So, What Is This Attachment-Style Parenting, then?

Parenting this other way is about respecting children, for their humanity, for the truth of their experience, for their body’s wisdom, for their inborn genuine goodness, for the people they were before they were born.

The cool thing about parenting this way is that one of the primary results is that children raised respectfully become respectable and respectful. Exactly the opposite of what the critics up there formulating their outraged comments get. And, for most people, that is a happy accident and a side-effect of why they are parenting this way.

Treating People Well Feels Better

We treat children this way because it feels better (to ourselves) to be kind, and sometimes because we can remember what it felt like to feel respected as children (if that ever happened to us) and what it felt like to be on the receiving end of being controlled by systems, rules, clocks, and adults determined to get their own way, and not listen, no matter what.

We treat children either the way we were treated (there are many, many adults walking around today who were never bribed or threatened, never made to pretend to sleep when they weren’t tired, or required to comply with mercurial demands), or the way we have decided is respectful.

Specifics?

This whole way of parenting is 180° from how most people think about and talk about children, so for newcomers to this idea, one of the hardest ideas to convey is the foundation of why words like ‘misbehaviour’ (‘acting out,’ ‘making poor choices,’ whatever) and ‘obedience’ (‘listening,’ ‘cooperating,’ and ‘minding’) are not relevant.

My goal as a mother was never to create compliant or obedient children who never misbehaved. Starting with a single fact: children do not ‘misbehave’ –they just behave. They do the best they can with what they understand as far as they are developed at this point. 

Kids just behave. 

They do the best they can with what they understand as far as they are developed at this point. 

That sometimes their behaviour makes a mess, or causes problems for others, or hurts someone is not a reason to punish them, but a reason to understand what they were attempting, and to see if there is a way to accomplish what they were trying to do that doesn’t have the unfortunate effects adults don’t want (like having to clean up messes, bothering others or hurting people or animals.)

I love this flowchart 

 because until a child is rational, the child is not rational, so things that seem rational to adults will never seem rational to children (and vice versa.)

My Whole, Complete Newborn Human

     When my eldest was born, I was looking into the face of an obvious person, a real live human being who was already completely present. She wasn’t going to be sub-human, or a fake person, until magically turning into a human being (an adult), or a real person, at some date far in the future.

     It was perfectly obvious to me that she was also completely whole and good. She was a 3-minute-old human person. She wasn’t 0/12^th of a 1-year-old. She wasn’t 0/228^th of a 19-year-old. She was not partly a person, or an empty bucket to be filled with my brilliance and wisdom, like some sycophant breathlessly awaiting the installation of the wise woman’s delicate pearls of knowledge. 

She was also not broken, flawed or evil.

I have no idea how anyone can look into the eyes of a newborn and see evil, except to say that people do not see the world as the world is, they see the world as they are: evil people see evil everywhere, regular people can’t figure out what they’re talking about.

The next obvious thing to me was that I could not know better than my daughter when she was hungry, tired, bored, overwhelmed, curious, content or enthusiastic. That was all about her own internal experience, and I could not feel how full (or empty) her stomach was, not only because I had no way of knowing what number of calories she was burning, but also because I had no idea how many calories she needed or how fast she was digesting her food.

I could certainly not declare that x-many minutes of sleep was insufficient or too much for that body now. And it dawned on me that the clock, and any distant self-declared expert, was certainly never going to know more about her immediate need (or lack of need) for sleep than her body.

From this I learned to trust her. I respected her experience of herself and her life, and had the most wonderful ride imaginable, watching her grow from herself as a tiny newborn into herself as a full-grown, married, beautiful and intelligent and kind and respectable woman.

     I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and every single one of them were from listening to people who knew ‘better’ than she did what she needed, what she was trying to accomplish, and what she ‘meant.’ They were almost always wrong, and they were usually deeply disrespectful in the process. She was right, she always knew: this is what I am interested in now, this is me, this is what I want and need, this is my life, this is what I want to attempt to accomplish.

     And, because I have clearly been well-behaved in some life, I also got to have another daughter, totally different and exactly the same as the first: whole, complete, already human at birth.

When people compliment me on my daughters, which happens often, I always demure: they came this way, I just limited how much I screwed them up.

