Acceptance

Sovereignty and empathy are augmented by acceptance, a third fundamental element of mindful parenting. The three complement each other and are intimately interconnected. You can think of them as together forming the sides of an equilateral triangle. Acceptance is an interior orientation that recognizes and acknowledges that things are as they are, independent of whether they are the way we want them to be or not, no matter how terrible they may be or seem to be at certain moments. This is not easy to actualize in everyday life, even if you feel that it makes sense. The practice of mindfulness is about developing awareness of our relationship to the present moment, and noticing when we are struggling against the way things are. The stories we just visited illustrate the openings that can happen when we manage to not be caught by our strongly aversive thoughts and emotions.

Gawain accepted Ragnell as she was. Mell Lazarus’s father accepted that what the boys had done was already done. In doing so, he saw that the next moment called for something new, something to further healing, completion, and respect. Acceptance of what is underlies our ability to choose how to be in relationship to whatever is actually happening. Acceptance is not passive resignation or defeat. Just as sovereignty does not mean unbridled entitlement, so acceptance does not mean that everything our children do is okay with us. Even as we are clear with our children that certain behaviors are not acceptable, they can still feel that we accept them completely, including their strong emotions. Acceptance is a door that, if we choose to open it, leads to seeing in new ways and finding new possibilities to navigate in difficult moments, as well as being more in touch with the harmonious and joyful ones.

The process of attempting to see things as they actually are is key to cultivating even a modicum of acceptance. Thus, working with acceptance itself becomes a form of mindfulness practice. Part of the practice involves bringing awareness to how much resistance we sometimes feel when things are not going “our way.” All sorts of emotions arise under such circumstances, including frustration and anger. There is a paradoxical opening and a loosening that may come about when we hold these afflictive emotions with kindness and clarity. A large part of this is not taking personally things that are not fundamentally personal. Not so easy to do when it comes to our children’s behavior, or anything else that we may find upsetting or threatening.

I (mkz) am in a shoe store with my daughters. One is four and the other is an infant. The four-year-old needs new shoes, and there are none that are quite right. As we are leaving, she starts to yell and scream and grabs a shoe on display, refusing to let go. Holding her baby sister in one arm, I grab her hand and get to the door of the store, where I ask an employee to take the shoe from her. A tugging match ensues. I’m feeling angry and helpless and out of control. I finally manage to get us outside. She is still screaming and crying, her face bright red. She is wild, furious that she cannot have new shoes. It is a struggle to get her into her car seat. In the process, her foot kicks the half-open car door and breaks the plastic side panel.

How I respond to this whole episode is determined by how I see or don’t see my child in that moment. At the time, feeling completely overwhelmed by the intensity of her reaction, I felt angry and not very sympathetic. I wasn’t feeling particularly empathic, but I didn’t lash out at her, either. It took all my attention and effort just to get us home and keep her from hurting anyone. It was only later that I was able to look at what had gone on and feel some sympathy for her as I started putting together clues in an attempt to understand what had happened.

The possible causes were as disparate as her being overtired, hungry, perhaps reacting to the fumes from the leather products in the store, coupled with her frustration over not getting what she wanted, made worse by the larger picture of having to share me with her baby sister. In all likelihood, it was a combination of these factors.

In looking back on what happened, I could see that she wasn’t kicking and crying and destroying the car out of maliciousness or to drive me crazy or to control me. Her anger over not getting shoes set off a huge reaction that she couldn’t control. She was in the grip of something, as if under a spell.

There are so many different ways to view what we often call “difficult” or “negative” behaviors in our children. What might be unacceptable to someone else might be normal behavior to me, and vice versa. Very often we’re locked into seeing things in only one way, conditioned by views and emotions that are frequently unexamined, and that may put social decorum—what other people might be thinking, or how embarrassed we are feeling—above the emotional well-being of our children. In such moments, it is easy to feel controlled and manipulated by our children, to feel completely helpless, and then of course to feel tremendously angry. We might find ourselves lashing out at them in an attempt to assert our authority and regain control of the situation.

