Don’t only hold standards for your children: hold standards for yourself and your spouse ! Setting up boundaries that you must enforce.
I just got out of a group therapy session where we ended with talking about spouses. It was an interesting turn of events as we had primarily been focused on the subject of the group therapy class: parenting our neurodivergent children.
It is interesting that I would be surprised that talking about our spouses would come up when problems solving parenting, our neurodivergent children.
Obviously your spouse and the other parent of your child would be a important foundation stone for parenting your child.
Who would’ve thought!
It was a quick little, tangent conversation at the very end of our lesson in which one of the members talked about how difficult her spouse was and would not support her in helping out the children.
She did not talk about how all of the work was on her shoulders, but did talk about everything she was doing and very quietly mentioned that it would be nice to have a supportive spouse. She then followed up with a slew of excuses for why he was unsupportive.
This led the therapist to comment on setting up positive boundaries for our self and our spouse not only our children.
We had previously talked about parenting ourselves, meaning, doing the things we tell our children to do. Be nice, speak nicely to yourself, speak nicely to your siblings, speak nicely to your parents, etc. what made me realize?
When I was married, it felt like I was doing all of the parenting, he was doing all the working, and every now and then he would undermine my parenting and tell me I was doing everything wrong, then go back to work.
Now that we are no longer married, but coparenting with 50-50 custody, I still have to set boundaries and follow up with myself, my kids and my co-parent.
Many times mother's are the ones that teach the kids to sit at the dinner table, get their elbows off the table, how to cut food the right way, say, please, and thank you, to help others, be courteous, say nice things about yourself, if you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all, clean up your room or no screen time, etc. but how often do we do this to ourselves or our spouse?
If your kids were saying bad thoughts about themselves, you would tell them to stop and teach them how to say nice things about themselves. We need to do this ourselves.
If your kids were yelling at each other you would have them stop, diffuse and redirect them, then once things are cooled down you have them say nice things about each other. Shouldn't we do this for ourselves and our spouse.
If your kids can't have play time till they've cleaned their dinner place, put their dishes in the dishwasher and told you thank you for the meal, shouldn't you and your spouse do this as well?
In what ways can you parent yourself? How can you hold boundaries when your spouse isn't doing the things even the kids are doing? How can you communicate your needs and hold firm to them, without caving just like you would when parenting your child?