What 'Safe Parent' REALLY Means....

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Parallel Alliance podcast. Today's episode we're going to be deciphering what is a safe parent. Now so many of you may have heard this term across social media and I need to just tell you straight from the off that it does not mean the parent with whom the child is physically safe with. A safe parent does not mean the absence of physical violence or corporal punishment. A safe parent is who the child or the children feel the most emotionally safe with and most psychologically safe with. The parent who hears them, the parent who validates them, the parent who shows that child or the children how they move things around to allow for that child or the children to have the space for their needs to be met. Now another nuance to this is when I say needs I don't just mean food, warm water, bed and roof, I mean that they are made to feel like a real individual, they are made to feel like their feelings matter, like their point of view counts, like they are listened to and wherever we can we can really make decisions in a mutual sense. Now don't get me wrong I'm not saying that now your child needs to make every single decision within the household because we know that that's not possible but wherever possible that you can actually take their opinion into account, you can listen to their views, you can take their suggestions and you can act upon them and show them that you are doing so and that will give your child or your children so much emotional security and emotional safety to allow them to just express themselves. Another thing that comes along with this is allowing your child or your children to express their opinions and their views and when we can show them that we can take it into account we can action them, the byproduct of that is often that actually when we do have to say no, when we do have to put off at down, when we do have to have our boundaries, more often than not the children are more amiable to it because they can see that you've already taken steps to incorporate their wants, needs, wishes and desires to be facilitated wherever you can so that when you do actually have to say no or say sorry we can't do that now then they're more inclined to actually respect your opinion on that because they will see if you can facilitate it for them then you absolutely would. Now one thing that I always hear clients on my strategy call saying is that the other parent reports the children are fine when they're with them. Now just as a side note I hate that word fine I think it disguises a huge number of potential issues and it kind of minimises them to a degree however it's always the word that's used so let's run with it. The other parent will always say that the children are fine when they are with them and then when the child comes back to my client aka the safe parent then they fall apart they're dysregulated they're argumentative they're really highly emotional they're angry and you see a lot of explosive behavior from them. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you as the safe parent are the pushover the one who the child feels they can get away with it you're not the disciplinarian that you thought you were it's purely the fact that potentially at the other house your child or your children have had to mask a lot and when I say mask I mean they have to put on that brave face they have to keep their opinions to themselves they're not allowed to express themselves maybe in the ways that they would like to and if they do they're reprimanded for it so it creates this air of them feeling like they have to censor themselves and when they do that it just gets bottled up they come back to us and then they explode that's what also really does put you in that position as the safe parent because your child feels like they are comfortable enough to have these big feelings and emotions with you because you'll be there to help guide them through them. Now a really important nuance to this being the safe parent does not mean that you're automatically the better parent okay it doesn't mean that the other parent is inherently bad it just means that your child or your children feel safe enough to come to you for things to talk through things with you to ask questions that they might not feel comfortable enough asking the other parent when they're trying to decipher what it is that this dynamic is that we're all living through so I need you to remember that sometimes it's not always because the other parent is an awful parent it's just that they don't feel safe with that other parent they might still get all of their needs met and they might be taken for lovely activities and given presents and time and decorated bedrooms and toys whatever but the safe parent means that they psychologically and emotionally feel safe with you. Now when we start talking about the safe parent and your child feeling emotionally and psychologically safe with you then it does inevitably lead us down this road of what happens when the child or the children start to make disclosures what happens when they start to say things to us and one thing I need you to know straight off is that whenever we have the child or the children saying things to us about what's happening at the other home I need you to not interrogate I need you to start learning what open-ended questions are I need you to start realizing that they will say what they want to say until they don't want to say it anymore so you might find that in the past they've said something you've asked a couple of questions to clarify and then they'll all of a sudden shut down they've reached their bandwidth they're done they don't want to talk about it anymore if that's the case and that's what's happening I need you as the safe parent to respect that if they want to just stop talking about it and move off to go in colour to go watch telly to go for a play on their bikes outside whatever just let them do it it is very much how young children will operate what you might find then is that this is also them trying to see whether or not you will interrogate them they might get interrogations at the other house they might be expecting it so you showing them that you respect that boundary of actually stopping talking about it is going to be something that pays dividends no end in the future because your child or your children knows that they can come to you at any time to carry on this conversation to pick up where you left off to ask more questions that help them make sense of whatever it is that's going on in the back of their mind that's what the safe parent is now another thing that we've talked about so much in the secret podcast on my social media or my strategy calls in my academy is that we do not allow our children to feel responsible for our feelings and emotions so the minute that they start worrying about the other parents reactions or upsetting the other parent that's when we can really recognize that the other parent that they may be dealing with if they're feeling this way is not the safe parent so it just means that we need to double down even more on ensuring that our child knows that this is a relaxed atmosphere where easy breezy you come and talk to me whenever you feel like it and I'll help you work through those emotions and then if you want to stop that's not a problem we can pick it up another time because that's respecting what bandwidth they have whilst also ensuring that we're taking these opportunities to remind them that they're not responsible for other people's feelings they're not responsible for making me happy the other parent happy their teacher happy their aunt or their uncle they're not responsible for making anyone else happy especially when these people around them are adults you can grab so many organic moments throughout dynamics happening at school if they fall out with their friends at school and their friend is upset or maybe grumpy for a random reason one day okay that's a great organic moment to grasp to teach your child or your children that you are not in charge of making that person feel better that person is in charge of making them themselves feel better yes there's some things that we can do sometimes that might be nice for them but ultimately it's not our responsibility other people's feelings are not our responsibility and this is particularly true when teaching our children about the adults around them now going back to disclosures I need you to remember this one really clear rule that whenever your child or your children make some kind of disclosure that you believe as a safeguarding concern or a welfare concern I need you to have that conversation with the same parameters that we've just been discussing and I need you to go away and document everything as clearly as possible as soon as you can why because this is a clear procedure in the NHS in childcare settings in school settings and other academic settings because that information is fresh in your mind and the sooner that you get it on paper the more that you can rely on its authenticity for its accuracy because say if these are disclosures that we have to talk about with other professionals further on down the line we need to know in our bones that what we're saying is exactly what was actually said we don't want to be paraphrasing we don't want to be putting words or nuances in their mouths we just need to quote exactly what was said and that's it so ultimately to finish your role as a safe parent isn't to put words in your child's mouth it's not to tell them how they need to be feeling it's not to show them and guide them out of every single uncomfortable situation that may come into their lives because uncomfortable situations are going to happen and so many that we actually can't stop and we can't actually control. What we can do as a safe parent is give our child or our children the space to feel what they need to feel, validate those feelings and ultimately it's about creating enough emotional intelligence and awareness of different dynamics that they might find themselves in so that eventually they'll be able to handle them on their own. That is what a safe parent is all about.