Announce & Wait, part 2, or Why it does not work for all kids

Announce & Wait – a Caveat: 
                                            it takes a minute or so. . .

The feedback on the post Announce & Wait has made me realize that not all people are starting this kind of parenting thing from the earliest days of their parenting life, and many people have a history of not-this-kind-of-parenting … which makes some of the suggestions look like they don’t ‘work’.

In case you don’t feel like wandering over and reading the related piece, that post is essentially a suggestion for how to have more peaceful cooperation with things like toothbrushing, diaper changes and getting ready to leave the building when it’s -73°C outside: gather everything you need, go to where you need to do it (at the door, on the floor near the changing pad, or on the way to the washroom with the toothbrushes in it) saying --to someone whose full attention you actually have--‘I’m going to brush your teeth [or whatever] now…’ and wait. Stay still, don’t say anything, and really don’t say it again. Just wait. Meditate. Everyone needs more opportunities to focus on staying in the moment. Every parent I have ever met wishes for more uninterrupted time to be themselves in … what a wonderful free moment you are being given, until the little one processes the information, sorts out what they want to do, and comes to go along with your plans.

That is the suggestion in that post. It works.

However . . .

Think of all the other ways people are told to ‘encourage’ kids to do things the kids don’t necessarily want to do or agree are very important. Toddlers don’t understand ‘cavities in 18 months’ or ‘frozen flesh warnings.’ Parents do, which is why they get to be in charge of the hygiene and safety stuff.

When you’re just entering the ‘I don’t want to do what you want to do because you want to do it’ stage with, say, a 14- or 18-month-old child, starting with this approach before any other approach is attempted makes it ‘work’ –peacefully, and at least as effectively as anything else anyone suggests, but again: peacefully, which isn’t how most command-and-control, coercion, or orders –sorry ‘opportunities for cooperation’—usually turn out.

How Orders [ahem . . . opportunities to cooperate] Turn Out

Even if they work, there are natural responses to ordering people around, and pretty much every parent looking for ideas for how to make their days go more smoothly have ample evidence of what those responses look like:

Is my child deaf? I swear she could hear a moment ago when I unwrapped a chocolate bar… three rooms away behind a door. . .

          I am SO tired of the word ‘no,’ it is              all the kids ever say. . .

I don’t have the energy to chase the child around the house every time we need to do something. . .

Oh, great, I don’t have time for another temper tantrum right now, we need to GOooooo!

Sometimes people think I’m talking about kids’ reactions.  

Kids’ reactions are just their response to what is happening around them, to them, and within themselves. That’s all perfectly natural. It’s also inevitable and unchangeable from the outside.

The reactions that aren’t ‘working’ for the parents are the parent’s: impatience, frustration, irritation, martyrdom, hopelessness, exasperation, desperation, depletion and burnout.

Often parents see the kids’ behaviour as the driving force causing these responses, which is pretty usual in a culture that shames anyone responsible for anything, and encourages people to evade blame at all costs.

However. . .

A great friend who has renamed herself Talloolah in the tradition of Wise Women everywhere who step outside the mainstream, says ‘expectations are just planned disappointments.’ 

Another friend, who proudly calls herself a Crone, says ‘that’s not just asking for frustration, that’s ordering it.’

I segued away there to pave the way to say something rather counter-culture:

choose your action, choose your response

Am I saying that parents are asking for frustration and irritation and burnout on purpose? Absolutely not. Am I saying that they are doing it without realizing it, and often without any awareness of what is happening? You bet!

By choosing your action, you are choosing your response

If you order another human being to do your bidding, you are choosing resistance. It’s basic human nature, and while there are unicorns in the world who might comply instantly for fun or because the sun is up, the chances of you having given birth to one (or adopted one, or had one assigned to your classroom or sign up for your daycare services) are kind of remote. They aren’t called unicorns because they are everyday horses –or because they are people.

If you nag a human being to do what you want when they clearly are doing something else, you are choosing frustration AND resistance. It’s basic human nature. Humans do not like being told what to do, and when the resistance to being ordered around becomes second-nature, humans will not do what they want to do if they think it aligns with what the authority wants them to do. This is the basis of a lot of ‘forgetting’ and procrastination. Repeating the order is just irritating to everyone.

If you interrupt a human being with what you believe is more important (to you) than what is important to them, you are choosing exasperation. It is basic human nature. People of all ages naturally resist having other people choose their priorities.

