My friend Megin recently provided us with some tips on dealing with kids and their school projects. One of her suggestions struck a deep chord with me: “Don’t act interested- BE interested.”

You and I take parenting seriously. We are earnest, sincere, and deeply devoted to being the best parents we can be. But that’s not how it always plays out, is it? There are times when we drift away from our role as parents, distracted by whatever else is going on for us. Maybe we’re hungry, maybe we’re tired, maybe we are dreaming about that faraway place, sipping drinks with little umbrellas in them. There’s nothing wrong with that, we’re human, it happens.

But does it just happen? What causes us to lose focus? Why do we drift away from our kids, even just for a moment?

Why? Because we choose to.

Everything is a choice. Every moment, every emotion, every action is a choice. Sometimes the choice is an unconscious one, but it’s still a choice. Take feelings for example. We’re in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, and we drop our favorite coffee mug, and it breaks. We get sad. Or we get mad. Or we stop in our tracks and reminisce about the history of the mug, remembering that snowy morning when we had a moment of peaceful perfection, sipping on our favorite blend of coffee, staring out the window, and losing ourselves in the beauty of each snowflake.

These feelings seem to come out of nowhere, but you and I know better, because there have been times when the anger started to rise and then we realized that one of the kids was in the kitchen and we didn’t want to get mad in front of them. Here was the opportunity to teach a lesson, to show our child that we didn’t need to get angry just because something broke, that getting mad wasn’t always necessary. So we took a breath and smiled and said, out loud, “Oh well, these things happen.” And our kid saw our reaction, and if we were really lucky, they learned from us, a mini-class in anger management. That quick choice we made in changing our emotional response gave us some satisfaction. We gave ourselves a gold star in parenting because we taught the kid, at least in this one instance, that cursing isn’t an involuntary response.

And that concept of choice is so very essential to being the best version of ourselves, of being the best parents we can be. The more aware we are of our power to choose, the better our choices become. And that’s how we become the parents we want to be. That’s how we make our children’s lives the lives we want for them, by choosing, at every turn, to be that awesome parent we dream about.

It’s not easy. Sometimes our desire to get mad overpowers our desire to be the dream parent we want to be. And that’s ok, stuff happens. But understand, the more aware we are that the choice is ours, that we have the power to make a choice, the more likely we are to make the right choice.

Now I’m not trying to suggest that anger is never the right choice. Sometimes anger is completely appropriate. Expressing anger can be a good thing. It gets it out of our system, it gives us a chance to be honest with ourselves, it validates our sense of the value of special things. Very reasonable, very healthy. So get mad if that’s what you want, if that’s what you need. But see it as a choice, that it’s not an involuntary reflex, like blinking. It’s a choice.

And if you’ve come this far, if you’ve wrapped your head around the concept that emotions are choices we make upon experiencing an event, that we hold the key to each and every reaction, let’s go back to Megin’s advice:

“Don’t act interested- BE interested.”

That advice is the very root of positive parenting – choosing to be interested in our child, regardless of what we’d rather be doing. Sure, kids can be boring. How many games of Candyland is too many? How many knock-knock jokes are too many? We all have our thresholds. But it’s not about us, is it? We gave away that part of ourselves when we became parents. So we need to remember, in that moment when we think we might snap because our little one has been taking ten minutes to tell a joke that has no structure or punchline, there’s a choice to be made. Yes, we can choose to express our boredom or frustration in the moment, but what’s the consequence? What does that communicate to our child? At the end of the day, is that really what we want to say, do we really want our kid to have that sense that they bore us? Probably not. Would *you* want to be seen as boring?

On the other hand, if we can keep our wits about us, if we can remember the idea of choice, we have the power to handle one more nonsensical knock-knock joke. We can choose to find something interesting in our fourth-grader’s report on the life-cycle of the Australian echidna. We can choose to demonstrate how much we value them, to give them the gift of self-worth. Let’s face it, the Universe, despite its beauty and magnificence, is going to try to grind our kid into the dirt. Life can be cruel, unjust, and just plain awful at times. But if we give our kids the memory of having fascinated their parents with their sheer mastery and strategic brilliance during the last game of hide-and-seek, we give them the power to take on the worst that the world has in store for them. And isn’t that what we want for them? Isn’t that what we would choose?

by Stu Mark