“Children can’t behave right, when they don’t feel right” – Haim Ginot

Makes total sense, right? Of course, they can’t behave right when they don’t feel right... But how can we make them feel right? And why don’t they feel right so often? And do we acknowledge and accept the fact they don’t feel right?

Think about it...

Your child falls down and hurts her knee badly. It’s bleeding and it looks very painful. You kneel down and look at her injury. You can totally imagine this is a very nasty wound. You hold your child, talk to him and try to calm him down by cleaning the wound and picking out a bandage. Sounds familiar, right? And we understand that the child will need some time to recover from this physical hurting.

And now...

You are making after school snacks. You are slicing up some apples, adding some cookies, pouring drinks and serving this to your hungry children. Your youngest looks up and starts to cry immediately as you have placed the bowl in front of her. “I wanted the pink bowl and not the blue bowl… now she (points at her sister) has the pink bowl! She had the pink bowl already yesterday, it was my turn to have the pink bowl!!” How do we respond to this?

“ Come on, don’t be such a baby, it’s just a bowl.. it has the same in it...”

“ Stop crying immediately, you had the pink bowl all of last week...”

“ I really can’t deal with this behaviour at the end of a long day, you are totally overreacting..”

“ Your sister never complains when she gets the blue bowl, don’t make such a big deal out of it and eat your snacks”.

Sounds familiar too? Why do we respond like this in this case? Probably because we find it hard to understand why this causes such an emotional response, where we can understand it if a child is physical hurt.

You know what?

We don’t have to understand it, still we can acknowledge it.

“You were really hoping to get the pink bowl today and then I just gave you the blue one without asking, that can be really disappointing.”

“Your sister had the pink bowl yesterday, so you were really counting on the pink bowl today.”

“It can be frustrating to not get what you think you deserve.”

“I totally forgot how important it is to you to get the pink bowl every other day, let’s make a note for me so I won’t forget tomorrow.”

This is an important building block of “How to talk so kids will listen”. Want to know more or sign up for a workshop? Contact me on www.assk.info.