The Long Way to Say: announce and wait ‘works’

. . .when the person involved trusts your motives

It is hard to hear that the reason your child does not respond to your communication openly and eagerly . . .

. . . it is hard to hear that this is about trust and connection.

Resistance to you and your words is not built on trust, it’s built on command-and-control parenting styles. Even ‘peaceful’ command-and-control styles. The thing about human nature is that the words don’t matter. At all. Call is ‘peaceful’ if you want to, if it is coercive, command-and-control, the resistance you encounter will be the truth of the situation. Call it ‘attachment’ when you leave the baby with a total stranger for something ‘important’ and the baby will still be freaked out by the stranger. Call it ‘logical consequences’ and the child will perceive it as the punishment that it is, because it is imposed in response to ‘poor choices’ (read: adult-determined ‘bad behaviour’) and never to ‘good choices.’ That is how you can always tell it is not ‘natural’ consequences, because the universe supplies those quite without fear or favour, regardless of what anyone ‘meant.’

This is not about ‘bad’ parenting. That’s a value judgement that people take personally, naturally resist, and isn’t helpful in any context.

It is about taking bad advice –sometimes without thinking about it at all, sometimes because of where it came from (our own childhoods, often) and sometimes because of how delightfully convenient and simple it would be if it did work.

Bad advice is the kind that can’t work because it fails to accept reality as a premise. Coercive, command-and-control parenting advice is like that: it can’t work because: people.

This is about the problem with following age-old (and sometimes new-sounding) advice that disregards basic human nature because … well, I don’t really know why it disregards basic human nature.

Maybe because for a really long time, kids have not been thought of as really human.

Maybe because it sounds like it should work.

Maybe because it feels like it would be faster if you could just activate the Voice Command Software and have a smooth-running, adults-deferred-to, convenient ‘the Queen is in charge of the Universe and the time at which other people wash their faces’ house…

I don’t really know what is the impetus behind disregarding basic human nature in favour of the stories around ‘you should be able to control your kid’ and all the advice that sounds like that … but I do know it is fantasy fiction.

Sure, if people weren’t people, maybe it would work.

If kids weren’t people, maybe it would work.

It doesn’t work.

Because: people.

And the length of time the sun is visible in the sky does not change based on the number humans decide to put on their clocks, and there is no ‘daylight’ to ‘save’ by changing them. Not sure why that bit of weirdness ever took hold, either, but here we are: daylight hours in the Northern hemisphere shorten through October and November, just as they are lengthening in the Southern hemisphere and staying completely the same at the equator –let’s all change the clocks and pretend something else is happening because … then children will have Voice Command Software and they will magically stop being human and stop resisting being controlled by … um … nah.

It’ll never work.

What is the Caveat?

The caveat to Announce-and-Wait is that in a place where kids are used to being, expecting to be, and have a lot of experience being ordered around (sorry I meant so say: motivated to comply / encouraged to listen… but really: ordered around), they will absolutely not magically ‘perform’ differently in the face of one simple change of a parent’s behaviour in this instance. It will ‘work’ –just not right away, and maybe not at all today.

Because this is about trust.

Trust is messy, because people want to control what other people think and feel … and that urge alone damages trust.

Wanting other people to trust you feels controlling to them, and that damages their ability to trust you.

This Relationship Thing is COMPLICATED!

As much as we want to feel capable and in control, the simple reality of relationships is phrased the way a late friend put it:

               This is me

               That is you

All the ‘this is me’ stuff we are in control of is:

     1.       our words and,

     2.        our actions.

We don’t control our thoughts, emotions, the world around us, the weather on Europa or what other people think of us or what they think about what we do.

All the ‘that is you’ stuff we are in control of is this list here:

      1.

        . . . 

Even in our own very young children, we cannot control the impact we have on them, what they think about what we do or say, how they understand what we do or say, what they think our actions and words mean about them and their value as people, or how much they trust or respect us.

One more time for the people in the back: we do not get to decide what impact our actions and words have on other people.

We do not control what they think about us, or about themselves when we are affecting them.

When we make changes, of any kind really, we are not the people who get to decide how those changes will be perceived by others. We don’t get to decide that we have sufficient authority for others to go along with those changes instantly, or to respond to those changes immediately the way we expect them to or how we hope they will.

