How I Feel, What They’re Saying

 

Chatting with a friend today, I mentioned some of Don C. Dinkmeyer’s work, from Systematic Training for Effective Parenting, thus:

One of the tools I've found helpful is 'parent reaction'...to discover the probable underlying need expressed through [a child’s] intense behaviour.

When you are irritated or annoyed, it's probably attention the child is seeking... When you're angry or want revenge, it's probably power. When you give up and feel despondent, it's a mirror of the child having given up on ever feeling successful.

Or, as she rephrased it:

when your child does x, and you feel __________, the child needs __________.

I like it when people sort out my thoughts more clearly than I can.

What I like about this tool is that it stops asking the child the horrible question ‘why?’ Kids don’t have a clue what they’re not successfully getting that they need, whether it be attention or power or a feeling of capability.

The other thing I like about this tool is its inherent respect for the sanity and needs of the child. A misbehaving child is not insane, bad or wrong … but struggling to meet needs and attempting creative means to accomplish their valid goals.

It is valid to need attention, power and a sense of being capable. The naturally immature methods use in their bids to get what they sense they need are information and communication –not misbehaviour.

Building a Brain

When I was a new mom, I was learning about neural networks and how memory and learning work in a biomechanical sense. Did you know that every time a newborn has an experience that ‘works’ –they get milk, they get to be close to mom, they get clean, they get sleep—their brains are building synapses? Those are links between neurons that will eventually make neural pathways.

One of the fun pieces of brain development science that has been discovered is that the more you do a thing, the faster and more automatically your brain will replicate the thing. It’s not just ‘training your arm’ to throw a ball, it’s training your brain to build strong neural pathways so ‘throwing a ball’ becomes a high-speed highway of connections that make throwing a ball an act completed without confusion, thought, decisions or concentration.

For newborns, this means that if snuggling this way, and suckling this way results in a warm, fully belly, they are likely to do it again. And tomorrow, they’ll do it again and again and again. Every success strengthens the pathway. So, while the first time they tried it, it was pleasant… and a neural path was ‘walked’ through the grey matter… it’s the fifth or seventieth ‘walk’ down the same pathway that has made it visible as a track.

Initially, the synaptic ‘walk’ might be confusing and hard to retrace (poor little confused baby trying to figure out how to latch on again at 3 days old) but every single success makes the pathway stronger. Stronger pathways make for more-skilled brains…

Practice doesn’t make perfect… but it does make brains more complex.

This is Why the Demand for Attention Must be Met

Editor's Note: This post contains affiliate links. Linda Clement only ever shares links to books she has read and believes are of value. No authors have been harmed in the sharing of these recommendations...




A great deal is written, and worried about, when it comes to attention-seeking behaviour in children. 

A lot of the concerns are a result of the very-disturbing adults we all know at least a handful of, who are examples of why attention-seeking behaviour run amok is so unattractive.


When parents (and onlookers) attribute that adult behaviour to children who successfully attained as much attention as they needed... there is a problem.

One thing that La Leche League taught me long ago was:  

a need met dissipates

a need unmet remains 

Children need attention. They don't want it or demand it or prefer it or brat it up because they're devious, selfish little hellions in need of a smack. They need it.

Like how they need food and shelter and protection from predators and fresh, clean water and shoes.

Well, maybe not the shoes. But attention, they need. 

In the absence of appropriate attention, children are unsafe both physically and psychologically. They instinctively know that they need attention, so when they are not getting it, they devise creative and astonishing methods of acquiring it. 

Often extremely effective creative and astonishing methods...




In the lovely, funny and pointed book about childrearing, Purrfect Parenting, Beverly Guhl points out that children prefer lovely fresh breakfast cereal that's crisp and flavourful, with fresh, chilled milk. When they are starving, they will eat stale old breakfast cereal that's dusty and served with warm, soured milk. 

What they want is the good kind, but they'll take any over none.



When they get none, they do the most remarkable things. Things I have known attention-starved children to do include (but is not a comprehensive list):

• throw an armchair through a (rental house) living room window (he was 5)
• stand on the train tracks to see if the train would kill him (he was 4)
• cut a flower girl dress to shreds with paper scissors the day before the wedding (9)
• gag herself in order to barf in a restaurant (she was 3)
• stand on a kitten (4)
• pick a stranger's baby up by the ears (6)
• sit and then stand on a baby's head (4 years old)
• light a basement curtain on fire (11)

Now, the thing about these amazing feats is that the children weren't angry --they were all acting with a deep concentration and hyper-vigilance about where the parent's eyes were. 

Every one of them smiled when they got caught --sending their freaked out parents right over the edge. But that smile was from the very heart of them: there, it worked.

Whew... relief --attention at last.

When these kids grow up, they'll have the most remarkable set of coping skills imaginable: like a train wreck their lives become the thing of legend --seriously unattractive, but so hard to look away. So hard not to talk about.

If, though, these attention-seeking adults had made eye contact with someone who took them seriously, and reflected their experience back to them and interpreted the extremely contradictory and confusing huge world for them with kindness, generosity and love, they wouldn't be the attention-seeking adults they have become. 


They would be able to co-exist with other equals from a position of being filled --not empty and starving and willing to do anything, sell anything, permit any kind of humiliation just to get looked at for one more moment. Just one more bowl of tooth-breaking cereal swamped with curdled milk in what amounts to a steady diet of it...

Humans need attention. They will get it, anyway they can.