What Good Parenting Looks Like According to a Child Therapist

How often do mums get told they’re doing a good job? Possibly not often enough.

Yet the moment you’re told you’re a great mum, you brush it off because you know your failures and the moments when you lost the plot because your kid started painting with their poo or decided to unpack their clothes drawer for the millionth time.

Yet a lovely exchange between author and blog writer Constance Hall and a child therapist offers perspective and a lesson to us all.

Hall shared a photo of herself and her children in a restaurant and shared how the conversation with a child therapist started.

”A couple of weeks ago a child therapist that I know looked at my kids and said, ‘You’re such a good mum,’” she wrote in the caption.

Hall explained she didn’t feel like a good mum.

‘Feeling like a total fraud I blurted, “I don’t feel like a good mum. The kids are driving me so crazy, I’m losing my temper and falling asleep at night wondering where I’m going got get the patients for another day”’

But the child therapist responded with this,

“Babies cry, it’s how they communicate. Toddlers scream, children whinge and teenagers complain.

Then mums say the words ‘for f*ck sake under their breath before ever responding. It’s how we communicate.

But guess what Con? It’s better then silence.

A house full of screaming kids and fighting teenagers and a parent who’s being thrown every question and request is a healthy one to me.

It’s the silent children, the scared toddlers, the teenagers that don’t come home and the parents who aren’t in communication with their children that I worry about.

And kids don’t drive you crazy, you were crazy already. That’s why you had them.”

Hall said she couldn’t stop thinking about what her child therapist told her and put it in a Facebook post to encourage other mums.

‘And just like that, I felt like a good parent again.

Deep breaths, you’re doing a good job.’

The post received over 300,000 likes and was shared over 150,000 times. Parents shared their own experiences of dealing with loud kids and how they were encouraged by Hall’s post.

While we know that tantrums and screaming are not how we want our kids to communicate as they mature and get older, if you’re in the thick of a loud household, take courage from this post.

Your kids are communicating.

And that opens the channels for your kids to listen to you and engage with you which is so important as they grow and become teenagers.

There is a lesson for us all in this post. You’re doing better than you think.