Announce-and-wait is not magically different.

It takes time to make changes that matter.

It takes patience, to allow the other people to see that you really mean it, and this isn’t some new trick you’ve discovered to make them compliant a new way.

It takes time to rebuild trust that you really are not trying to control them, that they really are free and that you really will wait for them to be ready to do that thing you want them to do.

As I said: change is hard. It works, but not instantly like a Polaroid picture (which also takes a minute…)

5 Ways to Playfulness: Full Innovation Parenting

Because February is the month of love the posts this month are all about values. This one is about playfulness and humour…

Picture this: two women on an international flight, tired and bored, in a packed economy section for 14 hours. One of them says ‘let’s play rock-paper-scissors’ and the other one goes along with it (after the third time it was suggested.) 

Five minutes later, they’re giggling uncontrollably because they both keep doing ‘rock’ while both keep saying ‘someone has to do something else’ and then both do it again, anyhow. 

Suddenly, the cramped and noisy plane is background to minutes of joy and laughter. Nothing changed in the environment, only the willingness to play made these minutes less uncomfortable, boring and exhausting.

Now, of course, the twit who thought up playing rock-paper-scissors half way across the Pacific ocean at middle-of-the-night o’clock was me, and I have a long history of being completely ridiculous, but this is the kind of antic anyone can employ to improve any moment of tedium or annoyance in any situation.

There is nothing in the world like a drab February day, whether it is in the middle of a Canadian (read: seemingly never-ending) winter, or just the 15^th rain day in a row, to toss all the possible dull and irritating aspects of cabin fever into a family. 

Let’s have one or more of them have a cold, or worse (and maybe even more likely) the stomach bug that’s making the rounds this year. It’s February, so unless it’s one of those years (divided by a 4) that Olympics are happening –supposing you actually like or watch the Olympics ever—the tv is mid-season reruns, and by now everyone knows all the words to every single Dora, Daniel the Tiger, or Elmo’s World episode… 

The bills from Christmas are still in a worrying pile, so there won’t be any escapes to the tropics, and even an escape to the local indoor play place (where everyone can catch that cold and/or stomach bug, yea!) is not in the budget today.

The younger is now determined to get as far up the nose of the other kids as possible, as quickly as possible –whether by repetitively patting them on the head ‘gently’ but incessantly, humming or the same three notes constantly for 9 hours, or saying their favourite word 1100 times until their mouth is numb and everyone in the building wants to choke them out.

And the cat barfs.

Now, who hasn’t been here? In some fashion or other, in the midst of one of those months, where the drudgery is rapidly overtaking the exhaustion, and everything tastes like dry bran.

There is a solution, and it is a wacky one.

Number 1

Do anything differently.

If your house is usually formal, go casual; if it’s usually casual, really dress up. If the usual routine is for a light breakfast and a big dinner, reverse it. If you always sit at the table to eat, sit under it. If you usually wear your clothes frontwards…

There is power in the ridiculous, and in the simple joy of letting go, letting off some steam, and having a laugh.

What makes one family collapse into a heap of giggles will, of course, be very different from what unhinges another, but that’s no reason at all not to try anything.

Be loud, if you’re usually quiet. Play polka music if you usually prefer the opera. Make sleeve puppets with your sweater, and create two whole characters who are worried about being invaded by the ‘arm’-ies they find within…

If you’re often concerned about your adult-like image, use a child-like voice and make the kinds of silly mistakes in language or pronunciation toddlers make while trying to figure out this weird language. Dance like a 3yo. Jump around in the yard like a child pretending to be a kangaroo.

Generally goofing around… singing badly, reciting every word you can think of that starts with J, laying on the floor and kicking in the air like a young baby, acting like a monster… is the idea, here.

Laughter lowers stress levels immediately, it boosts immunity, improves attention, increases energy, and brings people together in a specific, important way: cooperation is necessary.

Number 2

Say yes.

The first rule of improv is ‘yes.’

Whatever your team just did, say ‘yes, and…’ to it. The killer of improvisational humour (and creativity and innovation) is when the answer is ‘no, not that.’ Even subtle ways of saying ‘no’ like ‘why did you colour the tree purple?’ or ‘you look like a twerp when you do that’ are humour killers.

