5 minutes

If you’ve ever said something to your child that you regret as a parent you are not alone. We would be here all day if I were to go through all of the things that have come out of my mouth that I’ve regretted saying over the past 15 years.

You know that childhood rhyme: “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”? As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realise it isn’t actually true. Or, at least, it hasn’t been true for me, if I’m honest.

The truth is that words do matter.  How we speak to each other, in the tone that we use, with the words that we say. They matter. As hard as it is to face as a parent, they really really matter when it comes to the things we say to our kids.

I want to flag something at this point: don’t start beating yourself up about things you may have said to your child in the past. The reason is that it gives us an opportunity to teach our children to say sorry when we do or say things in the heat of the moment that we don’t mean.  Saying sorry is just as important a lesson as knowing that our words matter. 

Reflecting on all this, there are two things that I have really regretted. I have had to spend a lot of time talking through these with one of my kids due to the impact she felt from them.

So here’s my confession of two not great things I have said to my kids.

There was a period of time where I would say to one of my children, when she was behaving in a way that I didn’t like, that she was “giving me anxiety and I needed her to stop”.  For some, this might not seem too harsh of a thing to say, but for others you may understand what the impact of those words can be.

What I was telling my daughter was that she was giving me anxiety.  That my problem was  because of her.  That she was the problem.  She was just a kid, and I made her feel like my anxiety issues were a direct result of her as a person. For a time she took that belief on, which is a lot to carry for a kid.

Her behaviour was causing me anxiety. But it was because she was holding up a mirror to me. She was reflecting back to me what I was programming in her. And instead of taking responsibility for that as the grown up, I was blaming her behaviour and my behaviour on her.  That’s a lot for a child to carry and process.

The second major regret when it comes to things I have said to my kids is this. You know when children come into a room with “Mum, mum, mum, mum…”? Before they had a chance to get their request out I would bark in sheer overwhelm, “What else do you want from me?”.

What these particular words were communicating to my children in those moments were things like: you are too much; I am not available to meet your needs; I don’t even want to know what they are, figure it out yourself; I don’t want to help you; you are not allowed to have needs and you are a burden if you have needs.

Can any parents out there relate to that story and those feelings? How about as an adult in terms of you feeling like you’re not able to have needs?  I’ve known that story very well as an adult. It took a lot for me to come to a place, as a parent, where I realised that I was passing it on to my children, through things I would say without fully understanding what the impact of that was.

For the last few years I have worked really hard to become aware of what I am passing on to my kids, often in very unnoticeable ways, sometimes without even realising it.

As a part of this process I put together a set of values to help guide our family around how we show up together, how we treat each other and how we BE together.  I’ve had a very strong focus on trying to make sure that our family culture is really positive because it hasn’t always been that way.

I’m proud to say that it’s possible, though. And through intentionally focusing on trying to improve how we treat each other, and showing up together as a family, we have been able to shift into a much more positive place.

On the back of realising that this actually worked for real I, partnered up with two of our leading ParentTV experts, Dr Vanessa Lapointe and Jason Gibson, to put together a free mini-course sharing these 5 Family Values and how you can use them to take your family from what feels like surviving to thriving.

The course is completely free because I want this kind of help to be available to every parent no matter what.

Click here to check out all the details of what’s in the course and to sign up for free.

I hope it helps 

Sam xx