Parenting &... Change
- lauraharris
- 22 hours ago
- 3 min read
We started school again. That’s a thing. And the getting up and the getting ready and the getting the lunchboxes and the shoes and the folders and out the door is happening. And the realizing that your kid left his lunchbox in the house after you drop them off is happening. Fall is not quite in the air yet… but change is definitely in the air.
Change
I don’t know about you, but I’m not great with change. I like my rhythms and my routines. And I especially like that familiar feeling where you pretty much know how to deal with the things going on in your life. I tend to dread change (even good or expected change) because I know that with change often comes challenges that I might not know how to handle.
Things change. All the time. It’s the only constant that we can count on. The minute that you solve that child’s potty training hiccup is the minute that this child’s shoe-tying problems begin. And the minute you fix the shoe-tying issue over there is the minute that the picky eating starts over here. And as soon as you get a handle on the picky eating is when the not-sleeping-through-the-night-anymore starts. And on and on it goes.
Challenges
And honestly - that’s okay. Change and challenges are fine. As any parent knows, they are a huge part of parenting. Children change all the time and throw challenges our way all the time. That’s not the damaging part of life.
What can be really damaging is the message about the challenges. The message often is “If you’re in the middle of something and you don’t know how to handle it, you’re doing it wrong.”
How discouraging is that? And yet we believe it all the time. If we find ourselves in the middle of something with our kids and we are not sure how to help them, we often tell ourselves that we are failing. “You’re failing your kid, you’re failing this family… you are failing as a parent.”
And that is an impossible standard. We can’t know how to handle everything. The reality, the truth, is that of course we don’t know how to handle this. We’re new at it. We’ve never done this before. Even if it’s the third kid heading into pre-K with his adorable little backpack, we can say “we’ve done this before, we got this”… and it’s still a completely different kid! They are going to encounter the world in a completely different way and have different challenges than the first kids. So yes, we’ve done this before, and also we haven’t.
Consistency
And that’s okay. We are not called to be perfect. We are not called to know exactly what to do all the time. And we are not called on to know the answers to every situation.
We are simply called to be present. We are called to show up. And we are called to do our best, hopefully with a lot of grace for ourselves and for our kids in the process.
What a beautiful model for our kids if we could meet their challenges with them, this school year and beyond, saying “I don’t know exactly how we’re going to solve this, but we’re going to do it together.”
Laura Harris is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who works in the Northwest Arkansas area, servicing Bentonville, Rogers, and Springdale. With over 10 years of experience, she's worked in various fields from in-home parenting counseling, to kids, to supervision of other therapists. Currently her specialty is supporting new parents, especially mothers.
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