Connecting with Your Kids

Transcript: Connecting with your kids

As adults, there are many ways we can help our children feel safe. It starts with observing your child, so you’re not just plugging in and playing a 10-step process that’s not appropriate; start with conversation first.

Listen and Play to Build Trust

But before conversation connection, the way you find connection with a child is to listen to them, to play with them. Children don’t want to go and have coffee with their parents to discuss their day; they want you to play and read books with them, sit next to them while they’re doing something, and be genuinely interested in what they’re doing. When they feel a connection with you, they feel safer with you, and the conversation can then flow from that.

Stay Regulated When They Open Up

The second thing, before we even talk about what to talk about, is to make sure that whatever they tell you, you have a regulated, calm reaction. Some children would love it if you flew off the handle and said I’m going to speak to your teacher or I’m going to talk to that little kid. And I laugh at that idea because as a teacher, you see these parents storming in to come and face off against an eight-year-old. I step in the way and go back down, buddy, you’re a 40-year-old man and you’re going to face off against an eight-year-old. There’s another way to do this.

We Can’t Shield, But We Can Strengthen

So we don’t want to go down that destructive road. We can’t, again, we can’t stop every other child from hurting our child, but we can get our child to be stronger. There are other components we obviously, if something’s going on that is destructive, we engage the school, we engage parents, we solve problems around that level, but ultimately, we want our child to be more resilient and not resilient to the level where they can take anything that’s not the point the point is that they feel safe in as many environments as possible as often as possible.

Safety Comes from Inner Strength

Safety doesn’t come necessarily from being safe; it comes from the ability to create safety for yourself. So, as a parent, we want to start with connection play, build that relationship, then it’s allowing your child to talk, and in that talking, to have a regulated response.

A Three-Step Listening Approach

I hear you, you’re doing a three-step process. You’re saying, ‘Wow, that’s a big story, and sure, little Mary did this and your teacher did that, ’ and you relay the story back to them so they feel heard. They feel like you’ve got it; that’s step one. Step two is then to give huge amounts of empathy. ‘That looks like it’s really tough for you. I can see how you would be so angry. Validate all those feelings, and then, you don’t necessarily want to go to step three, which is a solution.

Problem Solving with Playful Creativity

The third step is then ‘what could we do differently, ‘or what could we do now to make you feel better, or what choices do you have for next time?’ The solution comes third, but it’s a conversation. So, I remember very specifically, one of my daughters was struggling with something, and we came up with ten solutions for her. I encouraged her to do the first two, which were crazy, silly, and even bordering on illegal. However, the idea was to make it insane, bearing in mind she was eight (you don’t want to delve into illegal discussions with a 21-year-old). I’m so angry at my teacher – what could you do? Well, I could squash her with a hammer – you could do that.

Allow Thought, Then Guide the Action

Entertain the creative problem solving that a child has, but don’t drive them further down the road, but to say okay that would be big, could we do that, should we do that, and then your daughter or your son walks themselves back from that. No, we can’t do that, we shouldn’t do that.

What you’ve done is if you’ve allowed an outlet as opposed to no, no, no, we don’t do those things around here, and there’s no outlet for thinking. We can let them have freedom of thought; we can think anything we want. Allowing a child to go that distance and think those thoughts, which are natural human thoughts, is essential.

Making Space for Generalisation

Then, showing them how to come back from those thoughts, we don’t act out, and that also creates space for when children want to hit other children because they’ve been hurt, and that’s a more realistic response. Kids do this; it gives us space as adults to say, ‘We can think those things, and we felt like doing that. ‘ Remember when we said we were going to squish our teacher with a big crane, and we’re going to bring in the Hulk or whatever we’re going to do?’

This wasn’t possible; we shouldn’t do that when we want to hit our friends either, so it gives you this open conversation. There’s an idea of generalisation that we discuss with children, where we teach them a skill in one context and want them to apply it to other contexts; this is the same concept.

We teach them the conversation and idea generation in the context of a relationship with parents, connection with parents, and at home in a nice, regulated, and contained way. Then we teach them those regulation skills that can be generalised.

So, the next time I’m in a big discussion, in adulthood, or I’m in a huge fight with somebody, I’m 35 years old and having been parented, do I have it in me to walk those ideas back? That starts when you’re young.

Let Them Lead Their Growth

So now it’s this parent has found connection, you’ve played with your kid, started the conversation and you’re letting your child speak out about what’s happened and you are reflecting that back to them so they feel heard not changing it; you don’t want to change words if they use – I was scared – you use the word scared so they feel heard. Then, with huge amounts of empathy for their emotion, allowing their emotion to exist and then move into problem-solving mode.

I was discussing the conversation I had with my daughter, during which we came up with ten solutions. At the end of it, we discussed that maybe three of them were reasonable solutions and possible options; so I said, ‘ You choose one of them and go with that one, and then tomorrow when I pick you up from school, we’ll chat about how it went. ‘ As it worked out, she went and did the one she had selected. I don’t remember whether she pre-selected or made the selection in the moment.

I picked her up, and she said, ‘Mom, that didn’t work. ‘ My response in that moment was, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. ‘ Tell me more about how it went. How did you feel? We go through the same process again: connection, listening to the story, and validating the feeling. What were the other options you had? Do you remember them? She said yes, I remember the other two options, and then she said, But one of them is not going to work because it’s similar to the one I just tried, I’m going to try the other one.

So she tried the other one, and it worked, and it wasn’t my choice, my decision. It was a discussion with her that had given her two possible solutions, and she whittled them down. I was working on my self-regulation as a parent. At that stage, it was a big deal for me; I was being deliberately regulated as opposed to when we are all stressed, our regulation goes out the window. It was a beautiful period for both of us to develop our parenting skills and for her to develop her growth skills in the context of real-life events at school.

The Power of Follow-Through

That was an incident she needed to handle, but it’s the same process of listening to your child when they say they don’t want to go to school, finding out the context of that, and then saying, ‘Well, what can we do differently?’ As an adult, you can bring many solutions. You can get up to ten or 20 solutions because they don’t have them yet.

You can build those resources; ultimately, what we’re doing is creating a basket or a toolbox, a basket of resources that children have forever. If we all go back to when we were five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten years old, we possibly could recognise things we do now that we learned back then, because they have become tools that we have, including the negative ones.

The Long-Term Impact of Coping Tools

A lot of addiction and a lot of coping mechanisms that are not healthy for us are also developed over that time, and they become part of the toolbox, and they don’t go away. Eating disorder, for example, is a coping mechanism; it doesn’t go away. It’s always going to be there, that’s why they talk about once you have an eating disorder, you have it for almost a lifetime, the trick isn’t to get rid of that tool because it’s already worked, or at some level it’s already worked. It’s to add more tools, so as parents, when we’re looking at how we transition children from home to school or into an environment where they’re struggling, what tools are we developing in them?