ONE THREAD AT A TIME

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 NOTE

 I will, in this blog, be dealing with raising children of all ages, from infancy to young adulthood.

I  am not,however, going to do this in chronological order but rather address different stages as they come up for me. This way the blog can be appealing to a wider audience.  Also some blogs, this one today for example, is relevant at all stages of development. I hope this works for you. Also please remember to register so you don't miss out on any posts. Just click the subscribe button at the bottom of the page.

 

 BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR CHILD

I have for a long time looked at building a relationship with a child as the equivalent to weaving cloth and, as in weaving cloth, the end result can be strong, flexible and well wearing over time or something loosely bound, weak and unable to with stand stress. You cannot un-weave the past. Your relationship with your child is something you will live with for the whole of your life so weave carefully and take the time to make sure it is a relationship that can withstand time.

In terms of your child the threads of your cloth are created by each and every interaction you have with your child.  Not that all interactions are equal, some will be more significant and others less so, resulting in thinner or thicker threads. But what determines the strength of the thread is the quality of the interaction.  Positive interactions yield strong threads and negative interactions yield weak threads.  So the more positive your interactions are with your child over time the stronger the weave of the cloth and the stronger the relationship. Relationships are built by the everyday, little interactions that you have with your child. It is the sum of these that create the fabric of the relationship. You have to work at it all the time. No interaction is insignificant.

. This is why parenting requires so much of our attention, particularly in the early

formative years. It is during this time that you are laying the strands that will make up the foundation of your relationship and the early yarn is defining the shape of your cloth. 

The time will come, much sooner than you can possibly believe, when the opportunities for adding to the cloth becomes far less frequent.  Your child, when he starts school, will be looking beyond the family orbit for his influences and will be guided much more by external factors, friends, culture, school, etc. than by you and his family. Your interactions will still be very important but as he grows older and moves through the educational system your influence will diminish.

 In later blogs I will be looking at how to influence your child even as he slips out of your orbit but for now I’d like to look at how you might best use your skills to build a strong relationship with your child while the building is good. The older he becomes the less time he will spend at home and the less opportunity you will have to “weave” a relationship with him. So make each one count by developing constructive principles that will almost reflexively influence and shape you interactions. It is not practical to expect that every time you speak to your child you analyze each interaction which is why you need to consciously decide on the principles that you will use to guide you through all of your interactions. You need to, over time and very carefully, develop ways of responding to your child that are constructive and then make these reactions reflex reactions.

WHAT KIDS NEED AND WANT

In order to develop a relationship with your child you need to understand your child and what his needs are at each stage of development. The frustration here is that as soon as you master one stage he is on to the next. It feels like you're always starting over. One of the first things your child will need is to feel as though he counts and his opinion counts. From a very early age they want you to see them as person and one that is valued.

Too many parents take the attitude that I am the boss, you are the child, you will do as I say, end of story. Sounds easy; too bad it doesn’t work. You can’t raise a child the way you’d run a boot camp. In his very insightful book choice theory William Glasser labels this approach External Control Psychology. Using this approach we control behavior through a system of rewards and punishments, not unlike Pavlov’s dogs.  This system works rather effectively at molding behavior while children are young but that is all that it does. This approach can be effective in the moment but it breaks down because it does not generalize, as the behaviorists have shown. The child responds as desired when he is in your company but since the behavior is dependent on your presence it does not generalize to situations when you are not there.   What it fails to do is to provide the kind of parent/child interactions that helps the child internalize the principles of behavior that you want for your child. External Control does not build parent child relationship based on mutual respect. If this approach is relied on too heavily it will build resentment and hostility in the child as he begins to feel coerced and controlled. The result is that you will have a child who resents you and has no experience of confidence in his own decision making, and in the end is both dependent on you and resentful of you at the same time.

 The alternative is to give your children choices and then teach them to make the right ones as you build a positive and supportive relationship. As Glasser  puts it “We must realize that if we coerce anyone too long there will be a point of no return. We may never be close again.  Lacking this closeness, some children begin to give up on relationships and, eventually, embark on a lifelong destructive search for pleasure.  To achieve and maintain the relationship we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw.  We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem.  These words define the difference between external control psychology and choice theory.”

This does not mean that rewards and consequences will never play a part in raising your child.  It means that it must play a limited role and as soon as is possible, given your child’s development, it needs to be supplanted with a system of choice that teaches your child how to make intelligent decisions for himself with your guidance but not guidance that is so strong that it is merely a disguise for coercion. “Bobby, you will do your homework or you will be grounded for two weeks, it’s your choice” is no choice and will in no way help to foster positive independent decision making in your child.  The choice is another form of coercion.

The Pit Fall here is that initially coercion is the easiest and most effective way to get children to do what we want them to do especially when they are young. Fear is the strongest motivator. Unfortunately it does not generalize or help to grow a relationship.  Also as the child gets older and consequences by necessity become more serious you hit a ceiling with  nowhere to go. I mean you can only take so much away and then nothing is left.  It is the same problem with corporal punishment.  For it to continue to be effective the severity, the level of pain inflicted, must be increased and soon we are in the area of abuse. So although the early results of this approach look good the long term prospects are disastrous. This approach, with the knowledge we now have of children, if it came in a package, would come with a warning from the surgeon general “this approach has proven to be hazardous to the well being of you and your child.’

We all have basic needs that motivate us and influence our choices every day and all day and for every day of our lives. These choices can and have been expressed in a number of different ways but for purposes of understanding what motivates your child I find that the following work as well as any.  The basic needs of a child., once our physical needs are met (and sometimes before), for food and shelter are:

            -They need to feel loved and accepted for who and what they are right now not what
               you want them to become.

            -They need to feel that they have something useful even vital to contribute to the

              community to which they belong.

            -They need to feel as though they have some control over their lives and that this

               control increases as they grow.

            -They need to feel safe both physically and emotionally in the environment

              in which they live.

           

            -They need to have consistent and age appropriate limits placed on their behavior

               that helps then gradually learn to deal with a world that gets bigger for them

               every day.

             -They need to have realistic expectations placed on them so they learn to be responsible.

             -They need to be taught compassion by being treated with compassion.
             

           

You could easily edit this list, it is not a definitive one, but it does serve to communicate the basic needs that you as a parent need to provide for you child, beyond the basic needs of food and shelter, if you are to raise a child who has the ability to make the most out of the world into which he was born.  If these basic needs are met you will have gone a long way towards creating the foundation needed to weave a relationship with your child that will have the strength to withstand the inevitable stresses that will occur between parent and child by giving him the strength of ego and sense of self worth needed for him to love and accept himself and in return to genuinely love you.