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.

Chores and Underlings: What Works

 

Surrender works so well in so many areas of parenting (and life) –it is when we stop struggling with reality that we find ease and peace.

One note for clarification: surrender is not sacrifice. Sacrifice is for martyrs, not people who seek happiness, effectiveness, joy, peace, connection or love. Martyrs may get admiration . . . maybe. But what they will get is resentment, avoidance, criticism (which is ironic, because they seek to avoid it) and derision.

Regarding chores, there are several aspects of surrender necessary to create a peaceful and healthy home:

Surrender to the reality of time constraints

You can do it all, just not all at once. Priorities need to be evaluated so you’re not wasting your life –or trying to waste anyone else’s—on things you don’t genuinely value

Surrender to the necessity of the task

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water

There will be no time in your life when feeding and cleaning does not need to be done, however much modern conveniences ease the work. Accept that it must be done, without end.

Surrender to the real equality

All people need feeding and cleaning: of all the base, common and menial drudgery, none can be less exalted than ‘voiding bladder and bowel.’ We all get to do that with part of our days – 5 cent/hour garbage pickers in Brazil and $30,000/minute superstar athletes, and everyone in between. You can value this real aspect of life or revile it, but no one else is far enough beneath you to have to do it for you.

It is deeply disrespectful of humans to hold the opinion that the work is beneath you but not them.

Surrender to the power of mindless repetition –and hard work

All the effort spent (and technology invented) just to avoid the peace and ease of simple, repetitive work…

The dedication modern folk give to avoiding some of the easiest and most instantly-gratifying work available is amazing. A cleaned plate is clean: visibly, obviously and it is ‘finished.’ So much work is never done, has no clear product or is so complex and involves so many people that our part in it is (or feels) both invisible and impersonal. A clean plate is clean. A planted garden is planted. A cooked meal is completed.

Surrender to the fleeting nature of life

Yes, the meal will be eaten and the plate will once again need cleaning, but such is the nature of life. What is it that, once done, need never be redone or will never be undone? A singer walks off the stage and the song has ended. It can be re-sung, of course, but that performance is over. Even a recording of the thing is not the thing –it was live with a live audience and now it is a recording of both. Why is that less distressing than the laundry that needs re-washing?

Find the joys in doing, not in only having done. Life is a process, not a product.

Surrender to the chaos

Unless you seek to live alone forever, chaos will always be your roommate. Other people are ‘other’ –they see things differently, they react because they have a different perspective. The desire to live in peaceful harmony forever precludes living with other humans at any age.

Even if you did not understand the deal you were signing up for, the decision to have children comes with the built-in guarantee of a life filled with chaos. Will you fight it like it’s an unwanted intruder, or accept it as the inevitability it is, like static or dust?

Surrender, finally, to your own personal preferences

Do what you will, as you will.

It is only within this freedom and self-respect that you can find worth in your work –and free others to see the worth in the work you do, and perhaps even find value in doing it themselves.

The secret of children happily cooperating in their own homes is an atmosphere of joy, worthiness and respect which cannot be found in an atmosphere of dictatorial superiority.

A parent who finds himself sneering at the idea of washing a floor cannot be surprised by a child’s distaste for the task. Equally, a man happily engaged in nurturing his family through meal preparations may well find cooperative bodies eager to share the room and help.

Joy, enthusiasm and a sense of an important job well done are all attractive, and contagious. When you feel resistance from your kids, check to see how you really feel about the work. . . and if you believe it is necessary to do at all.

Pushing Kids Away, or how to create lonely empty-nesters

What with her sweet new baby (right), and all, my sister and I had been talking a lot about attachment... and by natural extension, attachment disorders, and how easily you can find examples in the wild.


She asked, rhetorically, 'why is it that the parents who spent the kid's whole childhood pushing the child away, arranging daycare and babysitters and ordering the child outdoors, or at least into distant rooms, are also the parents who complain endlessly that their adult children don't have time for them and never call or write?'


Cue the smirk.


Is that not the apparent goal of every parent who celebrates 

~ the first day of school

~ the first day back to school after any break or long weekend

~ or who laments the cost of boarding school 

~ or who threatens that social services or the police will come and take the kids away and give mum a 'break' 

Is it not clearly their goal to keep the children as far away as possible, for as long as possible? 



Does it strike anyone but me that it's a tragedy that so many 'normal' parents are working diligently toward goals they do not wish to achieve?

