Ok I admit it. I am a control freak.

You would not know it to look at me. I seemed relaxed and at ease with my surroundings. I am very functional and everyone who knows me would describe me as happy and content. In fact I did not realise that I was a control freak until I started to raise one!

It started with one of the happiest moments of my life… the birth of my beautiful daughter. Over the next few years I realised that myself and my partner had very different views on parenting. After 10 years these issues had never come up before… but I found her to be “jelly like” in what I perceived to be “giving in” to our daughter all the time. She found me to be inflexible and punitive.

Now dont get me wrong… I was no ogre. But I was obsessed about certain things such as:
- CONSISTENCY: I felt that consistent responses were the most important way we could empower our daughter. I wanted her to know about implications to actions and feel like she was in a “knowable world”
- UNITED FRONT: I felt that as parents we needed to present a consistent face no matter what differences, I used to say to my partner “even if I think you are wrong about a decision I will back it up to the hilt and then discuss it with you later”.
- IMPLICATIONS: I was also big on positive reinforcement, on acknowledging what I perceived to be “positive behaviour” and trying as much as possible to ignore negative behaviour

There is a lot more I could say but you get the idea.

It is only quite recently that I have been making major shifts to what I think and therefore what I am doing and therefore with who my little girl is becoming. The problem came for me when I saw her interacting with younger children.

It horrified me to see her wanting to control situations and people around her. Then getting frustrated when she could not.

Was it genes? Was it some of the stories we were reading? What could cause her to be such a control freak? Then the light bulb moment came… she was becoming what I was modeling in my parenting style

My values were well intentioned – I was committed to nurturing a free, empowered and confident child who could deal with a range of situations and people because she was in touch with her own self esteem and power. However I could already see at three years old that this was not the result I was getting.

So I changed. I ditched my assumptions and approach and have been searching out new ones. I now embrace non coercive and in my view more effective parenting styles. It has/ is taking a lot of work on myself and has become the catalyst for great personal development.

It is a journey that I am happy to be on and I appreciate the “free spirit” still within my child who put me back in touch with the free spirit that I had long buried over in myself. I am now working on releasing mine and in the process helping my daughter… and now son… to thrive.

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