Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I've been thinking about how to help children not push back, fight back, fall back when something has gone wrong. It's so frequent through a day that for a child, really almost of any age, that things happen, right? Things go wrong.
What can we do as parents to help them get a sense of movement, not feel stuck? Because it's the stuckness that has children very often feeling like they're being corralled. Something's happened, it hasn't gone well, and now, uh-oh. So what are some simple little steps? What's one simple little tool that's kind of very doable for us all? About how to get that movement forward on one hand, but without glossing over that something's happened, that a sibling has had something really mean said to them, or done to them, or something has just simply not been okay with what's been going on.
So, it'll come as no surprise, you know, to people who listen and watch these podcasts regularly that the first step comes under this big broad heading of connecting. So the first thing to do if something has gone wrong, as always, is connect, is connect with a child. You're about to correct them, right? You're about to correct.
But first, connect. And it can be very brief. It doesn't have to go on, it's just, you know, 10, 15 seconds maximum, actually.
But to be able to say to them, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, hang on, no, no, no, no, no, no, hey, listen, you can be really helpful, you can. You help bring all that stuff in from the yard, or you help me bring all those, those groceries in. I didn't even ask you.
You can be so helpful, you know, you can. But what just happened really wasn't helpful. It wasn't.
Just that's, you know, to speak to your brother like that, or to, you know, whatever it is, that's, that's not okay. But I know you can do a whole bunch better than that, because you do. Okay, that's step one, right? And it was that 10, 15 seconds, I'm not sure, wasn't long, right? But it's, it's putting a boundary in place.
But it's also letting a child know that, okay, they've, they've lost the plot, they got angry, they shouted, they did something, they threw something, they, you know, whatever it was, you put in a boundary in place, but you're letting them know that you know, that, that they can do a whole lot better. And by the way, this connects a little bit with last week's theme. Because if we picture a kid like a like a tweenager, even a teenager, and of course, a little one, a little child, then if we picture them doing okay, then there's, we've immediately calmed down our own fight or flight, our own amygdala hijack.
The moment we picture a kid doing okay, we've actually not only helped them, we've helped ourselves, because it's really hard to take it personally, and start arguing with a child and getting into places we just don't want to go, when we have created an inner picture of them doing well, right? It's not just them doing well, it's a picture, we've brought ourselves to a different part of our being and of our brain. Okay, step one, simple. Like it took a couple of minutes to describe, but honestly, it's just a couple of seconds.
But we can become we, we can really practice this and become really good at it. Always connecting before, before correcting. Okay, so the second step, let's say we've done that, we pulled it off, yay.
Okay, so the second step is to say to a child of any age, you know, I think we need to put this right, right? How can we put this right? That, that didn't go well, something must have been up. But let's put this right, so we can move on and just put this behind us. Now, that's a little bit step three, you know, but how can, tinges of it, but the second step is, is how can we put this right? Right? What can we do to put this right? Because we, we just want to move on, right? And so you're signaling to a child that, that, that, that there's movement here, that you want to be moving forward.
One of my favorite cartoons that I saw in the New Yorker years ago, was there was a younger child and a mother, or the child was clearly doing something wrong. And the mother was saying, come over here right now. Your mother's going to talk to you quite a lot in a weird, calm voice.
I just thought it was the great, like kids really don't like it when we go on and on and on. They want to know if we're going to sort this out, let's do this quickly. So we can put it right.
So the emphasis is on putting it right, right? And then moving on. We're not going to talk about all this stuff. We're going to put it right.
We're going to move on. And then the, then to let a child know, and right away when we put this right, and then we can just put it behind us and maybe get back to, and you might give them a little bit of an idea of what they can do. Then we can get back just to, we can just get back to the game.
We can put it right, get things worked out, and you can get right back to the game with your brother. Yeah, we can do that. But let's put it right now.
You see, this prevents a child from feeling trapped. That's one of the, that's one of the primary reasons kids either fight us back or they fall back. It's fight back or fall back.
The fight back is obvious. The fall back is just getting really stubborn. And the stubbornness, both fight back and fall back, have an aspect to it of denial, where a child will just deny it.
And then we get into it and we'll say things like, no, no, no, no, Kobe, you, you, no, no, you know, I saw you do it. And you're into it. Right? And voice goes up.
Everyone go, oh, that's like, you know, if so giving them a feeling that they're not being corralled, they're not being trapped, they're not being fenced in because we've connected with them. We've told them that's not okay. We're going to put it right.
And then we can get back to the game. And then we can, whatever it was, it prevents those long winded lectures that kids just feel corralled by. And it most of all, it gives this general feeling of movement because a child's stuck.
Right? As I mentioned, they're stuck that something's happened. We've stopped it. We've pulled it up.
So we've been co-responsible for stopping what was going on because we needed to. Right. But it gives a feeling of, of, of forward direction of moving forward.
There's a chance that if we get this sorted out, this is what the child's thinking. There's a chance if I actually cooperate here, I can get on and just and get on with my day. And that is, is a really good motivation for most kids actually going with you in this because their direction in childhood is forward.
Right? They've come into this world and, and, and they're wanting to go forward. They're not wanting to get stuck and analyze all this stuff. Yes, they need to be held accountable.
A hundred percent agree. But that's the putting it right. It's not, you know, what are your feelings feeling and how could have you and, and, you know, was it because, and, and it's just, there's maybe a little bit of a time for that kind of thing, you know.
But actually what they're interested in is, is it went wrong. Now we're going to make it be right with my mom and my dad, like my guardians help. And then I can, can get back into what I was doing.
And then getting back into what I was doing was actually growing up and growing forward into the day. Okay. I sure hope that was helpful.
It's a little thing, right? These three little steps, but it's a, it's one of those little mighty things. Okay. Bye bye for now.
