How am I supposed to raise my sons and daughters?

Every day we find thousands of messages about parenting, about how to educate, about food, emotional management, or emotional intelligence, on the accompaniment of boys and girls…

And every day we are more fathers and mothers who question how we want to care for, accompany and educate our sons and daughters. That, on many occasions, causes many contradictions, contradictions that we put into practice and that make us feel bad.

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The challenge of adapting parenting to the particularities of the family

Every family is unique, and every member of that family is, too. Therefore, we cannot forget that each one of them has their own experiences, their education and upbringing, their parents and mothers who have done the best they could and knew how, and that has been the learning that people carry in our backpack.

It is our family and we must know it, know what is inside, know every detail to be able to assess what we stay with and what we do not agree with.

Making that trip is sometimes not easy, because it means reconciling with your childhood, with your mother and/or with your father and never forgetting that they always did the best they knew how. It supposes knowing which are those weak points from which we start and which are the strong points, and That's why it's so important to have this conversation with yourself and your partner before you even have sons. This is how you can visualize how you would like your upbringing to be to start working on acquiring the necessary tools.

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To do?

It is clear that, when a family considers that another education is possible, they do everything in their power to obtain the information and even the necessary training to be able to do so.

These families are the ones who have realized that the education that we ourselves have received did not accompany the entire emotional sphere on many occasions: educated in genres and promulgated the idea that emotions, better at home (same as dirty rags).

So we get down to work, but sometimes the training we have is not enough, because day to day overwhelms us. Because Adult obligations sometimes eat up childhood rights and the right to be able to educate with conscience; because having the tools and information is very good, but when you see yourself in the situation it is difficult to reproduce the appropriate parenting model and not fall into what you know is not correct, which is not what you want.

And so blame comes. That damn word that often accompanies mothers and fathers in our upbringing, perhaps more than we would like.

Given all this, how can we deal with those feelings we were talking about? Well, considering these keys:

• You need to do all that retrospective work, self-knowledge.
• Share with our partner our desires of how to raise, to share and to reach points in common in those situations that we feel at opposite poles, make a team to be able to go to one and if we feel that we are weakening, knowing that the other will be at our side side. Because motherhood and fatherhood are wonderful, you learn and enjoy it, but sometimes it's not easy.
• Inform and train us both. In order to make the previous point, it is necessary that it be fulfilled.

On the other hand, we must know how to seek help if we feel it necessary. A more continuous or punctual advice that guides us in how to put knowledge into practice, that approaches situations from the coherence of educating in a positive way, but without permissiveness and without authoritarianism, balancing towards the midpoint and becoming aware of where we are at all times in order to be able to later raise our children without the need for their presence.

From TAP Center, we continue to work on training and accompaniment in the positive upbringing of neurotypical and neurodiverse families. If at any time you feel that you may need this accompaniment, do not hesitate to contact us.

Author: Irene de la Granja Muñoz, Master in Special Education and Master in Educational Psychology.