They accomplish this through the very simple process of mindlessly doing what all the rest of the 'normal' parents seem to be doing.

Following the advice all the 'normal' parenting experts, those warning parents to comply lest they fall prey the evils of permissiveness, cause arrested development or, horror of all horrors, 'losing themselves.'  

And daily, moment by moment, walking further from the goals they do wish to achieve.


Even way back in the dark ages (1974), when Sandy Chapin wrote the poem, which became the lyrics to Harry Chapin's Cats Cradle, at least one person recognized the path taken when the son's need for his father is dismissed for decades only to be supplanted by the father's need for the son.


Richard Carlson, author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, had a brilliant insight as a father, regarding the insidious idea of 'me-time': why would I actively avoid spending time with the people I love most in the world?


How is spending time with the people we love anything but me-time? 

And, because I'm in a noticing kind of frame of mind, I just noticed that this whole 'me-time' necessity has been created entirely by the current generation of parents and parenting experts who are bleating on about how this generation of youngsters have the most outrageous sense of entitlement ever... hmmm...

Spend a week pushing a child away because you have more important things to do, and you'll have some work to catch up on when you're free --to re-connect and reassure and just be together to establish a relationship with this child who has now had 168 hours of development without your presence. 

Spend a month 'too busy' and you find yourself facing a changed child who is no longer someone you can predict accurately, and whose cues and communication have changed from the last time you met. 

Spend a year away from a child and you will encounter a different person. Spend a child's childhood away and you will be facing a stranger, who you might remember used to like a particular colour or didn't used to want to eat a specific food, but who now you do not know at all.

From the small child's point of view, the week is a serious problem, the month is traumatic, a year is everything he can remember and his whole childhood: even if he feels a bit guilty about his natural resistance to approaching his parents, his natural resistance is based entirely in a lifetime of rejection.


Barbara Coloroso so deftly recommends: spend time with your children while they're still young and want to.

Do All Stay-at-home Parents Have to be Stupid?

Years ago, I ran across an article in the now-defunct Home Education Magazine. The short version, in case you don't feel like finding a back issue and reading the whole thing: 

Amy Hollingsworth ruminates on what is 'missing' from a stay-at-home-mom's life, mainly work that will not be undone tomorrow... laundry that's just going to get dirty, meals that are eaten, children who will need a bath again, and her perspective of how to find a tangibly rewarding aspect to motherhood and housewifehood.

This is a perspective that has long bothered me. She says, at one point:

"Not like the tangible sense of accomplishment you might get after finishing a report or closing a deal or saying something really smart in a board meeting."

Uh... saying something really smart in a board meeting is tangible?

I worked for years before having children, and I have to say that closing a deal might be momentarily satisfying, but in a moment there are other open deals that need to be closed, and others still that are unopened... that never ends, anywhere. 



There are few jobs where people finish the work and never have to repeat it, or something quite a lot like it, tomorrow. The report might be all crisp and bound, but it's not the last report. It will be revised, there will be editorial changes, it will need to be added to or there will be a different one to do. 

No one, in any job, walks home at the end of Friday and says 'there, that's done once and for all' with nothing to do on Monday. Even one big win doesn't stop the workflow, getting a huge project completely finished is satisfying, but it only completely clears the desk of someone whose job ends simultaneously.

The tangible rewards of motherhood and housewifehood are akin to the kind in the work world: I can enjoy the fresh air scent of the line-dried sheets when I replace them on my bed, and when I stick my nose into the linen closet, and I know I've accomplished something that is as lasting as the employee review, or serving the last table of the night. 

If I don't believe the clean linens have value, or I don't value my effort (however much was done by technology), the accomplishment will not feel like one. But the same can be said of an employee review that is ticked boxes and requires the use of phrases written by others, or not being the one who made the food being served.

I believe that the key to healthy sanity is in personally valuing what we do. If I feel that tidying up the Lego  is drudgery or not worth my time, or what servants should be doing for me, or it should stay tidied up because I tidied it up ever... I'm going to have no difficulty slipping into the misery of unfairness, of being asked too much, of not being wealthy enough to own slaves or not being appreciated enough by others who should see Lego tidying as more valuable than I do.

This is the core of the problem with grades and praise and employee reviews and rewards and awards: they take the onus for appreciation off the person doing the work and put it 'out there' --where the tangibility of the smart thing said in the board room first has to be acknowledged as such by others. 

