What Kids Say To Parents vs What They Want To Say
Trust That Your Needs Can Get Met
The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness.
-Dorothy Thompson
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-Buckminster Fuller
What makes it so difficult at times to trust that your needs can get met?
If you have a backlog of experiences from the past in which your needs were not met, you may be inclined to doubt that they can or ever will be met. Trust will grow, however, when you take responsibility for your needs and take daily actions to fulfill them. As you develop more skills for meeting your own needs, fear, anger, defensiveness, and reactivity will subside.
Children also have fears about getting their needs met; their fears often lead to anger and defensiveness. Working with kids to recognize needs and find ways to meet them goes a long way to reduce anxiety and conflict.
With more confidence that your needs can be met and that you can help your kids meet their needs, you will be able to show your family a less reactive side of yourself; this experience has surprising benefits. You will be able to see beyond specific behaviors that scare and irritate you.
You will have a better understanding of yourself and your kids. You will be steadier and calmer more of the time. Your kids might be doing the same things they have always done; however, your eyes and ears will now be seeing and hearing differently, allowing you to respond to their needs rather than react to their behavior.
Trusting that their needs matter to you, your kids will also relax and react less. They will not need to take a defensive stance and protect themselves from a parent who uses power-over tactics to get them to do things. And as this trust builds, you will experience a wonderful surprise – your kids will want to co-operate with you to meet your needs and find ways to live together that work for everyone.
Trust That Needs Will Lead to Solutions
Remember, there is an abundant universe full of strategies to meet needs. Conflict occurs when you and your child, or any two or more people, lose sight of this fact. Feelings of impatience, anxiety, or fear may come up until you have a solution in sight, or until you regain trust that a solution will come.
As we understand it, conflict occurs when a need is urgently calling, you don’t see how you can meet this need in the situation, and you fear that it can’t get met.
A common conflict in families comes up when one family member wants to relax by increasing the volume on the CD player and another family member wants to relax in quiet. Conflicts happen when children want to play together but one wants to play on the swings and the other wants to play cards. Conflicts happen when one family member wants to celebrate a family holiday by going out and another family member wants to celebrate at home. Quite frequently, as in these examples, you will see that the needs involved are the same for both parties-in these examples; the needs are for relaxation, play, and celebration.
While it is not always the case that the needs are the same, it is always the case that it is the strategies that are in conflict, not the needs. As you come to trust in an abundant universe and to see a range of possibilities for meeting needs, you will find that you don’t hold on so fearfully to your favorite strategies.
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. -Albert Einstein
Co-operate to Resolve Conflicts
At times when you do feel fearful or feel any other heightened emotions, choosing to connect and co-operate with your child may be the farthest thing from your mind. Indeed, you might at those times experience the “emotional hijacking”. Heightened emotions swamp your thinking; your more reasoned brain functioning is diminished, leaving you with charged feelings; you feel the urge to charge ahead with what you think you need; and you forget that you have any choices other than to follow that urge. We’d like to review here the choices you do have in any and all situations. You may want to post this list somewhere to remind yourself of these choices at moments of emotional hijacking.
Three Choices for Moments of Conflict
1. You can decide you want to be right and get your way no matter what.
This choice most often leads to using power-over tactics to get what you want (tactics such as angry outbursts, arguments, fighting, sulking, or walking away and refusing to talk). These actions are very likely to escalate conflict in the moment and in the future.
2. You can ignore it and hope it goes away.
When your discomfort around conflict gets the better of you or you don’t see a way to deal with it that won’t make it worse, there’s a temptation to walk away and hope it disappears. Sometimes things do sort themselves out and you’re off the hook. More often than not, however, the conflict doesn’t go away and the same old battle comes back, but bigger, more complicated, and more difficult to sort out than ever.
3. You can hold the intention to connect and co-operate.
When your intention is to connect and co-operate, you seek to understand everyone’s needs in the situation and you hold all needs equally. You will work with others to find the best solution you can to meet mutual needs-a solution that everyone can feel good about.
Neither of the first two options give the results parents want, and yet these are the choices parents make every day, by default, when they are unaware of or ignore their third option.
Move from the Battle Zone to the No-Fault Zone
When you find yourself emotionally charged and in the battle zone with your child (or anyone else)-when you notice that you are feeling upset, afraid, or angry, and doing things such as raising your voice, arguing, name-calling, or blaming-we hope you will remember that there is another place you could be, a fault-free place that would be much more productive and satisfying for everyone. Just remembering that such a place exists can help you change direction.
To get to that different, calmer place, follow these steps: (1) First, Hit the Pause Button and stop doing anything you will regret later. (2) Next, do what you need to do to Regain Equilibrium: take some deep breaths, go for a walk or a run, do yoga, or get empathy from a friend. (3) Then, Connect with Your Feelings and Needs as soon as possible. If you are angry, take the time to identify the anger-producing thoughts that are the source and fuel for anger. Feel the feelings and sit with the needs that are urgently calling for your attention. (4) Finally, Reconnect with Your Intention and Purpose, the one you established in Key 1 for how you want to interact with your children. Make your next move from that place.
You can help your children redirect their energy when they are charged up or spinning out of control by coaching them through these same moves. At noncharged moments, or during family meetings, you can go over the steps and explore activities that restore you so you and your kids can operate from choice more of the time.
When emotions are highly charged, it makes good sense to delay conversation about conflict until attention, mental focus, and goodwill have returned. Once everyone is calm and enjoying themselves again, however, these conversations are often forgotten or put off indefinitely.
No one wants to talk about conflict and risk spoiling the good time. As a consequence, the issues often don’t get addressed at all, and they usually resurface later in a new and often intensified conflict. If you do choose to put off discussion about a conflict, remember to take it up later, during a time of ease and sweet connection, when it can be most productive.
Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way. -The Dalai Lama
Build a No-Fault Zone and they will come
If you can envision a place where respect and co-operation reign, you are on your way to creating it. If you have a deep longing for connection and harmony, you are on the way to bringing it into being. Once you choose these as your purposes and intentions for creating a home, you can, one step at a time, one day at a time, align your thoughts and actions to create it. The 7 keys in this book, with the exercises and activities, can unlock this creative capacity in you. We call the place where respect and co-operation reign the No-Fault Zone. You might want to choose a different name.
In this place, everyone attempts to understand the good reasons people do things. You and your children trust that your needs will be considered and cared for. A respectful focus on needs replaces criticism, blame, and punishment. And everyone co-operates to make life more fun and wonderful for one another.
The thirteenth-century Persian philosopher-poet Rumi describes this place as a field out beyond wrong-doing and right-doing. If you create such a fault-free place, whether it is a field or a castle, others will want to join you there because they too are longing for it in their hearts. Your home will be a place your kids want to be. And, each parent who creates a home based on mutual respect and co-operation moves us all closer to creating a peaceful and sustainable world.
