No matter how old your child is, there are likely times when you feel a high level of distress, frustration, and/or anger at their choices and behaviors. In those moments, you may find yourself thinking things like: “why can’t he/she just do X?!” or “I did not raise him/her to do Y!” or “what did I do (or fail to do) that led to Z?!” Or even just: “this can NOT be happening!”

It is in those moments that a concept from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) called radical acceptance can be helpful. Radical acceptance is a therapeutic tool that can help you tolerate distressing situations. Distress and suffering result from expecting or wishing that things be other than what they are. Railing against, denying, or trying to avoid reality won’t change that reality, but your non acceptance will amplify the pain of a given difficult situation. While this idea
sounds straightforward, many people find practicing radical acceptance – particularly when it comes to parenting – quite challenging.

Sometimes it is helpful to highlight what radical acceptance is NOT. When you work to accept a given situation, you are not just giving up. You are also not ignoring the situation, and you are definitely not just deciding to approve of whatever is going on. What you are attempting to do is not use your energy fighting the reality of what is happening and/or wishing that it was different. You are shifting your focus away from the stubborn and resistant stance of “this can NOT be happening” to “I don’t like what’s happening, but I have to accept that it is, in fact, happening.”

Radical acceptance can be beneficial as a coping strategy for a range of reasons. One is that once you are in a more accepting frame of mind, your resources for coping are often more freed up such that you can be more thoughtful and flexible in your approaches to problem solving. Once you are expending less energy resisting reality and fighting things you can’t control, you can focus on what you can control and take more effective actions. Another benefit of this strategy is that radical acceptance by definition is accompanied by a less negative and blaming mindset, which usually helps to shift our thoughts and feelings and relieves distress and frustration.

So how can we apply the concept of radical acceptance to parenting? First, it is helpful to work on accepting our children for who they are, and especially to accept who they are in this moment. You may want your child to be more responsible, to be more independent, to be less of a follower, to take better care of themselves, to be a better sport, to work harder in school, to have less of a temper… and the list goes on. But if you expend your energy trying to parent the child that you wish your child could be, you will miss opportunities to meet your child where he/she is and potentially provide them with more appropriate supports. Radically accepting our children as they are doesn’t necessarily mean that we are giving up on them, but rather that we understand that they have a particular set of strengths and weaknesses that is unique to them at this particular point in time.

A corresponding aspect of radically accepting our children involves acknowledging that we can NOT change or “fix” our kids, and further, that it is not our responsibility to do so. You can’t control who your child is or how they think, feel, or behave. This concept truly does feel radical at times; it is easy to feel as a parent that we are in charge of who our children are, and that it is our job to mold them in certain ways. Societal pressures contribute to this notion – parents tend to be judged on the behaviors and achievements of their children. But it is important to tailor your actions as a parent to what your own child may need, not what other people might think is acceptable.

Finally, it can also be helpful to work to radically accept yourself. Focusing exclusively on the mistakes that you feel that you have made as a parent, on things you would like to be better at, and/or on things you wish you had done differently tends to make parenting exponentially more stressful. Focusing on the ways in which you are not a “perfect” parent makes it difficult to see what is going well, and can contribute to getting stuck in regret as opposed to more productive
problem-solving.

Kathleen Boykin McElhaney, Ph.D.
FamilyFirst Psychological Services