When an accomplishment has at all to do with being seen by others, then I can feel exactly the same kind of tangible sense of accomplishment by saying something brilliant to a child, or even to myself in the kitchen... because it's either smart or it isn't, who hears it cannot be related.

I suspect that what many mothers feel the lack of is the pats on the back. 

When one is required to seek to find ones own sense of accomplishment, it challenges something we've come to believe is necessary for the functioning of the galaxy: an external witness. 

Yet, a huge part of self-esteem is being able to see, and value, ourselves accurately without relying on external praise or rewards to prop us up.

After my first was born, I went through an interesting change of heart. While I used to believe that what I did at work was valuable and a good use of my time, and worth what I got paid for it, I came to discover that it wasn't. In fact, it went from feeling important to feeling irrelevant. Anyone could move that paper around, answer that phone effectively, transfer those calls, write those reports, organize that workflow --only I could mother my daughter. I felt for the first time that what I was doing actually mattered, both in terms of what it was I was doing, and that it was me doing it.

From that initial discovery, my self-esteem came to be linked very closely with what I thought was valuable, not what other people might see, or think, or believe. So, my house is messy --and my children are loved and healthy and nurtured. The laundry really piles up, and I nurture my family with food made with care and love, skill and knowledge. The dandelions on the lawn are thriving, and I have nothing better to do with my energy than sit up until 3:35 a.m. talking with my 21 year old daughter about her day, her friends, her thoughts and her discoveries.

One of my tangible accomplishments has always been that the week ended with people who experienced many great moments, laid down some excellent memories, have fun stories to tell and deep connections between them. How can a job, a paycheque or a employee award, or the applause of the board compete with that?

Baby Tyrant: do infants manipulate and plot to annoy?

I found myself once again in the midst of a surreal conversation...

"There is a difference between needs and wants, and she just wants to nurse, she doesn't need to," says a mom of a 5 month old baby.

"She's 5 months old," says I.

"It's just a habit."

Now, I didn't say, "I find eating a bit of a habit, too. I've gotten quite used to that statement over the years..." but I wanted to.

There are two things wrong with 'it's just a habit' and 'she just wants to nurse.' 

The first thing wrong with those statements is that they are predicated on a philosophy of humanity that I just can't agree with: people are, at their foundations, devious, bratty, bad and undeserving of kindness, love, and generosity. 

This is the really big one that hurts my heart when I think of how stingy some people feel compelled to be toward their loved ones. This compulsion to hold all the goodness of life away from others seems to be to avoid the future: so they won't get spoiled or come to think that they're worthy of love or generosity or anything else completely unreasonable like that. 

That dark view of humanity is quite painful to watch, and I just never know what to say to someone holding that opinion, I don't know how to bridge the gap -- but I want to.

The second thing wrong with those two statements is that they rely on an adult-level understanding of devious behaviour, maliciously aimed at 'getting something' undeserved or unwarranted. 

Now, I will skip over the fact that I don't think adults get up in the morning thinking 'now, how can I screw them out of happiness, love, and good things so they'll be miserable?' While I'm not an optimist, exactly, I am a pragmatist and I know that no one gets up in the morning thinking of anyone more than they are thinking of themselves. They may be thinking about what they get can 'from them' but it is universally 'for me' not to do damage to anyone else.

A friend has the best-ever response to the implication that an infant is capable of such advanced thinking:

Honey, I know that you're little one is exceptionally brilliant and superior to all other human babies born to date and advanced well beyond her age, but at 5 months, there is simply no way she can plot to overthrow her parents.

Babies certainly learn quickly, and every generation is significantly smarter than the last... but, seriously!!

The child can't even open a drawer yet! 

Let the baby be a baby without polluting her motives with anything other than the instincts she has for survival, one of which is the need to keep the big people who are fully capable of throwing her off a 21st floor balcony from doing so.

Babies are fragile, incapable of keeping themselves safe, unable to care for their most basic needs, from cleanliness to nurishment. What would be in it for a baby to antagonize the people who keep him alive? This is such an important question, I think I'll put it in bold...

What would be 'in it' for a baby to antagonize the people 

who keep him alive?

If the baby gets to nurse in the middle of the night -- for any reason -- what is going to be bad about that? Breastmilk is the best possible thing any baby can eat, and direct from mom it comes in a warm and loving embrace, a sense of being cherished, affirmation of the child being worthy of nurturing, and both physical and psychological comfort.