Give Your Kids a Break – Parenting with Compassion for You and Your Kids
Give Your Kids a Break: Parenting with Compassion for You and Your Children helps parents relate to themselves with kindness as they struggle with the demands of parenting. It also helps them teach their children how to be compassionate with themselves as they grow up. It makes such a difference to go through life with a kind friend on the inside rather than a critic who tells us how we’re messing up.
Our culture can be quite hard on us as parents, passing judgment on how we raise our children. We live in a social media society where most things are edited, photo-shopped, and presented as perfect. Parents can be hard on themselves too. They don’t mean to; they simply don’t know another way to respond to the struggles and stresses of being a parent.
Parents need compassion, not only for themselves and the impossible job of being a parent, but for their children too. When we don’t know how to be compassionate with ourselves, we may default to blaming, shaming, and bashing ourselves. Parents cannot teach their children what they don’t know themselves. Give Your Kids a Break shows parents how to be compassionate with themselves as well as teach their children to treat themselves with kindness.
Children need us to help them live in a judgmental world that doesn’t offer grace and understanding for mistakes. As we respond to their imperfections with kindness, they will learn to respond to themselves with compassion as well.
When kids practice self-compassion, they become more resilient, feel better about themselves, and have a greater ability to handle life’s problems.
About Kim Fredrickson, MFT (Sacramento, California Author)
Kim Fredrickson is a licensed marriage and family therapist of thirty-plus years. She loves to teach others about the power of self-compassion from a faith perspective. She is the author of Give Yourself a Break: Turning Your Inner Critic into a Compassionate Friend and Give Your Kids a Break: Parenting with Compassion for You and Your Children. She recently retired from her counseling practice when diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a terminal lung disease that developed as a rare complication from the chemotherapy and radiation she received for breast cancer.
After being diagnosed with a terminal illness, she decided to write this book as a way to have a positive influence in the lives of her adult children and their future grandchildren. Kim wanted to help them with the challenges of parenting, when the time came. She knew she wouldn’t be around to hold her grandbabies, and help her children raise them in person. Originally it was only going to be for them. As Kim wrote, she thought others might benefit as well, so decided to self-publish it.
Kim has been married to her husband, Dave for thirty-nine years and they have two grown children. Learn more and read her blog at www.kimfredrickson.com She also writes a weekly patient column for Pulmonary Fibrosis News, Just Breathe…Compassionate Help for the PF Journey. Thousands of patients and their loved ones read her column all over the world.
