I have a neighbor who once said, “Glenn, this parenting, it’s for the birds.”
As parents, we can appreciate the frustrations that inherently follow with raising a child. While being a parent is a life fulfilling joy, parenting can be a struggle. As children grow, each developmental stage presents itself with unique challenges. Once we have figured out how to meet these challenges more effectively, patterns of behavior, emotions, and cognitions change, and so do the challenges.
Juggling the pressures of financial, household, and family responsibilities while parenting can leave you exhausted and stressed. At some point, you may wonder when you can really enjoy being a parent. How can we be equipped to remain adaptable to meet the ever-changing demands of parenthood while being the parents who we deeply want to be?
A relatively new form of therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) may help.
What is ACT?
ACT is a behavioral therapy designed to promote psychological flexibility (think: increasing the ability to adapt to life’s challenges) and live with vitality.
To increase psychological flexibility, individuals are guided through experiential exercises to become aware of thoughts, evaluations, and judgements through mindfulness, reduce the influence of unhelpful thoughts, foster willingness to be present to whatever emotions show up, help discover and clarify values (answering, “What do you want to stand for as a parent?”), and develop committed action plans.
How can ACT help?
Getting absorbed in a favorite book or movie can be a wonderful experience. On the other hand, getting hooked by unhelpful thoughts and feelings may lead you astray of who you want to be as a parent. For instance, finding a little one drawing on a newly painted wall may have you scolding the child and then later regretting your actions. It is easy to slip into becoming the parent you swore you never were going to be when faced with this type of problem.
Alternatively, slowing down, being mindful by noticing your thoughts attempting to push you around, and being present in the moment (taking a deep breath from the belly and pressing your feet firmly into the floor) may open other previously unseen choices.
For example, you may recognize the incident as a way to 1) look at the situation with humor, 2) acknowledge that it is an easy fix, 3) note that the child is showing an interest in artistic expression, and 4) instruct the child where drawing is permitted.
Therefore, ACT may help give you the distance to avoid reacting to a stressful situation, respond more creatively, and enrich the relationship you have with your child.
Overall, combined with behavior-based parenting strategies, ACT may help strengthen the effectiveness of these strategies over the long-term (Blackledge & Hayes, 2008).
Furthermore, the psychological flexibility gained may improve your well-being (Blackledge & Hayes, 2008) and use of parenting strategies across a variety of situations. By incorporating ACT with parent training, we may be able strive to become the parents we want to be.
For more information on parenting with ACT, please consider:
http://contextualscience.org/quick_tips_for_parents
The Joy of Parenting: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Guide to Effective Parenting in the Early Years by Lisa Coyne and Amy R. Murell (2009; New Harbinger Publications)
About the Author
Glenn M. Sloman, Ph.D., BCBA-D, NCSP is a Licensed Psychologist in New Jersey and a Board Certified Behavior Analyst at the Doctoral level. Dr. Sloman is also a Nationally Certified School Psychologist and a Certified School Psychologist in New Jersey.
