Navigating Parenting Meltdowns with Mindfulness

Parenting can be a journey filled with joy, love, and inevitable challenges, particularly when dealing with children's meltdowns and tantrums. For those striving to be more conscious parents, maintaining calm in the face of such outbursts is a common stru

If you are on your journey towards becoming a more conscious parent, you have probably realized by now that you don’t want to be shouting at, or losing it at your children. You have probably realized by now that it is ok for them to have meltdowns and tantrums. Despite all of this there is one question you get stuck at “But how do I stay ‘Calm’ amid a meltdown?” This is the one question that haunts all parents. 

 

We all are aware that we want to be able to handle our children’s tantrums without losing it ourselves, but reminding ourselves to ‘CALM DOWN’ isn’t enough. If we are using our willpower to do this it comes back to bite us. It works for a day or two, exhausting yourself in the process, and it’s probably going to build up over time and we will burst out at some point. If not on our children, then on someone else. 

 

Learning to stay ‘Calm’ amidst these meltdowns is a process we can work on over time, so it might be difficult for me to explain it through this one article. I am still going to try, hoping it might inspire you to take that first step towards the process.

 

We need to start with understanding that the reason we lose it when our children throw a tantrum, is not because of their behavior. It has very little to do with the child. Most children behave erratically at some phase in their lives. The reason we get so bothered by their behavior is our conditioning. We have all had experiences in the first few years of our lives that stay in our system as ‘Implicit Memories’. These experiences or rather memories from these experiences go on to define our personalities in many ways. It leads up to patterns in the way we act, and react to certain situations. It defines the things that trigger us. It is often hard to pinpoint an exact memory or experience. Although often during my sessions we do manage to come across such a memory or experience that changes things for the future. 

 

What helps most is first convincing yourself that it is not your child, or your child’s behavior but rather the way you feel about that behavior. A simple example that is most common for all of us could be when our children cry. We almost always want to stop that crying instantly, whether it is a baby, a toddler, or an older child. First of all, it is hard to watch our children cry and be in pain. Although we do know somewhere that crying might be a healthy way for them to release their emotions. Yet we have this instant urge to shhh them, distract them, and sometimes shout at them so they will stop crying. To put it simply, one of the reasons is that this crying bothers us, cos when we were kids, this crying bothered our parents as well, hence we are conditioned to believe that crying is not an okay emotion to have and/or display.

 

This could be a mild trigger, but many things are more specific to our situation. For some of us, it is when our children don’t eat well. For others, it is when our children disrespect us in some way. Now that you have convinced yourself that it is more about you than your child, you can start taking steps to work towards it. First, I would ask myself, “Why am I feeling this way?”. “Why does it bother me so much when my child disrespects me?” Yes of course, we all know that children shouldn’t be disrespecting their parents, and we could teach them what we feel is right, but we could also do that neutrally, without being extremely angry. So, we need to repeatedly ask ourselves, “Why do we get angry?”

 

Once we do this, we can start to see patterns in our lives where similar situations have affected us, whether it be with a close friend or a sibling or even our partner/spouse. The more we notice these patterns the more we’ll realize that this has something to do with us. 

Once we have recognized these patterns there are many ways to work on them and integrate with them so that in the future we don’t act/react as we have always done. Basically, forming new ways. As I mentioned this is a process that we can start working on, and is beyond the scope of this article. But I hope we all can already start taking those first few steps towards becoming more conscious parents. When we shift the focus to working on ourselves first, we watch the magic unfold in both our children’s and our lives.

Introduction: Mridula Saria is an Educationist, Certified Parent Coach, and Child Development Researcher. She is a passionate learner dedicated to understanding and exploring child behavior and development. As the co-founder of Grooming Tales, she works with children to foster their growth and development. Through her coaching practice, she helps parents and mentors navigate their journey, sharing effective methods and tools to support children's learning and thriving. You can reach her at www.mridulasaria.com