As parents you need to have resilience, flexibility and inner strength to bounce back when things don’t go your way. There are multiple stressors in life, such as a family history of abuse or neglect, health problems, marital conflict, or domestic or community violence, and financial stressors such as unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. All of this can reduce parents’ ability to effectively cope with the daily stresses of parenting.

Recognize yourself

It is important to recognize yourself and push yourself in four aspects:

1. As an individual or as a family
2. In school or training
3. In self-care
4. In the community in general

Parents should build resilience with their children on a daily basis, teaching self-care and maintaining a daily routine, emphasizing the positive, building a strong parent-child bond, reading together, promoting social skills, maintaining a daily routine, building self-esteem, and practicing reflection.

Stress itself can be defined as the perception that something is more than we can handle. When we frame challenges as surmountable, we overcome them more easily. When we frame them as opportunities for failure, we often fail. That may sound like the most clichéd and hackneyed advice ever, but it is a foundation of resilience research.

What is resilience

Resilience depends on how we perceive our lives . So maybe we got tense seeing our daughter on stage for the first time; anxious and worried, we begin to ponder. Within those thoughts are layers of assumptions, perspectives, and mental filters: “I didn’t prepare her enough,” “she’s going to embarrass herself,” “I should do something to save her,” etc.

If we believe that our role is to protect children from everything, that moment on stage becomes too tense. If we recognize that we cannot protect our children from every pain, but we have done our best, the experience changes: “I am almost as stressed as she is! I hope she’s doing well, but I’m here if she’s not.”

Perception itself is malleable. In fact, this idea is like an approach to military resistance training for soldiers. Participants explore mind traps, habitual distortions that undermine emotional well-being. These difficulties may represent thoughts that asking for help is admitting failure. They include in the catastrophe the worst possible outcome of each situation or, alternatively, they minimize and ignore whatever is overwhelming for them.

An inner critic who keeps telling you bad things , it can continually let us know that we’re not good enough to handle it. All of these distortions represent filters that twist perspective and take us away from resistance.

With mindfulness practice, we learn to hold these patterns in the light and ask ourselves, “what, if any, is valid? something, and what is not useful? Is our vision inflexible, reactive or full of doubts? Without belittling each other or forcing ourselves to be unnaturally positive, we watch each other curiously and redirect ourselves until new habits develop: “Now she’s alone on stage”, “I’m nervous but I need to stop doing what I think what’s best for her.”

Uncertainty and Perspective Change

Uncertainty and change are inevitable in life, and even more so for parents. Instinct leads us to care and protect because we care more than anything about our families. But if the only relief we seek is to fight to combat uncertainty in submission, that causes unnecessary stress, since certainty never occurs, and excess stress undermines not only how we feel but the choices we make each day. day.

Working under the misperception that parental concern always goes away only makes us feel worse. We cannot and should not aspire to control everything. Rather, we can change our perspective to accept that stressful things happen over and over again. When we try to fix everything we’re up against and achieve a perfect picture of happiness, we undermine our best intentions. The perception that parenting or any other part of life can be anything but imperfection and change pushes us away from our most skilled and resilient selves.

STOP

Working under the misperception that parental concern always goes away only makes us feel worse. We cannot and should not aspire to control everything. You can begin to separate your perspective from the experience itself. Many attitudes towards adversity seem like factual statements: “those people are like that”, “my son will never do it”, “I’m not the kind of person who can do this…”.

Watch those habitual thoughts and ask yourself: Is it true? Put aside your assumptions and predictions for a while and see what changes occur in your life. Try to catch up with this simple STOP practice with the word STOP.

• S. Just stop what you’re doing
• T. You need to take some slow breaths
• O. Observe what is happening around you and in your mind
• Q. Think about how to proceed with your well-being and that of others in mind.