Resisting the Judgement of Parenting Struggling Kids

I am a new parent on the playground, navigating a social scene that is challenging for me – playground chitchat.

I’m trying to discern socially appropriate things to say to a stranger, always challenging for me, while keeping an eye on my two young kids who each need special supervision on the playground.

My younger son is particularly a concern. I stop listening to the other mother as I tune into his facial expression. He is grimacing — his lips pulled back, like a growling tiger. Another toddler has come too close to him, touching his steering wheel on the play structure, and I know that this will not end well. I start running, I’m only five steps away but it is too far. My son pulls his hand back and lets loose on this other child. I hear the child’s wail and see the mother I was just chatting with run up by my side. 

“He just hit him!” she says in shock, eyes wide as she stares at me for a response. 

I have no response, and my grim face reveals that this is not the first time. We each comfort our crying children, and with my arms wrapped around my sobbing two-year-old, I feel the familiar crushing cycle of shame and judgment. I shouldn’t of brought him to this playground, it’s always so crowded. We can only go to playgrounds where there are no other children. I messed up, there’s something wrong with me and something wrong with my kids. I’m a bad mom.

All parents occasionally feel judged, and in our current parenting culture, judgment can feel pervasive. But there’s a special judgment reserved for parents of kids with challenging behavior and different neurobiology of that makes social interactions difficult. Our kids are the hitters, biters, fighters, and breakers. Our kids don’t just throw tantrums; they throw chairs, rocks, and sticks. They break holes in walls and smash tablets on the floor.

I knew early on that we needed more support, and I pursued it in every way I knew how. At first I tried to talk to other parents about the challenges we were facing to see whether this was typical child behavior, typical family challenges. But I quickly discerned that no, we were outside the bell curve, and none of my friends with children could relate to my experience of parenthood. I saw a look in their eyes, a mixture of pity, compassion and judgment. Wasn’t my fault? Was I doing something wrong? None of us knew the answer.

“Go see a therapist,” they urged me.

Our first psychologist believed that it was an attachment problem, perhaps my removed, inconsistent connection was to blame. So we implemented a series of connection activities that my children hated, and which only ratcheted up the intensity of what I had to accomplish in a day. The second psychologist believed that my permissive, inconsistent, unboundaried discipline was to blame. So she created a set of rules to implement, consequences and rewards for behavior.  I was desperate to be good, so I implemented it religiously for 6 months, but it absolutely made things worse. Life was getting unsustainably hard.

I read all the books on the shelf about boundaries, discipline methods, and peaceful parenting, but they only made me feel worse. None of the examples in these books sounded at all like my life. It is one thing to gently block a kids hand as they come to hit when that kid is three and cannot hurt you. It’s another thing to block a six-year-old wielding a tree branch. De-escalation techniques simply didn’t work. No amount of emotional validation or mirroring or sportscasting brought my children calm. It seem to ramp them up further, taking a small tantrum into an over the top meltdown. I scoured these books for places where they admitted that sometimes the systems don’t work. Do they ever explain what to do if it all fails? No, the system doesn’t fail. The parents fail. The parents fail to implement it properly. This is what my parenting books lead me to believe — I have failed.

Parents of well behaved children get entirely too much credit, and parents of kids with challenging behavior get far too much blame. The worst of the blame didn’t come from others though, it came from myself. My children needed me, but stuck in my shame spiral, I could not show up for them the way they needed. Deeply desiring to be a good mom, but believing in my heart that I was a bad mom, I was stuck. 

Good Mom became a character, a characature of all I dreamt of and wanted to be. But I soon found that Good Mom is not nice to me when I am in the trenches of aggression and difficulty with my kids. She stands at a judgmental distance, far off from the gritty realities of my daily existence. She lurks in the corner, arms crossed, always with the judgy eyes. Who are you, anyway? she demands. Are you a Good Mom or are you a Bad Mom? You can only be one or the other, she declares. We do not both get to the exist. We both take everything. We get it all. All is evidence in one column or another. I soon discover that Good Mom/Bad Mom are one, a Judge who watches me and tallies my marks in various columns, preparing to bang her gavel and make a pronouncement of guilt or innocence. Good Mom flips to Bad Mom in the span of a push, a hit, a scream. Playing the role of Good Mom never actually makes me feel good. I only feel relief that Bad Mom is at bay, for now. But she never stops lurking. 

I longed for freedom from this terrible twosome who judged and criticized me at every turn. They were bad friends and bad company, yet somehow we kept hanging out. I was desperate for Good Mom to free me from Bad Mom, to tell me I was never bad, could not be bad, because I love these kids so, so much. But Good Mom refused to distance herself from her dark twin. Judgment was the game they both played, and they would not be moved. 

Then in conversation with a dear friend, where I revealed the depths of my breakdown and how hard my parenting journey had been, she looked me in the eyes and uttered a single word, “Brave.” And in that moment God, the living God, was speaking directly to me, giving me an answer to the question I’d been asking over and over. “If I don’t want to be good anymore, what do I want to be?” 

Now I knew: I want to be brave. I want to be a Brave Mom. I felt breath filling my lungs, deeper than usual, a lift in my lower abdomen supporting a strong back and neck held high, enabling more air to fill my frame. Brave Mom. The identity settled into my belly, hot and seeping, like a shot of whisky. 

An image filled my mind—Brave Mom is scarred and dirty, rough around the edges, hands on hips as the smoke clears around her. She steps from the battlefield. No one expects this woman to be meek and mild. It is clear she’s seen action. I don’t ask Brave Mom if she won all her battles. I know that’s not the question, and anyway the scars say that the answer is no. Brave Mom is proud. Her chest is out. Her head is high. 

I immediately thought of the famous Theodore Roosevelt quotation, “It is not the critic who counts…The credit belongs to the [wo]man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” Brave Mom is in the arena. She is knocked down and gets back up. Brave Mom chooses love, hard fought love. 

I am that brave mom, and I choose to love my wondrous, complex, challenging kids. I declare myself a pilgrim on the holy quest of being brave.