Since such occasions abound in parenting, we are given plenty of opportunities to work with these reactive patterns and develop, out of our awareness and discernment, a more appropriate and nurturing repertoire of emotional responses. This is where mindfulness of our emotional reactions can combine with even a modest engagement in formal meditation practice to help us deepen our natural capacity to be more aware and to see more clearly, as we describe in Part 4. Formal meditation can function as a kind of laboratory, in which we can develop a high degree of familiarity with our mind states and feeling states and how they affect us. We get to watch our thoughts and feelings arise from moment to moment and to see them as impersonal events in the mind, much like weather patterns, to which we do not have to react in a particular way, or in any way at all. Awareness of our emotions simply means consciously acknowledging that they are there. We simply or not so simply accept that they are our feelings in the moment, whether we like them or not, without judging them (which usually means without judging how much we in fact are judging them).

As we learn to observe and accept our own wide range of feelings, including very turbulent ones, as part of our effort to be more mindful, we naturally become more aware of other people’s feelings, especially our children’s. We come to know something of the landscape of feelings and their changing nature and are more likely to be sympathetic and less likely, at the same time, to take them personally. We are better able to accept our children’s experience and their feelings, even if we may not like how they are behaving. In doing so, we are able to step out of the limited realm in which we as parents can often find ourselves, where we are so carried away by our own feelings and our attachment to our view of things that we cut ourselves off from our children and in some deep way, from ourselves, and thus, from our ability to work creatively with what is in front of us in such moments.

How we view what is happening, whether it is with judgment and disapproval or with an openness to trying to see beneath the surface, strongly affects our relationships with our children. Viewing our children’s problematic behaviors (for example, hurting others, being rude or disrespectful) in a less harsh and judgmental manner allows us to remain their ally and keep a heartfelt connection with them even though their behavior is not okay, and we need to let them know that clearly and firmly, and establish some kind of boundary or limit.

Our children will give us countless opportunities to practice seeing and accepting things as they are through the veils of our own emotional reactivity, and then acting as best we can based on our understanding of the larger picture.

How we see things always colors what we choose to do. When a baby is crying, do we see it as a willful attempt to control us or as an expression of discomfort and her needing something from us? When children begin crawling and exploring the world around them, do we view their unstoppable curiosity as a sign of intelligence, strength, and spirit, or as a threat to our control, or—when they get a bit older—as an act of disobedience? How do we view it when a son is wildly teasing his sisters, or when a teenage daughter is moody and distant, critical and demanding, or when a child is so angry that he threatens to run away from home?

Accepting our children as they are. It sounds so simple. But how often do we find ourselves wanting our children to act, look, or be different from the way they actually are in that moment? How often do we want them to be, or look, or relate the way they were in a different moment, at a different time, and not accepting—despite all the evidence—that right here, right now, things are not the way we want them to be but are undeniably the way they are?

When things feel out of control, the impulse may be to reach for whatever methods we have at our disposal to “discipline” the offender and restore order. This cycle of “bad behavior” followed by some kind of discipline imposed by us often does not include any attempt to empathize with what the child is experiencing. Rather than a difficult moment leading to a greater sense of understanding and trust between parent and child, distance and alienation can be created instead.

The alternative to this is a process that is much less clear-cut. There is no set formula for it. But we can say that it begins with an attempt to be open, to see our child freshly in that very moment. When we try to do this, we often find that our view is colored by our own needs, fears, and expectations, and by the extent of our resources in that moment. These can combine either to filter our vision so that everything is colored in one particular way or to cloud our vision completely. In either case, we are no longer seeing the whole picture. Only certain colors and certain details come through. Our own partial seeing can lead to habitual negative labeling and judging of our child’s behavior and to sustained anger and emotional distancing.

