My Child’s Behavior ≠ My Self-Worth

"A tree is known by its fruit" is a phrase that appears in the Bible.

Srila Prabhupada also spoke this phrase to appreciate the parents of his disciples. 

Naturally, we, as parents, internalize this saying to evaluate the results of our parenting efforts.

We invest more than our 100% in raising our children. Parenting is probably the most demanding service that we will ever undertake. So it's easy to equate the results of our parenting to our self worth. 

However, I found that the more I equated my children's behavior and speech to my worthiness, the more I acted out of shame in interacting with my children. The consideration of "what will people think" took up a disproportionate amount of my brain and heart space, while the ability to care for the needs behind my children's actions and speech was getting obscured. 

One day, we invited guests to our home. Our older son was sitting next to the Prabhu, eating dinner. After having served everyone, my husband wanted to sit down on the table, and requested my son to move, so that he could sit next to the Prabhu. Our son flatly refused. No matter how much my husband requested, the answer was a firm "no".

I noticed myself starting to feel a blush in my face, queasiness in my stomach, and heat in the body. I know these are bodily sensations I feel when shame starts to rise. I was equating my son's refusal to my worthiness as a human being. If my child is being uncooperative, that is obviously a measure of how poorly I'm parenting, I thought. How embarrassing that this is happening in front of outsiders! 

I have done enough work with my shame to know that when I speak or act out of shame, I regret it later. My ability to be curious about my children's needs declines and my self-absorption sends me into "fight" mode. When my self-worth is on the line, I am not grounded enough to parent with love. So I simply paused, told myself, "Ah, I am feeling shame. How human of me! Sri Radhika, you are always worthy of love and belonging." Poof, shame loses its power when it's named. It's that simple! 

I have sometimes noticed that parents push their children to "perform" out of this drive for their own self-worth. Whether it is leading kirtan or playing the mrdanga or harmonium, or being "obedient" in public, when our worthiness gets enmeshed with the child's performance, we lose the essence of bhakti - which is to please Krishna, not to satisfy my need for self worth and belonging. Similarly, I have found disproportionate disciplining of children sometimes arises out of the parent getting flustered from a shaken sense of self worth. The consideration of everyone's needs that comes out of being grounded is hard to tap into when we are hustling for our own self-worth.

Awareness of this dynamic is the first and perhaps, biggest, step towards liberation. The more I work on finding creative ways to meet my needs for inclusion and belonging, the freer my children are to choose to do a mrdanga performance or participate in dramas, without the burden of proving my self-worth as a parent, but simply to meet their own needs for contribution, belonging, and recreation. 

Fulfilling our needs is our responsibility. Getting attached to the strategy that my children must meet my need for worthiness creates a lot of strife. When we stop making veiled or unveiled demands from others to satisfy our needs, both we, and those we love, breathe more freely!

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NVC provides us three options to mindfully navigate our human experience - 

1. Self-Connection,

2. Empathy (which can be of two types - verbal and non verbal), and 

3. Self-Expression. 

The NVC Tree of Life is a pictorial representation of the three options for connection 

What I shared so far was my exercise in self-connection. As you can see in the root of the tree above, self connection has two parts - self empathy and humanizing the other person. 

• Self-empathy - Getting in touch with my bodily sensations (heat, blushing, queasiness) and my feeling of shame were part of giving myself empathy. The needs that were unmet in the situation were peace and harmony.
• Humanizing - Then, I moved on to humanizing my son. Having prevented myself from going down the shame spiral, I was in a position to start guessing the needs my son was saying "yes" to behind his "no". Perhaps, as a teen, he had a strong need for autonomy. He probably wanted to be able to make the choice of where to sit. He might have needed some ease and comfort, i.e., being tired at dinner time, he might not have wanted to make the effort to move. He might have wanted respect by being allowed to have a prominent seat at the table. He might have wanted his needs to be understood and considered. He might have been enjoying the connection by being engaged in the conversation with the Prabhu. Ultimately, the need for mattering exists in us all, i.e., he might have wanted to know that his seating preference matters to us. I have all these needs too, so surely, I can extend understanding to him for these needs!

Using NVC, I felt empowered to parent in ways that aligned with my value of seeing the beauty in his "no". Since this was an interaction between my husband and my son, I consciously chose not to go up into the empathy or self-expression branches of the NVC Tree of Life. But just let the situation pass! 

"Gosh! I don't have time for all this", you say! I get it! Life is busy, and demands come at us one after another, as parents, without the time to pause, it seems. As our practice of NVC deepens, the depth of our internal connection shortens the length of time it takes to achieve congruence with our values. We're going to spend the time one way or another - either cleaning up the messes we create in relationships, or proactively, at the forefront, taking our time to pause before responding to stimuli! 

How does this land for you? Please share your experiences and comments below.