I pretty much stopped reading books about parenting after the first year of the monkeys’ lives. In part, I stopped reading because I was less desperate for help. In part, I stopped because I finally realized that there was no answer in any book that would really help me figure out my kids and figure out how to be the best parent I could. Those answers, I realized, had to come from me, my kids, my husband, and our relationships. Otherwise they wouldn’t work.
On one visit to Atlanta, though, my mom gave me a book, Scream Free Parenting, written by Hal Runkel, who she had seen speak at her synagogue. I read it because she asked me to, and was rewarded with one pearl of wisdom: we can’t always control our kid’s behavior but we can always control our reaction to their behavior.
I’m pretty sure this is something that’s covered in therapy 101, but it’s a useful reminder for me as a parent. It’s also a useful reminder for me as a leader, a manager, and an employee at work. We all encounter situations where we think that the folks we’re working with are acting badly, acting out, or just acting stupid. And sometimes, we want to act out too, in response to them.
It makes sense that if we scream at our kids in response to their screaming and whining, we’re not actually helping the situation, we’re modeling bad behavior. Likewise, if someone overreacts to something you’ve done at work, overreacting to their reaction isn’t going to help. In fact, it’s going to make things worse. Instead, try to do what you do with your kids: take a deep breath, take a moment, and respond as calmly and reasonably as you can. At the very least, you’ll feel better about your role in the situation. The best case scenario is that you calm down the other person, too, paving the way for a more rational, direct conversation.