Cooperation is key to getting everyone laughing: whatever the last thing tossed into the air was, greet it with ‘sure, let’s go with that, now add this’… the 7yo says ‘farty poopy pants’ and instead of doing a rerun of the lecture about potty language, say ‘yes, and’ by responding ‘party floppy rants’ … and see what happens next…

This was a game that lasted nearly 10 minutes with my potty-obsessed niece, as she tried to get me to repeat whatever poop-related phrase she kept repeating, and I made up other words that rhymed without every saying anything that she wanted me to, which turned potentially irritating behaviour into the whole family giggling.

Number 3

Stand out.

‘You know how people look at you when you say things like that?’ says my terminally-embarrassed-by-her-mother’s-behaviour daughter…

‘That look is exactly why I say things like that…’

I read a few weeks ago someone who said something like: I felt like a freak, an outsider, someone who never had any hope of ever fitting in, until I found Monty Python when I was 12, and thought this is my tribe.

I know that feeling (I was about that age when I found them), and I sometimes suspect it may be universal: that we all feel awkward, like outsiders looking in, like we’ll never understand all the things everyone else seems to just know (like what to say at funerals, or how to stand while someone is scolding you that isn’t too casual or mocking their intensity, or whatever it is you’re supposed to look like when you just want them to stop because you got it the first five words in…

That desire and need to fit in is normal and natural, but some days we just need to recognize that it isn’t us looking like everyone else that will lead to our success but standing out might. Shining our unique light is why we’re here, and we need to help our children feel safe shining theirs –by not fitting in and doing what is normal (around here.)

At least sometimes.

Dancing in the puddles in the pouring rain, even if that neighbours may you think you look crazy.

Dancing in the starlight instead of bedtime, to make an innovative bedtime routine.

Dancing in the dawn light because of being awakened by the sound of the cat retching, because dancing is better than explaining to the kids why the cat’s ‘run away.’

Laughing always comes in a close second after swearing up a storm over how inconvenient all these creatures living in our homes really are, so much of the time…for its therapeutic value. 

There is a great ad, for some church or other, where the kids are caught covered in mud from goofing around with some water, as the parents come home –dad storms off and mom says ‘you’ve really done it now…’ and everyone waits in dread for the storm to come, but dad comes into view with the hose, and joins in.

We always have the option of doing something unexpected, sometimes we just need to be reminded that we’re allowed to stand out and be different.

Number 4

Look for the unrelated.

Part of Monty Python’s quirky humour that immediately resonated with me, and made me spend several decades trying to figure out, was the dis-associated randomness. A pair of men doing what looked like a serious and formal folk dance, but with fish that they slapped each other with. How do you think that up? The Very Silly political party’s candidate’s name, a string of weird words and noises that included Wham Bam Tim Tam Fa-tang Fa-tang Ole Biscuit Barrel.

I mean, how? How do you come up with something so ridiculous?

Sometimes innovation is looking at something and adding one totally unrelated thing: Thomas Kincaid paintings with lights installed in them. Van Gogh’s view of the sky with what looks like bathtub bubbles swirling instead of stars. WestJet Airlines’ irreverent safety announcements that genuinely attract people’s attention. Restaurants without lights, served by waiters without sight. Training people who are blind to do massage. Putting internet access into a fridge.

Innovation is very often just two ideas beside each other that don’t initially look like the fit.

Number 5

Be willing to fail.

That internet fridge? An idea whose time may never come, and far from a roaring success… but the creativity is there. What other bizarre and far more successful ideas might arise from such ludicrous examples of dischord and never tried?

One of the killers of creativity, innovation, and playfulness is believing that all bets must be safe bets, that you must know where this road leads, and that you must avoid failure or mistakes at all costs.

Play requires the Beginner’s Mind: I don’t already know for sure how this will turn out… what if I…?

Innovation and creativity come more out of play than any other aspect of thinking or being. Play is our natural way of exploring the world, and it is our natural way of creating new and innovative ways and things, from technology to ideas to art. Possibly-Picasso said,

Every child is an artist, the problem is to remain an artist once he grows up.

