The other morning I promised to take my 3 year old son Ari for a special breakfast treat – waffles and strawberries - before I dropped him off at daycare. Right before we left our home, I received a work related text. “Mommy, mommy, come on, let’s go for our special breakfast waffles,” Ari called over to me, while I tried to speedily answer the text. poster kids count “One second, sweetie,” I promised. “I just have to do a quickie text.” Unfortunately that swift text turned into a detailed text conversation – which lasted 10 minutes. (Confession: Okay – more like 15 minutes!) As soon as I was done, I reached for Ari’s hand and said, “It’s waffle time.” “No. I want to go directly to school now,” he said. “I want to have breakfast at daycare.” Ouch. I understood immediately what had happened. My son wasn’t just choosing daycare food over yummilicious waffles. He was also choosing to avoid expressing his feelings of hurt. I believe we create a lot of problems in our relationships if we don’t feel safe to talk about our feelings at the speed of life. Yep, there’s a lot of unnecessary pain we can cause one another when we choose to silence our self-expression and instead act out our hurt by “whammying” one another. I can describe in 3 SHORT ACTS what causes much of the conflict in relationships – since the beginning of time on this planet. ACT 1: You hurt me. ACT 2: Because you hurt me, I’m now gonna hurt you. ACT 3: Because you hurt me back, I’m now gonna hurt you back, and so you hurt me back, and so I hurt you back, and downward-spiraling our relationship goes. Plus, there’s another potential path unexpressed hurt can take. We can start a folder called, “My Collected Proof That This Other Person Is Doing Bad Things Which I Don’t Like And Thereby I Should (Potentially) Not Like This Person.” In other words, when we avoid using our words to say how we feel – we wind up silently (and continuously) collecting proof of “perceived wrong-doings” done-unto-us - to put into this folder – until we build up a big enough case against feeling close to this other person. One small fissure (texting for too long rather than leaving immediately for special breakfast waffles) is added to another small fissure. Then another small fissure. Until there’s a humongous gap of unexpressed disappointments blocking the once flowing pathway to our heart. Let me take a moment to express myself incredibly clearly about how much I feel it’s essential to raise kids who express themselves incredibly clearly! Here it goes… It’s incredibly important to raise kids to feel safe to express their feelings – at the speed of life. Not just to protect our closeness as parents and children – but to ensure our children enjoy the most loving and lasting friendships and relationships throughout their lives. I’m now doing seminars at schools and writing a book called” DON’T JUST TEACH KIDS HOW TO COUNT, TEACH THEM WHAT COUNTS MOST” – and STRONG COMMUNICATION SKILLS is one of my top 10 CORE VALUES. I’m doing my best to mindfully raise my son to feel safe and encouraged to express himself. I sure as heck didn’t want to waffle up this opportunity to get Ari to express his true feelings behind this sudden-waffle-turnaround. CLICK TO READ THE COMMUNICATION TOOLS I USED TO INSPIRE MY SON TO FEEL SAFE TO TALK ABOUT HIS FEELINGS: notsalmon/2013/09/13/teaching-kids-communicate/
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 18:59:36 +0000
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