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Yesterday in church Jacob and I really were not getting along.  He was whining, wiggling all around and just generally being disagreeable and difficult to deal with.  I tried being comforting and letting him sit on my lap.  I tried being stern and threatening to take him out to the hall.  Nothing was working.  Towards the end of mass he looked at me and said, “Daddy, I’m having a hard time.”  

As a parent I’m often struck by how often I need my children to help show me how to be a good parent and how grateful I am when it works.  With those few words Jacob was able to help me shift my focus from being upset with him to trying to figure out how to help him.  It was also an admission on his part that he needed the help and was willing and ready to accept it.  We shifted from adversaries to partners and from that point on we were able to figure out a way to make it through mass together.  

We’ve worked really hard to help the kids understand what is going on in their brains and bodies and to tell us so that we can figure out how best to help them and so that eventually they can figure out strategies to work through it themselves.  ”I’m having a hard time,” “I’m tired,” “I’m hungry,” “I was really angry,” and “I just couldn’t control my brain” are a few of the things I’ve heard from the kids lately.  

It’s not rocket science of course and seems obvious that to help kids (or adults for that matter) deal with their emotions the first step is recognizing and verbalizing that.  But when it happens, like it did yesterday, it feels so good.  It helps me be a better parent and for that I am grateful.  I’m hoping that this trend will continue, but I know that the coming years (particularly those that end “een”) will present some serious challenges to the kids being able to recognize and share what’s going on inside of them.  But for now, I’ll take comfort in the small success of yesterday and hope that because he was able to verbalize how he was feeling and we worked through it together it made Jacob’s “hard time” a little easier for him to bear.