As a parent, you may find yourself dealing with daily situations where you may become frustrated with your child. While such challenges may be more common with your adolescent child, they can also occur with your own adult child who may or may not have children of their own. How can you make sure that such situations don’t cause you to yell and lose your temper?
The first step is to manage your expectations during your encounter with your child. Almost everyone has expectations of what they want for themselves and those around them. This includes parents who have expectations of their children or children of their parents or friends of their friends. A few years ago, a friend of mine was upset because his son had refused to invite him to his grandson’s birthday party. His first instinct was to call him and scold him on the phone, but he decided not to say anything and carry on as if it were no big deal. He told me that he had high blood pressure and that losing his temper and getting angry would increase his chances of having a stroke or heart attack. How would you have reacted in a similar situation?
Sometimes the best reaction when it comes to conflict and disagreement is to just say nothing, even when you have a lot to say. This is part of what I call strategic engagement. You need to remember that while expectations are good to have, they can also cause stress or unhappiness if not managed properly. You may end up taking the resulting stress out on yourself and others.
It’s important not to let your expectations get out of hand when it comes to negative interactions. You should be careful when dealing with your children, because his perspective or point of view may be completely different from yours. Another approach to the idea of managing expectations when dealing with others can be to lower them and make them more realistic. By turning your expectations into achievable goals, you can help avoid conflict. This can lead to friction and criticism.
If you are not careful, how you handle criticism and misunderstanding in the family can lead to yelling. To reduce this, you must learn not to take criticism personally. Daily criticisms are some of the most difficult obstacles you have to overcome every day because they hurt your feelings and cause self-doubt and significant emotional upheavals that alter your sense of identity and stress you out. Refuse to take every criticism or disagreement with others as a personal attack on your integrity, productivity, or reliability. Remember that critically you simply reflect another person’s perspective and protect their own ego.
Sometimes when you deal with your children, you may come across the problem that everything is great or everything is terrible. The key to remaining happy or unruffled during such interactions is to remember that you can’t control how others will behave towards you, but you can control how you would react to their behavior. One way to do this is to lower your expectations when dealing with others. Don’t expect a negative person to have a positive outlook or a grumpy person to be kind and welcoming to you. This is true even if that person is your child.
You can improve your anger management during your interactions with your children and others by making moment-to-moment adjustments. Once you learn to do this consistently, you’ll find yourself less stressed and happy, even during the most challenging interactions with your children and others. This is part of the self-mastery process. You have to remember that the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. I hope these few tips that I’ve shredded with you help you on your own journey of self-mastery, personal transformation, optimal health, and ongoing success.
