Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim Jong Paine. So glad you could make this little window of time in a busy, busy sort of week for us as parents. So glad you could make this time available.
So, this week I've been thinking about how to help children and ourselves understand that we all have different ways of seeing and feeling things. This is at the core of a value that certainly Catherine and I, my wife and I have raised our kids over the years, is to understand that something can be a different way of seeing it that is kind of different and maybe even interesting and not an opposing opinion to fight against. Now imagine a world like that, hey, you know, where we would see something as a different perspective to be interested in or an opposing opinion to fight.
And this value of saying to children over and over and over, you know, you can tell me the way you see it, that, you know, it's going to be probably different to your brother, probably different from a classmate, might be different from me as well, but it's okay. You can tell me the way you see it, or, you know, the way you felt that happened and what you're feeling now, you know, if you're talking to a 12, even 12, 13, 14, 15 year old, you're going to feel this thing and your experiences are going to be different. One person might not have felt that was so kind of off or insulting, but you did.
And it's really important and okay to give that some space just because another person doesn't feel that way, doesn't mean that you don't have the right to feel it your way and to see it your way. Now this seeing and feeling things differently, I know it sounds awfully basic, but gosh, it's an important value to raise children. It prevents and helps so much sibling tensions and arguments because, and I've mentioned this once before in a podcast, more in passing, but it, when you're working with brothers and sisters, it's so, creates a bit more spaciousness, perhaps is the best way to put it, when we can say to them, look, you definitely see things differently to your brother, you do.
Tell me about the way you see it. And then you can talk to the, another child and say, no, you tell me the way you see it and the way you feel it, the way you experienced it. And you can turn to either one of the children.
Sometimes it's worth doing this separately. Other times when they get used to doing this, they get very well practiced in being able to say the way they see it. And even to the point in schools that I work with, some of you know, I work with many, many, many schools on social inclusion and what I call the three streams of integrative student support.
If you're interested in that, that's a website, integrativestudentsupport.org. But the, there's a little exercise that I work with teachers, I do a lot of teacher training and, you know, school counselor training and so on, care professional trainings. And there's a little tool called the way we see it actually, where the children, when they've had a dispute, rather than talk about it and need to argue about it, they come, they join with a teacher or with an older, a member of the school community who's in an older grade, in eighth grader, and let's say these are third graders, and they come in and they'll literally sit down and draw a sequence, almost like a cartoon sequence. Like it began here and then the problem went to there and it went to there and there and they'll draw and this happened next and this happened next and so on.
And then another child, you know, at the same time will be drawing the way they saw it. And then often a neutral child that wasn't involved in the dispute will come in and they'll draw a sequence of little boxes of little drawings of the way they saw it. And it's fascinating to see kids lay out these drawings next to each other, and for a teacher or an older, you know, a bigger kid, to be able to point out where it was they saw things similarly, and where it was they saw things that they experienced it as being quite, quite different.
And that's all okay. Now the end of this brief little story is that then the children are invited to draw a sequence of pictures of how they would like to see it, when and how they would like it to go next time there's a dispute. And what can they do about, you know, the picking of unfair teams or kids not going out when they, when they, one child feels they should go out, the other one feels that they weren't out.
All those playground disputes that come up where kids learn so much about how to be a social being. Now rolling that all the way back to our families, we might do some little drawings like that. I know many, many parents that have done that.
But we can also simplify it and just to say, Joshua, you tell me how you see it. And Sam, in a moment, or Samantha, in a moment, you tell me how you see it. And you know what, and to say this to kids, in our family, remember, it's okay to see it differently.
It really is okay to see it differently. One of the big things is it prevents then kids recruiting you as the adult, because often they'll fight and they'll fight like the Dickens in order to get you on their side. Because we, you know, as parents, we're the most powerful thing in the room.
And so a child will say, you know, they will perhaps exaggerate, amplify what happened. And then another child will say, that's not true. And the first child says, it totally is, you did, I did not, I didn't do any.
And you get that kind of thing starting up, because they are jockeying for position in order to get you on their side, so that they win and get what they want. And that's a definite win lose situation right there. You can avoid all that by talking to kids about perspective, and it's very fine, and it's okay to see things differently.
And then when they describe things differently, you can say, well, Jacob, you saw what you saw. And the way you saw it was that actually, when you are building the forts, that was your fort material, that big board that you really wanted, you saw it as that was just laying near the garage, you went and got it, and that was yours to use. Now, his sister might say, or his brother might say, that's not true.
That board was mine, and I made a bridge of it yesterday. And so you might say, well, now, Sophie, you saw that that big board was actually something you were playing with just yesterday. And so we've got a situation here where we've got to figure out what to do with that board, because Sophie, you figure that, and you go, you do a little combined summary, you work it out.
Like, in other words, it's saying to both the kids, I hear you both, and we have to work out what to do with this material. Let's say it's one child feels they want to build a fort with it. One child feels they were playing with it yesterday, and they should have been asked.
Well, now one child asks the other, is it okay? That child then says, well, it is okay, but can I come into the fort? By the way, I'm not making this one up. This was real. And things sort of resolved themselves until they didn't.
But this is a very important way of raising kids as a core value. Last thing I wanted to mention is that it also applies to us. A mum and a dad, and particularly a mum I was talking to quite recently, a couple of months ago, had a kind of semi-estranged herself, had had an estranged relationship with the family.
She felt that in their time together as young children and as tweens and teens, that she'd been subjected to quite an abusive way that their father related to her, her father related to her. The siblings just didn't see it, didn't agree, didn't, and when she tried to talk to her siblings about it, what she experienced was almost denial that it happened. And so therefore she felt that how can I have a relationship with my siblings when something so basic as an abusive situation is not even recognized or even worse, she said to me, has been normalized.
They just said, well, it's just what happens in families, and you were a bit provocative as a kid. And what she experienced for her fell definitely within abuse. Talking this through about perspective taking for the children, and we were talking about the children, she said, you know, that really applies in some ways to me because in my situation with my siblings, gosh, I realize now that they just didn't see it that way.
It, it's hard that they didn't, but they didn't, and they didn't experience it that way, and they didn't see it that way. And maybe I can just give them the space to see things differently, rather than seeing it only as denial and seeing it as, as that's a broken bridge. She actually spoke with her siblings, her grown up siblings about this, about, well, what was their perspective? Because she'd actually never asked them that.
She had just rather angrily put forward her own, her own perspective. And when they, when she felt they were denying that, the conversation grew tense, and then she just left it and walked away and basically walked away from a closer relationship with her grown siblings. When she went back and actually asked them the way they did see it and the way they did feel it, it was quite interesting to her, as she reported to me, because they did see that there were things that were going on, they, but they didn't rank it.
They didn't see it as, as abusive, but they did see it, her sister in particular, did see it as being, you know, really hurtful, not okay. And the two of them began to reconcile. I don't know how it'll go with her grown up brother, but certainly the two sisters have begun to build a bridge now, because this very kind and good and insightful mum actually gave her sister the space and the invitation to speak about how she did see their relationship as children growing up with, with an aggressive father who was very, who could get very angry.
So what applies to the children applies to us, of course, in so many, in so many ways in our parenting. But coming full circle now back to raising our children and being able to say to them authentically that in our family, it's okay to see things differently. It's okay to feel things differently.
This, my goodness, this just would be, imagine a world, imagine a world where we, where we, where, where children all around the world were being raised to understand that because someone sees it differently doesn't mean they're wrong. Gosh. Okay.
I sure hope that was helpful. Bye bye for now.
