I Lost It

I pride myself on being an intuitive parent- present, empathetic to my children's needs; void of taking things personally; relatively non-emotional, but tonight I lost it. I flat out lost it with my oldest son. He is entering the pre-adolescent time of his life or "tween" years and he is beginning to develop feelings for girls. Well, one girl in particular.

Adam has adored Heather since first grade. I would say one year is a crush, but to have affection for a girl for four years is much more than a simple crush- it's puppy love. We have worked hard to nurture his heart and encourage the normal feelings to flow so when he asked if he could give her a Christmas gift, we agreed; when he expressed his desire to buy her a Valentine's gift, again we agreed; we even agreed to a birthday gift. When he asked if he could ask her out (because all of his friends were asking girls out), my husband had a conversation with her dad.

Her father confessed there was nothing about our son he could find fault with. He genuinely likes everything about him and allows only our son to call his daughter; so when we asked whether he would mind if Adam asked Heather out, he was okay with it (supervised of course). I had different feelings about it however. Heather is a very shy, private girl with interest in gymnastics and studying hard to keep up her grades. My intuition tells me she is not at all ready to think about boys. We shared this with Adam and encouraged him to develop a stronger friendship first and see what the summer brings.

Score:
Parents 0
Peers 1

He called and asked her if she would go out with him. She responded with "I don't know." Not really the answer a young boy wants to hear. To make matters worse, everyone in school is now discussing the turn of events as gossip runs the mill. The rumors he is hearing- she doesn't want to go out with him.

So how did I lose my cool and what caused me to lose my temper?

Adam is a sensitive, but behavioral child. He acts out his frustration through his physical being. The hurt he is feeling has caused a well of emotion to spring forth which he has decided to take out on his younger brother and sister. Though we have made several attempts to discuss how he is feeling about the situation, he continued to show aggression toward his siblings. The challenge soon became how to help him manage his emotions while at the same time managing my own.

I sent him to his room to decompress and separate him from his brother. I joined him to discuss his feelings and talk through the emotion. He shed some tears, said he felt better and came down for dinner. The talk didn't seem to have done much as he preceded to antagonize his brother yet again. This went on for an hour as he was sent upstairs a second time to work through his aggression.

This parenting thing is not easy, especially as we begin to deal with real emotions and matters of the heart. We apply several techniques in situations like this from deep breathing; to talking through the emotion; and even writing our feelings out on paper, but tonight I experienced an even more intense energy which will require more from my parenting intuition. Stay tuned as the story unfolds!

© 2008 by Tara Paterson, ACPI CCPI
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