4 Ways that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy could Improve your Parenting
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an integral part of my parenting training. CBT teaches us to identify the difference between anxious thinking and reality. Let’s face it, parenting a child (especially your first one!) can be nerve-wrecking. It's unlike any job we have ever done before. The stakes are just so high, and we are very emotionally invested. That's a tough combination for parents to be level-headed and logical.
So here are five examples of how I might use CBT in my practice to reduce parenting anxiety and de-escalate tension in the home.
1. I will bring parents’ awareness towards any magnification.
The thinking distortion of magnification commonly arises for parents. We identify the problem and then exaggerate it in our heads. We get stuck on some problem, and have trouble seeing this issue in balance with other aspects of our child’s development and character. The best advice I ever got as a stressed-out brand-new parent was, “Just wait a week and you will be obsessing over something else.”
Every problem from birth until college can feel overwhelmingly big, in the moment. Magnification of a problem can give us a sort of tunnel vision about our child, and our child can feel that! Magnification can make us yell or over-punish. Magnification might even trigger our fight or flight response, when there truly is no danger.
Sometimes, just speaking a magnified thought out loud can reduce it in size. “I guess this isn’t that big of a problem” parents start to hedge, before I have even made a comment.
2. I help parents revise unnecessary rigidity.
The thinking pattern of all-or-nothing thinking can make us unhelpfully rigid. This type of thinking sees only danger and safety, bad and good. This type of thinking allows no space for flexibility. Anxious parents are often rigid. Healthy and strong boundaries are incredibly important for kids. However, rigidity can be deeply destructive to our parenting goals.
For example, a parent might vent in my office that their child is failing to adequately practice the piano. They may describe numerous unpleasant encounters where the child pushed back on their parents’ expectations. Both parents and children are committed to what they want. Noone is budging. Parents might note that they feel that the piano is starting to really damage their relationship with their child. My job as a family therapist would be to facilitate a brainstorm of flexible solutions to the current standstill.
In this example, the parents and child are stuck in a rigid pattern that isn’t working for anybody. Sometimes just the smallest respite from rigidity and some collaborative (and flexible!) thinking can diffuse the tension.
3. I support parents and children in not jumping to conclusions.
Our minds naturally want to jump to conclusions and fill in the blanks of the unknown -- this is another well-known CBT distortion. Even with our beloved family members, we sometimes don’t show curiosity about their true feelings and thoughts. We assume that we know how they feel and we understand how they will act.
In family therapy, we slow down the pace of these family conversations. I often interrupt the rapid-fire response of a family member, to ask them to instead repeat and reflect back what they just heard. While annoying, this technique gives us some space to make sure each person is heard. Slowing down can keep us from presuming that we know what someone else is feeling or thinking. Slowing down piques our thinking brains, rather than our reactive brains.
When we use our thinking brains, we can often notice when we are jumping to conclusions.
4. During therapy, we notice and dispute emotional reasoning around parenting.
Another common thinking error is assuming that just because we feel something, it must be true.
Most emotional reasoning is based on anxiety. A parent of a 10 out of 10 school can have a bad feeling that their child is getting a poor education. Another parent might feel panic as their child becomes more independent. A parent of a younger child may worry that their child will never learn to read. We all have our own irrational emotional reactions, depending on what it is that really scares us. We can often notice emotional reasoning in our friends (and we can easily jump in to comfort them!), but usually people have a blind spot for their own anxious thinking.
People also assume that intense anxiety means that the situation is particularly problematic.
Sometimes, our feelings and reality can be pretty far apart. The level of anxiety we feel is a poor litmus test for how things are actually going. My job as a family therapist is often simply to guide our thinking back to reality.
Learn about how CBT Therapy at South Boulder Counseling can help you here.