Homework can bring us to our knees — “Just, will you JUST, finish it ALREADY!?” It’s hard to like ourselves as we scream, judge, blame and compare when we’ve flipped our lid. And, once we’re calm, it’s difficult to let go of the guilt. It’s crazy making stuff that we want to be SO DONE with.
Over the years, a number of parents have been concerned about their child’s hesitance to assert themselves. I wrote the tale below in 2014 with that (and a very special girl) in mind. I like to imagine living in a kingdom where our leader models assertive Confrontive I-Messages! Here’s how one such person came to be so wise.
Without a secure bond with a trusted, stable adult, kids are more prone to social media addiction. The nature of Internet communication leads to a digital intimacy that falls short of authentic, vulnerable relationships so they keep grasping for more approval and acceptance.
It's so easy to feel aggressive when we impute bad intentions to our kids -- e.g. He's deliberately NOT writing the invites to get a rise out of me. If we pause to contemplate the spins we put on kids' behaviors, we just might choose not to believe them.
He grinned down. I grinned up. Then, shaking my head in wonder, I went to my journal to record this remarkable conversation.
"Remarkable" because the old Catherine would not have known what to do. I probably would have peppered him with questions, "What's wrong? Well, have you tried approaching him again? Did you ask him why you you got that score? Have you gone over the rubric - maybe you missed something?"
I've written before about how Claudia's whining gets to me. Clearly, I still have some work to do unearthing the button that Claudia may have pressed but did not install!
That button says it’s dangerous when someone is upset and perilous to assert my needs.
That button tries to convince me that it makes more sense to wait for others to figure out what’s bothering me and change their behavior accordingly.
That button's been around a long time.
Besides wanting to make peace, I had gone into Claudia's room as her cheerleader.
You see, in my room I had reflected on whether I had ever openly defied my own mother and came up with not a single instance.
No surprise there. I was always a very, very, very "good" girl.
I initially wanted to say that my values were:
But there was more to it when I started thinking about where these values came from. My mother (I focus on her because my father passed away when I was two) did not model rigid punctuality.
I realized my strictness comes from the keen discomfort I feel (less and less now but it's still there!) when people are displeased with me.
Last week, when my 14 year old Jake interrupted me in the kitchen with, “Just have a look at what this person messaged me on Facebook," I let slip a golden opportunity to help him grow.
Why? Because I panicked.
Someone -- apparently she had ten friends in common with Jake -- had contacted him saying, after seeing photos, she wanted to book him for some modeling.
"Claudia, come here! Stand right here! You need to go up the trunk first all the way up to the top!" I couldn't keep myself from whining.
"Ok." She slid over and did as told. When she hit resistance on the first bough, though, she gave up,"I don't want to do it anymore. You do it."
And she walked away.
We are motivated by love. We fervently want our children to adopt our closely held values to improve, not our lives, but THEIRS. But how best to pass them on? The problem is that most parents have never had a chance to think about or practice this. That's where P.E.T. can help, but it's hard stuff.
Just a few days ago, I dropped my P.E.T. roadmap (aka the Behavior Window) and ventured into the land of Roadblocks. Even though the trip lasted just a few minutes, it's never fun losing your way like that.
The Behavior Window is the handy visual that Dr. Thomas Gordon created to help parents get to where we want to go.
At the beginning of the summer, Claudia set herself to doing 20 minutes of Chinese a day and packed a fiction book and a fresh notebook for this purpose. Over one month in, she had done less than two hours.
The pressure to guilt-trip him was great. His basketball coach and tons of parents would say, "You just go out there and do it. You don't quit and you don't waste your parent's money." "Do you see?" I asked. "This is what I'm dealing with from the outside and also from within because it's just such a huge amount!"
I was mindful that I was out of control. I apologized, “Sorry, I am being quite a control freak right now, I am just so stressed!” And then, suddenly I had another crisis: I couldn’t locate the Keynote presentation for my class the next day! I got snippier and toggled back and forth for a good 15-20 minutes between “adult” behavior and, well, a tantrum. Claudia gently said a few times, “Ok, jeesh, just calm down!”
