Should I give my baby this medication? Should I supplement with formula? Should I let my kid go to the sleepover? We are so caught up in making the right decision that it somehow gets in the way of what most of us want as parents: Connection.
'We cannot parent from both the present and the future.'
We desperately want good things for our kids! We want them to stay healthy, content, and stay away from pain. However, we just don't live in a world where our kids are never going to get hurt or sick or disappointed. And this is the human experience...but that is a whole other blog post!
We also have protective defenses in our brains that try to figure out the worst case scenarios in order to predict pain and therefore prevent it. Ruminating thoughts, or thoughts that build into irrational snowballs of stress, tend to creep up when we are not making the same decisions as our peers. We somehow find ourselves feeling like we are terrible parents if we behave differently than others.
These thoughts bring up stress and shame. When we feel stress and shame we are taken out of the present moment and launched into forward thinking, typically using 'what if.....?' statements. 'What if i give my baby this medication and he develops a side effect we don't know about yet?' 'What if I stop breastfeeding and she doesn't get the nutrients she needs?' 'What if we go on this trip and we all come back with the flu?'
These thoughts surrounding the 'correct' decision while parenting actually take us out of being able to have connected relationship with our kids because our consciousness cannot be both in the present and the future at the same time. Our minds are shifting awareness when we are worrying about the outcomes of our decisions. Therefore, we cannot parent both from the present and the future because don't know what will happen.
And that is just it. We don't know what will happen. There is the anxiety my friends. We shift into scenario scheming and survival tactics because there is something within us that just wants to keep us safe....just simply survive. Yet, the anxiety is slowly taking over our lives. It takes us away from relationship with our babies. The very thing that we are having anxiety over protecting!
My Challenge to you: Remain Present
Pull your awareness from the future by grounding yourself in your current moment. Maybe this means putting your feet in the grass, a breathing exercise, bringing mindfulness to eating your snack or drinking your coffee. In the present is where we find connection with ourselves and our baby.
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