By Rochelle E. Brenner
Imagine one of your good friends walking into your house carrying a big, black trash bag. You wonder what’s in it. Maybe it’s presents.
They open it and dump it all over your floor, and it’s actually the garbage from their house. It’s like a week’s worth of all types of garbage, the type you put in the kitchen trash. Imagine what you would do, and what you would say. You would obviously be annoyed. It would be smelly, messy and if you left it there it would make being in your house unpleasant to be in.
Of course, you’d insist they clean it up right away, and you tell them to never bring garbage into your house again.
Here’s the next scenario. Imagine your kids come home to see you carrying a big, black trash bag. They think it might be presents. But instead you dump out all your stress, relationship drama, work problems and bad attitude right at their feet.
Can you do a better job of keeping garbage out of your house? Do you protect the environment where you are raising your kids with the same intensity that you would get rid of rotten food? Are you making sure you aren’t ranting negative thoughts about people – especially people they care about like relatives and exes?
We need to protect our parenting at all times and make sure we don’t have garbage dump thinking. Life is stressful. Hold onto that trash around kids instead of dumping it out on them.
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