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?"
The mother threatened, “If you can’t walk like a big boy, I’ll remember that. No more vacations then until you can walk!” The boy continued to wail and the father had to hold him back from the stroller. The man started to whine himself, “I know you’re tired, but everyone is tired!"
At that point, we split ways so I don’t know how long passed until some sort of resolution. Just watching, though, made every compassionate hair on my body stand on end. I FELT the parents' rage and helplessness.
A while back, I got tagged on a Facebook parents forum when a friend asked what I thought of this short little video. With a young daughter herself who was already experiencing unfriending -- "You're not my friend!" "I don't like you. Go away!" -- she wondered whether her little one should practice the following handy retort.
I let them leave it at that so I could focus on the line of traffic in front of me. Inside I was swelling with pride. This is stuff I just recently learned how to do myself. How awesome is this kid's life going to be?
P.E.T. is the reason I now relish these precious 104 days of the year. Knowing what to do and how to do it has given me back a huge chunk of my life.
I thought about this fact last weekend when, in less than 24 hours, I went on quite a roll and executed a whole bunch of P.E.T. skills!
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.
He went on, "The point is, Mom, Jake always complains and makes everyone's life hard and Dad doesn't like it so he goes out and gets him a new one just to make it stop. Whereas, if I just keep quiet and act 'good,' then it pretty much sucks."
What that means, I recently explained to a good friend, is that we wait until there is no high emotion and then reach back to a painful incident and explore it. Many people, I acknowledged, would protest: "Why would I ever ruin a perfectly good day and do something like that?!"
Again, my aunt explained, "Emmett, we can't. We are leaving in the morning."
I decided to Active Listen him and then tap into his imagination: "You so wish you could come back, you really love this train! Oh, it would be so fun to live near this train!"
When I gently raised the topic of language I realized I was jumping the gun. "Mom, I don't need that right now. I need to be Active Listened. You're supposed to do that stuff later. I'm still very upset."
I didn't mind the correction at all. Not. At. All.
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.
One of the best things about teaching P.E.T. is that I get to hear the excitement and wonder in parents' voices when they have Active Listened for the first time! Parents sometimes proudly share their stories after just the first session on this skill. I'd like to think it was the superlative instruction, but I know better.
She quickly took the letter out, and then her brow furrowed; too long passed. I leaned over and saw she had failed by a couple of points.
I looked at her and she blinked and shrugged, “That’s fine. I can take it again.”
It seemed like time froze as people watched to see how I would react. If I could not get my child to say "sorry" or lower his voice or repeat what she said with "excuse me, Mommy" I would feel varying degrees of -- really, the only word for it is -- shame.
Left with little sis Claudia (10), Jake was reminded constantly of how she is so NOT his brother. When his frustration showed, Claudia noticed and engaged.
Ah, what to do with summertime bickering?
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!"
Upon leaving the house, I kept my mouth shut and did not mention homework in any way, shape or form nor did I discuss League of Legends (you may remember from last week that L.O.L. was his siren call). I simply nonchalantly waved “Buh-bye!” to Harrison, who was still in his pajamas. Under my breath I repeated that day's mantras: "His homework is not my problem" and "I can choose to be a new kind of mom!"
Lucky for them that, about the time they started playing the game League of Legends, I started learning P.E.T. My transformation from a controlling and stressed-out crazy mom to a chill, “Yeah, I can be around her” kind of presence was due, in no small part, to the box at the bottom of P.E.T.’s Behavior Window.
Two things happened recently that made me realize, wow, solutioning really gets my back up. (I hear it's kind of an American thing to make a verb out of a noun but I WAS born in Philly so I'm just going with it.) Don't get me wrong, I'm superb at solutioning; it's just that I don't like being on the receiving end.
I had been so mired in the habit of ignoring myself that I faced the steepest of learning curves. I discovered that, when upset, I was grossly incongruent in the way I interacted with the outside world and, sadly, my kids. What I usually showed was only a sliver of the truth. Not surprisingly, the words I was most facile with on the feelings list were those that had to do with anger.
Getting home base under control was the crucial first step in our family's progress toward mindful, assertive and empathetic communication.
So, here's what P.E.T. has meant for me, countdown style . . .
