self-trust and safety and connection.

Interventions that hint that the other person did something that lead you to react that way are not helpful. They fail at the goal of reconnection. They also insinuate that your child or the other person caused your reaction. It is not true and it is not a model of emotion regulation we want to pass on to the next generation.

When we do repair correctly, what will that look like in the child’s adulthood? The adult child will not spiral in self-blame when they make a mistake and will not take on blame for someone else’s mistake. They will know how to take responsibility for their behavior - because we, as their parents model how to take responsibility for ours.

Repairing with children today sets the stage for these critical adult relationship patterns.

It gets better. We can do something really impactful. We can teach kids a skill that they didn’t have in the first place - which is how kids actually change their behavior. We can teach them how to regulate their undesirable disappointment and communicate effectively and respectfully with another person.

Questions that come in the way: Is it too late? Have I done a lot worse that it could not be repaired?

It is not too late. It is never too late.

Imagine getting a call from your parents. Or if they are not alive, imagine getting a letter you hadn’t seen till that moment. Imagine it says “I know this sounds out of the blue, but I’ve been thinking a lot about your childhood. And I think there were a lot of moments that felt really bad to you. And you are right to feel that way. Those moments weren’t your fault. They were times when I was struggling, and if I could’ve gone back, I would have stepped aside, I would’ve calmed myself down, and then found you to help you with whatever you were struggling with. I am sorry. If you are ever willing to talk to me about any of those moments, I will listen. I won’t listen to have a rebuttal. I’ll listen to understand. I love you.”

That will make things better. So it is never too late to repair with your kids.