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DRIVING LESSONS: Parents do well to avoid the blame game

Thursday, June 14, 2007

What aspects of parenting challenge us the most?

There's the first tier: tantrums, whining, backtalk, potty talk, squabbling sibs, balancing our kids' needs with our own.

And there's the second tier: wondering how our choices today will play out tomorrow, teaching responsibility, raising children with character in an age of indulgence.

Then there's the hidden tier: self-doubt, guilt, fear, feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, which we learn to camouflage through pride, anger, reactivity and power struggles.

"I've messed up," admitted one mother in a workshop I presented. "If it's not my fault for messing my kids up, it's their fault for messing me up!"

Blame. There's always plenty to go around. Author and psychologist Dr. Lawrence Cohen says parents list five common sources of self-blame: not playing with their kids enough; getting bored playing with them; feeling that they have ruined their children permanently; not knowing how to discipline; and yelling at them too much.

Let's see. We think we're not doing enough. We feel guilty. We feel ineffective. Then we blow.

The real shame about blame is not that we feel any of these, but that we feel them in an endless loop. And for a cycle to continue, we need a running narrative -- a compilation of voices in our head from decades gone by, spewing warnings, beliefs, judgments and fears. Our narrative has played reliably and inaudibly beneath our conversations and actions for so long we're not aware of it or what it's telling us, even as it erodes our trust, our sense of competence and confidence.

Self-blame is not a sudden event. It's not the result of one bad blunder.

Somehow, it creeps into parenthood and then spreads like an oil spill. We feel the weight of expectation, the pressure to be perfect, to be right all the time, to raise kids who never struggle and sail through life unscathed. As if that bred character. But blame gets in the way of character, because, instead of learning to be accountable instead of guilty, we become really versed at either taking the shots or calling them.

Our kids absorb our pain, either to share our burden or because we unknowingly assign it to them.

As long as blame grows, we don't. My colleague Jay Fiset is a blame specialist whose insightful book "Reframe Your Blame" teaches people how to be personally accountable.

He says the way to release self-blame is to realize parenting is a learning process for us as well as our kids, to become aware of what our lessons are and then ask ourselves how we can apply those lessons next time. The catch, he adds, is we can't truly relinquish blame without forgiveness.

So, maybe our biggest challenge as parents is self-acceptance. Without it, we are stuck in the quicksand of self-judgment, where the only perceived way out is through judgment of others, including our children. Instead of wanting our kids to fess up when they mess up, we can teach them to step up. It's like starting with our own foot -- one giant step for parentkind.

Lu Hanessian is a TV and radio journalist, author of "Let the Baby Drive: Navigating the Road of New Motherhood' and the host of "Make Room for Baby' on the Discovery Health Channel. You can reach her at www.letthebabydrive.com