Parenting: long days but short years

“Being a parent is not just about something that we do, but being part of a relationship. If we’re lucky, it is a life-long relationship.”

This was the essential message of Mary Hartzell, an acclaimed parent educator, who spoke to Laguna Beach parents at the February PTA Coffee Break, as part of an ongoing parent education series held at the Surf & Sand Resort.

Hartzell is the co-author of a bestselling book, “Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help your Child Thrive.”

Implicit in this book and Hartzell’s presentation is how we make sense of our own childhood experiences has a profound effect on how we parent our own children. Unresolved and left-over issues from our own childhood influence how we react to our children because these issues get triggered in the parent-child relationship.

Research in the field of child development has demonstrated that the way we communicate with our children not only nurtures a child’s sense of security, but also has an impact on how their brains develop.

Early memory is called implicit memory. It is present at birth and results in certain circuits of the brain that are responsible for generating emotions, behavioral responses, perception, and even the encoding of bodily sensations.

Our early brains can encode memory without our being able to recall specific things. Sometimes parents find themselves thinking: “I can’t believe that I just said that to my child. I sound just like my own parents and I promised myself that I would never do that.”

This is an example of implicit memory. Working something through is making the implicit more explicit, so as to be able to tell our early story rather than to feel emotionally triggered by past events.

Explicit memory develops in the second year of life and includes both factual and autobiographical memory where we are able to recall events and have a sense of self and time.

The development of the prefrontal cortex is responsible for explicit memory and is profoundly influenced by interpersonal experiences. This is why our early relationships have such a significant impact on our development.

When parents are able to connect the dots to better understand their own emotional triggers and to put words and understanding to that, they are less likely to do or say things that they later regretOften, our busy lifestyles get in the way.. Hartzell reminds us that “the days are long when our children are young, but the years are short.”

Communication and staying emotionally connected is the key to raising secure children who thrive. We increase our capacity for raising secure children when we: