90 - Parenting with Heart: Doing Your Own Work as a Parent
The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at chip@chipdodd.com. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at bryan@vothcenter.com.
2 Helpful resources along the parenting journey:
Link to 8 Feelings for Children Chart
The focus of this season on “Living with Heart: From Birth to Death” is parenting. Some of the content in these episodes loosely connects to the book, Parenting with Heart by Stephen James and Chip Dodd.
Taking responsibility as a parent is referred to in several ways:
“Dealing with unfinished business”
“Doing your own work”
“Owning your own problems”
“Self-care to care about others”
Taking responsibility as a parent means that a parent accepts that they are a work in progress, as is every child. We are all WIPs (works in progress).
A WIP recognizes that humility is an essential factor to be a healthy, responsible parent.
A WIP has healthy shame, identified by five basic recognitions:
I make mistakes; so do others.
I need other grown-ups and others need me.
I don’t have all the answers, but I will share what I do know.
I ask questions when I don’t know how to do something; I support others in doing the same.
I am not God; I am in need of God.
The responsible parent is a WIP who:
has humility
has a willingness to grow and change
and recognizes that they are just as human as their children
The responsible parent also faces and is humbled by these realities:
The best we ever become is clumsy.
We have to live life on life’s terms.
Everything in life is practice.
It takes a lifetime to learn how to live.
These four realities that are faced by the parent, give permission to the parent, and child alike, to live with imperfection and still pursue excellence.
Basically, there is no finish line.
By having an attitude and disposition that focuses on growth, not perfection, parents create a healthy environment of children.
Ultimately, the responsible parent is a person who lives the Golden Rule.
Jesus said, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12, NIV).
Unhealthy or irresponsible parents
When a parent demands or expects their own children to rise above being struggling human beings and perform beyond human limits, the parent is not taking responsibility.
This parent has issues from their own past upbringing that need to be addressed and healed so that the child does not have to lose their own God-given identity to please or perform for the parent.
Facing childhood
For a parent to be the best version of a responsible parent, they need to identify the story of their own upbringing.
A parent needs to know what blessed them most in childhood and what wounded them most.
Most importantly, the responsible parent does not live in denial about their families of origin.
Denial suppresses the emotional and spiritual availability of a person, thus suppressing what a child needs from a parent.
What the parent had to suppress emotionally and spiritually in their own upbringing will become the “burden” upon the child.
Some of the greatest gifts a child can receive from a parent is for the parent to be humble, realistic, and available.
If the parent’s childhood blocks any of those characteristics, the responsible parent does the work to heal from the wounds and dysfunction.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center