Art is made of play, and all art comes with the 25-50-25 Rule. This is how I remember someone describing this rule:

               All real art requires risk. You have to try something new that you don’t know whether or not it will work until you do. You don’t know if you can accomplish it, or sometimes even if it can be accomplished at all. So, some of what you do will be mediocre: kind of what you were shooting for, but not really all you wanted it to be, and you’re not sure how to fix it (or if it can be fixed at all.) That’s probably 50% of most working artist’s material. And a smaller but significant proportion of the work will be complete crap: irredeemable, unquestionably lousy, with too many errors or problems to even consider bothering to try fixing. Call it the 25% craptastic quota.

               Most working artists (by which I mean people who are actively making art, not necessarily people who sell any to anyone, ever) prefer not to make the 25%, and a whole lot of them will live their whole ‘artistic’ lives safely in the Mediocre 50% realm: safe, okay, good enough, it will do.

               The thing is, there is that other 25% that every honest artist will always admit to wanting to create: the masterpiece, the amazing, innovative, wonderful, inspirational stuff that everyone dreams of signing, sitting back and marveling at (whether or not they ever show it to a single other human.)

               What too few people know is that 25% of amazing requires the 25% craptastic quota. In order to risk what it takes to make the marvelous, you have got to be willing to make the crap, because you have to be working on the edge of what you don’t know you can do well, what you don’t even know if it can be done well. It costs 25% crap to make the top 25% of your work… or you can just settle in the middle, and be a never-was instead of a has-been.

The failure in not even trying is where most people lose their shine, and fall into the doldrums of a too-drab life of predictable, ordinary, fitting in.

Innovation, creativity, and play can elevate a dull February day, even with sick kids, sick pets, sick weather or sick finances. Try one of these five ways of bringing light and energy to your dullest days.

P.S. I’d love to have a collection of stories of other people’s wacky creativity and those magical moments that transform a drab month… share yours in the comments or join the ThriveParenting: AP life andrespecting children facebook page to share there…

10 Ways to Be Curious & Build Compassion and Vocabulary in The Young

Because February is the month of love, I will be writing this month’s posts about virtues. Today’s virtue, for no real reason, is curiosity…

How does curiosity related to both compassion and vocabulary in young people?

One way is that without curiosity about the world around us, we won’t learn new words, like what ‘fleek’ or ‘code 9’ mean, and we’ll be impaired in our interactions with others. That’s maybe bad, although it’s popular for the older generation to calcify and be unbending about what qualifies as a ‘real’ word, ‘real’ usage, ‘real’ pronunciation, or ‘real’ music… fashion, art, movies, whatever. Do we want to become those out-of-touch folks?

I don’t. But that’s less to do with parenting, and vocabulary in young children. Middle school kids make up their own vocabulary (or find it online –urbandictionary, btw, is the source and solution for that, although it seems to be taken over by grumpy old fogies who judge the words instead of simply defining them, so perhaps soon urbandictionary will be supplanted by something fleek…) but in order to get to that point, one has to be able to converse comfortably with the people around about the world around…

… and that comes from having the vocabulary to even think about it.

Some of the everyday messages our culture sends to kids are impediments to this vocabulary development.

When kids learn that ‘all noisy kids are bad kids’ they don’t learn to distinguish in themselves or others the nuances of feelings that provoke loudness –fury, enthusiasm, terror, grief, excitement, disappointment, dejection, rage, anxiety, pain, ambivalence, boredom, annoyance, irritation, aggravation, agitation… All they end up with in the ways to express themselves to be understood is shouting, feeling ‘bad’ and being ‘upset.’

Without the words, we can’t think

In a book I read (I really should take better notes) it was posited that without the vocabulary to think about the world around us and within us, we are trapped in an internal experience that we can’t describe or understand, because we simply can’t think about it at all. We think in words.

Without thinking, we can’t learn

From having the vocabulary that describes what we’re seeing and interacting with and discovering how we feel about it all, we can broaden our experience of life to include what others are seeing and interacting with, including how it seems to make them feel. That is: when we have the vocabulary to share, we can learn how differently we can see, understand, think about and respond to the world and our feelings about all of that.

This learning is the basis of compassion.

Without learning, there is no compassion

When we learn the words to describe our own experience, internal and external, we simultaneously learn the words others use to describe their experiences, internal and external. 

