Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Tim John Payne. This week we're going to be looking at when you don't know what to do with Kitwin and things are not going well and as a parent you think, oh my goodness, what am I meant to do in this situation? Before that, I just want to remind you, I mentioned this last week, is that we've got this Family Life, Simplicity Parenting Family Life Care Professionals training coming up on January 25th and 26th. That's three hours on both those days.
If you're a care professional educator working to help parents simplify and balance, this might be worth just having a little read about it. Click this link below and see if this might be for you. I personally lead the training for those six hours, those two times three hours.
We all gather together and we talk about how to help the parents we care for and support simplify and balance their family's lives. It's beautiful training. I love doing it.
So anyway, if you're interested, click on the link below or just go right to the Simplicity Parenting website. You'll see it there. Trainings, Care Professionals and all that.
All right. So what to do when you don't know what to do. You know, I've spoken a few times in these podcasts and certainly in the Soul of Discipline book that I wrote about kids pinging, about kids echolocating, how when they are emotionally disoriented, they ping us, they echolocate in order to orient themselves.
And they can be quite controversial in what they do to get that reaction. It's like they sort of walk around looking for emotionally dry grass to sort of throw a match into it and they get a big reaction. And then it orients them.
And I know that might sound like, gosh, that's sort of weird. Why do they need to do that? But they do. It's just a reality of the way kids echolocate.
Because being disoriented is a yucky feeling, it's awful. No one likes to be disoriented, little kids or grownups, teenagers, no one likes it, right? It's not a good feeling to not know where you stand emotionally. And this term you may have heard me use before, that I've never met a disobedient child in my life.
I just don't believe in disobedience. What I see is disorientation and then the kids pinging us, echolocating in order to orient themselves. Now, that might help when, in one way, when you don't know what to do, one of the first things to do, to know, is that you're getting pinged, right? Because if you know you're getting pinged, if you're getting echolocated, it's really hard to take it personally.
I guess we could still manage, but it's like, if we know a kid is pinging us, and we look at this grumpy little gnome, and we just think, I wonder why you're so disoriented? That wondering, right? There it is. That wondering takes us as a parent, as an educator, whoever's working with kids, into a different place within us. It's not about the child.
It's about us. If we know that they are disoriented, and they're trying to orient themselves in a pretty provocative way, albeit, but that's what they're trying to do, it helps us orient ourselves, and then they can co-orient. Then a little kid can orient with us, a teenager can orient with us.
Okay, so that's one, that's one aspect of this. Another layer is when you don't know what to do, right? So you're wondering, I wonder what's up with you, that you're needing to be so provocative. Very often, we don't know.
Like honestly, we don't know. It might be while they're hungry, or they're tired. Okay, I get that part.
But many other times, it's like, what's going on here? That's weird. And so, to just be okay with that, to be okay with not knowing what's going on, and just to be able to, as evenly as you can, repeat back a child's experience in your own words. Not their feelings, careful of that, but their experience.
So to say to, I don't know, a five or six year old, gosh, that is just not, is it really, it's not going how you want it to go. Or to a 12 year old, okay, so this is not fair, you're not seeing this as fair, right? Or to a three year old, oh, it's just not, that is not sitting up straight like you wanted that dolly to sit up, is it? It's floppy? Is it floppy? And you hate it being floppy. This, this is what I mean.
Because what it's saying to a child is pretty obvious, right? It's saying to a child, I'm with you. I've got my metaphoric canoe moored right alongside yours, and it's choppy water for you, and I'm not going to try to figure out how you got here. I'm not going to try and figure anything out at all.
I'm not going to problem solve. None of that stuff. I'm not going to talk about, you know, go into sort of some, some version of psychotherapy and figure out what you're feeling.
It's just that is your experience, and it's saying to a child, I can be okay in my anger. I can be okay in my frustration, because if, and it's just not a teachable moment, honestly, it's not a teachable moment. It's a moment to anchor a child within their own experience that their frustration is understood, that their anger is understood.
And that's, that's what we're, we're doing in this moment is that, is that we are echoing. We're echolocating back to them. You see, they were, they were, they were pinging, echolocating us, all right? They're sending out this anger, this frustration.
So it bounces on us and bounces back. That's what pinging is, right? They send out a sonic ping, it hits an obstacle and bounces back. Because if we go into too, like a flurry of problem solving, the message they're receiving is all murky.
They don't know what that means. Even teenagers, then it really bugs them when we try to go into all this stuff, rather. And this is, this is not, you know, like all the time, but it's a wonderful beginning point.
And sometimes all it's needed is to be able to ground a child, ground a tween or a teen within their experience, so that they know they can trust that feeling. The feeling's not wrong, it's not right, it's nothing like that. It just is.
It just is. And you know, you can, you can talk about it, go a little further, maybe, if you want to, and say, that's really hard to, that's really hard when it doesn't go well. Hmm.
Yep. Okay. Yep.
But try to, at least initially, to avoid, to avoid what we very quickly do, is a child's frustrated, angry, said something that is provocative, even provocative, right to you. Now, of course you can say, oh gosh, you know, Jacob, hmm, Miguel, uh-uh, hmm. You know what? Okay.
All right. So you, so you really don't like those, you, mm-hmm, you don't like those shoes, right? You, mm-hmm, you want to wear your sneakers, okay. It's hard when your sneakers are, I know, they're wet, they're not dried out yet.
It's very frustrating. This is, this is what I mean. And you really don't have to be, you know, a parenting savant to do this.
Don't get annoying so that you're all sort of in a therapeutic way, repeating back the words they say to you. That will really bug a child. But as authentically as you can, just connect them to their own experience, and in connecting them to it, you connect yourself to them.
Try it. You know, you might already be doing this a little bit, but if you can, over this coming week, you'll get, there'll be lots of opportunities to try this out. And just try it.
Just say back to a child the words that they're saying. You might paraphrase a little bit so that it's not annoying, but, and that's it. And just sit with them.
It's that, it's almost like the opposite of that saying. Do you know that saying, don't just, don't just stand there, do something. Well, in this situation, it's just, don't just do something, be there.
Just be there. Be there with them and let them know they can trust their experience and they can trust you. Okay.
So, oh yeah, don't forget the Care Professionals Training, January 25th, 26th, link below. If you're at all interested or someone else might be interested that, you know, let them know about this. Okay.
That's it for now. I sure hope that's helpful. Bye bye.
