Which actually translate into future immunity to the weight of the carrot or stick. Which leads to painful episodes.

Ack – being a friend to myself. Mmmmm.

That’s so much better than trying to be all self-love (word wise) not conceptually or in perpetuity.

The Archives RAWK!!!

Becca – I don’t know if this helps you, but with my own kids I have found that the fear at new situations is often a dynamic between the parent and the kid. In some strange way the fear is a method the child can use to connect with the parent. The parent responds to the child’s fear in ways that are frequently inappropriate, because the child’s fear makes them scared. The child hangs on to the fear because it is a way of getting comfort from the parent that they can’t easily get otherwise.

A potential solution is to create some distance between the parent and child, to break each of them out of that little drama in which each of them is playing a role. Depending on the age of the child, the distance can be created by creating a strong bond between yourself and the child, by physically creating some distance between the parents and kids (i.e. playing follow the leader or some such game), or ring around the rosie where all the kids and yourself play but the parents are on the outside of the circle. The goal is to reduce the attachment to parent (for the duration of the lesson) so that you can teach them without that interference.

I wouldn’t try to speak directly to the parent about their parenting techniques. This is a minefield. People are going to take it personally, and they are going to get mad, or cry, or pull their kids from your class and speak to your supervisor. Do what you can with the kids, and let the parents work their own issues out, UNLESS you suspect some sort of abuse is going on.

Sometimes parents will ask you for advice about dealing with their kids, especially if they see that you have been able to make progress with them in areas that they have not. I’m sure you’ve run into this already, but if you are in a situation where you are able to recommend some reading to someone, I’d suggest a book called “How to Talk so Kids Listen, and How to Listen so Kids talk”. It provides some concrete examples of how to parents can listen/talk to their kids without being hurtful or doing more damage. I certainly saw myself doing a lot of the bad stuff when I first read it.

I’d also like to warn you that I’m completely unqualified to give anyone any sort of advice about anything, so please treat the above like any other sort of random information that you might encounter on the internet.

peace.

I have a small curly-ish question. How can I pass on this compassionate motivationy thing to People Who Should Seriously Know Better? Lemme explain…

I work as a swimming instructor – mostly teaching kids – which I utterly love. What I non-utterly love is when parents of aforementioned children use horrid, yes horrid, bribes to “encourage” their kid to swim! It is flippin’ SCARY what some people will say to their beloved offspring, even to kids who are frightened out of their skins about drowning-potential! Excuse me, but that is a very real, reasonable and true fear!

Case in point: a particular parent often remarks to her crying child: “if you don’t go under water to get the sinky toy, no ice cream later on!” (oh, mucho-incentive there! & just makes the kid cry harder).
Same parent, another episode: “I can’t believe I took you out to the movies earlier today and now you’re not even going to try to do a torpedo – thanks a lot”. And so on and such forth. Emotional junky-mail. What yuck internal resentment must be brewing up in her youngster. And yes, parent evidently has monstrous issues. But still, methinks she should know better.

So: do you have any suggestions for how to approach this situation? Generally when this happens, I focus on acknowleding the fear and then awakening esteem/ self-trust in the child, which tends to work. But if there were appropriate words to say to the parent (“you’re making this worse!” wouldn’t go down too well!), with off-handedness, some humour and indirectness… that would be cool. What do you reckon?