Parent's Corner

From: Jeffrey Bernstein, Ph.D.

Help for Parents with Parent Frustration Syndrome (PFS)

How Much Do You Suffer From PFS?

It can be helpful for you to get a handle on how you feel when your child is driving you up the wall. Parenting expert and author of Liking the Child You Love (Da Capo Life Long Books, 2009), Jeffrey Bernstein, Ph.D. says that most frustrated parents can identify with the at least a few of the following at one time or another.

• You resent how your difficult child has drained you and the rest of the family.
• You feel desperately overwhelmed trying to keep up with all of life’s demands.
• You feel nothing is going to help your situation.
• You can’t understand why your child acts better behaved for other adults than with you.
• You feel exhausted.
• You can’t comprehend why your child acts this way, especially since you try so hard to be a good parent.
• You feel manipulated.
• You question why you had children in the first place.
• You feel sad that your marriage has lost its passion.
• You get easily angered, yet feel guilty for being so frustrated.
• As a single parent, you feel it is impossible to stay sane.
• You feel like a horrible failure as a parent.                                        

 
This list of PFS related thoughts is representative but certainly not exhaustive. Parents who get frustrated start to feel much better when they gain control over what is going on in their heads. This is because it is very hard to gain control of your child, your own feelings, or anything else in your life, until your first gain control of your thoughts.

Parents became more effective with their kids when they focused on changing their own toxic thoughts instead of overly focusing on their child’s problems.  Negative thinking is not extreme, distorted and far off-base like toxic thoughts are.  For example, saying to yourself, “He is just not taking me as seriously as he used to and I am not feeling good about this.” is a negative.  A toxic thought would be, “He never listens and with that attitude he will definitely fail in life.” 

Our toxic thoughts tend to create big time problems for our parenting success, and even more scary for the success of our children. Think about how many adults are still in emotional pain while remembering upsetting sound bites or reeling from the disconnects with their own parents! 

Trying to work on your parenting relationship without first getting rid of toxic thoughts is like building a house on quicksand, the only place you’re going is down.  Unless you clear the fog of toxic thinking from your own mind, you can’t see your child in a fair, realistic manner, you really don’t stand a chance in being empathetic to him, and you can’t work through problems. And let’s face it, kids won’t open to parents who they perceive as unfairly judging them.

Because deep down we are afraid of our kids struggling, being rejected, and getting hurt, we tend to be mistakenly (and toxically) fill in blanks about our children’s intentions and actions that we don’t understand.  Whether it is the Always or Never Trap (e.g., “You never care about school”) or Label Gluing (e.g., “You’re lazy”) or Should Slamming (“You should always tell me how you really feel!”) all nine of the toxic thought patterns share one thing in common.  They are distortions that are very unfair, and very damaging to parenting.  The scariest thing about all of the toxic thinking patterns is that like cancer or high blood pressure, they can develop without even knowing they are there—until major parent-child rifts occur.

It can be helpful for you to get a handle on how you feel when your child is driving you up the wall. Parenting expert and author of Liking the Child You Love (Da Capo Life Long Books, 2009), Jeffrey Bernstein, Ph.D. says that most frustrated parents can identify with the at least a few of the following at one time or another.

• You resent how your difficult child has drained you and the rest of the family.
• You feel desperately overwhelmed trying to keep up with all of life’s demands.
• You feel nothing is going to help your situation.
• You can’t understand why your child acts better behaved for other adults than with you.
• You feel exhausted.
• You can’t comprehend why your child acts this way, especially since you try so hard to be a good parent.
• You feel manipulated.
• You question why you had children in the first place.
• You feel sad that your marriage has lost its passion.
• You get easily angered, yet feel guilty for being so frustrated.
• As a single parent, you feel it is impossible to stay sane.
• You feel like a horrible failure as a parent.                                        

 
This list of PFS related thoughts is representative but certainly not exhaustive. Parents who get frustrated start to feel much better when they gain control over what is going on in their heads. This is because it is very hard to gain control of your child, your own feelings, or anything else in your life, until your first gain control of your thoughts.

Parents became more effective with their kids when they focused on changing their own toxic thoughts instead of overly focusing on their child’s problems.  Negative thinking is not extreme, distorted and far off-base like toxic thoughts are.  For example, saying to yourself, “He is just not taking me as seriously as he used to and I am not feeling good about this.” is a negative.  A toxic thought would be, “He never listens and with that attitude he will definitely fail in life.” 

Our toxic thoughts tend to create big time problems for our parenting success, and even more scary for the success of our children. Think about how many adults are still in emotional pain while remembering upsetting sound bites or reeling from the disconnects with their own parents! 

Trying to work on your parenting relationship without first getting rid of toxic thoughts is like building a house on quicksand, the only place you’re going is down.  Unless you clear the fog of toxic thinking from your own mind, you can’t see your child in a fair, realistic manner, you really don’t stand a chance in being empathetic to him, and you can’t work through problems. And let’s face it, kids won’t open to parents who they perceive as unfairly judging them.

Because deep down we are afraid of our kids struggling, being rejected, and getting hurt, we tend to be mistakenly (and toxically) fill in blanks about our children’s intentions and actions that we don’t understand.  Whether it is the Always or Never Trap (e.g., “You never care about school”) or Label Gluing (e.g., “You’re lazy”) or Should Slamming (“You should always tell me how you really feel!”) all nine of the toxic thought patterns share one thing in common.  They are distortions that are very unfair, and very damaging to parenting.  The scariest thing about all of the toxic thinking patterns is that like cancer or high blood pressure, they can develop without even knowing they are there—until major parent-child rifts occur.

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