If we bring mindfulness into those very moments when we sense ourselves losing perspective or clarity, perhaps using our breath to ground us in the body, and if we try looking carefully at what is really happening with our child, we often find that there is much more going on than what we are reacting to on the surface. If we assume that there is some underlying reason for a child’s “difficult” behavior, even if we don’t see it immediately or understand what is going on, we may be able to be a little more sympathetic and accepting. When we are able to put aside our habitual, often critical ways of seeing disruptive or difficult behavior, we may begin to see that wild, loud, or even angry behavior is not necessarily “negative.” Sometimes children are acting out as a way of regaining their equilibrium. They may have felt constrained by school or by the demands of homework and need outlets for their energy, their vitality, their agency.

Over the years, in moments when our children have been particularly wild, silly, goofy, or generally provoking, it has helped me (mkz) to view such behaviors as a form of discharging or releasing, an important way for them to let things out rather than hold them in. Sometimes young children are bursting with uncontrolled energy. At other times, they may be expressing deep, subterranean emotion. Even when they are falling apart, yelling, screaming, kicking and banging, seeing such behavior as a passing expression of their inner state makes me more tolerant. Resisting simply isn’t helpful in such situations. As much as I want to control and change things in moments like this, I usually can’t. Viewing such behavior as a normal release helps me to get some perspective on it and not take it so personally. I can choose to be more sanguine. It also gives them the freedom to express their feelings and try out different behaviors that often arise spontaneously, instead of being locked by a rigid parental authority into a narrowly defined framework of what is acceptable in the domain of being.

There are times when we might find it helpful to view an emotional outburst the way we view suddenly inclement weather. Sometimes we just have to sit out such an eruption the way we might sit out a thunderstorm. Do we think of thunderstorms as manipulative—a word that often comes up when children are not acting the way we want them to? Sometimes the only way our children have to start fresh is to erupt. When disequilibrium builds up for whatever reason, discharging it may be the only way to achieve the peace that follows in its wake, the sigh, the letting go. Children sometimes have to push us away and find a new space within themselves before there can be the possibility of a reconciliation, a reconnecting, and a new beginning.

Every time that we resisted, fought with, attempted to control, or commented negatively about this energy, we only made it worse. In such moments, it helps to find ways to move with our children rather than only to offer resistance, to work with them, rather than against them.

Sometimes this calls for engaging their energy directly. If a toddler or even a school-age child is getting wild and a bit out of control, he might like to wrestle with you, or play some other very physical game that allows him to let out his energy but in a more focused, grounded way. Once you have connected with him, you can more easily help him to make the transition to whatever it is he needs in that moment.

If we are observant, over time we can begin to identify the early warning signs that a storm is brewing. We can then work with our children in peaceful moments, when they are more receptive, and encourage them to pay attention to how they feel in those prestorm moments. They can begin to ask themselves: “Am I tired?” “Am I hungry?” “Am I mad, or sad?” Slowly, over time, as they get older, our children can learn to ask for what they need, whether it’s a quiet time in their room alone, or a hug, or a warm bath, or a snack, or a rough-and-tumble game. We can also look back at what happened and talk about it together. Depending on their age, we can share what we sensed and saw in terms of what they might have been feeling (“You sounded really frustrated.” “You seemed really upset with me.” “You wanted this very badly, and I said no.”) and listen to what they say in response. Going through this kind of process can strengthen our relationships in the aftermath of these inevitable emotional storms.

We can also let them know how their behavior affects us and others around them (for example, making it difficult to listen to them, pushing us away, etc.). With school-age children, we can ask them if they have any ideas about how they might express their feelings and needs so that they can be better heard. In this way they learn that they can reflect on their experience and perhaps see that they have some choices in regard to expressing their strong feelings. They can also begin to recognize and become more familiar with strong emotions in general: “Anger feels like this,” “Sadness feels like this,” “Fear feels like this.”

Being accepting doesn’t mean that we have to be naïve or passive in regard to our children. There will inevitably be many times when we need to step in and act decisively and wisely. Of course, what we do will depend very much on a child’s age and the particular circumstances. At times, our children may be simply doing too much, moving too fast, flying too high. Learning to self-regulate happens slowly over time throughout childhood and adolescence. Our children may need us to rein them in, give them more structure and boundaries, provide something to come up against to slow them down, to bring them down to earth.

There are also times when our child may be waving a red flag at us, sending a serious distress signal, saying, “Pay attention! Something is not right!” These red flags can take many different forms, such as a pattern of angry outbursts, fearfulness, being withdrawn, physical symptoms, or not wanting to go to school. At such times, if we automatically attribute the worst motives to their behavior and react with punitive harshness, or we ignore them, we diminish our children as well as ourselves. We cannot be sure what our children’s motivations are, any more than we can with anyone else. When we label their behavior as “manipulative” and react with disapproval and discipline, we essentially cut ourselves off from our children in those moments, just when they may need us the most. Our judging throws up a barrier. It becomes a dead end. We miss an opportunity to build trust and a sense of connectedness. We also miss an opportunity to deal with what may be very real problems and empathize with the underlying pain that accompanies them.

At such times we have to look beneath the surface and see what is going on. It can be hard to track down the source of these red flags. But rather than a negative, fearful, judging perspective, we might try cultivating a more open, curious, and caring perspective: “What do these signs mean?” “What can we work with here?” If we are more sensitive and attentive to the cues and clues our children give us, and combine them with what we know about them, we can usually begin to see what the underlying issues are and what may be needed.

Of course, when a toddler is kicking and screaming, or a school-age child is yelling and slamming doors, these are not the best times to wonder what is really going on. First, we need to get through the immediate crisis. Whatever the cause, when children are upset, they are not in a thinking mode. They are immersed in strong feelings, and they don’t want us to try to reason with them. In such moments, they are unable to hear us, never mind understand us. They need us to stay with them through the storm and to not lose our own center just because they have lost theirs. We might imagine that we are a large sheltering oak tree in this storm, a solid, overarching friend, not necessarily understanding or having answers, but offering a sympathetic presence.

Once the storm has passed, that is the time to ask ourselves what may be going on here. We can become detectives and consider the possible source of his or her unhappiness or disequilibrium. Is it something at school or something at home? Is it physical, emotional, or both? Is it something relatively simple, like needing more structure, or less, being overtired, hungry, or overstimulated? Is there a pattern of behaviors that we need to pay attention to? Has something troubling happened that our child can’t share with us? What are the possible stressors in our child’s life? What inner and outer resources does he or she have to draw upon or need to develop?

Being accepting of who our children are and what they are going through means asking these kinds of questions and, to whatever degree possible, looking deeply into what we may find.

My ten-year-old daughter, in bed, lights out, says to me:

“Mommy, I feel so confused.”

I reply: “What are you confused about?”

She says: “I don’t know, I just feel confused.”

I struggle with my urge to make it better… “It’s okay to feel confused.”

She says: “It is?”

I say: “Yes, it is.”

She is silent and drifts off to sleep.

She didn’t need a discussion or a solution in that moment. Feeling held by me, she was able to accept uncertainty, confusion. My acceptance led her to an acceptance in herself.

It can be much harder for us to show teenagers the warmth and affection that may have come from us so easily when they were little. We need to find ways to remind them that we are on their side, that they are as precious to us as they were when they were adorable, red-cheeked cherubs. But this is not so easy, especially on those occasions when everything they say seems to be a direct criticism of us. This usually happens at the end of a long day when everybody is feeling tired and depleted. Along with what sometimes feels like a steady stream of negative comments often come requests for us to do things for them and complaints about how tired they are and how much they have to do. The more alienated we feel from them, the angrier and more critical and demanding they become. In turn, we might feel angry and even more unaccepting and rejecting of them.

My teenage daughter comes into the kitchen, shivering, dressed in a T-shirt, and we have the following exchange:

Her: “It’s cold in here.”

Me: “Put something else on.”

Her: (annoyed) “I don’t need to put something more on—it’s cold in here.”

Me: “It’s not very cold in here. Why don’t you go and put something warmer on?”

Her: (getting angry) “I shouldn’t have to put something on. It’s cold in here.”

It seems so inconsequential, yet each interaction pushes us farther apart. I am annoyed by her behavior and not feeling sympathetic because of all the times recently when I have felt relentlessly picked on by her. Later, things dissolve into a hugely upsetting scene in which she is in her room and refusing to talk to me. This has the effect of throwing cold water on me and waking me up, and I am finally able to see past my own anger and glimpse the difficult time she is going through. I see that the more distant we have grown in the past few weeks, the angrier she has become, and the more she has snapped at me, the angrier and more alienated from her I have become. A horribly vicious cycle, culminating in this present impasse. How does it end?

Clearly, I have to end it. I see that she can’t get what she needs from me. She wants something, but she doesn’t want it from me… she does and she doesn’t. In that lies a conundrum.

When she complained of being cold and refused to put something on, I could have been sympathetic and just turned up the heat, which would have given her warmth in a way she might have accepted. Sometimes teenagers are asking for our attention and love and yet at the same time, they need more distance from us and are pushing us away. I could have responded in any number of ways, but instead I let my anger from the previous days make me intolerant. I closed myself off from her and made her the problem.

During this time, she needed me to not take her criticisms of the past few weeks so personally but to see them as a sign of her own internal struggles and the pressures she was under. I couldn’t change things in the rest of her life, but I could have been more empathic and made an effort to hear the feelings behind her words and actions. At the same time, it would have been helpful if I had addressed her hostile behavior when it occurred in all those earlier moments, letting her know how it felt to me, so that my own resentment hadn’t built up and she had more awareness of the effect of her behavior on others.

Our children’s feelings are their own, but how they express them affects us and others. When their behavior is off-putting, hurtful, alienating, rude, or disrespectful, it does not serve them or us to ignore our own feelings and the effect their behavior is having on us and on the relationship. Figuring out when and what to say—or whether to say anything at all—is a creative process and requires us to be in touch with the present moment. There is no formula, no one right answer. The creativity arises in response to the particulars of each situation, with each child, and with ourselves. For this reason, a mindful response can only come from our willingness to stay in the situation with openness and not jump to finding “solutions” out of our own discomfort and our desire to fix or correct or teach in such moments.

Some of the ways in which our children behave may on occasion trigger volcanic feelings and destructive behaviors in us. These reactive patterns might have been part of the landscape of our own childhood, and we may have absorbed them without even knowing it. They tend to surface in particular situations when similar conditions arise. Our reactions can take the form of unconscious posturing, tension, self-righteousness, contempt, intolerance, cruelty, and catastrophic thinking.

Any behavior can be seen in its worst light, but most behaviors can be seen in a more understanding and accepting way. When we have been raised in an environment of mistrust, when we have been hurt by suspicion and judgment, when we have been belittled or ridiculed, we are primed to fall into these familiar patterns and repeat them with our children. To break out of them takes ongoing moment-to-moment awareness. It helps to be aware of what we are saying, how we are saying it, and the effect we are having on our children. Every time we are able to see a little more clearly our own reactive patterns and where they come from, we have the possibility of embodying new and healthier responses.

Too many children and adults live with the feeling that they are not accepted for who they are, that somehow they are “disappointing” their parents or not meeting their expectations—that somehow they don’t “measure up.” How many parents spend their time focusing on the ways in which their child is “too this” or “too that,” or “not enough of this or that”? A great deal of unnecessary pain and grief is caused by this withholding, judging behavior. When has parental disapproval in the form of shaming or humiliating or withholding ever been a positive influence on a child’s behavior? It might result in obedience, but at what cost to the child, and the adult the child becomes?

Parents don’t have to like or agree with everything their children do, or the ways in which they choose to live when they are older. There are always going to be differences. But when a child, no matter how old, feels our acceptance, when he feels our love, not just for his easy-to-live-with, lovable, attractive, and agreeable self, but also for his difficult, repulsive, exasperating self, it can free him to become more balanced and whole. Children can face all sorts of difficulties and challenges if they can come back to the well of our unconditional love. For it is in our recognizing and accepting them as they are that inner growth and healing take place.