ScreamFree Articles

How did you come to develop ScreamFree Parenting? Back in graduate school I became amazed at the level of existing knowledge on how relationships and family systems really work. I also became amazed at how most of this great knowledge was couched in academic language and available only to the most educated therapists. So, as I learned to work with families, and began to raise a family myself, I searched for ways to capture the best theoretical concepts and effective principles into the working language of real families and organizations. I then began to see that any truly helpful teaching would have to begin with calming our emotional reactivity. “Emotional Reactivity-Free Parenting” was still too academic, though. ScreamFree Parenting was born.

You say “emotional reactivity” as a parent can be our biggest enemy. Please explain what it is and where it comes from. Emotional reactivity is the driving force behind every bad decision, bad pattern, and bad relationship. It is the opposite of responding according to our highest principles; it is reacting out of our deepest fears. Emotional reactivity is what happens when our anxiety gets the best of us, and we act in ways that are actually contrary to our intentions.

Say a dad wants his son to talk to him about his life, telling him “you can tell me anything.” This is well-intentioned, principled behavior. However, when his son begins to tell him how we was recently offered drugs and he’s tempted to take them, Dad flips out. He demands to know the boy’s name, starts to look through his son’s room, etc. He has now eliminated himself as a resource for the son, who might actually run to the drug scene because the friends there are more accepting.

This type of scenario happens every time we get reactive; we actually create the very outcomes we’re trying to avoid.

What responsibilities do parents have to each of their children? We’re called to launch our children into adulthood with the best foundation for living an effective life. We are meant to help them become self-directed adults, capable of discerning the factors that shape their lives, deciding the direction to take, and living with the consequences of their decisions. That means our main responsibility to them is to not be responsible for them. They cannot become responsible for themselves as long as we consider ourselves responsible for their life and their choices. We are only responsible for our own lives and our own choices. We are responsible to our kids for how we manage our emotions, our relationships. We are responsible to them for how we take care of ourselves. We are responsible to them for whatever we do to create a home that nurtures their self-direction.

Why do you say the greatest thing a parent can do for their child is to focus on themselves, rather than the child? As long as I am focused on my children, orbiting my whole life around them, then I am putting all of my emotional responses into their hands. I become dependent upon the least mature persons in the family to actually lead the family. This is simply backwards. Children are not given to us to become our whole world. They are here to become self-directed, contributing adults. Our calling is to create an environment that helps them do that. This means focusing more on what we’re doing and less on them. How am I going to behave, regardless of their behavior? I have to focus on me because am the only one I can ultimately control.

What should a parent do when their child is seemingly out of control? Make sure they themselves are in the most control possible. So often we focus so much on the child that we lose control of ourselves, which makes things even worse. This can occur with the toddler’s tantrum in the restaurant or the teen’s struggles with promiscuity. Once we’ve brought ourselves under control, however, then it becomes much easier to respond to our child with wisdom and principled decisions. Then we can set and enforce consequences. Then we can better understand what’s emotionally behind our child’s behavior. Most importantly, we then can see our own role in contributing to our child’s situation.

What do most parents find to be the hardest part about parenting? The hardest thing for most of us is realizing that our children are separate human beings. This means having to accept that our kids will continuously make decisions we simply do not want them to make. Does that mean we practice some sort of hands-off, aloof parenting? Not at all. It means that all our interaction with our kids, indeed our whole relationship with each of them, is like interacting with a stranger we’re just getting to know. Having a deep respect for our child’s otherness, their differentness, greatly helps us to remain calm and connected at the same time. It’s when we begin to assume a certain right over our child’s space that we begin to push them into the very choices we’re hoping they avoid.

How did your view of parenting change once you became a parent? There’s an old saying that everyone has great parenting theories, and then they have kids. I did not even begin to develop the ScreamFree approach until I was in training to become a therapist, and by then I already had both of my kids. I sometimes shudder to think about what my parenting would have been like without my training. And that’s a thought that compels me to share the ScreamFree Parenting vision with every parent on the planet; the vast majority of us are operating in the dark. People aren’t kidding when they lament that there’s no instructions that come with a baby, they’re desperately serious!

So how do you bring yourself under control when your kid seems to be out of control? How do you calm down? Alcohol. And medication (just kidding). If we wait until the heat of the moment, without making some serious changes to our thinking and our patterns, then there’s little hope of creating lasting change. We’ll just have to resort to pale anger management techniques, like counting to ten or snapping a rubber band. The ScreamFree way is about making some revolutionary shifts. And choosing to focus on ourselves is the first and most important shift. And when it comes to making such a shift, people do not need a “how to” as much as they need a “why to.” My hope is to provide enough vision to prompt people to truly investigate the “whys” behind their parenting choices, well before the heat of the moment.

What do you see as the paradox of parenting? We know that parents are a critical element in shaping the future of kids’ lives. And yet we also know that for kids to lead the most effective lives, they have to grow themselves into the most critical element in shaping the future of their lives. So, we have a paradox: Parents shape kids, and kids shape themselves. This is why we have so much confusion about the childhood roots of adult dysfunction. Are you a victim of your parents’ bad choices? Yes, we all are. Are you yet responsible for your own choices? Yes, we all are. Both are true, and that creates the paradox. The only way out is to begin with yourself, right now. How do you want to relate with your kids, regardless of your past influences and their present behavior?