Parenting is not a one way street. Two separate personalities interact to hopefully produce a loving parent-child relationship. Becoming a good parent is as much about us as it is about our kids. We have to understand our beliefs, emotions and our own “parented” experience. Not only that, we have to process all of this so that we parent consciously and not reactively.

Here’s an example: Tim is 15 years old. He has shut himself in his room, barely communicates and has even gone so far as to put a sign on his door which says, “Keep Out!” This can be hard to deal with especially for parents who believe that children should always listen or for parents who have problems with not being liked. This can feel impossible and they may react in anger, creating a power struggle which resolves very little.

Parents who take the time to recognize their feelings may be more able to react by saying to themselves, “This is a tough situation for me and it evokes all these feelings. This self-acknowledement creates consciousness and we are much more able to show empathy to our child. It may allow us to see that our teenager is seeking independence and separation.” Understanding allows for compassion and empathy which are two attributes important in parenting and never more so than in parenting teenagers!

Does this mean that before becoming a parent we should all go into therapy? (In truth, it probably wouldn’t hurt!) It does mean is that parents should think about parenting from a personal perspective. Become aware of the issues that you bring to the parent-child relationship. Sometimes knowing what your issues are allows you to react differently even if you have not resolved those issues. Taking responsibility for who you are adds a layer to parenting by increasing consciousness.

We are all human however, so be prepared for mistakes. We learn from our mistakes! And they’re not always set in stone. An apology goes a long way, both in correcting a parenting mistakes and in teaching our kids that it’s ok to make mistakes and to apologize.

Avoiding power struggles does not mean soft parenting. Children need to know that their parents are in charge and their protectors. Be in charge. Just don’t be there for the wrong reasons.

Laughing and smiling are essential to a full life. We do both when we are happy. Laughing is often a great release of emotion and triggers a release of chemicals in our brains that make us happier. Smiling is an instinct in humans. It is seen in children as young as 4 weeks old. Smiling and laughing are often infectious and can easily spread to other people. Laughing together can often feel very connecting and connecting with others is at the core of all relationships.

Many wonderful childhood memories are those that have occurred with humour. When a family laughs in a spirit of togetherness, the value of that connection is enormous. Laughter is a strong emotion and when a strong positive emotion is connected to an event in childhood, it is remembered. Connecting in a family with humour increases our emotional intelligence.

Possessing a good sense of humour is a by-product of having high emotional intelligence. The greatest sense of humour comes from kindness, which is a characteristic present in people with high emotional intelligence. A person with good empathy will know when it is appropriate to laugh.

Another common place that humour can often occur is when something unexpected happens. A person’s ability to laugh in situations like this is often related to how that person generally deals with the unexpected and how quickly they can adapt to seeing a situation in a new way. Self-understanding and knowing how to deal with feelings, yours and others, produce this lack of rigidity. Learning how to do this with humour is yet another characteristic of high emotional intelligence.

Everything that we ever learn as humans, from riding a bike to knowing when to laugh, grows with practice. There is a necessary period of self-consciousness before it feels natural and automatic. People who live a life of spontaneous joy have learned to live that way. They have all “worked” in some way on developing high emotional intelligence.

Along with many other characteristics of high emotional intelligence, we can and should teach children to use humour appropriately.

In the following days, I spent hours mulling over all the things that I could have done differently to avoid the accident.  I could have paid more attention to the road instead of the linguistics paper that was due the next day.  I could have driven more slowly, used my mirrors more often, or changed lanes earlier. Even something as seemingly trivial as leaving the house a minute later would have almost certainly lead to a smooth ride.  If only I would have grabbed a snack before leaving, or answered the phone, or had trouble finding a shoe. Maybe if I spent an extra second searching for a good song on the radio, or putting on my seatbelt, or backing out of the driveway all of it could have been avoided.  Thinking about these endless scenarios in which everything would have been different caused me to feel anxious, frustrated and guilty.

Finally, amid my endless “if only” fantasies, I had an appeasing thought:  if I mourn for and blame myself over all the things I could have done to avoid negative situations, then it is only rational that I should also be grateful for and laud myself for all the things I did do in positive situations. What about all the times I hit the breaks in time to avoid a reckless driver?  What about all the times where leaving the house a minute later would have put me in a situation where an even worse car accident was unavoidable?  I quickly realized that the amount and quality of my negative “if only” thoughts paled in comparison to the infinite positive ones that I rarely explicitly recognized.

It became a game.  What if my parents enrolled me in a different high school (where I would have made different friends)?  What if I didn’t let my friends convince me to go out the night I met my girlfriend?  What if I stuck with my English major instead of switching to psychology?  What would have happened if, before all those instances where I found myself “in the right place at the right time”, I grabbed a snack before leaving, or answered the phone, or had trouble finding a shoe?  It soon became clear to me that, even if I was going to build true emotion upon an imagined foundation, I would have to give equal time to both my shortcomings and my virtues.  This is a principle that I often turn to in my life, and one that I believe can be extremely helpful in building optimism, self-confidence and resilience.

As an ardent candy addict, I offer a metaphor:  If you are going to blame your right hand for dropping a single candy on its way to your mouth, then you also must commend your left hand for gripping the bag tightly enough to retain the many others.

No one, of course, is wholly guided by perception. Our rational minds are constantly evaluating and revising our perceptions in an effort to more closely approximate the “real” – the true meaning of an utterance, gesture or incident. Often, to be sure, our perceptions are dead on, such as when the intent of an ambiguous gesture is accurately discerned (e.g. a friendly hug is recognized for what it is and not misconstrued as romantic). Other times, contrarily, our perceptions lead us astray, obscuring the reality of a situation with a host of ideas that can result in needless negative emotional experiences (or, sometimes, risky positive ones).

These are hardly new concepts, and they are taken into account by the majority of people at least to some extent in their daily lives. We recognize, for instance, that motivations are often hidden and that we must use the information available to us in order to form as accurate a perception as possible. What we often fail to take into account, however, is that perception in interpersonal interaction is a dynamic process that involves a thinking, interpreting and evaluating mind other than our own. In other words, when we attempt to get at the “true” meaning of another individual’s actions, we may forget that that person’s actions are themselves based on interpretation. Thus, where we seek truth we find only more subjective perception.

Taking a fresh perspective, as is often preached through the adage “walking in someone else’s shoes”, is in my opinion one of the most important steps towards empathizing with and understanding others. By recognizing that our ways of interpreting the world are complimented by infinite variations, we can begin to understand true motivation; that is, the motivation behind motivation. The reasons why some react with anger when we would have reacted with kindness, or how someone’s opinion can be so drastically different from our own, for instance, become more available as we realize that the same forces acting upon our perspectives are acting upon others in varying degrees and combinations.

Asking the question “what might I have done in a situation” will provide some important insight into others’ behaviour and help you to understand their motivations. It is equally important, however, to wonder how others’ unique perspectives lay the foundations for the way they feel, think and act.  Teaching children (and recognizing ourselves) that others respond to their own perspectives, no matter how off track they appear to be, with the same conviction that we respond to ours, will undoubtedly help to foster social intelligence, self-awareness and empathy.