Why do so many children love to dress up as a superhero? They get to embody the most incredible superpowers that no mere human could possess: laser vision, the ability to fly, telepathy, or superhuman strength, just to name a few.
As a parent venturing into the world of peaceful parenting, you can embody certain superpowers rare in traditional parenting methods: honesty, vulnerability, curiosity, and empathy.
Each of these special abilities shows the benefits of peaceful parenting, both individually and within your relationship. Let’s take a closer look at what each superpower really is, and how it impacts you and your family.
Honesty
Being honest as a parent means building a foundation of trust through your words and actions. Honesty includes truthfulness and sincerity and is an absence of lying, cheating, or deception.
Using honesty as a superpower means refusing manipulative tactics to control your child’s behavior. It means looking at your reality with self-responsibility and taking ownership of your choices and actions.
When you can be honest with yourself, you can ease the guilt and fear of harming your child or messing them up beyond repair. As you release the need for bribing your child into “good behavior,” threatening your child to motivate them or punishing your child for behavior they can’t even control, you are inviting deeper and deeper trust from your child.
Kids feel when parents attempt to control them, so the more honest you are in your interactions, the stronger that foundation of trust is.
Honesty also leads to freedom because you get to take control of yourself. The more honestly you can assess your own actions, the better you can shift and make tiny changes. In my work with
parent coaching clients, I see how difficult it is to step back and see the bigger picture. I get to offer an objective view to highlight where a parent can take control and make different choices, versus where they get to release control because the situation is not their responsibility.
Vulnerability
A basic definition of vulnerability is being exposed to attack or harm, either physical or emotional. In the world of peaceful parenting, the real superpower is emotional vulnerability, which Brené Brown describes as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure” that is neither optional nor a weakness.
Developing your ability to be vulnerable feels counterintuitive: it’s like seeking kryptonite, rather than avoiding it! The fear and uncertainty of sharing your emotions with anyone (yourself, your friends or partner, your children) can come from experiences where you had to protect yourself, or lack of modeling and practice.
Regardless of your current comfort level with vulnerability, it is a superpower that has tremendous value in your parenting.
Vulnerability as a parent means finding the power to use your own voice:
- Expressing your feelings and needs
- Sharing your ideas and desires
- Claiming your own boundaries
- Taking responsibility for mistakes and offering repair
These are generally practices that we, as parents, somewhere down the line thought we had given up our rights to. However, getting more comfortable with vulnerability opens the door to communication, and sets the stage for your children to be more vulnerable with you.
Letting down your defences actually deepens your relationship with your child. When you are vulnerable enough to claim your mistakes and offer to repair with your child, you bolster the relationship to become stronger than it could be if you never made a mistake at all. To be human is to be fallible, and it’s in our vulnerability that we turn this into a superpower.
When your child experiences your vulnerability, they learn from an early age that vulnerability is safe, courageous, and is a healthy and supportive way to relate to people you care about. A child who is brave in their vulnerability becomes the child who voices their own needs and desires, who stands up for their friends, or who calls out injustice despite the risk.
Imagine the long-term impact of vulnerability as a peaceful parenting superpower: you are creating a generation who can feel deeply, communicate openly, and stand firmly in their truth and authenticity. That is the parenting version of changing the world!
Curiosity
Bringing curiosity into your parenting is simply bringing in a desire to learn: about yourself and about your child. The real advantage of curiosity is that aiming to learn rather than answer preserves the relationship of trust you have worked so hard to create.
The result of curiosity for yourself is that you become more aware of your blindspots and hidden patterns and habits. Asking yourself “How do I keep ending up here?” is much more influential than telling yourself “I messed up again.”
Getting curious about your actions opens a space of reflection, which leads to opportunities for repair. This is the parenting “get out of jail free” card! You are allowed to make mistakes! Mistakes become positive when you use curiosity to learn from them.
You probably don’t instinctively turn to curiosity when things get hard. That’s why I love my role as a parent coach: curiosity is a skill I can model and teach until you embody it for yourself.
You can experience powerful questions in a parent coaching session, and continue asking yourself those questions as you build a habit of curiosity in your daily life. (You can also explore more here on how moms and dads like you are turning their passion for parenting into a thriving Parent Coaching business by learning these skills for their own family and then helping other parents do the same.)
The impact of curiosity on your child is profound. When you ask about your child’s experiences, feelings, or wishes rather than tell them what you see and think, you are demonstrating unconditional acceptance of who they are. Curiosity about your child removes judgment of your child.
Your curiosity allows your child to feel seen and heard; a critical component to a secure relationship.
Empathy
If there was one real-life superpower that mimicked a comic book hero, it would be empathy: the ability to sense, understand, and perceive what is happening in another person’s internal world. Even transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau considered this to be a significant power: “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
Empathy is a perspective-expansion tool that you can use for yourself and your child. When you give yourself empathy, you are minimizing shame that may result from your thoughts, words, or actions. Talking to yourself with an understanding of your feelings, recognition of all your thoughts (even the harsh, judgmental, and critical ones), and acceptance of yourself as a person brings you into connection with yourself.
If no one else is around to see, hear, and understand you, don’t wait around:
give yourself empathy.
You’ve probably heard the saying “You can’t give what you don’t have” so when it comes to empathy it’s no wonder you might need help developing this skill. If you didn’t experience empathy from others, it will be hard to offer it now. The more you can offer it to yourself, the easier it becomes to offer it to your child. Then the real magic happens.
Children who experience empathy find safety in their emotions because they aren’t facing them alone. Big emotions like anger, sadness, fear, and grief can feel like too much to handle for a young body and brain. Your empathy is an emotional lifeline, a tether that shows your child their emotions are real and they’re not too big for you to witness.
When you offer empathy to your child and acknowledge and validate their feelings, you are preventing the mental and physical symptoms that result from ignoring or suppressing emotions.
In my own family, I feel the pull to shush cries, stop tears, or control outbursts, and then I remember that feelings must be felt. Focusing on empathy before trying to soothe or solve anything is actually the fastest route back to calm and stability. Allowing a child to be in their emotions completely is what helps the emotions get fully processed. This is especially helpful for
neurodivergent children. Your empathy for your child is like an emotional daily vitamin: an antidote to pent-up stress, fear, or anxiety.
Empathy is also a bridge to vulnerability. When you sense and understand your child’s inner experience, they don’t need to fear or feel shame around their emotions. Then they have less resistance to vulnerability.
Your empathy sends messages of love and acceptance that lead your child to create an intrinsically positive sense of self. You can’t tell your child how to feel about themselves; you can only empathize with their experience, and the result is your child will learn they are loveable exactly as they are.
You don’t need a mask, cape, or secret identity to use these superpowers of peaceful parenting. You can embody honesty, vulnerability, curiosity, and empathy through your commitment to learning, reflection, and progress toward your parenting goals.
And remember:
you are already the hero of your child’s story.
Meet Your Author, Allyn Miller
Allyn Miller is a Master Certified Parent Coach and owner of Child Connection. Her mission is to help exhausted moms thrive in every tantrum or meltdown, whether it’s their child’s or their own.
She is surprisingly funny (and emotional) despite her background as an accountant. Her sense of humor kept her going through years of classroom teaching. These days her clients rave about her listening skills and the unique way she breaks down big concepts into doable actions.
When not celebrating “aha” moments with her clients, you can find this chocoholic mama splashing in the ocean waves near her home in Weston, Florida… or snuggling on the couch with her husband and two kids watching the latest Pixar movie.
Website: www.child-connection.com
IG: @child_connection
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