PACE Yourself
No matter how much we love and adore our children, completely relating to them can be challenging at times. Yet, that ‘relating’ is essential to the life-long connection we have to our kids. . .and their life-long connections to us and to the world.
The following is an adaptation of a strategy from Daniel A. Hughes and others in the field of Family Attachment. I teach these skills to parents in my family sessions.
Often families come to me when the relationship between parent and child is already pretty strained. It can take a good deal of work to get things back on track. I am sharing these strategies, or skills really, here in an effort to head some pretty common parenting challenges off at the pass. Many of these steps may seem obvious or easy, and they can be. However, they do take some attention.
In today’s high-paced world where information overload, fast-paced days, and virtual communication are the norm, it can be really easy to let some of the basics slip. While these steps seem more concepts or skills than actual steps, each of these builds on the others, so it’s important to make sure we are mindful of all of them. Simple? Perhaps. However, these simple steps can help to ensure that you consistently connect with your kids and that they are then able to consistently connect in the world.
Playful:
Be playful with your kids. Playfulness creates a feeling of safety and joy. It can bring both defenses and inhibitions down. Now, this doesn’t mean that we make light of feelings. When our kids are bothered or hurting. we always want to be mindful of hearing and reflecting back their emotional state. However, in the day to day with your kids, find opportunities for play, humor, and fun where possible. This might take the form of love/humor notes in your kids’ lunchbox, telling a funny story or joke at dinner, playing a board game or even a game of catch.
Believe me, I know how stressful the average day can be with or without children. There is more coming at us from the world than at any other time in history. I also know that releasing one’s inner goofball isn’t natural for everyone. However, finding authentic, even if fleeting, moments to be silly and playful can be crucial toward providing a feeling of safety and joy for our kids and can take our blood pressure points down a few notches at the same time.
Accepting:
Accepting your kids for who they are will be one of the most important gifts that you will ever give them. Now, acceptance doesn’t mean that we agree with or like all of another person’s behaviors. It means that we can see past the behaviors to accept the wonderful being beneath. Remember, we all make sense in context. Thoughts, feelings, behaviors don’t happen out of the blue. They happen based on our understanding of whatever experiences we’ve had in the past.
While it’s important to guide our kids through inappropriate behaviors and work with them to find more appropriate and functional behaviors when necessary, it is just as important to see the child apart from the behavior as an amazing being in his/her own right.
It is also important to accept your child’s emotional state as is. This is often so difficult for us as parents as we want to “fix” our child’s emotional state as soon as possible and end his/her suffering. However, sitting with your child’s current emotion and reflecting back understanding and empathy allows him/her to feel “felt”.
Feeling understood is one of the most comforting feelings there is. It’s great to soothe and help your child to problem solve afterward, but first meet him/her where he/she is. When hurt because someone teased him at school, it might be oh so tempting to offer, “Don’t feel sad. Johnny is just a big bully!” Instead try, “Wow, it really hurts when someone says something so mean, doesn’t it?” before moving on to how your child might handle teasing later or why some kids feel it necessary to bully.
Curious:
Being curious about your child makes him/her feel loved, noticed, and important. It also allows you to begin to understand the world in the way that he/she does. Please note that curious does not equal nosy. It also does not entail prying details out of your quiet child before he/she is ready to share. Believe me. I know how difficult it can be to ask your silent child questions about her day only to be met with more silence or one word answers. Kids can clam up for many reasons: they might need mental/verbal down time after a long day, they may legitimately not remember any noteworthy details from the day, or they may not be used to you asking. However, while curiosity might eventually allow you to know your child better, the true purpose here is to let him/her know that you are truly interested in who he/she is. What’s more, curiosity is one of the precursors to empathy (below). Curiosity mindfully gets the detailed information necessary to put oneself in another’s proverbial shoes. It gathers information about what your child sees as important and how your child feels about things and why.
You can ask questions about who they played with/hung out with at recess or what the funniest thing they saw was that day or, when all else fails (and it does sometimes) what they had for lunch. You might sit and watch his favorite television show with him and then talk about it after. You might ask about her favorite Pokémon character and which Pokémon she would choose to be. The bottom line is that showing your genuine interest in your child makes him/her feel that he/she matters while at the same time gathering the information necessary to understand his/her view of the world. That’s important for kids and adults alike. Think about times in your own life when you’ve met individuals that expressed genuine curiosity in who you were and how you felt. How did it feel?
Empathetic:
Empathy is the art of purposefully putting oneself in the shoes of another. It is matching your child’s heart– his/her emotional state. It is mindfully experiencing your child’s experience of an event or of the world, looking at that experience through the perspective of your child. This might sound like an easy feat, but looking at the world through a lens that isn’t our own can be challenging.
In my sessions with families I often do an exercise with my coffee cup. The cup has a picture on one side and print on the other. “Describe this cup.” I ask, holding up the cup with the picture towards them. Each person describes what they see in the picture in front of them. “Hmmm. That’s odd,” I say, “because I see the words . . .” What each person then realizes is that one’s perspective or description has everything to do with the direction one is looking from.
The same is true when discussing world perspective. No two individuals will have exactly the same perspective because each of us experiences the world at least slightly differently. As a parent it can be challenging to remember life from the perspective of a 5-year old. Even if we could, your 5-year old has necessarily experiences the world differently than your 5-year old self.
That’s where acceptance and curiosity come in. Once you can accept your child for where he/she is in a given moment and truly accept that that place makes sense given his/her experience of the world you can listen with new ears. Your curiosity will allow you to gather information then that allows you to share an emotional understanding and an emotional space with your child so that he/she feels “felt”. This sharing is one of the basics of a great connection with your child.
The beauty of great connection is that it doesn’t require that we have shared every experience that our child has in the same way. It doesn’t require an automatic understanding of his/her view of the world. It does require that we are consistently making attempts to get there.
Through playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy you will build a bridge from your heart to your child’s and back again.
It takes a bit of attention, but this is the stuff amazing relationships are made of. Moreover, it builds strong, connected, and empathetic kids that grow into joyful adults.
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