“It’s just been released mummy, AND I NEEEEEEEEEEED to see it now! I won’t be long, you have to wait.”
Every word stung. My eyes narrowed. How dare she? My fists began to clench. Not only does she know the rule of no screens but her tone? OMG?!
If you’ve been on any of my courses, you know when I say, it’s here that we can choose to escalate or de-escalate the situation.
Escalation looks something like this:
“How dare you speak to me like that! You’re so rude. You know the rule of no screens, and not only aren’t you ready, but you’re keeping everyone waiting yet again!!!”
“You are just soooo mean! You never understand,” she shouts back.
“That’s it! You talk to me like that again, and no screens after school. You carry on speaking in that tone, you’ll be lucky if you go to the party on the weekend.”
And on and on it goes. Both of us at each other’s throats.
You finally make it to the car, worn out, with no one talking. Not, the start to the day you had hoped for.
Where did it all go wrong?
Let’s look at it in a different way. One where we can calmly respond and actually de-escalate the situation. Where we aren’t adding fuel to the fire but putting it out AND getting the results we want.
Before I tell you how, I want to mention, this is not permissive parenting. I don’t want my daughter back-chatting and talking rudely at me. Don’t worry, in Language of Listening®, you get to hold your boundaries while coaching your child to control their own behaviour.
It is how we go about it that brings us the long-lasting results and the connected relationship.
The first step in Language of Listening® is the connection step. It has an amazing result of calming the brain down. Don’t just take my word for it, neuroscience shows us how empathy and connection physically change the structure of the brain.
When you and your child are upset, frustrated, disappointed or angry, your brains go into survival mode. The fight, flight, freeze part of the brain has hijacked the thinking brain.
Remember a time when you’ve been shouted at? I bet you can’t think clearly. I know I can barely string a sentence together!
No learning is happening.
That’s why we can often find ourselves dealing with the same situation over and over again. Our thinking part of the brain has literally shut down.
When you’re in your reactive brain, you’re not able to access the part of the brain needed to learn and make rational decisions. You and your child are not learning how to better deal with a similar situation next time.
It’s here that we make the not-so-good choices. We say things we don’t mean, we shout and scream, or we just give up in frustration.
I know first-hand how easy it is to get triggered and lose your cool. We so want to teach them a lesson in the moment. But when we’re triggered, we try and teach them to talk calmly and respectfully by not talking calmly or respectfully ourselves. Funny that!
Screaming and losing my cool at my daughter is not modelling the behaviour I want to see.
This is how you can change it all around.
Here are my 5 steps to change using the framework from Language of Listening®, the coaching model I use and teach.
1. Calm things down.
One of the premises of Language of Listening® is: Everything children do and say is a communication.
That means their communication is not about you. It is a reflection of their internal landscape.
When we calm things down, we actually have the ability and brain capacity to see things more clearly, have a productive conversation, find out more facts, and work together to find solutions to get us out of the house on time.
2. Look behind the behaviour.
In a calmer state, I could see my daughter wasn’t being rude to me. She was frustrated and upset. She knew she didn’t have time to watch her video that all her friends were going to be talking about at school, and she knew she shouldn’t be watching it in the first place.
Although I definitely don’t like being spoken to like that, and I knew she’d overstepped my boundary, I could see how she had worked herself up and got triggered in her reactive brain. Joining her there wasn’t going to help matters.
3. Acknowledge your child’s frustrations.
By acknowledging her upsets, I could de-escalate her frustrations and her reactiveness.
It’s by stepping into our child’s world and connecting that we help our child move out of their reactive brain and into their thinking brain.
I like looking at the rudeness and backchat as the symptoms of the reactive brain.
When we focus our energy on calming everyone down, their frustrated tone of voice and reactiveness will automatically disappear. The calmer their brain, the less reactive they become in the long-term. Just what we want isn’t it?
So instead of:
“How dare you speak to me like that! You’re so rude. You know the rule of no screens, and not only aren’t you ready, but you’re keeping everyone waiting yet again!!!”
It becomes:
Say What You See®: “We’ve 5 minutes till we leave, it looks like something’s really important for you to be watching YouTube before school.”
Child: “Yes! I forgot that Emma said they were all watching this clip. I don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t know what they’re talking about!”
4. Find Solutions.
Now you have more information from your child. You can see how saying what you see opens up the conversation for you both to find solutions.
Either your child will find their own: “Sorry! I know I shouldn’t be watching it. I’ll hurry up now.”
Or you can use the Language of Listening® coaching step, CAN DOs, to support your child to find what they CAN DO within your boundary.
It can sound something like this: Say What You See + CAN DO
“Oh! You’re frustrated. You want to watch the video before school, and we’re running late. Must be something you CAN DO to be ready on time!”
“I know Mummy! Just this time, I pinkie promise, can I get ready and finish watching it in the car on the way to school?”
And now, it’s over to you to decide in the moment, is that OK with you?
You might choose to go with it this time, then spend the day thinking about what you want or don’t want to happen in the future and how to keep this from becoming recurring problem. Then you can have a calmer discussion with your child in the afternoon – when you’re not in the midst of the problem – and see what solutions you can come up with together, within your boundary of no screens on school mornings.
5. Connection is key.
Connecting is usually the last thing we think of doing when our kids are pushing our boundaries or speaking in a rude tone. There’s so much outdated advice out there saying that it’s somehow “rewarding bad behaviour.”
I am here to bust that myth.
1. Connection is the only thing that calms us all down and gets us back to our thinking brains. Remember, no learning is happening when we are in our reactive brain.
2. Boundaries don’t need to be mean; we don’t need to make our children suffer to change their behaviour. As Jane Nelsen from Positive Discipline so beautifully puts it: “Where do we get this crazy idea, that we have to make children feel bad in order to do better?!”
Although this may seem like work, in the beginning, it’s going to save so much time and stress long-term as you coach your child to find their own solutions, control their own behaviour and work together as a team.
So, with a big breath and a new sense of purposefulness, I bent down, gave her a kiss, and used my five steps to turn it all around.
And with that, we were in the car in less than 5 minutes – all was calm, both kids happily chatting and having fun.
If you want more support getting out the door on time without the daily battles or if home life feels like a daily battleground and you want to have a more fun, relaxed, happy family life let’s chat. You can schedule a complimentary, no-obligation call. You can do that by clicking right here.