This is telepathy: the minds joining in the space between them, to hear and be heard, to understand and feel understood, to feel and to feel felt –as Daniel J. Siegel describes in his many books (Parenting from the Inside Out, Mindsight, etc.)

We can’t do it if we don’t have the words.

The words are made from the world.

The world is here to explore, and human brains are instinctively attuned to explore, to understand the world around us, from before we are born as we become familiar with the voices closest to us, and the sounds they use to make meaning. From there, we race to understand the music, the words, the sensations, the sights and flavours, as quickly as we can.

What can go wrong if curiosity isn’t present

When we are with people, in the early stages, who are ‘busy’ doing ‘important’ things –on their phones, with the tv or computer, or silently in the house or facility—or we spend our days surrounded by people mostly our own age who are physically watched over by too few adults to interact with about most of what we’re experiencing, or in environments that are unsafe to explore (or banned from exploring) we learn what little we can divine mostly by ourselves, particularly what is happening within us. This desert of curiosity leaves us without the natural support we need to feel normal in wondering and asking, and without the vocabulary we need to even form the questions.

When we are with carers who ‘already know’ what’s going on for us, who we are and what we’re worth –who tell us we’re not hungry when our stomachs are churning because the clock doesn’t say ‘hungry time’ on it yet, or that we’re not sad or scared or lonely or hurt when we are, or who tell us we’re bad people for being alive, making noise, making messes, making poop, or needing more than they expect us to need, our learning is impaired because our experience is not what we are told it is. The words we learn don’t mean what we’re told they mean. This is confusing, alienating and leads to dissociation from our bodies, and self-loathing.

In each of these scenarios, children grow up without understanding themselves or their world accurately (or at all), always only coping and struggling and compensating for what they never got that they needed. They learn to judge, blame, evade blame, self-medicate, distract and ignore… themselves and others. This impairs their ability to feel curious about the world, themselves or others. It is that lack of curiosity that ultimately impedes compassion, for themselves and others.

Now that we can see clearly why compassion matters so much, and how curiosity is linked to it, so now we can help our children:

10 Ways to be Curious and Build Compassion

1. Answer questions to the best of your ability, and, when you don’t know the answer demonstrate how to look answers up, how to wonder about their accuracy, and what else might be connected to the subject
2. Look up answers you are certain of, because information changes over time and what you learned 15 years ago may not have been true at the time
3. Share discoveries you make in your world, whether it’s a way of making your work run more smoothly, a new play strategy in your favourite game, or an ingredient you didn’t know how to use, or a way of driving that makes it safer, or an investment strategy that you’re investigating … curiosity breeds curiosity
4. Wonder why others feel or act as they do, and talk about possibilities: what they might be feeling or thinking that leads them to feel that choice is sensible or effective to them
5. Notice body posture, gestures, facial expressions and vocal tones around you –on the radio or in movies, or live as you watch the passing parade on the streets, watching from your window or what you see from the car, and describe them: shoulders slumped, big smile, crushed eyes, swagger stride, shaky voice, clipped speech, snappy replies, placid face, touching hair, leaning in, leaning away, et cetera
6. Talk about the words for those postures, gestures, facial expressions and vocal tones: dejected, excited, nervous, distracted, depressed, timid, confident, et cetera
7. Ask yourself out loud why you acted as you did: what was I thinking? What was I hoping would happen? How was I feeling? What could I have done differently that would have ended up with a different result?
8. Observe out loud, in neutral terms (like a camera would record the details, without judgement or evaluation, and without attributing intent or character flaws) what the child was thinking, trying to accomplish, or feeling before they acted the way they did
9. Speculate about how you would feel if, or how you did feel when, something happened to you –good or bad: how you would react if you won a lottery, got invited to a special event, lost something valuable, damaged the car, et cetera
10. Lead kids to consider how they think they might feel if something amazing happened, or something tragic happened, or if they were where the news report is, or what it might be like to visit astonishing sights like the pyramids in Mexico, or the glaciers in Norway, or Easter Island

Imagination, curiosity and compassion are all tangled up together, so developing one will help the other to develop in parallel… and all of it works better with a nuanced vocabulary to accurately describe the difference subtleties between this shade of blue and that one… this kind of anger and that feeling of rage… this way of steering different from that…

All that will help raise a child who can understand themselves in their bodies and in their world, so they can feel others, and help others feel felt.